Summer (4 page)

I stepped away and shook my head.

‘Yes. The way you always know what’s right and what’s wrong, no grey areas. Me – I look from all angles and end up without a point of view.’

‘We’re different,’ I agreed. ‘But you’re the one with the talent. We all envy you. Actually no,’ I said straight away. ‘No way do we feel jealous. We all want you to be this big, big star, for the whole world to know you.’

‘We’re talking as if it might still happen,’ she pointed out, staring up at the sky.

I took her hand and stood with her for a while. Then we walked arm in arm back to the house.

The whole of the state police were still looking for Summer’s killer. It was a high-profile shooting, part of the cluster of deaths that launched Ellerton into national prominence and kept it there for months on end.

‘You need to dig deep,’ Hunter instructed before
I left Foxton that night. ‘And this time you really don’t come back until you have something new to tell us – understand?’

‘Got it.’ My short answer came through gritted teeth. I held Phoenix’s hand more tightly.

‘Wait for us to come to you,’ the overlord insisted. ‘And be careful not to attract attention.’

‘Got it,’ I said again.

‘So go.’ Hunter turned his back and it was Phoenix who led me out of the house in silence.

‘How are you doing?’ he asked, halfway up the hill.

I shook my head. ‘This is cruel. Why can’t I come to see you?’

‘Because.’ His shrug conveyed the helplessness we shared. ‘Hunter tightened up on the rules,’ he explained. ‘He doesn’t want anyone following you out to Foxton – Logan or any of your buddies. You know what happens if someone from the far side finds out we’re here.’

‘You leave and never come back.’ It was a death sentence all over again. None of the Beautiful Dead ever got another chance to unravel the mysteries surrounding them. No one got justice or peace of mind.

‘So that’s the risk.’ Phoenix stopped as we reached the ridge where Summer and I had star-gazed earlier. ‘No one’s saying you got careless, Darina. Hunter’s looking
at the laws of probability, is all.’

‘The more I drive out here, the greater the risk that someone follows me?’ This discussion, which pushed me kicking and screaming back into the grey world, was making me miserable. ‘Maybe Hunter should trust me more,’ I pointed out. ‘I’m getting pretty good at covering my tracks.’

‘I know, baby.’ With his arms around my waist, Phoenix pulled me close. ‘I know, I know.’

‘Tell me you’ll still be here when I come back,’ I sighed.

‘I’ll be here.’

‘Tell me you still love me.’

This time he didn’t speak. He put it all into a long, lingering kiss that told me everything I needed to know.

The next day, Sunday, I steered clear of Laura and Jim and took my laptop with me to a quiet coffee bar on the edge of town. I sat by the window, looking out on roofs and sidewalks still wet from snow melt.

‘Black coffee,’ I told the waitress as I logged on and typed
Ellerton killings
into the search engine. I wasn’t feeling good. Maybe the coffee would help with the headache left over from the day before and the shaky, hopeless feeling of being cut off from Phoenix until I came
up with some good new information on Summer.

I already knew there was a whole website devoted to recent events in town. It listed the deaths – Jonas Jonson, Arizona Taylor, Summer Madison and Phoenix Rohr, with pictures of each of the victims, together with short biographies and quotes from friends and families. The entire thing was a rubber-necker fest for people who got their kicks from sudden, untimely deaths – those onlookers who pick over details until they feel they’re somehow part of the story and write stuff on the site like
Summer, I luv u so much
and
We’ll miss u 4ever.
This was so not my thing. In fact, I felt queasy just accessing the site.

But where else did I start with solving the mystery of Summer’s killing? I had to trawl through the tributes, the newspaper articles, police activity, autopsy report, even the reviews of her music and the links with her angelvoice website, looking for anything that jumped out.

The waitress brought coffee and looked over my shoulder at the screen. ‘Are you reading about that poor kid, Summer Madison?’ she asked. ‘Did you hear her “Red Sky” track?’

I nodded.

‘And the one about being in love with someone who doesn’t know you’re into them, and how that feels. What’s the name of that one?’

‘“Invisible.”’ I didn’t welcome the conversation – it was happening even though I’d turned my screen away and kept my shoulders hunched over my coffee.

‘Yeah, “Invisible”. So cool.’ Waitress-girl was still hanging around and hoping for a reaction from me. ‘Actually, I know Summer’s family. My mom was their housekeeper. She says there was music and guitars everywhere. She doesn’t go there now that Mrs Madison isn’t doing so well. Mom says she doesn’t like people poking around Summer’s old stuff.’

I looked up over my shoulder. ‘I’m pretty busy,’ I told her.

She nodded quickly. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to—’

‘You didn’t. It’s cool.’ I waited for her to get back behind her counter then refined my search to find newspaper articles written at the time of Summer’s killing. There were dozens and systematically I began to read the reports, trying to keep my own feelings at bay and not to relive the nightmare moments.

Friday, April thirtieth, four-thirty p.m. Lone gunman, random attack. Shot twice – once in the leg, once in the chest. The seventeen-year-old victim died instantly. Some facts were set in stone.

I went on to interviews with witnesses – mall employees, friends of the victim, including the comments I gave to a
reporter while I was still traumatized: ‘This is not happening. It can’t be true.’ The reporter states that I said the same short phrase over and over: ‘It can’t be true.’ Even though the ambulance had arrived and the paramedics had taken Summer away in a body bag, and the place was swarming with cops.

Then I got into the police statements. There was the point twenty-four hours after the shooting when their investigation had thrown up a couple of unspecified leads. They were planning to interview everyone present in the mall at the time of the shooting, then a couple of days down the line they were spreading the net, appealing for any information about the missing gunman, asking the public to report anyone behaving suspiciously on the day of the shooting. Then, later still, they got into searches of abandoned cars and buildings, and as a last resort they went to Allyson Taylor’s news station and recorded an appeal from Jon Madison, begging the killer to give himself up and give the family closure. Eventually, when that failed, they started to look out of state at copycat killings.

I slowed down with the mouse action to read this part thoroughly. The local newspaper stuck with the crime long after it vanished from the nationals. On June sixth they reported a shooting in Venice, Florida. The same
thing – the guy walked into a mall in late afternoon, wearing a black sweatshirt and white baseball cap. He didn’t aim before he fired. This time he hit three targets. Two people died, the third had serious chest injuries. And again the gunman got away. The Venice cops believed he’d parked his car close to the car-park barrier, straight out on to an intersection with five exits. He probably chose the coast road north to the Texas Panhandle, the fastest highway he could find.

I read the report twice. The white cap grabbed my attention. I got a flashback of April thirtieth – Summer exiting the music shop, waving at me and starting to walk across the plaza, a wide-open target. The face of the gunman beneath the white peak – thin and wearing aviator shades.
Why those ugly shades?
I wondered at the time, in the seconds before he pulled out his gun.

Now I sat and asked myself if the same crazy guy had driven south and chosen another mall. Had he driven from town to town until he found one with an easy escape route? Did he plan things this carefully, with chilling attention to detail?

‘More coffee?’ The waitress was back, snooping at my screen.

‘No – thanks.’ I clicked the Back key repeatedly.
Ellerton
killings
came up. I was back where I’d started. This time I
chose a new route and clicked on
Ellerton – a town’s
History of Violence
.

A journalist had written a special feature for a weekend magazine and it was reprinted here. He seemed to think there was something in the fact that a small town in the American Midwest had played host to more than the average number of killers. He claimed that the crime statistics put Ellerton in the same league as some of the major cities. ‘You can’t sleep safe in your beds’ was his message to residents. And as a matter of fact, he told us, this curse went way back, to the start of the last century and beyond.

I read that I lived in a town that grew up around cattle – we were on the route the drovers used as they headed south from Montana into Texas, and these drovers were a lawless bunch, stealing steers from other herds, shooting each other in the back for the sake of a few dollars per head. The whole thing didn’t settle down until the cattle drives dried up and Ellerton got itself a train station on the main route west through the Rockies. Then haulage companies invested and Ellerton grew respectable, on the whole.

Come the end of the nineteenth century, we had three churches and five schools. We still had cattle, but they were mainly fenced in. The ranchers’ wives came into
Ellerton to shop along a main street selling hats, gloves, lace for their collars and hand-made boots.

End of history lesson, but not quite. The journalist soon got back to the gory part of our past – for example, the ancient, unsolved mystery of a rape and homicide out at Foxton Ridge. My finger twitched on the mouse button as I read on.

The name of the rape victim was Marie Hunter. She’d been home alone on the remote ranch when her nearest neighbour, Peter Mentone, paid an uninvited visit. Mentone had a history as a loner and a loser – he lived below the poverty line in a wooden shack with just a few cattle and his horse for company. He must have been seriously delusional if he expected the beautiful and respectable, married Marie to return the attention he was suddenly paying.

The journalist had done his research thoroughly. He recorded how Mentone had made his move, how Marie had fought back but couldn’t stop the assault. She was left with bruises all over her body and a broken arm. So imagine the relief she felt when her husband, Robert Hunter, came home unexpectedly and caught Mentone in his kitchen raping his wife.

This is the graphic part. Court records told how Hunter broke the bolt on his own front door and crashed into the
room. He saw Marie on the rug with Mentone still on top of her. He ran and grabbed the guy by the back of his jacket and swung him aside, not seeing the gun in Mentone’s belt. I guess he was blind with rage as he sent him sprawling across the room. He stooped over his wife to help her up, then he turned to deal with her attacker.

Mentone had had time to get to his feet and draw the gun. He pointed it at Hunter and shot him in the head at point-blank range.

It was an open-and-shut case. Mentone had killed his victim and fled the scene, but Marie soon identified him and the sheriff arrested him – he was hiding stupidly in his shack. He didn’t try to run or resist in any way. They had the trial and they hung Mentone within two weeks of the crime.

No one felt sorry – Robert Hunter had been well liked and his wife had been brought up by a strict protestant family in the town. She’d taught school before she married and settled down.

There was another tragedy for Marie Hunter to bear, the journalist added. Nine months after the rape and the death of her husband, she gave birth to a child – a baby girl whom she named Hester after the girl in a classic novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

I was stunned by the report and sat for what seemed
like an age running through the details. I got through to the end of the account for a fourth time. Mentone had raped Marie and she had his baby! Plus, Hunter had a first name – Robert. He wasn’t only Hunter the overlord with the fading angel-wing tattoo.

While I was staring out of the window working through my reaction, Brandon Rohr rode up on his Harley.

He came into the café, straight to my table. ‘Coffee,’ he called to the waitress.

‘Hey, Brandon, is this a weird coincidence or what?’ I set up the ironic defence before he could, overcoming the spooky feeling that he was stalking me. ‘Sit down, why don’t you?’

‘Darina.’ Unzipping his leather jacket, he didn’t seem in the mood to take up the challenge. ‘We don’t see you this side of town. What happened?’

‘I wanted a quiet morning to focus on a school project. It was working until you walked in through the door – thanks!’

‘I’m out of here,’ he offered. And he meant it. He picked up his keys and scraped back his chair.

‘No, stay. Drink your coffee.’ I looked more closely and dropped the stalker theory. Brandon seemed tired, minus the usual macho posturing. ‘How are you doing?’

‘Good,’ he said, walking over to the counter to save the
waitress a trip. He stayed there to sip his coffee.

‘What happened to you?’ I asked. ‘How come you’re not pressing my buttons?’

‘I’m not in the mood.’

‘You were the last time we met, outside the Madisons’ place.’ This new subdued Brandon allowed me past the tough-guy image to view the Brandon that reminded me more of Phoenix – quiet and somehow vulnerable. ‘Really – did something bad happen?’

He came back to the table, turned his chair around and sat astride. ‘The cops brought Zak home,’ he told me. ‘Last night. They caught the kid setting fire to a janitor’s store at his school.’

‘That’s bad. I’m sorry.’

‘Mom went crazy. After she yelled at Zak she turned on me and said it was all down to me. Zak needed someone he could look up to and now Phoenix is gone, I’m the lousy role model he has to follow.’

‘She said that? So when did you last set fire to a janitor’s store?’ I asked. Phoenix had told me about Brandon’s past and it didn’t include arson. True, there was a jail sentence for fighting over a girl and beating the other guy to a pulp, and other angry adolescent stuff before that. But nothing since, as far as I knew.