As if on cue, a NewsOne truck pulled in front of the school. “Told you so.”
Ellie was heading back to her car when she heard the boy’s voice again behind her.
“You should tell her parents a hundred grand’s not enough. At least not in Julia’s circle.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Oh, you didn’t even know? That is classic. Mommy and Daddy dearest announced a hundred-thousand-dollar reward for info. Might make a difference if she’d been killed by some gangbanger in the Bronx. But the people who knew Julia best know there’s nothing to telclass="underline" Life sucks and then you die. Besides, that kind of money’s only—what? Like a few months’ splurge for a kid who’s already got a trust fund? They’re wasting their time.”
Her cell phone rang as she unlocked the car door. It was Rogan.
“Hey. I just talked to one of Julia’s friends and want to scrub my brain out. You can’t possibly be done already.” Judges insisted on promptness from everyone but themselves. By Ellie’s estimation, Rogan’s testimony on the pretrial motions in the Washington case should have started only minutes earlier.
“The defense withdrew the motion. They reached a plea agreement before I even hit the stand. Guess I scared them that much.” Despite the bravado behind his words, he sounded disappointed.
“I’m afraid to ask.” She knew how much Rogan cared about that case. She had watched him adjust Thelma Washington’s threadbare housedress before they’d zipped the body bag around her corpse.
“Life with possibility of parole at twenty. I can live with it. Better than some jury feeling sorry for the crackhead and coming back with a Man One verdict. What’s up on your end?”
“Have you heard anything from the Whitmires? A kid at the Casden School says they announced a reward.”
“Hold on a second.” She heard Rogan asking someone in the background to pull up the New York Post’s website. “Yep, got it right here. A hundred grand.”
Just as Marcus Graze had said. “I figure we only have a couple of hours before we get hammered by all the money-sniffing whackjobs coming out of the woodwork. Very helpful of them to mention it to us, huh?”
“Great. The phone number listed here’s not even a city number. If they’d coordinated with us, we could have at least used the tip line and staffed it with our own people. Now we have no idea what kind of airhead will be manning the incoming calls. Rich people got their own way of doing stuff.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” she said, recalling the bizarre atmosphere at Casden.
“I’m heading your way. Where you at?”
She gave him the location of her parked car. She wasn’t planning on heading out yet. She sat in the driver’s seat, but did not turn on the engine, watching the entrance to the Casden School. “Do me a favor before you leave? See if you can find a picture online of a Casden teacher named Kenneth Wallace. Supposedly teaches physics.”
Margaret Carter might be in bunker mode, but for the first time, Ellie was starting to think that Julia’s story might be more complicated than she’d first thought—and that somehow the answers would be found inside that building.
Chapter Twenty
Ramona sat on the bench next to the playground south of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Though a sign labeled it the Pat Hoffman Friedman Playground, everyone in the neighborhood called this the Three Bears Playground because of the bronze statue of three bears—one sitting, one standing, one walking. She watched two little boys climbing on top of the sitting and walking bears, just as she had as a toddler. One of Ramona’s favorite childhood pictures showed her standing on the back of the walking bear, her hands held in front of her like paws to emulate the standing bear beside her, her mother hovering behind, waiting to catch her in case of a fall.
Today, she chose this bench more for its view of her own apartment building than for the bears. She stole another glance across Fifth Avenue. Nothing. She took a lick of the whipped cream on top of her Frappuccino.
She hadn’t planned to cut school. Her parents had offered to let her stay home, but honestly, the thought of staying in the apartment all day with her mom was unbearable. Her mother kept trying to convince her to talk about her feelings.
How are you feeling? How are you feeling? Tell me all about your feelings.
If she heard that word one more time, she was going to throw something. So she had put on her uniform with every intention of making it to classes. Then, on her way to Casden, she realized everyone would be talking smack about Julia—either pretending they were better friends with her than they were, or knew more about it than they possibly could, or saying she was the fucked-up head case who killed herself.
Before she knew it, she was calling the school from her cell phone, telling the headmistress’s secretary she was Adrienne Langston and that Ramona wouldn’t be coming to school today. No school. No home. Just walking through Central Park, thinking about that last phone call to Julia on Friday night.
Julia had picked up after half a ring: “Hey.”
“It happened again.”
“Your little visitor? How many times have I told you there’s a book about that you should read. Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret. And then one day, when you meet a man you love and are ready to be married and have a baby—”
“Very cute. It’s my mom again. She’s acting weird.”
“Your mom’s not weird. Mine, on the other hand? Mindblow.”
“Seriously, she hasn’t been herself. If I ask her about it, she snaps at me.”
“You realize that no one else in the world would find this unusual, don’t you? Leave it alone, and consider yourself lucky.”
Ramona absorbed what Julia was trying to say, but she and her mom had always been more like best friends than mother and daughter—or stepmother and stepdaughter. That was exactly why the recent distance between them had been bothering her. She should have listened to Julia right then and there. She should have let it drop. But instead she’d gone on and on about how she and her mom were different from other relationships. What if the entire conversation had only served to remind Julia of how screwed up her own parents were?
“It’s not just the way she acts around me. She and my dad don’t seem—right lately. Maybe whatever’s bugging her, she doesn’t want my dad to know about it, either.”
“Oh, Jesus. George and Adrienne are like Ward and June fucking Cleaver. What do you mean, they’re not right?”
“My mom spends a lot of time on her own, holed up in her study. They seem sort of quiet with each other. Uncomfortable or something.”
“Seriously, your parents are, like, so perfect compared to mine. If you’re really worried about whatever Adrienne’s doing, go check it out yourself.”
“What do you mean?”
“Snoop. Go on her computer, look at her search history, read her e-mails—whatever.”
“No way.”
“Fine, I’ll come over and do it.” Julia had no qualms about reading diaries, opening medicine cabinets, and otherwise violating people’s privacy. As they were leaving Cynthia Lyons’s holiday party last December, she’d boasted proudly about searching the entire house. Not a speck of cocaine in sight. Apparently Mr. Lyons’s well-known stint in rehab had worked. “Or, better yet. Tell your dad. George will TCB.”
Ramona had never really thought of her father as a taking-care-of-business type. He was, after all, one of the partners who got squeezed out of his law firm during the downsizing.