“Why are you doing all this now?” she asked on a huge sigh. “Acting like you care or something.”
“I do care.”
She snorted her disbelief.
“I mean it, Lissa, and I’ve missed you.”
“Save me,” she whispered, arms folding over her chest, chin jutted forward in rebellion.
“Okay, I screwed up. Is that what you want to hear?”
She didn’t reply, and he shoved his uneaten food to one side and turned to look her squarely in the eye. “I think we should get something straight, okay? No one in our family is perfect. We’ve all made mistakes. But I am your father and the adult here. So we’re going to figure out why a smart girl like you lets her grades slide into the toilet and hooks up with a guy who hasn’t shown me that he has an ounce of respect for her or anyone else.”
“You don’t even know him!”
“You’re right. I don’t.” He found his cell phone and slid it across the table. “Call him. I think it’s time we met.”
“What?”
“You know his number, right? Dial him up, tell him I want to meet him.”
“Now?”
“No time like the present.”
She glanced away. Thinking. “He’s probably busy.”
“Thought you said he was coming over to your house to watch television. Call him.”
“To have him come here?” she asked, pointing at the floor.
“Yeah.”
“With you?” She was shaking her head. “He won’t do it.”
“Why not?”
“It would be too weird. With you. You already don’t like him.”
“So this is his chance to change my mind.”
She eyed the phone, then stood up and walked to the couch, where she flopped down. Picking up the remote control, she started flipping through the channels. “You’re so lame,” she accused.
“Probably. So, since we’re not entertaining Zeke, let’s figure out what the problem is in chemistry. I can’t help you much on the German, but I’m a chemistry ace.”
“Lucky for me,” she mumbled with more than a touch of sarcasm.
“That’s right. This is without a doubt your lucky night.” He sat beside her on the couch and cracked open the huge textbook before taking the remote from her reluctant fingers and turning the television off.
“Why can’t you just leave me alone?”
He grinned. “Come on Lissa, how much fun would that be? I figure I’ve made a mistake, not being around so much, but I’m changing my ways, turning over a new leaf. So you’d better get used to it.”
She probably should have gone straight home.
That would have been the smart thing to do.
It was getting late and she was tired and there was still the issue with Lissa. But after all the talk about St. Elizabeth’s and its imminent closure, after seeing a smattering of her classmates and remembering what they were like in high school, after being dragged kicking and screaming to the past, Kristen couldn’t help herself.
Maybe it was the reporter in her.
Maybe it was just curiosity.
Or maybe it was because it was time to put to rest some old ghosts.
Whatever the reason, she headed out of town and toward Beaverton. Though her old alma mater and her current home were less than five miles apart as the crow flies, they were separated by hills and canyons and winding roads. She’d never felt any need to visit the old campus. In fact, if she thought about it, she’d studiously avoided returning to St. Elizabeth’s.
Until tonight.
The beams from her headlights cut through the night, shimmering against pavement growing wet with new rain. She wound through the steep hills of Douglas fir, oak, and cedar, her wipers slapping slowly. She wasn’t completely alone on the county road that ran past the school. Taillights glowed red in the road ahead when she crested small hills, and she met a broken line of oncoming headlights.
How many times had she driven this route during her four years at St. Elizabeth’s? At first her mother, a devout Catholic and a widow who owned a bakery/café on Twenty-third Street, had hauled her to school in the Sweet Nothings delivery van. Kristen had been mortified to be dropped off in the rattletrap of a vehicle when Lindsay Farrell arrived in her father’s Porsche and even Rachel Alsace alighted from her mom’s vintage, but cool, Jeep.
Kristen had saved all the money she’d earned at the bakery, and the minute she turned sixteen and passed her driver’s license test, she bought a 1976 Volkswagen Super Beetle convertible with a dent in one fender and ninety thousand miles under its fan belt. Not in the same class as the Mercedes and BMWs that were parked in the school lot, but better than the stupid van. She’d been in heaven. Innocently unaware of what was to come.
Now, as the buildings of St. Elizabeth’s campus came into view, she felt a chill as cold as winter. The church was there, a massive stone structure with a high bell tower, and set back a bit, the attached convent, where once the nuns who had taught at the school had lived.
Kristen wondered if any of the sisters still resided beyond the thick gates. What had happened to Sister Clarice with her weak chin, rimless glasses, and bloodless lips? Or Sister Maureen with her apple cheeks and tittery laugh? She’d filled the classroom with flowers and always smelled of lilacs. What about the Reverend Mother, Sister Neva, who had been in her seventies twenty years earlier and had walked with a cane and thankfully had never been able to remember Kristen’s name? Were any of them alive? Did they still dwell behind the thick rock walls?
The rain began in earnest, covering the windshield and fogging its interior. Kristen turned the wipers higher and stared through the glass at the school. In the gloom, it seemed miraculously unchanged. Its broad portico, supported by stone pillars, still protected the heavy double doors leading to the main reception area. The building was two stories, faced with the same rock, brick and mortar as the church.
Kristen eased on the gas and inched closer, fighting the sensation that she shouldn’t be there, that she was trespassing into a faraway time and place that was no longer hers.
Her car crept forward and she recognized the gym, set back from the rest of the classrooms, its high, domed roof dwarfing the cafeteria next to it.
The gym. Venue to the doomed Valentine’s Day dance. She tapped her fingers against the steering wheel and wondered about the maze separating the gymnasium from the cloister. Was it still intact? Or hopelessly overgrown? Had the order had the hedges removed, hacked down to stumps after the tragedy, or had the laurel and arborvitae been shaped and manicured, the topiary sculptured as if nothing horrible had ever happened within the garden walls?
“This is nuts,” she told herself as she flipped up the hood of her jacket and grabbed a flashlight from the glove box. She cut the engine and stepped out of the car into the puddles and drizzle of the night, then walked toward the back of the school, stepping over a chain that barricaded the unused gym lot from the delivery alley. The pavement was pockmarked and rutted, but she followed it unerringly to the back of the gym, across a parking lot to the gardens.
The hedge was as she remembered…maybe a little less groomed, a few more weeds surrounding it, but it was there. It didn’t take too much imagination to remember that night, the music in the background, the smell of cigarette smoke, the horrifying sound of Lindsay’s scream and then the sight of Jake, his lifeless body slumped over the heavy arrow pinning him to the tree, the blood everywhere, dark against the trunk of the tree, pooling on the wet grass, staining the front of Jake’s tuxedo and smearing over Lindsay’s dress.
Oh, God, what was she thinking, coming back here to this dark place? She glanced up at the nunnery and saw a few lights glowing in the tracery windows. She swallowed hard as she saw a silhouette in one window, a movement of the blinds.
So what, Kristen?