Текст книги "Twisted Fate"

Автор книги: Norah Olson

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 14 страниц)

Syd came home so broken up and freaked-out I had no idea what could have happened to her. I thought at first she had been raped, it was that bad. She was shaking and crying. She told me she was going to report Graham to the police.

“What did he do to you?” I asked, angry and worried, grabbing her by the shoulders and looking into her face.

“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing, it’s what he did to you, and this movie he made of Eric.”

“What movie?” I asked.

She went into our bathroom and threw up. I came in and held her hair back, then poured her a glass of water and sat on the side of the tub.

“Sis, what happened?”

“He has a movie of Eric dying,” she said, and her voice had no emotion in it at all. “And he has films of you naked and talking about all kinds of things.”

I could see she was terribly upset, but I knew Graham did not have movies of me naked and I knew there was no way he would take a video of his best friend dying. As far as I knew, Eric was still alive and Graham and I would go visit him on a road trip probably this coming summer. What I did see though was my sister losing her mind and I wanted to help her.

“What did the films look like?”

“OH!” she said. “And he has films of me, wearing your clothes. And I never wore your clothes or went sailing with our parents.”

“He probably thought it was funny to make movies like that—just Photoshopped it.”

“They weren’t funny, they were creepy. They were all creepy.”

“Come here,” I said, and I put my arms around her. “Graham makes some weird movies and you might be upset about some of them, but I am sure they are either faked, like the ones of you, or just weird collage art. Think about it. You know Graham, you know how he is. Would he really do those things? I don’t think so. You need to relax.” She started crying. “Syd. Remember when you said we need to come together and be unified? We need to come together now. You need to relax. You need to take some of my optimism and see what has really happened instead of being stressed and hysterical about seeing some weird art.”

“I have the movie here,” she said, pulling it out of the pocket of her hoodie.

“Let me see it,” I said.

“No, Ally. It will ruin your life. I’m taking it to the cops right now.”

She looked determined and like that determination was the only thing that was keeping her going. But still. She might have something that could get Graham in trouble if it was taken out of context. “Give it to me, Syd!” I tried to grab it from her. “It’s not ours. You’ve stolen it from his room. You shouldn’t have been in his room.”

She burst into tears, and pulled the disk close to her body, kicked at me with her feet. I hadn’t ever seen her so upset—even when our parents would go away for whole days when we were little. I’d never seen her crying like that. “Get it through your head, Ally! He’s bad. He’s bad!” Her face was tear-streaked and swollen from crying. She looked desperate. There was nothing I could do. I had faith that she was wrong. I knew Graham wouldn’t do anything to hurt me or hurt his friends. She was hysterical and there was no way I could protect her anymore. If she went to the police I was sure they would come to the same conclusion and send her home. In the end I had to let her go.

“Okay,” I said. “Do what you have to do, sis. The police will decide if it’s a problem or not. I can see how upset you are. Do it and then come home and I’ll make you some hot cocoa. I’ll bake you some muffins.”

There was, of course, nothing we could do about the video he had. It was evidence from another crime, and he was apparently not using it for anything, just keeping it. The other videos she said he had we could never find, and sadly I think it was just something she made up so that there would be another reason to go after him.

We tried everything we could, called it a snuff film because that’s essentially what it was, and that was all we could do. But you would be amazed at how wealth can tie up a court or how psychiatric experts can be used to turn things you know are wrong into things that are considered therapeutic. That family circled the wagons like nothing I’d ever seen in my life. Privilege doesn’t begin to describe it. It was like we were nothing to them. They were some kind of royalty. The family’s lawyer reminded the DA here repeatedly about double jeopardy. I don’t know which was worse—them telling us that we’d victimized their son, or knowing that the kid’s dad could just buy his freedom no matter what. And this came after everything that had happened to Brian.

We would sit around shaking our heads, wondering if this kid, Graham, was a sociopath, or if he was just the stupidest kid we’d ever come across. And then he would come in and be such a nice kid. I mean, polite, easygoing, incredibly relaxed, confident, focused. His parents clearly loved him and paid attention to him. He didn’t look like he was capable of any of these things. And it really did remind you of why there’s such a thing as juvenile detention—because kids don’t think the same way as adults—some kids may never develop adult morals or understanding, some kids get more selfish as they get older, but most don’t. Most people in Graham’s situation would look back on his life and shudder. Know that they had made a mistake and wonder how they could even have been that person. That’s the best you can hope for in a situation like that.

In the end the worst of it was how that girl got traumatized by seeing the video. I felt bad for her, I did. I can’t imagine watching it and sitting right there in his room and knowing he was your friend. And of course it’s bad having any kid learn the hard way that sometimes the justice system doesn’t work like you want it to. Let alone a kid like Phil Tate’s daughter. That girl did not listen to anyone and did not take no for an answer. She was a force. And after seeing that video, she was an unstoppable force.

I felt like I was losing my mind. I went out and skated and skated and tried to get the images out of my head. I was so angry I thought I would burst. How could it be that I was the only one who saw how bad things were? I didn’t tell anyone but the police about Graham’s film. Of course I didn’t tell my parents who probably didn’t even notice I was upset at all. And when the police did nothing, I felt like my life was a puddle that was drying up. Everything seemed to get smaller and more terrifying.

How could what he had done be legal in any way? How could he hide who he was so easily? Why couldn’t they just go into his house and grab the computer and arrest him and take him away? How could they tell me that I had been breaking and entering, committing a crime, when he was the one who was sick and dangerous?

I began having nightmares. Almost every night. We were living right next door to this guy and still Ally slept soundly. She still didn’t believe me but she was nicer to me than ever. We spent more time together. We would come home right after school and just sit in our room and talk. She knew something had happened, there’s no way she didn’t, but she still thought I was making up most of it or the police would have done something.

At some point, I felt so defeated I started believing her version of everything. It was easier just to believe her honestly, to deny everything I’d seen, to take comfort in her view of him. I let her take care of me, bake things. I just hung around the house with her. She still went out with Graham but I stayed home. I didn’t feel like hanging out with my friends because I didn’t want to burden them.

But one night everything shifted. Ally would tell me what Graham and she talked about sometimes, and he slipped up. She thought Eric was still alive and he told her he wanted her to come to Virginia with him and visit his grave.

Of course, she chalked it up to him “grieving,” but I knew it was weirder than that. He told her he wanted her to come visit his grave and then the two of them would take a drive together on the roads that Eric and he used to drive in the Austin.

When she told me this, I got angry all over again. He wanted to do the same thing to Ally. He was looking for another Eric and he wasn’t even being clever about it. He was so drug-addled and stupid and arrogant and he had no respect for my sister—he just told her like it was how he wanted to film her and kill her and she was still gullible enough to listen. He had said similar things to me. That’s why he always wanted me to take his drugs.

He was looking for someone to take all the pills that make you brave and relaxed and think you’re invincible and drive that person into a bridge or off a cliff or who knows what. And he didn’t care if it was Ally or me or anyone. What he wanted was to see that image, to sell that image, to believe in the stupid idea that he was a cutting-edge artist doing things that no one could understand.

Then she told me the worst part. Every night she went over there he made another film of her. She was becoming his most popular subject, she said. His girl-next-door series. He said he wanted to have a thousand films of her. To film her her entire life.

I listened to Ally talk about Graham, saw the way she just believed everything he said. And I formulated my plan.

When I got home, Graham was standing on the roof of his garage looking out into the woods. He must have heard the skateboard because he turned around. Most of the town still thought he was a hero because of little Brian and even after the film emerged, his parents somehow made it look like he had kept this monstrosity of a movie because he loved his friend. I had never seen anything so sick. No one knew about that of course. Just me and him. And he didn’t seem to care that I knew anymore. It had made him even more relaxed.

“Hey,” he said. “I called you earlier but you didn’t pick up.”

I looked at my phone. There were no missed calls.

“Sure you didn’t call Ally?”

He laughed. “Yeah, that must have been it. How’s it going?”

I really couldn’t believe that he could just talk so normally to everyone—considering all the secrets he had. But he was always like this. Gracious and charming when he was on the drugs, shy and polite when he wasn’t. That’s why it was so hard for people to believe what he was doing. Even when the evidence was staring them right in the face.

“It’s good,” I lied. “Hey, I was thinking about that thing you thought would be fun to do. I want to give the meds a try.”

“Yeah?” he asked, raising his eyebrows. He hung off the side of the garage and then dropped to the driveway and walked over to me. “What part of it?”

“All of it,” I said. “The driving, all of it. If we can drive with the top down.”

I watched his breathing change and a smile spread across his face.

“It’ll be fun,” I said. “I want to feel how it feels. We can go after school on Thursday. We can drive up past the golf courses where there’s no one around. I’ll drive so you can film. Those drugs will make me a really good driver, right? The ones that make you focus?”

“Yeah,” he said, looking deeply into my eyes. “They will. They’ll make all of it so much better.”

“Okay,” I said, my heart pounding in my chest. He was so awful. And he had no trouble just going with me of course. He had no faithfulness or respect for my sister, would sell her out and cheat on her. He was the worst.

“Cool,” he said. “I’m so happy we’re going to do this. We’re going to become immortal.”

“Yeah, we’re going to be stars,” I said. “Hey, are you still selling those films?”

He nodded.

“The documentary ones of Ally?”

He nodded again and I thought, how could anyone be so stupid to admit that? He just knew he was bulletproof. He could admit to anything now, it didn’t matter. He always got away with everything. Even if I deleted them, he would simply make more and keep posting them. I vowed that that would be the next part of my plan.

“It’s an automatic system,” he said. “I never shut it down.”

“Can I be in some of them?” I asked.

He got that huge grin again. “Sure. Of course. We can make very different films than what me and Ally make.”

“I want part of the money, though,” I said.

He said, “You got it, partner. I’ll see you Thursday at the old pier.”

He was there standing out on the pier waiting for me. I flipped up my board and carried it while I walked along the wide wooden planks in the cold autumn air. My footsteps hollow, clunking along the dock. And then he turned and looked at me. He was beautiful. There was no denying it. I could see that his beauty was probably the thing that made his whole life possible. All the things he had done wrong all crimes all the “mistakes” forgiven when people looked into his pale-blue eyes and saw the smooth contours of his jaw. Or when they knew how much money his parents had. There was a light breeze and his T-shirt and thin jacket clung to him, showing the outline of his broad shoulders, his muscled form, his hair tousled and windblown.

“I’m so excited we’re going to do this together,” he said to me. Then he reached in his pocket and pulled out a little prescription bottle and rattled it. Smiled.

“What about our deal?” He nodded and reached in his jacket pocket, took out his keys—the key to the Austin, which had his house key attached—and handed them to me. As promised, he’d let me drive the Austin and in exchange he could film me doing it while on his special prescription.

“Thanks,” I said, putting them in my pocket. I looked again at his beautiful face—the face that wasn’t hiding anything evil—it was simply expressing nothing at all. He was like a big empty hole, someone built entirely of secondhand images of life and chemicals made to numb the experience of living it.

I smiled back at him and then took my skateboard in both hands, swung it fast like a bat and hit him in the face as hard as I could. There was a loud hollow sickening crack as he was knocked backward by the force of the blow and toppled into the water. The ocean was choppy and his body bobbed and drifted quickly north toward the yacht club. I looked down and saw the spray of blood across the pier and spattering my jacket. There was also blood on the board, but I would get rid of it in just a few minutes.

There. Done. Over. I turned to walk away, but gasped as Ally was literally right behind me—my face nearly touching her face. She was stunned and horror-stricken, in shock.

“What have you done?” she wailed, tears streaming down her face. “We have to get him out of the water, he’s going to drown. He needs to go to a hospital!” She lunged for the water, but I held her back.

“No, Ally, we have to get out of here now. He hurt you. He hurt you and a lot of other people and he won’t be able to do that anymore.”

I held her around the waist and pulled her backward into my arms, trying to drag her off the dock as she dug in her heels. Finally she broke free and ran, threw herself off the end of the dock into the water with him.

“Ally, stop. Stop! There’s nothing we can do now. This was his fate. This is how it ends for him after all the things he did.”

I saw her struggling in the water. Ally is a great swimmer. She had lifted his head above the water, his face torn and bruised and broken, his nose flattened his lips smashed. She was swimming with one arm around him making slow progress to the ladder beneath the dock.

“Let him go, Ally, we have to get out of here. Let him go,” I said. “I won’t let you bring him back up on this dock.”

It seemed that he was still breathing—bubbles of foamy blood came out of his mouth and nose. His weight was pulling Ally down. I watched my sister struggling, crying flailing in the water, trying desperately to carry the weight of someone who was more than half dead, who had filmed her naked and lied to her and sold her image to old men who wanted to do her harm, someone who did this all under the guise of loving her. I couldn’t bear to see her this way. And I knew I would almost rather see her dead than see her revive Graham Copeland.

Almost.

“Help me get him up the ladder,” she called to me, spitting water from her mouth and gasping.

“No,” I said.

“Sydney! Please, we can’t do this. Please! Help me!” She inhaled water and then spluttered and choked it up. Her head disappearing below the surface for a minute. I climbed down the ladder and kicked hard at his body to get it away from her, but she held tightly to him. I am certain he was already dead but still she clung to him, trying to raise his face, putting his body above hers.

I grabbed the ladder with one hand, then held tight to her wrist with the other and put my foot on Graham’s shoulder, trying to sink him back beneath the waves as I pulled her up.

She was crying hysterically and shouting for me to stop and then I watched it happen. A large wave came cresting in and threw her against the base of the peer knocking her unconscious. It pulled her down where I couldn’t see her anymore. And only Graham’s body was bobbing there streaming blood.

I felt light-headed. I screamed her name and dove into the cold waves. I swam in the choppy water trying to see her. I thrashed in the water in my soaking cumbersome clothes for what seemed like an eternity. Minutes ticked by, each second a precious moment of my sister’s life. Then I caught a glimpse of her floating facedown far away—the wave that had crested had sucked her right out into the harbor. She wasn’t moving.

I knew that she was dead and that the water was already freezing my limbs making it impossible for me to swim. I climbed back up the ladder and raced to Graham’s car, looking for a cell phone or anything I could call someone from. There was nothing. I screamed for help but the whole idea of meeting at the abandoned pier is that there is no one to help. I looked for a rope I could throw to her—knowing as the minutes raced by that there was no way she could have survived this.

I heard myself scream as if I were drowning and then I ran. Fast. I had to save the only thing I could.

I put the key in the ignition, turned the car around and drove frantically to Graham’s house. His parents were not home—and if mine were they didn’t notice their dripping-wet daughter crying and whimpering as she fumbled for the neighbor’s house key and let herself in.

I raced up to his room and followed the instructions Becky had given me and got to the dummy site—logged in and then there it was. The swirling beach-ball timer showing how many girl-next-door videos were being downloaded.

I logged into Graham’s site administrator page and voided the sale of the videos. Then I called up the full list of other footage, selected them all, and hit delete. I knew I was destroying evidence. But the boy who had committed that crime had already paid. And so had my sister. I would not let him be the one who controlled what people remembered of her. I would not have people know her for anything other than what she really was. Not a piece of meat, or some girl who should have known better, or all the other terrible things people say about girls when boys hurt them and use them. I had gotten rid of all the disgusting images he made of people because he thought that they weren’t real or were just for his own entertainment or his own way to make money.

When I got back to the pier, their waterlogged forms still bobbed in the waves and I was wracked with guilt. I had made sure Ally’s life would speak for itself. But she was still gone.

It didn’t seem possible. I’d tried to save her, and now she was floating below me in the harbor she’d loved, beside the boy she never should have loved. I couldn’t let her drift anymore. I dove into the icy waves to drag her out, pull her up the ladder, to feel her hand in mine one last time. And I rocked in the waves, swimming with her head against my chest, clinging to my sister’s body as if it were my own.

We still don’t know exactly what happened. It seemed they fell in together. Or might have been attacked by a third party, who we haven’t yet found. Both of their faces were smashed. One from a flat, blunt object, the other from the pier. They died maybe ten minutes apart.

The strangest part was the boy’s home.

His bedroom was covered with puddles of ocean water, his computer equipment partly wrecked, all his files destroyed, sometime after the accident. His car seat was soaking wet, but the car was still parked where he left it by the pier. And no fingerprints anywhere. Not one.

We questioned Becky and Declan, but they hadn’t seen Phil Tate’s daughter in over a week before it happened. She’d been staying home. We talked to the parents and they said the same. The girl seemed preoccupied but fine.

We don’t know what we are looking at here. We don’t know if this is a murder or a double suicide or a jealous fight that got out of hand. There are only two bodies. Two kids that lived next door to each other.

We do know that Graham Copeland found trouble wherever he went and that this time trouble found him.