Keaton School 01: Escape Theory (32 page)

“I think I know,” Reed said between labored, raspy breaths. He pushed himself out of his chair. Bodhi reached out a hand to help him, but Reed waved him off and shuffled to a room in the back of the house. “Raven’s back!” he yelled from down the hallway.

Bodhi sent a text on his phone. “How did he know that?” Cleo asked.

“Camera at the foot of the driveway, the guest house, here, among a few others. We know everything and everyone that comes and goes from this property,” Bodhi finished up his text. He put his phone down on the coffee table. Devon thought he seemed very nonchalant about Eric and Maya. Shouldn’t that have been a bigger surprise?

“So, you know about Eric and Maya already? Why were you suspicious of Matt and Isla then?” Devon asked.

Bodhi shrugged. “We don’t have cameras everywhere up there. Yet. But we know Matt was out of his room the night Hutch was killed.”

“I’m here. What’s up?” Raven barged through the front door in her usual red bikini, cut-offs, and flip-flops. She spotted Devon and stopped. “You’re back? What the hell happened? One minute we’re cool the next you’re looking at me all weird and faking being sick and begging to go back to Keaton on an off-weekend.”

“Yeah, I’m sorry about that.” Devon couldn’t hold eye contact. Raven was right; Devon had acted like a jerk.

“Rav, it’s cool. Devon has something to tell us.” Bodhi waved her over. She sat on the arm of Reed’s leather chair. “It’s Eric. He and Maya really are together.”

“Jesus,” Raven mumbled.

When Reed reappeared, he dropped a crinkled paper bag on the coffee table. “I didn’t want to tell you kids this way, but … I should have said something sooner.” He dumped the bag out and pill bottles rolled onto the wooden table. Bodhi sat on the floor next to the table and read the bottles.

“Vicodin. OxyContin. Demerol.” Bodhi shook the bottles as he spoke. “This one’s empty. The OxyContin.”

Reed sat back in his leather chair and closed his eyes. “That’s what I was afraid of,” he gasped. Forming the words seemed to sap all his energy.

“Reed, why do you have these? These are some serious drugs,” Bodhi said as he analyzed each bottle.

“I haven’t been taking them. The doctor said I’d need them as the cancer gets worse. I’ve got bone cancer, kids.” Bodhi and Raven locked eyes. Devon knew their fragile world was about to change all over again. “I probably won’t see the end of this year. You’re the first ones to know.”

“So Eric.…” Cleo began. Devon and Raven and Bodhi were all still processing Reed’s news.

“He was here that week. We were fighting. We all were,” Reed said. “I was worn out by all the fighting and must have left this out in my bathroom.”

“What were you fighting about?” Devon asked. “Maya’s pregnancy?”

“No, I didn’t know about that then. I changed my will over the summer. I had to make arrangements after I got the diagnosis. Instead of passing everything down to Bill and his sons, everything was going to go to Hutch. The land, the vineyard, the house and my work in the lab. Eric and Bill, they just didn’t get it. They wanted to butcher the land and sell my property so Eddie Dover would finally own the whole mountain and he could rip it apart for his experiments. I won’t let them destroy our land and the school. I promised Francis Keaton I wouldn’t let them, and I intend to keep that promise from the grave if I have to. Hutch understood. He’s the only one who really understood. Eric came down thinking he was going to talk sense into me. I can’t believe that sonofabitch. His own brother.” Reed shook his head and twisted his mouth into a grimace.

“These are forty milligram pills,” Bodhi said. “It wouldn’t have taken much. If Eric crushed them up—”

“In a beer?” Devon added. She didn’t want to be right. Somehow if her hunches were wrong she didn’t need to look at the brutality of the truth.

“In a beer,” he agreed. His voice shook. “A strong beer like Gernsbach would have hidden the taste. If the pills are broken up they release the full dosage at once instead of over time as they’re supposed to. He would have stopped breathing within an hour.”

The room was silent as everyone absorbed what Bodhi said.
For once
, Devon thought,
it feels like the puzzle pieces are all starting to fit together
.

“What do we do now?” Raven asked. “Reed is the one with the pills in his name. If we accuse Eric and we’re wrong, the cops will turn on Reed, won’t they?”

“We need a confession,” Cleo said. “And if there’s one person who can get someone to talk.…” Devon blinked. All eyes in the room were on her. “You’re up, Counselor.”

The last remnants of daylight were fading from the sky. The night was taking over, ushering the brighter colors off stage. Devon leaned back on the bench against the cement wall of the Palace. But the beauty offered her no comfort and with all the graffiti vying for wall space around her, she felt as if she were in a bathroom stall. Trapped. It was hard to imagine that seventy years ago soldiers sat here, scanning the ocean for incoming enemy activity. It seemed ironic. This used to be a place of safety, security. And now it was for rebellion and secrets, the worst of all, murder.

Tires twisted on the dirt path above. A door slammed. Devon checked the six pack of Gersbach beers at her feet, the notebook in her lap. Everything was in place.

“Babe? You down here?” Eric’s voice called. He was getting closer. Devon exhaled long and slow. Looking calm and confident was key. This was her session. She was in control here.

Eric rounded the corner and stopped when he saw Devon. “What are you doing here? Where’s Maya? She was meeting me here.”

“I know. Maya called you. But I’m the one meeting with you.” Devon stood up. “Have a seat. Pop a beer.” She slid the cardboard pack toward Eric with her foot. The glass bottles clinked together.

Eric tucked his hair behind his ears and glanced around. “Nah, Maya wouldn’t do that. Where is she?”

“Well, she did. And she’s not here. Maybe you two have more trust issues than you thought.” Devon sat back down and crossed her legs.

“Excuse me?” he said. “What’s this about, Devon? You wanted to have a beer with me in honor of Hutch or something?”

“I’ve got something for you.” Devon tapped the hard edge of her notebook. “Heard you were itching to get a look at my session notes.” Eric eyed the notebook in her lap. “Figured, if you were gonna pay someone to steal them from me, we could just cut out the middleman. I make a little cash; you get what you want. That is what you want, isn’t it? To find out what everyone’s been saying about Hutch. About you.”

The crickets filled in the silence as Devon leaned down and pulled a beer from the six-pack. With one deft move, like she had seen Raven do, she snapped the metal cap off with a pop of her hand and the bottle against the stone bench. Devon took a long pull from the bottle like Eric’s answer didn’t matter to her. The beer tasted sour and the bubbles were thick in her throat.
Just try not to hurl in front of him
.

Eric broke the silence with a short laugh. “Listen. You could get suspended for being out here, doing what you’re doing. You should walk back up that hill and check yourself into your dorm like a good Keaton kiddie.” He stood, arms crossed, towering over Devon.
Okay, maybe staying sitting down wasn’t the best idea
. “Whatever you think you know, you don’t.”

“Probably not. Want to explain it to me?”

“It’s not in your notes, I can tell you that.” Eric reached down
and grabbed a beer and used a lighter to snap the cap off. He took a sip and looked out over the distant ocean. “Besides, I don’t need your notes to know what happened. Hutch committed suicide. We had some family stuff go down and he was upset.”

“Upset that he was set to inherit everything? Or, was it you that was upset?”

Eric glanced at Devon and then turned his gaze back to the horizon. “You spoke to Reed? He tell you how he was going to betray my dad and me? How I only found out about it by accident?” Devon didn’t answer. She let him fill the silences, as she was trained. “Yeah, he wasn’t even going to tell us. His lawyer’s secretary screwed up this summer and gave me the wrong envelope with Reed’s revised will in it. Reed wanted to give all the land to Hutch to make sure it becomes a nature preserve or some shit like that. He has no idea how much money we could make if we just let the Dovers drill. He’s sitting on a goldmine and what does he want to do with it? Keep away the one person that is willing to pay him for this stupid land.”

“You’re smart,” Devon said.

Eric turned to her. “What?”

She lifted her shoulders. “It’s a smart move if you want to get in with the Dover family. I mean, you’re looking at a potential statutory situation with getting Maya pregnant, but bringing something the Dovers want to the table could help your cause.”

“Yeah, well, it wasn’t going to matter. Reed wouldn’t budge. And that same week Maya found out … we found out she was pregnant. I lost it when she said she wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with it. You know it’s my life that would get screwed too. I’m the one that’s supposed to become this great doctor. And then, to find out Hutch was helping her get the pregnancy test? How much more could he turn against his own family? Against me? That’s not how brothers are supposed to act. I was raised knowing this land would one day be mine. And in one week Hutch takes the land and tries to turn my girl against me?” Eric tossed his bottle over the
hillside. “He probably killed himself because he couldn’t live with the betrayal.”

Still clinging to the lie
. “Reed is dying. That’s why he changed his will. He’s going to be gone in a matter of months.” Devon looked at him, calm and assured.

“How do you know that?” He tucked his hair behind his ears again. “That’s true? Shit.” He shook his hands out and flexed his fingers like he was warming up for a fight.

“That’s why he had those pills in his house. The ones you found and slipped to Hutch in a beer like the one you just finished. Did you regret it all? Because, you still sent that text to everyone in his phone book, so you were probably around to watch your own brother die at your feet. What do they call that? Fratricide? It’s a good SAT word.”

Eric said nothing. The hairs on the back of Devon’s neck rose as he stood still looking at the view below.
How could he not react? How could he not fill
this
silence?

Finally Eric spoke. “My knee was killing me. I was at Reed’s. We were arguing, and the pain was making it all worse. I found the Oxy in his bathroom. I put it in my pocket to take with me back to the city. I was going to go back to the city that night, but I called Hutch to try to talk it out again. He wouldn’t listen to me. He wasn’t going to listen, but he agreed to meet me here. I waited for him, and I don’t know why, but I started crushing up the pills and put them in his beer. I didn’t wake up wanting him dead that day. Really. This wasn’t easy for me. I loved my brother.”

Eric turned and looked at Devon, his eyes exploring her body up and down. She suddenly felt gross, exposed much too casually to someone so foul, so dangerous. He kept his eyes set on her as he reached for another beer. But in one swift move, he darted toward her and yanked her to her feet by the front of her shirt. He spun her around and broke his beer bottle against the wall of the Palace. He was strong, even stronger than he looked. Devon’s arms flailed
behind her, but she merely slapped and pecked at Eric. He held the broken bottle to her throat.

“What’s to stop me from shutting you up right here? I killed my brother, you really think I wouldn’t hesitate to kill some nosy little bitch?”

“People know I’m here,” Devon whispered. Her voice quavered. “They’ll know it was you. Maya will know. Please.” She tried to dig her nails into his arms, but they didn’t break skin. He didn’t flinch.

“Oh, that’s not a problem. I’m thinking that you were so distraught over Hutch’s suicide, everyone knows it, everyone’s seen you obsess about him, that you came down here where he killed himself and slit your wrists. It’s romantic but it’s also a slow death. Gives me enough time to text your suicide note.”

Devon was crying now. She tried to kick his legs behind her but caught air.

“The common misconception about slitting is to go across like this,” Eric used the glass and cut a thin line across Devon’s wrist. The blood sprung to the surface, as if making a jailbreak from her skin. “But really, the way to do it is to cut upwards, severing the artery like this.” Eric dug the glass into the center of her wrist. Devon screamed. But the glass didn’t go any further. Eric let go and Devon fell to the ground.

Above her, she caught a blur of someone wearing a white hat.
Grant
? He pulled Eric away from Devon and punched Eric in the center of his jaw. Eric’s head spun from the impact. It moved so fast it looked like it could spin a full rotation.

“Leave her alone,” Grant choked out, his voice thick. “You’ve done enough.” He punched Eric again and Eric fell to the ground.

“You suddenly going to do the right thing?” Eric said as he wiped at the blood running from his nose. “She’s never going to be into you. Don’t you get it? It’s my brother she’s wanted this whole time.”

Grant’s chest heaved. His right hand was clenched, ready to strike again. He looked at Devon, still sprawled on the ground
clutching her wrist. “Yeah, well, Hutch was a better guy than you or me.” Eric stood up.

“Give it up. You’ve taken too much money from me to suddenly switch sides. Let’s go.” Eric turned to walk away dismissing Grant as a credible threat.

Grant looked at Devon again. And then he stepped forward and leveled Eric with another right hook. “I should have done that when he asked me to steal from you.”

Eric lay on the ground, passed out and bloody. Dirt streaked across his face. Devon could feel shards of glass on the ground digging into her thighs but the pain was remote. Nothing seemed to hurt. Her wrist bled and she held onto it, watching the blood ooze down her arm in long tendrils. Grant sat down next to her. He looked at his own hand, the skin on his knuckles torn and already swelling.