What We Saw at Night (28 page)

“The experience will be invaluable. It’s a good résumé item.” With one hand still on my arm, my mother piloted the car into around the corner onto our street. “The days will go past so quickly. This time will always be a terrible memory. But it’s over now. Allie? Do you hear me?”

“I hear you,” I said.

“Do you believe me?”

“I believe you, Jack-Jack,” I said, using the name I used to tease her. At least one of us should relax. I didn’t believe her, at all.

“I believe you,” Angie said. I had to smile.

“No one will punish you anymore. It’s over,” my mother added.

On both counts, she was wrong.

A week later, when I showed up for my community service, the first person I saw was Garrett Tabor, the man who murdered Juliet and who knows how many other girls. The man who would have also murdered me.

2
ONCE AGAIN, FOR
THE FIRST TIME

“G
ood evening, Allie,” said Tabor. “How are you?”

“I could be better,” I told him. “If you were dead.”

It astonished me that I could speak at all, much less summon up a barb.

I could see the fabric of my T-shirt rising and falling with the whomping of my heart. How could he fail to see it, too? Didn’t he know this was all bravado? I glanced around to find the night supervisor. There had to be one.

Please let it not be Garrett Tabor.

“I’m sorry, Allie,” Garrett Tabor said. “I’ve felt a great deal of sadness about what happened. I’ve had time to reflect on everything. I realize how impaired your judgment was. I’m sorry for that.”

“Leave me alone.”

“I’m not trying to bother you. I’m trying to move past this.”

“You’re crazy,” I said. “Who else is here?”

“Just us,” he said. I put my hand on the handle of the door behind me. It was locked. Tabor explained, “It’s the medical examiner’s office. It has to be locked. There’s a code you punch in.”

A code. He would know it. The medical examiner was Garrett Tabor’s father, Dr. Stephen, and Dr. Andrew Tabor ran the Tabor Clinic. Iron Harbor was the name of this place only by virtue of geography. It should be called Taborville.

I stared now at the scion of that great family of healers.

Blondie
. The child’s nickname I had given him the first time I saw him would always spring to my mind. It owed to a streak of platinum down the wavy dark pelt of his hair, a blanket over the twisted brain beneath.

Blondie.

Garrett Tabor: trusted coach, privileged son, genetic researcher, and serial killer.

Yes, serial killer.

Does that surprise you?

That he is one, or that he’s walking around?

The great majority of them are walking around. The great majority of them look like everyone else. Some of them even look a little better, unless you catch the unguarded glance—the flat gaze of the predator, as sympathetic as a grizzly. Mostly, they present a front that’s civil, lively, even charming. That’s how they get people.

Garrett Tabor and I had a short, blunt, potent history.

I was here because Garrett Tabor’s word was better than mine. He claimed that after my friend Juliet’s death, I had scaled the balconies to his apartment at the Tabor Oaks Condominiums, broken in wearing a ski mask, and poured boiling water on him as he lay unprotected in bed. That part was pure nonsense.
I
poured boiling water
on him?
I took the time to put a teakettle on the stove, able to find the stove and the kettle in an apartment I’d never been in, with Tabor separated from the kitchen by one wall? If I’d gone to all the trouble to catch him alone and vulnerable, why didn’t I just hit him with a hammer? Still, Tabor had the surveillance tapes of Rob, Juliet, and I climbing the outside walls “to case my place,” he said. He had the second-degree burns rippling along his neck and shoulder, not to mention a ski mask I’d once owned, to prove it.

What was true was that I was a gifted climber.

Rob and Juliet and I had practiced the urban discipline called Parkour, and we were so skilled that there was almost no vertical surface that we couldn’t boulder up or leap down from. We had indeed traced the Tabor Oaks, although that was before Garrett Tabor lived there.

The Tabor Oaks was the first place I remembered seeing him and his blond streak. We were doing what Parkour people call a “trace,” jumping from the roof of one building to the next, then preparing to swing down. When my foot touched the first balcony, I saw him. In an empty, uncurtained apartment, he bent busily over the still, colorless, half-naked body of a young woman whose name no one would probably ever know. She laid helpless, her clothing and dignity torn away by the same immaculate hands I was now staring at.

Had I called the police? Who wouldn’t?

You bet I called the police.

I called them then, and again later, when Garrett Tabor forced me to jump from the third story of a parking garage, breaking my arm so badly I had to have surgery.

I called when he threatened me, while I was babysitting a little boy, and again when he cornered me in a local cemetery.

It was always my word against his. His word always prevailed.

Except once.

After Juliet’s memorial service, when I got the phone calls, I didn’t risk calling the police. Dr. Barry Yashida, a former FBI evidence expert, was my college advisor, and there was no one else in the wide world I trusted except him: a man I’d never met face to face—only on Skype, and then just twice. He had done exactly what I asked him to do, in confidence, and he had
kept
my confidence, in hopes of a future time when the information he gave me could be useful.

It wasn’t even the horror of Juliet’s disappearance, or the confirmation that Juliet’s DNA matched the badly mauled remains pulled from the river three weeks later. It was her
voice
.

I’d never heard her phone go off. I was deep in sedative-soaked sleep after the incomprehensible experience of reciting a poem and then accepting a handful of ash—all that remained of the wild and splendid beauty, Juliet—to scatter in the dark waters of Ghost Lake. When I awoke the following night, my breath stopped when I saw the screen: five calls had come from Juliet’s phone, the phone that was never found.

Dead for weeks, Juliet left me five pleading, chilling phone messages.

After I cried and screamed in Rob’s arms until I was too limp to do anything but stand in the shower and fall asleep, I made copies of those calls. I copied the files onto my computer, and then onto a CD. I gave Rob the CD and he burned several copies, locking one in his fireproof ceiling safe. Maybe he was only humoring me because he knew I had
Xeroderma Pigmentosum
, or XP, the deadly “allergy” to sunlight. And while I never accept pity, I accepted that he was willing to accept my version. He simply said that he had a great deal of experience with things that could not have actually happened but had.

Dr. Yashida sent a courier for the copy I made for him. An FBI analysis compared the voice on the phone calls with the audio of old videos Juliet and I made, of us skiing, or dancing, or modeling the clothes we’d bought. At least three were a near-perfect match for her voice. Of the last messages, less than two seconds long, when she was screaming for her mother, the analysts couldn’t be sure.

They did believe those were also real.

While I was certain, utterly certain, that those calls had been recorded long ago, they did the job they were meant to do on my head. They were a heartless ruse from a soulless creature to convince me that there was the slimmest chance that Juliet was still alive and needed me. The subtext was clear.

If I told anyone the truth, the unthinkable would happen. If Juliet were somehow alive, then she would die, and her death would be on me.

T
his is a work of fiction. As such, any and all errors of fact are the author’s alone. I wish to thank my friend and fellow author Dr. Gay Walker for her help in understanding the hope of gene therapy for families afflicted with real diseases such as
Xeroderma Pigmentosum
, and my son Dan for dabbling in Parkour and not letting me know about it. Always, but especially through some harrowing recent times, I owe a great debt to my extraordinary friends, to my even more extraordinary children, and to my beloved agent and longtime friend, Jane Gelfman. A salute to Soho designer Janine Agro, and cover designer Michael Fusco for making this all look so grand, and my editor Daniel Ehrenhaft, for making it sound even better than it looks.