Julia’s girlfriend Margot had seen it one night after she came over for dinner. She’d asked what Julia would be wearing to a mutual friend’s wedding, so Julia brought her upstairs and swung the closet door open.
Margot had stepped forward and sighed. “Are you kidding me? Could you two be any cuter?”
“Ignore that,” Julia said with a grin as she dug for the dress.
“Impossible.” Margot’s eyes scanned the collection, and her voice went syrupy. “Aww, you’re so romantic, Julia.” Margot shoved her with a soft hand.
In truth, though, it was Tony’s collection. She’d added the stray piece here and there, but he was the true curator. He was the one with a roll of tape in his sock drawer. Some mornings she’d find Tony standing in the closet, half dressed for work, staring at the door. She might watch him for a full minute before he turned to her, his eyes a little misty.
Tony’s softness was one of his greatest qualities. He was so handsome, his body so strong, that even after more than a decade together, she could still be caught off guard by his tenderness. The way he’d touch her back so gently as he passed by her in the kitchen while they cooked. The way he pecked the kids on the head. The fatherly voice he used with his younger brother.
Tony was shutting the door to the study as she left the bedroom.
“Was that Nick?”
He looked surprised, like he’d been caught. “Yeah.”
“What’s going on?”
“Nothing,” he said quickly. “Just—we were talking about court yesterday on the drive.”
Tony had driven Nick to Goodspring a day ago. He said Nick had been quiet. They hadn’t talked about the overdose or anything else.
“Oh, you were?”
“Just for a second. Barely. He’s just nervous to testify. You know.”
Julia nodded. It would be awful. The chance that it would settle in January seemed fleeting, but sometimes the possibility was the only thing that gave her any peace about what Nick would otherwise go through.
“Were you telling him not to tell the ADA that he’s nervous? She’ll understand.”
“Not that he can’t tell her, just that he doesn’t need to think about it really.” There was a defensive edge to his voice. “Until the next court date. Since it might settle. That’s all.”
Julia nodded. That made sense. Tony must have been so upset about all of this—Nick trying to overdose, going to the program. She replayed their fight—was it a fight?—at the hospital and regretted how harshly she’d spoken to Tony. But he needed to understand the severity of the situation with Nick’s mental health. That they couldn’t take on keeping him safe themselves.
And now both of them, Nick and Tony, were already back on court. Although they were premature, Nick’s fears weren’t misplaced. If there was a trial next fall, it would be awful. Eva Barr would try to make Nick look like he’d been drunk and willing. Photos of Nick’s body would be shown in court. Eva would argue that the graph of Nick’s actions only had one logical landing point: a consensual sexual encounter with her client.
And at the end of the trial, a jury of Mainers would decide what the situation looked like to them. The court would try to control for prejudice—would try to remove from the jury pool anyone who held a bias against gay people or male victims. But surely they would squeeze through: unspoken inclinations and unrealized beliefs. People who would watch the evidence for proof of their preheld beliefs about what a man like Nick or Walker would be like, and what must have happened between them.
It was too early to worry about that. She stepped forward and pecked Tony on the cheek. She was glad he thought so, too.
45
Tony Hall, 2015
Tony was greeted by warmth as he opened the front door of the Portland Public Library. His face had gone stiff with cold on his walk from his office. His ears began to ache as he crossed the atrium with the bubbling fountain.
He took the stairs to the lower level and made his way to the nonfiction section, keeping his face turned away from the circulation desk. He remembered from the past two days that he was looking for the general range of 363–364. Eventually he would move into the pharmaceutical section, but he was going to take this one topic at a time.
It seemed the odds were higher that he’d run into someone he knew in Portland, but he was tired of using up most of his lunch break driving to and from libraries farther away. Besides, he had rehearsed for the possibility earlier in the week on those very drives.
“Oh, this?” (Sheepish laugh.) “I’m trying to write a murder mystery—how embarrassing is that?”
Maybe it was stupid to be using the library like this at all, but using his phone or a computer to plan anything seemed a dangerous idea. He’d deleted the history on Julia’s computer earlier that week, but he couldn’t shake the vague idea he had that for the police, everything electronic was traceable.
Tony walked around the edge of the room, reading the numbers on the sides of the shelves until he found the right range. With relief he quickly spotted the spine of a promising book he’d found on an earlier trip. Now take it and go sit down.
“Tony?”
Tony jerked his hand and sent the book pitching forward off the shelf. He caught it awkwardly, splaying the pages open between his hands.
“Whoa, sorry!” the voice said.
He turned to see it was Walt Abraham, a classmate from his first year in law school.
“Walt, hey!” They met mid-aisle and shook hands. “How’ve you been?” Tony folded his arms over the book against his chest.
Walt launched into the same chitchat Tony heard every time he ran into a former classmate. How long had it been? What was he up to? He was smart not to be a lawyer, what a slog. (As if human resources at a law firm was any better.) How about Julia? How old were the kids now? Tony squeezed the book to his chest and kept his answers short. In spite of Tony’s decision to leave law school after the first year, his career and marital choices had left a foot firmly planted in the world of attorneys. He generally didn’t mind running into a guy like Walt, but at the moment he wanted nothing to do with him.
“Well,” Walt said at last. “I’ve gotta get moving, but I just had to stop when I saw you. I’m so glad to hear you and Julia are well. You know,” he said, stepping closer to Tony and lowering his voice, “a lot of guys I run into after seven years, I might not expect they were still married to the same woman. But look at that—you even sound happy!”
Walt had gotten divorced the year after Tony left law school, then married again a few years after graduation, Tony had heard. Judging by his bare left hand, that one hadn’t gone well, either.
“How do you two do it?”
“Oh, just lucky I guess,” Tony said.
“Great running into you,” Walt said as he walked away.
“You, too,” Tony said. His heartbeat thudded against the book. Walt hadn’t even noticed it. And why would he have?
He looked down at the book, nestled against his chest; there was a splash of coffee or tea spattered across the top edge of the pages. Just go sit down and read. Standing here, staring at it is way more obvious than sitting down and reading it. He strode across the collection room, sat in an overstuffed armchair, and read.
* * *
As he walked back to the office, Tony probably should have mulled over everything he’d read in the last forty minutes, but instead he couldn’t distract himself from Walt’s question. How had they stayed happy—save for the present blip—for so long?
His first and only year in law school, Tony had noticed Julia Clark, sure, but he noticed other pretty classmates, too. She was reserved in class, like a lot of them were that first year, and he hadn’t thought too much at all about her. He was too busy bombing his classes. At the end of the first year, he dropped out. Then one night that summer, he walked into a bar with a
friend and found Julia there, slinging drinks.
The bar was called the Ruby, and Julia looked different there. Her wild, curly hair was up in a ponytail. It swished against her neck as she wiped out the glasses with a cloth. She was wearing a tight tank top and high-waisted jean shorts that made her ass look ample—it wasn’t, he’d snuck quick glances during the school year, but the illusion still excited him.
Struck by how cool she looked behind the bar, he worried what she would think of him ordering something nonalcoholic. When she greeted them and took their orders, Tony asked for something off the chalkboard behind her. It did not taste like alcohol—instead like vanilla and something spicy—and he drank it far too fast.
She stood behind the bar giggling and talking to him for an hour before his friend saw he’d become the third wheel and left. They’d covered their classmates, Tony’s drop-out, and had started in on television when she asked if she could make Tony another.
What had felt like the warm fuzzies of infatuation suddenly went numb.
What number was that?
“Hold up,” he said.
She turned to him, standing against a backdrop of liquor bottles—blue, green, amber. A loose curl had fallen to her collarbone, and in the dim lighting, her features were pronounced and beautiful.
“I don’t drink.”
“Oh.” She looked down at the clean glass in her hand. “But you just drank.”
“I mean, I do—no, I can.” He felt his face flushing. “I just don’t really like to.” This was the part where she’d ask why—was he an alcoholic, or just afraid of becoming one?
“Okay,” she said skeptically. “Can I get you a water?”
And just like that, everything changed. They stopped flirting and started talking. Over the next three hours, they laid themselves bare to each other, knowing that if either pulled away after this, it didn’t count as real rejection, because it hadn’t been a date to begin with. Tony told Julia, as best he could, why he didn’t drink. About his father who did and the brother who still lived with him. How badly Tony wanted to fight whenever he drank, as stupid as that was.
“Are daddy issues sexy on a guy?” Tony asked.
Julia raised an eyebrow. “Wanna hear mine?”
Tony leaned forward. “Please.”
She leaned down onto her elbows so her face was inches from his. “My dad was perfect.”
Tony laughed and sat back.
She smiled. “Perfect for the first twenty years of my life. Then one day I went to my parents’ for dinner, and my dad told me he had pancreatic cancer, stage four, and a month later my mom was giving his eulogy.”
“Fuck.”
“Yup. It sucked, big time. And the worst part?”
Tony shook his head.
“He refused treatment.”
“Why?”
“He didn’t want to spend all the money, didn’t want to take medicine that would make him even sicker. I was never sure which reasons were real and which were bullshit, because none of them were good enough not to try to stay with us.”
Tony didn’t know what to say to that.
“For the record,” Julia said, “I will never marry a man who isn’t a fighter.”
Tony leaned toward the bar again. “As you know, I fight too much to trust myself drinking.”
She smiled and nodded. “I noticed.”
As the memory played out in his mind, Tony felt a resolve swelling in his chest. He and Julia had compared their emotional baggage that night and found it compatible. He’d driven her crazy a few times over the years, and she him, but they worked together because of their pasts. Julia had always wanted a fighter.
And that, Tony was.
46
John Rice, 2015
Rice and O’Malley were in the break room making their morning coffees when Merlo poked his head in and told Rice he had a visitor.
“Britny Cressey?” Merlo said.
Rice groaned.
“Britny who?” O’Malley asked.
“She called me a couple months ago—Ray Walker’s old friend. Or girlfriend, but not.” He shrugged.
“Right,” O’Malley said as Rice followed Merlo out. “‘He’s not a violent guy, I just happen to want you to know that,’ et cetera.”
“Yep,” Rice said. He had actual work to do today. She was just going to waste his time.
He set his coffee on his desk, then met the woman with the girlish voice in the lobby.
“To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“I don’t even know where to begin,” Britny said. In spite of her voice, she looked her age. Late thirties.
“Why don’t you give it your best shot.”
Her long hair was dyed an unnatural red, and she pulled a handful of it in front of her shoulder. “I told you Ray and I were friends in high school but we lost touch.”
“Yes.”
“I reached out to him when I heard about all this, and at first we just chatted a bit but not much, but we’ve started to get close again. I think he’s losing friends because of everything, getting lonely.” She pushed her hair off her shoulder and smoothed her part.
“All right,” Rice said.
“We’ve had drinks a couple times and talked on the phone a lot, and at first I really did feel bad for him, but I’ve started to feel like he’s hiding something.”
“About this?”
Britny nodded and raised her eyebrows. She brought both her hands up and smoothed her hair again, then shook it over her shoulders. “Like, I think maybe he did hurt that boy.”
Goose bumps spread over the back of Rice’s neck. Had Walker confessed to his friend?
“Has he said anything to you about Nick or that night?”
“No, but I think he would if I asked the right way. He’s talked about nearly everything else with me. He’s so stressed about money and court. He tells me everything about his lawyer. She just wants him to take a plea deal and go on the sex-offender registry. He borrowed so much money to pay for her, and he fights with her constantly and can’t afford to get someone new. I guess he wanted to testify that you wouldn’t arrest someone who assaulted him?”
Of course. The call about Tony Hall, where Walker said he didn’t want to press charges. “He’s saying I wouldn’t arrest someone?”
She nodded smugly. “He told me he told you not to arrest him, but he was going to testify different. He was gonna say it was just more proof you all decided he was guilty. To show you were wrong about the rape, too. But his lawyer won’t let him lie in court. He’s all pissed off about it. I guess they’re having huge problems, and she pushed court off because of it.”
“Stop,” Rice said, and held up a hand. “I—I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t interested in all this, but I don’t think you should be talking to me. I mean, I guess he’s waived any privilege about these conversations by telling you, but—” His mind was racing. What Walker and his lawyer talked about was supposed to be privileged, confidential. But if Walker told Britny, Rice could let Britny talk, couldn’t he? But why was she doing this? “Aren’t you friends with him?”
Her gray eyes went wide. “Not if he’s a rapist, which now I think he is.”
“Okay, well—”
“I think I can help you.”
“How?”
“He’s telling me so much. He’s so stressed. Even his mom is driving him nuts. I’m the only friend he has left. I think I can get him to tell me whatever you need to know.”
“I don’t want you to do anything for me.”
She dropped her hands to her side. “What?”
“Hold up, let me be clear, Ms. Cressey—I’ve never asked you to do anything for me.”
“I know that, I—”
“Let me explain something to you. He has a lawyer. He’s asserted his rig
hts. I cannot and would not try to get a statement from him by working around his lawyer, through you. You got that?”
Her lip trembled. “Yes.”
“I know you’re trying to be helpful. But don’t be helpful for me.” It was more than helpfulness—she was one of those people. The limelight people. She wanted to testify. It was probably why she reached out to Walker in the first place—to worm herself into the news or something. And she didn’t care whose side she was on, so long as some of the spotlight hit her.
“I think you should go.” Rice waved toward the front doors. “I don’t want any part of this.”
Rice turned and strode for the stairs.
Her childish voice was a whimper behind him. “You don’t want a confession?”
“Not like this.” Rice let the door slam on the lobby without waiting to see if she was leaving, too.
His coffee was still warm at his desk. His mug read: “If you run, you’ll just go to jail tired.” It had been a parting gift from the last admin to retire from Salisbury. Something about filling that mug with coffee, holding it in his hand, drinking from it, even just seeing it at his workstation—it made him feel good. More competent, somehow. O’Malley was on the phone across the room, but as soon as she hung up she’d be asking about Britny Cressey. What a viper of a friend. Rice didn’t need to be accused of making a civilian into his agent, trying to get a confession from Walker. They didn’t need one.
But was that true? He sipped at his coffee and watched O’Malley absently. Her desk was much messier than Rice’s, but she never seemed to lose things in the snowdrift of files and loose papers atop it. She laughed into the phone and crossed one leg over the other. Something was going on with Nick Hall. The suicide attempt. That could have to do with trauma, yes. But could it also speak to something else eating away at him? An attempt at escaping something besides a night he couldn’t remember? An escape from something he’d done?
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