Over Her Head (27 page)

What was that from? Laurie grabbed a tissue from the night stand and blew her nose, hard. Then, hiccuping with the last of
her tears, she gazed at the Bible sitting next to the tissue box like a silent reproach.

Then the proud waters had gone over our soul.

She picked it up and found the verses. The psalmist again. That poor guy had really had a hard time.

Then they had swallowed us up quick, when their wrath was kindled against us:

then the waters had overwhelmed us, the stream had gone over our soul:

then the proud waters had gone over our soul.

That was it. The waters were over her head and she couldn’t—

The phone rang and jolted her out of her meditation. “Yes?”

“Lor, it’s me,” Colin said. “Tim has been upset all evening, and he doesn’t want to go home. Mom thinks I should stay over
with him to see if he’ll calm down.”

Oh, her poor baby. Her arms ached to hold her son and comfort him, to give him a little of what she needed so badly herself.
This family just had to find its way back to balance again. “Okay.” Her shoulders drooped. “It’s probably better if he has
a change of scenery right now anyway. Come by here first thing tomorrow and pick me up so we can go get Anna, okay?”

“Will do. Tim needs to see that Anna is okay, so I’ll bring him, too.”

“Good choice.” She took a deep breath. “I . . . I love you.”

In the beat of silence, she heard his throat working, and tears welled again in her eyes. “Love you, too.” He cleared his
throat. “See you in the morning.”

Laurie hung up gently. If they couldn’t find comfort in holding each other, she’d have to make do with what she had. She picked
up the open Bible and wandered down the hall to Anna’s room. The lamp on her study desk was the jointed kind architects used,
but Laurie turned on the Tinkerbell lamp on the night stand. They’d lugged it all the way back from Disney World the summer
before Anna turned five, and Anna had refused to give it up even when she was long past believing in fairies.

Laurie sat on the bed and tried to find comfort in her daughter’s things, in the smell of baby shampoo and cherry lip gloss,
in the jumble of clothes in the closet that mapped a girl’s journey to finding her own style. “BoHo or Classy?” asked the
cover of
Seventeen
from the floor. “Goth or Geek?”

Laurie remembered buying magazines and trying to figure out what kind of body type she had (which clashed with the one she
wanted) and then what kinds of clothes could best enhance or hide it while still communicating her style. If she had a style
back then. She couldn’t remember.

Ping!

The monitor of Anna’s computer was in sleep mode, but apparently the machine was still running.

Laurie’s body still felt heavy, as though it would be too much effort to get up and turn the thing off. Her tired gaze returned
to the floor, and her thoughts to the psalm she had just read.

Maybe that was why Anna had gone into the bathroom and taken down that bottle of pills. The waters had gone over her head,
too, and she couldn’t see her way to the surface. Was life just simply too much to bear, and she didn’t see any other way
through except to check out and not try? At fourteen, how many choices can you see from that chaos under the waves?

Randi Peizer had had no choices at all. The water had closed over her head, and she’d never come up again.

The spiritual parallel stopped there. She and Anna could still fight their way to the surface. But how?

The Bible in her lap felt the way it always had, the leather handled to a comfortable limpness, the gilt worn off the pages
in the middle. Once, it had been her guide for nearly everything. Now it was an accessory she took to Bible study group, the
way she grabbed her handbag and keys. When was the last time she’d read something just for the sheer comfort of hearing God’s
voice in the words? When was the last time she’d opened it for counsel, or even prayed?

Laurie couldn’t remember that, either.

Her life was filled with religion—with Bible study group, with service, with friends all from the same church, with making
sure Anna and Tim grew up with Christian principles. But what about under the surface? What was the core holding her together?
Was God there, or was it simply an empty space with church activities packed tightly around it?

Oh, Lord, have I replaced you with the church?

Ping!

She glanced at the computer and frowned. Downstairs, Colin’s grandpa’s mantel clock gave a single chime. Why was the computer
pinging at one in the morning?

She’d turn it off in a minute. Meantime, she located the psalm about the waters and read the rest of it:

Blessed be the L
ORD
, who hath not given us as a prey to their teeth.

Our soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowlers: the snare is broken, and we are escaped.

Our help is in the name of the L
ORD
, who made heaven and earth.

Well, there was a happy ending for you—and she could use one of those right now. Was it really possible that the One who had
made heaven and earth could pay attention to her family’s problems and help them find a solution?

Lord, give those girls on the bridge a shake and order them to tell the truth.

There you go again
, she heard Colin’s voice in her mind,
telling people what to do
. When talking to God, it was probably better to ask than to tell. But wasn’t that what she’d been doing all along? Effectively
telling the Lord that he wasn’t doing a very good job of organizing things, and taking it upon herself to do it? And what
had been the result?

I’ve lost everything.

Almost. Everything that she’d thought counted, anyway. She’d lost the trust of Glendale Bible Fellowship, and the friendship
of women she’d known all her life. She’d lost Anna’s trust. She’d probably even lost her relationship with Nick, and her marriage
was battered, if that crack in Colin’s voice was any indication—not to mention the fact that he’d rather stay at his mom’s
house than come home and see this through with her.

Surely there must be something left.

Her gaze tracked down the page:

As the mountains are round about Jerusalem, so the L
ORD
is round about his people from henceforth even for ever.

In other words, she had God. When all else failed, he was with her still. But was he?

She could ask and find out.

Tears thickened in her throat again as she bowed her head over the pages that, despite her neglect and hardheadedness, were
trying to tell her something.

Lord, are you there? Has it really taken all this to drive me back to you? Am I that stubborn and filled with my own self-importance
that I abandoned you and took over the job of steering my own life?

Please help me, Lord. I’ve got nothing else to work with here. I’m done. I’m at the end of myself. I know you can fill that
space inside. Bring me back to you, please, and make me one of your own again. Please, Lord. You’re all I’ve got.

Laurie had never felt so alone, so empty. And yet, wasn’t that the perfect condition to be in if you wanted to be filled with
the Spirit? Motionless, she waited in the silence of the deserted house, feeling still and quiet for the first time in months.
Maybe even years.

That still, small voice. Maybe it needed a place like this to work. Maybe if she would just shut up and listen, God could
tell her what she should do. God could open a way once he’d opened her heart. He was good at that. Look at the Red Sea.

Ping!

Oh, for heaven’s sake.
Laurie cocked an eye at the sleeping monitor. What was with these kids? If Anna was getting instant-message alerts when she
was in total lockdown, there was going to be trouble.

Excuse me a minute, Lord
.

She pulled out Anna’s desk chair and jiggled the mouse so the monitor would light up. When it did, little IM notes littered
the desktop.

JohnnysGrrl:
Check ur mail yet? Good pix.

B good or b sorry.

What on earth was this? Both her kids’ e-mail addresses were sub-accounts of her own. Normally she wouldn’t invade their privacy
by logging in and reading their mail or their IMs, but life was no longer normal. And what exactly was “B good or b sorry”?
With just a few keystrokes, Anna’s mailbox came up and she was in. She didn’t even need a password.

The first thing she saw was that every e-mail except the last few had been read, which meant Anna had been ignoring the rules.
Half of the list was from [email protected] No surprise there.

The other messages were from a variety of people with names like “edancer” and “mrsbloom” and “mwah.” At the top of the list
were three from someone called “JohnnysGrrl.” Laurie opened the first one.

Kelci sez ur on lockdown but Kyle sez ur reading mail. Got a present 4 u.

The next one said:

B good or b sorry, Poser2. As long as Im alright, ur alright. But if u fink, baby bro gets it. Proof coming.

A 140KB image was attached to the most recent message, which said:

See how ez? B good or maybe baby bro wont be smiling. Maybe he’ll hit his head like Poser.

Laurie’s fingers felt cold and stiff on the mouse as she scrolled down and looked at the image. There were Tim and KeShawn
on either side of Kate Parsons, who had a boy under each arm in a mock headlock. The boys’ eyes were crossed and their tongues
lolled out as they mugged for the camera.

Kate was smiling . . . and in her eyes was something that chilled Laurie to her core.

Laurie had no idea where they were or when the picture had been taken, but the message was clear. JohnnysGrrl was threatening
Anna and using her love for her little brother as leverage to keep her quiet.

Laurie would bet her mortgage she knew who JohnnysGrrl was.

She scrolled through Anna’s e-mail, and every message from JohnnysGrrl was a threat. Some were veiled and rambling, some brief
and to the point:

Tell ur cuz what happened and baby bro goes swimming. Just try me.

She had to nail down JohnnysGrrl, or at least find someone who would know. The girl in the picture was Kate, but who had taken
it? Was Kate JohnnysGrrl, or was it the person behind the camera?

Ping!

KEdgar254:
Babe, u OK? Cell dead?

Laurie grabbed the extension sitting next to the computer and dialed Janice’s house. Kyle Edgar answered on the first ring.

“Anna?” he whispered.

“This is Anna’s mom.”

Silence. “Oh.”

The least of her worries was who was grounded and who wasn’t. “Never mind that now. Why did you ask if Anna was OK?”

“I heard something weird on Dad’s scanner, and I’ve been trying to get ahold of her all night. Is she there? Can I talk to
her?”

“What did you hear?” She wasn’t even interested in why the mayor was monitoring the police bands.

“An ambulance got called to her street and I thought—” He cut himself off.

“Thought what?”

“Nothing.”

“You thought she’d been hurt?”

“Um, yeah.”

“By someone?”

Silence.

“Kyle, I’m sitting in front of her computer. I know someone’s been sending her threatening e-mails. There are dozens of them,
going back over the last two weeks. And they start on the night Randi Peizer was killed.”

Silence.

“Kyle? Answer me.”

“I can’t.”

“You’d better. Someone called JohnnysGrrl wrote all of these. Do you know who that is?”

When he finally replied, it sounded as though every word was being pulled out of him with a pair of tweezers. “I can’t tell
you, Mrs. Hale. She’ll—”

“She said she was going to hurt my little boy. Send him swimming, the way Randi went swimming. That’s the hold she had on
Anna. What has she got on you?”

“She—” His voice broke, and he took a breath. “She said she’d tell the papers some dirt about my dad.”

“That’s impossible, Kyle. Your dad is a good man. He doesn’t have any dirt. That’s why I voted for him.”

“She said he had an affair with Randi’s mom. That Randi was really his daughter. And if I said what happened, she’d tell the
papers like she told them Anna did it.”

Bingo. “It’s Kate Parsons, isn’t it, Kyle? Kate pushed Randi off the bridge, didn’t she?”

She could practically feel the misery coming through the phone. “I didn’t say that. You guessed.”

“Has your dad ever lived in Ohio, Kyle?”

It took him a minute to catch up with the swerve in topic. “No. We moved here from New Mexico when I was a baby.”

“Tanya and Randi lived in Ohio before they moved here a few months ago. Randi’s dad is a drifter named Daryl, and he was last
known to be living in Columbus. The man who donated his chromosomes to Randi was not your dad.”

Silence. “You must think I’m pretty stupid.”

“No. I think you love your dad a lot. And now I think you’d better go tell your parents the truth about what happened that
night.”

“But what about Tim? And Anna?”

“Kyle, I don’t want to make this worse for you than it already is, but Anna tried to . . . She took too many Tylenols earlier.
That ambulance call was to our house. She’s in the hospital—and Kyle,” she said when he made a sound halfway between a cry
and a moan, “she’s going to be fine. They have her there for observation, but they pumped her stomach, and everything will
be okay.”

Again she heard the sound, only muffled this time, and she realized the mayor’s son was crying.

“Sweetie, this is not your fault. It’s Kate’s fault. And my very next call is to Deputy Tremore. I’m going to tell him everything,
and then this whole nightmare will be over.”

As she hung up, she spotted the Bible where she’d left it on the bed:
The snare is broken, and we are escaped.

H
ospitals and police
stations never sleep. Nick stood next to Anna’s bed and traced the line of the IV drip from the bag hanging on the tree,
to the rail of her bed, to the needle taped into the back of her hand—a hand that looked too fragile to support it. Didn’t
those things come in kid sizes?