I envision Rachel—in her Manolo Blahniks and tailored Armani—being hit on by this smooth-talking, golden-haired Adonis. No, he isn’t the suave businessman she’d been hoping to attract with her rock-hard glutes and blown-out hair.
But he has to have been the closest thing she was likely to get to it in Richmond, Indiana.
“Anyway, she let us off. For the pot-smoking thing, you know? Said it would be our little secret.” There’s a smirk in Chris’s voice. But it isn’t a happy smirk. “At first I thought it was because of whom my father is. But then we started running into each other in the cafeteria and stuff. More like—well, she’d run into me, you know? And the guys were like, ‘Go for it, man. You start going with the dorm director, we can get away with anything we want.’ And I had nothing else going on, you know, lady-wise, so I figured, ‘Why not?’ And one thing led to another, and then, well, we were an item, I guess.”
He ducks under an archway, and we follow, through an open sliding glass door and into a dimly lit, sunken living room, where the primary decorating theme appears to be black leather. The couches are black leather. The ottomans are black leather. Even the mantel appears to be encased in black leather.
But surely not. I mean, wouldn’t that catch on fire?
“Turns out, I was her first,” Chris explains, going to the mantel and twisting a dial. Suddenly the room is bathed in an unearthly pink light. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have thought we’d walked into a bordello. Or maybe one of those oxygen bars in SoHo. “She wasn’t always as… put together as she looks now. She was actually kinda… well, when I knew her, back in Richmond, Rachel was kinda fat.”
I blink at him. “What?”
Cooper throws me a warning glance. Chris is on a roll, and Cooper doesn’t want me interrupting.
“You know.” He shrugs. “She was fat. Well, not fat, really. But like… chubby. And she wore sweats all the time. I don’t know what happened to her, you know, between now and then, but she slimmed down, majorly, and got, I don’t know, like a makeover, or something. Because back then… I don’t know.”
“Wait.” I am having trouble processing this. “Rachel was fat?”
“Yeah.” He shrugs. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe there is less… pressure being with someone who doesn’t have anyone else to measure you by. There was definitely something—I dunno—exciting about being with this older chick who was so smart in some ways, and so dumb in others… ”
“She was fat?” I am seriously stunned. “She runs like four miles a day! She eats nothing but lettuce. With no dressing!”
“Well,” Chris says, with another shrug. “Maybe now. Not back then. She told me she’d been heavy her whole life, and that’s why she’d never… you know. Had a guy before.”
Whoa. Rachel had still been a virgin post—grad school? Hadn’t she metanyone in high school? In college, even?
Apparently not.
“So how long did this go on? This affair,” Cooper asks, apparently in an effort to get me off the Rachel was fat? thing.
Chris sinks down onto one of the black leather couches, not seeming to care whether he got the cushions wet. When you’re as rich as he is, I guess things like that don’t matter.
“Till midway through my senior year. That’s when I realized I had to start really studying, you know, to get decent scores on my LSATs. After letting me goof off through most of my twenties, my parents were riding me, you know, to get into law school. I told her—Rachel—that I was going to hafta play it cool for a while. It seemed like a good time to break it off. I mean, it wasn’t like it could go anywhere, her and me, after I graduated. No way was I sticking around Richmond.”
“Did you tell her that?” Cooper asks.
“Tell her what?”
I see a muscle in Cooper’s jaw twitch. “Did you tell Rachel that it couldn’t go anywhere?” he elaborates, with forced patience.
“Oh.” Chris doesn’t meet either of our gazes. “Yeah.”
“And?”
“And she flipped on me, man. I mean, really flipped. Started screaming, tearing stuff up. She picked up my computer monitor and threw it across the quad, no joke. I was so scared, I moved in with some buddies of mine off-campus for the rest of the year.”
“And you never saw her again?” A part of me can’t believe Chris’s story. Another part of me believes it all too well. Not that I can picture Rachel throwing a computer monitor across the room.
But I can’t picture her killing two girls—and almost killing three other people—either.
“No,” Chris says. “Not till a couple weeks ago, when I got back from Richmond. I spent the summer there, doing volunteer stuff, as part of the deal I had with my dad about law school. Then I walked into Fischer Hall, and the first thing I see is Rachel, up at the reception desk, bawling some kid out for something or other. Only, you know, she’s all… skinny. I nearly passed out, let me tell you. But she just smiled, cool as can be, and asked how I’d been. No hard feelings, and all that.”
“And you believed her.” Cooper’s voice is toneless.
“Yeah.” Chris sighs. “She seemed cool with it. I thought—you know, the weight loss, her new hairstyle, the clothes… I thought it was a good sign, you know. That she was moving on.”
“And the fact that she had purposefully set out to get a job managing the building your parents live in,” Cooper says. “That didn’t raise a red flag that she might not be as ‘cool with it’ as you thought?”
“Obviously not,” Chris says. “Until… well, what I found out last night.”
A bell-like voice cries out, “Oh, there you are! I looked all over outside. I didn’t know you’d come in.”
Hope comes traipsing down the stairs, holding a tray of what looks—and smells—like spinach pastry puffs in one hand, and the hem of a floor-length, leopard print robe in the other.
“The canapés are ready,” she says. “Do you want them in here, or out by the pool?”
“Out by the pool, okay, honey?” Chris smiles weakly at her. “We’ll join you in a minute.”
Hope smiles good-naturedly and detours toward the sliding glass doors.
“Don’t be long,” she warns us. “They’ll get cold.”
As soon as she’s gone, Chris says, “I’ve gone over it and over it—since talking to you the other night, I mean—trying to figure out if Rachel could have done it. Killed those girls, I mean. Because I’m good, you know… but not exactly anybody worth killing over.”
He smiles weakly at his own little joke. Cooper doesn’t smile back. I guess we are still playing good cop/bad cop. Since I’m apparently the good cop, I smile back. It isn’t even hard. I mean, in spite of everything, I still sort of like Chris. I can’t help it. He’s just… Chris.
“I mean, when she and I broke up,” Chris goes on, as if there’d been no interruption, “I told you she was—well, violent. She threw my computer across the quad. That’s like a hundred and fifty feet. She’s pretty strong. A girl—a small girl, like Beth or Bobby. Well, that’d be nothing for Rachel. If she was mad enough.”
“And you believe that’s what happened to those girls?” Cooper seems to be making sure. “Not that they died accidentally, but that Rachel killed them?”
Chris is sinking deeper and deeper into his parents’ leather couch. You can tell he totally wants to disappear.
“Yes,” he says, in a small voice. “I mean… that’s the only explanation, isn’t it? Because that whole elevator surfing thing… Girls don’t elevator surf.”
I throw Cooper an I told you so look. But he doesn’t see it. He is too busy staring stonily at Chris.
In the silence that falls after this, I can hear a cricket start to chirp loudly outside. I have to admit, I’m kind of… well, moved by Chris’s speech. Oh, I still think he’s a pig and all of that. But at least he freely admits it. That’s something, anyway.