Owen was the only one who hadn’t had anything to drink, so he was in the driver’s seat. They might have an unofficial get-out-of-jail-free card with the local constabulary, but the Storm King didn’t believe in recklessness—at least not gratuitous recklessness. Johnny was in the passenger seat, which left Tom and Nate in the back.
“We’re lucky the Stones don’t have a fence around their pool,” Owen said.
“Yeah,” Tom said. “Lucky.”
Tom always felt rotten after a Thunder Run. Hollowed out, somehow. The ramp-up was always exhilarating while Nate psyched them up for it. They need to be punished, he’d tell them. We are agents of karmic retribution setting a lopsided universe into balance. It somehow made sense when Nate said these things. But afterward, Tom felt unsettled. Guilty. He couldn’t take the same pleasure in destruction that the others seemed to. Afterward, he couldn’t help thinking that in trying to reconcile the equations of pain they somehow edged them further out of balance.
“I’m sure it was insured, Tommy,” Nate said. He wrapped his arm around Tom’s neck, too tight.
Tom winced and waited for the pressure to ease. Nate was always too rough when he’d been drinking.
“To Jim Tatum’s house!” Nate told Owen.
Owen pulled away from the curb, and Tom watched familiar houses hum past his window. Greystone Lake reeled by like a long camera pan of a memorized film.
He tried to absorb the fact that this era of his life was over. That high school was finally over. Did he feel different, he wondered. Had the world changed?
Nate had eased his grip, and his arm was draped loosely around Tom’s neck as he looked through his own window.
Sometimes Tom knew exactly what Nate was thinking, and other times he could not begin to fathom his friend’s mind. He imagined Nate’s interior landscape as an awful and wondrous alien place.
Long lines of cars presaged the festivities at Jim Tatum’s house. Though nearly everything in the Lake was within walking distance, the Tatum residence was on a big chunk of land at the northern edge of the town, abutting the protected forests of the headlands. It was a familiar venue for their class’s festivities, and the location was perfect for an all-out rager.
The Lake had secrets, but the party that traditionally followed the school’s officially sanctioned graduation events wasn’t one of them. Everyone knew about it, including Tom’s dad and the rest of the police force. But they’d once been teenagers, too. They’d once been as fortunate, and vital, and proud, and knew in some part of themselves that the most foolish thing young gods could do was not milk this incandescent age for its every drop. If you weren’t in these fleeting years, you longed for them.
The authorities usually looked the other way as long as things didn’t get too out of hand. Which was good, Tom thought, as he surveyed the stretch of parked cars. Because you didn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to know what was afoot.
Owen and Johnny exited the car, and Tom opened his door. Nate was still motionless, staring out his window.
“We’re here, Nate.”
When Nate turned to him it took only a fraction of a second for a smile to regain his face, but Tom still caught a glimpse of blank distance in his eyes. Tom didn’t know where Nate went in moments like this, but he knew he went there alone.
Where do you go? Tom always wanted to ask him. Where do you go while you’re right next to me?
“Let’s get something to drink, boys!” Nate said. As he burst from the car, no trace remained of the depths to which he’d drifted. Once on the wet street he was thunder and light and joy.
The rain from earlier should have cut the humidity, but the air felt tropical.
The Tatums had a stately colonial, but the party was set far back from the house, through the woods in a clearing just shy of the headlands. The forest was dark, but music led them to the others like a beacon. Soon the flicker of a bonfire and the twinkle of lanterns cut through the stockade of trees.
Nate led them onward, and their gathered classmates let out a roar when they saw him. Tom felt proud standing next to him. His friend. His best friend. His oldest friend in the world. The eyes of their whole class were upon them as they cut through the undergrowth and Nate put his arm around Tom’s shoulders. He pulled Tom’s face to his own until they were only inches apart and looked straight into his soul as if to say:
This. This is what life is.
Eleven
Nate hesitated at the sight of his own name, but his hands did not.
They yanked the filing cabinet drawer open hard enough to jostle its contents. Its hanging folders swayed and fell, exposing an 8 × 10 of his teenage self leering sideways at him.
His senior portrait. His hair had been longer then, casual without being careless. Little about that boy had been careless. He was not quite smirking, but there was an undeniably satisfied look on his face.
There were other small cabinets pushed up close against the closet’s wall. Drawers for Tom, Johnny, and Owen were in the same cabinet as his own. Adam Decker and his circle of friends had their own. A third contained Lindsay, Emma, and even the Sarahs. Friends, enemies, predators, prey, and others not so easily categorized.
Nate had been so starved for information and so eager to discover something—anything—about Lucy’s murder that this trove overwhelmed him. He opened one drawer after another, pulling at files and paging through reports, but the first one he studied in depth was Adam’s.
Adam and his accomplices had been expelled from Greystone Lake High after the violent confrontation in the chemistry lab. When their house burned down, the Deckers moved full-time to their farm in Gracefield, where Adam had finished his senior year. Nate wasn’t sure what had happened to his minions, but Adam had been recruited by a solid New England college for lacrosse. His player profile photo was in his file. A Piscean-eyed Nordic giant in shoulder pads.
The material within Adam’s drawer seemed scant compared with what was in Nate’s section. In addition to official reports and photos and photocopies of evidence, Adam’s file contained what looked like pages ripped straight from the chief’s own notes. Written in caps on a piece of yellow legal paper: INCONSISTENT ACCOUNT. ATM CAM FOOTAGE CONFLICTS WITH TIMELINE FROM SWORN STATEMENT. Copies of withdrawal slips and gas pump receipts were stapled to this note.
In the days immediately following Lucy’s disappearance, Nate had coerced Tom into prying, wheedling, and outright spying on the police investigation, but this information about Adam Decker was news to him. Decker had lied to the police, which meant he was hiding something.
Nate felt the thing inside him writhe.
He was supposed to be a man who built things up, not one who ripped them apart. He was supposed to make people better, not bring them pain. Despite the good life he’d constructed around this idea of himself, that wildfire of a teenager still burned inside him.
There was far too much here for Nate to absorb, and the chief was overdue to return. He toyed with the idea of letting himself be discovered inside this forbidden space. This would at least compel the chief to address the roomful of research he’d collected. Because it meant something, this closet and its concealed knowledge.
It meant that the chief never believed Lucy had run away. It meant he knew that her body had been out there, waiting, all this time.
Forcing a confrontation was tempting. Surprising the man could shake loose all kinds of interesting things. But Nate decided that the smarter move was to get Tom on board and access this place after hours. That way, they’d be able to pore through everything at their leisure.
Nate made up his mind to leave the closet just as he’d found it, but he couldn’t resist another look at his own drawer. He couldn’t understand why there was so much more in here than in any of the others he’d opened.
He straightened the hanging folders he’d accidentally dislodged. Among them was one enigmatically titled EVENTS. A quick thumb through its manila subdivisions revealed the damage report
s, repair estimates, and newspaper clippings of a number of their Thunder Runs. The chief must have gone through Lucy’s journals and researched each and every episode of vandalism she’d mentioned.
Nate knew he was out of time, but another folder caught his eye: PSYCH. As with the aftermath of his family’s car accident, the weeks that followed Lucy’s disappearance were blurred and nettle-edged. But a bad fight that July had briefly landed Nate back with his old therapist. There’d been talk of charges being filed, but as is often the case in such small towns, the incident was smoothed over in the end.
Copies of his therapist’s notes from those sessions were filed here. The documents weren’t anything approaching an official psych evaluation. They were casual, handwritten pages complete with doodles. This was a clear violation of Nate’s patient privileges, but the chief could have outright stolen them for all he knew. It didn’t matter now. What mattered were the words scrawled across these pages. Phrases like “dissociative tendencies,” “highly manipulative and narcissistic,” and “weak conscience/no conscience?” Boxed and underlined at the bottom of the page was a question: “ASPD?”
Nate knew from his psychiatry rotation that this stood for antisocial personality disorder. It was the umbrella under which psychopaths and sociopaths were placed.
The chief had known Nate as long as anyone in the world. Was this what the man believed he was?
Nate was unsteady when he turned to leave the grim little room. And this was regrettable, because it was then that he most needed his strength.
A last filing cabinet was separated from all the others. It was closest to the door, which is why he hadn’t noticed it at first. This one was Lucy’s. Its contents were the reason Nate had come to Greystone Lake, and he didn’t even need to open its drawers to find what he wanted. The chief must have been studying her files recently because a manila folder lay open on top of the cabinet. Her senior portrait glowed from it. It was startling to see her so youthful after all these years, though it was the only age she’d ever be. Nate pushed aside a pair of pressed uniforms and took an involuntary step toward her files, pulled like a flower to the sun.
She’d been so beautiful. He picked up the 8 × 10.
Behind it, there was a more recent photograph.
Despite his medical training and common sense, Nate had somehow convinced himself that those hikers in the headlands had discovered her body. But Lucy’s body was long gone. Her long limbs had wasted and contracted into a stick figure’s parody. Her skull grinned a shocking smile. Her once-white shirt had yellowed and shrunk to only a gesture of modesty. Her lustrous hair had been reduced to something spare and dry and bristling. It wasn’t a body, because after fourteen years, how could it be? She was a skeleton.
Nate’s stomach lurched, but this was why he was here. He had to find out what they knew. Skeletal remains gave the medical examiner less to work with, but they still might have been able to re-create something of Lucy’s final moments. He didn’t need to fumble through the drawers to find the postmortem report, because it was right there, too.
Fracture of hyoid bone.
His eyes speared sentences as he paged for the ME’s concluding remarks.
Colles’ fractures of left and right wrists.
White underwear, partially torn, blood-stained with positive prostate-specific antigen (PSA) reaction in fabric analysis.
He had to force himself to breathe.
Remarks: Decedent’s remains were presented to this office as a homicide victim. Hyoid bone fracture suggests strangulation as cause of death. Hyoid fracture is indicative of manual strangulation, though decedent’s skeletal remains provide insufficient evidence to determine this conclusively. PSA-positive result indicates presence of semen in decedent’s clothing. Paired with dual Colles’ fractures of the wrist, this suggests violent forced intercourse. It is unknown whether intercourse occurred antemortem or postmortem. DNA from samples are too degraded for further analysis. GLPD were notified of these findings immediately upon conclusion of examination.
Nate’s vision went bleary and it took every mote of self-control he possessed to make it back into the office before vomiting into the chief’s trash can.
“What in the—?”
Nate turned away from the bin to see the chief standing in the doorway. The man glanced at the open door to his closet, and his face swelled with fury. “How did—the hell do you think you’re doing! Interfering with an active investigation? Going through confidential documents! I could charge you.”
“He raped her.” Nate coughed the last thing left in his stomach into the trash can. “He raped her then he killed her.”
The chief stooped to bring his face closer to Nate’s. His eyes held a mixture of horror and hunger.
“Who? Who killed her, son?”
“Who?” Nate’s shock turned to fury at the speed of lightning. He sprang from the floor, wrapped his hands around the chief’s neck, lifted him off the ground, and slammed the man against the office’s glass partition. Cracks exploded across the pane as shadows streaked the edges of Nate’s vision. “Why don’t you know? After fourteen years why don’t you know?”
The man became loose in his grip. He clutched the chief’s jaw with one hand while the other grabbed the side of his head. One pulse of movement would shatter his C3 vertebrae to sever the brain’s connection to the diaphragm. Nate ran his hand to the base of the chief’s jaw and left a trail of blood along the bristles of his cheek.
The sight of blood returned Nate to himself. He released the man and stared at his own hands. He’d again clutched his fists tight enough to slice his palms. The blood was his own.
“You didn’t do it.” The chief coughed the words out as he slid down the wall to the floor. His shoulders went slack, and Nate couldn’t tell if this was in defeat or in relief. “You didn’t kill her.”
Nate collapsed to the carpet across from the older man.
He raped her then he killed her.
Nate’s shouting had gotten the attention of the uniformed officer who’d been manning the front desk.
“You all right, boss?” the officer asked. He hadn’t drawn his gun, but his hand was on his holster. His gaze did not waver from Nate.
I never should have come back here.
“It’s fine,” the chief muttered hoarsely. “It’s over.”
Nate leaned against the desk. Every part of him shook.
He raped her then he killed her.
Someone else approached the office door. A man not in a uniform.
Chief Buck staggered to his feet, looked into the hall, and waved the new arrival away. There was something frantic in the chief’s gestures that set off an alarm in Nate’s head.
He got to his feet.
The man was still huge, and wider than Nate remembered him. He seemed to take up the entire hallway. He was powerfully built, but softer around the midsection than he’d once been. An athlete gone to seed. The pate of his head caught the layout of the overhead lights.
Nate’s trembling stopped, and he felt his body center itself into perfect balance. Before his vision dissolved into black and red, he became aware of his own unstoppable charge at Adam Decker.
THIS. THIS IS WHAT LIFE IS.
That was the message Nate’s electric eyes telegraphed to Tom’s as they trampled through canary grass to the welcoming roar of their classmates.
Like many good things, Tom’s euphoria was ephemeral. It lasted only as long as it took for him to notice Lucy, all but elbowing her way through the crowd. She rushed Nate as if he were the last lifeboat on a foundering ship. Nate pulled her tight while he still had an arm around Tom. For a moment it was as if the three of them were wrapped in a single embrace. But not even Nate was strong enough to hold both Tom and Lucy at once.
“I’ll get drinks.” Tom snaked out from Nate’s hold.
Lucy lobbed a smirk at him as Nate closed his hug of her with the arm Tom had vacated.
While he, Nate, Johnny, and
Owen had gotten pizza after school, Lucy had metamorphosed into something else. In addition to the manicure and pedicure, she’d gotten her hair cut and styled. She’d worn a sundress and heels under her graduation gown. She hadn’t bothered with such delicate things since the days before her friendship with Lindsay and the Sarahs collapsed. If anything, her recent style tended toward grunge. But this was the New Lucy. Since the ceremony, she’d changed into short-shorts, a white tank top, and a jade kimono wrap that matched her eyes. Things are about to change was the message Tom gleaned from the plunge of her neckline and the careful auburn waves that bounced at her shoulder. She even wore a trio of white calla lilies in her hair.
There wasn’t a line at the keg. He pumped it a dozen times before it released its beer in a flaccid trickle.
Red and orange paper lanterns were strung from branch to branch along the edges of the glade. A shoulders-high bonfire crackled at one end of the clearing while speakers pumped from the other. Jim must have rented a generator for the lights and sound system, but if there was ever an event for which to go all out, this was it. Their class had shared good times together. If this was to be their last, it should also be their best.
Once he’d filled two cups, Tom returned to find his friend listening intently to Jim Tatum. Someone had given Nate a joint, which he casually rested in the hand wrapped around Lucy. He held it for her as she took a hit. Jim must have reached the punch line because Nate leaned back and laughed. A rich, deep, genuine sound that made Tom smile.
Tom handed Nate his cup and was about to clink his own drink against his when—
“You’re a doll,” Lucy said as she plucked the beer from his hand. She gave him a sidelong glance and blew a flute of smoke from the corner of her mouth.
Tom felt a flare of anger, though he knew this was wasted energy. Lucy could get away with just about anything. Maybe he’d get another beer or maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe he’d hang out with Johnny and Owen, or maybe he’d just walk home. If he did, Nate would eventually notice he was gone. Eventually, he’d wonder where his best friend had disappeared to on the greatest night of their lives.
The Storm King: A Novel Page 17