Killing Britney Read online

  It was a beautiful day, warm for this time of year—thirty-eight degrees Fahrenheit. Sunlight glimmered off everything—the windshields of the cars in the parking lot, the snowbanks piled up on the side of the road. The telephone wires looping along overhead were crusted in a thin layer of ice; they shimmered like bands of silver.

  The minutes seemed to drag on.

  Britney stared at the walls, which were painted a fluffy blue and decorated with intentionally soothing posters of impressionist paintings: Seurat’s Sunday in the Park, Monet’s Water Lilies. The bookshelf contained a whole collection of self-help books—she’d stared at these titles many times before.

  Dr. Yeager broke the silence. “Have you thought about your mom at all recently? I’d think, given all that’s happened, some of those old wounds might have opened up.”

  If she were going to be honest, she would have to admit that it was true, she had thought about her mom. The rampant fear she’d been experiencing since Ricky’s death was made worse by her worries that she might just be paranoid, more like her mother than she wanted to believe. But she couldn’t allow Dr. Yeager the satisfaction of hearing her admit he was right.

  “No,” she mumbled, clicking her jaw.

  The silence was excruciating. She wondered, where was her father? This tardiness was becoming a habit.

  Finally the chime of her cell phone bailed her out. It was him.

  “Where are you?” she said.

  “I’m not going to make it.” His voice was muffled. Britney could barely make out what he was saying.

  “Why not?”

  The long silence on the other end of the line made Britney think she’d lost him for a moment, but he finally said, “I’m over here at Mr. and Mrs. Brown’s house. Melissa’s here too. I can’t really talk right now, so I’m going to come right out and say it. There’s been an … accident.”

  Before he even told her what it was, Britney felt the muscles around her stomach clench, as though it were preparing for a punch in the gut.

  She lowered her voice. “Oh my God, what?”

  Dr. Yeager was watching her as she spoke. She tipped her head and tried to cradle the phone away from his gaze.

  “Karl. He … he was found murdered this morning over at the Brat Haus.”

  Britney grimaced. She didn’t want to give a single emotion away to the doctor.

  “Uh-huh,” she said.

  “So I’m going to be over here most of the morning helping. I’m sorry, Pumpkin. I got the call as I was driving over and I haven’t had a chance to get to you until just now.”

  “It’s okay,” she lied. She was shaking.

  “Do you want to talk to Melissa for a second? I know she’d appreciate hearing your voice.”

  “Uh, okay.” She told herself, Hold it together, hold it together.

  Melissa’s tears almost made Britney feel like she was going begin sobbing as well.

  “You’re one of the strongest people I know,” Britney said, trying to find the words that might best console Melissa. “You’ll get through this. I promise. If you need me for anything—anything at all—I’ll be here. Okay?”

  Melissa murmured, “Thanks,” and quickly said she had to go. She was too upset to talk.

  “Don’t forget, okay? You’ve been there for me every time, and if …” Knowing there were no words to take Melissa’s pain away, she said, “I love you, Melissa. I’ll see you soon.”

  When she hung up, Britney didn’t know where to look. She knew that Dr. Yeager was staring at her. She didn’t want to return his gaze. She settled on the mobile hanging in the corner above the window—dark-stained wooden blocks cut into odd geometric shapes.

  “Is everything okay?” asked the doctor.

  Britney couldn’t stop herself. “No, everything’s not okay!” she shouted, finally releasing all the panic and fear that had been building up inside her. “Someone’s out to get me! Do you understand that? What happened to Ricky … And Karl’s dead now … It’s all part of their larger plan!”

  He jotted something down in the folder on his desk.

  “How does that make you feel?” he said calmly.

  “You know, what? Forget it.” She covered her face with her hands and moaned. “You people all just think I’m crazy like my mom!”

  twenty-two

  Melissa’s parents had offered to come along to help clean out Karl’s meager belongings, but Melissa had insisted on doing it alone. Now here she was in her dead brother’s apartment. Her relationship with Karl had always been troubled. She thought packing up his stuff, holding each item in her hands, looking at the refuse left of his life one parcel at a time, would help her understand him better.

  Mr. Johnson, who was taking care of everything for Melissa’s family, even going so far as to work out the funeral arrangements, had dropped her off in the parking lot behind the complex where Karl had lived. Just seeing the place had made Melissa’s heart throb. It was so chintzy. A two-story yellow-brick development behind the multiplex off the Washington Avenue strip—nondescript in every way. She couldn’t imagine how anyone could live here without being terribly lonely.

  “Are you sure you don’t want any help?” Mr. Johnson had said.

  “No. It’s okay. I sort of want to do this by myself,” she said.

  He had handed her a set of keys.

  “You see that truck over there?” he’d said, pointing at a beat-up red Ford sitting all alone in the far corner of the parking lot. “That’s Karl’s. You’ll probably be able to fit all his things in the back.”

  Not even knowing what his car looked like made her feel terrible. It was sad. She’d paid so little attention to Karl since his getting out of jail. This was the first time she’d even been to his apartment.

  The front room was moderately small. It was nearly completely empty and carpeted in an ugly beige. There were no curtains on the windows, no art on the walls, no bookshelves or stereo or television.

  What it contained was this: a fold-up card table; a beach chair; a stack of well-thumbed books by Elmore Leonard and Jim Thompson; a CD/cassette boom box with a broken antenna, missing the door to the cassette player; and a few other sundry things. Nothing of any real value. Paper plates and plastic silverware. Half a mushroom pizza, still in its box on the counter.

  She recognized his imprint on the space. The empty tallboys of Miller Genuine Draft stacked in a pyramid in the windowsill. Lying on the floor, the baseball signed by Paul Molitor and Robin Yount that he’d cherished since he was a child.

  It was hard to imagine what he did with his time here. The image of him slouched back in the beach chair, dirty jeans hanging low on his hips, his naked shoulders and back scratching against the white and green strips of vinyl, a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other, staring at the wall, staring and staring and waiting for his brain to tell him it was tired—this was what she imagined the substance of his life had been like since he’d been released.

  The room stank of sadness, and to think that this sadness was related to her, it was too much to bear.

  There were tears in her eyes now.

  She was startled to find a shotgun leaning against the wall behind the bedroom door. She wondered where he got it and what kind of trouble he could have been in. Maybe he hadn’t reformed himself as much as Mr. Johnson claimed he had. For some reason, the gun didn’t scare her so much as make her feel even sadder for her brother.

  Other than the gun, the bedroom was nearly empty. A mess of clothes in the corner. A futon, a shoe box stuffed with documents. Rummaging through the box, Melissa found Karl’s birth certificate, his social security card, his release papers.

  There were letters in the box as well.

  The one on top, decorated with florid drawings of pursed lips and cupid hearts, read:

  Dear Karl,

  It’s Valentine’s Day and you’re in there and I’m out here. It’s not fair. I wish I could at least come to visit you. I can’t, obviously. It would
be too risky. But all day today I’ve been imagining what I’d do if I could. Remember that day when we drove out into the country and found that abandoned farmhouse? Do you remember what we did when we got there? I wish I could do that with you today.

  That’s not all I would do, though. If I could, I’d put on that Victoria’s Secret slip you bought me—the black lacy one that barely comes down to my thighs. And I’d wear the silky red thong you like so much, or maybe I wouldn’t. I guess it would depend on how good a boy you were. I’d sashay my hips and dance in front of you, teasing you until you couldn’t stand it. You wouldn’t be allowed to touch me. That would be the rule. Not until I said it was okay …

  The letter went on to describe an extremely sensual situation. It was so graphic that Melissa flushed. She felt like she was doing something unethical by intruding like this. She knew she should stop reading, put the letter back in the box, and pack the whole thing up with Karl’s other things, let his prison letters remain secret and his, but she couldn’t.

  The script the letter was written in was vaguely familiar. She’d seen it before, but she couldn’t place it.

  It was unsigned.

  There were many more letters like this in the box. All of them sexy. None of them signed.

  She racked her brain, trying to place where she’d seen this handwriting before, but she couldn’t remember.

  As she continued digging to the bottom of the box, she dreaded what she might find there.

  In a sudden rush of memory, she knew where she’d seen the handwriting on the letters before. At Britney’s house. Hundreds of times, on little notes left on the kitchen table reminding the girls that there were cookies in the rabbit jar or lemonade in the fridge, on permission slips for school trips, on all the various scraps of paper that parents leave trailing behind their children.

  It was Jan Johnson’s handwriting. Britney’s mother. But she’d died before Karl was sent to prison.

  Then she felt something small clinging to the bottom of the shoe box.

  A Polaroid.

  She was afraid to look at it.

  twenty-three

  Adam noticed as soon as he saw Melissa that she looked hollowed out, her eyes sunken and dark, like they’d seen things that had turned them prematurely old, her posture broken as though she had been dragging a boulder behind her all day. Her curly red hair was more unruly than usual, sticking up everywhere.

  Her parents were sitting together at the cluttered table in the living room. They each had a stack of books in front of them, but neither was reading. It was hard to tell what they were doing, actually. They looked shell-shocked, harrowed. As though they’d been staring off into space for an eternity of hours and Adam’s ringing of the doorbell had blasted them back from their dark reverie; they seemed confused about where they were.

  Melissa barely stopped to acknowledge them. She nodded his way and said, “This is Adam, Britney’s friend.” Then she ushered him upstairs so quickly that he had time to do nothing but grimace and wave.

  Locking the door behind them, she kicked a path through the clothes piled in the middle of the floor and shoved the open notebooks and loose-leaf papers to the side of the bed, making room for the two of them to sit side by side.

  Then she started sobbing.

  Cupping her hands loosely, tenderly between his palms, Adam said nothing. He watched her, waiting.

  Death seemed unreal to him. He’d never known anybody who’d died—well, he’d known Britney’s mom, but he hadn’t been here for that. He’d heard about it from his parents one day when he got home from school. It had made him sad, but he hadn’t seen Jan Johnson for years and it had just been news from the world outside his reality at the time. When he’d arrived here in Madison, her absence had seemed strange for a few weeks, but it hadn’t been shocking. It hadn’t turned his world upside down.

  When Ricky died, Adam had felt bad for Britney, even though he didn’t know how to show it, and remembering the way his jokey behavior had upset her, he tried now with Melissa to be more appropriately somber.

  Before leaving work at Amoeba, he’d bought her a CD with his employee discount, It’s a Wonderful Life by Sparklehorse. It had come out a while ago, but it was still one of his favorites—not many people had heard of the band, and they were haunting and mournful and very, very cool. The perfect thing to remind her that she wasn’t alone in her sadness.

  “Do you have a CD player?” he asked.

  She nodded and pointed to the Discman balanced precariously on the windowsill.

  They listened reverently to the dirge-like songs on it.

  After a couple of songs, she said, “It’s good.” A brief smile broke across her face, but it quickly dissolved.

  When she’d called him at work to tell him about her brother, she’d said she had something else important she needed to talk to him about. Her voice had been clipped, strained with the effort to hold her emotions in.

  “What is it?” he’d asked.

  “I can’t tell you now.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s … you know … my parents are here.” There was a shuffling noise on the other end of the line, and then Melissa whispered into the phone, “I found something. While I was cleaning out Karl’s apartment. It’s … I’m really freaked out.”

  The dread and not knowing had rattled him for the rest of the evening. He couldn’t imagine what she might have found. A journal full of murderous confessions? A message written in blood on the wall? Child pornography? Every idea that slid through his mind seemed far-fetched. And none of them explained why she had to keep everything secret.

  The whole walk over, he’d prepared himself to listen, told himself not to judge the things she might say to him, to be prepared for anything. That’s what he’d thought Melissa wanted from him.

  Now, beneath the dim shaded lamp on the bedside table of her messy bedroom, he asked her, “How are you feeling? Is there anything … What can I do?”

  The tears came pouring out of her, as though she’d been saving them all up for this moment.

  She buried her head in his shoulder, and he held her, rubbing her back lightly with his fingertips.

  After she’d calmed down, she looked up at him. Her face was pink. Her freckles were darker, angry splotches of red screaming from her nose.

  With the back of his finger, he wiped the tears from her cheeks. They were surprisingly cold. He wanted to give her a tissue to wipe her nose with, but he couldn’t find one in her cluttered room.

  After a while, when she could finally get out some halting words, she said, “I’m so scared. Who would want to do this? Karl was a messed-up guy, but he wasn’t a bad guy. He was just … Whoever is doing this, it seems like it doesn’t matter who you are; they don’t care.”

  Her shoulders shook as she sobbed, and Adam tried his best to hold her steady.

  She looked him dead in the eye.

  “Do you know anything about guns?” she said.

  Hearing this question, he startled and recoiled slightly from her. He wondered what she knew about his last few months in New Hampshire and how she could have learned it. “A little,” he said. “Why? Does this have to do with the thing you couldn’t tell me?”

  Nodding, she slid from the bed and dug into the darkness of her closet, pulling out a shotgun.

  Adam’s eyebrows rose. He was disturbed, but he was also relieved; this had nothing to do with him. “Where’d you get that?”

  “It was in Karl’s apartment.”

  From the way she waved the gun around, she obviously didn’t have any experience with firearms.

  “Whoa! Whoa!” Adam said, as calmly as he could. “Watch where you point that thing! Here, let me see it.”

  Examining the gun, he recognized the make and model. It was a Winchester Super X2 Greenhead.

  “Do you know where he got it?”

  Melissa shook her head.

  He pointed out a small dot of Wite-Out on the hilt. “You se
e that? That’s the way Mr. Johnson marks his hunting rifles.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “He showed them to me a month or so ago. He’s got two of them.” A flash of disturbance flew briefly across her face, and hoping to reassure her that he and Mr. Johnson had a legitimate reason to be playing with the guns, he said, “Back in New Hampshire, I was a big hunter. See, look at my coat. It’s a duck-hunting jacket.”

  She nodded gravely. She was nervously tapping her knuckles against her lips.

  “Does he know you found this?” asked Adam.

  “No.” She started rummaging around in the closet again, looking for something. “There’s this other thing too,” she said. “Let me just find it.”

  “Does Detective Russell know?”

  “No.”

  “Well, you should definitely tell her. But I don’t know, maybe you should hold off on telling Mr. Johnson.”

  “Why?”

  She looked suspicious suddenly, and he scrambled to explain. “I mean, can you imagine how much more upset Britney would be if she found out about this? She’s already a nervous wreck.”

  Melissa stopped her search through the closet suddenly. For a second, she played with the rim of her glasses, like she was calculating something in her head. Then her face broke and scrunched in on itself and she started sobbing again.

  Adam reached out to touch her shoulder, and she wrapped her arms around him, clutching him tightly. Her head was buried in his collarbone. He could feel her tears soaking through his T-shirt.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay. I’ve got you.”

  Then he felt something else, something unmistakable. She’d kissed his neck.

  He squeezed her more tightly, ran his fingers through her hair, and somehow, he was suddenly kissing her back and she had her hands under his T-shirt and he had his hands under her sweatshirt and they weren’t sitting up anymore—they were lying down, and Melissa’s skin was so soft and her hands so tender and when she said his name—“Adam”—he realized she wasn’t crying anymore.