The Prophet (8 page)

“Marie’s waiting,” Kent told him.

Adam was actually puzzled—no, Chelsea was waiting, and how in the hell did his little brother know?—but then he got it. Yes, Marie was also waiting. Marie had cross-country practice and Adam had the car and thus the responsibility of getting her home.

“Can’t do it,” he said.

“Huh? They got done an hour ago, man. She’s been waiting.”

“I just said I can’t do it,” Kent said, anger showing itself, except it wasn’t really anger, it was fear, it was
no, no, Chelsea’s wrong, she’s not leaving, she can’t be leaving.

“Well, I’ve got to stay with the coaches. They want me watching tape. You knew this. I can’t walk her home.”

And then came the words that still woke Adam in the night two decades later, the words that on three occasions had led him to go so far as tasting the barrel of a gun, cold steel and oil on his tongue:

“It’s five fucking blocks, Franchise. She’ll make it.”

He left then. Jogged out of the locker room and into the night to meet the most important thing in his eighteen-year-old life.

Marie was walking away from the school when Adam drove out of the parking lot with Chelsea. He passed her in the dark, her head down, backpack on, walking through the chill night toward a car that no longer waited, and he thought that he would
deal with that problem in the morning. She’d be angry, but he could always joke his little sister out of anger fast enough, could always raise a smile even when she desperately wanted to refuse him one. His dad was tougher, but that, too, could be dealt with, and what
really
mattered right now was the fact that Chelsea was being taken from him.

You had to prioritize.

He drove Chelsea to the pier. Put his letter jacket around her slim shoulders and held her when she told him that her father was going to be released in November and that meant she was gone. They’d go back to Cleveland, and they’d stay there. The city was an hour’s drive away, but that night, the idea of it was a world apart. They were standing in silence at the edge of the pier, water slapping on the pylons below, when she pulled her face away from his neck, looked into his eyes, and said, “Can we go somewhere?”

He had two blankets in the trunk of his Ford Taurus. There was a county park not far from the pier, up on the bluffs where you could see out to the lake, popular for summertime barbecues and sunsets but empty on this night, the first cold evening of autumn, with that menacing wind pushing down from Canada. They had no trouble with the cold, though. Two eighteen-year-olds, first time together? No, cold was not an issue. Snow could have been flying and they wouldn’t have cared. There was a moment, as they lay on their sides, her back to him, his hand tracing her breast, side, hip, that he knew it was going to be a night that lingered, something they would talk about when they were old, because the first time with the right one, the one that lasted? There was nothing else like it on this earth. Tonight would linger with him, always. He was sure of it.

He made it home by eleven.

The first of the police cars was in the driveway.

Twenty-two years later, as he drove to her husband’s house
through a light rain, he remembered the police questions, the look in his father’s eyes, his mother leaving the room.

The last five hours, you’ve been where?

The pier and the park.

Doing what?

Talking, man, hanging out.

You just forgot to give your sister a ride, is that it?

Well, no, my brother reminded me. But it was kind of an emergency.

Marie was still gone at three, and then at six, and then any half-hearted hope that she might have gone to a friend’s house and fallen asleep or broken an ankle or, hell, even run off with a boy to do the same damn thing Adam had done was gone. The questions grew more pointed, the truth more painful.

Yes, I was supposed to take her home.

No, I did not.

I got in the car with Chelsea Salinas and drove away. We were at the pier, then the park. We had sex on a blanket.

No, I did not call to tell my parents I’d left Marie to walk home alone.

Yes, I passed her heading out of the parking lot.

No, I did not stop to speak to her.

No, I did not see her on the street when I came home.

But he felt that he had. In fact, he felt that she was still there, that on the right night, with the right half-moon rising behind charcoal clouds above the lake, walking into the right cold breeze, he might find her heading into the parking lot in search of the car he’d driven away from her. Felt that if he hit all of those elements just perfectly, he’d see her marching through the dark and toward the lights of the football field, backpack on, and she’d turn and look at his slowing car and flash the cautious smile before remembering that the braces were gone and then finally letting the smile go wide and radiant. She would slide
into the passenger seat, call him a jerk, and he’d get her home. Back to her bedroom, where the sign warned away trespassers. It was still possible, somehow, it had to be, because if it wasn’t? Well, fuck this world, then.

He was sitting with his head on the steering wheel, his eyes dry but closed, when Chelsea opened the driver’s door and laid a cool hand on the back of his neck. He eased out a slow breath, kept it from shuddering with an effort, but left his forehead on the wheel and his eyes closed.

“It was five blocks,” he said.

She rubbed his neck, silent.

“Half a mile,” he said.

Her fingers found a knot, kneaded it.

“Rachel Bond was seventeen,” he said. “Did I know that? No. Should I have seen it? Yes. You would have. If you’d been there, if anyone but me had been there…”

She stopped kneading, let her fingertip rest on the knot, gentle but steady pressure, like a doctor trying to draw infected blood. Something faded from him and into the touch, but not the right thing, or not enough of it.

“Seventeen,” he said again.

“Come inside,” she told him, and moved her hand away from his neck.

He shut off the Jeep’s engine, climbed out, and followed her up the steps and through the door to see the snakes.

T
HE DESIRE TO KEEP
calling the police caught Kent off guard, and it was impossible to shake. Every ten minutes his mind returned to it:
Maybe they know something more now. Maybe Salter will tell you. Maybe there’s some question you can answer that they haven’t thought of yet. Maybe you can ask them to confirm that Gideon Pearce had nothing to do with this.

It was the last part, the ludicrous one, that stalked him with the most diligence, utterly absurd yet utterly relentless. The man who had murdered his sister in the autumn of 1989 died in prison years later, convicted of the crime, and rightfully so. The rational mind reminded Kent of this over and over, but the heart frequently shows nothing but disdain for rationality, and his heart called forth the question time and again.

Two murdered girls, separated by twenty-two years. How many people had been murdered in this country since 1989? This state, this county, this town? They weren’t all linked. But in Kent’s heart these two were.

He did not call the police. If they needed him for anything, they would call. Until then, he would serve only as a distraction
and a hindrance. So he turned to football, to the best of his ability. They had lost a practice during a playoff week, and while it had been the right thing to do, it was also a costly thing. The team didn’t meet on Sundays, just the coaches, and that meant player preparation would not begin until Monday. Kent’s team was already forty-eight hours behind the opponent. Forty-eight of 144 prep hours gone before they even started. That was the sort of thing that lost you football games.

The burden of making up that lost time belonged to him.

At the start of his coaching career, he’d spent hours charting plays and breaking those plays down into percentages, until he could show Walter Ward that he understood an opponent’s tendencies better than the opponent did.

“They blitzed thirty-six times when the ball was between the twenties,” he’d inform Ward. “But if it was in the red zone, they never brought pressure on first down. Not once.”

Ward believed in precision, he believed in preparation, but he often dismissed Kent’s detailed scouting reports with a flat smile, altering his own game plan little. If they
just played Chambers football,
he’d always say, things would work out fine.

These days, under Kent’s leadership, Chambers football meant being the most prepared team in the state. And thanks to computers, the ability to understand your opponent was available in a way it had never been before. The team subscribed to a database called Hudl that was used for sharing game video. It wasn’t a cheap program, but one of the boosters, a dentist named Duncan Werner, covered the cost. Kent loved Hudl. Not only could he easily watch video for every situation he desired, but also the stat breakdown was remarkable.

Blitzes by field position
was one click away.
Blitzes by down and distance
was another. Want to know the percentage of running plays an opponent used on first down? Or maybe how often they passed out of a specific formation? Just click. By Friday morning,
Kent would be able to quote these tendencies without pause. He would understand the mind of the opposing coach, what he wanted and what he feared. From that he would be prepared to avoid their strengths and hammer their weaknesses. You would not surprise him on the football field, you would not surprise his team. They would see teams that were bigger, stronger, and faster, but never would they see a team that was better prepared.

Never.

On Saturday afternoon he sat on the living room floor with his back against the couch, a laptop computer to his left, a notepad to his right, and, every few seconds, a Nerf basketball in his lap. He was tossing it around with Andrew, who approached the task more like a rabid German shepherd than a budding athlete, and Lisa was doing homework, though she had none to do. That was her thing these days, always announced formally—she was going to do her homework now. Just so you knew. Then she’d arrange books at the table and spend her time drawing. Kent’s favorite touch, the one that he and Beth laughed themselves silly over when their daughter wasn’t around, was the slide rule. She’d come across the antiquated math device at a neighbor’s garage sale, purchased it with her own money, and insisted on keeping it at hand, finding the look much more sophisticated than a calculator.

The idea of being a student had suddenly appealed to her. A recent perfect score on a multiplication test prompted her to announce with gravity that she was hoping she could get a scholarship because she understood the Ivy League schools were very expensive. Kent asked where she’d heard of an Ivy League school and was met with a sigh.

“They’re the good ones, Dad. The
really
good ones.”

All right. He’d told her if they were that good, then yes, a scholarship was probably a great idea, because his bank account was not nearly so good.

“Dad? You’re not watching.”

This from Andrew. Kent flicked his eyes up from the screen, said, “Playoffs, champ. Playoffs. We multitask now, okay?”

The word
multitask
left his son blank-faced, but then Kent tossed the ball and Andrew charged after it, banging down the hallway. Kent looked back at the script again. Hickory Hills was an option-heavy team, and fast enough to pull it off against most of their opponents. He wasn’t worried about his team’s speed, though. They’d just have to widen their gaps on the line, and shade to the strong side because that’s where the quarterback wanted to go most of the time.

“Hackett’s article is up on the website.” Beth had emerged from the kitchen, her gentle blue eyes grim.

“It’s bad?”

“No. But they mention Adam.”

“What do you mean?”

“The police explained that she was trying to find her father. And that Adam… that he got it wrong.”

Kent let out a breath and tossed the Nerf basketball one last time, Andrew chasing after it wildly, nearly wiping out an end table in his pursuit, and then he rose and went into the kitchen where she had the laptop open on the granite-topped island.

The home page of the newspaper’s website was devoted entirely to Rachel Bond. Pictures of her were now joined by pictures of a desolate cottage surrounded by investigators. Five stories were linked around the photographs, one headline reading:
TRAGEDY FAMILIAR TO KENT AUSTIN.

He closed his eyes for a moment, bracing. Reading your own press was always an uncomfortable thing. Kent never felt anything but uneasy dread over it. You weren’t in control of the way you were about to be presented, weren’t in control of the context of your remarks or, with many reports, even the accuracy of your remarks. You were someone else’s version of yourself, fed to the
public to create their version of you, a disturbing disconnect.
We will build a new you, thanks. The one we want.

He’d spent his life in the public eye of the town, and so far the town hadn’t snapped on him. He always felt as if it might. You drifted around in front of enough people for enough time, eventually someone would take a swipe, and then the rest would join in. Eagerly.

He worried more for his family than himself when it came to the media. He’d seen good coaches, good men, turned into objects of scorn with swiftness and alarming hunger, and he always thought it went harder on them if they had children old enough to be aware of it. Lisa was nine and Andrew was six. They were excited to see their father in the paper, particularly this season, when his team was unbeaten. He wasn’t sure what he’d do with this story. They understood a little about it, but now they would want to know more. They would want to know the very sorts of things he didn’t wish them to hear, ever.

Your sister was murdered, Daddy?

Yes.

Did he do anything else to her?