Page 27 of It's One of Us
At the end of the call, they hear whispering, then a sigh from the woman they’ve been talking to.
“Fine. Here. Talk to them.”
A young woman’s voice comes on the line, tremulously excited.
“We’ve agreed to give you our information. My name is Scarlett Flynn. And if you speak to our donor, tell him I’d like to meet him.”
12
THE PAST
Chapel Hill, NorthCarolina
University of NorthCarolina
April 2001
Park Bender, lanky, lean, fraternity heartthrob, catch of the century and knew it, strolled across the campus with his backpack on one shoulder and a hand in the pocket of his North Face, trying to look cool. He had a vicious hangover, compliments of the PKA party the night before. The Pike house had been thumping; someone had passed around a dose of mushrooms at the pregame, and he always drank too much when he was tripping. After the semester he’d had so far, no one blamed him for overdoing it.
No one blamed him at all.
Because Melanie Rich was missing.
Still missing.
When the police had questioned him, the weekend she disappeared, about his perky young on-again, off-again freshman girlfriend, about the fight they’d had that Thursday night at the KD house, witnessed by Melanie’s roommates, he blew it off. He figured they’d find her sleeping off a bad drunk in one of her friends’ apartments or discover she’d gotten homesick and gone home to her parents’ place in Raleigh for the weekend. But hours became days, which stretched to weeks, and suddenly she’d been gone for two months, and the semester was ending. Everyone from the students to the media speculated about when her body would show up. There were even betting pools in some of the frat house basements with Las Vegas–style oddsmaking, though no one would admit that publicly. Odds that Melanie was dead: four to one. Odds that Park killed her? Ten to one, as of last night, which was why he’d gotten so smashed. Last weekend, they’d been riding at thirty to one. His favor among his compatriots was slipping.
When the cops finally came and took his DNA, he gave it willingly, without making a fuss or asking for a lawyer; he had nothing to hide. But after that, tired of the sideways glances and sudden ends to conversations when he came in the room, Park decided to head home the moment finals were over, instead of lingering for the end-of-semester parties.
He’d been more than relieved to be back in Nashville over winter break, something he usually avoided because it made him sad. Holidays just weren’t the same now that they were all grown and his mom was gone. He missed the excitement of Christmas Eve, he and Perry whispering under the covers, timing their descent down the big staircase so they could catch Santa coming out of the chimney. Missed the gentleness of Christmas Day, when kids and parents all had their presents and were playing before the big dinner. Missed what it was like before things fell apart.
He missed the way it was before their mom got sick and Perry bailed for Europe, and it was just him and Lindsey and his dad, who had checked out when his mom died, and the family’s descent into depression was too much to bear.
This year, though, two months after Melanie went missing, he’d thrown himself into the holidays, doing all the things his mom used to love. Put up a tree, dragged out the ornaments they’d made as kids, hung wreaths on the garage doors. Lindsey, relieved to have at least one brother around to temper their dad’s benign neglect, helped cheerfully, and even his dad seemed to pull out of his funk for a while Christmas morning.
Melanie was still missing when he got back to campus. While he was home, the police had cleared him, and the media reported his innocence, and now people weren’t quite so jittery around him. The odds, though, getting tighter and tighter as the semester went on.
Sometimes he missed Melanie, though most of the time, he tried not to think about her. She went into the bucket of emotions that included his mom’s death and the med school rejections and the hopelessness that his life was going nowhere. It wasn’t that he forgot about her. The posters all over campus made that impossible. But they’d dated for only a little while, and he hadn’t even liked her all that much. She’d wanted more than he was willing to give.
Back in his apartment, he dropped the sunglasses on the kitchen counter, adding to the crowded mess of backpacks and mail and empty beer cans, and downed four ibuprofens with the lukewarm remnants of a Moosehead. He needed to go shopping. He needed to do laundry. He needed to clean up the wreck that was his apartment, and he desperately needed to study. He needed a lot of things. Instead, he got a fresh beer from the fridge and plugged in his brand-new Xbox, a Christmas present. A few rousing kills inHalowould set him straight.
The door crashed open half an hour later, making him jump. His roommate, Peter Johnson, burst into the living room looking like he’d sprinted all the way from the arboretum. Johnson’s hair was a drenched mess, and his face was red as fire. Park hit Pause on the game.
“Dude. Did you hear?”
Park pulled down his headphones, pointed sarcastically at them. “Hear what?”
“They found her. They found Melanie.”
A crappie fisherman had caught the edge of the girl’s cardigan and dragged her from the depths of University Lake. Her bloated body was put through an autopsy, which determined she’d been murdered. Cause of death, either a subdural hematoma, or manual strangulation. Or both.
The students on campus held prayer vigils and Take Back the Night rallies. Park attended them all. Then they had September redux: the questions from the police, the stares from the coeds, the suppositions from his professors. This time he handled things more soberly. No more drugs, no alcohol. He wanted to be clearheaded, clear-eyed, in case someone thought to try and hang Melanie’s murder on him.
Melanie, no longer missing. Murdered.
The funeral was awful. He went, buttressed by his loyal fraternity brothers, but it didn’t feel right, listening to her parents crying in the front pew, the oversized portrait of Melanie in her high school graduation gown, wispy bangs and a secret smile, and NSYNC on the church speakers singing “Bye Bye Bye”—Melanie’s favorite song, but really, it seemed too on the nose for a funeral—and at the wake after, her sister got drunk and screamed at him to leave, which he thought was totally unfair, since he wasn’t a suspect and no one thought he’d actually killed her. He was a good target for fury, though, and he understood the need to blame someone when there is no one to blame.
Melanie’s murder stayed unsolved through his graduation, through his tenure in graduate school. It was still unsolved when he got his first teaching gig. Still unsolved when he hooked up with Olivia again.
