In the Pines

by Laura Lascarso

  Mom liked to remind me from time to time my father had a mental illness, like cancer or any other debilitating disease, and we couldn’t blame him for what he did, but I was still angry he didn’t get help. And rather than answer our appeals to see him and be with him, he retreated into his own world, turtle-like. One thing my therapist taught me was that I had a right to my feelings and denying them, however shameful, wouldn’t make them go away. Still, it was one thing to know it and an entirely other thing to believe it.

  I pushed those thoughts aside as I entered the church.

  Mason’s visitation was a closed casket, and staring at the coffin placed in front of the altar reminded me of what was left of his body and the fact that GPD had never found his remains. Mom must be feeling pretty bad about that. I’d overheard some conversations between her and Hartsfield indicating that the Chalmerses were deeply unhappy with GPD’s handling of the case. Whether it was GPD’s or my own, today I’d be praying for a breakthrough.

  The Chalmerses stood at the head of the aisle, greeting people as they came up to pay their respects. Dare sat in the front pew, head bowed, with Daniela and Joey on either side, propping him up like an old pylon. I told my mom I was going to say hello, and she shot me a warning look. I nodded in acknowledgment but didn’t deviate in my path.

  Dare’s head lifted as I approached, and he stood to greet me. As we embraced, it felt as though he collapsed into me. I was happy to support him for as long as he needed. Joey shifted over a seat so that I could sit next to Dare. It seemed significant that Joey was willing to give up his seat for me and include me in their circle.

  “How you holding up?” I asked.

  Dare shook his head slowly. I offered my hand, and he took it. In between greeting friends and family members, Dare always sought my hand. It felt like an important job. I wanted to be useful in whatever way I could.

  The visitation seemed to stretch on for hours, with friends and relatives in an endless train that only seemed to suck more and more energy from Dare. His life in the theater hadn’t prepared him for the amount of effort it took to sustain this kind of event. Afterward my mom and I, along with Mason’s relations, followed in a solemn line of cars with police escorts to the cemetery, where the actual service would be held. It seemed our entire high school had gathered in the cutting winter light of early afternoon. There wasn’t room enough in the tent for all the bodies. The crowd’s collective grief was sharp and frequently punctuated with mournful sobs.

  Despite the somber atmosphere and my own feelings of sorrow at Dare’s profound loss, I found myself searching for the faces of my suspects. All were present. Ms. Sparrow and Coach Gundry stood in a group of Eastview High staff, each of them clutching a program in their hands, tears in their eyes. Peter Orr was with the rest of the wrestling team, wearing their green letterman jackets in a show of solidarity. Mason’s jacket was laid over the casket, having been recovered from the cabin of Mason’s truck with no traces of blood or any DNA evidence other than Mason’s and Daniela’s, which wasn’t unusual since she was more often the wearer of the jacket.

  Peter had a hard look on his face, but so did many of the wrestlers, as though they were afraid the slightest show of sadness might lead to an embarrassing emotional outburst. The code of man was rigid indeed. Joey had his arm around Daniela, who hadn’t stopped crying since the service began. Joey had tears in his eyes too. Only Dare seemed removed from the scene, with a distant, vacant expression on his face. I remembered when he’d gone into shock after seeing his brother dead. I suspected he might be disassociating from the situation altogether.

  The adults said what needed to be said, painting a version of Mason that was rosy and good and utterly boring. They listed a few of his and Dare’s pranks over the years, but even that didn’t do him justice. I sat dutifully at Dare’s side and offered up my presence as a comfort. Finally, the pastor officiating the service invited Dare to speak. He took the microphone and glanced out at the crowd. Even in his grief, his stage presence was commanding, and it seemed as if this was what we had all been waiting for. No one, not even his parents by our estimation, loved Mason as fervently as his brother.

  “There is nothing I wouldn’t give or do to have Mason back for even a day.” Dare’s lashes dewed with tears, and he closed his eyes for a moment to gather himself. “And there’s nothing I could say that would capture the kind of person he was and what he meant to me.” His eyes scanned the crowd for a moment, before landing on Joey. “What he meant to us.”

  Joey gave him a wan smile.

  “So, instead, I’ll relate to you all a plan the two of us made when we were sixteen. It was around the time he started dating Daniela.” Dare gazed down at her before continuing. “I was jealous Mason wasn’t spending all of his free time with me, so he made me a promise that when we got our inheritance, we’d start up our own ice cream business, like Ben & Jerry’s, but instead of clever names that referenced pop culture, we’d come up with flavors to capture all the feelings that were difficult to put into words… ‘Christmas morning’ and ‘Scoring the lead in the school musical,’ but sad feelings too, like ‘Instagram envy’ and ‘Making weight,’ which was going to be a really terrible flavor of nonfat frozen yogurt.” Dare shook his head, and a small smile appeared on his face as if remembering.

  “And one of the flavors was ‘Missing Mason,’ and I was supposed to eat it whenever I was lonely because he was away at sports camp or off with Daniela….” He pressed his lips together as if trying to hold back a sob. “But there is no flavor for a world without Mason. And the saddest thing is knowing I’m all alone in remembering, and all of my thoughts of my brother will forever be looking backward and never forward.” At this Dare started breaking down.

  “We’ll never be able to make our stupid flop of an ice cream business or take secret video of each other and post it online or make each other laugh over something stupid. We won’t wear tuxes at each other’s weddings and make really bad toasts. I’ll never be Uncle Dare and he’ll never be a father. So what is the flavor for that? Huh, brother?” Dare laid his hand on the shiny wood casket. He seemed for a moment to be communicating with Mason’s ghost. Then he tore his eyes away and shook his head remorsefully. “It’s absolutely nothing.”

  Dare passed off the microphone. His shoulders shuddered as he tried to contain his sobs. I expected him to go to his parents for comfort, but instead he headed for Joey, who pulled him into his arms and gripped the back of his head possessively while whispering words of comfort into his ear. Then, instead of resuming his seat in the chair next to mine, Dare strode out of the tent and continued along a path between two rows of headstones. I glanced over at Joey and Daniela to see if someone should follow him.

  “You go, Charlie,” Daniela said.

  I gave Dare a bit of a head start, then left the ceremony in pursuit, allowing him a few minutes to himself. The cemetery lawns were lushly green, the weather having just turned but not yet cold enough to kill the grass. The sky was blindingly blue. It was far too colorful a day for such a bleak occasion.

  I caught up with Dare where he sat in a bed of pine needles at the base of two trees that had grown so close together they’d fused at the bottom. Dare was smoking a cigarette and flicking a Zippo lighter. I watched him for a moment, his eyes focused on the flame before snuffing it out, the metallic clink like a tomb being shut. Over and over he did it, in a rhythm that suggested it was a regular kind of ritual for him. Finally he glanced up and saw me.

  “Hey there, Charlie-bo-barley,” he said sadly.

  “I don’t want to disturb you.”

  “You’re not. I could do that for hours—stare at an open flame. Did it a lot growing up.” He picked up the lighter but didn’t summon the flame. “Mason gave this to me last year for our birthday.”

  He flashed the side toward me. DLC was engraved into it in an ornate script. Darren Lee Chalmers. “He told me not to start any fires bigger than me with it.” Dare’s fist
closed around the lighter, and he tucked it back inside his coat. “So far, I haven’t.”

  I took that as an invitation and sat down next to him with my forearms on my knees. The hem of my slacks tugged up to show off my dress socks, which were decorated with the sequence of pi in an unending spiral.

  “You are such a geek, Charlie,” he said with a weak laugh and pointed to my socks. “Don’t ever change.” I was glad I’d chosen these socks to wear; anything to bring a moment of levity to this sorrowful day.

  “You did a good job back there.” I didn’t know what it meant to do a “good job” giving a loved one’s eulogy, but Dare’s speech felt honest, and that seemed like the most important thing to me.

  “Thanks,” he said glumly. He squinted at the blinding sun. “Mason and I were supposed to go to Europe this summer. Just the two of us. And Joey if we could convince him. Mason wanted to spit off the side of the Eiffel Tower.”

  “Sounds like Mason.”

  “Yeah, he couldn’t admit that he actually wanted to see it without making it into a joke. Not even to me.”

  “We’re all trying to be something, I guess.” I cringed inwardly at my psychobabble. I sounded like a cheap imitation of Dr. Rangala.

  “You believe in heaven, Charlie?”

  I cleared my throat. He sure didn’t ask easy questions. “No.”

  “Hell?”

  “Nope.”

  He exhaled a cloud of smoke. When it cleared, his gray eyes were staring at me. “So, where is he, then?”

  Judaism was pretty ambiguous about the afterlife. My mom tended to focus on the complexities of the observable world. She said humans have the capacity to create their own hell on earth for themselves and others. And she’d seen a lot of nastiness in her line of work, which caused her to doubt that humans—even the best of us—had any right to eternal life.

  My dad was a little less cynical, though he too had no answers on the subject. Something he always told me: people will try to tell you they know what happens after we die, but the truth is, no one knows. So you’d better make the most of what you got. I supposed that was the question that kept some of us awake late into the night.

  Looking at Dare’s forlorn face, I wished I had a better answer for him. “I don’t know, Dare.”

  “It’s like he’s just… gone. Forever.” His shoulders slumped, and he stared at the ground while flicking the ash out of habit. “I can’t watch them lower the coffin. I don’t want to see my brother being put into the ground.”

  He seemed to be looking for permission to miss the rest of the service. “You don’t have to go back.”

  Dare nodded. He smoked, and I stared out at the rows upon rows of headstones. My father’s body was interred at my mother’s family burial plot in a cemetery not far from here. At the end of shivah, we floated down the Itchetucknee River, where we’d spent some of our happiest times as a family. Mom and I made a yearly trip during the summer and allowed ourselves to grieve. I wondered if the Chalmerses would do something similar to honor Mason.

  Nearby a chickadee made its call, cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger, reminding me how strange it was that even with your loved ones gone, the world continues on.

  “It’s all my fault,” Dare said, biting down on his lower lip.

  “It’s not.”

  “It is. It absolutely is. Here’s something you should know about my brother. Mason hated scary movies, and the only way he’d watch one was if I’d already seen it and could tell him when bad things were about to happen.” He took a terse drag from his cigarette and blew out the smoke aggressively. “And I keep thinking about what he must have experienced the night he died—how scared he must have been—and I wasn’t there to protect him.”

  I placed a hand on his back to reassure him. I understood what he felt.

  “He needed me, Charlie, and I bailed on him.”

  “If you had known, you would have fought his attacker with everything you have.”

  “Yes, I would have.” His regret was threaded with menace. “And I will.” He blew out a deep smoke-fumed sigh and crushed his spent cigarette on the sole of his shoe. “How’s the investigation going?”

  I sensed this was his attempt to switch topics, though the subject certainly wasn’t light-hearted. I didn’t want to tell him I’d reached a dead end, but I owed him the truth. “I still need to check on a few alibis, but right now, everyone acts suspicious but no one seems to have a strong enough motive. My mom also hasn’t been too cooperative with sharing evidence.”

  “Didn’t Daniela say my brother had been going to Café Risqué this summer?”

  I nodded. “You think there’s something there?”

  “He never told me about it. Just like the drugs. Mason was hiding things from everyone, including me. I feel like the key to finding his murderer is figuring out what the hell he was up to.”

  “I can check it out,” I told him. “But I won’t be able to get inside. I don’t turn eighteen until April, and I don’t have a fake ID.”

  “I can get around that. What are you doing this afternoon?”

  “Isn’t there a reception happening at your house?” I asked.

  Dare grunted. “Yeah, I have to be there for that. My mother will kill me if I miss it. How about after then?”

  I’d have to make up an excuse to tell my mom. Not an excuse, I’d have to flat-out lie to her, but maybe she’d be busy following up on her own leads. “Sure, I’ll hang out until you’re finished and we’ll go together.”

  Dare stood and offered me his hand. He looked a bit brighter than when I’d found him. Searching for his brother’s killer gave him purpose. I understood that. Part of what was so maddening with my father was there was no one to direct all my anger and frustration at, except for him and in a roundabout way, myself.

  I worried, though, when Mason’s killer was found, if Dare might not be worse off for it.

  Chapter 11

  THE RECEPTION at Dare’s house lasted for a few hours, and then some of Mason and Dare’s friends hung out by the pool and reminisced. I was on the outside of their shared experiences, which allowed me to listen for any clues that might be nested in their conversation, but most of the stories I’d heard already, and none of them hinted at any undiscovered scandal. Dare seemed to delight in their stories, though all were tinged with a pallor of melancholy. I kept thinking about what Dare had said about looking backward and never forward. Like that pendant Ms. Sparrow wore, a life forever trapped in resin.

  While waiting for the bathroom, I heard a snuffling noise coming from inside. It sounded like someone was crying. I drew back into the shadows of the hallway and waited for the mourner to emerge. I was shocked to see Peter Orr with a splotchy, tear-stained face, and instead of rejoining the group of friends out back, he skirted around the remaining members of the Chalmerses’s party and headed for the front door. I felt as though this was my chance, if ever there was one, to get Peter to open up.

  “Hey, Peter, wait up.” He swiveled around with a savage expression, upset that I’d caught him emoting, as if it weren’t a natural and healthy expression to be sad over a friend’s death.

  “What do you want?” he growled. His eyes were red and his freckles stood out more prominently on his brick-like face.

  “I just wanted to thank you and the team for coming out. I’m sure Dare appreciated it.”

  Peter shook his head, a rueful twist to his lips. “It’s all about Dare, isn’t it? Even now. Mason is dead and Dare’s still on stage getting all the applause.”

  That seemed like a pretty harsh assessment, but I was curious to follow that trail to see where we might end up.

  “You don’t like Dare,” I said.

  “It’s not that.” Peter plugged his eyes with his fists. “They just… they get whatever they want, you know? Everything’s been handed to them, their whole lives. They don’t even have to work for it. Makes me mad, is all.”

  I could argue that none of it matter
ed now because Mason was dead and Dare was missing his other half desperately, but I decided to take a more sympathetic route. “Like in wrestling? It just came easy to Mason.”

  “Yeah, it did. God, they’re so stupid, the both of them. I just wish….”

  I waited for him to finish the thought.

  And waited.

  “What do you wish, Peter?”

  Peter looked at me as though trying to determine whether or not I could be trusted. “I wish Mason had more common sense, is all. Maybe if the two of them weren’t always trying to one-up each other, this might have never happened.”

  He shook his head again and stalked out the front door. A moment later I heard tires squealing as I puzzled over how a competitive streak between the brothers and a penchant for pranks could lead to Mason’s murder. And what Peter might know about Mason’s death that he wasn’t revealing.

  “Anger issues,” said a voice beside me. Joey had snuck up on us in the hallway and caught the tail end of our interaction. He still wore his black funeral suit, along with his UF ball cap. Still, it wasn’t enough to hide his swollen eyes.

  “You know Peter well?” I asked Joey.

  “Well enough. I don’t care to know him any better.”

  Interesting.

  “Were Mason and Peter close?”

  “Mason tolerated Peter. That’s about the extent of their friendship.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Peter’s a dick, but Mason said Peter made him better. More competitive, I mean. If Mason could beat Peter in a match, he could beat anyone.”

  “Did Mason ever throw that in his face?”

  Joey shrugged. “The usual trash talk. Nothing out of the ordinary, though.”