Ecstasy Read online

  ALSO BY Beth Saulnier

  Reliable Sources

  Distemper

  The Fourth Wall

  Bad Seed

  COPYRIGHT

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2003 by Beth Saulnier

  All rights reserved.

  Originally published in hardcover by Mysterious Press

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  The Grand Central Publishing name and logo are registered trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  First eBook Edition: September 2009

  ISBN: 978-0-446-56601-8

  Dedicated to the memory

  of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl,

  a fellow alumnus of the North Adams Transcript

  who died in the line of duty

  Contents

  ALSO BY Beth Saulnier

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  With many thanks to: Sara Ann Freed, my beloved editor

  Jimmy Vines, agent extraordinaire

  Miss C. A. Carlson, weaver of diabolical plots

  Seth Adelson and Jackie Cerretani for “Melting Rock” insights

  Susan Bloom for coming up with the title

  Mark Anbinder, iMac wrangler and man-about-town

  &

  special thanks, as always, to David Bloom for being himself

  PROLOGUE

  I still wonder what it was like for him in those last minutes—lying there alone, the nylon walls close against him in the dark, the only light coming from the kaleidoscope in his own head. I wonder if he was scared; did he know what was happening to him was the end, or was he just too out of it to realize? And if he did know, did he kick himself for it?

  His death, after all, can in great measure be chalked up to his own stupidity. You can argue all you want about the fundamental nature of justice, you can point out that the punishment didn’t really fit the crime, but the bottom line is that although other people were obviously responsible for his death, he damn well helped; somehow, this clueless seventeen-year-old boy managed to be both victim and accomplice.

  I barely knew him, so it’s probably nuts even to speculate, but at the moment I can’t seem to stop. Maybe that’s because lately I’ve come across so many kids just like him, or because I’ve spent so many hours trying to walk in his patched-up Birkenstocks. Either way, right now his last hour or so on earth is incredibly vivid in my imagination. And I’ll tell you the truth: I really, really wish it weren’t.

  But it is. And I picture it like this:

  He crawls into the tent, strips down to the childish white underpants they’ll find him in. He’s full, probably uncomfortably so; the coroner will find a gigantic amount of food in his stomach—falafel and veggie chili and peanut butter cups he put away a couple of hours before, probably in an attack of the munchies from all the grass he smoked that afternoon.

  A different sort of guy might want company, but later his friends will say that wasn’t his style. He likes to be by himself, savor the moment—open his mind to new realities, I suppose he’d say. He prefers to lie by himself in the dark and wait for the universe to open up and swallow him, to take him on some dopey journey of the imagination; the next morning (or more likely afternoon) he’ll tell his friends all about it over a whole wheat bagel with extra honey.

  So he pins a sign to the tent that says—no kidding—TRIPPING, DO NOT DISTURB. He zips up the flap and lies on top of his sleeping bag mostly naked, since the late-August heat is all but unbearable, even if you’re in your right mind. He pulls his long corkscrew curls out of their usual ponytail and wraps the elastic around his flashlight. He lights the candle on the milk crate beside him, but only long enough to let the scent of sage waft over to him. He blows it out after a minute or so, not only because he craves the dark but because he knows you’re never supposed to have an open flame inside a tent; later, when his friends are called upon to eulogize, they’ll say he was a kick-ass camper.

  He’s happy, at least that’s the way I imagine it. He’s utterly in his element, a skinny little fish gliding in his favorite pond. Within a few hundred yards are most of the people on the planet who really matter to him—guys he’s been skateboarding with since he was ten, girls he’s danced with and gotten high with and screwed, and no hard feelings afterward.

  The night feels alive around him; it’s loud with laughter and bits of conversations, all of them important—some pondering the next band on the playlist, others the fundamental meaning of the universe. There’s music everywhere, coming from so many sources and directions it’s impossible to separate them, innumerable voices and bass lines and drum beats going thump-thump-thump inside his chest.

  He closes his eyes, because even before the candle goes out there’s no need for vision. His other senses are on overload, and he likes it. If he’s feeling this much even before the drug really kicks in, he knows he’s in for one hell of a ride.

  This is the moment he likes best, when it’s just starting and he’s not quite sure which world he’s in. At first, the sensations are slow, sneaky, subtle—fictions masquerading as fact. The beginning of a trip is like crossing a river, he’s always said; you can try to stay on the rocks of reality, but the closer you get to the other side, the wetter you’re going to get.

  I have no idea how long he balances in the netherworld between here and elsewhere; for his sake, I hope it’s a while. But eventually, he segues into something infinitely wilder—and since my personal experience with mind-expanding drugs is essentially nil (my head being kooky enough without the addition of psychotropics), I have a hard time imagining it. When I ponder the usual stereotypes—shooting stars and melting walls and talking rhinos and such—it just seems pathetic, and I know he didn’t see it that way. To him it was something profound, something worth stretching yourself, maybe even scaring yourself, just for the sake of the experience.

  But was it something worth dying for? That much I seriously doubt. But there’s no arguing with the fact that that’s precisely what happened.

  At some point, quite when I don’t know, things start to go wrong. His mouth goes dry. He gets a raging headache. Maybe his stomach starts to hurt; then it starts to hurt bad. He can barely breathe. Eventually, he can’t breathe at all.

  I wonder if he thinks it’s all just part of the experience—that he’s taking some dark spirit journey to the edge of his own demise. (And, okay, I know that sounds like your typical druggie-hippie crap; it just goes to show you how much time I’ve been spending with these people.) How nasty a
surprise must it have been to realize that it wasn’t a fantasy version of death, but the real thing?

  But there’s another possibility—one that’s even more unpleasant, if such a thing is possible. From what I’ve been told, physical well-being is essential to the enjoyment of your average acid trip. The symptoms he must have experienced, then, could very well have sent him spiraling into the same mental purgatory that keeps cowards like me limited to gin, Marlboro Lights, and the (very) occasional joint.

  This seventeen-year-old boy, in other words, may not have died in just physical agony; he may have died in mental agony as well. Serious mental agony. Through the magic of chemistry, his was an anguish not necessarily bounded by the normal limits of the human mind. It’s a horrible thing to contemplate, to tell you the truth. There’s plenty of pain in the conscious world, after all; how much must there be when the pit is well and truly bottomless?

  When they finally found him, he was in the fetal position—curled up tight, knees against his chest, stringy arms wrapped around each other. The doctors say this doesn’t necessarily mean anything about his last moments, but frankly, I don’t buy it. As far as I’m concerned, it means he didn’t go peacefully.

  Because, after all, neither did any of the others.

  CHAPTER1

  August in a college town is its own special brand of torture. The living is easy, the weather is still gorgeous, and the students have been gone so long you have a hard time remembering what the place is really like nine months out of the year. You have these vaguely distasteful images of crowded restaurants and SUV-driving frat boys and gaggles of tummy-shirted coeds, but none of it seems real. You soak up the delicious moments—when you get a parking place right smack in front of the multiplex, say, or you go out for a drink without having some postadolescent moron comment on your cleavage—and you fantasize that maybe, just maybe, they’re never coming back. Maybe the leaves will stay on the trees forever, and the streets will always be open and empty, and the new semester will never come.

  But deep down, you know it will. Damn it all, it will—and it always does.

  It used to be that October made me feel wistful, what with impending winter and the smell of decay in the air and the knowledge that you weren’t going to get to wear shorts again for a very long time. But since I moved to Gabriel five or so years ago, my wistfulness threshold has been pushed back a good two months. Maybe it’s just because people around here are too smart to ever really be happy, but we townies tend to start feeling blue three weeks before Labor Day, and we don’t really shake it until graduation.

  I mention all this by way of explaining that although late summer/ early fall in this ZIP code can be a tough pill to swallow, by all that’s holy, last August should’ve been comparatively jolly. I was, after all, celebrating the fact that I had recently avoided being killed on three separate occasions within a matter of weeks—rather a nifty accomplishment, if you ask me. The newspaper where I work was, for the first time in recent memory, fully staffed. And—here’s the cherry on the sundae—my boyfriend, who I’d been fearing was about to move away and break my little heart, showed every sign of staying put. Even the imminent return of fifteen thousand undergraduates couldn’t put the kibosh on my good mood.

  If I tried to put my finger on when everything went to hell, well…it wouldn’t be too hard. That would be when I walked into the newsroom around eleven on a Wednesday morning in mid-August. I’d walked out of there precisely ten hours earlier, after covering a particularly pissy county board meeting that went until nearly midnight, then scrambling to slap together three (mercifully short) stories by my one A.M. deadline. Then I’d gone home to hold the crying towel for my roommate, Melissa, whose boyfriend had recently—you guessed it—moved away and broken her little heart.

  So it was without a whole lot of sleep that I went back to work, toting a bagel with diet olive cream cheese and blissfully unaware of how much my life was about to suck. I poured some coffee into my big Gabriel Police Department mug, one of several recent gifts my aforementioned boyfriend had proffered to celebrate the fact of me not being dead. Then I sat down at my desk and tried to figure out which of the county board stories was going to need a follow-up for the next day’s paper.

  I’m not sure how long it took me to figure out something weird was up. I do recall that my first clue was that I was the only reporter on the cityside desk; come to think of it, I was the only reporter in the entire newsroom. It was way too early for the sports guys, but there should’ve at least been someone else around somewhere; as it was, though, the owner of every single Gabriel Monitor byline was nowhere to be found.

  To round them up: There’s Jake Madison (aka “Mad”), the science writer and my best buddy; Cal Ochoa, the cops reporter and one moody hombre; Lillian, the elderly-but-steely schools reporter; Marshall, the Dixie-born business writer; and—both last and least—Brad, an ambitious, scandal-mongering young fellow who’s on the towns beat, and whom I avoid whenever possible.

  Where was everybody? In a word: hiding. And if I’d known better, I damn well would’ve been hiding too.

  But there I was, sitting at my desk with the kind of clueless-but-doomed expression you see on a cow peeking out of the airholes in a livestock truck. At some point, my catlike instincts must’ve registered the fact that someone was breathing down my neck; when I looked up, there were three of them.

  Three editors. As any reporter can tell you, there was no way this was going to end well.

  “Alex,” one of them said, and way too brightly. “You’re here.”

  This from the shorter and rounder of the two women. Her name is Sondra, and she’s the editor of (among other things) Pastimes, the paper’s deeply mediocre arts-and-leisure magazine. Except for the weekly processing of my movie review column, I don’t have a lot to do with her; she mostly lives in her own little universe, eternally beset by underpaid freelancers.

  She was already making me nervous.

  Standing next to her were both of my bosses—Bill, the city editor, and his own overlord, the managing editor. Marilyn is not short, and she’s in no way round; in fact, she has a black belt in tae kwon do.

  “Um…,”I said, “where is everybody?”

  “My office,” she said.

  “They’re all in your—”

  “Come into my office,” she said, and turned her well-exercised tail on me.

  I followed, with Bill and Sondra bringing up the rear. In retrospect, they were probably trying to make sure I didn’t make a run for it.

  “Um…,”I said when we’d sat down, “so where is everybody?”

  “Alex,” Sondra said, sounding even more scary-friendly than before, “what are you doing for the next few days?”

  “Huh?” I looked to Bill, who was taking a passionate interest in the pointy end of his necktie. “You mean, what am I covering?” Sondra nodded and leaned in closer, so I had a clear view right down her blouse to her tattletale-gray minimizer bra. “Today? Maybe a couple follows from last night’s board meeting. Tomorrow… I think another stupid Deep Lake Cooling thing. Why?”

  “And do you have any plans for this weekend?”

  Uh-oh. Say something clever. Say… you have to donate a kidney to homeless mental patients.

  That’s what one side of my brain told the other. But I wasn’t quick enough on the uptake, so all I said was, “Um…No.”

  Sondra squeezed my upper arm, harder than I would’ve thought she could. “That’s great.”

  “Huh?”

  “Alex,” she positively cooed at me, “I was hoping you could do me this teeny-tiny favor….”

  Now, at this point my hackles well and truly hit the ceiling. Because when an editor asks you for a teeny-tiny favor, it generally means you’re about to get screwed without so much as a box of chocolates.

  “Listen,” I said, “I’m actually pretty busy at the moment, so—”

  “You’re covering Melting Rock,” Marilyn said, sounding nowhere
near as nice as Sondra, but considerably more genuine. “Starts today. So—”

  “What?”

  “Haven’t you heard of it?” Sondra chirped at me. “You know, the official name is the Melting Rock Music Festival, but lots of people just call it—”

  “Hell yes, I’ve heard of it. But what do you mean I’m—”

  “Freelancer flaked out,” Marilyn said into her mug of terrifyingly black coffee. “Chester says we gotta deliver the goods. So go.”

  Chester is our publisher—and there are guys in the pressroom with better news judgment. Things were not looking up.

  “Go where? You mean go now? And where is everybody, anyway?”

  I must’ve sounded either very desperate or very pathetic, because Bill finally took pity on me. “Here’s the deal,” he said. “You know Sim Marchesi?”

  “Er…I dunno.”

  “He covers pop music for me,” Sondra offered. “I mean he covered it. Right now I wouldn’t hire that miserable—”

  “Listen,” Bill said, “Marchesi pitched us this story, and when Chester got wind of the thing, he ate it up—promoted it up the wazoo. Then Marchesi bailed.”

  “Bailed how?”

  “He was gonna cover the days and nights of Melting Rock, camp out there with the rest of the freaks and send us dispatches from the front. It was on the budget at the cityside meeting yesterday. Remember?”

  “Vaguely.”

  “So the thing starts today. He was supposed to get there last night to cover the setup—was gonna file right before deadline for today’s paper.”

  “And he blew it off?”

  “Blew it off?” Marilyn growled with a whack of mug onto desktop. “Little prick flew the coop.”

  “You mean he hasn’t filed yet? But maybe he just—”

  Sondra waved me off. “He never even came by to pick up the laptop or the cell phone we were lending him. I tried his apartment and the number’s disconnected. Then I tracked down the fellow in charge of the Melting Rock campground and… it looks like he never showed up yesterday.”