No Way Home (24 page)

“That’s all you can say about it? You were helpless?”

“Come on, Mom. Don’t you think I would have done something if I could?” His eyes were bright with tears, and he wiped the muddy sleeve of his jersey across them, streaking his face with dirt.

Lillie shook her head furiously, her own tears choking her. “I don’t know,” she wailed. “I’ll never know. You stand there and tell me this. As if you don’t realize how you betrayed her. You betrayed Michele. And me. All of us. Aren’t you ashamed?”

This seemed to prick him and his face hardened. “Look,” he said, “I’m not the only one…”

“I cannot understand this,” she said. “No matter how hard I try. How could you stand there? And do nothing? How can you sleep at night for thinking of it? How can you walk around each day as if none of this had ever happened?”

“I said I was sorry,” he cried hoarsely. “Look, what do you want from me? What do you want me to do? Just tell me and I’ll do it.”

Lillie turned away from him and looked up at the steely gray sky. It was true. What else could he say? Michele was dead. Of course he was sorry. How many ways could he say it? His tears told her everything. For all the good it did, he was as sorry as could be.

Lillie shook her head and sank down on the edge of one of the bleacher seats, staring blankly out ahead of her. “I don’t want to torture you with this,” she said softly. “You’re my son. I know you are sorry. And I know you have suffered too. But I can’t just let it go. All these lies.” She shook her head. “What about Michele? When you agreed to all these lies, to this silence, didn’t any of you think of her?”

“What do you mean?” he asked warily.

“You know what I mean,” she said. “Your sister is murdered and the whole lot of you just bent over backward to pretend it never even happened.”

“Wait a minute, Mom,” he said. “We couldn’t tell. Once it came out that I was there too—”

“I know,” she interrupted him. “You don’t want to face the humiliation. Maybe even a trial. God help me, I don’t want you to either. And now your father is involved. And the sheriff. But, tell me something, Grayson. Do you think this boy who killed your sister should just go free? Go unpunished? How can we live with that?”

Grayson stood silently above her, chewing the inside of his mouth absently as he stared out over the field. Then slowly, gingerly, he sat down on the bleacher beside her. “Mom, there’s another reason,” he said. ‘This is hard to tell you…. There’s more to this than you really know about.”

Lillie frowned at him. “Meaning what?”

Grayson licked his lips and turned his helmet in his hands, avoiding her eyes. He seemed to be concentrating on something, wrestling with it. Then he said, “There’s something else that happened that night. Dad doesn’t even know about it.”

“Since when do you tell me and not your father?” she asked stiffly.

Grayson sighed. “I didn’t tell Dad because…it’s about Michele. I didn’t want him to know this. I mean, you know how he is about her. I mean, in his eyes, she was just…you know, his little girl.”

“What are you trying to say?” Lillie demanded. “I can’t take much more, Grayson.”

“Look, I know you think I’m a coward and that’s why I wanted to cover this mess up, but I’m trying to protect Michele too, in my own way. So it won’t come out what happened.”

“Wait a minute,” Lillie cried. “No. You can’t think that you are going to turn around now and somehow blame this whole thing on your sister? Are you going to tell me maybe that she had a drink and she hit him first? Don’t you dare, Grayson. Don’t you dare try to blame this on her.”

“Not a drink, Mom,” he interrupted her. “We all had a drink.”

“You stood there and you watched it happen and you did nothing. At least be man enough to admit it now, Grayson.”

“I wasn’t standing there. The truth is…I walked away,” Grayson said. “I was leaving.”

“We know that, Grayson,” she said sharply.

“I had to.”

“You did not have to. You chose to,” Lillie insisted.

“I had to,” he cried. “She…she took off her blouse.”

Lillie stared at him. There was a bright pink flush rising up his neck to his cheeks. He did not look at her. Her own face felt hot. “She did not,” Lillie said in a shaky voice.

“Mom, she did,” Grayson said. “She liked him. She had a crush on Tyler. I guess she had some idea that it would make him interested…I don’t know. She said it was too hot out and she took it off. I couldn’t just stand there, Mom. It was too embarrassing. I had to leave.”

Lillie was shaking her head. Not Michele, she thought, her cheeks burning with shame for her daughter. Not my baby. But she was not a baby.

“I guess she thought he’d like it, but he must have thought she was a tease or something.” Grayson sighed. “Anyway, I went to leave and I heard it happen, and when I turned back…”

Lillie hid her face in her hands, humiliated, terrified, as if she herself were reliving her daughter’s final moments.

“I put her shirt back on her after it was over,” said Grayson. ‘There was nothing else I could do. I didn’t want anyone to find her like that.”

Lillie squeezed her eyes shut but she could not blot out the image of her shy Michele, made reckless by infatuation and moonshine and moonlight, trying to be daring. Never suspecting…a victim of her own innocence.

Grayson interrupted her thoughts. “Don’t tell Dad,” he said earnestly. “Okay, Mom? I don’t want him to know about this.”

Lillie nodded numbly.

“What does that mean?” said Grayson. “Are you going to tell him or not?”

Lillie looked at her son with vacant eyes. “I don’t want to talk to your father right now.”

“I don’t want anyone else knowing this about her,” Grayson said. “They’ll get the wrong idea about her. She really wasn’t like that usually. She was kind of shy of boys. I still don’t know why she did it.”

Why? Lillie thought, more empty than angry now. Did she think, as young girls sometimes do, that no one would ever want her? She should have told me how she felt, Lillie thought bitterly. I could have made her understand that she never had to flaunt herself. That one day she would be loved, pursued, cherished. Lillie felt as if her head were spinning from this new revelation. You could have confided in me, Lillie wanted to cry out. We were so close. There was a sick churning in her stomach.

“I was trying to protect her, Mom,” Grayson said urgently.

Lillie looked at her son as if he had awoken her from a trance, and she felt her heart soften toward him. She searched his troubled eyes as if from far away and then nodded. “I can see that,” she said, reaching over and gripping his forearm for a second. Despite the renewed anguish she felt, picturing the clumsy attempt at seduction, the explosive consequences, she was glad he had told her. It was like a rickety bridge back to her son, reconnecting them. It was as if her heart had stopped completely, and now she could feel it, feebly beating again.

‘Thank you for doing that for her,” she said.

“I just wish I could have saved her, Mom,” he cried.

“Oh, Grayson, so do I.” Lillie moaned, shaking her head. Slowly she got up from the bleacher seat and brushed herself off.

Grayson scrambled to his feet. “When you get home—” he said.

“I’m not going home,” Lillie interrupted.

“Where are you going?” he asked, alarmed.

Lillie looked around the playing field, empty now, the clouds low and smoky, the darkness gathering. “I’m going to Aunt Brenda’s. I’m going to stay there tonight, if she’ll have me.”

He glanced at her bruised eye and nodded. “Because of that.”

“Because of everything. I just can’t. Grayson, I need to think. I don’t know what to do next. I just need to be by myself and think about all this.”

“Well, what are you going to do?” he asked anxiously.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t mind telling you that I have never felt so completely at a loss in all my life.”

“It takes a while to get used to it all,” he said. “But I don’t think you should be away from home right now.”

“Don’t worry about me,” she said. “You just go get dressed. I’ll be fine.”

Grayson glanced at her through narrowed eyes. “You’re not going to tell Aunt Brenda about this, are you?”

“I am not telling anybody anything tonight, believe me. I am just going there to have some privacy. Some room to breathe.”

This answer seemed to reassure him. “Listen, Mom,” he said. “I have given this a lot of thought. And I am sorry.”

“I know,” she said dully.

“But it’s too late now to start dredging it all up to other people. Everybody gets hurt that way.”

“Everybody’s already hurt,” she said.

“Yeah, but now we have to think about the future. I mean, what good would it do to have to go through it all over again?”

“I have to go, Grayson.” Lillie sighed. “Tell your father where I went, okay?”

She did not wait for him to reply. She had to get away from him. From all of it. She felt battered, inside and out. She had thought that Michele’s murder had been the ultimate nightmare. She smiled bitterly at her own naivete. It seemed now that her daughter’s death had been just the beginning. She felt as if everything that held her world in place was coming apart.

Lillie walked slowly toward the parking lot and her car. When she reached the car, she turned and looked back. Her son was still standing there in the gathering dusk, feet apart, fists clenched, his eyes boring into her. His padded figure was silhouetted against the gray sky like some large, impossibly idealized sculpture of a man.

IN THE GLOOM OF A FOGGY EVENING,
the cluster of dimly lit Georgian-style buildings of the Sentinel Military Academy looked like a fortress built into the North Carolina hillside. Jordan passed the sign that indicated the school had been founded in 1887 and drove slowly up the hill and down the driveway until he reached the parking lot beside the main quadrangle.

It was nearly seven o’clock and he was weary from his trip, but he wanted to accomplish his mission right away. He was edgy and anxious about how he was going to handle the boy, and it was best to just get it over with. There was an American flag, and a WWI vintage riding gun anchored in the center of a grassy island in front of the central building. Jordan figured that was where he was bound to find the person in authority. A couple of gray-uniformed cadets hurried past him on the walkway, their heads down, and some dried leaves rustled across the lawns, but otherwise it was quiet. Jordan climbed the steps to the main building, walked inside, and looked around.

The old mahogany woodwork gleamed like an officer’s shoeshine, even in the dim light of the hallway. The building appeared to be deserted, but he followed a sign indicating the commandant’s office and was relieved to see that there was a light coming from it. No one was sitting at the secretary’s desk in the anteroom. The paneled walls were covered with plaques of achievement and bookcases holding military histories and Sentinel yearbooks dating back to the 1930s. The inside office door was ajar, and as Jordan walked up to it he noticed the plaque: Colonel James Preavette. Jordan tapped on the door. When a raspy voice ordered him to enter, Jordan poked his head in and saw a tanned, wiry man in shirtsleeves wearing silver-rimmed spectacles that matched his slicked-back silver hair. His glasses glinted as he looked up.

“I’m sorry to bother you, Colonel Preavette,” said Jordan.

“No problem, come on in. You just caught me doing some piled-up paperwork.”

Jordan could not help noticing, as he introduced himself, that the colonel’s desk was immaculate except for two neatly arranged file folders and a framed photo of his family.

“What can I do for you?” the colonel asked.

“Well, actually I’m here to see one of your students. Ah, my name is Jordan Hill.”

The colonel gave a sharp nod. “Well, I’m sorry, but you’ll have to come back tomorrow. Sunday is Visitors Day around here. Are you a family member?”

Jordan hesitated. “A friend of the family,” he said vaguely. “Actually, this is kind of important. It would really help if I could talk to this young man tonight.”

“Is this a medical emergency in the family?” the colonel asked sternly.

Jordan felt like a soldier on the carpet. He did not try to lie. “No, but it’s a matter of the greatest urgency to me. I believe this boy may have some important information concerning a serious crime…”

“Are you a policeman?” the colonel demanded.

“No, sir,” Jordan admitted, acutely aware of his rumpled appearance, his longish hair, and his jacket, still redolent of Lillie.

“Rules and discipline are what make this institution work, Mr. Hill. The example we set for these cadets is all-important. There is a very fine motel not far down the road where most of our family members like to stay when they visit. Come back tomorrow, Mr. Hill,” the colonel said, giving Jordan a fleeting wintry smile.

The dismissal was final and Jordan knew it. He also knew better than to try to persuade the colonel otherwise. He wished for a moment that he had thought to skirt the official channels. “What time tomorrow?” he asked coolly.

“Anytime after nine. What cadet was it that you wanted to see?”

Aha, Jordan thought. So the mention of a crime had registered after all. He’s curious. “Tyler Ansley is the cadet’s name, sir.”

The colonel’s eyebrows shot up behind the silver frames. He reached for the pack of Camels on his desk and released a cigarette with one hand. Jordan waited patiently while he lit it and took a drag. The colonel nodded.

“I knew there was something wrong there,” he said. “I can spot a boy in trouble a mile away.”

Jordan did not reply. If the colonel wanted information, he was going to have to bend the rules. The colonel instantly understood the unspoken terms and took a moment to consider. Then he shook his head.

“Come back tomorrow, Mr. Hill.”

Jordan thanked him curtly and walked out. Once he got out into the quadrangle he looked angrily around at the buildings of the school. It was possible that one of them housed his daughter’s killer. But if he tried to determine which, without the colonel’s permission, security would have him removed from the grounds, and he would not be allowed to return in the morning.