Trixie pulled off her pajamas and stepped into the shower. She crouched in the tub and let the water sluice over her. She cried great, damp, gray sobs that no one could hear over the roar of the plumbing, and she carved at her arm - not to kill herself, because she didn't deserve such an easy way out - just to release some of the pain before it exploded inside her. She cut three lines and a circle, inside the crook of her elbow:
NO.
Blood swirled pink between her feet. She looked down at her tattoo. Then she lifted the blade and slashed hatch marks through the letters, a grid of gashes, until not even Trixie could remember what she'd been trying to say.
5
When Jason Underhill's ghost showed up that night, Trixie was expecting him. He was transparent and white faced, with a gash in the back of his skull. She stared through him and pretended not to notice that he had materialized out of nowhere.
He was the first person Trixie knew who'd died. Technically, that wasn't quite accurate - her grandmother had died in Alaska when Trixie was four, but Trixie had never met her. She remembered her father sitting at the kitchen table with the telephone still in his hand even though the person on the other end had hung up, and silence landing on the house like a fat black crow. Jason kept glancing at the ground, as if he needed to keep track of his footsteps. Trixie tried not to look at the bruises on his face or the blood on his collar. “I'm not scared of you,” she said, although she was not telling the truth. “You can't do anything to me.” She wondered if ghosts had the powers of superheroes, if they could see through linen and flannel to spot her legs shaking, if they could swallow her words and spit her lie back out like a bullet.
Jason leaned so close that his hand went right through Trixie. It felt like winter. He was able to draw her forward, as if he were magnetic and she had dissolved into a thousand metal filings. Pulling her
upright in her bed, he kissed her full on the mouth. He tasted of dark soil and muddy currents. I'm not through with you, Jason vowed, and then he disappeared bit by bit, the pressure against her lips the last thing to go.
Afterward, Trixie lay in bed, shaking. She thought about the bitter cold that had taken up residence under her breastbone, like a second heart made of ice. She thought about what Jason had said and wondered why he'd had to die before he felt the same way she had felt about him all along.
* * *
Mike Bartholemew crouched in front of the boot prints that led up to the railing of the bridge from which Jason had jumped, a cryptic choreography of the boy's last steps. Placing a ruler next to the best boot print, he took a digital photo. Then he lifted an aerosol can and sprayed light layers of red wax over the area. The wax froze the snow,
so that when he took the mixture of dental stone and water he'd prepared to make a cast, it wouldn't melt any of the ridge details.
While he waited for his cast to dry, he hiked down the slippery bank to the spot being combed by crime scene investigators. In his own tenure as a detective, he'd presided over two suicides in this very spot, one of the few in Bethel where you could actually fall far enough to do serious damage.
Jason Underhill had landed on his side. His head had cracked
'he ice on the river and was partially submerged. His hand was covered with dirt and matted leaves. The snow was still stained pink with blood that had pooled beneath his head.
For all intents and purposes, Jason had done the taxpayers a favor by saving them the cost of a trial and possible incarceration. Being tried as an adult for rape made the stakes higher - and more potentially devastating. Bartholemew had seen lesser motives that
caused folks to take their own lives.
He knelt beside Jerry, one of the forensic cops. “What have you got?”
“Maria DeSantos, only seventy degrees colder.” Maria DeSantos had been their last suicide plunger in this location, but she had been missing for three weeks in the heat of the summer before the stench of the decomposing body had attracted a kayaker on the river.
“Find anything?”
“A wallet and a cell phone. There could be more, but the snow's pretty deep.” Jerry glanced up from his collection of blood on the body. “You see the kid play in the exhibition game last night in town?”
“I was on duty.”
'I heard he was hammered . . . and that he was still a hell of a
player.“ Jerry shook his head. ”Damn shame, if you ask me.'
“I didn't,” Bartholomew said, and he stood up. He had already been to the Underhill house, to bring them the news of their son's death. Greta Underhill had opened the door, looked at his face, and burst into tears. Her husband had been only superficially composed. He thanked Bartholemew for bringing the information and said he'd like to see Jason now. Then he'd walked outside into the snow, without a coat, barefoot.
Bartholemew's own boss had brought him the news about Holly. He'd known that the worst had happened when he saw the chief of police standing on his porch in the middle of the night. He remembered demanding to be driven to the scene, where he stood at the guardrail her car had smashed through. He remembered, too, going to identify Holly's body in the hospital morgue. Bartholemew had pulled aside the sheet to see the tracks on her arms, the ones he'd been blind to as a parent. He'd put his hand over Holly's heart, just to make sure.
The Underhills wanted to see Jason; they'd be given that privilege before the autopsy began. In this sense, accidents, suicides, and murders were all the same - any death that occurred without someone there to witness it was automatically brought to the medical
examiner for a determination of cause. It wasn't police procedure as much as human nature. We all want to know what went wrong, even when there isn't really an answer to that question.
* * *
The Monday after Jason Underhill's suicide, two psychologists were called to the high school to help students
