Very Bad Things (17 page)

“It’s good to be careful these days,” the woman said as she gestured for Katie to enter. She sat down on a floral-patterned
sofa, taking care not to unsettle a black cat sprawled across the cushions. “It’s a scary world we live in, isn’t it?” she remarked, and absently began to stroke the sleeping feline. “You’d figure nothing much would happen in a town like this. First to have the house burn down next door and then to have that young waitress from the diner go missing.”

Katie cleared her throat. “I read an article from the
Gazette
about the fire. In it, you said you wouldn’t be surprised if Peter Lupinski was responsible.”

The woman nodded, the skin beneath her neck wobbling. “There was always something off about him. He drove his mother to distraction. Tanya would be over here, red-faced, asking if I’d seen him. He used to steal from her. And then he’d disappear for days. It broke her heart.” She stopped petting the cat. “They came from an orphanage in Russia, you know. Tanya said they were badly neglected and malnourished, Peter most of all because he’d been there longer. I read up on it some. Those poor babies get no affection, none. It makes them go numb.” Her gaze drifted over to the window. “I once saw him race around on his bike, run it into a tree, and fall hard on the concrete. You would’ve thought he’d cry his lungs out. Only he didn’t. Kid had blood all over and lost some teeth, but his expression didn’t change a hair.”

Katie sat very still, trying to imagine what it had been like for Tessa and Peter, first living in an orphanage and then trying to adjust to being a family. If you shut down your emotions for too long to protect yourself, it couldn’t be easy to turn them on again. No wonder Tessa didn’t want to talk about it.

“He had a speech impediment,” Mrs. Cottingham went on, and waved a blue-veined hand. “I’m not sure of the technical name, but he was tongue-tied. He didn’t talk much. And when he did, he was hard to understand. As far as I know, he didn’t have any friends. Except”—her face bunched up like she had smelled something putrid—“when he brought that riffraff home. Kids who looked like they hadn’t washed in weeks. Tanya would find them in her kitchen, eating her food, sometimes sleeping in her sheets. Horrifying.” She sniffed. “But more than anything, she was afraid for the little girl. In the end, all they wanted was to save her.”

“What about Tessa?” Katie asked. “Was she reckless like Peter?”

“Quite the opposite.” The woman began stroking the cat again, eliciting a gentle purr. “She was a quiet mouse. I saw her with her mom in the garden sometimes. I used to wave at her and say hello, but I don’t think she ever said boo to me.”

That sounded like Tessa, Katie thought. Reserved to the point of being standoffish.

“She loved her brother, though, I’ll tell you that.” Mrs. Cottingham nodded. “If he was anywhere near, she clung to him like she was drowning and he was her life raft.”

Tessa must have felt completely lost when her brother had died along with the only parents she’d ever known. Was that the reason she couldn’t move past it? Or was there something more that Katie wasn’t seeing yet? “You don’t think Tessa set the fire, do you?” she finally asked, thinking of the rumors she’d heard since she’d come to Whitney Prep.

The woman hesitated for a few seconds before she shook
her head, setting her chin to wobbling again. “No,” she said, “I truly don’t. I always believed it was him. Tessa was only seven when it happened. He was twelve, practically a teenager. There was still hope for her. But him …”

“Hopeless?”

“Yes.”

“Did anyone ever find out who rescued Tessa that night?”

“Not as far as I know,” the woman said, puffing air through her lips. “I recall the firemen saying it was a miracle she’d survived without burns, that whoever got her out must’ve suffered for it. But no one ever came forward.”

Tessa had told Katie that “a ghost” had saved her. It sounded close enough to the truth. Who else could have done something so heroic and then disappeared like a wisp of smoke?

“Tanya and John just tried to do what was right, and that boy destroyed them all. He couldn’t be saved. He had no heart,” Mrs. Cottingham said, and put a finger to her lips as though to steady herself.

Katie could see that the woman had more she wanted to say, so she let her talk.

“About a week before the fire, Mr. Whiskers went missing.”

“Mr. Whiskers?”

“My dear cat.” Her red-rimmed eyes filled with tears. “He was more like my child. I’d had him for fifteen years. Got him when my husband passed. I should never have let him outside, but he liked to wander over to Tanya’s garden next door, and I never thought a thing about it.”

“What happened? Did he die?” Katie asked, and the woman’s face quickly went from sad to angry.

“Did he die?” she repeated so fiercely she left spittle on her chin. “That evil boy killed him! I couldn’t prove it, but I know it’s true.” She tugged roughly on the hem of her zigzag shirt. “The day before the fire, I found a cardboard box tied with garden twine left on my porch.” She made noises like tiny sobs and then cleared her throat. “When I opened it up, Mr. Whiskers was inside, stiff as a board.” Her rheumy eyes looked up. Her mouth trembled. “I couldn’t prove it but I know that boy poisoned him. And if he could murder Mr. Whiskers in cold blood, he was capable of anything.”

K
atie left Virginia Cottingham’s house feeling strangely wired, like she’d had too many caffeine shots. Her head swirled with what she’d learned about Tessa and Peter Lupinski, things she’d never known, stuff Tessa would never have told her in a million years. But instead of getting all the answers she wanted, she ended up with more questions.

Like, who had saved Tessa from the fire? How far could someone with burns go without getting help? Had Peter killed Mrs. Cottingham’s cat and set it on her porch in a box tied with twine? It was so eerily similar to the box with the hand that Katie couldn’t shake the sense that the two were connected.

There was something else that kept nagging at the back of Katie’s brain about Tessa and The Box, but she couldn’t put her finger on it.

The worst part of all was that Katie found herself wondering if her best friend might be involved with what had happened to Rose. Was that the reason Tessa was so determined to place the blame on Mark? Maybe it had nothing to do with being jealous and was all about saving herself.

Oh, God, what’s going on?

The more she dug, the more complicated everything got.

She stood on Mrs. Cottingham’s porch for a moment before calling Dr. Capello. There was one more place she needed to go before she went back to school. It wouldn’t take long. She hoped the school psychiatrist was busy with a session and wouldn’t try to stop her.

“Hey, Dr. C, it’s Katie,” she started to say when a voice answered, “Hello, this is Dr. Lisa Capello,” but it was only voice mail.

Katie took a deep breath and rambled on after the beep, “Yeah, I know you told me to stay put, but I need to visit the Lupinskis’ graves, and I’m only three blocks from the cemetery. Maybe you could pick me up there. I swear, I’ll be careful.”

She quickly hung up, her heart racing, expecting her phone to ring and Dr. Capello to bawl her out and tell her not to go anywhere. But when she didn’t hear anything within a few minutes, Katie took it as a sign and started walking.

It was a bright and mild April afternoon, and she didn’t feel the least bit nervous as she took the sidewalk toward the town center. An orange school bus rumbled by on the road,
and she passed several dog walkers and a mother pushing her baby in a stroller.

When Katie got to the cemetery, she stopped outside the gates.

Even though the sun perched high in an impeccably blue sky, there was something ominous about the wrought-iron gates with the arched entry flanked by two solemn Victorian angels carved from stone and discolored by time and pollution; their hands were clasped in prayer, weathered faces tipped toward the clouds as though desperately seeking permission to depart their sooty pedestals and return to the sanctity of heaven.

It was very Gothic, Katie thought, kind of
Twilight
meets
Jane Eyre
, and creepy enough to make her shudder. After such a gloomy greeting, she appreciated the cheerful pots of marigolds inside the gates and yellow daffodils that speckled the lawn between burial plots.

She had to stop and ask the groundskeeper where the Lupinskis were buried, and he pointed her toward the pond, where dappled sunlight danced.

“Look for an elm tree with a concrete bench beneath it,” he told her, and Katie thanked him.

She could hear the occasional whoosh of cars beyond the fence and the squawk of ducks and geese. No one else was about, so the grounds seemed ungodly quiet save for the scrape of her shoes on the gravel road and the twitter of birds.

Katie paused as she came to a curve in the path, the duck pond just yards away.

Headstones and monuments rose from the grass, serenaded
by chirping birds and shaded by trees, branches swaying in the breeze. She wended her way through family plots, squinting at unfamiliar names and moving on. She passed a dozen before she saw the one engraved
JOHN HENRY LUPINSKI, BELOVED HUSBAND AND FATHER
.

Beside it was the marker for Tanya Lupinski. The tombstone for Peter Mikhail Lupinski sat at least a dozen feet away. Maybe the space between was reserved for Tessa? Or maybe they just hadn’t wanted Peter so near even after they were gone.

Her phone rang, cutting through the quiet of the graveyard, and Katie felt relieved when she saw the number was Bea Lively’s.

“You found something?” she said, staring at the duck pond as she waited for Bea’s answer.

“That’s what’s weird,” Bea replied in a hushed voice. “I didn’t find anything. Nothing at all. Steve’s transcript for this past semester at Whitney and all his transferred records have no remarks regarding discipline.”

“None?”

“None. So either he’s a Boy Scout with a bad rap, or someone’s done a great job of scrubbing his records.”

“Nothing?” Katie croaked, unable to believe it.

“Nada, zip, zilch.” Bea sighed loudly. “I even poked into my own file and yours to make sure it wasn’t a glitch in the system. We both had disciplinary notes about that sit-in at the cafeteria last November, so it’s not like Big Brother wiped out everything.”

“Too bad.”

“Yeah, no kidding. I glanced at Tessa’s transcript, too, just to be sure,” Bea went on in the same hushed tone. “Even she had a blot on her record from way back when she first started at Whitney.”

“Really?” Katie couldn’t imagine what Tessa had done. Ever since she’d known her, Tessa had been all about “we scholly kids have to go by the book.”

“Apparently she stole some stuff.”

“From another student?”

“No, from the dorm kitchen,” Bea told her. “She took food. Tins of fruit and bags of bread. They found a hoard of it in the basement machine room. Maybe she had the opposite of anorexia, whatever that is.”

“Yeah, maybe.” Katie wondered if hoarding food was a hangover from Tessa’s days at the orphanage. The neighbor had said that Tessa and Peter had been malnourished.

“Anyway, I’m sorry I couldn’t help you nail that prick Steve, but his record’s a big, fat blank.”

“Thanks, Bea,” Katie said, and hung up.

She sank down on the grass, biting her cheek and screwing up her nerve before she pulled up the Whitney website on her phone, entered her password, and found what she needed in the school directory. Then she dialed Joelle Needham’s number.

“It’s Katie,” she said the second Joelle answered. “I wanted you to know I got into Steve’s records, but his transcripts don’t show he was ever disciplined for anything. There’s no proof that he ever hurt anyone. If you don’t step up and talk—”

Joelle hung up on her.

Katie sighed and put her phone away. She’d tried, right? She’d done her best, but she didn’t know where else to look. She wasn’t a cop or a forensics expert. There wasn’t much else she could do.

For a long time, she just stared at Peter Lupinski’s gravestone, her thoughts so confused it made her head hurt.

I think it was a ghost … I wish he’d left me there … whoever got her out must’ve suffered for it …

What if—Katie’s exhausted brain began to wonder—what if Tessa’s brother had saved her from the fire, the same way he’d protected her in the orphanage? Was it possible he’d gotten Tessa out safely and then gone back into the house?

He brought riffraff home … kids who looked like they hadn’t washed in weeks … Tanya would find them in her kitchen, eating her food, sometimes sleeping in her sheets
.

Or maybe he hadn’t gone back in at all. Could the charred bones buried in Peter’s grave belong to someone else? Was there any way—any chance—that Tessa’s brother could still be alive?

A chill crept up her spine despite the warm afternoon.

A twig snapped nearby, and Katie looked up as a shadow fell upon her, blotting out the sun. Before she could make out a face, she held her breath, her heart beating a million miles a minute, thinking it was Peter Lupinski, risen from the dead.