“Well, you haven’t. And I haven’t. And I’m sure as hell your mom hasn’t.”
“True.”
Ben took another hit on the joint. “Your mother’s made Andy her life’s work,” he said when he finally exhaled. “I figured that out the first time I met her at the pool, when she gave me written instructions on the best way to deal with him.” He laughed. My head bounced on his chest.
“That’s my mom,” I said.
“She doesn’t mother you much, though, does she?”
“Well, I’m seventeen.”
“But has she ever?” he asked. “Has she ever taken care of you the way she takes care of Andy?”
I felt a hurt inside me that I didn’t want to feel. “I never needed taking care of the way Andy does,” I said.
“Everybody needs to be taken care of.”
“That’s why I’ve got you,” I said.
He didn’t say anything, and the hurt expanded inside my chest. He held the joint to my lips again, but I shook my head. I felt a little sick from it now. I tried to think of a different subject we could talk about. His daughter. He loved talking about her. I could ask him when he’d see her again. I opened my mouth to speak, but the alert tones suddenly rang out from his fire department pager, which was buried somewhere in the pile of clothes on the floor.
Ben jumped to his feet, as I knew he would.
“Are you getting up?” He pulled his T-shirt over his head.
I stretched beneath the covers. “I’m going to stay here a while.” The long window in front of the bed was full of stars. I could sit outside and try to make contact with Daddy’s spirit. It had been so long since I’d been able to reach him, and all that talk about needing to be taken care of really got to me.
“I don’t like you being here alone at night.” He had no idea how often I came to The Sea Tender alone.
“I’ll be okay,” I said.
I listened to him walk through the living room and close the front door. I heard the thump as he jumped from the steps to the sand. I tried to hear his van start, but he must have parked too far away.
He’d handed me the joint before he left. I held it between my lips without inhaling as I pulled on my shorts and top. I blew out the candles, then walked outside to sit in my favorite spot on the edge of the deck. I dropped the rest of the joint to the sand below. Wasteful, Ben would say.
Closing my eyes, I took in a deep, salty breath as I tried to still my mind.
At least the fire had been good for Ben, I thought. He was happy in the department now. He wouldn’t leave.
Stop thinking!
I took in another deep breath, and my mind was on the brink of clearing up when those damned posters from the memorial service popped into it again.
I groaned. “Daddy,” I whispered in frustration. “Please come.” What if he was just as frustrated as I was? Maybe he was waiting on the other side for me to quiet my mind long enough for him to break through. Maybe I was failing him like I was failing everybody else.
I thought I heard a sound from inside the house. I turned to listen through the screened door, but all I could hear was the ocean.
A flash of light bobbed on the railing next to me. I jumped to my feet.
“Maggie?”
A woman’s voice. I felt so busted and was glad I’d dropped the joint.
I tried to block the beam of the flashlight with my hand to see who was aiming it at me, but it was impossible. I was dizzy from standing up too quickly. I grabbed the deck railing. “Who are you?” I called.
“Oh my God, I don’t believe this!”
Dawn. She pushed open the screened door. Her flashlight blinded me.
“What are you doing here?” I asked as I backed against the railing, shielding my eyes with my arm.
“I could ask you the same question.”
What did she know? The light was trapping me. I had to get away from it. I pushed past her and into the house. She followed me inside.
“This is the cottage where I lived when I was little.” My voice shook. “I visit it sometimes. I was just going to leave.”
Dawn scanned the living room and kitchen with her flashlight. I could just make out that her hair was in a ponytail and she had frown lines like stripes across her forehead. She sat down on the arm of the sofa and put the flashlight on the floor, aiming it toward the corner of the room. She was too quiet. I wanted to get my pocketbook out of the bedroom so I could escape, but what if she followed me in there and saw the unmade bed? Did she have a clue what was going on? Why was she here?
I picked up my bottle of water from the breakfast bar and started talking to fill the silence.
“I’m sorry I didn’t call you about the fund-raising yet,” I said. “I was waiting till I worked out details, but we’re going to have this massive makeover event at the high school, with—”
“Why was Ben here?” she asked.
Shit. Shit. Shit. “Ben?” I asked. “What makes you think he was here?”
“Don’t play dumb,” she said. “D’you think I just happened to show up here tonight? I followed him. I wanted to know where he disappeared to so many nights without explanation. When I saw him leave this cottage, I decided to see what was so…so alluring to him about it. Now I get it.”
I opened the water bottle and took a sip to give me time to think. “We meet here sometimes to talk about the swim team,” I tried.
“You can do better than that,” she said.
“Dawn, it’s really not like—”
“Don’t give me that crap.” She sounded harsh, not like the Dawn I thought I knew. “How long’s this been going on?”
I sighed. Gave in. I felt my shoulders sag. “A while,” I said.
“I can’t believe he’s cheating on me with a teenager. A kid. It’s sick.”
“He’s not cheating on you!”
“What do you call it?”
“You’re just friends.”
“Oh, cut me a break,” she said. “Did he tell you that?”
I was afraid of getting Ben in more trouble by saying the wrong thing, but I was so nervous I couldn’t think straight. “I know when he first moved in, he…the two of you…you slept together, and I know you hoped you’d be more than just friends, but—”
“That goddamned son of a bitch.” She rubbed her neck. “I thought he was different, but turns out he’s like all the rest. He wants the thrill of doing something forbidden, behind closed doors. With a tight little body.” She motioned toward me, toward my body.
“Ben’s so not like that.”
“Don’t tell me what Ben’s ‘so not’ like!” she snapped. “I live with him, sugar. I know him better than you ever will.”
I twisted the cap of the bottle back and forth, afraid of her anger and what she might do. Who she might tell.
“Does your mama know about this?” She was a mind reader. “She can get him for statutory rape.”
“The age of consent is sixteen.”
She let out a nasty laugh. “You’ve figured this all out, I see,” she said. “Even if it’s not illegal, it’s immoral for a twenty-eight-year-old man to sleep with a seventeen-year-old girl.”
“Age is just a number.” I wrinkled my nose as the cliché popped out of my idiotic mouth.
“And it’s immoral to sleep with two women at once and lie to them about it.”
“It’s not at once. You are so yesterday to him!” I felt like a bitch, but she deserved it. “You think he’s your boyfriend, but he’s not.”
She stared at me, then started laughing again. “Lord have mercy,” she said, “I’m going to give that bastard one hell of a talking-to.” She tilted her head to the side. “Was he your first?”
“None of your business.”
“I just bet he was. Men love that, don’t they? Popping the cherry.”
“Don’t talk that way about him!” I said. “Don’t lump him together with all the losers you’ve been—”
“Does
your mama know you’re smoking weed?”
“What?”
“Don’t play innocent with me, Maggie. It reeks in here.”
Oh God. Now she had two things on me. My hand twisted the bottle cap back and forth. Back and forth.
Suddenly, she stood up. When she spoke again, her voice was totally different. She growled like a tiger. “Lay off my man, girl,” she said. She picked up the flashlight and walked to the door. “If you don’t, I’ll have to tell your mama what you’re up to, and she’s got enough to worry about right now. You sure don’t want to add to that now, do you, sugar?”
I threw the bottle hard—really hard—before I knew what I was doing. It caught her on the side of her neck and she screeched, dropping the flashlight.
“Bitch!” she said.
“I’m sorry!” I pressed my hands to my face. “I didn’t mean to do that, Dawn! Honest!”
She picked up the flashlight and I thought she was going to come after me with it, but she opened the door and ran onto the front deck. I listened to the creak of the stairs and heard her jump to the sand.
I slammed the door shut and turned the lock. Then I pulled my phone from my pocket and hit the speed dial for Ben’s cell. No answer.
As fast as I could, I typed a text message into the keypad.
D knows.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Laurel
“HAVE A SEAT, PLEASE.” DENNIS SHARTELL led me into his office and gestured toward one of the leather chairs in front of a massive mahogany desk.
“I appreciate you seeing me so quickly,” I said as I sat down. I’d only received his name from Ms. Terrell the day before, but the attorney’s receptionist said he’d be able to squeeze me in.
“I can imagine what you’re going through,” he said as he sat down on the other side of the desk. “I’ve heard the rumors.”
“You’ve heard them here? In Wilmington?”
“The fire was big news,” he said, “and although the officials aren’t calling it arson, everyone knows it’s arson—or in legal terminology, the ‘burning of a church.’ People love a good twist to a story. What better twist than the hero turns out to be the villain?”
“He’s not, though.”
He nodded, the overhead light glinting off his glasses. He was a slender man, but soft looking, as though he didn’t have to work hard at keeping the weight off. His face was long beneath thinning dark hair, and he wore a smile that was equal parts kind and self-confident. I liked him. I was practically in love with him. He would help me make sense of this ridiculous mess.
“Tell me what you know,” he said, clicking his ballpoint pen above a yellow legal pad. “What evidence do they have so far?”
“As far as I know, they just have the word of a few people that Andy was outside during the lock-in. I don’t believe it, though. Even if it’s true, so what? But my son is a very concrete thinker. If the rules say, ‘this is a lock-in and you stay inside,’ he’d stay inside.”
“What do you mean, he’s a concrete thinker?”
I explained FASD to him. Maybe it would have been better to find an attorney already familiar with the disorder. But Dennis took notes and appeared to be listening carefully.
“All right,” he said when I had finished talking. “Who are the witnesses who claim they saw Andy outside during the lock-in?”
“One is a boy named Keith Weston.” I told him about Andy’s fight with Keith during the lock-in and about their long-ago history as childhood friends. “Another was a woman who was just passing by the church that night. Of course, she couldn’t identify Andy by name, but she described seeing a boy who may have resembled him. Then his friend Emily—who’s also a special needs child—said he disappeared during the lock-in.”
He looked at me as if waiting for more. “That’s it?” he asked finally.
“That’s all I know of. They searched his room.”
“They had a warrant?”
“No. I signed a consent-to-search form.”
“Did they remove anything?”
“They took the clothes he had on the night of the lock-in. And I think some information from his computer.”
Dennis tapped the pen against his jaw. “Andy seemed to be the only person who knew a safe way out of the building, is that correct?”
“Yes. But that’s not a crime.”
“Hardly.” He chuckled. “From what I’ve read, your son is viewed as an outsider. Not very popular. Do you agree with that description of him?”
I nodded. “Yes,” I said. “He doesn’t fit in very well, but that doesn’t mean he’d set a fire to make himself look like a big man on campus.”
“Well.” Dennis rested his pen on the legal pad and sat back in his chair. “Unless there’s more to this picture than meets the eye, it would seem that all they have now is circumstantial evidence. Nothing they can use to pin a felony on your son, that’s for sure. How did he get to the lock-in?”
“My daughter—his sister, Maggie—drove him.”
“And I assume Maggie knows he wasn’t carrying a couple of gallons of flammable liquid, right?”
I smiled. I was beginning to relax about this whole thing. It was, as I’d thought all along, absurd. “Right,” I said.
“As long as his clothes don’t come back from the lab with traces of accelerant on them, I’d say he’s home free.”
“That won’t happen,” I said. I knew that for a fact.
I was so relieved after speaking to Dennis that I sang along with the radio in my car. I opened the windows, letting my hair blow around my head in the warm spring air as I sang oldies but-goodies at the top of my lungs all the way to the swing bridge.
I turned right after crossing the bridge and headed for Jabeen’s. Maybe Sara was still in Surf City and would have some time to catch up. Once again, I felt out of touch with her. I’d called twice in the past few days, but she hadn’t called back.
Dawn was cleaning the counter when I walked into the empty café. She looked up and gave me a halfhearted wave.
“Hi, Dawn,” I said. “Is Sara in today?”
“She’s back at the hospital.” She barely glanced at me as she sprayed a spot on the counter, but I could see that her eyes were bloodshot and I was immediately worried.
“Is Keith okay?” I asked.
“He’s actually doing better.” She put down the cloth and spray bottle and picked up a paper cup, holding it under the spigot of one of the coffeemakers. “But those burn treatments don’t sound like fun.”
“I know,” I said. “I had a couple of burn patients when I was in nurse’s training.” Scrubbing scorched skin raw had been, without a doubt, one of the most disturbing parts of my training. “Poor Keith. It’s got to be so hard for Sara to watch him go through that.”
Dawn snapped a lid on the cup of coffee I hadn’t ordered and handed it to me.
“Thanks,” I said, taking a sip.
“She makes out like she’s doing all right with it,” Dawn said, “but you know she must be wrung out.” Dawn looked wrung out herself. There were puffy bags under her eyes.
“How about you?” I didn’t want to pry, but something was clearly wrong. “Are you all right?” I asked.
She nodded. “Just tired.” She sat down on the stool behind the cash register, her feet propped up on the rung, and rubbed her palms on her lean, denim-covered thighs. “You wouldn’t believe how the money’s been rolling in since the Today show,” she said with a little more pep in her voice. “Thanks for your help with that.”
“You’re the one doing all the work.” I took another sip of the coffee. “Is Ben’s head healed?”
She ran her fingers through her pretty red hair, taking her time, as if she had to think about her answer. “Doesn’t Maggie keep you informed?” she asked.
It took me a moment to realize that my children would see Ben at swim practices. “Oh, of course,” I said, “I guess if he were having any problems, Maggie or Andy would have let me
know.” Actually, I wasn’t sure either of them would think to tell me. “He is all right, isn’t he?”
“He’s fine,” she said quickly. Then she chuckled, and I imagined she was thinking of a private moment between them, because when she spoke again, it wasn’t about anything funny. “Listen, sugar.” She leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees. “I know there’s all this talk about Andy, and it must be driving you ’round the bend.”
“It is,” I acknowledged.
“Well, I just want to say that, even if Andy did have something to do with the fire, I’m sure he’ll be able to get off because he couldn’t possibly understand the seriousness of what he was doing.”
I stared at her, momentarily speechless. I knew she was trying to comfort me, but it certainly wasn’t working.
“Andy didn’t do anything wrong,” I said.
“I’m just saying, even if he did.”
I let out a long sigh. “All right.” I gave up. People were going to believe what they wanted to and there wasn’t much I could do about it. “Thanks for the coffee. And if you talk to Sara before I do, please tell her I was asking about her and Keith.”
As I drove home, I wondered if Sara hadn’t returned my calls because she, too, believed Andy was responsible for the fire. Ludicrous. Sara knew Andy nearly as well as I did. I’d try calling her again as soon as I got home.
There was a police car in front of the house when I pulled in my driveway, and the sight of it wiped Sara from my mind. I hurried into the house and found Maggie standing in the entryway with Sergeant Wood.
“They think we gave them the wrong clothes,” she said quickly.
I looked from her to the sergeant.
“Sorry to disturb you again, ma’am,” he said. “But we have some pictures from the lock-in that kids took with their cell phone cameras. The clothing and shoes you gave us are not what Andy has on in those pictures.”