Chapter Twenty-Eight
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
GRAHAM KELLY HEARS the knock at his front door on Sunday morning and freezes. He calls to his wife, ‘Can you get that?’ He’s reading the paper in the kitchen – there is nothing about Turner, thank God – and he’s certainly capable of answering the door, but his legs suddenly feel like jelly.
He keeps perfectly still and listens intently as his wife answers the door. ‘Yes?’ she says.
He hears a voice, ‘Is your husband home?’
It’s Brad Turner. Fuck.
‘Yes, he’s in the kitchen,’ his wife says. Kelly hears their steps coming toward him and prepares himself. He hasn’t spoken to Brad since he phoned him Friday night to warn him he was going to go to the police the next morning. He’s ignored his calls. His wife doesn’t know anything about any of this.
‘Look who’s here,’ his wife, Sandra, says brightly. ‘Can I get you some coffee?’ she asks Brad.
‘Yeah, sure, thanks,’ he says, and she turns to the carafe and grabs a mug from the cupboard and pours him a coffee.
‘I’ll leave you to it,’ Sandra says and exits the kitchen, glancing at them curiously.
Kelly doesn’t want to risk her overhearing anything. ‘Let’s go to my study,’ he says, getting up. They take their coffees upstairs to his office at the end of the hall. He lets Turner enter first and closes the door firmly behind them. Sandra is downstairs and has begun vacuuming the carpets.
‘The detectives interviewed me yesterday,’ Brad says, before they even sit down. And then he becomes petulant. ‘Why haven’t you answered my calls?’
This gets Kelly’s back up. He hadn’t answered because he hadn’t wanted to talk to him. ‘I already told you what I was going to say,’ he answers hotly. They both take a breath. Kelly sits down heavily in one of the armchairs, and Brad sinks into the other. They lean toward each other, keeping their voices low. Kelly asks, ‘So, how did it go? They can’t think you had anything to do with what happened to Diana.’
‘I wouldn’t be so sure,’ Brad says, looking tense.
‘What?’ Kelly asks in surprise. ‘Surely you must have an alibi, though?’ he asks anxiously. ‘Wasn’t your fiancée with you?’
‘She was at home at her parents’ that night.’
‘I thought she lived with you.’
‘No, she lives with her parents.’
It stuns him for a moment. Brad doesn’t have an alibi. He hadn’t anticipated this. So Brad won’t be quickly discounted as a suspect, as he’d expected. They will look more closely into him, and into Diana’s complaint, and how Kelly handled it. Now Kelly is deeply worried. He’s required to report suspected child abuse. If it becomes known that he did nothing about these allegations of Diana’s, his career will be finished. He has a mortgage, three kids. He swallows. ‘Do you think the police will pursue this further?’ he asks.
‘I don’t know.’
He gives Brad a cold, angry look. ‘I’ve tried to protect you the best I could. It was her word against yours, and I believed you. I don’t know what really happened, and I did what I thought was best. Innocent until proven guilty. I didn’t believe her and I didn’t want to ruin your career. But I don’t want anything more to do with this.’
He experiences a plunging sensation inside him as he tells Turner this, while the younger man sits hunched in front of him, visibly nervous and smelling strongly of cigarettes. Kelly has a sudden, horrible feeling that things might be much worse than he thought, that it might actually be possible that the twitchy young man in front of him killed that young girl. He remembers what she said he’d done. He’d thought she was lying because she’d refused to go to the police. And because he thought she was a dishonest girl. She’d been caught cheating on a science assignment the previous spring. At first she’d denied it emphatically, but had finally admitted it, in tears, in front of him and her science teacher. But what if she hadn’t been lying about Brad Turner? He recoils from the man across from him.
Where does that leave him now? He could have blood on his hands. He should tell the police the truth, not the milder version he gave them yesterday, the version that’s written down in the file that he’d never meant anyone to see. Let them figure out who was lying.
But there’s his mortgage, and his wife and three kids.
Still, he decides, observing the man in front of him with deep dismay, if Turner can’t account for where he was that night, he must now do the right thing. Perhaps Turner senses his change of mind because he suddenly leans in closer, and his eyes sharpen.
‘I’d stick to your original story if I were you,’ he says.
‘I must do what I think is right.’
‘But, Kelly, I know about that fling you had. With Ms Desjardins. And I wouldn’t hesitate to tell your wife.’
Kelly feels his face go pale. How the hell does he know about that?
‘I saw you, one night, last spring, after dark,’ Turner says, pressing close. ‘I was in the park, after a run, catching my breath. I saw you knock on her door across the street and slip into her house. Saw the way you kissed her, before she closed the door. I was curious, so I stayed. You were there long enough.’
Brad Turner leaves Graham Kelly’s house more unsettled than he was when he arrived. He feels like everything is closing in on him. He doesn’t trust Kelly any more. He hadn’t liked the way he’d looked at him in his study. His barely concealed revulsion – as if he thinks he might have murdered Diana. And he couldn’t have Kelly thinking that, because then what might he do? He might tell the detectives what Diana had really said. He’d had to threaten to reveal what he knew about him, that he’d seen him and the attractive young teacher together, quite by chance. Lucky for him that he did.
Still, he doesn’t know what will happen. Kelly had been terrified. He doesn’t think he’s going to say anything, but he can’t be sure. What if he thinks his wife will forgive him? What then?
Brad doesn’t walk directly home. He walks around the perimeter of town, head down. He doesn’t want to talk to anyone.
He thought it had gone relatively well with the detectives the day before. He’d handled it well. Still, they’d asked him for an alibi, and he hadn’t been able to provide one. Will that be the end of it? That really depends on Kelly, he thinks now.
He’s been such an idiot. He didn’t seem to be able to help himself. The glances, the casual touches – he got pleasure out of it. He didn’t think anyone noticed. And once he started, he didn’t know when to stop.
He’s always enjoyed looking at girls. At their young, developing bodies. It’s one of the reasons he became a gym teacher. He likes their long, coltish legs and their swinging ponytails. He likes to watch them in shorts and skimpy tees bending and twisting and stretching. He likes to imagine them in the locker room – especially that. He likes watching the way they develop over the course of a year. When he coaches them, he likes to lean in close and smell their skin, the musky sweat on them, like perfume. To pat them on the back when they’ve done something well. And then he stepped over the line with Diana. What a mistake that was.
Diana, especially, was a temptation, something to be resisted. He’d been fresh out of teachers’ college, and he noticed her right off, last year in September, when she was in eleventh grade. She was a natural athlete, and that appealed to him. She was beautiful, with her large eyes and lightly freckled skin, her long honey-coloured hair. She used to bend over and let her hair hang down as she gathered it up and put it into a ponytail before she started running. He’d stand behind her and stare at her in her running tights, watch the graceful movement as she flipped her head up again, ponytail swishing. God, she was something.
She caught him looking.
What is he going to do about Ellen? She knows something’s wrong. All his attempts to brush off her questions on the phone seem only to have made her more certain that something’s not right. She knows he’s upset about Diana’s death, but she doesn’t know the half of it. She might soon find out, and then where will he be? Will she stand by him?
She has to.
Riley and Evan arrive at Joe Prior’s building on the outskirts of Fairhill. They stare at the ugly low-rise in front of them.
Evan drives around behind the building. There are several parking spots in the lot, and some are empty. At the moment, there’s only one pickup truck in the parking lot.
Evan parks the car on the street and they get out. Riley looks around nervously before approaching the truck. There’s no one around. They both study the truck, looking in the windows, casting glances over their shoulders. They don’t even know if it’s the right truck, but Riley nervously takes some pictures of it with her cell phone, while Evan keeps watch. She doesn’t know what she expected to find – it’s not like he would have left any evidence on the back seat. But she had to look. What if the detectives couldn’t because they didn’t have enough to get a warrant? But there’s nothing remarkable here – a dusty hardhat, a high-visibility vest, and a newspaper on the passenger seat, a dirty coffee cup in the cup holder. This truck is similar to Cameron’s, which is also a black pickup. The hardhat makes it seem likely that the truck belongs to Prior, but they won’t know for certain unless he comes out of the building and gets into it.
‘Is something wrong?’ his wife asks when Graham Kelly comes back downstairs a few minutes after Brad Turner leaves. ‘Why was that teacher here?’
It’s on the tip of Graham’s tongue to deflect, to say that it was nothing, to make up some reason, but before he can marshal his thoughts there’s another knock on the front door.
‘Who the hell can that be?’ Sandra says, moving toward the door.
This is it , Kelly thinks. The police are here . What is he going to tell them?
But it’s not the police. It’s a reporter from KCVS News. He hears her introducing herself to Sandra at the door – I’m Jennifer Wiley, KCVS News – and he feels trapped. Reluctantly, he joins his wife. He’d already said all he was going to say to the press at the school on Friday. They’ve been leaving him alone since. He can’t avoid them for ever, but he’s annoyed that they’ve come to his home.
He recognizes her; she was at the school on Friday, after Diana’s body was discovered. As the principal of the high school, he’d made a statement and spoken to reporters about what a great loss it was to the school and their community, about how lovely Diana was, how much potential she had, and how important it was that they find whoever it was who did this terrible thing. He has nothing more to say. But now Jennifer Wiley looks at him and says, ‘Mr Kelly, I understand that Diana Brewer made allegations of inappropriate behaviour against one of your teachers, Brad Turner?’
For a moment he’s speechless. He can feel the heat rushing to his cheeks. Then he says tightly, ‘No comment,’ and closes the door in her face. He turns around and finds his wife looking at him with an expression of astonishment.