Too Close to Home (31 page)

“I know you don’t believe this, Jim, but I like you,” Conrad said. “I hope that when Elizabeth came to see you, she conveyed that. The fact is, you’ve really rattled me these last few days with your accusations and insinuations. So I unburdened myself to Elizabeth, had her approach you since I wasn’t having much luck on my own. And I gather she didn’t have that much luck, either.”

I said nothing.

“The thing is, and I fear this is going to sound insincere or patronizing, but running Thackeray these last few years, I’ve had the opportunity to meet governors and senators and even a couple of presidents. Plus, at the annual festival Ellen puts together, I’ve met some of the greatest literary minds in the country. Quite a few of them have had some very flattering things to say about me. They think I’m a writer of great talent. But you, Jim, you consider me to be a fraud.”

I wondered what I would do with a watering can if I had one just then.

“The thing is, you’re a bright guy. A lot brighter than you let on sometimes, I think. And you’re an artist. I think you understand something of the creative process.” He smiled ruefully. “You don’t believe I wrote
A Missing Part.
There aren’t many people around privy to the story surrounding Brett Stockwell’s computer, so there aren’t many people to question the veracity of my authorship in the first place. You’re a very select group.”

“I’m honored,” I said.

“That’s why I tried to get Elizabeth to persuade you to read my new book.” He reached over the desk and patted a stack of paper about three inches thick. “This is it. I wanted you to realize, I
can
write a book.”

“Even if you wrote that pile there,” I said, “it doesn’t change anything about the first book.”

Conrad’s lips went in and out for a moment. “Yes, well. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, just a little flight of fancy here, but let’s suppose there were something to your suspicions about my first book. What if this book is designed to make up for that? Wouldn’t that be worth something?”

Again, I was at a loss for words.

“This is the wrong time to ask you again if you’d read it. A lot’s happened, you certainly don’t owe me any favors at the moment.”

“When do you think that might change, Conrad?”

He chuckled. “Good point.”

“Here’s an idea for a book,” I said. “Why don’t you do one about a college president who’s so fucking self-consumed, even after he’s acknowledged that his wife nearly got a guy killed, he still thinks the guy would like to read his book.”

Conrad nodded slowly. “Well, I thought it was worth a shot. Perhaps Ellen will read it. I’ll drop it by sometime.”

“Yeah, that’d be great.” I ran a hand over my face, took a breath. Now I had a question. “What did you do with the computer, Conrad?”

“I took out the hard drive, smashed it to bits with a sledgehammer, took a drive out to Saratoga Lake, rented a boat, and dropped it in the middle of the lake.”

There was something about the forthright way he told me that I almost admired. “Did you look at what was on it before you did all that?” I asked.

“Briefly.”

“Did you notice anything else in there? Some letters, for example?”

Conrad cocked his head and eyed me curiously. “Letters?”

“Yeah.”

“No, I didn’t notice. Why?”

I waved my hand at him. “Doesn’t matter now.”

He settled into his chair, tented his fingers before his chin. “You’re a decent guy, Jim, and I understand your view of me,” he said. “And you have every right to be angry at—to be appalled by—what happened to you and Ellen. You were terrorized. What my wife, Illeana, put into motion, it’s unforgivable. But there’s a reason why I asked Ellen not to identify Illeana’s brother Lester when he went into that lineup. To expose what Illeana did, and her motives, no matter how misguided and unnecessary, runs the risk of subjecting me to greater scrutiny, and ultimately, that’s going to reflect on Ellen.” Another pause. “And that will have an impact on you. And your son.”

“I don’t know what you’re getting at,” I said.

Conrad leaned in closer to me. “You need to talk to your wife,” he said.

THIRTY-SIX

I
NEED TO TELL it from the beginning,” Ellen said, sitting at our kitchen table. When I’d come out of Conrad’s study, I’d headed straight for Ellen, said nothing more than “Let’s go,” and drove home with barely a word between us. When we got inside, Derek was sitting in the living room. MTV was on the tube, but he appeared to be fast asleep. Cutting grass all day in the sun will do that to you. I gave him a nudge. He woke with a start. “What? Where am—oh, okay.” He scratched his head. “Hey, buddy,” I said. “Your mom and I need to talk. Why don’t you hit the sack?”

“Yeah, sure.” Groggily, and with great effort, he made his way upstairs. When we heard his door close, we found ourselves in the kitchen, standing, moving from counter to fridge to table, as though circling each other.

“Let’s sit down,” I said, and we each took a seat at the kitchen table. “Conrad said I should talk to you. That you had some things you needed to tell me. Other things, not about what Illeana did.”

“I don’t quite know what you mean,” she said. “Things I had to tell you about what?”

“About everything,” I said. “About how all this got started. He wasn’t exactly specific.” I paused.

Ellen took in a long breath and when she exhaled she seemed to tremble. “I suppose it’s time,” she said. “It’s always has been, really. I’ve wanted to talk to you about this so many times, but never felt I could. Maybe, because talking about it wouldn’t change anything, except it would probably change your impression of me.” She laughed quietly to herself. “Or maybe not. Maybe your last impression was formed when you found out about me and Conrad.”

“I got past that,” I said.

“No, you didn’t,” she said.

“It was a long time ago.”

“It doesn’t matter. I hurt you, and you’ve never healed. And what I have to tell you now, I don’t know whether it will make things better or worse between us. It’s why I’ve held off telling you.”

“I need to know what’s going on,” I said.

And that was when she said she needed to start at the beginning.

“When I got the job here,” she said, “and we made the move from Albany, they paired me up with Conrad pretty much from the beginning.”

“I know,” I said. Like maybe I’d forgotten.

“We—you and I—were going through a bit of a rough patch then,” Ellen said. “I’m not blaming you. It was me, too. I was throwing myself into my work, you were depressed about yours. Your art, the lousy security jobs.”

“What does that have to do with—”

“Just let me tell this,” Ellen said. “It’s hard.” She took a long breath. “Conrad advised me, offered input on who we should try to get for the festival. He read a wide cross section of stuff, from the very literary to so-called popular fiction. And so did I, although I didn’t bring a Ph.D. in English literature to the table. But together, we were able to come up with a list of people we wanted to bring to the festival, and once we’d settled on the ones we hoped to attract, we started approaching them, or at least the people who represented them.”

I still didn’t know what this had to do with anything, but I listened.

“That was how Conrad got to know Elizabeth Hunt. She represented a wide range of people, from the oh-so-literary to that guy who wrote about the serial killer who collected the hearts of his victims. The one they made a movie out of? Anyway, they kind of hit it off, and she said to Conrad, if he ever wrote anything, he should definitely show it to her.

“And the truth is, he’d been working on something. For years. The Big Novel.” She said the words like they had quotes around them. “And as I got to know him better, I realized that his project, this book that meant so much to him, was going nowhere.”

“Aw,” I said.

Ellen’s head snapped up. “I can’t tell this if that’s what you’re going to do.”

Admonished, I shut up.

“He was feeling under a lot of pressure to produce something, to make his mark as a member of the Thackeray faculty. Others had been published, not that they’d had bestsellers or anything, but they’d written academic works that had been well received within the community. They had something to show for themselves. But Conrad didn’t want to produce some essay that would be read by fifty people and then tucked away on a library shelf. He wanted to do more than that.” She took a breath. “And then he met Brett Stockwell.”

“His student.”

“That’s right. A promising, gifted student. Gay, and troubled, moody, and mature beyond his years. Certainly where his writing ability was concerned. Conrad, who normally didn’t have a good thing to say about any of his students—who felt so much above them—talked about him all the time.”

“Let me guess. Brett showed him the novel he was working on.”

“He wasn’t just working on it. He’d finished it. He wanted Conrad to read it, tell him what he thought about it.” She shook her head and looked downward again. “He worshipped Conrad. He desperately wanted to know what his favorite professor thought of his novel. He so looked up to him.”

“And Conrad betrayed him,” I said.

Ellen gave me the look again. The one that said shut the fuck up and let her tell it.

“So Brett gave him this book to read. He told him he’d been working on it for months, hadn’t shown it to anyone else, hadn’t had the nerve to even tell anyone else what it was he’d been working on. Conrad was very skeptical at first, because, even though he regarded Brett as a fine student, he doubted he had the stuff to write a novel at his age, at least a good one. Brett had the book on a disc, which he gave Conrad, and which Conrad read on his own computer. And he was blown away by it. It was a strong piece of work, satirical, provocative, funny. It was vastly superior to the book Conrad had been struggling to write for years.”

Ellen stopped. “I need a drink,” she said.

She got up, opened the fridge, and I expected her to pull out a bottle of wine. I figured that, after pouring out what she’d had the other day, she’d had a change of heart and replenished her supply.

But she brought out a bottle of Fruitopia and held it up to me, asking, without asking, if I wanted one. I nodded.

Ellen sat back down, uncapped the bottle, poured it into two glasses, and continued. “The thing was, Brett’s book was similar in subject matter to the one Conrad had been working on. I mean, not the exact same idea by any means, about a man who wakes up one day and finds his entire sexual identity has been changed, but it was a satire of contemporary sexual attitudes, and I think when Conrad read the book, he somehow convinced himself that this was the book he’d been trying to write all along, that in many ways he and Brett were on the same wavelength. Conrad wanted a professional opinion at this point. He wanted to know whether he was alone in thinking it was brilliant. So he sent the book to Elizabeth Hunt.”

“Did he tell her who’d written it?”

“No. He didn’t say anything at all.”

“Do you have any idea what he was thinking at the time? When he sent it to Elizabeth? Was he thinking, if she loves it and can get it published, I’ll be able to take credit for launching Brett Stockwell’s career? Or was he thinking, if she loves it, I’ll tell her it’s mine?”

“I don’t know what he was thinking. I don’t even know whether he knew. There had to be something going on in the back of his mind. Maybe part of him was hoping Elizabeth would say the book was terrible, that it was unpublishable, because that would have been the end of it. He wouldn’t have to think about it anymore.”

“But that’s not what Elizabeth said, is it?”

“No,” Ellen said. “She said it was brilliant. That it still needed a lot of work, but it was brilliant. She said she wanted to try to sell it, that she wanted to represent the author. And she asked Conrad, ‘Who’s the author? Are you the author?’ To this day, I think, he can’t believe he said yes.”

“How do you know all this?” I asked.

“That was when . . .” And Ellen’s voice trailed off.

“When you were sleeping together,” I said. She said nothing. “He was sharing all this with you, these developments.”

“Up until the time that Elizabeth reported back that the book should be published. He stopped talking about it then.”

“Conrad didn’t want to admit to you what he was contemplating doing.”

“No. I know he met with Brett. I’d come to see Conrad about something, to his office, and the door was slightly ajar and I could hear that he was having a meeting with a student. So I just hung around outside, waiting for them to finish, and then I realized that he was talking to Brett, about his book.”

“What did Conrad say?” I asked.

“Conrad told him the book was not very good.”

“You’re kidding.”

“He told him it was amateurish, unbelievable, clichéd. He piled on every negative adjective he could think of.”

Of all the things I’d known, and imagined, Conrad to have done, this seemed the worst. Trying to put aside my own issues briefly, it struck me that what Conrad had done to Brett, in that moment, was a far greater betrayal of trust than sleeping with my wife.

“I watched Brett come out of that office, his laptop slung over his shoulder, and he was absolutely destroyed,” Ellen said. “There were tears running down his cheeks. Can you imagine it? You hand over your book—your life—to this man you hold in such high regard, whose opinion means everything to you, and you get completely crushed. And maybe,
maybe,
you could defend something like what Conrad did if the book really stunk, that there was no sense misleading a kid into thinking he had talent when he didn’t, the whole Simon Cowell approach, but the thing was, Conrad was lying.”

Brett’s sadness, his overwhelming disappointment, reached through nearly a decade to take hold of me.

“I can’t believe anyone could do that,” I said.

“I confronted Conrad, told him I’d heard everything, asked him what the hell he was doing, that I knew he loved the book. And he was totally taken aback, flustered, grasping for an explanation. He said the book had its moments, but it was not
that
good, that the kid wasn’t going to make it as a writer if everyone went gaga over everything he did, and I realized at that moment what a horrible mistake I had made, what a despicable person Conrad Chase was, and I hated myself for involving myself with him, for betraying you.”

I said nothing.

“I asked Conrad what he was up to, why he’d say what he did when I knew that Elizabeth had thought the book showed so much promise. I asked him if he had any idea what he’d done to that boy, to Brett, how he’d left his office looking like he was ready to kill himself.”

It was like a lightbulb went on. “Oh my God,” I said. “So all this time that I’ve been thinking Conrad killed that kid, he really did commit suicide. Although, in a way, Conrad did kill him. By lying to him, by telling him his book was a piece of shit. That’s what drove Brett over the edge, what drove him to jump off Promise Falls.”

“No,” Ellen said quietly. “That’s not what happened. That’s not what happened at all.”

“So, wait a second,” I said. “So I
am
right. Conrad did kill him. He pushed Brett over the falls so he could get away with stealing his book.”

“No,” Ellen said again. “That’s not what happened, either.”