... I can't come up with a way to start this off without being awkward (believe me; I've tried), so I'm just going to start. My name is Jade Lorey. Here's a brief summary of my life as I know it, to get it out of the way. I'm a nerdy high school junior, with heavy emphasis on the nerdy. At school I take AP classes and work on the yearbook. At home I read a lot, procrastinate by simultaneously playing Tetris and watching vloggers, and stress about procrastinating. I'm really sarcastic all the time (sorry if you're on the tail end of that). I also use a ton of parentheses when I write (can't you tell?).
Why should you read my blog, you ask? Well, that's a good question. To be honest, I'm not sure I want anyone to read it at all. Not yet. This is just going to be my personal record book for now, but it might not always be that way. If anything happens to me, I want what I'm learning to do some good. Maybe someone else will be able to put all the pieces together. Maybe that someone will be you.
So to address the mysterious (or possibly just weird) title of this blog-thing- My two friends (Shawn Esher and Connor Soll) and I discovered that we all love suspense movies, especially the old ones like Alfred Hitchcock used to make. At some point this hobby turned into an obsession, and we started getting together every week to watch some black-and-white detective track down the perp. I was the one who came up with the name the Hitchcock Society a while after that. And yes, I'm aware that this is weird. I mentioned it in the first parentheses of the paragraph, after all. My friends and I were awesome enough to have a name for our movie club. Be jealous.
This was how things went the night everything began:
We had these nights at Shawn's because he was a plasma-screen snob. To him, every other TV was less awesome than the giant one in his basement. I brought the DVDs because I was a movie snob. The few times I'd let the boys pick we'd watched gore-fests. Connor made the pizza runs NOT because he was a pizza snob, but because he worked at the best Italian Restaurant in town. I mean, he was a busboy, not a cook or delivery guy, but if they made a pizza wrong he got to take it home (or, in this case, Shawn's home).
"Hey, I got the pizzas!" called Connor as he clomped down the basement stairs. He was carrying three massive and greasy boxes and was walking like a blind man. "Ready to chow down?"
"Well you got your dinner. What are the rest of us going to eat?" I teased him from the couch.
"I dunno," he shrugged after he put the boxes down on the coffee table a few inches from my sock-covered feet. "I've got some stale donuts in my truck, if you want them."
"Shawn, get down here before Connor eats all the food!" I called up from the basement.
Normally he would have rushed down his basement at the promise of fresh pizza. Normally the smell of pizza alone would have drawn him into the room. Actually, normally he would've been the first one in the basement, guarding his precious plasma screen and bantering right along with us. But not that night. That night he took his own sweet time, so much that we had to call his name twice more before he came down to us. When Shawn did finally come down he was taking slow, cautious steps and holding a bulky piece of paper in front of his face.
"What are you doing with the newspaper, Grandpa?" asked Connor, throwing a nerf ball at Shawn's head. That was a pretty typical repsonse for Connor, actually.
"He got another one," said Shawn. "The Zip Code Killer."
A quick note on where I live: it's a little town called Stone Hill. It's one of the many teeny-tiny suburbs surrounding St. Louis. It's quiet and a nice enough place to grow up in. Unfortunately, something had just started happening that was giving the whole area a national reputation in a bad way. This guy, called The Zip Code Killer by the press of our country, was systematically killing women from different zip codes. They're all middle aged, all pretty but normal, and every one had a note pinned to her clothes, telling everyone which zip code was next. She's also left in that area, giving the local cops way too many problems. Everyone in that area would quake in fear, worried about their family and friends, until the next body turned up.
"This murder's from more than three weeks ago," I said, doing my best to read the write-up over Shawn's shoulder. "It's almost time for his next victim. Why are they just reporting this now?"
"They probably wanted to hold off on the story until they caught the guy," Connor reasoned. He actually hadn't moved his butt off the coach. For an amazing sports guy, he was really lazy. "But they figured they had to let people know when they didn't."
"What zip code is next?" I asked him, trying to read the bottom of the article around Shawn's arm. His arm was surprisingly solid and impossible to read text through. I was also not-surprisingly short. "Is it us? Please tell me it isn't us."
"It's not us," he said, and we all let out a pent-up breath of relief. "It's Elmwood next."
"He's getting really kind of close, don't you think?" Connor asked. No one bothered to disagree.
Let me tell you something about a self-professed mystery-movie addicts (in other words, my friends and me). We like to think that the stories we love actually exist. We've read books and seen movies on the Zodiac Killer, Son of Sam, Ted Bundy, and all the other famous serial killers. So, of course, we knew everything about this investigation. We'd quickly learned that it was a lot cooler to study these things from afar- every time another body showed up, we worried that the next one was going to be someone we knew. We knew exactly what would happen if they were.
That night, we didn't get around to watching the Hitchcock movie (Dial M for Murder). We sat around talking about the case, about the little-known facts that Shawn had found on the internet, and about how to hack into the local police's database. Shawn was pretty sure he could do it. The pizza got cold as we debated how we'd stop him if we were the cops. Our stories got wilder and wilder, ending with a fantasy of Connor's that was a combination of Film Noir and James Bond, when we noticed that it was seven o'clock. We had to get to school.
Being in a small town with an even smaller high school means that most of the people in that school are super involved. The last home game of the Stone Hill Badgers was that night, so most of the town was heading for the gym. Connor was playing, since he's the best athlete in our (really freaking tiny) high school. Shawn was recording it for the school's website because he was the only student (or teacher) who knew how to do it in a timely manner. I was taking pictures for the yearbook and school paper because our yearbook supervisor, Mr. O'Konnell, was way too fond of yelling at us underlings.
The three of us walked to the high school that night, even though it was cold. I don't know what made us do it. Maybe we were afraid of Connor's truck (I know I am). Maybe we thought it wasn't even worth it since Shawn lives literally two and a half blocks from our high school, which is a ten minute walk if you move REALLY SLOWLY. Whatever the reason was, we were shoving each other and having a grand old time when I saw them.
I don't know what made me give them a second glance. They were walking the opposite direction as we were, across the street from us. They looked for all the world like a normal couple, enjoying a clear cool night together. I don't know why I did it, but when I looked back at them the woman gave me such a look that I couldn't look away.
She was my mom's age, maybe, with long blond hair and wide, bright eyes. Her face was probably pretty, but right now she just looked scared out of her mind. Her oh-so-bright eyes were the size of saucers and her eye make-up was running, like she'd been crying. She made eye contact with me somehow and I saw it in every part of her being- she was scared to death of whatever was going on. By the look in her eyes, she knew that something horrible was about to happen and there was nothing she could do about that. She started to mouth something- maybe she was saying 'Wow, that girl and her friends are really strange' or maybe she was trying to tell me something. But before I could tell what she was saying, her companion pulled her away. It was weird, true, but by the time I got to Stone Hill High School I'd managed to push the whole thing from my mind.
The game was fun. It was our senior game, so everyone was there and everyone was playing like they had to win. Connor was on fire and played for most of the game, even though he was a junior. I became completely obsessed with taking good pictures. I was in the middle of taking the best-ever jump shot picture I'd ever taken when everyone's cell phones started lighting up and playing little bits of last year's pop hits. All of the kids answered their phones even though they were in a super-loud gym and it was the fourth quarter of a very close basketball game.
"What would make you go for your phone right now?" I asked Shawn, dropping into the empty seat next to him. "What would make you look away from the biggest game of the year to answer a call you can barely hear?"
Shawn looked like he was going to answer with some sarcastic quip but then his phone started beeping. He turned off his camera (they were in a time out anyway) and reached for his cell. He saw the caller ID and the little smirk on his face slid right off. He held the little touch screen up for me to see.
"When it's your mom calling for the third time," he said.
They had found her body in the parking lot of the local Walgreens. Her name was Celia Dawkins, she was forty-five, pretty, with a husband and two kids, and she was the ninth victim of the Zip Code Killer. She'd been stabbed nine times, one for every one of the victims. The killer had pinned a note to her blouse, saying which zip code was next. It was ours.
She was also the woman we'd passed on the way to the game.
I assume that you'd figured this out as soon as I started describing the victim. Ok, on to the stuff that is not horribly obvious:
Somehow (without talking to Connor, Shawn, or my wonderful self) the cops determined that the killer was incredibly near a building of at least a hundred teenagers and was probably on foot. That caused them to call the school's office, which called everyone's parents. They sent out a message telling them about the situation. The teacher's kept everyone in the gym until their parents could sign them out.
"We're next," I said quietly.
"All of our moms fit the profile of his victims," agreed Connor. He was standing in a little circle with Shawn and I. The game had only been over for ten minutes and there was still sweat dripping from his hair (eew) but he was perfectly still and incredibly serious. "Hell, the moms of almost everyone in this school fit the profile. What are we going to do?"
"We're going to find the killer," said Shawn with absolute conviction. He had been looking down at his sneakers, but then he glanced up and met our eyes with an extremely powerful gaze. "We're going to be smarter than the cops, we're going to follow every lead, and we're going to figure out who this crackpot is before he strikes again. We're going to get him." I gave him a look. He amended his statement. "And by 'we're going to get him', I mean 'we'll call the cops and let them get him'."
"I'm in," I said, returning his penetrating gaze. "We're going to find this guy before some poor woman has ten stab wounds and the next area's cops have to start all over."
"I'm in too," Connor said. "You two nerds will need someone to watch your back." He looked at our harsh gaze. "I say that lovingly," he added.
And just like that, we were in. We were in, and there was no turning back.
-Jade
P.S. Here's a picture I drew for you guys of my friends and I. The blond one is Connor, the girl is me, and the one with the glasses in Shawn. I apologize for my lack of drawing skills and I hope this helps you picture us in this story.
Times I've googled something for this blog: 3
Number of parentheses I used: 15 (or 30, if you count them as individuals, not as pairs, and if you count this one).
You might be interested in an interview I did with Stephen Rebello, the last person to interview Hitchcock as well as the writer of the recent Hitchcock film. http://portuguese-american-journal.com/stephen-rebello-in-hollywood-with-alfred-hitchcock-interview/
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