Son of Destruction (21 page)

Sallie twists her beads in a show of remorse. ‘It would be on our heads. We made him give that party, after all.’

‘For Cecilia. She’d want us to make sure he’s OK.’

‘After the way he did her?’

‘Because he did.’ Nenna is all wronged wife today, rehearsing for the divorce.

‘Did you
see
how he threw himself on her coffin down at St Timothy’s? He loved that girl in spite of everything.’

‘If Brad wants to kill himself, let him! It’s not our fault.’

Betsy sighs. ‘Unless it is.’

‘It isn’t safe. You know what he’s like when he gets mad. Let one of the guys check on him. Buck, maybe, or Stitch. They’re still friends.’

Kara says, ‘Not after last night. They’re over him.’

Betsy turns to Sallie. ‘Chape can do it. After all, they’re best friends.’

‘They weren’t
that
close,’ Sallie says. ‘Besides, Chape’s at the Florida Bar Association in Deland, and he won’t be back until tonight.’

‘By then it might be too late.’

Oh, Betsy, head cheerleader. ‘OK, then. It’s up to us.’

‘We can’t all go.’

‘You brought it up, Nenna. Maybe you should . . .’

‘Can’t.’ Their old friend’s mouth narrows. Her eyes are gun slits with a massed army behind them, glaring out. ‘I have a lot on my plate right now.’

‘It’s our duty.’

‘I would, but this is my acupuncture day.’

‘I promised to take Gramma Bellinger shopping after lunch.’

Betsy sets her cup down hard, like a gavel. ‘After all, we started it.’

Somebody ought to do it but nobody really wants to do it. Nobody present really likes Brad. Jessie gets up, broadcasting contempt. ‘When the check comes, my number is V48. Since you’re all too chicken, I’ll go.’

And how she brought it off? Timing. When Mom went into the kitchen, she hissed, ‘Don’t tell Mom. I found something scary at the house.’

She didn’t have to say which house. He dropped that ancient yearbook he came with. Now all she has to do is make up some story, right?

But Dan’s all over it, like white on rice. ‘OK. What did you find in the house?’

‘Yeah, well. Whatever. It’s hard to explain. You kind of have to see it.’

‘Letters? Papers? Skeleton? Disembodied corpse?’

It’s just something she made up to spring him. ‘You mean, like, ghost? Not really.’ She fishes, but comes up empty. ‘It’s a lot and a lot stranger.’

‘Explain strange.’

Come up with something, quick
. All she hears in her head is, duh. Duh. Duh. Only three more blocks. Duh! ‘So, where did you get that old
Swordfish
?’

‘Yard sale!’

Did he just turn red? Her tone says,
Gotcha.
‘Yeah, right.’

Dan counters with, ‘So, what’s this, like,
scary thing
you found at the Archambault house.’

And Steffy knuckles. ‘Oh, that. That was just a story to get you out of Mom’s clutches. Like, you were desperate. Look, we’re here.’ Carter is here too. Her heart leaps up at the sight of his car. She jumps out.

He says, ‘OK then.’

‘Are you coming or what?’

‘Can’t. Researching down at the
Star
.’

‘OK. The something strange was just a story, but it wasn’t,’ she says heavily. ‘There’s. Um. Something in the attic that you have to see.’ That, at least, is the truth. She needs to get him in there long enough to mess Carter up a little bit, you know, to get him back for the hickey Jen plastered on him like a fruit label, then he can go. She leans into the car, wheedling. ‘Really.’

‘Look, you got your ride. If you’ll just close the door?’

‘Come on, it won’t take long.’ When he greets this with an apologetic shrug, she comes clean. ‘OK, I need a favor. It’s my boyfriend? It’ll only take a minute, just enough to make him jealous, please?’

‘You’re kidding.’

‘It’s important. You don’t even have to talk to him.’

He cuts the motor. ‘OK.’

It’s kind of trippy, going into
their place
with a gorgeous man, knowing that Carter, who might actually be watching from the attic window, will hear them talking on the stairs. But of course they aren’t talking. Dan just follows politely so she is rummaging again, weighing setup lines. Think of something to say that will make him answer, Stef, think fast. She blurts, ‘I told him you were my boyfriend!’

‘What?’

‘Carter. Carter Bellinger. It’s a long story,’ she says, thinking:
Take
that
, perfidious Jen.

‘I bet.’ He isn’t listening, he’s inspecting the scarred wallpaper as they climb the stairs, as though what he needs is written there.

‘So if you wouldn’t mind . . .’

‘What, holding your hand?’

‘Playing like you care.’

But he is running his fingers over initials carved in the old newel post with a weird, visionary squint.

‘Come
on
!’

Opening the attic door Steffy says, to keep the conversation going, ‘Mom told me you have, um, family down here?’

‘Sort of. Maybe. I don’t know.’

‘Where else would you get a copy of the world’s oldest
Swordfish
? I mean, fuck, it’s from my mother’s year.’

And for the first time since they left her house, her new guy smiles. ‘It was my mother’s year too. Her name was Lucy,’ he adds, as though she’ll recognize it and start to talk. ‘Lucy Carteret?’

‘Awesome!’ she says as her head clears the top of the attic stairs.
We’re practically the same age.
This makes her so happy that she laughs. She’s trying hard to make this sound like a party. ‘That is sooo cool!’

What follows is everything Steffy hoped and more. ‘Babe!’ Carter is energized by the unfamiliar voice. He greets her with a studly hug. At the same time he is craning over her shoulder to see who . . .

‘This is my friend Danny,’ she says carelessly, as Dan Carteret emerges from the stairwell. ‘Danny, Carter. Carter, Dan.’

Nicely – he really is a good guy! – her friend slips a possessive arm around her. ‘Any friend of Steffy’s . . .’

Carter gives him a diffident, ‘Hey.’

‘He’s a reporter. How cool is that?’

‘Really.’ Not a question. Period. Carter is trying way too hard to sound unimpressed. ‘And you brought him up here because . . .’

Steffy says, all, everybody-knows-this, ‘You mean you don’t know what happened here? When you get home, Google Lorna Archambault. She burned up right here in this house.’

‘No shit.’

‘Yeah, shit. Dan’s doing a story about it, for his paper? It’s . . .’

But her trophy is too absorbed to pick up on his cue. Instead he spooks around the attic, peering into gables, turning over trash with his toe, running a hand over the dressmaker’s shape which might in fact be dead old Lorna’s shape, poking at defunct Venetian blinds. When he does speak, he says nothing that Steffy expects. Instead he pulls out a tired old picture, which he hands to Steffy first. ‘I can’t stay, but, hey. Do you know these guys?’

More than anything, Steffy wants to help him, but she doesn’t know these guys. She hands off the snapshot to Carter, who’s so close that her flank twitches, from her armpit all the way down. His warm breath swirls around in her ear; she wants to finish this fast so Dan will leave. Then she’ll do whatever she has to with Carter, to get him back from Jen.

But the least likely person to recognize somebody in Dan’s crap snapshot turns out to know. Carter yips like a pirate with a treasure map. ‘Well, yeah!’

‘No shit!’

‘Yeah, shit. There’s one a lot like it tacked up at my dad’s fishing shack? Except my dad isn’t driving in that one, go figure. I mean, it’s his Jeep. That’s Millicent Von Harten’s father in the back with Mr Coleman and his twin brother, the one that died in the wreck? And the guys hanging off the sides? Oh hell, I don’t know who this one is, that has all the red hair? But the one on the driver’s side is definitely Mr Kalen, you can tell by the unibrow.’

A quick study, Dan leaves the attic before the kids can distract him, rehearsing their names. Coleman. Von Harten. Kalen. Bellinger. Four names, sixteen steps. It won’t take long. Chaplin’s off the list – those watery blue eyes. With four locals to research, it won’t be hard. Then he can hunt down and slay, or . . . He doesn’t know. It’s like that old movie:
I know who you are and I know what you did.
Except he doesn’t.

He aches all over, as if they just told him that his father died. How do you grieve for somebody you never knew? It’s odd. He does. He always has.

Get down on your knees and thank your God.

What?
He trips, nicking his hand on a latch. ‘What!’
Oh, crap, this house is not good for me.
Why is he still on the second floor?

It’s in the blood.

‘Get the fuck out of my head!’

Not him. Never. Do you hear?

The hell of it is, he does. Where he should be downstairs and out of here at a dead run, Dan’s like a car with a dead battery, stalled in front of her bedroom door. Either he’s batshit crazy or the old bitch really is yelling,
It’s in the blood.

Out,
he thinks,
got to get out
, but he lingers, boiling with questions.
Then, my God! At his back, there’s a disturbance in the air. Before he can swivel to see, there’s a thump between his shoulder blades.
Mom!

Air knifes into his chest.

Liberated, he runs for the exit, wondering how the fuck his mother got into this house.

Jessie has been in worse places. The cavernous front room of the Sixties Modern shrine to Orville and Mildred Kalen is littered with the expected: crumpled beer cans, miniature airline empties and ranks of full-sized dead soldiers; clothes strewn every whichway; unopened bills and second notices, sleazy skin mags and months’ worth of old newspapers, some still in their plastic wrappers like snakes that died before they could slough their skin.

The architect’s vision went to hell the day Brad Kalen shipped his ancient parents off to Golden Acres, that’ll teach you to have a baby way too late in life, that’ll teach you to spoil him rotten. Mold overtook the white stucco walls the day they left; their pictures faded. It’s been a long time since anybody opened the dusty fiberglass curtains on their panoramic view of the inlet, or opened the sliding doors. Dead dieffenbachia droop in porcelain urns on the filthy terrazzo and the whole place smells of sour laundry.

He’s here
, she thinks, sailing into the kitchen as though she’d swept down the curved staircase all dressed up for the next party every night of her life here, the privileged child of the house.

Yes she has been here before. No she doesn’t want to talk about it. Junk from Brad’s tux pockets litters the kitchen counter: wallet, keys, dented silver flask. Somebody jammed last night’s dress clothes into the washer, tuxedo and all, and started it; through the glass she sees the stuff revolving, a study in black and white. A stinking load Brad washed but left to mildew in the machine is heaped on top; it was too vile to put into the drier. Brad’s black patent leather dress shoes sit in a bucket of suds, he’d probably puked on them. Somebody – not Brad – somebody’s fastidious.

Bobby
, she thinks. He lugged Brad out of the club last night, an unlikely pairing. Sure, they hung out back in the day, but they were never friends: the gorilla and the thinking stork. That load is sloshing into the rinse cycle; he must have just left.
Good old Bobby.
She nukes water in one of the few clean mugs she can find and with a grimace, takes the only thing available – instant – and makes coffee.
Get the bastard up. Then we can start
.

She goes up the pink granite stairs, wondering whether she’d rather find him awake or stupefied. All she has to do is see whether or not he’s dead, but Lucy Carteret’s son is in town, and Jessie has questions. Snores rip through the upstairs hall: asleep, not dead. Too bad. It would have settled a lot of things.

Fuck. He’ll be hard to wake up.

Brad is on the rumpled platform bed in the ruined master bedroom, drooling on his black satin sheets. Round bed, mirrored ceiling. Looks like a set for a porn shoot, but not anything you’d want to watch. Bobby maxed out on Brad around the time he should have been shoveling him into the shower. The room stinks of puke and hangover.

There are things it’s OK to do in high school. Kids don’t cut as fine a line when it comes to niceties, but adults discriminate. People who used to hang out together stop being friends or realize they never were friends, really. Age makes men cautious. Judgmental, and once they judge, it’s final. Yeah, Bobby dumped Brad on the bed naked and filthy, and walked away. He was that anxious to get shut of him.

A rank pile of grey sweats by the bed tells her Bobby did finish the job and left before Brad yacked again and crawled away from the stink. She has no problem seeing him like this. Because she was a Pierce Point girl, not one of the cool kids, it’s the only way she’s ever seen him. Not naked, necessarily, but real Brad, neither charming nor social in the Fort Jude way. Underneath, he’s always been willful, brutish and blunt.

Now it shows, and if it hadn’t been for Walker taking control last night . . .

Fucking Brad will strut right back into that circle like the gypsy’s daughter, miraculously turned back into a virgin again. It’s the Fort Jude way. The Fort Jude way is a little miracle of denial. Jessie should know. There’s a thin line between organized society and raw nature. She knows how the town’s anointed nice boys looked at her back then; she heard the girls’ savage whispers snaking down the halls, but now everything is pretty, pretty, now everybody’s nice.
Nice
is the product of a powerful group effort. Societies like this one survive on the strength of a pact created by the group and mutually agreed upon.
Nobody needs to know the truth if we act the part.

In this town the chosen are born smoothing over rough spots and ignoring the boggy ones – even Brad, at least they do in public, where people can see. Jessie shudders. As a kid, she envied that entitled, happy little circle. Now she’s in it – more or less. The kid who used to be nobody is
somebody
in this town. It’s comfortable. Fort Jude’s chosen do what they have to, to keep their pretty creation intact.