Page 111 of The Other Side
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Chance and I were awoken by shrill police sirens.
Haphazardly pulling on clothes, I stopped Chance. “We can’t go out there together.”
His shoulders fell, but he knew I was right.
“I’ll go ask what happened. Just give it a few minutes before you come down,” I instructed.
“Nobody would believe that you’d wake up earlier than me, let alone be able to get ready faster,” he argued half-heartedly.
I rolled my eyes before slamming the apartment door behind me.
Down on the front lawn, students, faculty, and staff were starting to wander out and congregate, wondering what could have possibly happened now. Some of the staff were trying to corral the students back into the dorms, but were less than successful with the worried and curious teenagers.
I clocked Jolene’s car in the staff lot. I knew if I could find her, she’d know what was going on.
I’d felt increasingly guilty for pulling away from Jolene, but the more things had progressed with Chance, and certainlywhen the shit had hit the fan with the police, it had been easier to avoid her, rather than lie to her. There was a huge part of my life that I couldn’t share with her, and just because it was to keep her safe didn’t make me feel that much better about it.
It didn’t take me long to find Jolene. Her despairing wails coming from the entrance hall, carried through the air like a portent of death.
The police officers surrounding her, attempting to calm her, almost stopped me, until her face lifted and her gaze met mine. “Violet!” she cried, pushing past them to run to me. Her face was red and blotchy from crying. Her sky-blue sweater sported fluffy clouds, with sun rays poking out of one side and a rainbow sprouting from the other. It couldn’t have been more contradictory to her mood.
I soothed her hair as she cried on my shoulder, looking around to the police officers for some kind of clue as to what had happened, but they were useless.
“He’s dead,” she moaned, clutching onto me tighter.
“Who’s dead?” I asked softly, not wanting to upset her further, but wanting to understand.
“The headmaster.” She sobbed. “He—he shot himself.”
My eyes widened, searching the police officers for confirmation. I found only pursed lips and averted gazes, which told me enough.
“I’m so sorry, Jolene,” I soothed her back and let her continue to cry.
“I found him in his office. There was—it was everywhere.”
“It’s okay. Everything’s going to be okay.”
I soothed her like that for a while, until the police felt comfortable interrupting to ask her for a statement.
“I’ll wait for you,” I told her, when she was hesitant to leave. “I’ll find some tissues.”
She nodded, sniffling, and followed the officers outside.
While searching for tissues, I couldn’t help but overhear a couple of the officers talking. “Can’t believe the old asshole took the easy way out after what he did,” one said.
“At least he had the decency to leave a suicide note confessing to all of it. Too bad he didn’t explain how he killed the girls they found last month, but at least the families will get closure.”
A suicide note?
Something about that didn’t feel quite right to me. Winston was so prideful, I wouldn’t have thought he would end his life, but if he felt the police had enough on him to make an arrest, I suppose he’d be capable of anything. After the grooming allegations, which were already causing quite the stir, though nothing had been substantiated, maybe the thought of a trial and prison sentence felt inevitable.
The suicide note, on the other hand…I wasn’t so sure about.
If Winston really had killed himself, he would have known that it would have pointed to his guilt, but I couldn’t see him having the kindness to offer the closure the officers spoke of to the girls he had abused, to Chance, or the Marshall family. If anything, I could see him denying things until the very end and deciding to take matters into his own hands, versus letting a court of strangers decide his fate.
It wasn’t until much later that I was able to find Chance and tell him about everything. He’d discovered the reason for the police presence on his own, but he’d known better than to seek me out.
