“No, Claire. You stay right here,” Henry said, and Corbin heard the sound of movement. He opened his eyes a fraction, rain obscuring his vision, and saw Henry gripping Claire by the shoulders. Her face was down, chin burrowing into her chest, head shaking back and forth. Corbin sat up, rain streaming from his hair.
Look up, Claire, he thought. Look up and see me.
She didn’t look up, but Henry took hold of her face in his hands, pushing her head back up. “Shhh,” he said. “Calm down, Claire.”
With her face in Henry’s hands, her eyes found Corbin. He was sitting fully up now, looking back at her. Her eyes went wide, and what remaining color she had in her face disappeared. Her scream was high-pitched, birdlike. Henry turned to Corbin, then let go of Claire and burst into laughter, putting his hands on his knees. Corbin just stared. He couldn’t take his eyes off Claire, who was stumbling backward like a boxer who has just been punched in the jaw.
Henry, done laughing, said to Claire: “Payback’s a bitch, eh?”
She turned to leave, took a step on the slippery ground, and went down on one knee.
Corbin stood, the knife slipping from his lap. Henry turned back toward him, grinning wildly, as Corbin stepped forward. Henry reached out the palm of his hand, and Corbin took it. Their eyes met over the handshake. Henry seemed like he’d just won a trophy. “Fucking A, man,” he said to Corbin. “Fucking A.” Accenting every syllable equally.
“Assholes!” Claire yelled. She was back on her feet, looking at them. “You assholes!”
Henry and Corbin released their hands.
“No, Claire, you’re the asshole,” Henry said.
“Whore!” Corbin yelled.
Her eyes jumped to him, her head shaking. “Jesus, Cor. How’d you get talked into this? You’re a decent guy.”
She wore a scoop-necked white shirt, and the rain was pulling it down, the edges of her beige bra showing. The exposed skin of her chest was wet and pale. “Yeah, I am a decent guy, and you’re a fucking whore,” Corbin said, his voice gone shrill.
Claire took a breath and hitched her shoulders back. “Okay,” she said quietly. She pushed her wet hair back off her forehead, then tugged her shirt back in place.
“Nice knowing you, Claire,” Henry said, and Corbin envied his normal voice, how calm he sounded.
Claire looked at Henry, then back at Corbin, and shook her head. Corbin watched as a slight, sad smile appeared on her face. She pities me, he thought, she fucking pities me. As she turned to leave, Corbin ran and shoved her as hard as he could in the center of her back. She jerked forward, feet stumbling, then hit the ground, her head bouncing. Corbin was on her, spinning her onto her back. Her head had hit the edge of a sharp rock, and bright-red blood was running from a flap of skin, mixing with the rain. “How’s it feel?” Corbin said, and shook her. She groaned and pressed a hand to the wound. She wore a Claddagh ring—she always had—and the heart was pointing toward her. Corbin had thought she’d done that for him. A surge went through his body, like a ripple going through a whip. He shook her harder, her head repeatedly hitting the ground.
“Hey, hey. My turn.” It was Henry, touching Corbin on the shoulder. He was holding the knife.
Chapter 15
They dug a grave in the clearing. The rain had turned the ground soft, the shovel making sucking sounds as they pulled out black clods of earth. When Claire’s body was in the hole, but before they covered it, Henry said, in his calm, measured voice: “I think we should take a picture. One of you with her body, and one of me.”
“What do you mean?” Corbin asked.
“We need to memorialize this moment.”
“Are you crazy?”
“No, listen. It will be a symbol of our trust. We’ll each hold proof on the other, and then we’ll know that we’re forever in this together. Think about it.”
Corbin was still in shock, trying hard to comprehend what had just happened. They had actually murdered Claire. The two of them, together, had ended her life. He’d started it, hadn’t he, by hitting the back of her head against the ground as hard as he had? He remembered how furious he’d felt, the adrenaline pumping through him, how good it felt to cause her pain. He’d wanted her to die, hadn’t he? Or had he just wanted her to feel pain and fear? Had he wanted her to feel the hurt that she’d caused him? He didn’t know now. But then Henry had come in with the knife, cut Claire’s throat, and when Corbin saw the spray of blood arcing high above her body, a sense of unreality had come over him, like he was suddenly watching everything through a distorted lens. It was a dream. But it wasn’t. It was real, all of it. The rain, the blood, the body twisted awkwardly on the ground, water pooling in her eye sockets, the eyes still open.
Henry pulled a Polaroid camera from the backpack he was wearing.
“Why do you have that?” Corbin asked.
“I told Claire I wanted to come here to take photographs. I needed a camera, didn’t I?”
It bothered Corbin that it was a Polaroid camera, somehow. Such a perfect camera for taking pictures of a murder. Still, he posed, and Henry took a picture of him standing over the grave, and then they changed positions, Corbin taking a picture of Henry. The plastic camera was yellow and black. It spit the picture out and Corbin watched the image develop. Henry’s shoulders were back, a toothy grin on his face. He looked proud.
Corbin handed the camera back to Henry, holding onto the picture. His hands were trembling, the tips of his fingers white as bone and starting to prune. He almost asked to see the picture that Corbin had taken of him, but decided he didn’t want that image in his mind.
Henry folded the camera back into its closed position and put it in his backpack, then they covered her, smoothing the dirt down and adding a layer of wet leaves. It looked untouched, like no one had ever been there. It was a relief that the body was no longer visible, that all traces of Claire had disappeared.
“Like no one was ever here,” Henry said, echoing Corbin’s thoughts. “Let’s go.”
They walked in single file along the path, each carrying his things. Corbin felt a little better now that they were moving, and talking about what to do next. The rain had even lessened, the clouded sky lighter than it had been. At the cemetery gate they stood for a moment before going their separate ways. “No contact,” Henry said. “Unless it’s absolutely necessary.”
“I agree,” Corbin said.
Henry smiled. “I can’t believe we did that, dude,” he said, and there was true joy on his face, like they’d just won the big game. Corbin smiled back, wanting to let Henry know he felt the same way.
Once Corbin was on his own, walking among the normal pedestrians—returning home from work or heading to early dinner dates—the enormity of what he had done filled him with mounting panic and disbelief. Claire was dead. This morning she’d been alive, going about her life, and now she was buried in the ground. Corbin stopped walking, and a man with an open umbrella bumped into him from behind. “Sorry,” Corbin said, ducking into an alley, where he put his hands on his knees. He was nauseous, and his heart fluttered in his chest. He took deep breaths, trying to fill his lungs with the sooty city air.
After a minute he began to feel better. He thought back to what Claire had done, trying to conjure up the rage he’d felt. It began to work, especially when he remembered the pitying look she’d given him in the cemetery, as though he were the asshole. He kept those thoughts in his head as he walked home. He needed to shower.
It was two days later when Corbin first heard about Claire.
“You knew Claire Brennan, didn’t you?” one of his fellow students, a girl from UCLA, asked.
“Yeah. I did. Why?”
“I heard she was missing.”
“Seriously?” Corbin had been terrified of being asked questions about Claire, but now that it was happening, he felt okay. His voice sounded natural.
“Yeah. She didn’t show up at the Lambs, and someone went to her place and she wasn’t there.”<
br />
“Maybe she went home early.”
Corbin braced himself for a visit from the police, but it never came. A few days later he was on a plane going home, drinking beer after beer in first class, and feeling the muscles in his chest and stomach finally unclench. He hadn’t realized how tense he’d been those last few days in London. He’d barely slept, and when he had, it was in that thin realm where dreams and memories overlapped. He’d wake, sweat filmed and guilty, unsure whether what had happened in the cemetery was real or imagined. When he realized it was real, a dread would settle over him, far worse than what his nightmares had conjured. Being on the plane, leaving England, was an overwhelming relief. Was he free now? Had they gotten away with it? Eventually, the body would be found, of course, and then there would be a murder inquiry. Would they come looking for him, and for Henry as well? It depended on what Claire had told her friends about her life, how much she had shared. Did she keep a diary? Corbin and Claire had e-mailed, but only a few times, and nothing that personal. Most of their dates had been arranged face-to-face at the pub. It was entirely possible that no one but she knew about her love life. She’d been secretive, obviously, hiding one boyfriend from another. Maybe there’d been other boyfriends. Maybe she’d been secretive with everyone in her life.
Back in Boston, Corbin stayed with his father in Beacon Hill for a week. His mother came and took him out to lunch; he hadn’t seen her in so long, and it was clear that she’d had more work done to her face. Her lips were fuller, her forehead unlined. She asked him, as she always did, for information about his father. He declined to tell her anything, except that he thought his father was happy, the opposite of what his mother was hoping to hear.
He moved to New York City and began his internship at Briar-Crane. He was sleeping better, the images from that cemetery in London receding slightly. He kept a constant eye out for Henry Wood, knowing that he was also in New York for an internship. They’d agreed to have no further contact after parting ways. In fact, they’d agreed to say they barely knew each other if questioned by the police, that they’d chatted once or twice at a pub. Corbin was eager to know whether Henry had been questioned by the police. He didn’t think so. If they hadn’t known enough to question him, then chances were they hadn’t gone to Henry either.
And it wasn’t just that he wanted to find out if Henry had been questioned. Corbin desperately wanted to see Henry again. He didn’t know exactly why. Part of it was that they had shared something so transgressive and intimate that Corbin needed to know what effect it had had on Henry. Was he haunted by the image of Claire’s lifeless body? Was he sleeping? Was he regretful at all about what they had done?
Corbin had Internet at his sublet in Manhattan, but he never searched for stories about Claire online, telling himself that search histories were evidence. Instead, every day he went to a newsstand near his apartment that sold foreign newspapers, and he bought the Times and scanned it for anything on Claire. On June 15, her body was discovered, dug up by an Irish wolfhound that was being walked through the cemetery. It was big news. There were pictures of Claire, looking rosy-cheeked and beautiful, plus a published shot of Claire’s parents arriving in London to identify the body. There was no mention of suspects, no mention of Claire having dated an American student. Done reading, he threw the Times out in a public trashcan as he always did.
In early July, drinking with coworkers at Jimmy’s Corner, Corbin spotted Henry, sitting in a booth with an older woman in corporate clothing. Henry was wearing a light gray suit, his maroon tie loosened, and his hair had been cut short. Corbin had been midsentence with Barry, a fellow intern, but stopped speaking the moment he saw Henry.
“You okay?” Barry asked, casting a look back toward where Corbin was looking.
“Yeah, yeah. I thought I saw someone I know. What was I saying?”
For the rest of the conversation, Corbin kept an eye on Henry, not sure what to do. Should they still pretend they didn’t know each other? When his coworkers decided to move on to another bar, Corbin stayed, still unsure about whether he should approach Henry, but desperate to find out how he was doing. He finished his old-fashioned and ordered another. He took one sip, and felt a hand clap onto his shoulder.
“Dude. I’ve been wondering when I’d run into you.”
“Hi, Henry. I saw you, I just didn’t know if I—”
“You should’ve come over. Met Anna. She had to leave, and I was all set to go myself when I saw you, lurking here.” He laughed, and Corbin smiled. “This seat taken? Look at you, drinking—what is that?—an old-fashioned. Dude, a few weeks in the city . . .”
Henry ordered the same, and they clinked glasses. “To us,” he said, then he lowered his voiced and added: “And to getting away with it.” He touched a knuckle to the wooden bar.
They spent the summer in each other’s company, developing a routine, meeting every evening after work for a cocktail at Jimmy’s Corner. Sometimes there were other people there—coworkers, college friends—but more often than not, they were alone. They usually had a martini, altering the ingredients on a nightly basis in a quest to discover the perfect concoction. After that initial cocktail they’d move on to other venues, other drinks. Henry had rules. “Always head downtown as the night progresses.” “Never have more than two drinks at any given bar.” “Don’t waste everyone’s time talking to girls before midnight.”
They’d break these rules, but not often.
Their nights together blurred into one long shimmering party. Henry made friends at every bar they frequented, yet he never abandoned Corbin. They’d always find one another toward the end of the night. Sometimes, of course, Henry would wind up going home with someone. But it was always a one-night stand, and never turned into anything serious. On one sweltering night in July, at a bar called Balcony, Henry left with a couple he’d met, an older man with a younger woman, and Corbin remembered the party in London when Henry had beckoned him into the bedroom. He wondered if there’d be another similar invitation, a night that would end with Henry and Corbin in bed together with the same woman. Corbin hadn’t been with anyone since Claire, and the thought of any kind of sex made his stomach buckle with a combination of anxiety and lust. But it never happened. Henry, for all his success with women, seemed, conversationally at least, uninterested in sex. He was, however, always interested in talking about murder.
When they were alone, they often recounted the story of what had happened with Claire, telling it in the same way that new lovers tell each other the story of how they met, going back and forth, remembering every detail.
“And then there was that look she gave you, dude, like you were some little boy who got talked into doing something he shouldn’t have done,” Henry would say.
“I remember that look very well.”
“She read you wrong, that’s for sure.”
The conversations made Corbin feel infinitely better, more at ease with what they had done. He still thought back with horror about what had transpired in that cemetery, but talking about it, especially in the way that Henry talked about it, well, it normalized it a little. They had been wronged, and they got their revenge. And now they’d gotten away with it. And that was the whole story.
“Think of all the men we’ve saved from Claire Brennan,” Henry liked to say.
“A lifetime’s worth. God knows how many.”
Toward the end of the summer, just before their senior years began, Corbin took Henry to his mother’s house in New Essex while his mother and his brother were touring Europe. They had the house to themselves for three warm days, punctuated by bouts of rain. They watched movies—thrillers, mostly, from the 1960s and ’70s—and because of the rain, had the beach to themselves, swimming in any weather, including a thunderstorm at dusk during a slack tide, the water frothing around them from the torrential downpour.
On their last night they watched Knife in the Water, then sat on the deck, drinking a bottle of Corbin’s mother’s expensive
Bordeaux and sharing a joint. Henry said: “We should do it again.”
“Do what? Come back here? Sure, man, anytime.”
“No. I’m talking about Claire, and what we did to her. We should do it again someday.”
It was sunset, and the house cast a long, narrow shadow across the dunes and onto the flat of the beach. “The right person, though,” Corbin finally said, when he’d realized what exactly Henry was proposing.
“Fuck yeah, the right person.” Henry slid forward in his chair, pulling a Parliament from his pack and lighting it. “Someone like Claire. Someone who would get involved with two guys, with both of us, and think she was getting away with it. I was thinking about it with Anna this summer till I realized I couldn’t spend another moment with her. You could’ve hit on her some night, see what she would do—well, we know what she would do—and then we’d punish her, the way we punished Claire.”
Corbin’s stomach had tightened, but there was something about Henry’s excitement that was contagious. And the longer he’d known Henry, the more he wanted to please him. “We’d have to be careful. We lucked out with Claire.”
“I know that. I think about that all the time. But don’t forget—we have each other. We could always be each other’s alibis. We’ll always have each other’s backs.”
Below, on the beach, a middle-aged woman was speed-walking near the surf and for one terrible moment Corbin thought that his mom was back at the house. His eyes adjusted and he realized that it didn’t look remotely like her. He plucked the lit cigarette from the ashtray and took a long drag before realizing it was Henry’s. “Sorry, man. I just took a drag off your cigarette.” He put it back next to the stub of the joint they’d smoked.
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