Forever (19 page)

Koenig led me down the aisle toward the front door. I was infinitely aware that the woman with the big purple bag was watching me
go, cell phone still up to her ear. Her phone speaker was turned up loud enough that we could both hear the woman on the other side of the line say,
“Are they arresting him?”

“Sam,” Koenig said. “Just tell the truth.”

He didn't even know what he was asking for.

• COLE •

After I left the Culpeper house, I just drove. I had Ulrik's old BMW wagon, some of the money I'd brought, no one to tell me not to go.

On the radio, I was listening to a song by a band that had opened for us once. They had been such a train wreck live that I'd felt positively virtuous, a difficult feat to accomplish at that point. I should've thanked them for making us look good. The lead singer's name had been Mark or Mike or Mack or Abel or something like that. Afterward, he'd come up to me, ferociously drunk, and told me I was his biggest influence. I could see the resemblance.

Now, a million years later, I listened to the DJ describe the single as the band's one hit. I kept driving. I still had Sam's phone in my pocket, and it wasn't ringing, but for once, I didn't care. I felt like I'd left a message for Isabel that didn't require a callback. It was enough to have said it.

My windows were rolled down and my arm was out, the wind buffeting it, my palm moist from grabbing mist. The Minnesota landscape stretched out on either side of the two-lane road. It was all scrubby pines and flat houses and rocks stacked randomly and lakes suddenly glinting behind trees. I thought the residents of Mercy Falls must have decided to build ugly houses to make up for all the natural beauty. Keep the place from exploding, or something, from an excess of picturesque.

I kept thinking about what I'd told Isabel, about thinking of calling my family. I'd been mostly truthful. The idea of calling my parents felt impossible and unpalatable. In the Venn diagram that was me and them, the shape where our circles overlapped was empty.

But I still thought about calling Jeremy. Jeremy the resident bassist-yogi. I wondered what he was doing without me and Victor. I liked to think that he'd used his money to go backpacking across India or something. The thing about Jeremy, the thing that made me almost willing to call him and no one else, was that he and Victor had always known me better than anyone. That was what all NARKOTIKA really was: a way of knowing Cole St. Clair. Victor and Jeremy had spent years of their lives helping describe the particular pain of being me to hundreds of thousands of listeners.

They did it so often that they could do it without me. I remembered one interview where they did it so well that I never bothered to answer another interview question again. We were being interviewed in our hotel room. It was first thing in the morning because we had a flight to catch later. Victor was hungover and pissy. Jeremy was eating breakfast bars at the tiny, glass-topped desk in the room. The room had a narrow balcony with a view to nothing, and I had opened the door and was lying out there on the concrete. I had been doing sit-ups with my feet hooked on the bottom rung of the railing, but now I was just staring at jet trails in the sky. The interviewer sat cross-legged on one of the unmade beds. He was young and spiked and pressed and named Jan.

“So who does most of the songwriting?” Jan had asked. “Or is it a group thing?”

“Oh, it's a group thing,” Jeremy said, in his slow, easy way. He'd picked up a Southern accent at the same time he'd acquired Buddhism. “Cole writes the lyrics, and then I bring him coffee, and then Cole writes the music, and Victor brings him pretzels.”

“So you do most of the writing, then, Cole?” Jan raised his voice so that I could hear him better out on the balcony. “Where do you get your inspiration?”

From my vantage point on the balcony, staring straight up, I had two viewing options: the brick sides of the buildings across the street, or one square of colorless sky above me. All cities looked the same when you were on your back.

Jeremy snapped a piece of his breakfast bar off; we could all hear the crumbs rustle across the table. From the other bed, still sounding like he was PMSing, Victor said, “He won't answer that.”

Jan sounded genuinely puzzled, as if I was the first to refuse him. “Why?”

“He just won't. He hates that question,” Victor said. His feet were bare; he clicked the bones in his toes. “It is kind of a stupid question, man. Life, right? That's where we get our inspiration.”

Jan scribbled something down. He was left-handed and writing looked awkward for him, as if he were a Ken doll with parts assembled slightly wrong. I hoped he was writing down
Never ask that question again.
“Okay. Um. Your EP
One/Or the Other
just debuted in Billboard's top ten. What are your thoughts on that incredible success?”

“I'm buying my mother a BMW,” Victor said. “No, I'm just buying Bavaria. That is where BMWs are from, right?”

“Success is an arbitrary concept,” Jeremy said.

“The next one will be better,” I said. I hadn't said it out loud before, but now I had, so it was true.

More writing. Jan read the next question from his paper. “Uh, that means that you guys knocked out the Human Parts Ministry album from the top ten, where it had been for over forty weeks. Sorry, forty-one. I swear there won't be typos in the final interview. So, Joey of Human Parts Ministry said he thought ‘Looking Up or Down' was such a long-lived hit because so many people identified with the
lyrics. Do you think listeners out there identify with the lyrics of
One/ Or the Other
?”

One/Or the Other
was about the Cole that I heard in the monitors on stage versus the Cole that paced the hotel halls at night. This was what
One/Or the Other
was: It was the knowledge that I was surrounded by adults with lives that I could never imagine living. It was the humming noise inside me that told me to do
something
and found nothing to do that meant anything, the bit of me that was like a fly smashing itself again and again on a windowpane. It was the futility of aging. It was a piano piece gotten right the first time. It was the time I picked Angie up for a date and she was wearing a cardigan that made her look like her mother. It was roads that ended in cul-de-sacs and careers that ended with desks and songs screamed in a gymnasium at night. It was the realization that this was life, and I didn't belong here.

“No,” I said. “I think it's about the music.”

Jeremy finished his breakfast bar. Victor cracked his knuckles. I watched people the size of germs fly overhead in a plane the size of an ant.

“I read you were a choir boy, Cole,” Jan said, consulting his notes. “Are you still a practicing Catholic? Are you, Victor? Jeremy, I know you're not.”

“I believe in God,” Victor offered. He didn't sound convincing.

“You, Cole?” Jan prompted.

I watched empty sky, waiting for another plane. It was that or look at the blank sides of the buildings. One/Or the Other.

“Here's what I know about Cole,” Jeremy said. Punctuated by the silence, it sounded like he was in a pulpit. “Cole's religion is debunking the impossible. He doesn't believe in
impossible
. He doesn't believe in
no
. Cole's religion is waiting for someone to tell him it can't be done so he can do it. Anything. Doesn't matter what that something is, so long
as it can't be done. Here's an origin story for you. In the beginning of time there was an ocean and a void, and God made the ocean into the world and he made the void into Cole.”

Victor laughed.

“I thought you said you were a Buddhist,” Jan said.

“Part-time,” Jeremy replied.

Debunking the impossible.

Now, the pines stretched up so high on either side of the road that it felt like I was tunneling to the middle of the world. Mercy Falls was an unnumbered stretch of miles behind me.

I was sixteen again, and the road unwound in front of me, endless possibilities. I felt wiped clean, empty, forgiven. I could drive forever, anywhere. I could be anyone. But I felt the pull of Boundary Wood around me and, for once, the business of being Cole St. Clair no longer felt like such a curse. I had a purpose, a goal, and it was the impossible: finding a cure.

I was so close.

The road flew by beneath the car; my hand was cold from being in the wind. For the first time in a long time, I felt powerful. The woods had taken that void that was me, the thing I thought that could never be full, never be satisfied, and they'd made me lose everything — things I never knew I wanted to keep.

And in the end, I was Cole St. Clair, cut from a new skin. The world lay at my feet and the day stretched out for miles.

I slid Sam's cell phone out of my pocket and dialed Jeremy's number.

“Jeremy,” I said.

“Cole St. Clair,” he replied, slow and easy, like he wasn't surprised. There was a pause on the other side of the line. And because he knew me, he didn't have to wait for me to say it. “You're not coming home, are you?”

• SAM •

They questioned me in a kitchen.

The Mercy Falls Police Department was small and apparently ill-prepared for questioning. Koenig led me past a room full of dispatchers — they stopped mid-conversation to watch me — and two offices full of desks and uniforms bowed around computers, and finally into a tiny room with a sink, refrigerator, and two vending machines. It was lunchtime and the room smelled overwhelmingly like microwaved Mexican dinners and vomit. It was excruciatingly hot.

Koenig directed me into a light wooden chair at a folding table and cleared off a few napkins, a plate with a half-eaten lemon bar, and a can of soda. Dumping them in the trash, he stood just outside the door, his back to me. All I could see of him was the back of his head, the straight edge of his stubble-short hair on the back of his neck eerily perfect. He had a dark burn scar at the edge of his hair; the scar trickled to a point that disappeared into the collar of his shirt. It occurred to me that there was a story behind the scar — maybe not as dramatic as the story of my wrists, but a story nonetheless — and the fact that everyone had a story behind some mark on their inside or outside suddenly exhausted me, the gravity of all those untold pasts.

Koenig was speaking in a low voice to someone in the hall. I only caught snatches of his words. “Samuel Roth … no … warrant … body? … what he finds.”

My stomach felt instantly sick, crushed by the heat. It was churning and turning over and I suddenly had the horrible feeling that, despite the heat,
because
of the heat, I was going to shift here in this little room and there would be no way out.

I lay my head on my arms; the table smelled like old food but was cool against my skin. My stomach pinched and squeezed and, for the first time in months, I felt unsafe in my own skin.

Please don't shift. Please don't shift
.

I repeated this in my head with every breath.

“Samuel Roth?”

I lifted my head. A pouch-eyed officer was standing in the doorway. He smelled like tobacco. It felt like everything in this room was designed as a specific assault on my wolf senses.

“I'm Officer Heifort. Do you mind if Officer Koenig is in the room while we talk?”

I didn't trust myself to talk, so I just shook my head, my arms still pressed against the table. The contents of my chest felt weightless and loose inside me.

Heifort pulled out the chair opposite — he had to pull it out quite a bit to make room for his paunch. He had a notepad and a folder that he laid on the table in front of him. Behind him, Koenig appeared in the doorway, arms crossed over his chest. Koenig looked infinitely more like a cop to me, very official and built, but still, the familiarity of his presence had a calming effect. The paunchy detective looked far too delighted by the concept of questioning me.

“What we're gonna do,” he said, “is we're gonna ask you a few questions and you just answer them the best you can, all right?” His voice had a joviality that didn't make it to his eyes.

I nodded.

“Where's your daddy at these days, Sam? We haven't seen Geoffrey Beck around for a long while,” Heifort asked.

I said, “He's been sick.” It was easier to say a lie that I'd used before.

“That's too bad,” Heifort said. “Sick how?”

“Cancer,” I said. I looked at the table and mumbled, “He's getting treatment in Minneapolis.”

Heifort wrote this down. I wished he hadn't.

“What's the address of the center, do you know?” he asked.

I shrugged. I tried to invest the shrug with sadness.

Koenig said, “I'll help track it down later.”

Heifort wrote that down, too.

I said, “What am I being questioned about?” I suspected that this was not really about Beck, but about Grace, and some essential part of me resisted the idea of being taken into custody for the disappearance of someone I had been holding in my arms the night before.

“Well, since you asked,” Heifort said, and slid the folder out from under the notepad. He removed a photo and put it in front of me.

It was a close-up of a foot. A girl's foot, slender and long. Both foot and what I could see of the bare leg rested among leaves. There was blood between the toes.

There was a long pause between my breath and the next one.

Heifort placed another photograph on top of that one.

I winced and looked away, both relieved and horrified.

“Does that mean anything to you?”

It was an over-flashed photograph of a naked girl, pale as snow, thin as a whisper, sprawled in the leaves. Her face and neck were a disaster zone. And I knew her. The last time I'd seen that girl she'd had a tan and a smile and a pulse.

Oh, Olivia. I'm so sorry.

“Why are you showing me that?” I asked. I couldn't look at the photo. Olivia hadn't deserved to be killed by wolves. No one deserved to die like that.

“We were hoping you might tell us,” Heifort said. As he spoke, he laid out more photos in front of me, each a different vantage point of the dead girl. I wanted him to stop. Needed him to stop. “Seeing as she was found a few yards from Geoffrey Beck's property line. Naked. After being missing for quite a long time.”

A bare shoulder smeared with blood. Skin written with dirt. Palm to the sky. I closed my eyes, but I couldn't stop seeing the images from the photos. I could feel them burrowing into me, living inside me, becoming something to populate my nightmares.

“I didn't kill anyone,” I said. It sounded false when I said it. Like it was in a language I didn't speak, and I said it with inflection so wrong that the words didn't even make sense together.

“Oh, this was the work of wolves,” Heifort said. “They killed her. But I don't think they put her on that property naked.”

I opened my eyes, but I didn't look at the photographs. There was a bulletin board on the wall, and there was a piece of paper tacked there that said
PLEASE CLEAN THE MICROWAVE IF YOUR LUNCH EXPLODES IN THERE. THNX, MANAGEMENT.

“I swear I had nothing to do with it. I didn't know where she was. This wasn't
me
.” I had this heavy, heavy feeling inside me that I knew who it was, though. I added, “Why would I possibly do that?”

“Honestly, son, I have no idea,” Heifort said. I wasn't sure why he said
son
, as the rest of his tone was entirely at odds with it. “Some sick son of a bitch did this, and it's hard for me to get in that mindset. What I do know is this: Two young girls who knew you have disappeared in the last year. You were the last person to see one of them. Your foster father hasn't been heard from in months and you're the only one who seems to know where he is. Now there's a body near your residence, naked and half-near starved, and it seems like the sort of thing only a really troubled SOB would do. And I have right now in
front of me a guy who was abused by his parents and they tell me that screws you up pretty well. Would you care to comment on that?”

His voice was slow and genial the entire time he spoke. Koenig was studying a print of a ship that had never been anywhere near Minnesota.

When Heifort had first started speaking, a tiny fleck of anger had scratched and twisted inside me, and every moment he kept on, that fleck grew and grew. After everything I'd lived through, I was not going to be reduced to a one-sentence definition. I lifted my gaze to Heifort's and held it. I saw his eyes tighten a bit and knew that, as always, the yellow of mine was disconcerting. I felt suddenly, utterly calm, and somewhere in my voice, I heard echoes of Beck. “Is there a question in there, Officer? I thought you wanted me to account for my time or describe my attachment to my father or tell you I would do anything for Grace. But it sounds an awful lot like really what you want me to do is defend my mental health. I can't tell what it is you think I've done. Are you accusing me of kidnapping girls? Or killing my father? Or do you just think I'm screwed up?”

“Hey now,” Heifort said. “I didn't accuse you of anything, Mr. Roth. You just slow that teen rage right down now, because no one is accusing you of anything.”

I didn't feel bad for lying to him earlier, if he was going to lie to me now. Like hell he wasn't accusing me.

“What do you want me to say?” I shoved all the photos of the girl — Olivia — at him. “
That's
horrible. But I didn't have anything to do with it.”

Heifort left the photos where they were. He turned in his chair to give Koenig a meaningful glance, but Koenig's expression didn't change. Then he turned back around to me, his chair groaning and clicking. He rubbed one pouched eye. “I want to know where Geoffrey
Beck and Grace Brisbane are, Samuel. I've been round the block enough times to know that coincidences don't just happen. And you know what the common factor is between all these things? You.”

I didn't say anything. I wasn't the common factor.

“So are you going to cooperate and tell me something about all this, or are you going to make me do it the hard way?” Heifort asked.

“I don't have anything to tell you,” I said.

Heifort looked at me for a long time, as if he were waiting for my expression to betray something. “I think your daddy didn't do you any favors training you in lawyer talk,” he said finally. “Is that all you got to say?”

I had lots more to say, but not to him. If it had been Koenig asking, I would have told him that I didn't want Grace to be missing. That I wanted Beck back. That he wasn't my
foster
father, he was my father. That I didn't know what was going on with Olivia, but that I was just trying to keep my head above water. I wanted them to leave me alone. That was all. Just leave me alone to work through this on my own.

I said, “Yes.”

Heifort was just frowning at me. I couldn't tell if he believed me or not. After a space, he said, “I guess we're done for now. William, take care of him, would you?”

Koenig nodded shortly as Heifort pushed away from the table. Breathing felt slightly easier after Heifort had gone down the hall.

“I'll take you back to your car,” Koenig told me. He made an efficient gesture that meant for me to stand. I did — surprised, for some reason, that the floor felt solid beneath my feet. My legs felt vaguely jellied.

I started down the hall after Koenig, but he stopped when his cell phone rang. He retrieved it from his duty belt and examined it.

“Hold on,” Koenig said. “I have to take this call. Hello, William Koenig. Okay, sir. Wait. What happened now?”

I put my hands in my pockets. I felt light-headed: strung out from the questioning, from not eating, from the images of Olivia. I could hear Heifort's voice booming through the open door of the dispatch room to my left. The dispatchers laughed at something he said. It was weird to think that he could just switch it off like that — righteous anger at that girl's death instantly changing to office jokes in the next room over.

Koenig, on the phone, was trying to convince someone that if his estranged wife had taken his car that it was not theft as it was co-marital property.

I heard, “Hey, Tom.”

There were probably dozens of Toms in Mercy Falls. But I knew instantly which one it was. I recognized the odor of his aftershave and the prickling of my skin.

The dispatch room had a window to the hall on the opposite side from us, and I saw Tom Culpeper. He was jingling his keys in the pocket of his coat — one of those barn coats described as
rugged
and
classic
and
four hundred dollars
that were usually worn by people who spend more time in Land Rovers than barns. His face had the gray, sagging look of someone who hasn't slept, but his voice sounded smooth and in control. Lawyer voice.

I tried to decide what was worse: risk talking to Culpeper, or brave the puke smell in the kitchen. I contemplated retreat.

Heifort said, “Tom! Hey, devil. Hold on, let me get you in.” He breezed out of the dispatch room, down the dogleg hall that led around to the room where Culpeper was, and opened the door. He clapped a hand on Culpeper's shoulder. Of course they knew each other. “You here for work or are you just stirring up trouble?”

“Just coming to see about that coroner's report,” Culpeper said. “What did Geoffrey Beck's kid have to say about it?”

Heifort stepped back just enough that Culpeper could see past him to where I stood.

“Speak of the devil,” Culpeper said.

It would've been polite to say hi. I didn't say anything.

“How's your old man?” Culpeper asked. When he asked, it was deeply ironic, not only because it was clear that he didn't care, but also because Culpeper was so far from the sort of person that would say “old man” that it was obvious he was being sarcastic. He added, “I'm surprised he's not down here with you.”

My voice was stiff. “He would be if he could.”

“I've been talking with Lewis Brisbane,” Culpeper said. “Speaking of legal advice. The Brisbanes know I'm there for them if they need it.”

I couldn't quite bring myself to fully ponder the implications of Tom Culpeper acting as lawyer and confidant for Grace's parents. In any case, the possibility of any cordial future with them seemed incredibly distant. The possibility of
any
future that I had hoped for seemed incredibly distant.

“You really are completely gorked, aren't you?” Tom Culpeper said with wonder, and I realized I had been silent for too long, unaware of what my expression had been doing while I was lost in my dismay. He shook his head, not so much cruel as struck by the strangeness of us misfits. “Word for the wise: Try the insanity plea. God bless America. Beck always has liked them cracked.”

Heifort, to his credit, tried not to smile.