Burning Blue (24 page)

My kick threw Bendix into the steering wheel. The horn sounded briefly as the BMW spun. I hugged the seat back as Kerns was thrown over the seat, into the windshield. The glass webbed around his skull. The car flipped over the guardrail and slid upside down into the gully. I don’t remember anything after that, until the ambulance lights. Somebody said, “Relax, buddy.” So I did. My eyes itched.

Dave had the airbag and made out okay. I was belted in and had the side bag and seatback. Kerns suffered a concussion and shattered a shoulder and both of his arms.

In the hospital that Wednesday night, or maybe it was into Thursday morning already, I was enjoying the painkillers too much to open my eyes, but I heard Detective Barrone just fine. “He admits to having sex with Angela but denies he put her up to burning Nicole. He insists his father would have disowned him if he found out he was in any way responsible for the acid attack, not to mention withholding information about the perpetrator. Apparently no Bendix has ever not been admitted to Harvard.”

“Those calls,” my father said. “What’d you want to talk with me about anyway?”

“I wanted your expertise. I’d interviewed Angela Sammick’s art teacher, and she’d shown me some of Angela’s work. Some of the pictures looked vaguely familiar, as if she’d copied some paintings that an art historian would be able to identify at a glance. I was looking for you to save me some time.”

“And why are you here now?” my father said.

“To check in on your son. I’m glad he’s all right.”

“So you’re dropping the obstruction of justice charge?”

“No.”

Later, I woke hungry. My father was still there, dozing in a chair at my bedside. I pretended to be asleep, enjoying the fact that we could be in the same room and relatively peaceful, even if it was a hospital room. The doctor came in. I watched through slit eyes as he showed my father the latest MRI on his iPad. “He’ll be fine,” the doctor said. “I’m releasing him tomorrow. But I just wanted to make you aware that your son has significant scar tissue buildup in his frontal lobe.”

“I am aware of that, Doctor,” my father said.

“This is not from what happened last night,” the doctor said.

“I know.”

“This is from an older injury—”

“I
get
it, okay? I get it.” He got up and went to the window and ran his hands through his hair, pulling it.

The next morning, Thursday, I felt a soft hand on my cheek. I opened my eyes. Nicole looked beat up, but she was trying to smile. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“I thought you weren’t supposed to leave the house.”

“I snuck out.”

“Can you sneak me out?” I took the saline IV out myself, got dressed, and we just walked out, no problem. We stopped in the hospital cafeteria to pick up my father. He’d gone down to grab coffee, but now he wasn’t there. I tried his cell, no pickup. I texted him to let him know I would meet him at home.

We went to the diner. Nicole seemed oddly relaxed—not happy, but calm. The real Recluse was still out there, and Nicole didn’t seem to care. I was beginning to think Schmidt was right. The guy who paid to have Nicole burned had gotten what he’d wanted, and he’d gotten away with it.

Nicole picked up on my anger. “It doesn’t help,” she said. “Believe me, if it did, I’d have no problem hating them day and night, Angela and whoever put her up to this.”

“And Dave?”

She looked down at her burger. She’d only had a bite. She pushed her plate away.

We went back to Nicole’s. She wanted to hang. All I’d wanted to do was get her back home safe, and now I had to get home myself, back to my computer. “I have to check in with my dad,” I said. Nicole seemed sleepy anyway.

Mrs. Castro drove me home. She had this meditation track playing, the word
om
hummed over and over. It was making me drowsy.

“Jay, I want you to know how grateful I am for all you’ve done for Nicole.”

“I didn’t do anything, ma’am.”

“You got yourself arrested for her. Mr. Castro insists that you let him hire a lawyer for you.”

“My father’ll never go for it.”

“You have to let the police do their job, Jay. I see it. Your anger. You have to let this go. We all have to move on.”

“Okay,” I said. “I will.”

She frowned and mussed my hair. “You’re horrible.”

My father wanted to go to the Palisades. He went there sometimes to smoke a cigar. “Pete says there’s a regatta going on. We could watch the boats, catch some fresh air, the sunset, grab dinner after?”

“Gotta sleep,” I said. “You go, though. Hang with Pete.”

He hadn’t gotten any decent sleep the night before either, at the hospital. He hit the couch and clicked to a hoops game he’d DVR-ed. He was snoring in five minutes. He was lying on his side, and his gut was hanging out of his undershirt. I wondered if he’d live to fifty.

I kept my bedroom door open with one eye on my father. I had some bullshit history assignment on my laptop screen in case he walked in on me. I followed the BinarTREE maps tracking Angela’s data flow into a chat room called Cutter’s Way. Angela had been using the site heavily. And then there it was again. She’d been calling herself GBAM. It was just such sad stuff. I kept looking at a string Angela was into the night before she was arrested:

GBAM: Blood?

Blood Princess: Howdy GBAM. You stay dry last night?

GBAM: Epic fail. I was going to be good, but at 3am, after my mother was asleep, I couldn’t hold off anymore.

bOYS cUT tOO: Carved the letters WOL into myself. I feel real when I see them.

Up Not Sideways: WOL?

bOYS cUT tOO: Waste of life. Why can’t I stop?

GBAM: Oh bct. I want you to love you. I want to help you stop. I want to help me. But how? It feels too good, burning blue.

Reading that last line in the string, I can’t say I forgave Angela Sammick, but I hated her a little less. That was the best I could do.

I didn’t have time to try to figure out what GBAM meant, but I figured if it was her username for Cutter’s Way, maybe she’d used it as the access name for her online storage vault. I took a shot at the major cloud vaults:

Username: GBAM

A password request came up on UniversalStorageTime.com. Maybe twenty minutes later I jumped the password wall. I started clicking wildly, opening multiple files at the same time.

An audio file, DBphonegrabOct21.aiff, from the same day I met Nicole in Schmidt’s office:

DAVE:
You knew what you were getting into.

ANGELA:
You were with me for three months before her, though.

(Eagles screeched in the background. There was a preserve at Ramapo.)

DAVE:
I was up front with you from the beginning. I told you this had to be under the radar.

ANGELA:
Under the radar. Right. You let me suck your dick no problem, but you’re embarrassed to be seen in public with me.

DAVE:
Do you know what my father would do if—

ANGELA:
Yeah, I know exactly what he’d do. He’d tell you I was a low-class whore, way beneath a Bendix’s station. Then, if you had any balls, you’d tell him to go to hell.

DAVE:
Look, I’m sorry, okay? You want me to screw up my life? That’ll make you happy? It was a mistake, Angela.

ANGELA:
A mistake? You have got to be kidding me.

DAVE:
Why can’t you just be cool about this?

ANGELA:
You’re part of it now, Dave.

DAVE:
Part of what?

ANGELA:
You waited too long. You had your chance to come clean when Barrone interviewed you the day of the attack.

DAVE:
I didn’t know you were the one who did it until now.

ANGELA
(laughing): Liar.

DAVE:
I didn’t see you.

ANGELA:
You didn’t
want
to see me.

DAVE:
My head was down. I was drinking water—

ANGELA:
You were looking right at me, Dave. We locked eyes. You know we did. And then that night, in the precinct, you panicked. You knew your father would kill you if he found out about us. You get implicated in burning Nicole? The story plays everywhere, with your name out there, as the one who jilted the sideline slut who burned the beauty queen? You held back. You had all that time after the interview too. If you’d come forward within twenty-four hours of the attack, you would have been okay. Maybe even forty-eight, with a generous DA. But we’re six weeks later now, dude. Six weeks you’re holding back info that could’ve nabbed the Recluse. You go forward now, you are
screwed.
You’re an accessory now. An accomplice. You obstructed justice. You’ll get as much time as I will for burning Nicole—if you turn me in. And even if you don’t do time, good luck getting into the Big H with a felony tacked to the bottom of your application. Maybe that’s what your essay could be about: How I learned about obstruction of justice by obstructing it. You good at keeping secrets, Dave? You better be, because this is one you’re going to have to keep for the rest of your life.

DAVE:
You really think you can play me like this?

ANGELA:
This isn’t playing. This is a promise: I’ll
throw
you to them.

DAVE:
You have no proof I so much as held as your hand. And as for the attack? Yeah, I saw you burn her, you sick bitch. But you can’t prove that either.

ANGELA:
I’m recording this, Dave.

DAVE:
Are you serious? Turn it off, Angela.

ANGELA:
If you don’t take your hand out of my pocket, I’ll stab it!

DAVE:
Turn it off!

ANGELA:
I’m relaying it real time to my cloud account anyway!

Untitled.aiff, from the day Angela was arrested:

ANGELA:
I’m being followed.

DAVE:
Shit.

ANGELA:
I’m not going to make it. The plane doesn’t leave for another half hour.

DAVE:
Are you recording this?

ANGELA:
No, I swear.

DAVE:
Just keep quiet. Do the sentence. It’ll probably be like three years max. After, I’ll move you up to Cambridge. Stick to the plan, Angela, and we’ll be able to be together. We’ll wait a few years and then we’ll—

ANGELA:
I have to nuke this phone. They’re like a couple hundred yards away. I love you. . . . Say it
back,
Dave.

DAVE:
I love you.

ANGELA:
So convincing. You have three years to make yourself mean that. You better be there when I get out.

Barrone had told my father that Dave was under house arrest. The DA initially threatened an attempted murder charge for what went down in the SUV with Kerns and me, but Dave’s lawyers were too good to let that stick. They were negotiating final terms for a plea to assault. Dave probably wouldn’t do more than eighteen months home confinement with probation after. Same with Rick Kerns. But Harvard wasn’t about to let either one of them trash its rep, and Kerns would never wrestle again, not with that shattered shoulder. Angela would pay the biggest price: No way Dave would be there for her when she got out. Not that I thought he’d have been there anyway.

I clicked BurningBlue.doc, desperate for anything that would point to the person who hired Angela to do the hit. It began with a journal entry:
What day is it? What night? I’m burning, burning, burning blue. —NC, 10/28

That was when I knew for sure. Just to be even more certain, I wormed a line into GBAM’s profile on Cutter’s Way. The registration tracked back not to Angela’s email but to Nicole’s.

The supposed cat scratch on her arm. The long-sleeved hoodies. Nicole really was mutilating herself after all. Could Chrissie Vratos have been right? Did Nicole hire Angela to burn her? Whether she in effect burned herself or not, Nicole Castro was definitely cutting. She needed help. Her therapists needed to know. Did they?

I scanned BurningBlue.doc. Angela had compiled a series of Nicole’s journal entries with lines highlighted here and there. If you could, would you read the diary of the person you were in love with? Or do you love them enough to trust them?

I couldn’t find anything in the document that suggested anybody but Nicole and her Cutter’s Way friends knew about her cutting. Angela had hacked audio files too, of Nicole’s sessions with Dr. Julian Nye. I had to listen to them. I had to.

Nicole and Nye Oct19.aiff:

NYE:
I’d like to offer you as a case study at my next Princeton lecture.

NICOLE:
“Offer me”? No thanks, really.

NYE:
You’re doing remarkably well, considering the circumstances. My students would have many questions for you. You could help them a great deal—help them help others.

NICOLE:
You’re saying you want me live? As in you want me to be online with them?

NYE:
I want you to come to the lecture.

NICOLE:
Are you insane?

NYE:
I don’t think so. You would be in shadow. They would know who you are, of course, but they wouldn’t see your face, if that would make you feel more comfortable.”

NICOLE:
Comfortable? Seriously, Julian? I can’t be up in front of people, even in shadow. Let me have that much at least.

NYE:
Have what?

NICOLE:
The dark. Total dark.

Nothing. They didn’t know—Nye, Schmidt, Mrs. Castro. I had to get Nicole help. Before I did that, I had to confront her about it. She would never forgive me if I went behind her back and ratted her out to her mother. She might never forgive me anyway. She’d wonder for all of two seconds how I’d found out about the cutting, and then she’d think I was hacking her. I’d promised her I never would. Technically I wasn’t. Technically I was merely checking out Angela’s hack. Technically Nicole wouldn’t give a damn how I’d gotten the information. Either way, I was invading her privacy. She would never speak to me again. But I had to out her, even if that meant losing her.

I called her, inviting myself over for dinner.
“Mom’s making dumplings,”
she said. She sounded better. Actually, she sounded good, maybe even great. I’d spent a lot of time with her the last three weeks, and this was the happiest I’d ever heard her. She sounded playful.
“Get on over here, boy.”
I could only think she was on a new prescription, and that made me even sadder. I grabbed my backpack and board and tapped my father’s foot.