East Salem Trilogy 01-Waking Hours Read online

  “I didn’t get a chance to work out today,” he said.

  She handed him the bag, slung her purse over her shoulder, and took a firm grip on her briefcase. “Thanks,” she told him.

  Tommy almost made it out of the lobby of the inn without being recognized, but then he heard someone call out his name. His policy was always to sign autographs except when the person seeking it was a professional collector who turned around and sold his autographs on eBay. “Just a second,” he said to Dani.

  “Tommy Gunderson,” Vivian Ross sang, throwing her arms out dramatically and hugging him, air kissing him on each cheek. She beamed at him. “How are you? They told me you were here. Do you remember when we met on the red carpet in Los Angeles? I believe you were escorting one of Hollywood’s latest young … things.” She lingered on the word things. “Not poor Cassandra—the one after that. I love your bag.”

  “Hi, Vivian,” Tommy said. “It’s not mine. Good to see you again.”

  “Listen, Thomas, dear—could I have a word with you?” She hooked her arm around his and pulled him aside. Tommy wondered how it was some Americans ended up with British accents, like Orson Welles, or William F. Buckley, or Vivian Ross.

  “I was hoping,” she said, lowering her voice to a range somewhere between confidential and top secret, “if you could do me a big huge favor and tell me what went on up there? Apparently my daughter had the boneheaded idea to dismiss her lawyer, and she won’t tell me a thing. I swear, Thomas, if there was the world’s most complicated way to peel an orange, that girl would find a way to make it even harder and wait for a bad day to do it.”

  “I can’t tell you, Vivian,” Tommy said. “Even if I wanted to. I got here after they’d finished.”

  “Well, who can, then?” she asked, arching an eyebrow.

  “I believe the conversation was private.”

  The actress dropped all pretense of cordiality. “Nice to see you again,” she said, giving him the most theatrically insincere smile he’d ever seen.

  Tommy waited in the parking lot while Dani scrounged in her handbag, searching for her car keys. He thought to offer her the use of his metal detector, but he’d left it at home.

  “Have you ever heard of a passage party?” she asked him. “Liam never mentioned anything, did he?”

  “He didn’t,” Tommy said. “What’s a passage party?”

  Dani told him what she knew.

  “It sounds crazy-dangerous. Liam’s not a big risk taker.”

  “This is going to sound naïve,” Dani told him, “but sometimes, even after all the work I’ve done with juveniles, I still don’t understand why they want to get high. I never did. I think I had one sip of crème de menthe at a slumber party in eighth grade and I felt like I’d swallowed toothpaste. I wanted to throw up.”

  “You’re asking the wrong guy,” Tommy said. “Your one sip is one more than I’ve ever had.”

  “Seriously?” Dani said.

  “You sound surprised,” Tommy said.

  “I am,” she said. “I could have sworn I saw a picture of you with a bottle of something in your hand.”

  “If you did,” he said, “it would have been champagne when we won the Super Bowl. But I was squirting it down my friend’s pants, not drinking it.”

  “I guess the tabloids tried to make you out to be a party lizard,” she said.

  “The tabloids say a lot of things,” Tommy said. “If you try to correct them, it only makes it worse.”

  “You never drank even in high school?”

  Tommy shook his head. “I just always knew what I wanted,” he said as she found her keys and unlocked the car. “Drinking or doing drugs wasn’t going to help me get to where I wanted to go. It seemed obvious. If you want a healthy body, don’t put stuff in it that’s bad for you. I don’t even like to take Tylenol.”

  “Kids give in to peer pressure,” Dani said.

  “I guess. Depends on who you consider your peers. Do you think it’s strong enough to make somebody kill someone?”

  “Excellent question. I’ve been asking myself that. I worked with a juvenile once who wanted to join a gang. They told him that as an initiation he had to shoot a homeless person. And he did. There were other factors, but that was peer pressure.” She sighed. “I feel like I could sleep for three days straight. But I’ll settle for three hours. Do you ever have trouble sleeping?”

  “Only when the burglar alarm goes off,” Tommy said. “Or if my dad’s having problems. I actually have a baby monitor in his room. How’s that for irony?”

  “You’re a good son,” she said.

  “Did you know that the animal that has the most dreams is the platypus?” he told her.

  “How do you know that?”

  “How do you not know that?” he said. “It’s common knowledge. I read it somewhere.”

  “What do platypuses dream of?”

  “Probably about being anything other than a platypus.” He’d also read somewhere that trying to impress a girl with random facts was something only morons did.

  Then he saw a flash of light reflecting off a telescopic lens. “Get down!”

  He grabbed Dani by the shoulders and spun her around, shielding her with his body. She heard automobile tires screeching and broke free of his embrace in time to see a black sports car speed away.

  “Who was that?”

  “I don’t know,” Tommy said. “Paparazzi. Using a 1200 millimeter telephoto lens. I used to see a lot of those. Prepare to see your picture in the papers tomorrow.”

  “Why would they want a picture of me?”

  “No offense, but they don’t,” he said. “You’ll probably be described as the mystery woman on the arm of ex-footballer Tommy Gunderson. Sorry about that. My reflexes aren’t what they used to be.”

  “Do you know the name Vito Cipriano?” she asked him. “Gossip columnist for the Star?”

  “Know him?” Tommy said. “I punched him in the face once … Aren’t you going to ask why?”

  “Do I need to?” she replied. “He was at the town meeting at the Grange Hall. He called my office four times today asking for a comment. We don’t release the names of juveniles. Why is a gossip columnist covering a murder?”

  “Because the parents are in the Who’s Who of East Salem,” Tommy said, zipping up his jacket and lifting the collar to cover the back of his neck.

  “Except the victim’s,” Dani replied. “I apologize for my tone earlier, by the way. It’s really good to have you on my side.”

  “No worries,” Tommy said. “You haven’t mentioned the voice mail you sent me. You okay?”

  “It’s just some nut job.”

  “What do you mean, just some nut job? The murderer is a nut job too.”

  “I’ll be careful,” she promised.

  “Be more than careful,” he told her. “Be totally paranoid. Err on the side of caution.”

  18.

  When Dani called her office to check her voice mail, she was surprised to hear the receptionist pick up.

  “What are you doing there?” Dani said. “Why aren’t you home raking leaves?”

  “I had some things I needed to finish,” Kelly said. “Sam said I could have tomorrow afternoon off. There’s a sale at the mall.”

  Kelly was twenty-four but could pass for eighteen. Hearing her voice gave Dani an idea.

  “Could you do something for me, Kell?” she asked. “How’d you like to get paid to go to the mall?”

  “Ooh,” Kelly said. “My dream job gets even dreamier. What’s up?”

  “I need you to go to places where local kids hang out, like Starbucks or the Miss Salem Diner or the mall,” Dani said. “Just blend in and see what they’re talking about. Can you do that?”

  “You mean go undercover?”

  “No … ,” Dani began. “I mean, yeah, I guess. Go undercover.”

  Dani was close to starving by the time she got home. She found a Tupperware container in her refrigerator, but when s
he opened it, the smell that escaped nearly made her lose her appetite. She put the lid back on and threw the whole thing into the garbage.

  She cracked a pair of eggs into a cereal bowl, added a little milk (smelling it first to make sure it hadn’t turned sour), blended it with a hand blender, grated some cheddar cheese, and made an omelet, though when she lifted the lid from the frying pan to see if the eggs had fluffed up, the cheese stuck to the lid. She couldn’t start over because now she was out of both cheese and eggs, so she set the lid upside down on the cereal bowl and scraped a little melted cheese off it with each bite of egg.

  She stared into space as she ate, daydreaming, which made her think of platypuses, which made her think of all the things she was learning about Tommy Gunderson, most of which were proving wrong the old things she’d thought about him. She wondered how many girls he’d dated, how many Hollywood starlets or models, and what they’d meant to him. She wanted to ask him about Cassandra Morton. Had he ever fallen truly, deeply in love?

  Her reverie was interrupted when Arlo meowed loudly and wrapped himself around her legs. His dish was empty.

  “Sorry, pal,” she said. “My bad.”

  She refilled it, then noticed the light blinking on her answering machine. She hesitated, unsure what she’d do if she received another threat. Gary, Beth’s husband, had argued that as a single woman living alone, she’d be smart to keep a gun in the house. Better to have it and not use it than need it and not have it, was his philosophy. She’d decided against it simply because she was a klutz with mechanical things. The cheese-covered frying-pan lid was a good example. If she owned a gun, she’d probably shoot herself in the foot.

  The message on her answering machine was from Willis Danes, asking her if she’d had a chance to look at her calendar. She felt bad for forgetting him. It was too late to call him now, but she wrote a note reminding herself to call him in the morning and taped it to the bathroom mirror.

  As she waited for the bathtub to fill, she drew the symbol found on the body of Julie Leonard on the steamed mirror with her finger. What did it mean? She believed that if they could answer that one question, the other answers would fall into place. She remembered what her Grandfather Howard had told her. “Kids are easy to figure out because no matter how tough they think they are, they still have a little bit of innocence left inside, and if you can find it, it opens them up like a key in a lock.”

  She thought of the young people she’d interviewed, trying so hard to be sophisticated and adult, when only three or four years ago they were probably still sleeping with stuffed animals tucked under their arms. Even though she hadn’t met him yet, her prime suspect, based on what she knew so far, was Logan Gansevoort. She wondered what small piece of innocence was left in him.

  Then a thought occurred to her. Her father had been a pediatrician, a good one, and practically the only one between Ridgefield and Mt. Kisco. It was possible that he’d been Logan Gansevoort’s pediatrician too.

  She turned off the water in the bathtub and then, on a hunch, went to the basement. In the far corner on a shelf, wedged between boxes of files she’d moved from her father’s office after his death, she found his computer, an old Compaq that had been state-of-the-art the day she’d helped him buy it. Today there was more computing power in the toys they put in children’s breakfast cereals.

  She brought the computer upstairs and set it on the kitchen counter, then returned to the basement. It took her a few minutes to find all the proper cables and wires. In the kitchen she dusted off the CPU and wiped the dust from the monitor. When everything was connected properly, she plugged the cord into the wall, closed her eyes, and turned her head in case anything exploded, then turned on the computer by pressing the button in the back.

  Nothing exploded. That was a good sign.

  She crossed her fingers, waiting for the screen to light up.

  The familiar partly cloudy sky that once served as the default wallpaper for Windows 95 appeared, along with a window asking her to input a password. This was unexpected, but when she typed in her mother’s name, Amelia, the program opened with a friendly, “Welcome, Fred Harris.” Her father, fearful that his paper files could be lost in a flood or fire, had been converting to digital and inputting all his medical data by hand. She’d helped him with some of it and was familiar with the software.

  She found his patient files, went to the G section, and found what she was looking for. She skipped over the parts covering Logan’s standard vaccinations and BMI growth percentiles and went straight to the Physician’s Notes section, where her father had jotted down personal thoughts and impressions. The first note that caught her attention was one saying that Logan was still wetting his bed at the age of eleven. Late bed-wetting, Dani understood, was a predictor of adolescent emotional dysfunction.

  Logan also suffered from nocturnal hydrosis, or night sweats. What would give a kid night sweats, a condition more common to older people and to women of menopausal age? Her father’s note said he suspected Logan was taking his parents’ prescription medications. That would do it. She wasn’t surprised to read that when her father apprised Logan’s parents of his suspicion, they’d terminated his services.

  The bathwater wasn’t nearly warm enough anymore, so she drained it, took a shower instead, brushed her teeth, and then checked her BlackBerry one last time before bed. She read an e-mail forwarded to her by Stuart, a note from Davis Fish. He was telling the district attorney’s office that he had advised Logan not to speak with the police unless compelled by law. That meant Logan had to be either subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury or arrested outright.

  Dani sat on the edge of her bed, staring at her new clock. 10:00 PM. She wanted to set it to wake her at eight, but she was too tired to figure out how it worked, so she put the clock on the floor and threw a pillow over it just in case it went off on its own.

  She fell asleep quickly but awoke suddenly in the middle of the night. When she removed the pillow covering her clock radio, she read the time. 2:13 AM. Again.

  She sat up. It took a second for the fog to clear, but as it did, she recalled her dream.

  It was her first day of kindergarten. She was wearing a yellow dress. Both her parents were holding her hands as they walked to school. Her mother was wearing a matching yellow dress. Dani was scared of going to school, but she trusted her parents. When they got to school, she came to a very tall building where she was told she had to climb an endless ladder to get to class.

  Jacob’s ladder? Jung considered a ladder to represent the soul. He said that the angels Jacob saw in his dream were the words of God, lifting souls in distress or descending to earth to rescue souls in trouble.

  Dani had climbed the dream ladder, but when she was high above the ground, a rung broke. She lost her grip and began to fall. As she fell, she saw down below that her father was going to try to catch her, and then she panicked because she knew that she was going too fast, and if she landed on him as he tried to catch her, she’d kill him.

  She screamed for him to get out of the way and let her die, but he couldn’t hear her.

  Suddenly she blinked, looked around her, and only then realized she was standing in her kitchen.

  The water was running in the sink.

  She knew she was awake … before, she’d only dreamed she was awake.

  She’d walked in her sleep, dreaming that she was awake but still dreaming.

  She looked at the digital clock display on her oven.

  It was 2:13.

  She turned off the water and ran upstairs to her bedroom, where she saw her clock radio on the floor beside her bed with a pillow over it. She removed the pillow and watched as the numbers changed from 2:13 to 2:14.

  Dani picked up her phone and dialed the first six digits of Tommy’s home number before hanging up. Don’t be such a baby, she told herself. Calm down. Take a deep breath. Take another. You sleepwalked. It’s not unusual.

  Before she went back to sleep, s
he checked her voice mail. Her call log showed she had two messages, one from Detective Casey and the other from an exchange in Fishkill, New York, a town on the Hudson River forty miles to the west. She listened to Casey’s message first.

  “Hey, Dani, it’s Phil Casey. Listen, don’t be concerned, but we traced the voice mail you got to the state hospital up in Fishkill. The relay tower matches. We’re looking into it, but I thought you should know. I’ll have a car keep an eye on your house.”

  She looked out the window and saw a police car parked at the end of her driveway.

  She listened to the second message.

  “This message is for Dr. Danielle Harris,” a woman’s voice said. “Dani, I don’t know if you remember me, but this is Ellen O’Reagan from the Fishkill Corrections Facility. I do meds here. We consulted about a year ago when you were helping evaluate one of my patients, a man named Jalen Simmons. Well, I have to apologize because apparently two days ago when I left the room, he grabbed my phone and found your cell number in it and called you. I’m sorry if it caused you concern, but don’t worry because he’s still here under lock and key. I called the DA’s office and left a message, but again, I apologize. Call me if you have any questions.”

  Dani remembered the patient, a psychopath who’d killed three kids but had nevertheless managed to pass a polygraph test. Dani observed him wiping his hands on his pants and correctly diagnosed him with obsessive-compulsive disorder. She suggested that to get him to talk, they needed only to take away his soap and shut off the water to his sink. Within a few hours he was telling the police everything they needed to know.

  She went back to her bedroom, stopping first in the bathroom to get a drink of water. She glanced at the mirror and remembered the note she had taped to remind herself to call Willis. She looked on the floor, in the wastebasket, everywhere. The note was definitely on the mirror when she’d brushed her teeth, just before 10:00 PM.

  Now she couldn’t find it anywhere.

  MONDAY,

  OCTOBER 18

  19.

  Tommy Gunderson had a weakness for gadgets.