Blood Ties (40 page)

“I know the police were here and I'm sorry,” I said, “but I had nothing to do with it.”

Suspicion came into his eyes, not, I thought, at my words—he had long established in his mind my guilt, my cravenness—but at the tone I used, the stance I took, my surprising unwillingness to settle what we'd started the night before, what we'd started years ago.

“That asshole Sullivan.” He ground the words out. “He came to my house with a fucking search warrant because you—”

“No, because your friend Letourneau sent him. They're looking for a boy who could be planning to shoot up the school. Paul Niebuhr. Gary's a friend of his.”

“And they're looking for Gary because you fucking said—”

“No, they're looking for Gary because he's a friend of Paul Niebuhr's.”

“You—”

“Scott, goddammit,
listen
. Whatever reason Gary had for leaving home, it came before he called me. It's connected to things going on in Warrenstown, and things that went on here. I didn't cause that, Scott, and I'm not looking to screw anybody over. Not even you. Not even you. I want to find your son.”

He stared at me, and I don't know what answer he was planning to make. If our positions had been reversed, if I'd been standing where he was as the twilight passed into night, the best I'd have been able to manage would have been, “Go to hell.” At my most controlled, I would have been able to turn, walk back into my warm, bright house, leave him alone and shut out in the dark.

Maybe he'd have done that, or maybe he'd have tried again to spark the explosion we both wanted. But the door behind him opened. Yellow light spilled onto the stoop once more, and my sister stood in it, one step outside her home. “What are you doing?” She looked from her husband to her brother, her high voice quavering. “What are you doing?”

Scott, eyes still on me, stepped back, pulled shut the door behind her. Now there were four of us under the glow of the porch lamp, darkness everywhere beyond except where a streetlight pooled to light the way, or where windows shone in other people's homes.

The silence was long, no one moving. Then Scott looked at Lydia. “Who's this?” he said, his voice so low the wind almost masked it.

“My partner,” I said. “Lydia Chin.”

“You were there last night,” Scott said to her. She nodded. Scott considered her another moment, turned his gaze to me again. Helen and Lydia waited, spectators; Scott, jaw tight, waited, too, for my move.

“When I saw Gary in New York,” I said, “he wouldn't tell me what he was doing, but Scott, he said you'd approve. ‘My dad would be cool with this, if he knew.' You tell me you're close with him. You take him hunting, you go to his games. What can that mean? What is he doing that he thinks you'd approve of?”

The wind was gathering strength now, and the night was complete. In the trees, the moon had come up, but the wind had brought clouds; all I could see was a ragged bright patch in the dark.

“I used to beat that kid's ass,” Scott said, “I used to make sure he felt it, when he lied. He fucked up, he came clean, he got off a lot easier than if he lied about it. I thought I could make a man out of him, a stand-up guy. But if he said that, he's lying now, because there's not a fucking thing I can think of that would make it okay, what he's putting his mother through.”

Helen bit her lip. Her eyes started to fill, tears glistening in the porch light. From deep within, the fire swept through me, and the words burst into my mind:
I'll
kill
him.
My face burned and my heart pounded when I saw her tears, and I thought,
Someday I'll
kill
him.
I stepped toward Scott, felt my fists clench, my blood race. Then Lydia did touch my hand. She just brushed it with her fingers, but her skin was cool and smooth, and when I felt her touch, the hot mist in my own eyes cleared. I saw who it was I was looking at, and I saw, in my mind, who it was I wanted, and they were not the same. I forced myself to stop, stand, forced the fire to retreat again.

“A couple more questions,” I said, my words gravelly but under control. “Then we're gone.”

“Why?” Scott's voice was as cold as the wind in the trees. “Why the hell should I answer any questions from you?”

“Because you were here,” I said. “Because I think this thing comes out of what happened here years ago.”

“Bullshit.”

“Maybe. But the cops are already working on the present. What can you lose, answering me?”

He didn't speak, but he stayed. That was enough.

“Beth Victor, Jared Beltran,” I said.

“It's bullshit,” he said again.

“What I need to know,” I said, speaking quietly, meeting Scott's eyes, “and I'm asking you because you were here, Scott, because I don't know anyone else who was a kid here in those days and I don't have time to find someone—about Jared Beltran stalking Beth Victor. Had you ever heard that before the rape?”

I expected something from Helen, a flick of her eyes toward Scott, a frown of confusion, a flush of embarrassment at the topic. She stood, instead, calm and still beside her husband, and I realized he must have told her. I wondered how much he'd said, whether she understood his role, but I wasn't here for that.

Scott's look, and the silence, were very long. Finally, he said, “No.”

“It wasn't true, was it?”

A long pause; then, “I don't know.”

“Who was the teacher the tip came from?”

“I don't know.”

I nodded. “What happened to Nick Dalton?”

“Nicky? Fuck Nicky, who the hell cares what happened to him?”

“Do you know where he is now?”

“Now?” A smile burned across Scott's face. “Fuck that asshole, maybe he's here now. Maybe it's him.”

“What does that mean?”

“Nicky. Nicky the fucking Nerd. He always said he'd come back, he'd make us all sorry. Fuck that asshole, maybe this is all about him. That what you think, Smith? You think Nicky's behind all this, Nicky kidnapped my son, Nicky killed that girl, Nicky came back to get us all? Well, good luck. Keep looking. You just keep on looking for Nicky and stay out of my fucking life!”

Scott reached back, pushed open the door to his house. He held out a hand to my sister. She took it, turned away from me, and went inside with him.

I was headed down the walk before the door closed. I wanted to keep going into the wind, away, anywhere, any distance, not look back again, not ever. But Lydia's car was at the curb and Lydia's footsteps, light and sure, sounded behind me. I stopped at the car; after a second, I brought my fist down hard onto the hood. I heard my voice throwing a curse into the wind, felt pain jar my arm to the shoulder. Then I thought, No! Goddammit, no. I stood, head down, hands on the cold steel of the car, trying again to force the fire back down into that small, controlled place.

Lydia said nothing. After a moment she went around and unlocked the car. I got in. She started it up and we drove away along the well-laid-out, gently curving streets. The people who'd planned this place had tried to eliminate sharp turns, hidden ways, any chance of anything unexpected. There was supposed to be nothing here to make you suddenly have to change where you were headed, take another path. But up ahead a dog sniffed his way onto the street from behind a parked car. Lydia stamped on the brake, pressed the horn. The dog, startled, snarled and sped across. It could have been a kid on a bike, on a skateboard. It could have been a police car racing up the street, or fire trucks at a burning house. I thought of the planners, and an icy contempt filled me, both for the intention, and for the fact that it had failed.

I rolled down the window and lit a cigarette. Lydia hadn't been to this development before but she seemed to know well how to get out, how to leave these houses, and Warrenstown, behind. She put us on the road to Greenmeadow, back to where we'd left my car.

We drove in silence. Not until we were pulling into the hospital parking lot did Lydia speak. She said, “That's why he hates you.”

I looked over at her as she stopped her car beside mine. I tried my voice carefully, not sure I trusted it. “Why?”

She turned the key in the ignition, faced me. “His testimony could have sent a friend to prison, and he took his story back.”

“And I didn't?”

“That's right.”

Her eyes were steady and clear; it was I who looked away.

“And I'm even worse,” I said. “Because in my case it was family. And in his, he wasn't sure of what he saw.”

“No,” Lydia said. “He was sure.”

I watched her face, soft in the shadows. “You think so?”

“He was. Al Macpherson raped Beth Victor; Scott saw them, just before. The stalking stories, the coach started that. The teacher who wanted to stay anonymous. He picked that boy, Jared, because he was weird anyway, so people might believe it. And because he was expendable.”

“Then why did Jared shoot himself?” I asked her, though I thought I knew.

“Because he was a nerd at Warrenstown High, and now they said he was a pervert. His life was already hell, and all he had now was a choice between going to prison, or worse hell.”

“No other way out?”

“In a town where the parents held a candlelight rally in support of Al Macpherson?”

I slipped another cigarette from my jacket, rolled it around in my fingers.

“Scott's always known that,” Lydia said. “That the coach's lies and his own silence killed that boy. He's spent his life telling himself that what he did was the stand-up thing to do, for his friend. Not the kind of thing a coward would do who was afraid of the other jocks, and the coach, and this town, and who wanted to play in the game.”

I said, “He's spent his life trying to make a man—a stand-up guy, he said—out of Gary.”

An ambulance pulled into the parking lot, no siren howling, no lights flashing. It rolled slowly around the building to the emergency entrance. It was headed there, I supposed, because that was the entrance ambulances used; but it was in no hurry, carrying no one who could be helped.

“And he hates you,” Lydia says, “and calls you a coward, because you had the guts to do what he should have done.”

The car was hot and close; I couldn't sit there anymore. I got out, stood in the wind. Lydia got out also, and came around the car to stand beside me, and this time she took my hand. I thought of Scott, and fire, and boys forced to make choices men are forced to live with; I thought of Gary, without a jacket, without help on the cold streets; I thought of a lot of things, a lot of places, and through it I felt the solid warmth of Lydia's hand.

“Why did he come back?” I said.

“Scott? To Warrenstown?”

I nodded.

“My guess?”

“Yes.”

“Gary was getting to be the age Scott was when Warrenstown made a man out of him.”

“So Scott brought him here?”

“To prove he'd been right, what he'd done. To prove he had nothing to be ashamed of.”

“Prove to whom?”

She didn't answer that, because she didn't need to.

“Do you think Gary knows?” I said.

“What Scott did? Probably what he knows is that Scott stood up for his friend.”

“And that's what Gary's doing now, that Scott would be proud of? Standing up for Paul? By helping him get ready to shoot the school up?”

“We don't know that's what he's doing.”

“We don't know anything.”

She shook her head, looked at the ground. A gust of wind lifted her hair; she pushed it back off her cheek, said, “You know who I feel bad for?”

“Besides me, because I'm so pitiful?”

That caught her by surprise; she smiled, and our eyes met. I thought again of fire, but a different kind. I don't know what she thought of, but her smile grew; then she looked away, and it faded again. “That other boy,” she said. “Nick Dalton. Watching that happen to his friend, and there's nothing he can do.”

“He said he'd be back, and get them all.”

“Umm-hmm,” she said. “Does he seem to have?”

The wind turned and blasted across the parking lot, pounding into us like a weight. I shook my head, saw Jared Beltran's face, the grinning kid in the newspaper photo, the kid who was excited at the idea of what lay ahead.

“Jesus Christ.” I was suddenly cold and it had nothing to do with the wind. “Oh, shit. Oh, sweet Jesus on the cross!”

Lydia lifted her eyebrows. “Am I to understand from this that an idea has hit you?”

“That picture! I've seen that kid before.”

“Which picture? Which kid?”

“Get in the car, I'll tell you as we go.”

“Which car?”

“Oh,” I said. “Oh. Both cars.”

“Where are we going?”

“Hamlin's.” I dropped her hand, fished for my keys. “He has a picture on his desk.”

“Two skinny kids on the beach? Bad haircuts, glasses?” She'd seen that one, too, but she hadn't seen the photo from the Warrenstown PD case file.

I nodded. “Nerds. The one on the left is Jared Beltran.”

twenty-four

We talked on the phone for a while, as we drove away from Greenmeadow, past Warrenstown, to the bridge, but the questions we had were not really for each other. Both of us knew the way to Hamlin's, so we didn't worry about traveling together, just set up a meeting place at the head of the driveway there.