Truly, Madly, Deadly

ELEVEN

Sawyer was pacing on the sidewalk outside Dr. Johnson’s office when her father pulled up. “Can you just take me back to the school to get my car?” she asked him.

Andrew Dodd nodded silently and Sawyer slipped in beside him, her hands gripping the strap of her bag, her heart thumping. “Dad, I—”

Sawyer stopped dead when her father made no indication that he heard—or was willing to listen to—her. His icy silence, his eyes fixed on the street in front of them was answer enough, and Sawyer kept her mouth shut, her hand on the door handle the second Mr. Dodd’s wheels crunched over the gravel in the Hawthorne High parking lot.

“I didn’t do this,” Sawyer said before getting out of the car. “I promise, Dad. I’ll prove it to you.” She snapped the car door shut and Andrew revved the engine, sliding smoothly out of the parking lot without response.

Sawyer was walking to her car when she heard Chloe calling out to her.

“Hey, Sawyer! What happened to you?”

“Therapy.”

“They still think you’re loony tunes, huh?”

Sawyer licked her lips. “Sometimes I think I am too.”

“Join the club.” Chloe offered a small smile. “Anyway, want to hit the mall or grab a bite or something?”

Sawyer shook her head. “Didn’t you hear? I got suspended. I’m pretty sure that translates directly to ‘Sawyer Dodd will be homebound until she’s seventy-five.’”

“Damsel in distress.”

“Yeah. Come throw pebbles—or jelly beans—at my window. Or better yet, throw a prince on a white horse at it.”

Chloe grinned. “I’ll see what I can do. So, see you later?”

“God willing.”

Sawyer walked into the house, sliding off her shoes in the foyer, feeling the need to be silent even though her father’s car wasn’t in the driveway and the entire house stood still and silent. She crept slowly up the stairs, each footfall landing with the heavy thud of her heart, her blood rushing in a deafening torrent as she walked to the baby’s nursery. The door was closed and Sawyer pushed open the door slowly, ice-cold air whooshing over her bare arms, making her hair stand on end.

“Oh, shit.”

The pale green curtains that had once seemed so sweet and dainty with their zoo-animal border looked menacing with their severe shreds as they were sucked and expelled from the window, edges catching and tearing on the broken glass. She had seen the kicked-in slats of the crib in Dr. Johnson’s cell phone picture, but up close the crib looked like a smile with broken teeth that had caved in on itself; the oozing red paint was as viscous as fresh blood and made Sawyer’s stomach lurch. She clapped a hand over her mouth and heaved, relieved when nothing came out.

The baby mattress exploded with downy fiberfill, and Sawyer ran her fingers over the soft matting, her nail catching on a sharp corner. She snatched at the corner and pulled out a folded piece of paper, the same familiar green, the identical weight.

She sucked in a breath sharp as a dagger.

After everything I’ve done, you go to the police? You are ungrateful, Sawyer Dodd. You will pay.

She dropped the note, and this time she did heave, vomit and bile searing the back of her throat, burning in her nostrils. She ran to the bathroom and fell to her knees, the thrumming pain of the cold tile against her kneecaps nothing compared to the cramping in her stomach, to the pounding of her head as she gripped the cool sides of the toilet bowl, hurling, sweat, tears, and snot mixing in a relentless whirl.

When there was nothing left, Sawyer trudged to her own bedroom and crawled into her bed, slipping under her blankets still fully clothed down to her sneakers, and fell into a fitful, restless sleep.

The shrill ring of the telephone roused Sawyer. It was coming from somewhere around her and she woke up confused, disoriented. It was dark; she was in her bedroom, and the phone was jammed in her pocket.

She answered on the last ring.

“Hello?”

“Sawyer!”

“Chloe?” Sawyer fumbled to sit up, to find her alarm clock. “What time is it?”

“Just after midnight. You have to get over here.”

“Over where? It’s midnight?” Sawyer kicked off her covers and stood up, going to her bedroom window and blinking at the single yellow streetlight that cast an ominous glow through her picture window. “Are you downstairs?”

Chloe’s brother’s car—mostly a Buick with three Ford hubcaps and a Rolls Royce emblem glued on the hood—was parked askew in Sawyer’s driveway. She could see Chloe, cell phone pressed against her ear, sitting in the driver’s seat, her eyes fixed on Sawyer’s second-story window.

“What’s going on?” Sawyer wanted to know.

“Just get down here.”

Sawyer looked behind her; her bedroom was untouched, nothing moved from the moment she crawled under the covers. “I don’t know if I can. Someone—Maggie—”

“That’s why you have to come down here.”

Sawyer hung up the phone and tiptoed to her closed door. She was already in trouble; sneaking out wouldn’t affect her cause for better or for worse, but when she opened her bedroom door she noticed her father and stepmother’s bedroom door was open as well. The bed was still made; her father had not come home after leaving her at the school. Sawyer sighed and made a beeline out the front door.

“So, what’s going on?” she asked as she sat in Chloe’s passenger seat.

Chloe turned the key in the ignition, and her brother’s car chugged to life, the stereo blaring and scaring Sawyer half to death.

“Sorry,” Chloe said, reaching out and turning it down. “It’s the only car I’m allowed near since the brake line incident. You okay?”

“No,” Sawyer said. “What’s this all about?”

“Maggie,” Chloe said without tearing her eyes from the road. She guided the big car down the sloping hills of the estates and through the heavy iron gates, steering smoothly—if twenty miles over the speed limit—onto the highway.

“What about her?”

Chloe swallowed slowly, and for the first time since she had gotten into the car, Sawyer noticed that her best friend’s blue eyes were impossibly wide, covered with a glossy sheen. Her makeup was crisscrossed with tear tracks, and the edge of her nose was red. “She killed herself.”

“What?” Sawyer stomped an imaginary brake on her side of the car and turned her full body to face Chloe. “What do you mean?”

Chloe’s eyes started to moisten again and she took her hands off the wheel, pressing her palms over her eyes. “Maggie’s mom called my mom. They found her tonight.”

“Chloe!” Sawyer gripped the wheel and pulled the car back into their lane as a big rig horn wailed next to them.

“I hated her, but I can’t believe she—she—”

Chloe sniffed, and Sawyer felt the same lump growing in her throat. “She committed suicide?”

They drove in silence for a beat before Chloe turned off the highway, down a forested off ramp that Sawyer recognized as the one nearest Maggie’s house. They drove down a long, windy street that was bathed in a starlit darkness until the angry slashes of emergency lights gashed the darkness, orange, red, and blue cutting through the Buick’s windshield as they veered to a stop.

“Oh my God,” Sawyer breathed.

The cul de sac was littered with cars—some Sawyer recognized from the student parking lot at Hawthorne, most she didn’t know—and police and emergency vehicles with open doors, officers and paramedics staggered around with notepads or listening to squawking shoulder radios. An officer stepped in front of a shard of yellow headlight, and Sawyer clicked off her seat belt, launching herself out of the car. She barely heard Chloe calling in the background.

“Stephen?”

Officer Stephen Haas stopped in midstride. He smiled when he saw Sawyer, but she could see that the grin held no joy, was wooden, meant to be offered to strangers and mourners in such situations.

“What are you doing here, Sawyer?”

Sawyer’s eyes cut to Maggie’s house ablaze with lights and then back to Stephen. “Maggie was my…” She pressed the word out over her teeth, reminding herself that it had been true, once, “My friend. What happened?”

Stephen swallowed slowly, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he raked a hand through his hair. He dropped his voice and Sawyer stepped closer to him. “There’s nothing official yet, but off the record”—he touched Sawyer kindly on the shoulder, an almost fatherly gesture—“I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but your friend Maggie killed herself tonight.”

Sawyer felt the firm fist in her gut, felt all the air go out of her body. “She what?”

Now Stephen’s fatherly touch on her shoulder dipped to her elbow, his fingertips closing tightly around her arm as he led her to a slightly less populated area. He cocked his head when he brought Sawyer to a stop, dug his notepad out of his front shirt pocket.

“Did you know of anyone who was bothering Maggie?” he asked her.

“Bothering Maggie?” Sawyer crossed her arms in front of her chest, suddenly, strangely aware of the chill in the night air. “No one ever bothered Maggie.” She bothered everyone else, she stopped herself from saying.

Stephen closed his little notebook and spread his legs, evening out his weight. “She left a note before”—his eyes flashed, and he went on—“before. She said that she couldn’t take the bullying anymore.”

“Maggie was a bully.”

“She said she was being bullied.”

“What? That’s crazy. I mean, you can even ask Logan—he would know. Maggie practically ran the school.”

There was a heavy metal clanging, and the heartbreaking wail of misery. Stephan looked over his shoulder, and Sawyer’s eyes followed his as the front door of Maggie’s house was pushed open wide and a gurney was pushed out, the unmistakable shape of a body covered in a black vinyl body bag strapped on top. Maggie’s mother, her face screwed up in agony, clawed at the bag, her husband grabbing her shoulders, trying to hold his anguished wife back.

“She obviously didn’t think so,” Stephen said.

Sawyer felt her fingernails digging half moons into her palms well before she realized she was fisting her hands. “Can you tell me—can you tell me how?”

She stopped before she could complete her sentence—can you tell me how Maggie killed herself? Because even though she knew the words, she couldn’t form them, couldn’t let them cross her lips, because teenagers weren’t supposed to die. They weren’t supposed to kill themselves.

The muscle in Stephen’s jaw jumped as he looked Sawyer over hard, obviously wondering what he should tell. “I’m sorry,” he said finally, “I can’t do that.”

He turned to walk away, and Sawyer jumped after him, her hands clawing against the navy blue of his heavy shirt. “Please.” It was half whisper, half gasp. “I need to know.”

Stephen’s eyes trailed down to Sawyer’s fingers and she unleashed them, one by one. “Please,” she whispered.

“Officer Haas!” The stern voice cut through the light-pocked night, and Sawyer whirled. Detective Biggs was striding toward them, his pants pulling up at the ankle as he rushed, showing off his thin, slouched socks, the tufts of black hair poking out of them.

“Sawyer.” Detective Biggs regarded her cautiously. “I assume you knew Maggie.” He cocked his head, a mask of sadness tingeing his big cheeks pink. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

Sawyer nodded, numbness overtaking her as her eyes swept over Maggie’s parents, embracing, shaking under the weight of their eldest daughter being moved slowly into the back of the waiting van, the word CORONER painted in bold, straight letters on the side.

“I have to go.”

Sawyer snapped herself back into the passenger side of Chloe’s brother’s car.

“What did you find out?” Chloe wanted to know.

“Can we just leave, please?” Sawyer’s voice sounded strange and hollow.

Chloe frowned. “Sure. I guess so. Did you—”

“Please, Chloe?” Sawyer shook her head, swallowing slowly. “I just want to go home.”

Chloe nodded, big blue eyes wide and focused on the dim street in front of them. “Sure. Let’s just head home.”

Sawyer’s father had come home sometime—during the night or in the morning, Sawyer couldn’t be sure—and left again, leaving a terse note on the countertop.

Will be late tonight. Food in the freezer. Dad.

Sawyer crumpled the note and tossed it in the trash; she hadn’t slept all night and her stomach had been in knots since she saw the paramedics wheeling Maggie’s body away. She drove to school with the radio off and the windows rolled up tight, convincing herself that if she could just stay in the tiny, closed confines of the car, none of this would touch her.

There would be no more notes.

No shredded surprises.

Sawyer took the exit that fed her into town; she slowed in front of the police station and turned into the parking lot. Her heart started to thump when she glanced through the large plateglass windows and saw Stephen in the lobby, talking to Detective Biggs.

I should stop, she told herself. I should go in and find out what happened to Maggie.

Sawyer pulled her car to a stop but kept her hand on the key, the ignition quiet.

After all I’ve done for you…

The words of the note flashed in front of her eyes.

He knew.

Sawyer’s hackles went up and a cold sweat pricked at her hairline, at her upper lip. Her saliva was sour, her tongue limp and heavy in her mouth.

He could be watching me now.

Sawyer turned in her seat, her eyes scanning the backseat littered with discarded sneakers and crumpled homework papers, a few paper cups from the Sonic drive-through on the floor.

She swallowed hard and then looked outside. The parking lot was choked with cars, but all of them sat empty. The bushes that lined the manicured lawn in front of the building were clipped too low, and the plants and trees were too sparse to hide a person. Sawyer should have felt better, but unease still cloaked her like a blanket.

When someone rapped on her windshield, Sawyer screamed.

“Sorry!” Stephen’s eyebrows shot up. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.”

Sawyer opened her door and smiled sheepishly up at Stephen, her heart thundering in her throat. “No, I—I’m just a little freaked out is all.”

“Is everything okay?”

Sawyer looked at Stephen, weighing the eager look in his eyes, the friendly, open set of his smile.

She could tell him.

Ask him to keep it a secret.

You’ll pay, Sawyer Dodd…

“Everything’s fine. I just thought I would stop by here and say thank you…to you. Thanks for listening to me. Everything is fine, though. I should go.”

Sawyer snapped her car door shut and flicked the key in the ignition before Stephen had a chance to answer. She pulled out of the parking lot leaving Stephen behind her, watching her taillights flash as she sped from the lot.

“It’s a juice box, not a male model,” Chloe said when they were sitting in the lunchroom.

“What? Oh. Ew.” Sawyer put down the juice she was drinking and rolled her eyes at Chloe. “You’re gross.”

“Sorry. Just trying to inject a little lightness into the day, I guess.” Chloe’s smile was wistful but held no joy. “How’s detention?”

Sawyer shrugged and shook her head, distracted.

There had been the pale drone of sad, whispered stories on campus since Sawyer stepped into the Hawthorne High student lot: Is Maggie really dead? Did she really hang herself in her closet? I didn’t know she was so depressed…

A semiofficial rumor—some kid was related to someone at the county coroner’s office—said that Maggie had hung herself, that she was found in her own closet, a belt wound around her neck. Rumor or not, the idea that Maggie—or anyone, for that matter—could loop something around her neck and kill herself made Sawyer’s blood run cold.

It had only gotten worse as the school day progressed, and every time Sawyer saw the red, puffy eyes of a fellow student, she was thrown back to Kevin, back to the Monday after his death when she trudged through the molasses-smeared memory of her heavy feet, her guilty heart.

Sawyer chewed her bottom lip. “Do you think she really did it?”

Chloe unwrapped her spork, stabbed at a dish of electric-looking orange pieces. “Did what?”

“Killed herself.” Sawyer’s voice dropped into a hoarse whisper. “Do you really think Maggie killed herself?”

“Well…yeah. She hung herself, S. She was in her own closet.” Chloe shuddered. “It’s just awful.”

“But—” Sawyer started and then stopped, snapped her mouth shut when Chloe looked up at her questioningly.

“What are you thinking?” Chloe asked.

A hot blush washed over Sawyer’s cheeks and she shrugged, shoulders to earlobes. “Nothing, I guess.”

Sawyer gathered up her lunch tray, unease settling over her. Maggie had harassed her every day for the last year and a half straight. Could it be a coincidence—or a message?