by Linda Keir
Dallas wasn’t very into talking to us, and I wondered if it was because he was hoping we’d meet some lowlifes for him to play. Or maybe he just wanted to soak up the atmosphere and use it as material for his poems. (Which I’ve hardly read any of. Andi probably has them all memorized by now, though.)
At one point some guy came over and watched us for a while and asked Dallas if he played any one-pocket, but Dallas told him no and the guy left.
After Dallas won like the seventh game in a row, he suddenly said, “Class dismissed,” and we took off. Some class. Basically, he spent the whole time beating us without giving us any advice to make us better players.
It was rush hour when we headed back, so the trip took almost an hour, and Dallas seemed pissed about it. But when he dropped us off, he said, “Hold up,” and went around to his trunk and took out a six-pack of Milwaukee’s Best that was still ice cold.
“Consolation prize,” he said, handing me the beer. “This didn’t come from me.”
“Damn, Dallas, thanks!” said Mike, practically ready to shotgun them then and there.
Mike headed back to Stimson, and I started to follow him, but Dallas put his hand on my arm.
“Everything going okay?” he asked.
I shrugged.
Then he said, “I heard you and Andi broke up.”
Great. So even the teachers know. Did they also know Sylvie and I made out at the Halloween dance, or that Sarah Ann Janeway stuck her hand down my pants while we were watching Dazed and Confused on video in the common area at her house? Did they know it was like an out-of-body experience each time I opened my eyes and saw someone’s face besides Andi’s?
“I’m fine,” I told him.
“Cheer up, Ian. This school is full of brainy, beautiful chicks. I wish they looked at me the way they look at you.”
I told him thanks and took off. Sometimes I can’t believe they let this guy teach prep school.
“I don’t touch anything less than twenty years old because it makes me feel like a pedophile,” said Preston with a grin, facing the selected members of the Grape and Barley sales staff who had assembled in the Clayton store an hour before opening.
As several of them laughed—one of them, a newer team member with gelled, spiky hair, a little too hard—Ian winced. Preston was undoubtedly a good businessman and knew how to close a sale, but he could be a little crass. Andi would have used the word oily. Ian had several big customers who wouldn’t appreciate that kind of humor.
Perhaps sensing Ian’s discomfort, Preston recalibrated. “Of course, you have to know your customer. A safer opening line is I hope you’re not looking for anything new. Because people are constantly being pitched what’s latest and new. That gets their interest.”
Then again, thought Ian, maybe it takes a little oil to grease the wheels.
Preston put both hands on the small table in front of him, bookending a half-dozen bottles of various vintages.
“This is not Budweiser,” he told the group. “It’s not even craft beer or craft spirits. The price points rule out ninety-nine percent of your customers, so don’t waste your time upselling a guy who just wants a bottle of Irish whiskey. Identify the one percent and build relationships so you can sell to them again and again. Find your whales, harpoon them, and keep them tied to the boat.”
To Ian, he added, “You should think about having an exclusive after-hours party in the store to really kick this thing off.”
Ian nodded, thinking it was probably a good idea.
“Once they get a taste for it,” Preston went on, “it’s like a hobby, and they’ll want rarer and rarer items. People get seduced by the idea of rarity, of history, of owning and then consuming something that is one of a kind and can never be replaced. But the real beauty of this product is that no one knows how this stuff is supposed to taste. They’re buying an idea and an experience, and you’re marking it up as far as the market will bear.”
After lifting into view a bottle wrapped in a brown paper bag, Preston poured tasting portions into thimble-size cups and invited everyone to take one.
“Your boss made me promise to keep you sober,” he joked.
Ian sipped the molasses-colored offering. It was rum, obviously. A little rough, but with imagination, it could have been sitting in a shuttered bar on some Caribbean island until Preston or one of his scouts liberated the stock.
“What are we tasting?” asked Preston.
“Demerara,” said Ian’s head buyer quickly, proving himself to a fellow expert.
“Nailed it. Now when was it bottled?”
Shrugs all around. No one wanted to guess and be off by a decade or two.
“2017,” said Preston with a laugh. “Sells for thirty-three bucks. But if I’d told you it was 1975, you would have believed it, right? And paid as much as three hundred?”
“What’s your point?” asked his buyer.
“My point,” said Preston, pouring the next sample, “is that success with this product depends solely on salesmanship and perceived value.”
“Well, how do they know it’s genuine?” asked the spiky-haired newbie.
Preston’s eyes twinkled. “How do they know it’s not? With only a few exceptions, we always sell sealed bottles. But wines and spirits age differently. Some spoil. We sell everything as is, caveat emptor.”
Ian could see his team getting interested and buying in. And he had no doubt they’d move more product after this. But could they possibly move the stock fast enough to balance the books and keep Simon Bloom out of his business? Once Simon came on board, there would be no way to hide it from Andi.
He wondered whether he was as good at keeping secrets as Andi—and if she was better at it than he knew. For years, he thought he’d known her deepest, darkest secret and assumed her recent jumpiness was simply due to the unwelcome reminder of what happened so long ago. Was it possible she had even more to hide?
Chapter Eighteen
Moments after the bell rang, Mr. Kelly came into the classroom, closed the door behind him, and leaned against the corner of his desk.
“Updates,” he announced, shaking his head at Noah Jacobs as he opened the door and tried to slip in late and unnoticed. “Alumni interviews first.”
Everyone was sitting with their working group, desks pushed together for what Mr. Kelly called “newsroom collaboration.” Cassidy’s excitement about her assignment was tempered by the fact that Noah was, so far, the only other person in her group. Tate had promised to help outside class, but in it she was forced to deal with the annoying, entitled, and lazy Noah, who slumped into his seat across from her with a look that said, Now I’m here, the party can start.
Liz Wright, one of the girls in Tate’s group, summarized the interviews that were already in the class folder by saying that, basically, the alumni they’d talked to so far had thought Dallas Walker was pretty cool, that he’d seemed different from all the other teachers at Glenlake, and that they had no idea why he’d disappeared. They were all uniformly shocked to learn he had spent the last twenty years in his car at the bottom of Lake Loomis.
“They all seemed really interested in what happened, but they didn’t have any useful information,” summarized Liz. “Except that he was a hottie.”
While people snickered, Mr. Kelly moved to the whiteboard and tapped the photo of Dallas Walker that had been printed out and taped to their growing collage. He grinned wryly.
“Journalism is the art of separating the subjective from the factual. Was the deceased poet, in fact, hot?”
Liz blushed and tried to defend herself with a half-hearted “Eew! He was old!”
Mr. Kelly smiled and shook his head, speaking over the laughter. “When you’re talking to these people, are you using the interview techniques I went over in class? Are you asking open-ended questions, letting them talk, and avoiding agreeing with them? Are you asking the same questions in different ways? Most importantly, are you looking for motive?”
“I’m trying to,” said Liz, “but it’s weird to treat them like suspects, because they were teenagers back then—it’s not like any of them killed him.”
“We don’t know that,” said Kelly, making the room fall suddenly silent. “If you don’t think teens are capable of murder, I suggest you start reading your parents’ newspapers. That is, if your parents still subscribe to newspapers these days.”
Tate spoke up. It seemed to Cassidy as though he was trying to save Liz from further mortification, and she liked him for that. “We’re still waiting to hear back from eight former students,” he added, “but we’re making good progress.”
“Just make sure your interviews don’t turn into gentle strolls down memory lane,” said Kelly, perching again on the corner of his desk. “Find out who was unhappy and why.”
Rowan Krause pushed his glasses back on his nose and raised his hand. “We’ve been reading old issues of the Glenlaker from the ’96–’97 school year. Scans of the articles specifically referencing Walker are on the shared drive. But I also found an anonymous student editorial about grade inflation in the fall poetry seminar. The author sounds like a brainiac who was pissed off that students who didn’t work as hard were also getting As. Hang on a minute . . .”
With a few clicks on his laptop, Rowan brought up the work in question so he could find the line he wanted to share.
“Maybe Dallas Walker was right to give his whole poetry class Cs, as he notoriously did several years ago at another school. Maybe we at Glenlake need to wake up and realize success is earned, not bestowed.”
Mr. Kelly whistled. “Nice work, Rowan!”
“We couldn’t find the author’s name,” said Rowan apologetically. “All those files were destroyed.”
“It’s possible the author wasn’t even in Walker’s class,” said Mr. Kelly. “But it’s still an important clue. Did he give his whole class at Glenlake Cs? Were the grades later inflated? Has anyone mentioned that?”
Everyone in Tate’s group shook their heads.
“Well, ask! Call ’em back if you have to!” He paused, remembering something, and turned his attention to Cassidy. “Your mom was in his class. Did she ever say anything about this?”
She shook her head. “Mom’s famous in the family for having a perfect 4.0 GPA at Glenlake and at Smith.”
“Confirm that with the registrar,” said Mr. Kelly, getting another laugh.
Cassidy played along. “I won’t have to. She probably still has her old report cards.”
“Since I’ve got you on the hook, does your group have a report on the mysterious employee?”
Noah gestured toward Cassidy, like he was going to generously let her make the presentation, when in reality he hadn’t done anything more than look at her notes and nod and grunt.
She opened her laptop and scanned what she’d written. “We don’t know too much yet. My dad mentioned that he had a neck tattoo, so I just asked the first groundskeeper I saw, and he said the guy’s name was Roy. The school website lists a Curtis Royal under Building and Grounds Maintenance Crew. There’s no picture, but the name was too similar for it to be a coincidence. I went to Mrs. Franti in Records, and all she would do was confirm he’s employed here.”
“Did you threaten to FOIA them?” asked Hannah.
“I didn’t have to,” Cassidy told her. “She said she’d looked it up and personnel records are private. She also said to tell you you’re busted. But we know from what you got last time that Roy didn’t work here when Dallas did.”
“Oops,” said Hannah, her earlier embarrassment at having conned Mrs. Franti having become pride that she’d pulled it off.
“I googled him, but he’s not on any social media, and I hardly came up with anything. It looks like he’s gotten arrested a few times for stuff like pot and failing to pay his speeding tickets.”
“A jailbird?” said Noah, forgetting he was supposed to know this already. “He totally did it.”
“It can’t be anything serious or they wouldn’t let him work at Glenlake,” said Cassidy, feeling strangely defensive.
“Maybe they have different standards for the groundskeepers,” said Felicia primly.
Mr. Kelly clapped his hands. “All right, let’s hold off on the other reports until our next class. Before we break into groups, does anybody have anything else?”
Liz swiveled around in her chair and gave Cassidy a look that was hard to read. “Did your parents say anything about how they broke up senior year?”
Caught completely off guard, Cassidy felt like someone had just pulled her pants down in front of the class. Her parents’ Glenlake story was one of unbroken bliss—nobody had ever mentioned a breakup.
“W-why would they?” she stammered.
“Your mom’s friend Georgina is super talkative. I just remembered that she said your parents had a ‘spectacular’ breakup senior year.”
“Aunt Georgina has a tendency toward hyperbole,” said Cassidy defensively. “Besides, I don’t see how that’s relevant to this project.”
“Well, your mom was in Dallas Walker’s class,” said Liz weakly. “Like Mr. Kelly said, we’re supposed to learn everything—”
“I’m afraid I side with Cassidy here,” interrupted Mr. Kelly, to Cassidy’s grateful relief. “I appreciate your questioning instinct, but I’m afraid this seems unrelated. Let’s spare your classmate the mortification of thinking about her parents as creatures with romantic and sexual desires.”
Which somehow made it worse. But then, thank god, the bell rang.
As Cassidy stuffed her things in her backpack, out of the corner of her eye she saw Tate hurrying over so they could walk out together. As glad as she was to see that, she wished she could be alone with her thoughts.
Her parents had broken up in spectacular fashion but had obviously gotten back together. Why? Maybe their storybook romance had some secret chapters?
All she knew for sure was that she needed to find out.
Chapter Nineteen
“Isn’t it just easier to fly Cassidy home for Thanksgiving?” Ian asked through a mouthful of toothpaste. He spit into the basin on his side of the marble vanity they’d decided to restore instead of replace when they’d renovated the house. One of the infinite number of household decisions on which they always seemed to agree.
“I heard a rumor that Chi Town Publishing is struggling,” Andi said. “I should really get up there and meet with them.”
“You can’t just call and find out what’s going on?”
She could have. But ever since she’d heard the journalism class was looking into old files and records, she’d been thinking about loose threads she had to snip so no one could start pulling. To do so, she needed a legitimate reason to get to Glenlake.
“If Chi Town is seeking an investor or, better yet, looking to sell, I need to make sure I put in the first and best offer,” Andi said. “I’ve been wanting to expand into a bigger market, and this is the ideal opportunity.”
“What about Thanksgiving prep?” Ian asked. “There’s a ton to do with both of our families coming this year.”
“It may be at our house, but it’s still Biz’s holiday. You know she’ll be here at daybreak, reorganizing the kitchen before we get started.”
“I’m not going to be able to help out as much as I usually do ahead of time, though. I have to be at the store for the ‘whales’ that are starting to come in now that it’s the holiday season. I’ve made nearly seven grand on a dozen bottles already this week. Someone paid eight hundred bucks for a bottle of 1957 J.T.S. Brown.”
“Whatever that is. I’ll only be gone from Monday morning until midday Tuesday.”
“What about weather?” Ian said, the weakness of his argument masked by an unexpected intensity in his voice. “It’s supposed to get bad.”
“Which could leave Cassidy stranded at O’Hare,” she said, wondering why he was being so stubborn.
“I just don’t want to worry about the two of y
ou getting stuck in a ditch along the interstate,” he said.
“Honey, I promise I’ll be extra cautious,” she said. After all, wasn’t her entire motivation for going an abundance of caution?
He pursed his lips, always a sign he wasn’t going to repeat what was on his mind.
Had she already brushed her teeth, she’d have given him a comforting kiss. Instead, she patted him on the bottom to let him know he had an IOU to cash in as soon as it was convenient.
And that there was absolutely nothing to worry about.
Chapter Twenty
IAN COPELAND’S GLENLAKE JOURNAL
Monday, November 18, 1996
So Andi and I finally talked. If that’s what you’d call it. I guess we said words to each other and we both heard what the other one was saying, but the words didn’t seem to matter.
It was her idea, actually. I was coming around the corner of Leggett, and all of a sudden she was right there. It was too late to change direction. She was like, “Hi,” and I was like, “Hi,” and then she just asked if I wanted to get coffee, and I said okay. I figured she meant at the student union, but then she said, “Three o’clock at the diner.”
I had to skip practice and sneak off campus to do it, but the fact that she chose “our” place made me wonder if she had something big to tell me. The whole way there I was thinking about if I’d take her back (answer: obviously) and how I’d tell Mike and Sarah Ann and if it would make me look like I was pussy-whipped or not. By the time I got to the diner I was more or less expecting to be back together with Andi and . . . I was practically fucking skipping.
But then I got there and she was in a booth in the smoking section, playing with her lighter and letting her cigarette burn in the ashtray. (She’s always liked the idea of smoking a lot more than actually smoking.) And she didn’t look at all like someone who wanted to admit she made a mistake.
