The Request

by David Bell

  “What are you worried about? Losing a job with Sam’s dad? Is that all you care about?”

  “Be careful.”

  “You’re going to face legal jeopardy for the accident. Remember? No statute of limitations. I’m telling them everything. And Sam’s family will know. Everyone will know.”

  The cops started down the stairs. I saw their black shoes, their guns drawn.

  And I said one more thing to Blake. And I hoped to stick to it forever.

  “And then you and I really and truly won’t ever see each other again.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX

  When we first arrived at the police station in Rossingville and before the questioning began, Detective Rountree allowed me to call Amanda on one of their landlines. They’d removed my personal effects, including my phone, so I sat at an empty desk and resorted to using a beat-up and out-of-date phone book, the cover so battered it fell to the floor, to find my in-laws’ number. I didn’t know it by heart. I hadn’t dialed it that way in . . . ever.

  When Amanda came on the line, I told her what I could tell her in the few minutes I was allotted, straining to hear her voice over the din of the police station. Ringing phones and chattering conversations, a siren wailing outside. More than anything I made sure she and Henry were safe, and I told her Aaron was in custody, unable to come near or harm anyone else.

  Our conversation paused for a moment. In the background on her end of the line, I heard Henry making a series of noises, including his habitual banging of the spoon against the high chair tray. And I heard Karen’s voice talking back to him, telling him how grown-up he was. Those sounds pierced my heart. How I wished I could have been there. How I wished to sit by Henry and feed him mashed-up food. I’d even have settled for changing one of his stink bomb diapers because it would make life seem normal again.

  “I have so many questions,” Amanda said. “So many.”

  “And I’ll answer them all. I promise. But the cops have a bigger claim on me right now.”

  “Just let me come down there. I can explain some things. There’s so much more to this.”

  “No, you don’t have to come down here. Stay with Henry.”

  I heard her breath on the other end of the line. “Do you need a lawyer?” she asked, again showing her practical side. “Is it that serious? I don’t want you talking to the police without being protected.”

  I considered the possibility. “I’m not sure. Maybe.”

  “I’m going to ask Dad. He knows every lawyer in Rossingville.”

  I wasn’t sure what to think. It hadn’t all sunk in yet. The deep shame I’d carried with me for years, the belief that I’d killed someone in that accident . . . none of it was true. But I couldn’t bring myself to feel relieved.

  Maggie Steiner was still dead. Emily was still hurt.

  And Jennifer Bates was gone too. Along with Kyle Dornan.

  Such a waste. So much waste.

  Rountree emerged from a back room and pointed at her watch. I looked around. I had no idea where they’d taken Blake or Aaron. I assumed they were being held in their own rooms, and they’d keep us all separate as we told our tales. At least that was the way it happened on TV.

  “I have to go,” I said. “I don’t know how long this will take. I really don’t. I’ll try to call again if I can, but . . .”

  “I get it. I’ll be here with Mom and Dad.”

  “Okay. I love you.”

  “I love you too.”

  I started to put the phone down, but Amanda’s voice came through the line, stopping me.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  She paused for a moment. Henry’s banging increased in frequency and volume.

  “I just said . . . I understand that there may be some things you tell them that are delicate. I get it. I do. I know sometimes these things come out whether we want them to or not. It can all get very tangled.”

  I wanted to ask her for clarification because it sounded as though she was speaking about something else, something besides the events that had spun out from Jennifer’s death.

  But Rountree came over to the desk and tapped her watch again, this time more dramatically. And there was no way to say or ask anything with any presumption of privacy, if that presumption had even existed in the first place. So I told Amanda good-bye and hung up, and then followed Rountree back to the room where I was to be questioned.

  And the police devoted hours to questioning me. To say it was unpleasant would be the understatement of the century. In order to explain to them how I ended up in that basement with Aaron and Blake, I naturally had to go back to college and start the story there. And then it continued all the way up until the events of the previous twenty-four hours, including how I had ended up in Jennifer’s house the night she was killed, the removal of her phone, the withholding of those details from Rountree the first time she came to the house.

  All of it.

  Rountree came and went. Sometimes I sat for long stretches by myself, and during those times, I replayed the events of the past day, especially everything that happened in that basement in Hilldale Estates. I’d spent the past six years of my life burying and secretly making amends for something I hadn’t played as large a role in as I’d always thought. Blake had been driving that night. And he’d not only lied to me about it, but he’d used it to coerce me into going into Jennifer’s house.

  But knowing those things brought me no great relief.

  Blake, someone I once considered a close friend, had lied to me for years.

  And setting aside how much I feared exposure at his hands, I had made the choice to give in and go along with entering Jennifer’s house the previous night. I shouldered the blame for that. I might face criminal charges for it. In fact, I couldn’t see how I wouldn’t.

  What I’d thought while talking to Amanda was true—it was much better to have it all out in the open.

  But my life would never be the same afterward. I’d never be looked at the same, and I wouldn’t be the same. The uncertainty surrounding that scared me more than any criminal charge that might have been coming.

  Everything felt new and out of control. No social media post or Instagram filter could put the right shine on my past decisions.

  Shortly before midnight, Rountree returned for the final time. She told me we were just about finished, and I’d be able to return home under certain conditions.

  “You can’t leave town,” she said. “And if we call you because we have more questions, we need you to jump. And I mean really jump.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” I said. “I just want to spend time with my family again.”

  She held a small notebook and flipped through the pages. I’d stayed focused on her questions the rest of the day, but with our time nearing its end, I worked up the nerve to ask a question I’d been thinking about for hours.

  “What is happening with Aaron?” I asked. “And Blake?”

  Rountree kept looking at her notes, but she answered. “Our friend Aaron Knicely is in quite a bit of trouble. He has a lawyer on the way, so things with him might take a while to sort through. That’s all I can really say about that.”

  She added nothing else and kept turning pages.

  “And Blake?” I asked.

  She looked up, closed the notebook, and tucked it into a pocket inside her jacket. “He’s in his own sinking boat. We’re going to be looking into this car accident from the past. He faces legal jeopardy over that. I can’t tell you more. And we’ll be deciding about possible criminal charges related to everything you did. Going into that house, taking the phone.”

  A few hours earlier, Rountree had brought me some crackers and a bag of pretzels from a vending machine. Except for those, I hadn’t eaten in hours. Despite that long stretch, my stomach felt nauseated, not empty. And when I said Blake’s name, t
he nausea increased along with a sour taste in my mouth. I wanted to feel relieved to be done with him, but the imagined freedom and lightness refused to come.

  “He’s asked for a lawyer about the accident, so it could take a while to get sorted out,” Rountree said. “But Aaron is telling the same story you are about the accident and the events in that basement. If that makes you feel any better.”

  I thought about it for a moment, looking at the scarred top of the beat-up table where I sat.

  “I’m not sure it does,” I said. “I understand it, but it doesn’t make me feel any better. Someone was killed. And someone still got hurt. Bad. And I was there for part of it, acting like an idiot. Nothing can absolve me from that.”

  Rountree nodded in a sagelike manner. “Not even envelopes of cash stuffed in a mailbox.”

  I looked up.

  “Yes,” she said, “everyone’s going to know you’ve been giving the Steiners the money. There’s no way people will think Blake did it.”

  Her words started to sink in.

  “Do you think the Steiners knew what Aaron was coming to do to us?” I asked. “I told you about Dawn Steiner. Could this relate to them in some way? Could they all be in on this with Aaron? Getting revenge together? You don’t know who killed Jennifer yet, do you? Was it Aaron? He said he was with her.”

  “We’ll look into everything. We always do. But you were the goose laying golden eggs. They didn’t seem to want that money to stop coming.”

  “Yeah,” I said, accepting it all. “But I guess you can’t buy your way out of guilt.”

  Rountree stood up. “Maybe understanding that is the first step toward moving on.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN

  Amanda managed to sleep fitfully, while I once again stared at the ceiling and paced the house.

  When I had left the police station, around one thirty, I went by my in-laws’ house to pick her up. Mercifully, Bill and Karen were asleep, and so was Henry, and Amanda had already arranged with them to leave the baby there overnight so the two of us could have distraction-free conversation in the morning. I desperately wanted to lay eyes on the little guy, but I knew he was safe with his grandparents. And I agreed with Amanda’s assessment that it would be nice to talk without interruption.

  Since I was up long before Amanda, my mind swirling with the events of the previous evening, she at least came downstairs to the aroma of brewing coffee filling the house and the sight of me at the counter buttering toast.

  She smiled when she came into the room, and we shared a kiss. But there was a strain in her smile, something that showed across her face. She wore a hoodie and baggy shorts, and I wished it were simple to pick up and return to our regular lives.

  But I knew it wouldn’t be.

  And I knew Dawn Steiner’s deadline loomed over the morning.

  But would she really show up? Wouldn’t she be scared off by the news that everything was out in the open? She held no more leverage over me. She had nothing to push me with. For all I knew, the police had her in custody as well.

  Before we sat down at the table with our steaming mugs, Amanda went out onto the stoop and grabbed the morning paper. She reluctantly slid it across the table toward me, and I saw Jennifer’s death and Aaron’s arrest taking up most of the front page. And when I saw the large type and Aaron’s mug shot, my heart jumped to a pace suitable for NASCAR.

  “I thought about hiding it from you,” she said. “But what’s the point? Isn’t everything supposed to be out in the open now?”

  “It is.” But I sounded less sure than ever.

  I spread the paper out and scanned the first story. It revealed less than I knew and relied on a lot of “sources say” and “police aren’t sure.” I felt some relief that I hadn’t been mentioned, but that lasted about one minute. In the second story, which detailed the circumstances of Aaron’s arrest in greater detail, I saw my name. “Ryan Francis, local PR executive and small-business owner.” While it withheld many of the details—it didn’t mention my presence in Jennifer’s house the night she had died—it did say that the potential crimes being investigated stemmed partially from an “alcohol-involved accident during college.” And it made sure to tell the readers that additional charges could be filed against all of the men, including Blake and me.

  I’d turned my phone off when I came home from getting Amanda, hoping to shut the world out so we could sleep. But something compelled me to reach for it. I went down the hall to my office, noticed the space on the desk where my laptop should have been resting, and picked up the phone. Amanda appeared in the doorway right behind me.

  “Ryan, maybe don’t . . .”

  But I’d already seen. Text after text after text. And calls and voice mails. I scanned the first few.

  Hey, man . . .

  Is this you?

  Do you need anything?

  Are they serious?

  I looked away, my face burning.

  Amanda took a deep breath in the doorway. She pushed her glasses up to the bridge of her nose. “The same thing happened on my phone. And Facebook and Snapchat too. I thought you might want to avoid that for a while.”

  “I thought people didn’t read the newspaper anymore. Do we know the only people who subscribe?”

  “Well, you know the newspaper reporters Tweet all their stories. And the paper shares its stories on Facebook. At least people care,” she said. “We have a lot of friends offering support.”

  “It’s ghoulish,” I said. “They just want prurient details. They want a glimpse of the disaster.”

  Amanda remained quiet, but she wore a knowing look.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Look, Ryan, live by social media, die by it. We put a lot of our lives on there, so naturally people think they can ask whatever they want. It happens.”

  “Just what I need to hear. Logic.”

  She came across the room and took me by the hand, the hand that didn’t hold the phone. “Come on out to the kitchen. We can talk. You know, face-to-face like human beings used to. You can respond to those later. Or ignore them all. You don’t have to jump every time that thing chimes. None of us do.”

  “Sure.”

  But I made the mistake of taking one more glance at the screen. Another text popped up.

  I know you’re pissed and I get it. But lets talk sometime.

  “Crap,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Blake. Of all the nerve . . .”

  “All the more reason to ignore that stuff.” She tugged on my wrist. “Come on.”

  “Wait,” I said, slipping free of her grip. “I’m going to do one more thing.”

  “Ryan.”

  “Hold on.”

  I went through and blocked Blake. I blocked his texts and his calls. I made sure he couldn’t contact me, no matter how hard he tried. I looked at my desk, where our barely used landline sat, the one we’d had installed when Henry was born. Amanda wanted a backup in case cell service went down and there was an emergency.

  “Can you block someone on that?” I asked.

  “Just don’t answer,” she said.

  I went over and pulled the plug.

  “Okay,” I said. “That actually felt good. Now you have my undivided attention. You should always have it.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT

  I told Amanda everything that morning. Over coffee and toast and so much more coffee that my body started to jangle like a singing electric wire, I told her what I now knew about the accident. That I’d always believed I’d been driving that night and had allowed Aaron to take the blame for what I thought I’d done. That while I’d let Blake guide me to that decision, I had no one to blame but myself for going along with it. I was trying to cover my own butt, trying to save my own skin and finish college without getting into trouble.

  Amanda’s f
ace flushed as I spoke, and her eyes narrowed. “All those years you thought you’d been driving that night? As long as you’ve known me, you thought that?”

  “I did.”

  “And you knew how I felt about that issue because of Mallory? But you didn’t say anything to me.”

  It was my turn to flush. Just because things were now out in the open didn’t mean it would be easy. Getting it all out felt like passing a kidney stone. A big one.

  “That’s right,” I said. “And I’m sorry. I always wanted to tell you, but I couldn’t. Because of Mallory. Because of the pain her death caused your family. I was protecting myself that night, and it’s the biggest mistake I’ve ever made, because I wasn’t honest with you.”

  I explained about the money I’d been giving to the Steiners over the years, the amounts I’d taken out of our savings account. All because I’d thought I was behind the wheel.

  “I saw the money being taken out,” she said. “I mean, I’m not a dummy. But you pay most of the bills. At some point it wasn’t really enough for me to worry about. I knew you had to put some money back into the Pig at one point. And then the work on the yard . . .”

  I went on and told her about Dawn Steiner, how she’d asked for that big chunk of money that I didn’t have. And the deadline she’d given me.

  “I think the police are after her now,” I said. “Since the story is out, she doesn’t have any real leverage. And for all I know, she might have been working with Aaron to harass us. That’s why—”

  “That’s why you asked if Aaron had a woman with him when he came to the door.”

  “Right.”

  “And all because Blake wasn’t honest with you.” She shook her head. “What a bastard.”

  I swallowed hard and told her about Blake coming to me outside the Pig, using the guilt over what I thought I’d done to the Steiner family to get me to go into Jennifer’s house and retrieve the incriminating letters.