After walking softly down the hall, I climb onto a chair, pull down the shoe box, and carry it to the bed. The scent of perfume wafts upward when I pull off the lid, exposing a jumble of letters, cards, ticket stubs, USB flash drives, videotapes, and various other knickknacks. There’s cloth in the bottom, which turns out to be a pair of men’s bikini underwear.
Beneath the briefs lies a photograph printed on computer paper. It shows Drew and Kate standing in front of a mirror—a hotel bathroom mirror is my guess. They’re naked and laughing, and Drew has his right arm around Kate’s waist. Kate is holding her right arm high in the air, and in the upper corner of the mirror I can just see the blue star of the flash from the camera she’s holding. Drew’s stomach muscles stand out in rigid relief, and Kate’s breasts are firm and erect. Her torso is marked with small red ovals, probably caused by the recent pressure of Drew’s fingers. It’s disquieting to see Kate this way after seeing her mostly from a distance: on the tennis court in conservative whites or wearing a cheerleader uniform on the gym floor.
“Daddy?” calls Annie. “Are you up here?”
“Yes!” I call toward the hall. “Are you ready to get out?”
“Almost!”
“Just call me when you’re ready!”
As I stare at Kate’s body, something else catches my eye. At the bottom of her shoe box lies a multicolored schematic of the London Underground. Picking it up, I realize that the map is actually the jacket of a thin hardcover book. A journal. And written on the first page in a flowing female hand are two paragraphs:
This is the journal of Katharine Mays Townsend. My father gave me this book of blank pages when he left for England this time—for my seventeenth birthday. He told me that this time of my life is precious, that I will never be so filled with possibility, and that I should record everything I think and do. Right now I’m more of a mind to record everything HE does and, more importantly, does NOT do, so that he might finally recognize himself for what he is and is not. But I doubt even that would do it. Denial is a powerful thing.
I’ve always been told that I’m a special girl, though not by the person I most needed to hear it from. But I do believe I’m unlike most of the peers I know at this point in my life. For that reason I shall record my thoughts and deeds, and if someone digs up this book a thousand years from now, they will find an accurate record of what was in the head of a materially spoiled but emotionally starved American girl of the 21st century.
Hello, whoever you are!
I flip quickly through the pages, conscious that Annie could walk in at any moment. Some are covered with tight blocks of script, others with hastily scrawled paragraphs. Doodles and caricatures adorn many pages, illuminating the journal as the work of a talented artist. I can hardly suppress my excitement. The last year of Kate Townsend’s life is right here, page after page of it, and I’d like nothing more than to read the journal from cover to cover right now. But that will have to wait until Annie is in bed.
Still, I can’t resist a quick look.
Suspending the diary by its front cover, I let it fall open to its natural breaking point. It opens to a two-page spread lined with four columns. The columns on the left-hand page are headed “Hook-ups” and “Real Hook-ups.” The columns on the right-hand page are headed “Rejected” and “Rejected by.” These two pages, I realize, are where Kate Townsend believed she saw herself most clearly, not through the lens of the effusive praise she must have heard every day, but measured by her physical acceptance or rejection by the people around her. Like most of us, sadly, this beautiful and brilliant girl defined herself more by who desired her rather than by any internal sense of self. But that weakness may be Drew’s good fortune. I eagerly scan the columns, searching for information that might somehow help to free him.
HOOK-UPS
David Adams, K
Peter Smith, K (Emerald Mound)
Johnny Wingate, K
Jack B., K
Henry F., K (St. James Park)
Jed Andersen, K, B
Patrick Schaefer, K, B, F
Chris Vogel, K, B, F
Geoffrey, K
David Quinn, K, B
Chris Anthony, K, B, F, O (the Pavilion)
Carson, K, B, O
Win Langston (the sand bar), F
Jody (first bj)
Michael (went down on me)
Gavin Green (Junior trip)
Walter Wenders (69) (I actually came)
Spencer D.
Turner (Queen’s Ball )
Andy Winograd
Steve
Kane J.
REAL
HOOK-UPS
Andy, V
Steve, V, 69, O/A
Sarah Evans, OV, V/V (weird)
Drew (EVERYTHING)
Shit, shit, shit, shit!
REJECTED
Timmy Livingston
Walter Taunton
Billy
Neil (hot, but too young)
Jack D.
Ricky
Dr. Davenport (yuck)
Chris Farrell
Cyrus (shit, close one!)
Tyler Bradley
Mr. Dawson,
PERV!
Mark Wilson (gross)
Bass Player, Blue Steel (2 Goth!)
Jeanne Hulbert! (2 butch)
Andy
Coach Anders! (I think)
Martin
Sarah Evans (stalker!)
Gavin
REJECTED BY
Point guard, Jackson Academy
Jay Gresham
Mr. Marbury
Laurel Goodrich
Dr. Lewis
Morgan Davis (25)
Lead singer, Wings of Desire
Several names jump out at me as I scan the list, most of them high school boys who attend St. Stephen’s. With some entries I recognize surnames only; they probably belong to boys from the other local high schools. But some of the names truly shock me, as they seem to belong to adults. Under the “Rejected” column is Coach Anders, the athletic director of St. Stephen’s. Wade Anders is thirty years old and divorced, with two kids of his own at St. Stephen’s. Kate’s parenthetical notation seems to indicate some uncertainty about whether Anders made a pass at her or not, and I can only hope it was her imagination. Mr. Dawson—the “perv”—is also a teacher at St. Stephen’s. He’s taught religion for one year, and now it’s likely to be his last. I have no idea who “Dr. Davenport” is. Ditto for “Mr. Marbury.” But they apparently had close contact with Kate, perhaps during her time in England. And Sarah Evans, a recent graduate of St. Stephen’s, is listed under both the “Real Hook-ups” and “Rejected” columns. There’s also a female listed under the “Rejected by” heading. Apparently Kate liked to experiment.
But the entry that stops my breath is under the “Rejected” column:
Cyrus.
There’s no surname listed, but the parenthetical, “Shit, close one!” seems to indicate some anxiety on Kate’s part that set this encounter apart from the others. She clearly felt less in control with “Cyrus” than with the other males she rejected. I can’t be sure that this Cyrus is Cyrus White, the drug dealer Sonny Cross warned me about, but I know of no Cyrus who attends St. Stephen’s or any other local school. At least Cyrus isn’t listed on the “Hook-ups” page, which tends to discredit Sonny’s theory that there was an ongoing sexual relationship between Kate and the drug dealer.
Studying the list in more detail, I can only hope that it’s comprehensive. The letters following the names seem to be a simple code signifying a graduated scale of sexual activity. I saw many similar codes during my time as a prosecutor in Houston, usually in the private documents or computer records of men. “K” probably stands for Kissed. “B”…Breasts? “F” probably stands for “fingers” or some variant thereof. The “69” and “bj” are self-explanatory. The letters following the entries under the “Real Hook-ups” heading are a bit surprising in their explicitness, but Mia did tell me that Kate was highly sexual. My guess is that “V” stands for vaginal intercourse. O/A must signify oral/anal contact. And the “EVERYTHING” following Drew’s name I can only guess at.
More than anything, I wish Kate had dated these entries. I’m sure Mia could give me at least a vague time frame, but I can’t afford to show her this journal—not yet, anyway. I need to read it from cover to cover, then load the computer disks and peruse everything on them. I hope Kate didn’t password-protect them, but I suspect she did. Even standing naked before a bathroom mirror, she radiates the self-possession of someone well practiced at protecting herself.
Staring at the photo in a kind of trance, I experience a rush of intuitive knowledge so powerful that, while I realize that facts could prove me wrong, I feel viscerally sure they will not. I race downstairs to my study, Annie’s voice pursuing me down the stairs. I call out reassurance, but I keep running.
In the study, I go to my bookshelves and pull out a folding map of Natchez. It’s a simple thing, a free handout produced for tourists by the Chamber of Commerce, but it’s proved invaluable to me during the writing of my last two novels. Spreading it open on my desk, I orient myself to Highway 61, then search for the Brightside Manor Apartments, the reputed lair of Cyrus White. I find them in short order, on the north side of town, near where the old black high school used to be. To the west of the apartments lies Lynda Lee Mead Drive, a street named for a Natchez-born Miss Mississippi who became Miss America. But to the east of them—my heart thumps against my sternum—to the east lies open land transected by a curving blue line.
St. Catherine’s Creek.
I close my eyes and breathe something very like a prayer of thanks. Though Brightside Manor is several miles from where Drew found Kate’s body—and even farther from where Kate’s corpse was discovered by the fishermen—the apartments stand a mere forty yards from the creek into which her body was dumped.
This
is something that will sway a jury, if not the district attorney. One glance at this map shows that Cyrus White could easily have raped and murdered Kate Townsend in his apartment, then dumped her body into the flooded torrent behind it with the near certainty that she would be swept far downstream from the crime scene, if not all the way to the Mississippi River.
“Daddy?”
Annie calls faintly.
Remembering the nude photo lying on my bed, I leave the map and sprint back up the stairs. From the reverberation of Annie’s voice, I can tell she’s still in the bathroom. “I’ll be here in a minute, baby,” I promise, looking in through the steam. “I’m doing something.”
Annie smiles up from the tub. “I’m fine. I just wanted to know where you were. I heard you running.”
“Everything’s okay.”
I hurry back to the bedroom and pick up the photo of Drew and Kate.
What were you doing at Cyrus White’s apartment?
I ask silently.
It takes a few moments for my ringing cell phone to register. When I pick it up, the caller ID saysMIA . I’m almost afraid to answer and find out what new tragedy she’s discovered. “Hello?”
“Nancy Drew here,” she says in a deadpan voice. “Remember I told you I wanted to do what I could to help Dr. Elliott?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I got to thinking about what you told me about Shad Johnson hijacking the grand jury.”
“Yeah?”
“So I decided to take a ride down to his office.”
“You knew where it was?”
“I figured it would either be in the courthouse or in Lawyer’s Alley. I didn’t have to look very hard. Except for the bars and Pearl Street Pasta, the waterworks building was the only one downtown with lights blazing inside.”
“That’s the D.A.’s office, all right,” I say, not interested enough by Mia’s amateur detective work to remove my gaze from Kate’s body or my mind from the juxtaposition of Brightside Manor and St. Catherine’s Creek.
“Well, that’s not all I saw,” she says.
“No?”
“You sound distracted. What are you doing, watching soft porn on Cinemax?”
“Sorry. What else did you see?”
“Two people walking into the first floor of the waterworks building. They used the D.A.‘s door, and they looked pretty friendly.”
“Did you recognize them?”
“Sure did. One was the sheriff, Billy Byrd.”
My chest tightens. “And the other?”
“Judge Minor.”
Holy shit.
Kate’s nude body is forgotten.
“Got your attention now?”
“You do indeed.” Arthel Minor is one of Natchez’s two circuit court judges. He was among the first African-Americans in Mississippi to be elected to the position after Reconstruction. As a circuit court judge, he has a 50 percent chance of handling the Kate Townsend murder case when it comes to trial. And like both Shad Johnson and Billy Byrd, Arthel Minor is known to have higher political aspirations.
“How did you recognize Judge Minor, Mia?”
She laughs. “I served on the Mayor’s Youth Council this year. I spent a couple of hours talking to him. He had me rolling on the floor with his jokes.”
This girl is good. “Can you see what they’re doing now?”
“Not from where I’m sitting, which is at the malt shop drinking a Parrot Ice. But I can get back there in about a minute.”
“Hang on a second. I need to think.”
“Don’t strain yourself.”
The image of Shadrach Johnson, Sheriff Billy Byrd, and Judge Arthel Minor meeting together after business hours sends a cold shot of fear through my veins. It might seem natural that these people should meet and discuss an investigation in progress. But in fact, this kind of meeting never happens. Contrary to what we see on television, the investigation of a crime is handled almost solely by police officers. After adequate evidence has been obtained, the case is then handed over to the district attorney, who takes it to a grand jury. If the grand jury binds the accused over for trial, there’s a preliminary hearing before a municipal court judge. Only then does a circuit judge enter the picture. What Mia has described is a meeting that, while legal by the strict letter of the law, is very dangerous to the integrity of the legal system, and more particularly, I fear, to my friend Drew Elliott. Together, those three men could investigate Drew’s life, try him for murder, and sentence him to death.