The Suicide House Page 3

  So, Theo Compton has my mind spinning. With so much evidence stacked against Charles Gorman, I’m curious to know if Theo, or any other student, possesses information that might refute this evidence. Of course, if listeners have any leads I encourage you to head to the message board on the website to share them with me, and the rest of the podcast community. For now let’s focus on Gorman and get back to where we left off at the end of last week’s episode. I told you that I was granted exclusive access to Westmont Prep’s campus and, in particular, to Charles Gorman’s home. Now we’ll pick up with my tour, which was conducted by the dean of students, Dr. Gabriella Hanover. Here is a recording of the interview, with my comments added in voice-over throughout.

  The Westmont Prep campus is both striking and ominous. The buildings are gothic structures built from white sandstone and covered by ivy that crawls to the eaves. It’s noon on a summer Saturday, and the place is quiet. Only a few students stroll the grounds as Dr. Hanover steers the golf cart over the winding campus paths.

  “The house where the murders took place . . . is it still off-limits?”

  I can immediately tell Dr. Hanover does not like the question. She shoots me a sideways glance that connects with a split second of eye contact. It’s as if our fingers touched and sparked with static electricity. The look is just enough to tell me not to press my luck. She and the school’s attorneys explained during the negotiations that preceded this guided tour that the portion of campus where the murders occurred was not only off-limits to me and the podcast but was inaccessible to the student body as well. That area had been sectioned off by a tall brick wall. I can see the partition in the distance as Dr. Hanover drives me through campus. To curious minds like my own, the red brick does not warn me to stay away; it does just the opposite. It begs me to discover what’s beyond it. It shouts to me that it’s hiding something sinister. On the other side of that wall are the woods, and in those woods is a forgotten path that leads to the infamous boarding house.

  For years prior to the killings, the school’s plan had been to demolish the house and clear a portion of the forest to make room for a football field, track course, baseball diamond, and soccer field. In just the past few months, the school has secured the funding. Renovation is slated to begin as soon as the Peppermill Police determine that there is no more evidence left to gather from the crime scene.

  Despite the case being so quickly solved, an executive order from the governor has held up the demolition of the house. Last year he was pressured by the district attorney’s office, and they were pressured by the Peppermill Police Department, to delay the destruction of the boarding house. Someone inside the department is still convinced that there are unanswered questions about that night hiding in the walls of that house. And so, demolition has been held off. But the powers that be at Westmont Prep—the board of trustees and those with money tied to the school’s success—long for the day the house will meet a wrecking ball. It’s a nasty scar on the school’s history, and the best way for it to fade is for the house to come down. For now, though, it stands. And I plan to find my way to it.

  Today, however, I decide to leave my question unanswered rather than press Dr. Hanover on the issue and risk ending the tour. I knew I wouldn’t be seeing the abandoned boarding house today, but Gorman’s duplex had been promised. And now we are upon it. We approach the faculty housing—a long stretch of connected homes called Teacher’s Row. It was here, in number fourteen, that Gorman lived during his eight-year tenure at Westmont Prep. An exemplary teacher of chemistry, he had only the highest marks of accomplishment and praise on his performance reviews. Reviews that, since the night of June twenty-first, have come under scrutiny.

  We pull up to number fourteen. It’s a small, efficient duplex made from burgundy brick and overflowing mortar. Narrow walkways cut between adjacent buildings and are lined by dogwoods and hydrangeas. Dual entrances are present out front, one for number fourteen, the other for fifteen. These are pleasant homes, comfortable faculty housing. It’s hard to believe such a monster lived here.

  The keys rattle as the dean unlocks the front door to number fourteen. We enter to an empty house but for bits of furniture that have sat unused for the past year. Dr. Hanover leads me through the front room, the kitchen, and a single bedroom. As we pass the small den, Dr. Hanover’s phone rings. She excuses herself, stepping outside to take the call. Suddenly I’m alone in Charles Gorman’s home. It’s unnervingly quiet. There is something ominous about being here by myself, and I realize that there is a likely reason this unit has not been reassigned, and likely never will be. It has sat empty for more than a year because Gorman lived a secret life inside the walls of this home, and any faculty member who dared to take this place as their own would be walking in a killer’s footsteps and dealing with the spirits of the students he killed. Spirits that surely roam this empty house looking for closure and answers.

  I feel them now. I’m looking for the same things they are. But I shake the chill from my neck. I know I don’t have much time. I also know better than to do what I’m contemplating, but my instincts as an investigative reporter are untamed. I walk quickly into the small office. The room is empty. Depression marks on the carpeting show me where a desk once stood in the middle of the room. It is likely the place where Gorman sat when he wrote his manifesto. All that remains in the room now is an empty bookshelf, a chair crooked from the loss of a wheel, and a portrait of the periodic table hanging on the wall. I know what’s behind it.

  I take a quick glance to make sure Dr. Hanover is still outside. Then I remove the periodic table. Behind it is a safe sunk into the plaster. It was here that detectives discovered Gorman’s manifesto.

  I turned the handle on the safe and pull open the door.

  “Close that right now.”

  Dr. Hanover’s voice is neither loud nor panicked. It’s just direct and firm. I turn from the safe. She’s standing in the doorway, and I know I’ve been made.

  Eerie music chimed from her phone and pulled Ryder back to the present, and away from Charles Gorman’s house, where Mack Carter had brought her with his alluring voice and vivid descriptions. The music quieted, and she heard Mack Carter’s voice again.

  On the next episode of The Suicide House, more on my discovery inside Charles Gorman’s duplex. You won’t want to miss it. Until then . . . I’m Mack Carter.

  CHAPTER 3

  AN ADVERTISEMENT BLARED FROM HER PHONE, AND RYDER TAPPED the screen in frustration to quiet it. She nearly threw the phone across the room. Mack Carter hadn’t discovered a goddamn thing in that safe, and Ryder didn’t need to wait for the next episode to hear him say it. It was a cheap bait and switch, an embarrassing self-promotion of his abilities as an investigative journalist. Anyone who knew anything at all about the Westmont Prep Killings knew that detectives had discovered Gorman’s manifesto in the wall safe. There was nothing groundbreaking about Mack Carter’s discovery, yet Ryder was sure that uninformed podcast listeners would be drooling with the idea that Mack had been caught red-handed just as he was about to break the case wide open with the contents of Gorman’s safe. She knew The Suicide House website would be overrun with traffic as podcast listeners breathlessly scrolled through the pages to see the photos of the Westmont Prep campus and Charles Gorman’s duplex and to view the cell phone pictures Mack Carter had snapped of the wall safe.

  Ryder’s blog and YouTube channel had much of this information just after the killings. She had obtained the images from newspaper clippings and public records of campus and Teacher’s Row. She had even managed to find a picture of the front of Gorman’s home roped off by yellow crime scene tape the day after the killings, which had been posted to a student’s social media account before being taken down. But Mack Carter’s stunt, whispering as he pulled the wall hanging from its hook and hyperventilating as he described the safe behind it, was sure to bring huge numbers to the podcast. She was angry with herself for falling for it, for being as interested as
everyone else. She cursed as she scrolled through Mack’s website now, having taken the bait like so many others. The message board was already inundated with threads discussing Mack’s findings—theories about Theo Compton’s cryptic suggestion that Charles Gorman was innocent and about what Mack might have found inside Gorman’s safe.

  “It’s friggin’ empty, you know-nothings!” Ryder shouted at her computer. “Why would evidence still be present at a crime scene a year after the fact?”

  After thirty minutes of reading the threads, Ryder could take no more. She was about to click over to her own blog to post some sort of update telling her followers that she was still the fearless, real crusader looking for the truth behind the Westmont Prep Killings and that her fans should not abandon her for such a transparent fraud of a podcast. But before she clicked off Mack Carter’s site, she saw a video playing on a loop in the comments section. She recognized the footage immediately because she had shot it. It was from when she had snuck through the woods behind Westmont Prep a couple of weeks after the killings and captured shaky video of the boarding house. It had been difficult footage to obtain, since back then the area was still roped off with crime scene tape and the police were interested in keeping prying eyes away from the place. Under the video was a short cryptic comment:

  MC, 13:3:5 Tonight. I’ll tell you the truth. Then, whatever happens, happens. I’m ready for the consequences.

  Ryder saw that the comment, which was meant for Mack Carter, had been posted at 10:55 P.M. Thirty minutes ago.

  She grabbed her car keys and dialed her phone as she ran out of the house.

  CHAPTER 4

  HE SLOWED HIS CAR AS HE PASSED MILE MARKER THIRTEEN AND THEN hit the reset button to bring his odometer to triple zero. He continued at a reduced speed as he watched the odometer click up from nothing. All the survivors knew the numbers: 13:3:5. It was how this whole thing had started. How different things would be had they never heard those numbers, had they never been lured to this place by the promise of adventure and acceptance. But the past could not be changed. He could control only the present in hopes of altering the future.

  When the number three spun up on the odometer, indicating that he’d driven a third of a mile beyond mile marker thirteen, he pulled over, parked his car on the gravel shoulder, and turned off the headlights. The dark night swallowed the vehicle. He was invisible and wished he could stay that way. He wished he could don a cloak and hide from the world. From his thoughts. From his memories. From his sins and from his guilt. But he knew it wasn’t that easy. If it were as simple as disappearing, he’d have long ago left this place and all its ghosts behind. How nice it would be to start over somewhere else, maybe at a different school, where he could return to being his old self and leave the past behind. But the demons had hold of him, and running would not cause them to release their grip. Had there been enough miles on this earth to outrun that night, the others would have run and run and run. Instead, they came here.

  He opened his car door and stepped out from the driver’s seat. Walking into the middle of the two-lane road, he looked up into the night sky. Heavy cloud cover had delivered a gray and dismal day, and the coming storm tainted the air with the pungent odor of humidity. The clouds erased the stars, reminding him that he was truly alone in this endeavor. Not even the heavens could look down on him tonight.

  The quiet of night filled his ears, but he wished for the roar of an eighteen-wheeler, its tires screaming over the pavement as it approached. How much easier would it be to simply stare into the headlights? He could close his eyes and it would all be over. Not for the first time he wondered if the consequences that waited in the afterlife were less than those here on Earth.

  Finally, he walked from the road and started his journey. Leaving the door wide open, he walked past the front of his car and into the woods. Thirteen, three, five. Mile thirteen, a third of a mile farther, and a half-mile hike through the woods. The path was easy to spot, but the trail through the woods was overgrown since his last trek on it. That had been the previous summer, on the night of the slaughter, and so much had happened since then that he barely recognized his life. He covered the half-mile stretch in ten minutes and came to the edge of the wooded path where a chain—rusted and corroded—drooped between two posts. A moss-covered placard read PRIVATE PROPERTY and was a feeble last attempt to keep trespassers away.

  He walked past the sign, and then the infamous boarding house was in front of him. Before that terrible night had plagued their lives, he and his classmates had come here often. Every weekend. Their use of the abandoned building had kept it alive back then. But now, after a year of absolute vacancy, the house was dying. Not like the massacre that took place here, where mortality came quickly and unexpectedly. No, the house was experiencing a slower death. One day at a time. The bricks were crumbling, and the cedar around the doors and windows was warped. The eaves had rotted, and gutters poked like hangnails from the roofline. The place looked ghostly in the dark of night, with frayed yellow crime scene tape still secured to the gate and flapping in the night breeze. He hadn’t been back since that night. When he and the others had come to show the police what, exactly, had transpired. As much as they were willing to tell, anyway.

  He stepped into the clearing and walked toward the house. Its wrought iron gate was like a moat surrounding a castle. Rusted and decrepit, the hinges whined into the night when he pushed the gate open, the bottom of the tines clawing half circles into the mud. His mind flashed back to what this gate had looked like the night of the killings. He blinked his eyes, but the image stayed firm in his vision.

  His thoughts stuck on the images of that night—blood and gore. He thought of the secrets they had kept, the things they had hidden. His mind became dizzy with it all until the rumble of the freight train pulled him back to the present. He shook his head to gain his bearings, then hurried along the side of the house to where the path bent and led to the tracks. The decisions they all had made that night brought him to this spot—the same spot where Mr. Gorman had come—and it was here that the rest of his existence would start. It was here that he would face down his demons and finally be free.

  The train’s whistle filled the night as the locomotive approached. Together with the thundering of the train cars on the rails, he could hear nothing else. As he waited next to the tracks, he sunk his hands into his pockets and grasped the item that was there. Like a child sucking on a pacifier, the feel of it between his fingertips provided a calming sensation. It always had.

  As the train approached, with its headlamp like a beacon in the night, he didn’t attempt to shield his ears from the thunderous roar. He wanted to hear the train. He wanted to feel it, and smell it, and taste it. He wanted the train to carry his demons away.

  He closed his eyes. The thunder was deafening.

  CHAPTER 5

  MACK CARTER SAT IN HIS RENTED HOUSE IN PEPPERMILL, INDIANA; popped open a beer; and read through his notes one last time. He took a sip to wet his throat, adjusted his noise-cancelling headphones, pulled the microphone close to his lips, and spoke.

  “The Westmont Prep Killings left the nation saddened and stunned that such a terrible tragedy could take place inside the protected sanctuary of a private boarding school. So far we’ve taken a look at some of the details of that fateful night. During the next episode, we will learn more about the two students who were killed, and we will take a deep dive into the dangerous game they were playing. To do this, we will take a closer look at what life was like inside this elite boarding school, and we will examine the teenagers that made up the student body. As always, I hope to stumble over something new along the way. Something no one else has discovered, a secret many of us believe is still hidden inside the walls of Westmont Prep. I’m Mack Carter, and this . . . is The Suicide House.”

  Mack tapped the laptop’s touch screen to stop recording. He played the promo back as he finished his beer, tweaking segments of it and working on the timing of the
delivery and the cadence of his voice. When he was satisfied, he e-mailed the intro to his producer. Already, his was the most downloaded podcast of the season. The Westmont Prep case was wildly popular within the true-crime community, and the story still had legs in the mainstream media. His network, where his popular nightly newsmagazine show ran five nights a week, was backing the production, and the huge sponsorship deals they had signed were a good predictor of success. The Suicide House was the next big thing.

  He spent an hour in the small recording studio his network had built in the rental house in Peppermill. On the computer in front of him were all the recordings he had created over the past week. His producer had cleaned them up and trimmed them down, and now they waited for Mack’s review and approval before his team would start organizing them into a coherent episode. Many of the sound bites were red-flagged, indicating additional voice-over work was needed from Mack.

  He popped another beer and worked steadily until eleven-thirty P.M., when his phone rang. He didn’t recognize the number, but he’d been getting many random calls since his arrival in Peppermill. Most of his interviews to this point had been conducted over his phone, which was fastened with a recording device that captured not only Mack’s voice but the caller’s as well. When played back on the podcast, the audio was surprisingly clear. He activated the recorder as he answered the call.

  “Mack Carter.”

  “It’s Ryder Hillier.”

  Mack closed his eyes. He almost stopped recording. Ryder Hillier was a true-crime journalist who ran a popular blog that hosted forums and chat rooms where other nuts shared conspiracy theories about all sorts of cases from around the country—from missing persons to homicides. The Westmont Prep Killings had been one of Ryder’s most popular cases. She had researched and written about it extensively over the past year, and she’d been reaching out to Mack since word broke about him hosting the podcast.