I shake my head. “For you and me, but apparently not for them. Name a tough decision you’ve had to make, one you’ve agonized over.”
She answers immediately. “Whether or not to leave you and return to Findlay. It was torture, but it was a decision that I knew I had to make myself, and I finally made it.”
“Okay, but what if you had turned it over to someone else and gave that someone full power to tell you what to do? The torture is gone, isn’t it?”
She shakes her head adamantly. “Absolutely not; it would be replaced by a different kind of torture. I would feel helpless… childlike.”
“But if you believed, if in your heart you knew, that it was God making the decision? Wouldn’t that be incredibly freeing, if you could talk to God and let him tell you what is right?”
“No one can do that. Not like that,” she says. “And certainly not the Centurions.”
“It doesn’t matter if they can. It matters if they believe they can. That’s why they’ll do whatever the wheel tells them to do.”
“Including murder?” she asks.
I smile my holiest smile. “That, my child, is still to be determined.”
• • • • •
AS PATHETIC AS it sounds, this is my first time in a girl’s dorm room. It’s not for lack of trying… back in college there’s no place I would have rather been. It was off-limits back then, even if a girl wanted to invite you in, or at least that’s what the girls told me. Which is just as well, since none of them ever expressed anguish that they were so constrained.
It only took Jeremy one day to set this up. According to him, Madeline jumped at the opportunity to come here and get Liz’s things when one of Liz’s friends made the phone call. Even better, she said that her mother was going to be working, so she would never realize that Madeline was gone.
Liz’s friend Emily checked me in at the downstairs desk as her father. She’s twenty and I’m thirty-seven, so it’s slightly annoying to me that the person at the desk had no trouble believing the relationship. She’s left me alone in her room as we wait for Madeline to show, and I’m sitting on the bed feeling like a pervert, Peeping Tom, dirty old man, or something.
I’m not sure exactly what I’m going to say to Madeline. I’ll probably act as if I know she’s the one who was in contact with Eddie, even though I don’t. I hope she’s a typically transparent seventeen-year-old and that I’ll therefore know from her reaction whether I’m right or wrong.
Madeline said she would be here by one o’clock, and at ten of one I hear people coming down the hall. The doorknob turns, and I move slightly to the side so that I won’t be in her line of sight when she enters.
The door opens, and Emily says, “Come on in. There’s somebody I want you to see.” Madeline walks into the room and Emily backs out, closing the door behind her and leaving Madeline alone with me.
Madeline sees me, and her reactions are astonishing and completely easy to read. First there is a look of surprise, then one of recognition, and finally, a pain like I haven’t seen in a very long time. I don’t say a word as she starts to sob, sinking to her knees in the process.
I walk over and place my hand on her shoulder as she continues to cry. Finally, it starts to slow down, and she gets up and goes over to the bed. She sits down on it, puts her head in her hands, and gets the remaining sobs out of her system.
“They killed him,” are the first words out of her mouth. “They killed Eddie. Just like they killed Liz and Sheryl.”
This starts her crying again, so I wait the minute or so that this lasts before responding. “I need you to tell me all about it, Madeline.”
She nods her understanding but composes herself a little more before speaking again. “I wanted to call you, to talk to you… but I was scared. I am so scared.”
“It’s okay… I understand. I would be scared in your position as well. But we’ll make sure you’re completely protected. Nothing will happen to you.”
She nods again. “I don’t know that much,” she says.
“Why don’t you just tell me what you do know?”
Another nod. “The night Liz died, she was really afraid of something. She was with Sheryl and Eddie, and I never saw them like that. They were like frightened out of their minds.”
“What scared them so much?” I ask.
“I’m not sure… they wouldn’t tell me. They said it was better if I didn’t know.”
“Was this before or after Liz went to see Jeremy at the bar?” I ask.
“Before. She went there to tell him she wasn’t going to see him anymore. She was running away with Sheryl and Eddie. Sheryl went with her, and Eddie stayed behind to get some things together.”
That explains why Liz and Sheryl were killed and Eddie ran away. His staying behind to get some things saved his life, at least for a couple of months, until I set him up to be killed.
“Were you in touch with Eddie after he ran away?” I ask.
“Yes. He called me a few times. The last time he asked me to send him some money.”
“So he told you where he was,” I say.
She nods. “But I didn’t have the money; I was trying to get it. Then that police lady told my mom you had been looking for Eddie, so when he called back, I told him that. I said he should call you… that you could help.”
“Why didn’t he just call the police?”
She shakes her head. “I don’t know.”
It’s possible that Eddie was distrustful of the police because Stephen Drummond represented authority to him. Maybe he thought that contacting the police was the same as contacting Drummond. He told me that he had run that day because he thought I might have been sent by Drummond. Whatever was scaring him, Drummond was behind it.
“You’ve got to think, Madeline. What could have scared Liz and Sheryl and Eddie like that? Maybe they said something, some little thing, thinking you wouldn’t understand.”
She thinks for a moment. “All I know is it had something to do with Sheryl’s boyfriend.”
I was so focused on finding Eddie, Liz’s boyfriend, that I spent almost no time thinking about Sheryl, and whether she might have had one as well. Yet Catherine Gerard told me that boys and girls are matched up at six years old. There’s no reason to think Sheryl would have been an exception.
“What about him?” I asked. “Was it something he did? Something he said?” I’m probing for information that she unfortunately does not seem to have.
“I just don’t know… I’m sorry,” she says, getting upset at her inability to give me what I want. “They wouldn’t tell me.”
“Do you know her boyfriend’s name?” I ask.
She nods. “Alan.”
“Do you know his last name?”
She nods again. “Drummond.”
Alan Drummond.
Son of Stephen.
When Eddie told me he was afraid that Drummond was coming for him, he wasn’t talking about the father; he was talking about the son.
“Is it possible that Eddie was afraid of Alan?” I ask.
She says it simply, almost matter-of-factly, but it sends a chill through me. “Everybody’s afraid of Alan.”
I continue to question Madeline, but she has little else to offer in the way of information. Finally, she tells me that she should be going so she can get back before her mother returns home.
“If you’re worried, afraid for your safety, I can get you taken into protective custody. That way no one can get near you.”
“You’re not going to tell anyone we talked, are you?” she asks.
“Only Laurie Collins. She’s the chief of police in Findlay, and she won’t repeat it. I trust her with my life.”
Madeline thinks for a moment, perhaps cognizant that it’s not my life we’re trusting Laurie with… it’s her own. Finally, she says, “Okay. How can I reach you if I hear anything important?”