“That night, when I took Miles to the ER…” I say, pausing to allow the old memory fragments to fit themselves together. After Miles was brought in on a gurney and admitted, I went to use the bathroom. When I came out, Beth was already arriving on the scene. I couldn’t figure out how she had shown up so quickly, but I was happy to be off the hook. I slipped out the exit and went home, leaving Beth to handle Miles and all the details. “How did you get to the hospital so fast?”
“BECAUSE I WAS IN THE FUCKING CAR THAT NIGHT!”
She regards our dumbstruck faces for a second, then says, “Graduation night! I was there! Lying under a blanket in the back seat. You two didn’t even notice me—but that’s nothing new. I heard everything that happened.”
She waits for the aftershocks to bounce around the room a few times, then says, “I need a drink.”
She stomps heavily out of the room and down the stairs. Miles and I look at each other in open terror and follow her down into the study. She plants herself behind the mini-bar and pulls out a bottle. Will it surprise anyone to learn it is the Glenmalloch? It will not.
She pours herself a hearty two fingers, takes a sailor’s swig, and says, in a somewhat calmer but shaky voice, “I had a lot to drink that night. Who didn’t, right?” Leaning on the bar to steady herself, she seems resigned to an unburdening. Relieved, almost. She swirls the scotch around in the glass, gazing into the little vortex as if it were an eyehole into the past.
“By eleven o’clock I was wiped and ready to go home. I couldn’t find either of you, so I figured you were off doing... whatever it is you two do when you’re together. Finn, you had promised to drive us home, so I went to your car and lay down in the back seat. I figured that was the only way to be sure I didn’t miss you guys. I fell asleep, passed out, whatever.” She takes another swallow. “When I woke up, the car was moving. We were on the road. You two were talking about something private. I didn’t want you to think I was listening in, so I didn’t say anything. And then the longer it went on, the longer I just pretended...” No need to finish.
My brain has been harpooned here. Is it really possible a third person was with us during the entire drive home that night? It’s hard to believe we wouldn’t have noticed. But then again, Miles wouldn’t have noticed anything, the shape he was in. And I was so focused on dealing with him... And she was under a blanket, lying down, in the dark... Actually, it’s not hard to believe at all.
“When that business with the bottle happened,” Beth says, “I heard everything. I had this terrible feeling in my stomach all night, and the first thing I did when I woke up the next morning was turn on the news. There it was, a story about a highway accident in Bridgefield. I threw up for forty-five minutes straight.
“When you finally woke up, Miles—came to, I should say—I asked you some questions about the night before, and you obviously didn’t remember a thing. I had a decision to make: destroy the life we were building together before it even got started—destroy all our lives, really; our careers, our dreams—or just keep my mouth shut and pretend I wasn’t even there.” She stares at the bar-top. “The decision made itself… as they often do.”
“So all these years you’ve known those people died that night?” says her husband.
“Don’t you get self-righteous with me, Miles. Don’t you fucking dare!”
Miles backs down. “How does Clarence Woodcock factor into this?”
“Just let me talk!” She takes another swig of the ol’ country, refills her glass, and says, “I felt horrible about not coming forward. Horrible. What sucked the most was that I had to deal with the guilt alone. Miles, you knew nothing. Finn, you had vanished from the planet. I tried to...” She stops and inhales slowly through her nose. “We got married that summer, Miles, and I tried to be happy. And I was. Sort of. But I couldn’t forget what happened. I watched the newspapers obsessively for any follow-up stories—about the accident, about Edgar Goslin and his rehabilitation.
“One of Goslin’s friends started a website to collect donations for his rehab and to help him get back on his feet. It was kind of a new idea back then—a charity website. Supposedly you could donate anonymously if you wanted. And that was where I made the stupidest mistake of my life. I started making some donations—pretty big ones, actually—from my trust fund. I had just gotten signing authority on it, and I was feeling my oats. The account wasn’t titled in my name, and I didn’t think my donations could be traced to me personally. Or would be, I should say. Young and stupid, right?”
She drinks again. “Well, no good deed, blah, blah. One day when you weren’t home, Miles—this was a year or so after graduation—there was a knock on our door, and two not-very-country-club-looking guys were standing there. One of them was using a walker. They introduced themselves as Clarence Woodcock and Edgar Goslin. I almost peed my pants; how the shit did Edgar Goslin find me?
“Well, he told me how. He started to get suspicious about those donations, he said. He figured—not stupidly, I must say—that when someone gives that much money to a stranger on multiple occasions, they might have more than a casual interest in his case. Maybe they’re trying to buy off some guilt. So he hired a private investigator to look into it. Woodcock.”
She moves to the window and looks out at the ocean, swirling her booze again as she tries to assemble the story pieces. Miles and I wait.
“This Woodcock creepo—red-faced asshole—tells me he traced the donation funds to my trust account and to me. And then he started looking into us. You and me, Miles. He found out where we lived, where we used to live, who our friends and family were. ‘How’s your cousin Helena?’ he says. ‘Did she ever get that cyst removed?’ He had my attention.
“Anyway, he goes on to tell me he has friends on the police department, and they told him they found pieces of the bottle that caused the accident. I knew that from reading the papers, but then he tells me something I didn’t know. It was a rare scotch, he says, and the cops were able to track down three local people who’d bought that bottle. ‘And that was kinda curious,’ he says, getting all TV-detective on me, ‘because one of the buyers was a guy named Carroll. Whaddya know, same last name as your husband’s best pal.’ He taps his temple like he’s some kind of special genius. ‘Well, Edgar and me paid a visit to this Mr. Carroll,’ he says, ‘and, knowing what we knew, we were able to... encourage him to part with some information he’d lied to the cops about: that the scotch was bought as a gift for one Miles Sutcliffe.’”
So my dad did supply the link to Miles. Jesus, what did they do to him to pry that information out of him? No wonder he was so stressed about the whole thing.
Beth proceeds, “I’m on the edge of panic at this point, and Woodcock knows it. He says, ‘So I was starting to get the picture on why you made the donations. If only I had proof.’ And next he tells me something I’m not sure if it was true or if he was just making it up. At the time, I believed him, but later...” She tosses her arm in a stagy shrug. “He said, ‘The cops had already turned Edgar’s car inside-out for evidence, but just for hell of it, I asked Ed what clothes he was wearing the night of the accident. Well, turns out the hospital returned those clothes to him when he was discharged a few weeks after the accident. The clothes were ruined, but Edgar kept them for some reason, and damned if they weren’t still in their Patient’s Belongings bag.’ Woodcock tells me that when he opened the bag, lo and behold, a piece of glass dropped out, a nice-sized one. Embossed, not windshield glass. Must have been lodged in a shoe or a pocket of his shirt or pants. Woodcock knew what he had.
“When he examined the glass, he said, he found a clean fingerprint on it. And it didn’t belong to Finn Carroll. He didn’t have to tell me what that meant.
“‘I’ve looked into you and your husband,’ he says. ‘I know y
ou got a big life planned for yourselves—country clubs and museum boards—and I know who your daddy is, Sweetheart. So here’s what we’re going to do.’ It wasn’t a discussion. ‘You’re going to... engage my services as a security consultant,’ he says. ‘I’m not going to do any work for you, but you’re going to pay me a monthly retainer, commensurate with the value of my silence. In perpetuity.’ Goslin started to grumble about the payment arrangement, I remember. Woodcock explained to him that the payments had to be in his name—Woodcock’s—to make them appear as a legitimate business expense but that he would give Goslin his cut every month.
“In case you’re ever tempted to change your mind about our… agreement,’ Woodcock says to me, ‘I’ll just be holding onto this.’ And he pulls out a little plastic bag with a piece of bottle glass in it. And he laughs this smug little heh-heh-heh, and then—the arrogant fuck—he leers at me and wiggles his eyebrows like he’s actually coming on to me.”
Beth dumps the rest of the drink down her throat and looks at Miles and me defiantly. “That’s who Clarence Fucking Woodcock is.”
Miles is seething, I can tell, though he’s trying to contain his rage. Oddly enough, his anger seems to be aimed in my direction more than Beth’s.
“Let me get this straight,” he says to Beth at last. “All these years, you’ve been making extortion payments to some thug, living in fear, and putting our family at risk because of something Finn Carroll did on a drunken night twenty years ago.”
“Finn?” says Beth, looking at him strangely. Then she turns to me and says, “You seriously haven’t told him? Jesus, you really must be in love with him.”
“What are you talking about?” Miles demands.
She spins toward Miles again. “Finn didn’t throw the bottle that night, Roger Clemens. You did.”
Chapter 37
Miles loses his shit, to put it mildly. This is the Miles who, when backed into an existential corner, dissolves into a blubbering, whimpering child. I have seen him like this on only a couple of other occasions, and never to this extreme.
“I threw the bottle?” he says, his eyes darting around as if someone else might be watching us. “What are you saying? You’re saying I threw the bottle? I threw the bottle?” His voice is moving rapidly up the pitch scale. “What the fuck, Beth? Finn? What the fuck? No! This can’t be happening to me!” To him. Ah, Milesy. “This can’t be happening! Not now!” He paces back and forth like a leopard in a cage, holding his head with both hands. “Oh my God. No, no, no, no, NOOOO!”
He wheels on me and Beth with wild eyes and says, in a voice a full octave above normal, “You’ve known this all along. Both of you. Why didn’t you tell me? Why the hell didn’t you tell me?”
“Because I knew you’d get like this!” snaps Beth. “I knew the worry would burrow into your brain like a parasite and eat away at you, day after day, year after year. And somewhere along the line you’d blow it; you’d blurt something out, just to relieve your anxiety.”
“Nice to know how highly you regard me.”
“People are what they are, Miles. It’s not a judgment. I did you a huge favor. I took the decision out of your hands. Like I always do when we face a really hard choice.”
“You had no right to take anything out of my hands! Either of you. How dare you withhold this from me? I had a right to know about my own actions. I had a right to know!”
“So you could what, Miles?” I say, keeping my voice low and steady to lend ballast to his tottering ship. “Stand up and do the right thing? Step forward and claim responsibility? You and I both know that never would have happened. We saved you from twenty years of mental anguish and bad decision-making.”
“It wasn’t your place to save me from anything!”
He has a point, but...
“When it comes to the tough calls, Miles,” says Beth, “the really tough calls... Well, that’s not really your area of strength, is it? That’s why Daddy’s always been... slow to move forward with you. That’s why he hasn’t given you more opportunities over the years. That’s why he hasn’t put you on a faster track.”
“Oh Jesus, your dad,” Miles says. His face pales. He moves into a weird internal space and resumes his caged-leopard pacing. “Why is this happening to me now? Why now? Why now?” He stares wide-eyed at the hand-woven Persian carpet, but he’s not really seeing it. “I’m screwed, I’m screwed, I’m so fucking screwed. I’m screwed, I’m screwed, I’m so fucking screwed.” He looks up at us and smiles a pressured, off-kilter smile, then repeats the words in a sing-song way. “I’m screwed, I’m screwed, I’m so fucking screwed.” He actually starts dancing to the rhythm of the words—a Vaudeville box step, yep he does. It is a truly unsettling thing to behold. I am watching my friend’s mind come unhinged.
“Miles!” I shout, but he seems not to hear me at all. “Miles!”
“I’m screwed, I’m screwed, I’m so fucking screwed. I’m screwed, I’m screwed, I’m so fucking screwed.”
“Miles!” I bark sharply, as if trying to call off a dog. “Stop!”
“Get a fucking grip!” shrieks Beth.
“I’m screwed, I’m screwed, I’m so fucking screwed.” He’s saying the words through an awful amalgam of laughter and tears, and I realize I am witnessing, perhaps for the first time in my life, a person truly “in hysterics.” I call his name a few more times.
No response. He keeps laugh-sobbing the words, “I’m screwed, I’m screwed, I’m so fucking screwed.”
I don’t know how to get through to him. My eyes land on the bottle of Glenmalloch.
“Miles!” I holler one last time, to no effect.
I seize the bottle and, in an act the fates have been trying to place in my hands for eighteen years, I throw the Glenmalloch. It strikes the fireplace, smashing into flying splinters.
There must be hidden power embedded in that Scottish glass, because the sound gets through to Miles where words could not. He goes deathly silent. He looks at me with a Where am I? expression.
“Get hold of yourself,” I order in a harsh whisper. He nods vacantly. He takes a silent minute to put himself together mentally.
Beth waits till he appears to be back in business, then wails, “What is wrong with you?” as if he has been coming unglued just to irritate her.
“What’s wrong?” Miles says, his tone now incongruously light. “Your father is here, that’s what’s wrong. And I’m fucking dead.” Miles goes to the bar and takes out a new bottle of scotch, the plebeian blended stuff, and pours a glass. He takes a drink, sits, tries to relax. No dice. Too much nervous energy. He bounces up out of his chair and starts pacing the floor of the study again. Something unsaid is still on his mind.
“Beth’s dad is the one who has the ‘in’ with the governor,” he spills at last. “He’s the one who’s been touting me for this Senate opening.”
Ah. Now I see why he’s been so guarded with me about the big career move. As I’ve said, he doesn’t like me to know how much power Simon Fischer wields over him.
“But it’s grown even bigger than that,” he adds. “Last time I saw him... he, he explained to me that there were these... people, these very... elite people he was making inroads with. These people were interested in backing someone for a run for... well, Pennsylvania fucking Avenue. Ha!” Beth knows all this, presumably, so he’s laying it out for my benefit. “He recommended me as their man and—surprise!—they agreed I might have just the qualities they’re looking for. If your dad could do his part and get me that Senate seat, they would start working on my behalf the day I took office. I would never meet these people directly, and I would never see their machinery at work. But they would remain extremely active in ‘clearing the road’ to the Whi
te House for me. They were only interested in backing a solid winner, though; someone they could count on to go all the way and to never, ever let them down.”
Miles turns and faces Beth. This is a part of the story she doesn’t seem to know yet. “So then he looked at me, your dad did, and said, ‘Son, before I put your ass in that Senate seat, I’m going to ask you a question. It may be the most important question you will ever answer. I don’t care if your answer is yes or no. I only care if it’s the truth.” Miles pauses for effect. “‘Do you have any bodies in shallow graves I need to know about?’
“I said, ‘No, sir.’
“He patted me on the knee and said, ‘That’s good, son.’ Then he gave me the patented Simon Fischer death-stare and said, ‘Because if I find out otherwise, hell will rain down.’
“And now—now—all this old stuff decides to surface,” Miles blubbers. “Goslin turns up dead...”
“Dead?” interjects Beth. “What? When?”
Miles ignores her. “That’s going to get some people asking questions. And this Woodcock sleazebag, you can bet he’s going to come crawling out of the woodwork...”
“You don’t have to worry about him,” I say.
Miles and Beth look at me in surprise. “What do you mean?” asks Miles. “Why not?”
“Why don’t you ask your wife?”
Beth draws her head back in a theatrical display of affrontedness. “What the hell are you talking about, Finn?”
“You’re seriously going to act like you don’t know?”
“Don’t know what?”
“Come on, Beth. Okay, I’ll play along,” Watching her face for a reaction, I say, “Woodcock’s dead too.”
Beth’s eyes go blank and her jaw drops. If she’s acting, she’s pretty good at it. “How? When? How do you know?”
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