by Linda Keir
Just as she knew there would be.
She tried to imagine the hood of the now-rusty Charger breaking the surface of the lake, water draining out of its cracked windows. How, once the car was resting on the barge, someone had been first to open the door, to see slimy, once-dark-blue-and-white custom leather seats, the black steering wheel that had shone like onyx, and a skeleton.
After all these years, Dallas had been found. Plucked from beneath the sun-dappled water.
She closed her eyes and opened them again, just as she had on her nature walk with him so many years ago.
Only one word came to her: murky.
And something she hadn’t thought about until that very moment—Dallas was the same age on the day he died as she was now.
And Cassidy was exactly the same age now as Andi was then.
Chapter Five
Ian woke from his nap disoriented, his phone alarm an alien trill, his mind lost in a vivid dream in which he and Andi were dorm parents, living in the apartment on Cassidy’s hall and hosting a weekend social for the students in their charge. At the end of the dream, there had been a Twilight Zone moment of panic when he’d had a chilling revelation: wait a minute; we’re the same age as Cassidy!
And then the alarm had gone off.
He got up slowly, reorienting himself, feeling a sore spot on his back where he’d slept on top of the lumped-up covers. The maid hadn’t come while they were at brunch, and the sheets smelled of sex, sweat, and the alcohol he was still burning off. After slipping off his pants, he moved slowly toward the bathroom, ready for his second shower of the day.
Did not need drinks three, four, and five, he thought as the hot water scalded his back. Or six.
The evening had taken a left turn with Wayne Kelly’s ambush revelation. After three years of visiting as a parent and two decades of sporadic returns for fund-raisers and class reunions, Ian had finally stopped holding his breath, thinking the subject of Dallas Walker had truly been laid to rest. And now, like a revenant from one of the poet’s own verses, he had come howling back to tranquil Glenlake to disturb the peace. If it were a Dallas Walker poem, the corpse would have pointed a smug finger at the dumb townsfolk and imparted a lesson about how they were all living their lives in fear.
But Dallas Walker had not authored this particular composition.
What the hell was Kelly thinking, assigning a death investigation to a class of juniors and seniors? It might seem like a game to teenagers, but bodies had consequences. His own daughter’s questioning at brunch this morning had been earnest, but Kelly had armed the students with rakes and shovels and sent them into a minefield.
Or, more accurately, over a cliff.
That cliff.
At least it looked like suicide. And he couldn’t have driven off accidentally. With luck, the police would agree, and the kids wouldn’t find anything to contradict that supposition. Or learn which students had seen Dallas outside class during his final days.
Maybe it was better not to leave things to chance. He couldn’t lose Andi again. He’d always assumed Dallas had left of his own accord because of what happened. Was his death also in some way connected? Had she ever had a sense this day might come?
Head somewhat cleared, he dressed casually—chinos, polo shirt, trainers, and windbreaker—and got in the car to head back to campus. Before he left, he made sure to hang the tag on the door handle, asking the maid to make up the room.
Some of the parents and teachers would be wearing sweats and athletic clothes to the parents’ weekend stickball tournament, but Ian didn’t bother. Most years this was due to his disdain for the phenomenon of flabby middle-aged people in tracksuits, as well as not wanting to look like he was trying too hard. It was more fun to be the guy who shows up dressed for the barbecue and surprises everyone with a grand slam.
But this year he just didn’t give a damn.
As he neared the fields, his phone vibrated with a text from Andi.
Are you up yet?
On campus, he wrote back, mildly annoyed but unable to defend his need for a midday nap. Where are you?
Student union. Coffee with Mrs. Henry.
Tell her I said hi, he wrote. See you at the game.
I’ll be there, she texted back.
He pocketed his phone and was scanning the early arrivals at the playing fields when he saw a ghost.
No, not a ghost, but a face that gave him a chill. He’d never expected to see the man after leaving Glenlake, much less to see him wearing a groundskeeper’s uniform. Now grizzled and stoop shouldered, the man pulled a wagon down the third-base line toward home plate. Age had not been kind: once upon a time, he had been tall and tough and terrifying to Ian’s seventeen-year-old self.
What was his name? R something. Ray? No, Roy.
Roy.
Friday, October 11, 1996
Today the pool club took a field trip. Dallas told us that since none of the schools we compete against in “soccer, lacrosse, and field hockey” (as if boys play field hockey) have “cue sports teams,” we would have to “seek out competition in its appropriate environment.” Which turned out to be a bar.
“I hope you all brought quarters,” he said as we pulled up in front of a sleazy-looking dive called Kyle’s Kabin. The other guys were practically peeing themselves when they saw real live Harley-Davidsons out front, but there were only two of those. It was afternoon, so it wasn’t like a scene from Road House or anything.
It was practically empty inside, which seemed to bum Dallas out, but there was a scary-looking guy named Roy who was obviously expecting us. He was HUGE and had homemade-looking tattoos on both arms and one on his neck. Dallas gave him a bro hug and told us he drank beer and played pool with Roy all the time. Possibly true, but Roy didn’t seem as into it as Dallas.
We formed three teams and had a little tournament. Roy, Dallas, and I were the strongest players, so we were all on different teams. Mike ended up on Roy’s, and Jacob had to play with Dallas. Patrick was with me. Roy’s and Dallas’s teams played first, and even though Roy’s technique looked terrible, he almost never missed. I think Mike was crapping his pants, but he only got one turn, and it didn’t matter. Roy made shots one-handed and left-handed and kind of smirked about it. They won, naturally.
Then it was our turn to play Dallas and Jacob. Patrick is better than Jacob, and I’m almost as good as Dallas, so it was a close game . . . and we won! I could tell Dallas was pissed, especially when Roy said, “Loser gets the beers.”
Then when Dallas came back with two beers, Roy said, “What about these guys?” Obviously meaning us.
Dallas said, “But they’re minors,” and Roy mimicked him: “But they’re minors.”
When Dallas seemed like he was going to get us beers after all, Roy stopped him and said, “You trying to get us both arrested?”
I almost felt sorry for Dallas, but it was kind of funny.
After it was over we were cramming ourselves back into his Charger (I got shotgun) and Dallas muttered something about “a life made vain by three spheres of insidious ivory,” which he told us is from a poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson.
Jacob asked him what the poem was about, and Dallas said, “Look it up. Ever heard of the library?” or something like that. I guess he was still mad about losing twice.
Dallas may be cooler than most teachers, but he can be kind of a dick, too.
Roy wasn’t scary now. His big frame looked like it was caving in on itself, and his neck tattoo was faded and wrinkled above the threadbare collar of his uniform shirt. Ian watched as he took bases out of the wagon and put them in place on the infield diamond, then set a bucket of balls against the backstop and a selection of sticks in each dugout.
Then, with a focus that seemed borne of bone-deep fatigue, he chalked a clean first-base line while students, teachers, and parents milled about forming teams and generally ignoring Roy.
Roy had to be in his sixties now, and it looked as though he ha
d lived every one of the intervening years hard and fast. Ian wondered how long he’d been working for Glenlake. Back when Ian was a student, he hadn’t even thought about what Roy did for a living—he probably would have guessed that Roy rode around on his motorcycle, sold drugs, and hustled pool. Maybe committed a little burglary on the side.
Fortunately, even Dallas had had the good sense to announce right off the bat that they weren’t playing for money.
Ian and the other students had fed off the adrenaline of that trip for days. The two boys who hadn’t made it were miserable with envy, thinking they’d missed a massive rite of passage, and Ian, Mike, Jacob, and Patrick reinforced that perception as much as possible. Only later had Ian come to realize that Dallas’s seeming act of antiestablishment rebellion should have been a warning sign.
There was a loud whistle, and Glenlake’s athletic director began moving through the crowd with a huge canvas sack and a rainbow assortment of pinnies. The annual parents’ weekend stickball tournament had been a tradition since the early part of the twentieth century, the common street game chosen on the assumption that none of Glenlake’s privileged attendees would be familiar with it, and all would be equally disadvantaged. To foster camaraderie, teams were chosen at random from students, parents, and faculty, with an effort to break up families and groups of friends by handing them each a different color to wear.
Once formed, teams played a short tournament on the two adjacent softball fields, with scorekeeping and play-by-play performed by alums who no longer trusted themselves to run the base paths. Players on the winning team would sign and date one of the batting sticks, which would be duly installed—if not exactly given pride of place—in the school’s trophy case.
Ian caught Tom Harkins’s eye just as the athletic director handed him a red pinny. Tom raised his own: blue. They both shrugged wryly as the bullhorn-voiced coach directed red teams and blue teams to separate diamonds. Then, spotting an unaffiliated Wayne Kelly just a little way off, Ian tugged a second red pinny out of the sack as the unaware director moved on.
He pushed through the crowd and handed the pinny to Kelly.
“He said you’re on my team,” Ian told him, inclining his head toward the athletic director.
Kelly raised an eyebrow but pulled the pinny on.
“You ever play stickball?” Ian asked Kelly as they headed for their assigned diamond to play the green team.
Kelly grinned. “I lived in North Philly until I was twelve.”
“So you’re a ringer?”
“I thought that was why you wanted me on your team.”
“You’re going down, old man!” heckled Cassidy from the diamond where she was playing, blue against yellow.
Ian grinned at her.
“From the way you two are trash-talking, you must be Cassidy’s dad,” said the teacher.
“Guilty,” said Ian, thankful his daughter had unwittingly provided the conversational opener he needed. “I hope she’s not too much of a handful in class. She can be pretty headstrong.”
“Are you kidding?” said Wayne. “That’s exactly the trait a journalist needs. Curiosity. The refusal to take no for an answer. Even being a bit of a pest.”
Ian filled a paper cup with water from a cooler on the end of the bench. The water was lukewarm, but he took a deep drink anyway. “Well, I’m not sure she’s planning on being a journalist, but she’s certainly excited about the class. The way she was questioning my wife and me, I should probably have asked if she was wearing a wire.”
Wayne laughed. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about! She and Tate really seem to be on fire for this.”
“Tate who?”
“Tate Holland,” said Wayne. “The boy who found the car. They’re always hanging out together.”
“Interesting,” said Ian, picturing a kid named Tate Holland. What were the chances he didn’t have gelled blond hair, a freckled snub nose, and a closet full of J.Crew clothing? He was a bit surprised his freewheeling daughter would go for a preppy kid—but then wasn’t that exactly what her mother had done? “She’s reached the age where relationships are as closely guarded as state secrets.”
“Huh. But she was questioning you? So that means you were here when Dallas Walker was, too.”
“My wife and I were seniors,” said Ian, wishing he hadn’t brought Andi into it, knowing it didn’t matter. Cassidy would tell him anyway.
“Wow,” said Wayne, and again Ian wasn’t sure what he was responding to. “So if you were here when he disappeared, that must have been huge. The talk of the campus and the town. You had to have a theory.”
He’s not just a teacher; he’s a professional journalist, Ian reminded himself as he thought about how to answer. He’d hoped to be the one extracting information, but Wayne had effortlessly reversed their roles.
“Dallas Walker saw himself as a bad boy,” he finally said. “I think he was compensating for being, you know, a poet. He wanted to be a red meat–eating, beer-drinking regular guy, and he prided himself on breaking the rules and being unpredictable. Some people thought he disappeared to Mexico. Others thought he’d picked up a hitchhiker and been murdered.”
Far off across the fields, he saw the slumped figure of Roy pulling his wagon.
“I guess I was always suspicious of the townies he hung out with,” he added. “He was rumored to run with a rough crowd—bikers and actual criminals.”
Wayne frowned. “Was there any proof of that?”
“I don’t know, but I was in his pool club, what he called the Cue Sports Society. He took me and some other students to some pretty sketchy poolrooms to play. One of them was a biker bar.”
Wayne whistled.
“I have to admit, I’m a bit surprised the administration is supporting your project,” said Ian.
“Oh, they’re not,” Wayne said casually. “But they hired an investigative journalist this year, not a poet.”
Ian wondered how much Wayne Kelly would make of his remarks. He supposed reporters were trained to make a meal out of the tiniest crumbs. But if Ian tossed the right crumbs, that might not be such a bad thing.
“If I were you,” he said, “I’d start with the lowlifes Dallas Walker ran with. I’m sure you won’t have to look farther than that.”
Chapter Six
“Your dad definitely seemed to be getting along with Mr. Kelly,” observed Tate, finding Cassidy in the crowd as the games broke up and the players and spectators straggled toward the table where the awards awaited presentation. Naturally, Dad’s team had won. Even though the ceremony wasn’t serious at all—by tradition, the winners were dunked with a “bucket of water” that was actually confetti, a gag that fooled only the first-year students and their parents—Cassidy found herself hanging back, not wanting to be in the front row as Team Captain Ian Copeland hoisted the cheap trophy.
“He was probably just excited to find out that Mr. Kelly’s as good at sports as he is,” she said. She wasn’t sure why it bothered her to see the two of them being so buddy-buddy. Maybe it was just because her parents usually made a point of not inserting themselves into her life at school.
“My parents already talked his ear off about how great I am. You know, used their first spare second with him to try and game the system,” said Tate.
At least her parents didn’t do that. The Copeland Way would have been to make a casual comment to someone who knew someone and knew how to respond, without the real subject ever being discussed. It was a big advantage in life, but it was also maddening, because they rarely talked about the thing that was on their minds.
Still, in all her parents’ stories about Glenlake, why hadn’t there ever been so much as a mention of Dallas Walker and his sudden disappearance during senior year?
“What did your parents say about this whole Walker business?” she asked Tate.
“My mom said I’m just lucky I didn’t get my ass kicked out over my ‘stunt,’ because life as I know it would have been over.”
Cassidy felt an unexpected sense of loss just thinking about the investigation, and the school year itself, continuing without Tate. “And your dad?”
“He was here a long time before Walker and didn’t really seem all that interested. He was super proud of me for having the balls to try and bring back the Loomis Leap, though.”
“My hero,” she said, just to watch him blush.
The back of his hand brushed against the back of her hand. Her skin prickled.
“Sorry,” he said quickly.
Sometimes he was such a dipshit.
She looked around to see if anyone was watching. The only thing wrong with Tate, really, was that her parents would love him because he was prep-school perfect and—moonlight dives aside—perfectly safe.
But why should she hold that against him? She didn’t love him, but she liked him a lot. And it’s not like they had to know about him anytime soon.
In fact, if there were things they weren’t telling her, she definitely didn’t have to share this development with them.
Feeling a grin form on her face, she tilted her head back and kissed him on the lips.
Chapter Seven
ANDI BLOOM’S GLENLAKE JOURNAL
Sunday, September 29, 1996
“I’ll never get you out of my system,” Ian said one night last year. I was super touched until he followed it up with, “My dad says I will, but I won’t. Not ever.”
I tell myself it isn’t a big deal, because we were a little drunk and a lot high, but I can’t stop thinking about it every time the Copelands come into town, which is regularly because Mr. Copeland is president of the board of trustees.
They are super polite because they don’t like me.
Mr. Copeland, “Cope,” greeted me at lunch today by shaking my hand way too firmly, like he always does. Mrs. Copeland, “Biz,” gave me an air-kiss. She’s always friendly enough, but she’s only invited me to St. Louis once in three years—last November, when she knew I was already meeting Dad and the brood for a “special New York Thanksgiving” that I would have just as soon skipped. Ian says I’m going to be invited to their cabin in Michigan this summer, but I’m not holding my breath.
