Chapter 152 – The Graduation Ring – Holly Hayfield
It was near midnight on a school night. Alyssa and I were just now lying down in bed to go to sleep together after an evening of hanging out. She invited me to sleep over at her place after taking Silver home. I gladly accepted her invitation after digesting the contents of Angel’s letter.
Angel’s letter, much like the letter she made for her parents, was an exhaustively long apology and explanation of why she was involved with a murder-conspiracy. Earlier I felt bitter about her, but now I was beginning to feel some sympathy. I could never forgive her for killing Malorie, but Angel at least admitted that she was a tragically flawed person.
Nowhere in the letter did she express any regret or remorse towards her evil deeds. Instead, it was stated as something that had to be done. That was indefensible. The part I sympathized with was the fact that she stumbled onto a path of events that she couldn’t pull away from. She knew what she did was wrong, but did them to protect herself and her friends.
I was similar, in a sense. My actions as the Killing Cat would always be a part of me and they were inexcusable, even if for a good cause. It was just that, unlike Angel, my goal was to bring about justice and security for our school. The role of the Killing Cat was a means to an end, not the end itself.
Silencing Malorie to protect their group from facing justice for Mrs. Duluth’s murder was wrong on so many levels. It was difficult for me to read Angel’s letter and not keep that fact in mind. This was a letter that she wrote long before she learned I was the Killing Cat. I wondered if she thought about the letter that night we fought out on the ice.
Attached to the letter was a graduation ring from the year that Angel, Ms. Sampson, and Ms. Logan graduated high school. This wasn’t her old graduation ring. It was Malorie’s. It was something that she managed to hide from Ms. Logan and the others back when they were deciding on how to hide the corpse.
In the letter, Angel said that she didn’t even know why she kept the ring. She just felt that it signified her complicated life from that point on. It represented the web of lies and deception she spun herself into because of the choices that she made. Malorie’s ring was a vicious memento mori to her, and a tangible reminder to all the crimes she committed.
Now it was mine.
I slipped it on the moment I got it and stared at it for a long time in silence. Earlier, Silver was so worried about me that she thought I was having an emotional breakdown. That finally caused me to snap out of my trance and laugh. This ring signified so much to me that I couldn’t put it into words when I tried to explaining it to her.
According to the letter, the rings were a gift they all received from Ms. Hoffman early that school year. The entire Art and Theater Club got similar graduation rings with different color schemes to suit each member. Malorie’s ring was fairly unique, being composed of a black steel-and-titanium band with an obsidian gemstone.
The dark, beautiful nature of it fit Malorie’s personality well. It was amazing to think that something she once wore on her ring finger would find its way to mine. This was my memento mori now. It was a reminder of Malorie’s fate and Angel’s deception. It was a reminder that the past had consequences for me here in the present.
I was still flipping the ring in my fingers and staring at it when Alyssa decided to give me an annoyed shake. I didn’t realize how long I had been staring at it for. She was probably feeling a little ignored. I smiled at her and wrapped one arm around her. She cuddled up against me even more, so much so that she felt too close. Her long hair was getting in my face.
“Too close!” I said playfully.
“Sorry…” She said and pulled away a bit. Just a bit. “You’ve been staring at that ring all night. Once you left to go take a shower my grandma asked me if you were getting married.”
I laughed.
“Is that what I looked like?” I asked.
“Yeah, my grandpa asked me about the ring too. He thought that maybe you hit the jackpot somewhere and bought the ring.”
I laughed again.
Knowing her grandparents as well as I knew them, they were too polite to ask me about the ring to my face. They had never met any of Alyssa’s friends other than Sofi, and they didn’t exactly approve of Sofi. They thought she was a bad influence on Alyssa, which meant more to them than it meant to most people.
Alyssa lived with them because her parents were both unstable. Her mother had a drug addiction and her father was an alcoholic. She had an abrasive childhood that caused her to grow a thick shell that she could hide in. That was why she was so reserved with everyone. It usually took her a long time to warm up to people.
She had a violent streak early in high school and was struggling with her grades. Her grandparents adopted her, against her mother’s wishes, and enrolled her into Meredith’s School for Troubled Girls to hopefully steer her on the right path. Since then, Alyssa has been learning to come out of her shell and adjust.
Her personal growth was somewhat stunted with Sofi, considering she had no other friends. She risked a similar situation with me, but that was another reason that I was adamant that she got more involved with the student council. She needed to be able to spread her wings and fly without relying on others.
If Alyssa could overcome her past then I felt reasonably confident about her future. She was doing well in school now that she had a stable environment behind her. She just needed to get better at talking to people. On that front, I believed that she was improving. The student council was beginning to understand her as a person.
“I’m not that obsessed with my ring.” I said.
“You kind of are.” She said. “You were staring at it with the TV off when I went to take a shower. When I came back you were still on the bed, staring at it in silence.”
“Alright, maybe I am.” I conceded. “But you of all people understand why more than anyone.”
Alyssa looked at the ring in my hand and nodded.
“It’s like a piece of history.” She said. “I can see why you’re so captivated by it, but you probably should be careful. You don’t want anyone asking you about it or noticing the year engraved into the band. A few people like Ms. Sampson could connect the dots.”
“You’re right.” I said. “That means I probably can’t wear it on my finger at school. Maybe I can attach it to my bag or something.”
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
“That would be better than staring at it in hypnosis. I can practically see the black-and-white spirals circling in your eyes.”
“Oh quiet, you! That’s how you were when you first got your scooter!” I said teasingly. “Are we going to go to sleep or what? We have to wake up early for school.”
Alyssa laughed this time.
“Sure, let’s go to sleep. I’m sure you’ll have a sweet dream about that ring of yours.”
“Goodnight!” I said stubbornly.
“Goodnight.” She said with a sly smile.
She rested her head against my chest, her favorite sleeping position when we were in the bed together. She always said that she liked to fall asleep listening to the sound of my heartbeat, the weirdo. She was strangely sentimental like that sometimes and it was adorable, but also overbearing.
It would’ve been easy for me to simply push her aside, but I had a habit of spoiling her lately. Alyssa meant a lot to me and accommodating her whims from time to time felt like small repayment for the help she gave me so often. Recently she was becoming keenly aware of this and trying to milk it.
I got the feeling that she’d let me do anything I wanted to her, if I so wished. The proposition alone was dangerous. Just like her, I enjoyed our physical contact. She was a lot less cagey than Lilith when it came to things like this, and not as overwhelming to me as Val was.
I didn’t want to take advantage of Alyssa like that, even if she didn’t consider it that way. She was still so heavily reliant on me that any romantic or intimate behavior towards her felt like an abuse of my status. That’s why I often had to set boundaries with her. Today though, I was making an exception because I was feeling torn up over Angelica’s letter.
There was a battle raging on the inside of me. It wasn’t an emotional battle of how to handle Angelica’s letter. It was about my thoughts in the wake of it. It made me want to reexamine how I was going about things. Would it be possible to get justice for Malorie without killing anyone else?
Aside from Angel and Ms. Logan, I hardly knew any of the Killing Cat’s other victims. Helping Angel’s parents cope with Angel’s dark side and helping them move out her stuff was putting me in a poor mood. The violence felt absolutely necessary in the beginning to make change, but was that true now?
Would I be able to scare my opponents straight, and force them to cooperate with the police?
Presumably the police were already reaching out to some of Ms. Sampson’s former contacts, but it was impossible to know how those things were progressing. They were having trouble officially pinning Ms. Sampson with anything and she was the key figure in the conspiracy. How could they hope to pin her accomplices as well?
I didn’t have an answer to that. The question remained on my mind throughout the following school day. When I was reading or doing homework in class my mind would constantly drift off to the future of the Killing Cat. I knew I couldn’t keep up the act forever. I’d have to choose how this story ended.
That’s why after school I decided to have Silver come along to the hideout again. Alyssa took me there first since Silver needed to visit home before she could go. That was good since we wouldn’t be able to have a meeting for a while. I needed to help Helga install the new generator.
Helga already bought a generator from the local hardware store. This one was smaller, but we were planning to buy others. By using this multiple-generator setup we’d have some emergency redundancy. Additionally we’d be able to spread them out instead of hosting them all in a single room.
We were talking about expanding the number of rooms we had active at any one time. We were planning on repurposing more rooms and expanding once Helga had more money. For now, the money came from the lockbox funds. Angel’s parents gave their blessing for me to keep a fair amount of the money for having found the lockbox, but most of it would go to them.
Now that we had power in our main operations room we could get back to work. My next target was named Sarah Rivera. She was a journalist working for a news station that Lilith told me about before. Not only that, but she appeared to be in active contact with Angel until recently.
The only real information of substance I had on her was a collection of articles that she published on the web. She was considered a junior member of the staff and her work reflected that. Most of her work at the news station seemed to be concerned with creating written analogues to their TV news segments.
She regularly professed interests in other ambitions, however. She wanted to be one of the anchors that would regularly go on live TV and have all the fame that came with it. That’s why she spent so much time writing her own articles on the side, in addition to her regular job duties.
For a while she was a dubious target. I thought that she was actively trying to suppress Malorie’s case based on her convenient position alone. Lilith seemed to think the same back when she originally told me about Sarah. Now I had more than just suspicions. I had letters that she sent to Angel.
In one of their correspondence letters Sarah listed some of the exact details of her ‘help’. She was instrumental in the early stages of the conspiracy, back when she worked at the news station as a college intern. There, she used her position to cast doubt on all serious inquiries into Malorie’s story.
Part of the reason that Malorie’s disappearance was heavily accepted as a runaway story for so long was because of Sarah. Sarah claimed to have insider knowledge about how Malorie thought and felt, being a classmate and fellow club member of hers. The news station treated her word like gospel since they knew that she was from the same school.
The additional details were minor things about how Sarah conspired to shut down other stories written by fellow junior journalists. No second opinion ever got past her while she was working there. Silver and I were discussing her foiling attempts as Alyssa worked to research more public information on her.
“She must be in a precarious position now that her runaway theory has been blown out of the water.” Silver said. “She can’t foil anything if her co-workers no longer trust her insight.”
I nodded as I paced around the room. I was wearing my usual Killing Cat outfit, save for the mask. Silver was becoming accepting of my identity as the Killing Cat and no longer gave me odd looks from the corner of her eyes.
“I think you’re right about that, although there’s no way to say for sure.” I said. “It has to hurt her credibility to be so wrong for so long, but it depends on how she and her co-workers reacted to the explosion of information surrounding Malorie and Angel. It’s possible that she just played dumb when the information came out.”
“I’m interested in what’s she’s writing right now.” Silver said. “You said that she wrote a story about Malorie running away in the past. Do you think she’d release a follow up article to correct things?”
This was when Alyssa turned in her chair to face us. She was sitting at one of the computers in our ‘research’ area of the room.
“It doesn’t look that way.” Alyssa said. “From what I can see on her webpage she’s just pretending like the entire Angel thing isn’t happening. Some of her co-workers released articles on the topic, but not her.”
“Which is strange, considering her history,” Silver pointed out. “Surely her co-workers have to realize something is up. It’s strange for her to be silent on something she was vehemently involved with before.”
“There’s no telling.” I said. “Not from our current position, anyways… I’d like to get a look inside that news station. I think checking the place out should be our next goal.”
Silver gave a half-hearted laugh.
“You’re going to creep in as the Killing Cat? You think you can get that far unnoticed?”
“Not as the Killing Cat,” I corrected, “As a concerned student of Meredith’s School for Troubled Girls with connections to Malorie Noelle.”
Silver looked at me as if I was spouting nonsense.
“But… How…? You’re identity…”
I grinned at her.
“Follow me. Allow me to show you a very special room of ours.”
Silver followed me out of the room as Alyssa continued her research. The room that we were walking to was right next door to our main operations room. I opened the door and started turning on the lights. I couldn’t afford to turn them all on given our currently reduced power capacity.
This was a room-sized wardrobe. There were racks of clothes throughout the main section of the room, collections of wigs on tables lining the wall near the door, tables for accessories and makeup, and a changing curtain. Silver walked inside and scanned everything with a mystified expression on her face.
“This is a disguise room!” She realized.
I grinned.
“It wasn’t easy to build this collection and bring it here.” I said, walking in behind her. “Helga is to thank for a lot of this. Some of these clothes were hers that she planned to get rid of. We’ve been making use of them.”
“This is amazing, I love it!”
“I thought you would. This seems like something more along the lines of your interests.”
“You’re going to pick out a disguise and visit that news station?” Silver asked.
“That’s the plan. I usually disguise myself and check out an area before actually going there as the Killing Cat. In fact, I spend far, far more time in regular disguises than I do in the Killing Cat mask.”
She looked around the room again and nodded.
“Then I want to go with you whenever you decide to go through with it.” She said. “Let me pick out a disguise and help you scout the place.”