The Christopher Killer Read online

Later that evening, Cameryn’s Mammaw had come into her bedroom. Cameryn had been lying there, her pillow tight over her face so she could block out everything, until she’d felt the bedsprings sag under a new weight, felt strong fingers kneading her backbone, heard her grandmother’s voice.

  “You haven’t said a word to me since you’ve been back and you’ve not eaten a thing. Was it seeing poor Rachel?”

  Cameryn had nodded beneath her pillow. She wanted to be little again, before people left or died, when she believed mountains were made of candy. Surrounded by her own things and near her own grandmother, she pulled the pillow from her face. Mammaw, tied into a red gingham apron, smiled at her, her forehead knotted in concern.

  “What’s on your heart, girl? Tell me.”

  “I don’t know if I can,” she’d whispered.

  “Try.”

  “It’s…Hannah.” She’d teared up but then forced them back. “What would happen if I had been the one who died? Could you…could you even find her? Do you even know where she is?”

  Looking at her carefully, her mammaw had asked, “I don’t suppose this sudden interest in your mother has anything to do with that new deputy, does it? Oh, don’t look so surprised, girl. Patrick told me about his run-in with Deputy Crowley. I understand the boy’s got a message from your mother that’s he’s dying to give you. Well, I don’t like it but there’s nothing for it. I’ve always told Patrick that secrets, especially family secrets, never stay buried forever.” Her grandmother’s fingers had spread across thick knees. “I know you’ll be wanting answers, but I’m not the one to give them. You’ll have to wait and talk to your father.”

  “Why wait?”

  “Because,” she’d said, “it’s his story to tell.”

  Then, just this morning, when she hadn’t been able to stomach her breakfast, Mammaw had tried again. She’d held her cup of coffee, handle side out, her blue veins winding on the backs of her hands like rivers on a map. “You’ve got to eat, girl. Starving yourself won’t help. You’ve got to keep your mind alert.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  She’d pointed at her with her cup. “It’s been a hard time for you. But you must remember you’re Irish, and we Irish know how to deal with life’s blows. You’ve got to get back in the game, girl, just jump right back in the game,” to which Cameryn had replied, “What if I don’t want to play?”

  As she made her way now along the sidewalk, a crack appeared, and Cameryn, remembering the old nursery rhyme, Step on a crack and you break your mother’s back, planted her right foot squarely on it with as much force as she could. Nothing mattered. Cracks on sidewalks were just cracks. People died. Children were abandoned and mothers returned from limbo. Saint Christopher himself was just a calling card for a killer. When she’d prayed all those years for her mother to come back, it hadn’t worked, and now that Cameryn didn’t want her, Hannah materialized. There was no sense in any of it.

  The early morning air was winter cool, so as Cameryn trudged toward Lyric’s house she pinched the collar of her jacket tight in her hand. Up ahead she was surprised to see an old blue truck in her friend’s driveway. A telltale plume of smoke rose from the driver’s-side window. She registered the dark shape inside, slouching behind the wheel. Adam. Lyric was already outside, standing by the truck. She waved her over.

  “You’re late!” Lyric cried. “We’ve been waiting. Adam’s taking us to school today, okay? But come here quick, I want you to help me pick out my earrings.”

  Cameryn understood the subtext—they often did this when they wanted to have a conversation within a conversation. “Sure,” she replied. She gave Adam a tacit nod and said, “Okay, Lyric, what are the choices?”

  “Hoops or beads,” she said. She was dressed in a flowered tiered skirt Cameryn guessed was a retread from the sixties, and instead of a coat she wore an oversized green poncho. Fawn-colored clogs encased her feet. Today Cameryn was dressed as usual, in jeans and a plain top. Her only jewelry was her Navajo flute-player earrings and a turquoise ring on her middle finger. She could feel Adam watching her, so she leaned close to Lyric and hissed, “What’s Adam doing here?”

  “I don’t exactly know,” she whispered back. “He called late last night—he’s just absolutely devastated by Rachel’s murder. He was really into her, you know? There’s a lot of stuff going down in his life right now and I think he wants to talk about it. I mean—he was practically crying and then he asked if he could take me—us—to school so how could I say no?” She held out two pairs of earrings and said, “Which ones do you think go best?”

  “Hoops.” Cameryn pointed to circles the size of a bracelet. Then, under her breath, she said, “But I wanted to talk to you. I didn’t even tell you what Justin said about my—”

  “I know, I know, I want to hear, but we’ll have to catch up later. We better go—he’s looking at us and I don’t want him to know we’re talking about him.” She dropped the beaded earrings into her backpack and slung it over her shoulder. There was nothing Cameryn could do but follow. Lyric huffed inside the cab and Cameryn squeezed into the remaining space, her right arm wedged against the door handle as she shut it. It was dirty inside, with a layer of dust on the dashboard and empty cans on the floor. Smears of dried paint were there, too, as though the interior had been finger-painted by a child.

  “Is this your truck?” she asked Adam.

  “My dad’s. He’s out of town.” He flicked the cigarette out the window, then rolled it up. There were telltale smudges beneath his eyes. He looked as though he hadn’t slept in days.

  “What’s going on, Adam?” Lyric asked.

  Backing out of the driveway, he said, “There’s bad stuff coming down. Really bad stuff. I don’t know what to do.”

  “What are you talking about? You can tell us. Can’t he, Cammie?”

  Cameryn nodded halfheartedly.

  Adam hesitated. “I don’t know, man. There’s no one I can go to but then I thought, maybe you.”

  “We’re here,” Lyric assured him. “Both of us.”

  He managed to say, very quietly, “It’s my boss. He doesn’t understand.” Adam was driving beneath a scaffolding of branches, and the light that came through mottled his face. When he looked over he wore an expression that Cameryn had never seen before on him. He was afraid. Of what she didn’t know, but the fear was real. The skull on the leather cord rolled against his chest as he drove and she began to get the uneasy feeling that she and Lyric shouldn’t be there. But her friend seemed unfazed. Placing her hand on his forearm, Lyric asked, “So it has to do with your boss? What’s up?”

  “Yeah, okay, so as you know I like”—he swallowed—“liked Rachel.”

  Lyric nodded. “All of us did.”

  “I know, I know. But for me it was different. She was nice to me. She was real. So—my dad has this camera and I—the thing is, Mr. Melendez asked me to work on the year-book staff and so I said okay. I took some pictures of Rachel. I mean, it doesn’t hurt anybody to take their picture. It’s just some pictures, right?”

  “What are you saying?” Cameryn asked, not at all gently. “Did you take them without her knowing?”

  He blanched. It took a moment for him to nod. “It wasn’t bad or anything. It was just for the yearbook.”

  “This doesn’t make any sense,” Cameryn argued. “Rachel graduated last year.”

  Adam stopped at an intersection. “She came back to school one day, a couple of weeks ago, and ate lunch with a group of girls. So I took one of her laughing in the cafeteria with the others—I don’t know their names. That’s it, I swear. I’m an artist. I was using them to make a present but then she started giving me the brush-off. She wasn’t really into me. I accepted that.”

  “So you put up some pictures of Rachel,” Cameryn said. “I’m not tracking this. What does this have to do with your boss?”

  “I have this darkroom in the basement of the souvenir shop. When I turn off my blue light there’s, like, no
light down there at all, so it’s been perfect. Old man Andrews said I could use it. But I guess he went down there and last night when he found those photos hanging on the wall he lost it. He told me I was fired and he was going to report me to the sheriff.”

  “You had her pictures up? What, like in a shrine?” Cameryn cried.

  Adam gunned the engine and pulled on to Greene. “No! It’s not anything like that! I’m an artist. I was going to paint her portrait.”

  “Cammie!” Lyric said, shooting her a warning look. “Taking pictures isn’t that big of a deal.” She turned to Adam. “I think you’re worried over nothing.”

  “Except it’s me we’re talking about.” He hit the steering wheel with his hand. “Don’t you think I know what people say? They call me a freak. Maybe I am, but I never hurt anybody. I’d never do that.”

  He drove past the school and pulled into the back lot, as far away from the other cars as he could get. Cameryn noticed that as he turned off the engine he was breathing hard. The bravado he’d worn like armor had shattered, exposing an Adam she’d never seen before, and somewhere inside she knew that he hadn’t done anything to Rachel or anyone else. He was just a skinny kid hiding behind black clothes and a silver skull.

  “Cameryn, would you please tell Adam that Rachel was the victim of the Christopher Killer and those victims were from places all over, like—like Virginia and I don’t remember where-all. That means it can’t be you, Adam. How could you have killed around the country like that? Am I right?”

  Adam looked unconvinced.

  Cameryn looked at her watch—five minutes until the first bell. She wanted to leave but it was obvious Lyric wanted to stay in the truck.

  “You’re giving in to the negative energy,” Lyric said.

  When Cameryn finally managed to catch Lyric’s eyes, she pointed to her watch and mouthed, “I gotta go.”

  “You go on,” she mouthed back.

  Out loud she said, “I’ll see you guys later.”

  Adam’s head hung down, but he lifted it and looked at Cameryn gratefully. “Thanks. You’re all right.”

  “See ya.” She didn’t return his sentiment. She wasn’t at all sure she liked the thought of Adam creeping into their lives. And she wasn’t completely sure she believed everything he said. Still, she didn’t believe he was a killer. He was just weird.

  She made her way to the front of the building. Ahead, she could tell the kids were abuzz with the story of Rachel because they swarmed the school steps, as though they were bees in a hive. Their heads were close together, their eyes darting. Usually, she slid into school unnoticed, but not today. The bees were waiting.

  “Oh, look, there she is—hey, Cameryn!” Jessica, a waiflike girl from her class, waved to her. “Cameryn, you were at the autopsy, right? Was it gross?”

  Cameryn didn’t answer. Silverton students were like kids in schools everywhere, only smaller in number. Everyone had found their niche since grade school and stayed there like fossils cemented in their own rigid layers. Cameryn, though, had always felt she could float through the striations, belonging to no particular order. The kids swarming her now, though, were the elite, and that was the one stratum she’d never felt entirely comfortable in. Neither, she knew, had Rachel.

  “Sorry, guys,” Cameryn told them, “I’ve got to run—I’m going to be late for biology.”

  Jessica thrust out a bony hip. “We were all her friends, Cameryn. You should tell us what happened. Everybody here knew Rachel. We all really care.”

  In a way it was true. The whole school had only a few hundred kids divided among grades kindergarten through twelve, all housed in the same building. They all knew one another, which meant in a way they were a tight, if dysfunctional, family. Out of the sixty or so kids that made up the high school, seven were the kind who never talked to Cameryn unless they wanted something. Six of them were on the steps today, surrounding her now in a vibrating formation, eager to get some tidbit about the murder. She felt them close in around her, pulsating with curiosity.

  “Come on, Cameryn, you were at the autopsy. Who do you think did it?”

  “Like she’d know—the Christopher Killer could be anyone!”

  “That’s right—he might be from Silverton—”

  “Or still be in Silverton!”

  “Who says it’s a man? It could be a woman. Ever heard of the lady who drowned her kids?”

  “Don’t be stupid,” Jessica said. “Just ignore them, Cammie.” Then Jessica put her hand on Cameryn’s backpack and pushed her forward. The other kids parted obediently as the two of them made their way up the steps.

  “I’m going to grief counseling after first period. I haven’t been able to think of anything else—remember, Rachel and I shared a locker.”

  “That was in seventh grade.”

  Jessica’s voice was dramatic. “But it hurts, you know?”

  It saddened Cameryn to realize most of Rachel’s true friends had already graduated. These weren’t her real ones; they were just the curious kids who hadn’t really known Rachel, the ones who were fishing for information so they could get on a television spot.

  Jessica opened the door for her and the two of them stepped into the dim hallway. The air was musty, the way buildings smelled whenever they had been closed for any length of time, but it wasn’t because it hadn’t been used. It was because Silverton’s ancient school was almost as old as the town. It possessed a gloom all its own, from dust clinging to the high foyer ceiling to the beveled windows that cast tiny rainbows against the walls.

  Cameryn heard lockers slam down the hall, machine gun–like, and saw two smaller girls hurrying into the restroom. A knot of teachers eyed her, stopped talking, then dissolved into the front office.

  Jessica kept the same intimate tone as they passed the drinking fountain. “Okay, now that we’re alone I’ve got to ask. Are you going to be interviewed? ’Cause if you were, I could, like, go with you.”

  “I would never do that,” Cameryn said.

  “Okay, don’t get so hostile, I was just trying to help. Things are going crazy, rumors are flying. Things in this town are just wild right now.”

  Her ears pricked. “What do you mean—what kind of rumors?”

  “One says it’s a trucker who makes a run from Durango to Ouray, and one says it’s probably an ex-priest. Then there’s a rumor that says the killer is that demented kid, Adam. I’ve been looking for him. We all have.” Her eyes searched the hallway. “I wondered if he’d show up today but so far he’s not here.”

  Cameryn’s heart gave a frog-kick inside her ribs. “Why would anybody think it’s Adam?”

  “Why not? Everyone knows he’s bizarre. And it’s going around that his boss fired him. Anyway, listen, if you change your mind about the TV thing”—she crooked her thumb and her index finger and held them to her mouth and ear—“call me.” Then she hurried off.

  In a daze, Cameryn made her way to room 101 and slid onto her seat, a stool behind a counter lined with empty beakers. She tucked her feet behind the bottom rung. Had the story of the Adam’s pictures of Rachel already been leaked? Gossip traveled like brushfire in a small town, so he might have been branded in the exact way he feared. But then, another more sinister thought worked in her mind, unsettling her. What if the rumor was right?

  The majority of kids were already in their seats. Her science teacher was speaking to them, so Cameryn shook herself and tried to focus, but he was only repeating the same lines every adult said at a time like this—they were here to help and to come to any teacher or school official if they needed to, or knew anything. Mr. Ward was tall and thin, with short hair buzzed into a square that mirrored his square jaw. The final bell shrilled and Mr. Ward droned on.

  Cameryn’s mind kept drifting back to Adam. A sick feeling was spreading in the pit of her stomach. Had she been too quick to believe him when he declared his innocence? Worse, she’d left him alone in the truck with Lyric. Could her friend be in danger?
Most of the time, those who knew serial killers would swear up and down that their friend could never have done it. One of the worst of them, John Wayne Gacy, had dressed up like a clown before brutally murdering over thirty young men. But Adam couldn’t have gone all around the country, leaving new victims in his wake. Unless…A new thought jarred her. Adam could be a copycat killer.

  A copycat. It was possible. The Christopher Killer had been in every magazine and paper for the last year. It wouldn’t have been hard for Adam to read the details. Other thoughts worked in the corners of her mind, like spiders in the dark. Adam had a photo lab, which meant he worked with chemicals. Could something used in the process cause that faint stain she’d seen on Rachel’s hands? Maybe there was a link there. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

  She raised her hand. “Mr. Ward,” she said. “I need to leave.”

  “Not yet, please. There’s an announcement coming you should hear.”

  “But—”

  The intercom crackled to life and the starchy voice of Mrs. Kellogg, their principal, filled the room.

  “Good morning, students, teachers, and staff. I will be brief. As all of you undoubtedly know, we have lost one of our own. The memory of Rachel Geller will include all the good and generous things she has done, for her family, her school, and her community.”

  Mr. Ward listened, head bowed as if in prayer.

  Cameryn glanced around the room again, and this time she noticed the other students, the girls hunched over, seemingly ready to cry while the boys stared ahead, their faces blank. Iggy, a large iguana kept in a glass aquarium, raised his head to the warming light. With one eye he seemed to stare at Cameryn; he blinked, then stretched his creped neck toward the manufactured sun. Beyond his tank sat a row of three computers hooked to the Internet.

  Cameryn raised her hand again. “Mr. Ward?” she whispered loudly. “Could I at least go online really quick?” She had it in mind to check out the chemicals used to process film. But Mr. Ward shook his head no and held his finger to his lips.

  “…because of the distressing nature of this occurrence, I have decided to dismiss school for the rest of the day, as well as tomorrow.”