A sick fatigue came over Colin, and his body felt like dead weight, impossible to move. This, he reminded himself, is what you were scared to hope for.
*
Too mad to sleep, Sarah dragged the sofa back to its proper place and went over to the dorm. She hesitated outside Graham’s door, then banged hard, determined to ask him flat out about the doll and the laptop. If he so much as twitched the wrong facial muscle, she was calling Morganstern.
Max, wearing plaid flannel shorts and a grey T-shirt, came down the hall with a towel over one shoulder and a bottle of dandruff shampoo in his hand. “He’s smashed. Father Cadigan had to come over and talk him down.”
“Oh, for God’s sake.” She pushed open the door, annoyed with adolescence in general. If it wasn’t bravado or fear, it was wilful idiocy . . .
He lay on the bed, fully dressed. “Graham!” No response.
Terrified, she grabbed his wrist and slid two fingers under the cuff of his chambray shirt. Still warm. His chest rose, barely. Was he drugged or just drunk?
She looked around wildly, wondering if he’d shot up. And if so, maybe he’d injected Philip too. Had he killed him deliberately? Had he overdosed in remorse?
“Wake up,” she said sharply, but he didn’t move. His olive skin was a flat, sallow beige. She flipped on the overhead light, leaned over him, and pulled up his eyelid with her thumb. It slid down fast, without a flutter.
She would have sworn he didn’t do drugs. He wouldn’t want to lose that much control.
His hand flopped off the side of the bed, and she picked it up and held it between her hands, rubbing the ice-cold skin. Still no response. Fumbling with one hand for her phone, she dialled 911, then Colin. “Graham’s barely breathing. He’s got no colour, and he’s not responding. I called for an ambulance.”
“We’ll be right over,” Colin said. “Jimmy’s with me. Just wait there.”
“Is he okay?” Max asked from the door.
“He’s breathing, but he’s not conscious. Keep watch for the ambulance, okay? Bring them straight up here. Father Mac’s on his way.” Over Max’s shoulder, she saw Steven’s face, white as blotter paper, soaking up the shock. She said Graham’s name again, louder.
His eyes opened, and his head lolled toward her, half off the pillow. “I did it,” he said, and let out a moan. “Oh, God, Sarah, I did it.”
“It’s okay,” she whispered, stroking the sweat from his cold forehead. “Whatever happened, it’s okay.” What in hell was she saying? He’d taken them all in, betrayed her faith, killed a boy? Not one thing about this was okay.
His eyes rolled back in his head, and she felt him leave again, sink back into nothingness. “Stay awake!” she urged, slapping his cheeks as hard as she dared. “Stay awake, Graham. Wake up.”
Footsteps, charging down the hall. Colin burst into the room, followed by Jimmy. The instant she stepped away from the bed, Colin took her place, shaking the boy gently by both shoulders. “For the love of God, Graham, open your eyes!”
Jimmy crossed the room to stand next to Sarah. “I guess he couldn’t live with it after all,” he murmured. “Poor bastard.”
Colin was still talking, his voice urgent. Graham moaned and rolled away from him, and Colin rolled him right back again. “Stay with us!”
Paramedics clattered in − again the brusque ‘Make way, please’, the rumble of urgent voices, the wheels of a stretcher. It gave Sarah a queasy sense of deja vu. “Get the Narcan,” somebody called. “His breathing’s depressed.”
Once they’d slid Graham into the ambulance, Colin drove Sarah and Jimmy to meet him at the emergency room. On the way Jimmy called the Dennisons, breaking the news more gently than Sarah would have imagined possible. Into his grave, careful explanation of the little they knew, he wove constant reassurance that the boy was alive and already in medical care.
Then he hung up and said tonelessly, “We’d better call the police.”
*
Sarah’s first waking thought on Tuesday morning was that a boulder was crushing her chest. The hospital had kept Graham overnight, but he would be fine. Philip, on the other hand, was dead because once again she’d ignored common sense and insisted on believing the best. It was so much more pleasant to think a boy sick or misunderstood than to think him capable of wilful, murderous rage.
First with Sean, and now with Graham, she hadn’t had the courage to face the obvious.
She’d never wanted to face the darkness of her father’s moods, either. Was that what had warped her judgement? A permanent blind spot. Drawing the blanket over her head, she hid there in suffocating heat, eyes open, staring at nothing. Not even coffee tempted her; she didn’t want to feel anything too sharply.
Claustrophobia finally forced her to throw off the covers. She dressed fast and made herself check her work email from her phone.
The message from Northrup Grant snapped her out of her fugue. He wanted to know if she’d meet him off campus for coffee, said he needed to talk to her. Which was odd indeed. Quickly she composed a reply, giving him her cell number. As she wrote, a text came in from Connie, ‘Adriana quit! Colin will be upset. Do u know why she left?’
Odder still. When Sarah went into the office, Connie pushed a sheet of paper into her hands. Heavy and smooth, its pale grey paper had a navy monogram at the top and a polite, handwritten message below it. Adriana was submitting her resignation, effective immediately. She made a brief, formal apology for the inconvenience and thanked Colin for an invaluable experience.
She couldn’t have known about Graham − Colin and Jimmy had decided not to tell the rest of the faculty yet. All the boys knew was that he’d been taken away high. What had made her quit? Sarah conjured scenarios. Maybe Adriana had slept with her brilliant, daring, confused young student, and she was still afraid his father would find out. Or maybe North was the killer and she’d run away with him.
No, Adriana had too much pride to do that.
But she might have run from him.
Sarah froze, remembering the email. Was Northrup Grant trying to lure her away from campus? Maybe he thought she suspected him and he’d decided to kill her. And now she’d given him her cell number, and he could track her with his drones . . .
Oh, for God’s sake. Graham had confessed. How much more proof did she need?
Still, none of this made sense. “Don’t even show Colin yet,” she told Connie. “He doesn’t need another straw.”
Connie nodded vigorous agreement.
“I’ll see if I can find out what’s going on,” Sarah promised. On the way to her car, she called Skycraft’s main number. Mr. Grant was unavailable.
Such a useful word. Like ‘indisposed’. He could either be stuck in meetings or miles away in some hideout, and she couldn’t get past the corporate baffle to find out which. Scrolling through her phone log, she found the number for Adriana’s sister.
“Yeah, she’s here,” Alyssa said, keeping her voice down. “But she doesn’t want to talk about it. You’re welcome to come over if you want. Just don’t say I invited you.”
Sarah set her phone app for Adriana’s address, deep in South County, and took the Miata well over the speed limit, blasting an old Chuck Berry album as she drove along red granite bluffs. When she reached her exit, she turned the music down so she could hear that nicely modulated voice giving her directions. But she also heard a clicking sound, something rattling around in the undercarriage. She listened hard. It wasn’t coming from the engine. It was something loose or extra. A stick caught under the wheel cover? A bomb?
A vivid imagination. That black speck in the sky wasn’t one of North’s drones, it was a crow. She sped up again, and the noise got louder, pennies jangling in a tin cup. She slowed and flicked on her hazards just in case. Why had she let her roadside assistance lapse? Now she’d pay double for a tow truck.
When she turned on to a street graded for fresh asphalt, she jounced along, and
the noise disappeared. Good. Whatever it was, she’d shaken it loose.
But when she reached smooth pavement again, the rattle returned.
*
Sarah turned into Alyssa’s driveway with a huge sigh of relief. She ought to take a minute to check the wheels, maybe even lift the hood and pretend she knew what she was looking for. But Alyssa was already standing in the doorway, jiggling a baby in one arm and hanging on to the collar of a young goldendoodle with the other. She motioned Sarah into the front room and said in a low voice, “Listen, you’ve met Northrup Grant, so tell me fast. Is he right for Adriana? I was too young to pay attention the first time round. Now . . . well, he seems like the kind of guy who pats you on the back when you hug him − but doesn’t hug you back.”
Sarah smiled. “That’s pretty apt. Although he’s different with her. I’m just worried that − he hasn’t called her here, has he?”
“She says she didn’t tell him where she was going.” Alyssa walked to the foot of the stairs and yelled with startling volume, “Adri, somebody’s here to see you.”
No answer.
“So this is about North?” Sarah asked, feeling her way. After all, the sister only suspected him of being boring, not homicidal.
Alyssa nodded. “She won’t say much, though. She was in hysterics when she showed up. Kept saying she’d had her only shot at happiness, and she’d done everything to keep it, and then sobbing some more.” Alyssa raised her hands, conceding defeat. “Maybe she’ll talk more to you. I’ll run up and get her.”
Before she left she plopped the baby in a bouncer seat, and with every bounce he giggled, marvelling at his own motion. This is a real life, Sarah thought. What Alyssa had here, with her husband and dog and baby, felt complete. So where did that leave her?
Satisfied that the baby could not escape his bouncer, she wandered along the hall, distracting herself by studying old family photos. As kids, Alyssa, Adriana, and their other sister had looked alike, and typical − sometimes pretty, laughing with friends or blowing out birthday candles, and sometimes plain or gawky, caught between stages. Their mother was a bit frumpy, in a happily married way: She might be a little too heavy for her Bermuda shorts, but her husband had his arm around her, squeezing her close to his own paunchy belly. No-one in the family even approached Adriana’s beauty − or showed any sign of her aloofness.
She came downstairs wearing an old Billiken sweatshirt and yoga pants, and her eyes looked like she’d rubbed poison ivy into them. “Sorry, Sarah. I was afraid you were North.”
She didn’t seem terrified, just drained. Sarah grabbed hold of her arm. “Did he kill Philip? You have to tell me, Adriana.”
The green eyes flew open. “North? Kill Philip? That’s insane! He’s utterly bereft. That’s why I had to leave. He’s been holding on to me so hard, wanting me close every possible minute. But it’s not really about me, it’s about Philip. And grief’s temporary.” She gave a shaky sigh. “I can’t go through that again, Sarah. It’s easier if I leave now.”
With that last sentence her voice took on a detached, Spock-like quality that Sarah knew all too well. She’d invoked pseudo-logic many times herself, arguing that some catastrophic loss was actually a marvellous gain. “Why not stay with him,” she said, “and let the crisis bring you closer?”
Adriana shook her head fast enough for whiplash. “Romance is something a bunch of spurned knights made up as revenge. It never lasts. I’d rather be in charge of my own life.”
“So . . . what are you going to do?”
“Move, as soon as I find another teaching job. Maybe even teach English abroad.”
Sarah puffed her cheeks and let the air out slowly. “I thought you loved him.”
“I do. I’ve loved him since college. But he only came back out of pity, and now he only wants me because he’s in pain.”
“You’re sure of that? You two were together well before Philip’s death.”
“Not like this. And I understand, I really do. There is nothing worse than a parent’s grief. But there’s no point pretending it’s anything more.” She gave a short, bitter laugh. “For some reason, it seems to be impossible for me ever to be loved for myself.”
Sarah looked down the hall for help, but Alyssa had vanished. “Can we sit someplace?”
The breakfast room Adriana led her to was buttercup-yellow, with sunlight streaming through white sheer curtains. Far too happy a room for what Sarah was about to say, but she plunged in. “Is it possible you’re being a little self-absorbed here? You’re afraid of getting left behind again. I get that. But you’re doing to North exactly what you’re afraid he’s doing to you. And at a time when he can least bear it.”
“I can’t help that part,” she said. Her tone was defiant, but her lips trembled.
“If he didn’t already love you, he wouldn’t want you anywhere near him while he grieves,” Sarah pointed out. “He’s too proud and too private. So are you, which is why you sent him away before.” She reached over and rested her fingertips against the cuff of Adriana’s sweatshirt. “I don’t blame you for trying to protect your heart. But you can’t determine what’s true all by yourself. Not when you’re involved with another person.” She hesitated. “You’re sure you’re not worried, deep down, that he killed Philip, and that’s part of what’s holding you back?” Sarah was having a hard time letting go of the theory.
“It occurred to me, back when he told me what a vicious fight they had. But that night he called the minute he got home, and we talked for at least an hour − wouldn’t that give him an alibi?”
Long phone chats, even the besotted post-coital sort, had always annoyed Sarah, so this possibility hadn’t even crossed her mind. She drew a mental line across both their names. “I think you should give this a little more time. But I won’t meddle any further, I promise. I’ve got to get to the hospital.”
“Is somebody sick?”
Sarah braced, knowing how Adriana was about to react. “Graham Dennison nearly died last night.”
“What? How?”
“He got drunk and pretty well confessed, then overdosed on something.”
“Then why on earth are you asking about North?” Adriana asked angrily. “I knew Graham did it.” She pressed the back of her hand against her lips. “Sorry. I know you’ve tried to be . . . fair to him. This must be wrenching for you.” Her relief was obvious, and the apologetic hug felt patronising. “It’s a terrible thing to say,” she went on, “but maybe it would have been better if he’d died. When someone’s that twisted, there’s just no way to fix him.”
*
The minute Sarah slid behind the wheel, she remembered the noise. Please God let it still be gone. She backed tentatively out of the driveway, narrowly avoiding the mailbox, and drove toward Wells Road. Blessed silence.
But when she turned on to Wells and picked up speed, the rattle returned. Louder now, amplified by worry. The day was overcast, heavy and grey, and the pine trees looming on both sides of the road made it even gloomier. Still no other cars − where was everybody?
She braked, just to see if the noise would stop. It clattered to a halt, then screeched back when she accelerated. Not caring anymore, she floored it. She was sick of being scared, sick of not knowing what was going to happen next. Sick of Colin and his damned school and of always sensing other people’s upset, other people’s needs. Simon had more of a life.
There hadn’t been another car on the road for miles now.
Just as she thought that, she heard an engine in the distance, accelerating toward her. Her eyes flicked up to the rear-view mirror. A sleek black car was approaching, gaining fast. It came within a few hundred feet and kept pace with her, twenty miles over the limit. One person inside, looked like a middle-aged man.
She slowed to let him pass. He slowed, too, staying behind her. Was that him waving?
Hands clenching on the wheel, she zoomed forward. The rattle got louder, but
she ignored it. When her damp palms started to slip, she clutched the wheel tight with one and wiped the other dry, still bearing down on the accelerator.
He stayed in her rear-view mirror, adjusting his speed to hers. Now sweating freely, she let the wild thoughts pass. Slam on her brakes and let him rear-end her? What would that gain? Go even faster and try to outrun him? The Miata couldn’t do it. As she braked for a curve, still thinking frantically, the car gave a single loud, definitive clank and died.
Shit. She threw it into neutral and coasted over to the skinny strip of gravel on the side of the road.
The black car pulled over behind her.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The tow truck took only half an hour, and while they waited, the guy in the black car made Sarah an offer for the Miata. He’d always wanted one, and he said his mechanic could fix anything. She was so relieved to be alive, she said yes immediately. The thought of selling her car made her stomach hurt, but the timing was perfect − she couldn’t afford the kind of repairs its future held. And this way, if she did land the foundation job, she wouldn’t have to pay to garage it. She took his number and said she’d decide within the month.
Meanwhile, she needed wheels. “Slave cylinder,” the guy at the auto shop had said with a jerky nod of certainty. “We’ll have to order one in. Might even need a whole new clutch.”
Waving off his offer of a ride − she’d picked a shop close to her parents’ house − she set off at a jog. Breathing fresh air and hearing the regular thump of her sneakers hitting solid ground, she felt the morning’s stress blow off of her. By the time she reached her parents’ door, she was calm. She knocked hard, eager for the usual safe-harbour welcome.
No answer. Alarm rippled through her − they rarely went out. She stepped back to look for lights in the windows.
A minute later her dad opened the door, hastily tying a faded blue terry-cloth bathrobe.
“Dad? Is everything okay?”
“I could ask the same of you,” he pointed out. “Your mother’s at the grocery store, and I was taking a nap.”
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