Ecstasy

by Beth Saulnier

Genres: Hard-Boiled; Female Sleuths; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Saulnier's previous hardcover, Bad Seed (Mysterious press, 2/02), is a Featured Alternate of The Mystery Guild. It will be published in mass market in 3/03. Hip and funny, Saulnier's style recalls Jen Banbury's Like a Hole in the Head (Little, Brown and Company, 1998), and a starred review in Kirkus calls heroine Alex Bernier "delightful, " comparing her to Stephanie Plum, the main character in the eponymous New York Times bestselling mystery series (St. Martin's Press). Saulnier's previous Alex Bernier mysteries include The Fourth Wall (Mysterious Press, 1/01), Distemper (Mysterious press, 2000), and Reliable Sources (Mysterious Press, 1999). Beth Saulnier is well-known in the Ithaca, New York, area as a movie reviewer for the Ithaca Journal and a film commentator on local television. Reliable Sources was the number one bestseller in Ithaca, New York, in 1999.

Release date: September 9, 2009

Publisher: Mysterious Press

Print pages: 360

Sample

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.

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.”


“So spike the story,” I said. It turned out to be a poor choice of words.

“What are you, deaf?” Marilyn said, segueing to something resembling a snarl. “We can’t spike it. Don’t you think I wish we could spike it? Chester’s really got his undershorts in a twist. He thinks it’s gonna
be the goddamn miracle cure for our circulation with the under-thirty crowd. He’s been flogging this thing all over cable
commercials and house ads and mother-humping rack cards. …Don’t you even read the paper?”


“Er…Yeah, sure I do. I guess I’ve been kind of busy.”

“Okay, here’s how it is,” she said. “Chester’s been promoting this package like it’s the Second Coming, you got it? Marchesi’s
AWOL, so somebody else’s gotta cover it. And that somebody would be you.”


“Why me?”

Another arm squeeze from Sondra. “Because,” she said, “you’re a really good feature writer. I mean, I know you mostly cover
news, but you always have lots of great color in your—”


“Give me a break.” I glanced out the window, which is not the kind you can open. Leaping to my death did not appear to be
an option. “Listen, like I said, I gotta do some follows on board stuff, so—”


Marilyn didn’t even blink. “Give it to Brad.”

“Brad? You gotta be—”


“Anything else?”

“Um…Yeah. There’s gonna be another town meeting for Deep Lake Cooling on Friday night, so I really have to—”

She turned to Bill. “Who’s weekend reporter?”

“Madison.”

“Perfect. He’s been covering the science end anyway. Hand it off to him.” She turned back to me. “That all?”

“Er…” I racked my noggin for something good enough to spring me, and came up short. “I guess so.”

“Super. So be a good girl and go put on your love beads and get the hell out there.”

“But why can’t we just—”

“Stop whining and hop to it,” she said.

I’m not kidding. That’s actually what she said. I decided to get the hell out of there before she told me to shake my tail
feather, or worse.


Bill, being no fool, beat a hasty retreat to his office. I followed Sondra back to the arts-and-leisure desk, which is at
the opposite end of the newsroom from Marilyn’s domain. The commute took ten seconds, during which Sondra said, “This is going
to be just great!” more times than I cared to count.


Sometimes I think that journalists, like double agents, should be issued a suicide pill.

You may be wondering just why I was being such a baby about this. To put it succinctly: The Melting Rock Music Festival is
my idea of hell. Until I was conscripted by the Gabriel Monitor’s editorial staff, I’d been there exactly once, and for a grand total of four hours.


It was the summer I’d moved to Gabriel five years ago, back when I didn’t know any better. Melting Rock sounded kind of charming,
and…well… this cute Canadian grad student in materials science asked me to go with him. So I put on a flowy skirt and a tank
top to get into the spirit of the thing, and proceeded to experience what was, at least at that time, just about the worst
day of my life.


First off, the guy’s primary purpose for attending the festival proved not so much to be rocking to the groovy beat but hunting
down his ex-girlfriend, whom he’d met there the year before. He didn’t actually inform me of this at the time, though I had
a sneaking suspicion something was up since I spent most of the afternoon looking at his back as he dragged me from stage
to stage.


You might think, therefore, that my negative feelings toward Melting Rock amount to sour grapes. But the fact remains that
the whole event gave me both a stomachache and a migraine. I’m not quite sure what my personal “scene” is, but I can tell you this much: Whatever it is, Melting Rock is
the opposite.


So what’s it like? To start with, it’s hot as Satan’s rec room, and sanitary facilities consist of overtaxed Porta-Johns and
rusty taps sticking out the side of a barn. Consequently, the whole place stinks—not only of urine and sweat but also frying
foodstuffs, incense, stale beer, and veritable gallons of patchouli. It’s also one of the most crowded events I’ve ever had
the misfortune to attend, so there’s no escaping the aforementioned aromas. You’re constantly elbow-to-elbow with young ladies
who’ve never heard the words brassiere or disposable razor and gentlemen who equate their shoulder tattoos with the goddamn Sistine Chapel.


The music is okay, I guess, though I can’t say I paid much attention to it. It all kind of blended in together to make this
incredibly tedious, drum-heavy soundtrack that was impossible to escape; within an hour I felt like the guy from “The Tell-Tale
Heart” who goes stark raving nuts because he can’t get the beat out of his head.


After about four hours of this, I decided I’d had enough. I told my quote-unquote date that I needed to go home, whereupon
he said that was fine with him and went back to searching for his erstwhile lady friend. Which might not have been so bad—if
Melting Rock weren’t held in a little village ten miles outside Gabriel.


I walked home. Honest to God. It was either that or hitchhike, which is something my mother would not approve of. I got back
to my apartment after midnight and jumped into the shower with my stinky clothes on.


These memories were, shall we say, plenty vivid as I sat at the leisure desk listening to Sondra prattle on about what a humdinger
of an assignment I’d just been shafted with. To summarize the various points of my misery:


And, worst of all:

I was pondering this litany of misfortune when my newsroom compadres finally started filing in. I was on the point of unloading
on one Jake Madison when I realized that—big surprise—he was already very much in the know.


“So you guys knew she was gonna sandbag me and you didn’t even give me a heads-up? Thanks a lot.”

“Hey, every man for himself.”

“Lovely.”

Mad took a seat on the edge of my desk and unwrapped his tuna sandwich. “Human nature.”

“Yeah, maybe yours.”


“Come on, you know,” he said, “it’s like that story about the two guys and the bear.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Two guys are walking in the woods and they see this bear, right? So one of them pulls his sneakers out of his backpack and
puts them on. And the other guy says to him, ‘What are you doing? You know you can’t outrun a bear.’ ”


“And?”

“And the first guy goes, ‘Hey, man, I don’t have to outrun the bear.’ ” He smiled his wolfish Mad smile and poised to take
a bite. “ ‘I just have to outrun you.’ ”


Jump forward half an hour. Since one of the two men in my life was offering me zip in the way of consolation, I decided to
go in search of the other. So there I was, standing in the vestibule of the Gabriel police station, talking to a certain red-haired
officer of the law. And, okay, I wasn’t just trolling for sympathy; I also needed to ask him to baby-sit my dog and to lend
me (ugh) a sleeping bag and a tent.


To give you some background:

Detective Brian Cody is thirty-three, as upright as they come, and the most unabashedly nice guy I’ve ever even considered
dating. He married his college sweetheart, then got summarily dumped when she decided she’d rather sleep her way up the chain
of command of the Boston P.D. Ours is one of those patented opposites-attract kind of romances; witness the fact that he carries
a gun to work and actually enjoys spending the night in the woods sans both TV and air conditioner.


“You know,” he was saying, “camping out can be really fun. I’ve been trying to get you to—”

“Come on, Cody. If I never wanted to sleep in a tent with you, what’re the odds I’m gonna like sleeping in a field full of dancing hippies?”


“Can’t argue with you there. I guess you just gotta try and make the best of it.”

“Couldn’t you just pat me on the head and say, ‘Poor baby’?”

“Poor baby.”

“What about the head-patting part?”

“Don’t want to mess with my macho image. They giving you hazardous-duty pay for this one?”

“Since I’m kind of working night and day, they’re giving me a four-day weekend for the next two weeks, which is nice. Just
about the only nice thing, if you ask me.”


“Poor baby.”

“Keep it up,” I said, “and you might get lucky on Sunday night, after all.”

As it turned out, Cody got lucky roughly fifteen minutes later, when he used his lunch break to squire me over to his apartment
to pick up his camping gear. It wasn’t until around two that I finally got into my trusty red next-gen Beetle and drove the
ten miles out to Jaspersburg, the one-horse town that has hosted Melting Rock lo these thirteen years. Even a festival basher
like myself knows that it’s the quintessential love-hate relationship: The town fathers love the bags of money that Melting
Rock drops on their doorstep and hate just about everything else about it.


I drove down the main drag in search of the so-called VIP parking lot, which proved to be hell and gone from the campground.
I, therefore, hauled my tent, sleeping bag, laptop, and backpack full of clothes half a mile through scraggly grass, already
starting to sweat and realizing that the only way I was going to get clean was to open my heart to the concept of the communal
outdoor shower.


I stomped around like that for a while before I realized I had no idea where I was going. Eventually, a wiry young man walked
by toting a load twice as big as mine, and I yelled for him to stop. He did, and when he turned around, I noticed he had a
ring in his nose—not a wee one through the side of one nostril but a honking doughnut of a thing right through the middle,
like a prize bull.


“Uh, excuse me,” I said. “Could you tell me how to get to the campground?”

“Sure, sister. Which one?”

“Er… The main one, I guess.”

“Main? You sure?”

I dug a piece of paper out of my pocket. “Yeah,” I said. “I’m supposed to go to the main campground.”

He whistled at me, and probably not because I was a vision of loveliness. “Hey, you’re lucky,” he said. “Slots in Main almost never open up.” He gave me an assessing look. “Hey…are you, you know, here by yourself?”


“Unfortunately.”

“Cool,” he said. “How about I crash with you?”

“Excuse me?”

“You know, can I crash in your tent? We’d have a blast. I got a ton of buds coming, and they’re bringing some really sweet—”


“Er…I’m afraid not. I’m kind of, um, here on business.”

“Yeah? Whatcha sellin’? You got E? ’Shrooms? What?” His eyes narrowed. “Listen, I don’t do Oxy—”

“Oh, er… nothing like that.” He looked rather crestfallen. “So could you maybe tell me how to get to the main campground?”

“Yeah, okay.” He walked ahead for a few paces and stopped. “Like …you really don’t want me to crash with you? You sure?”

“As sure,” I said, “as I’ve ever been of anything in my life.”

MY NEW FRIEND was nothing if not tenacious; he repeated the question at least half a dozen times before we finally got to the campground.
At one point I tried telling him that I couldn’t bunk with him because I had a boyfriend, but this did no good whatsoever;
he just mumbled, “But, come on, this is Melting Rock…” and proceeded to tell me I was one freaky chick.


I didn’t contradict him.

His name, as it turned out, was Doug—a rather conventional moniker for a guy with a pacifier through his proboscis, if you
ask me. And though I tried to shake him once I figured out where I was supposed to be headed, in the end I was just as glad
he stuck around; somebody had to get the tent to stand up on its own, you see, and that somebody wasn’t going to be me.


By four o’clock I was settled in my nylon rathole and beginning to contemplate the awful truth, whi