shock absorbers and rode the speed bumps like they were flat road: fast and smooth.
14/ SAY IT
April 1, 2007—12:16 p.m.
MADDEN WAITS. HE MUST HAVE WAITED A GOOD FIVE SECONDS, but Carrie still won’t answer.
“Did Kristen have sex with Dr. Cogan?” he says again. Still nothing. No reaction. He can’t figure out why she has reservations. Is she simply feeling overwhelmed? Or is she just playing some twisted version of the loyal friend?
“What do you think of Dr. Cogan today?” he asks, deciding to take a different tack.
“Today?”
“Yes, right now.”
“I don’t know,” she says uncomfortably.
“I think you do. Kristen wrote about it. She said that you didn’t think he was very nice to her.”
“That was her problem, not mine.”
He smiles inwardly. Now he’s getting somewhere.
“Do you think Dr. Cogan made love to her or do you think he just wanted to have sex with her that one time for his own personal gratification?”
“I don’t know. You’d have to ask him.”
“Did she tell you she’d had sex with him?”
“She didn’t have to tell me. I saw them.”
He blinks.
“Excuse me?”
“I saw them.”
“That night, you saw them having sex?”
“Yes,” she says, and he thinks, Jackpot, a witness, I’ve got a fucking eyewitness. “I heard something—a sort of grunting—coming from the guest room. I mean, where I was sleeping—that couch—was right up against the guest room wall. So I tiptoed over and looked in the room. The door wasn’t even closed all the way.”
“And what’d you see?”
“He was on top of her, humping her.”
“He was naked?”
“Yeah.”
“And what was she doing?”
“She was just laying there kind of moaning, I guess. And then all of a sudden I heard her say, ‘Fuck me. Fuck me like you mean it.’”
The remark floors Madden. Not because of the profanity, but because Kristen had written those exact words in her diary.
“I’ll never forget that,” Carrie goes on. “I was totally shocked. I mean, she was a virgin. It doesn’t seem like something a virgin would say, does it?”
Madden doesn’t know what to think.
“What happened after that?” he asks.
“Well, I went back into the living room and put a pillow over my head. I was very upset.”
“Because your best friend was having sex with a guy you had a crush on?”
“Not that. I wasn’t thinking about that. I wasn’t into him anymore at that point. That was, like, a three-week thing.”
He doesn’t want to lead her too much, but he feels he’s got to give her a nudge.
“So, it was just that they were having sex?”
“Yeah,” she answers. “I mean, he was a man. You know, and pretty old, too—like my father’s age. And there he is naked on top of my friend, grunting and stuff. I was kind of disgusted.”
“And did you say anything to him the next morning?”
“To Dr. Cogan? No, I didn’t see him. I called my brother at, like, seven-thirty and he came over and got us. We just kind of slipped out.”
“And did Kristen say anything to you?”
“Not until the next day. I pretended to be surprised. I didn’t want her to think I was a peeping tom or anything.”
“And you didn’t see Dr. Cogan again?”
“I didn’t.”
“But Kristen did?”
“She called him, and went over to his house, I think.”
“But he brushed her off?”
“Yeah, he told her he couldn’t see her anymore.”
“Why?”
“Because he could lose his job.”
Madden flips back a couple of pages in his notepad. He looks for the quote he wants. When he finds it, he says, “Kristen wrote: ‘I can’t tell if Dr. Cogan means to be hurtful, but there have been moments during the past few weeks when I’ve felt completely rejected. ’ Did her mood reflect that?”
Tears begin to well up in Carrie’s eyes. “Probably.”
“Probably?”
“To be honest,” she says, “at the time, I didn’t really care. I could see she was hurting and I was kind of happy about it. You know, serves her right and all. She wanted it and she got what she deserved.”
“Did she ever tell Dr. Cogan that when she had sex with him it was her first time?”
One tear, then more, stream down her face. It pains Madden to watch.
“No,” she murmurs after a moment. “I don’t think so.”
“Why not?” he asks softly.
“Because she didn’t want him to know.”
Madden reaches into his pocket and hands her another Kleenex. Her eyes move up to meet his. They seem to ask for some reassurance that she hadn’t really screwed up.
“Was I a bad friend?” she asks.
Her words have an echo to them—they seem to hover over the yard long