Greg Iles - Turning Angel

“You all right?” I ask, crossing the sidewalk.

She nods and wipes her cheeks. “I don’t know why I’m crying so much. Kate and I weren’t really close. It just seems like such a waste.”

Mia Burke is the physical opposite of Kate Townsend. Dark-haired and olive-skinned, she stands about five-feet-two, with the muscular frame of a born sprinter. She has large dark eyes, an upturned nose, and full lips that have probably sent a hundred adolescent boys into paroxysms of fantasy. She’s wearing jeans and aLIFEHOUSE T-shirt, and she’s holding a book in her hand: The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles. Mia has surprisingly eclectic taste, and this has probably confused the same boys who dream about her other attributes.

“You’re right,” I murmur, thinking of Drew with very little charity. “It is a waste.”

“Did she commit suicide, Penn?”

It occurs to me that Mia’s use of my first name might seem inappropriate to some people. It’s always seemed a natural informality between us, but in light of what I now know about Drew and Kate, nothing seems innocent. “I don’t know. Was Kate the type to kill herself?”

Mia hugs herself against the chill and takes some time with the question. “No. She always kept to herself a lot, especially this year. But I don’t think she was depressed. Her boyfriend was giving her a lot of trouble, though.”

“Kate had a boyfriend?”

“Well, an ex, really. Steve Sayers.”

Steve Sayers, predictably, was the quarterback of the football team.

“I don’t really know what the deal was. They dated for almost two years, then at the end of last summer Kate seemed to forget Steve existed.”

Thanks to Drew Elliott, M.D…

“The weird thing is, she didn’t break up with Steve. She’d still go out with him, even when she obviously didn’t care about him anymore. But she stopped having sex with him, I know that. And he was going crazy from it.”

Mia’s frankness about sex doesn’t come out of the blue. We’ve had many frank conversations about what goes on beneath the surface at St. Stephen’s. If it weren’t for Mia’s candor, I would have as little idea of the reality of a modern high school as the rest of the parents, and would be of as little use on the school board.

“Did Kate tell you she stopped having sex with him?” I ask.

“No. But Steve told a couple of his friends, and it got around. He thought she might be doing stuff with someone else. Someone from another school, maybe.”

“What did you think?”

Mia bites her bottom lip. “Like I said, Kate was very private. She had this charming persona she could turn on, and most people bought into it. But that was just the mask she used to get through life. Deep down, she was somebody else.”

“Who was she?”

“I’m not sure. All I know is that she was way too sophisticated for Steve. Maybe for any guy our age.”

I look hard into Mia’s eyes, but I see no hidden meaning there. “What made her so sophisticated?”

“Her time in England. After her parents got divorced, she went over to London and lived with her dad for a while. She went to an exclusive school over there for three years during junior high. In the end it didn’t work out for her to stay, but when she got back here, she was way ahead of the rest of us. She was pretty intimidating with that English accent.”

“I can’t imagine you being intimidated.”

“Oh, I was. But last year I started catching up with her. And this year I passed her in every subject. I feel guilty saying it now, but I felt pretty good about that.”

Some of Drew’s words are coming back to me. “You play tennis, don’t you?”

“I’m on the team. I’m not as good as Kate. She was a machine. She won state in singles last year, and she was on her way to doing it again this year.”

“Didn’t Kate play competitive tennis with Ellen Elliott?”

“Hell, yes. They won the state open in city league tennis.”

“What do you think about Ellen?”

Mia’s eyes flicker with interest. “Are you asking for the official line, or what I really think?”

“What you really think.”

“She’s a cast-iron bitch.”

“Really?”

“Definitely. Very cold, very manipulative. How she treats you depends totally on who your parents are.”

“How did she treat Kate?”

“Are you kidding? Like her personal protégée. Ellen was number one in Georgia when she played in high school. I think she’s reliving her youth through Kate.”

“How did Kate treat Ellen?”

Mia shrugs. “Okay, I guess. She was nice to her, but…”

“What?”

“I don’t think Kate respected her. I heard her say things behind Ellen’s back. But then everybody does that.”

“What do you mean?”

“The women Ellen trains with for her marathons talk all kinds of shit about her when she’s not around. They say she’ll stab you in the back without thinking twice.”

“So why do they hang around with her?”

“Fear. Envy. Ellen Elliott is hot, rich, and married to Dr. Perfect. She’s the social arbiter of this place, in the under-forty crowd anyway. She has the life all the rest of them want.”

“That’s what they think.”

Mia looks expectantly at me, but I don’t elaborate.

“I think I know what you mean,” she says. “I don’t know what Dr. Elliott is doing married to her. No one does. He’s so nice-not to mention hot-and she’s so…I don’t know. Maybe she fooled him, too.”

“Maybe.” Mia is too bright for me to question like this for long. “You probably need to get going, huh?”

She nods without enthusiasm. “I guess. I feel sort of weird, you know?”

“Because of Kate?”

“Yeah. But not the way you’d think. Her dying changes a lot of things for me. I’ll be making the valedictory speech now, for one thing. And I wanted to do that. I have some things I want to say to our class, and to the parents. I didn’t want to take any spotlight off of Kate by saying them in my salutatorian speech. Now I can say them, I guess. But I didn’t want it like this.”

“Well, you certainly earned it. Kate only beat you out by…what?”

“A sixteenth of a point on the cumulative.” Mia smiles wryly. “She wasn’t as smart as people think. She acted like she never studied, but she did. Big-time. I don’t know why I’m telling you this. I guess I have some anger toward her. I’m not even sure why.”

“Try to tell me.”

Mia sighs and looks at the sidewalk. “Kate knew how to make you feel like shit when she wanted to. She would tear out your heart with a few words, then act like it was an innocent comment. She got Star Student because she outscored me by one point on the ACT, and she always made sure people knew that. But I outscored her by forty points on the SAT. You think she ever said one word about that?”

“What did you make?”

“Fifteen-forty.”

“Wow. So you two were basically rivals, not friends.”

Mia nods thoughtfully. “I’m more competitive than I should be, but for Kate, winning was an obsession. We were always the top contenders for everything. She was homecoming queen, I’m head cheerleader.” A strange look crosses Mia’s face. “I guess some people might say I had a motive for killing her, like that cheerleader-mom thing in Texas.”

“I don’t think you have to worry about that. I’ve never heard anyone say a bad word about you.”

An ironic laugh escapes her lips. “Oh, plenty gets said about me. But that’s another story. And don’t get me wrong about Kate. She had a tough family life. Her dad was a real asshole. When she showed her vulnerable side, it was hard not to feel for her. Especially for me. But I had to deal with the same shit, and I don’t use my intelligence to hurt people.”