Killing Britney Page 7

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “You don’t like it, do you?” She sounded truly disappointed.

  “No, it’s not that. It’s—I love these guys. I had no idea anybody in this town had ever heard of them.”

  “Well,” she said, “I’m full of surprises.”

  A prickle of anticipation inched up Adam’s back. He hoped he’d have the opportunity to be surprised by her again and again.

  They didn’t speak much on the ride home, but the music made Adam feel like they were growing more intimate anyway. He almost felt like it would be all right to kiss her when they got to Britney’s house, but she got very serious as she pulled into the driveway. He wondered if maybe he’d been imagining the whole thing and if she still thought of him as just that guy who lived in her best friend’s house.

  “Listen,” she said. “You probably shouldn’t tell Britney about all the stuff we talked about tonight, okay? I mean, she’d kill me if she knew I still hang out with Bobby.”

  “Sure,” Adam said. He was afraid he looked sort of dumb nodding like this. “No problem.”

  She winked at him. “See ya.”

  “Yeah, see ya.”

  It wasn’t until she had driven away that he realized that they had a secret now. They had a secret! And a secret was almost as good as a kiss.

  twelve

  After the final bell rang on Friday afternoon, Britney hid her head in her locker so she wouldn’t have to be confronted again by the pitying looks of her fellow students.

  All day she’d been confronted by the eyes of freshman girls, of boys from the school newspaper, of the guys from Hummus, everyone staring, thinking, she was sure, There but for the grace of God go I. She knew that they wanted to impress their sympathy on her, but she wished they would stop staring. If everyone just acted like nothing had happened, maybe she could begin to feel normal again.

  When Melissa wandered over, Britney was momentarily disappointed. She’d hoped to hang out with Erin and the other wives, to go somewhere with them and do something mindless, maybe watch TV, while snuggling into their shared memories of Ricky.

  “Can I get a ride home?” asked Melissa.

  Britney gazed down the hallway. There wasn’t a hockey wife within sight. She didn’t want to be rude, and she really hadn’t spent enough time with Melissa lately, so she said, “Sure.”

  “I need to stop by the library. Is that okay?”

  Britney nodded. Now that she’d committed, she couldn’t back out, though hanging around at the library was the last thing she wanted to do.

  The two of them made their way across the parking lot toward Britney’s VW Bug. Their teeth chattered. Melissa’s heavy quilted coat was zipped up to her chin, her scarf wrapped tight, and she could withstand the cold. But Britney was wearing Ricky’s letter jacket, and even with the wool roll-top sweater underneath, she could feel the wind crawl in through the buttons. Despite her thick mittens, her fingers were numb.

  The ice on the ground was thick and slippery—the girls had to take care with every step not to slip.

  “Do you have some time? Let’s go to Fresh Grounds and grab a latte,” said Melissa. “I’ve got something I want to talk to you about.”

  “Oh? What’s that?”

  They didn’t look at each other as they spoke. It was so cold out that despite their coats, their muscles contracted and stiffened—any extra movement was another opportunity to expose some new bit of skin to the bracing wind.

  “There’s this, um—oh, now I’m embarrassed—this boy I like.”

  Britney spun on her and clasped her hands. “A boy! You mean like a real live boy? Of the human persuasion?”

  “Don’t make fun of me.”

  “Melissa, this is great. Look at you! You’re blushing!”

  As they neared the car, Britney fumbled with her keys. Pressing the unlock button was hard to do with frozen fingers. While she fumbled, Melissa pulled her door open. Britney thought it was odd that the doors were already unlocked.

  “I could swear I locked my car this morning.”

  “Sometimes when it’s cold, you think you’ve locked it when you really haven’t.”

  “No. I know I locked it. I distinctly remember hearing the chime and thinking about this car we had when I was little that used to say ‘a door is ajar’ every time I got in.”

  “So,” said Melissa, changing the subject. “The thing is, you know him.”

  “God, tell me already! I’m so excited!”

  “Let’s get warm first.”

  The two of them climbed into their respective sides of the car. As Britney settled into the driver’s seat, she heard something crunch underneath her. After fishing around for a moment, she pulled out a cracked jewel case. Under the clear plastic glimmered a blank CD. Someone had scrawled the words WITH LOVE on it in large block letters.

  She froze up.

  “Look at this,” she said, handing the CD to Melissa. “This is …” She shuddered involuntarily.

  As Melissa studied the CD, Britney put her key in the ignition.

  “Hurry up and turn the heat on,” she said. “It’s freezing in here!”

  Melissa’s attitude annoyed Britney. One of the things she liked best about her friend was that she could always be relied on to put aside whatever she was thinking about to focus on the melodrama of Britney’s life. “You don’t seem too concerned,” she said.

  “I want to tell you about this boy.”

  “Whatever. I’m a little freaked out right now, Melissa.”

  As soon as she’d opened the door, Britney had begun to feel incredibly anxious. It was as if she’d known, even before finding the CD, that her space had been invaded—as if someone had come in while she was in class and rubbed their greasy palms all over her stuff, not taking anything, but leaving a nasty scent behind.

  In silence, Britney turned on the engine and flicked the heat up to high.

  “Well, let’s hear what’s on it,” said Melissa with a little sigh that Britney took as a subtle criticism. She popped the CD into the stereo, and the two of them waited for what would come next.

  From the very first notes, a chill crept down Britney’s back. The song began with soft finger picking on what sounded like an acoustic guitar. It had an almost Celtic air to it, the mystical far-off quality of a mythic dirge. She recognized it immediately. Her fingers tensed on the steering wheel. Her stare drove into the windshield. Then the lyrics began….

  There’s a lady who’s sure

  all that glitters is gold

  and she’s buying a stairway to heaven…

  After a few verses, the song began to change. Static overtook the melody, as though the song was coming from a radio station that was on the verge of breaking up. The static grew louder and more disturbing as the CD played on—now it sounded like machine-gun fire, a rapid assault of feedback.

  Melissa gasped. “I think someone’s saying something. Is that a voice?”

  Listening closely, Britney could heard it. A murmuring, threatening gurgle of sound that when she concentrated, she could make out as words.

  “… deserved everything he got, and you know it. I only wish I could have stuck around to see him writhe in pain. … When I come for you, I promise, I’ll make sure I watch every minute of it….”

  Britney shrieked at the top of her lungs. It was like she was hyperventilating. She suddenly felt so hot, no, so cold, no, so hot. She tore at her letter jacket, but in her frenzy, she couldn’t get the thing off. Somewhere—it felt like very far away—she could hear Melissa screaming too. She could feel Melissa’s hand on her shoulder; it felt like a tentacle, a slimy, twisty thing reaching to throttle her. She screamed louder, harder. “Turn it off! Turn it off!” But the words weren’t coming out right, and the horrible white noise played on and on.

  Finally she couldn’t scream any longer and she collapsed onto the steering wheel, sobbing.

  Melissa stopped the CD.

  Neither o
f them spoke for a long, long time.

  When Melissa did finally speak, she did so in even, soft tones. “Are you okay?”

  “Do I look okay?” Britney shouted between sobs. She cried for she didn’t know how long. “How did they know about ‘Stairway to Heaven’? That was our song. Mine. And Ricky’s. I mean, nobody knew about it except me and Ricky. It … We … It … And the way the guy was talking …”

  “Someone’s been spying on you, obviously.” Melissa voice was soothing—in times of crisis, she was the best person to have around. She could be both firm and tender all at once. “We need to—”

  A snowball exploded on the windshield, and the girls both screamed again.

  Then, from nowhere, Adam was racing toward them, mounds of snow in both hands. He threw himself onto the hood of the car and rubbed the snow in like an overeager window washer. He grinned maniacally.

  It was all too overwhelming for Britney. Melissa leapt from the car to confront Adam and Britney leaned her head on the steering wheel and let the sobs wash through her.

  She couldn’t hear what they were saying, but when she finally felt calm enough to look up, Britney saw that they were both smiling. There was a sassiness to Melissa’s body language that Britney had never seen before. She dully registered that Adam must be Melissa’s secret crush. They kept glancing over at Britney in the car, and if she didn’t know Adam so well, she would have sworn that the expression on his face was one of concern.

  Jumping back into the car, Melissa spoke curtly. “We have to call that detective what’s-her-name immediately. We have to tell her about this. Here. Do you have that card she gave you? I’ll do it.”

  “No.” Britney struggled to hold herself together. “I don’t have it. I don’t want to talk to her. I want my dad. I want to talk to my dad.”

  Melissa thought about this for a moment. “Okay,” she said. “Come on, scoot over. I’ll drive.”

  Riding off toward her father’s office in the passenger seat of her own car, Britney felt like her insides had been scraped out. Even though nothing had been stolen, she felt like she’d lost something, like she wasn’t safe anywhere, not even in her own skin.

  thirteen

  Mr. Johnson was in consultation with a client. Closed into his office, behind a thick oak door. Melissa tried to explain to his assistant, Tamara, that this was an emergency—as if it wasn’t already obvious from the rivulets of black tears running down Britney’s cheeks. She stood there, hunched over Tamara’s desk, which, for someone whose sole job was to keep the office organized and make sure that anything Mr. Johnson needed was easy to find, was a disaster. Folders and documents binder-clipped together were piled everywhere, stained with coffee rings and dark splotches of soy sauce; the folders even spilled onto the floor.

  “I don’t know,” Tamara kept saying. “I’m not supposed to disturb him when he’s with a client.”

  “It’s an emergency!” said Melissa again. She was doing most of the talking. It was all Britney could do to sit silently, trying to hold herself together, on the antique couch, a deep royal blue with wooden scrollwork on the arms that her mother had purchased when she worked at the office.

  Suddenly Britney ran to the desk and, knocking over a mug of pens and spilling Tamara’s bottle of water, she yanked the phone away and shouted into it. “Dad? I need to talk to you! Tamara won’t let us in!”

  Then she very calmly placed the phone back in its cradle and returned to her perch on the couch. Acting like there had been no scene at all, as if she were just hanging out here, not even upset, Britney crossed her legs and waited. To make her point even more obvious, she casually picked up one of the old Newsweeks that lay on the art deco coffee table and began to leaf through it.

  “He won’t come out,” said Tamara as she tried to clean the water off the documents strewn around her desk. Picking them up in big bundles, she flicked the water into her trash can. Britney hoped that some of them were important; it would serve Tamara right if they got ruined.

  It took Britney’s father a few minutes, but sure enough, the door to his office slipped open a crack and he came out, shutting it quickly behind him to protect his client’s privacy. Britney was overjoyed to see him. He had that familiar hangdog droop to his shoulders—a defeated shuffle to his gait that had arrived soon after Britney’s mother died and never left. When he looked at her with those tender, pained eyes, she felt so safe that her whole body quivered.

  Tamara shot Melissa a dirty look, but she didn’t say anything. She acted like she’d known Mr. Johnson would come talk to the girls all along. Anyway, she was too busy shutting down the spider solitaire game on her computer to cause any more trouble.

  “Tamara,” said Mr. Johnson, “would it be okay if—” He glanced at the girls with a look that said to her, I’m sorry to get in your way, but if you could just give us a moment or two alone?

  “Sure. Okay,” Tamara said. “I want a muffin anyway.” Then, putting on the sickliest saccharine voice Britney’d ever heard, she said, “Can I get you anything?”

  He just shook his head wearily.

  Britney was so overcome that she just sat there with her head in her lap while Melissa explained about the CD and the scene in the car. Throughout the conversation, Mr. Johnson rubbed Britney’s back with the palm of one hand. He listened gravely, seriously considering every word Melissa said.

  “Oh, Brit, I’m so sorry,” he said once Melissa had finished. “You must have felt like the world was ending.”

  Britney nodded.

  “Do you have the CD?” he asked.

  Melissa handed it over, and he frowned, studying it carefully.

  “I think we need to tell Detective Russell about this.” He glanced at Britney and, seeing how torn up she was, said, “It’s okay. I’ll do it. I suspect it’s just a prank—probably those hockey guys. I can’t count how many times I’ve seen them in court over idiotic behavior like this.” He took Britney’s hand between his two palms. “I’ll see what I can do, though, okay, sweetie? Detective Russell and I will get this sorted out. In the meantime, do you still have those bath salts from The Body Shop that Grandma Johnson sent you for Christmas?”

  Britney shrugged. It was as much of a response as she could muster.

  “When your mother was especially rattled about things, she used to take a long bath to calm herself down. Maybe you should try it. Those salts are supposed to be therapeutic. They’ve got aromatherapy in them or something. Or you could—here, I’ll give you some cash. Pamper yourself. Whatever you think might relax you.”

  “I’ve got an idea. Why don’t you roll up a giant-size joint and get baked out of your skull? It always helps me forget all the bullshit.”

  The three of them—Britney, her father, and Melissa—all looked toward this new voice. There, leaning against the inner-office doorjamb, stood a gaunt, rangy guy in his early twenties. He was wearing a tattered black leather jacket over a Megadeth T-shirt. Looped through his dirty blue jeans was a thick black belt; the buckle was huge and brass: a screaming eagle flying out of an American flag. His curly red hair looked like it hadn’t been washed in weeks.

  Before anyone could say anything, the guy raised his hands as though to calm them down. “Joke. It’s a joke,” he said.

  “Karl?” The look on Melissa’s face was one of abject shock. “Karl, what—why—don’t tell me you got arrested again!”

  Smiling wryly, Karl said, “Ed here’s helping me hook up a job.”

  Karl was Melissa’s brother. He’d been caught working at a crystal meth lab a couple of years ago—just a few months after Britney’s mother had died—and shipped off to prison in Waupun. The lab hadn’t been his operation. His job had been to drive the chemicals and formaldehyde in from the feed store out in North Bristol. With Mr. Johnson as his lawyer, he’d been sentenced to five years. The other guys all got twenty.

  Britney had known Karl since they were kids. When she’d been a real small child, she’d seen him ling
ering around Melissa’s house whenever she came over to play. Then, as the girls got older, he was there less and less. At sixteen, he dropped out of high school, and this was such a blow to Melissa’s college professor parents that they kicked him out of the house. Before he’d been sent off to jail, Britney and Melissa used to hang around with him on State Street.

  He winked at Britney. “Hey, cutie,” he said. “Nice letter jacket. I didn’t know you played on the hockey team.”

  Melissa turned skeptically to Mr. Johnson. “You got him a job?”

  “He starts tomorrow,” said Mr. Johnson.

  “Doing what?”

  “Why don’t you ask him?” There was a fatherly glow of pride in Mr. Johnson’s face.

  “You know, that meat-packing factory,” Karl said.

  “The Bavarian Brat Haus,” Mr. Johnson interjected.

  “Yeah, that place.”

  Melissa rolled her eyes.

  Britney and Melissa had had many long talks about how sad she got when she thought about her brother’s troubled life. Her biggest fear in the world was that he’d never get his life together.

  “Karl—” Mr. Johnson said sharply, nodding toward the inner office.

  “I just wanted to see if everything was all right.”

  “Well, it is.”

  “So-or-ry,” Karl said, chuckling. “Britney, it’s always a pleasure.” He winked at her again. “And Melissa …” His voice trailed off. He shrugged as if he couldn’t think of anything worth saying to her and shut himself back in the office.

  “Okay, kiddo,” Mr. Johnson said when they were alone again. “I don’t want you to worry about this stuff with that CD. I’m going to take care of it. I’ll never let anyone hurt you.” He stood up and coaxed her toward him. “Come on, now, give me a hug.”

  There were his arms around her again, holding her so tight she almost believed, at least for a moment, that he could protect her from anything.

  “Better?” he said.

  She tried to smile. “A little bit,” she lied.