Summer Sons

by Lee Mandelo

  Riley said, “So I guess Sam’s lending a hand.”

  Andrew passed his phone from hand to hand, swallowed his pride, and said, “Guess so. Are you interested in putting some work in, too? Split things up, or something.”

  “Duh,” Riley said with a feigned nonchalance.

  “Found some names in Troth’s file, going to compare them to Sam’s business. In the meantime, I dunno, would you—read through his fucking notes, check out those books she foisted on me?”

  His roommate glanced at the keys in his hand, visibly put the pieces together, confirmed that Andrew was genuinely offering him an in to help, and nodded his assent. Andrew would rather be struck dead than read those journals again, even if it meant exposing stories about himself to Riley. Raw vulnerability stung at his nerves, but he had to delegate.

  “The books are in the car, stuck them in the back seat,” he clarified.

  Riley gently joked, “Put the nerd on the boring part of the case, I see how it is.”

  Anticipatory silence curtained the room. Andrew’s head felt full of fiberglass, biting and insulating at once. The two unanswered texts from West waited in his messages folder, one reading How was your meeting with Troth? and the other Would you like to unpack it with me later. He opened the thread and wrote having trouble with your research? then deleted it, what was your dissertation on again and deleted that as well. He settled on get coffee with me and we’ll talk about the meeting. Riley returned with the book-stuffed tote before he got a response. He dropped it next to the end table and picked up Troth’s folder.

  Andrew said, almost to himself, “There’s got to be something to find if we look hard enough.”

  Riley crossed his arms over his stomach and shook his head. “None of this makes sense, man. Feels like it can’t be real.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Riley ran a hand through his dye-crisped hair. It stuck straight up and he smoothed it flat habitually a second later. He shoved the tote with his sneaker-tip. “What the fuck in any of this could possibly have been worth killing him for?”

  The door slamming open a fraction of an inch from Riley’s elbow startled them both. Sam paused on the threshold, looking them over. His buzz cut was growing in. Riley handed Andrew the Post-It note list, scooped up the research, and headed for the stairs without a word to either of them, but it felt natural; a granted pardon, rather than a dismissal.

  Sam said, “Gimme that list. We’re going driving.”

  Andrew handed it over. Sam scanned the Post-It while Andrew checked his phone; West had responded, Tonight? He typed a quick maybe tomorrow. Andrew followed Sam out of the house. Sam glanced back once, grinned to see him there, and started to whistle as he crossed the street to his car. The sound was tuneless, flat, carrying an aggressively jaunty rhythm. In sync, doors shut on either side, sealing them in the already-hot interior of the WRX.

  “Half of those are people I’ve got on string, but the other half I don’t recognize, so those are on you to figure out,” Sam said. The engine turned over with a comforting growl. “You eaten today?”

  “No,” Andrew said.

  He’d had a bagel from the campus coffee shop the previous afternoon, and before that a carton of fried rice he ate standing outside a restaurant. Food hadn’t been much of a consideration since Columbus. His jawline was sharp enough to cut glass. The first thing Sam did was pull up to a Panera and say, “Stay put.”

  “Nothing sweet,” he requested and Sam flapped an acknowledging hand behind him as he got out of the car.

  He left it running for Andrew, air-conditioning valiantly fighting the heat, and returned a few minutes later with two sandwiches and two iced Americanos. Andrew unwrapped his sandwich. By the time Andrew took his second bite, Sam had crammed his down in six disturbingly fast bites, effortless and neat, then sucked down a third of his coffee in two long pulls. The sandwich, as with most things Andrew had tried to eat since the funeral, tasted like air and dust. But it was food.

  “So, Riley texted me in a fucking panic when he couldn’t get in touch with you,” Sam said. “Something about your girlfriend or ex-girlfriend or whatever showing up at the house?”

  “Yeah, that did happen.” Andrew popped his knuckles against the door panel in an irritated snap. Of course he’d told Sam about it. Andrew wasn’t sure why he hadn’t expected to be confronted with the situation immediately.

  “Okay, so it didn’t go well,” Sam prompted.

  “Ex-girlfriend, and no, it did not.”

  The interstate opened up around them as he continued eating the sandwich Sam had gotten for him. It was easier to swallow when someone else provided for him.

  “It’s sorted out now?” Sam asked.

  “Sorted,” he confirmed. “It was old business about us and Eddie, and it’s done for good, now.”

  Sam gave a quiet, satisfied hum of understanding. Andrew wondered if West had texted him again already, mind bouncing from one uncomfortable topic to the next. The ring of ink on his wrist kept catching his eye almost as if it were fresh, a scribbled signature that crossed time and space to remind him of his place, one half of a whole. He saw it how Del saw it, for a moment: a claim, not a bond. While Andrew sat deep in thought, Sam braced the wheel with his knee and snagged his snapback from behind the seats. He pulled it on and thumbed the brim up to the perfect spot, framing his face with afternoon-sun shadow.

  “We’re going to go out to the Masterson place,” Sam said over the crumpling of Andrew’s empty sandwich wrapper. “Beck is a decent dude, I’m sure he’s got nothing to do with whatever happened, but he said he’d chat.”

  Andrew had six names, and Beck Masterson was one of them. Sam wasn’t going to make him beg for help. Andrew threw the wrapper out the window and drank the first bracing, bitter mouthful of coffee while they drove in silence.

  * * *

  Beck Masterson was a nice enough man a bare few years older than Eddie himself, willing to express his condolences and share a bowl from the weed he bought off of Sam. He had precisely one spooky story to tell while reminiscing about the questions “Sam’s friend” had asked, but the story he shared was run-of-the-mill, a great-grandfather’s ghost out back making moonshine from beyond the grave. He even said it like that, from beyond the grave. Andrew hadn’t sensed more death from the property than usual, though—no great-grandpa lurking as far as he could tell.

  Sam dropped him off at the house no more informed than he’d been when they started, but far more exhausted. He’d learned nothing useful about Eddie, though he supposed expecting answers on the first attempt was a reach. Sam left him with a promise to call the other two names he knew to set up meetings; in the meantime, he needed to tackle his own share. Without Eddie’s phone or his records, though, that was a challenge in and of itself.

  On the back porch steps, the plastic bag with his ruined jeans sat sweltering and stinking. He held his breath long enough to gingerly remove the paper packet from the pocket, then kicked the bag into the corner to throw in the garbage later. He collapsed into the desk chair with an overstimulated groan and dumped the ring out of the packet.

  Platinum refracted moonlight as it rolled across the desktop. Andrew caught the cold metal under his thumb, sitting sprawled and barefoot. For a moment, he rolled it to and fro, considering: one more piece of Eddie returned to him, to try to fit into his life. Nowhere near sufficient. He let the ring clink onto its side and unbuckled his belt, thumbed open the button and zipper of his jeans. He hesitated with a hand splayed over his hip bone, fingertips dipping under the waistband of his briefs. The heel of his hand pressed a bruise over his stomach, speckled in the shape of Sam’s knuckles.

  With a groan, he stripped to his underwear and sprawled on the bed. The stale mess of sheets stuck grimy to his summer-salted skin. He kicked them to the end of the mattress, flopped onto his front. The air conditioner hummed. Eddie’s clock read 1:19 A.M. Exhaustion fogged his head, but the constant conflict of the past wee
k left him wired: the vision at the tree, and connecting with Troth, and Del’s axis-wrecking goodbye speech all together, stacked against a whole afternoon spent with Sam—Sam feeding him, and refusing to let him fade out of conversations, and constantly touching him. Light from his phone caught his eye, a soundless notification. He snagged it from the bedside table and held it at an angle above his head at the strained end of the charging cable. Sam had texted him:

  Sorry that was a bust

  What’s your theory

  The reason someone would commit murder over any of this

  He responded that’s what I’m trying to figure out and turned the phone off. After another defeated, miserable span of minutes, he lifted his ass enough to fit his hand down his briefs, pinned between his weight and the mattress. The tacky heat of his soft dick filled his palm, skin silky and loose, faintly damp from a long day’s confinement. He pressed his thumb at the base and kneaded his fingers against his balls, holding the whole package more for comfort than pleasure. No response from his traitorous, anxious body; he stayed limp. The pillow smelled as much like old spit as Eddie’s lingering hair product. He let go of himself and rolled onto his side, facing the far wall.

  At 3:05 A.M. he threw the pillow on the floor and padded in his underwear to the kitchen table with notebook in hand. The air-conditioning prickled goose bumps over his thighs. Beer at his elbow, he wrote:

  The car was with him so someone drove it there. Notes are missing—so’s his phone. Bet someone’s name is in both. How’d he find

  He stopped. His notes were sparse and his text blocky, uneven, ugly compared to Eddie’s wild meandering journals with their colorful ink, doodles, erratic trains of thought. Utilitarian at best. He closed the notebook with the pen still uncapped inside and took his beer outside to sit in the pitch-dark lee side of the porch. He wasn’t cut out for the life he’d inherited. It should’ve been him, not Eddie, in the ground.

  20

  A sedate robotic recording asked him to leave a message. The tone pinged.

  “Where are you,” he said, one hand tucked in his back pocket, and hung up.

  It wasn’t the most politic of voicemails, but he’d sent West three texts already, waiting out front of the campus café for almost an hour. The sun stabbed at his insomnia-sanded eyes through his shades. In the mood for a fight but without a contender, he grumbled a mashed-up curse containing the skeleton of fuckinggoddamnasshole and went inside to order himself a drink. The barista grimaced sympathetically at his expression.

  “Exams, or worse?” the barista said.

  Their hair was cotton-candy pink streaked with silver, complemented by a tiny silver nose ring and a light smattering of blond stubble on their upper lip. Signals crossed in his brain between pretty and handsome as Andrew struggled through a distracted pause to say, “Worse than that. Triple-shot iced chai, please.”

  As he reached for his card, they said, “Nah, on the house.”

  They turned from the counter to snag a cup for his drink, and he noticed from behind how the apron ties cinched their oversized shirt in close to reveal a tantalizingly narrow waist—petite enough for larger hands to wrap most of the way around. Would he have paid attention to them at all, before Nashville? They tossed him another winsome smile as he moved down the counter line. The other barista at the end handed him the finished drink as he muddled through his irritation with West and with himself, jamming his untimely insecurity about noticing and being noticed by the cute stranger in the basement of his brain where it belonged.

  He finished the sugar-bomb concoction at a corner table, phone unresponsive at his elbow. Class started in fifteen minutes; West had ghosted him. He strode outside and threw the cup of melting ice into a trash can so hard that a man walking past flinched. Instead of heading for the humanities building, he made for the garage, tired and furious and unfit for human consumption. As he squeezed the steering wheel of the Challenger, another connection to the man he needed to be to get through this, he got a text.

  Riley had said, meet me at the carrel in ten?

  fine

  Riley was drumming his fingers on the desktop when Andrew opened the carrel’s door. Documents spread across both desks, with the loaner texts from Troth in a stack next to the crumpled tote bag. Post-It notes and placeholder tabs bristled from pages of composition books and hardcovers alike.

  “Take a look,” Riley said, handing him an open notebook.

  Andrew read in Eddie’s scrawl, Hard to tell if West is trying to help or poach my shit. There are questions and there are Questions. He asks too many fucking Questions. And that he said/she said with him and Troth over their Novel article isn’t confidence inspiring either. Keeping him away from the actual research for sure. He went on to discourse at length on a disappointing collection of Southern-themed horror short fiction.

  “What the hell is that about?” Andrew asked.

  “I think he’s referring to this.” Riley handed over his phone, which was logged into the university’s library database and open to an article. “Troubled Lineage: Curses in American Gothic Literature” was authored by Jane Troth, with a first-line acknowledgement to Thom West for his assistance. “The article reads like his work, but it’s got her name on it. That’s something to fight about, especially if she’s going to keep rejecting his diss revisions and diverting all her attention to a first-year. And uh, the optics, you know? Rich ol’ white Tennessee lady versus the Black student from up North, et cetera. I wouldn’t put it past her to have some secondary motivations for fucking him over, frankly. We’ve never been close enough for me to ask about that.”

  “Seems petty to be a reason to lash out at Eddie though,” Andrew said.

  Riley choked on a laugh and said, “When isn’t this academic shit petty?”

  “Four rejected revisions,” he repeated.

  He ran through his interactions with Troth and West in his head, the usual shades of deference and direction between student and professor taking on an entirely different tone under the light of a previous conflict. West’s efforts to connect the professor and Andrew took on a compulsive edge. Troth’s ghastly, undaunted appetite for Eddie’s research, even though she thought him to be a suicide, spoke for itself. And she had a real obvious, uncritical hard-on for her family histories, which even Andrew had an inkling might indicate some tension between her and a Black student from Massachusetts.

  “Not a lot of recourse for a student with a fucked-up power dynamic under his advisor, especially an institution as, let’s say, traditional as this one,” Riley said with a sneer. “Plus he obviously didn’t succeed at calling her out before.”

  Andrew handed him the notebook. His heel bounced frantically where he stood, jiggling his leg and redirecting the burgeoning swell of energy out of his body to keep from sprinting across campus to find his supposed mentor. “Troth said she approached Eddie first because of his name; her family knew his. He didn’t initiate contact with her.”

  Riley whistled and said, “Like, I feel bad for the dude, but if I’m West and I’m already having a rough time with this lady, trouble getting independent research off the ground, then this fucking legacy asshole shows up and she loses interest in me—”

  “Petty as fuck,” he repeated again.

  “She’s kept him here years longer than he needed, and his job prospects are dwindling. People have done worse for a whole lot less,” Riley said.

  “West missed our meeting this afternoon, but it’s the first one he’s missed. Otherwise, he’s worked real hard to get friendly with me,” Andrew said.

  Riley chewed his thumbnail, spinning the chair in quarter circles back and forth. Andrew shifted his weight to his other foot and raked his gaze over the pile of materials again. Compared to the red-line tachometer at two in the morning and a snarling smile, the filtered murmur of a university library held less obvious danger. None of this academic shit seemed worth killing someone over, but nothing ultimately did, in the grand scheme of thi
ngs. If he put his mind to it, the death he’d expect for himself and Eddie would be an accident, a collision or flare-up, never purposeful violence. Both of them were spoiled enough to assume they’d be their own undoing, he guessed, but Eddie had paid the price.

  His phone vibrated and he checked it, said, “Speak of the devil, it’s West,” and answered with a curt “Hey.”

  “I’m sorry, Andrew, a meeting with Troth ran long. I didn’t mean to miss you. Are you in class?”

  “No, I skipped it,” he said.

  Riley steepled his fingers, grimacing as he listened.

  “All right. Is it too early in the afternoon to meet me for a drink?” West asked.

  “I’m fine with a drink. Where?” he asked, stilted.

  West’s harried tone wasn’t any less short when he said, “How about the Red Door?”

  “Be there in fifteen,” he said and hung up.

  “Is that a good idea?” Riley asked.

  “Best idea I’ve had all day.”

  “Peace then.” Riley flashed him a quick V sign as he left.

  If Eddie had died for some goddamn research into haunted houses and family histories, if that was the stupid reason Eddie’s life had been cut short, he didn’t know what he’d do. Nothing West had shown him indicated the temperament to harm someone else, but none of his other leads had gone anywhere. Tightness sang up his arms, and he realized he was clenching his fists hard enough to make his fingers go numb. The last time he’d had a second to relax was probably—the long drive and the companionable solitude after the faculty gathering, before the incident with the deer carcass.

  Crossing campus, he texted Sam.

  chill later?

  Sorry princess, got work tonight

  Unless you just need to get free then the key’s under the rock next to the steps crash on the couch.

  The relief that clawed from toes to sternum paused him on the threshold of the bar, hand on the door, staring at his phone. Country woods weren’t his favorite place to be, but Sam’s offer meant something; depending on how the conversation went with West, he’d need to have a breather outside of the rooms Eddie had left behind, and Sam was giving him somewhere to be. No one would fuck with him out at Sam’s, and there would be room to think through whatever he learned. He hated that it sounded so good.