Chapter 2

 

 

 

That was the summer I was crazy for movies and spy stuff. I loved anything to do with detectives or secret agents—my favorite television show was The Man From U.N.C.L.E., and I wanted to be the female James Bond. I’d spend my afternoons alone in the house trawling all four of our local stations for mystery movies, although I’d settle for monster movies or science fiction if the spies were all out in the cold.

Three days after we all thought the moon had blown up, CJ came running into the house, excited again about something.  It was three in the afternoon, and Journey to the Center of the Earth with James Mason and Arlene Dahl was starting on Channel Nine’s Million Dollar Movie. I was just settling in with a bag of Fritos and a glass of chocolate milk when the back door banged open, and CJ hurtled in like something was nipping at his heels.

I tried to ignore him, intent on our heroes’ discussion about an Icelandic volcano, but when he picked up the phone and said, “I need the police,” Professor Lindenbrook suddenly became less interesting.

“I want to report a dead body,” he said. I got up and turned down the volume.

I realized that CJ was as white as a proverbial sheet, and his hands were shaking; this was no joke.

“There’s a dead girl in the wash behind my house,” he said.

That was all I needed to hear—a dead body, right behind my house? This was like living inside a detective show! I had to see for myself. I set down the Fritos and headed out to the backyard. In the far fence was a gate that opened onto the dirt road beside the wash. I knew that CJ sometimes walked home that way from his girlfriend Vicki’s, because he could sneak out the back if her parents came home unexpectedly.

CJ looked up from the phone, saw me in the backyard, and deduced my intention. “Wait a second,” he said into the phone, then put his hand over the mouthpiece and yelled at me, “Joey, DON’T!”

“But I wanna s—”

“Trust me, you do not want to see this.”

“Yes, I do.”

I walked away, knowing he wasn’t about to hang up on the police to come after me.

I opened the gate and walked out onto the dirt road. It was a narrow, gray-brown strip bordered by the wooden fences of houses on one side and a chain-link fence keeping intruders (meaning kids) out of the wash on the other. The wash was pretty uninteresting most of the time—at least 350 days a year it was a bone-dry concrete ravine with nothing in it.

But today, I looked down and saw something a short distance ahead. I walked forward, my heart thumping in excitement and nervousness. Finally I reached the point where I stood directly opposite it and looked down from maybe thirty feet away at:

It was a dead girl, but not like any dead girl I’d ever seen in a movie or television show. I thought of the murdered woman from Goldfinger—the one Bond finds on the bed painted gold—and how elegant she’d looked in death.

The dead girl in the wash wasn’t elegant, though. She was sprawled in a strange position, one leg bent awkwardly under her, one arm akimbo, hair partially obscuring her face. Her clothes—a simple, button-down blouse and a skirt—had been torn away from her, as had her undergarments. One breast was exposed, and her panties were down around her knees. Somehow I knew that hadn’t happened in a fall.

And there was blood—a lot of it, mostly around and beneath her. She was lying in a pool of her own blood, although it took me a few seconds to realize that was what I was seeing—it looked darker than I thought it would. It almost looked more black than red, especially under the odd light cast by the smog.

I tried to imagine how she’d gotten down there and could only figure that someone had thrown her body over the fence and into the wash to dispose of it.

After they’d raped her and murdered her.

No, this certainly wasn’t like a movie. My stomach was churning, my heart still pounding…yet I couldn’t stop staring.

I didn’t look away until I heard CJ shouting at me. “Joey!” He came running down the dirt road until he reached me. “The police are on the way. You probably shouldn’t be here when they come.”

“How could somebody do that? They killed her and then…threw her away…”

CJ put a hand on my shoulder and tried to steer me back to our gate. “You shouldn’t have seen this. Let’s get you home.”

I allowed him to direct me, but my eyes wouldn’t turn away from the dead girl. “Do you know her?”

CJ shook his head. “I can’t really tell with her face covered by her hair.”

“Me either.”

As we reached the house, we heard the first approaching siren. “Stay here, Joey, okay? Promise me you’ll stay here.”

“I promise.”

I felt cold in the middle of the afternoon heat, and I had no desire for any more dramatic events. The dead girl was the worst thing I’d ever seen.

That would change soon enough.