by Linda Keir
I honestly didn’t know what to do, but she begged me not to tell anyone. She said she’s got an eating problem, and she let it get out of control, but she’s going to get better and she just can’t deal with adults right now. I guess I can relate.
People whisper about Sylvie and make jokes like “Why does Sylvie love KFC? Because it comes with a bucket.” I’ve even laughed a few times, but I never really knew how bad it was. She was so skinny looking, skinnier than I thought, but then again, when we did it, we were under the covers with the lights off because she wouldn’t let me look at her, and most girls are like that anyway.
I didn’t feel like I should leave her alone, so I stayed there all night. I made her take sips of water and Gatorade and fed her saltine crackers and little slices of apple like she had the flu. She kept it all down, which was a relief. I wasn’t sure if I was ready to hold her hair while she hurled into the toilet.
After a while I remembered to take my Tylenol and wrapped a cold Coke can on either side of my knee. I lay down next to her on the bed and propped my leg up on two pillows. She reached out and put her arm across my chest, but there wasn’t anything sexual between us. I don’t think there will be again. She’s not a bad person, and I definitely don’t feel better than her or anyone else. I guess I kind of used to.
She fell asleep a long time before I did. At one point I kind of almost started laughing, because I was thinking about how, for so long, I always thought I was going to have this perfect fucking life, you know? That I would just go on and on, and everything would be OK. Now I just feel like some kind of cripple.
My leg will get better eventually, and people who see me will think I walk normally. But I’m always going to be limping, you know? Because I don’t have Andi to lean on.
You can’t fix or change people, I guess. I’ll be here for Sylvie, but I can’t use her as a substitute for Andi. And I guess Andi has to deal with her decisions on her own. Even if I had limped over, tried to kill DFW, and gotten my ass kicked instead, what would that have accomplished? I hate that I left her there, but now that they’re broken up, I’ll just have to wait and see if she comes back to me.
I’ll wait probably forever, so it’s time to pull myself back together.
Ian sat at his desk. He’d poured three fingers of bourbon from his favorite bottle, a Blanton’s Gold Edition. It was an effective anesthetic. And it seemed a moment worth marking somehow, no matter what he read.
Andi had returned from upstairs, the journal already unlocked, and handed it to him without a further word. As he turned page after page, he felt a full-body catharsis, as if he’d been sobbing—only he hadn’t shed a tear.
He suspected, though, that it was only a matter of time.
Her distance these past months was clearly born out of fear of being discovered. She now knew that he’d always known about Dallas—but there was something she was still holding back. Was their life and marriage about to be upended when he learned that she’d never loved him, only settled for him because of the security and unconditional love he offered?
Or was it something worse?
He’d seen Dallas slap Andi. Were there bruises he hadn’t seen, physical or mental? Given the short time between what he had witnessed and Dallas’s disappearance, plus the fact that Andi had maintained her secret for all these years, Ian couldn’t help but wonder whether she was somehow responsible in a way she had hoped would remain submerged at the bottom of Lake Loomis.
After learning Dallas’s body had been found in his car in the water below the bluffs, Ian had allowed himself to fantasize, almost as if he were watching a true-crime show on TV, about a scenario in which the killer got Dallas wasted enough for an off-road joyride, plied him with even more drinks at the top of the cliff, and thumped him on the back of the head. Ian relished the image of this shadowy figure starting the car, putting it into drive, and then getting the hell out. Even without a foot on the gas, the six-cylinder engine would have taken the car over the cliff at a fast walk.
Had Andi, sick of Dallas’s ego-driven bullshit, conjured up a scenario of her own? What if she had brought them back together by making sure the man who preyed on her was permanently out of the picture?
Full of fear and a reckless surge of love for this girl who suddenly felt like a stranger, he forced himself to read.
ANDI BLOOM’S GLENLAKE JOURNAL
Monday, March 24, 1997
I keep thinking there’s going to be a note in the tree, or I’m going to walk into class and he’s going to be there, but there isn’t and he isn’t. I’d like to say that I miss him terribly, but, really, I just feel blank and alone.
The thing is, I need him to come back, because I need him to give me a ride to an appointment that he obviously isn’t up for dealing with. But I’ll find a way to get there. I’m making the call anyway.
Tomorrow.
Tuesday, March 25, 1997
Fuck Dallas for taking off. Fuck him for not being man enough to be there for me. Fuck him for flirting with other people. And fuck him for making me think it ever made sense for us to be together.
I really fucked up by breaking up with Ian. Every time I see him, and it seems like I see him constantly, it takes everything I have not to cry. I’ve made a horrible mistake. I would give anything to erase what’s happened and go back to the way things were. I miss Ian. I miss his friendship. I miss having a cute, smart, normal, stable boyfriend my own age.
I made an appointment for Monday.
I thought about asking Mrs. Henry for a ride to Northbrook and lying to her about why, but she keeps asking me if I’m feeling better, like she’s worried I have an eating disorder now, too.
I’ll just walk into town and then take a cab.
Fuck.
Friday, March 28, 1997
The definition of True Eternal Fucking Boundless Joy: I. AM. BLEEDING.
The definition of irony: IN. POETRY. CLASS.
I should be mortified by the bloodstain I left on my chair and the fact that I’m all crampy and it’s so heavy it has to be a miscarriage and not a late period, but somehow it feels like the fitting end to a really bad poem.
Literary It Girl
Falls
For the smooth lines of her predatory poetry master
Into the depths of disaster
Très
Cliché.
Friday, April 4, 1997
“Come on,” Georgina said, grabbing my arm and leading me up the stairs.
“Where are we going?”
“Spying mission. You won’t believe who’s here.”
“Who?” I asked, my veins turning to ice as thoughts of Dallas began to loop in my head. How dare he come back and show his face?
I had just decided I wouldn’t even give him the courtesy of eye contact when Georgina said:
“Susan Walker. Dallas’s wife.”
My legs felt frozen. “Ex-wife.”
“Whatever,” Georgina said dismissively. “She’s here to get his stuff.”
“How do you know this?”
“I overheard a little birdie, also known as Administrative Aide Darlene O’Leary,” she said, tugging on my arm again. “Aren’t you curious to see what she looks like?”
“A little,” I admitted.
“Pretend you’re not looking,” Georgina whispered as the door to Dallas’s office suddenly opened in front of us.
Georgina flat out stared as I glanced discreetly at a woman who looked nothing like I’d pictured Susan, or Tracy, his “friend with the very comfortable guest room,” or whoever it was he’d surely run off with. I was starting to think of Dallas as the kind of man who was forever running toward something new and less complicated.
With gray curly hair, mom jeans, sensible shoes, and no makeup whatsoever, Susan looked ten years older than Dallas.
“Total granola,” Georgina muttered as soon as she couldn’t hear us. “Not what I expected at all.”
“Me either,” I said. “I figured sh
e’d be—”
“Younger and prettier?”
Was it as simple as that? “Less like an English professor from a liberal arts college, anyway.”
“Good thing he didn’t have kids with her,” she said as we headed back downstairs.
Thank god there weren’t going to be any others in the near future.
Tuesday, April 15, 1997
Today is my eighteenth birthday.
Georgina gave me lottery tickets, a copy of Playgirl, and a pack of cigarettes.
In other words, I’m legal. Of age. Jailbait no more.
Dallas once told me he was going to take me to the city for my eighteenth birthday, even though he’d be strapped for cash on tax day.
Even if he shows up today to make good on his promise, it’s too late. I won’t bother telling him that I didn’t stay pregnant for long. He wasn’t there to share the relief I felt when I canceled the dreaded appointment.
But I digress. It’s a beautiful, sunny spring day, and I feel better than I have in months. Not only did I wake up to my contraband birthday presents from Georgina, but everyone in my dorm had something for me—candy, lotion, candles, and a scarf from Crystal, all of which I opened after I blew out the candles on the cake Mrs. Henry made from scratch.
It was red velvet and the glorious color of blood.
“It’s good to see you back to your old self again,” she said as Georgina and I fed each other like newlyweds and toasted with sparkling cider.
And I did almost feel like my old self again. Mainly because I got a Bit-O-Honey in my mailbox.
From Ian.
Ian poured another finger of bourbon and swallowed it, grateful for the burn in his throat, trying to make sense of all the answers he’d just learned. Some of them to questions he hadn’t known.
Andi had been pregnant.
She and Dallas had never broken up—he’d only assumed it, and Andi had let him believe it.
When he saw them, they’d been fighting because she’d asked Dallas for help.
Both of them had failed her.
Her records request at Glenlake had obviously been an attempt to find out whether there was any record of her pregnancy. Any evidence that could tie her to Dallas Walker.
It didn’t absolve her of murder. In fact, it gave her a motive. But Jesus . . .
He heard footsteps, and Andi opened the door to his study, her eyes sparkling with the things she had learned about him. He stood up. As soon as they started speaking, tears began to roll down her cheeks.
“You were pregnant,” he said, still hardly believing it.
“It . . . didn’t progress.”
“And Dallas was upset.”
“He asked me if I did it on purpose.”
“That fucker.”
Andi nodded.
“So you hated him at the end. Maybe almost as much as I did.”
“I was devastated by the way he treated me. Then he disappeared. All this time I thought it was because of me and my . . . situation.”
Ian wanted to take her in his arms, to crush their bodies together, but he couldn’t. Yet.
“But you let me believe you broke up.”
“I was over him even before it happened.”
“I thought it was possible you killed him because he broke up with you. Or because he’d been abusive.”
“It never occurred to me you might think that,” Andi said, sounding startled. “I was worried you’d find out what Dallas and I were really talking about that day.”
“And you were trying to get rid of your medical records so no one would see them and make the connection.”
Andi nodded and then looked into his eyes. “Ian, I didn’t kill Dallas Walker. I didn’t care about him that much. All I did that night was go back to my dorm. I tried to keep my mind off everything by playing a game of Monopoly with Georgina. The next day he was gone.”
“Are you saying your fucking alibi was Georgina?”
“Of all people.”
They both laughed for the first time in what felt like forever.
“Georgina told me she walked in on you and Sylvie doing it.”
“Of course she told you.”
“But not until yesterday, if you can believe that.”
“It doesn’t matter. Andi . . .” He reached for her and let his hand fall. “I need you to know I hated Dallas Walker—Dallas Fucking Walker—but for the wrong reasons. I hated him like I’ve always been seventeen years old. I hated him for breaking us up. But . . . what he did to you . . . you were just a kid.”
Andi smiled ruefully. “I was a kid, but I thought I was a woman already. I’d read about all these free-spirit artists who lived these amazing lives, who loved hard and broke hearts. Dallas really was one of those. I didn’t realize the emptiness that goes along with all of that. All the damage. He only hit me that one time, but he beat me up pretty badly emotionally. More than I allowed myself to see at the time. Once you and I got back together, I put the whole thing in a box and screwed the lid down tight.”
“I’ll never forgive myself for not protecting you then. I dreamed about that for years.” He felt hot, wet tears on his own face. “And I’m just so sorry. So, so sorry you ever had to go through that.”
“It wasn’t your responsibility. I’m to blame for putting you through hell. For allowing hate into your heart. And for what?”
“I think we both need to forgive each other, and ourselves,” Ian said, finally moving forward and taking her in his arms.
She hugged him back fiercely. “Yes.”
“We need to protect each other and our family,” he said into her shoulder, the familiar smell of her so utterly reassuring.
“But working together this time.”
“I still haven’t even had a chance to look at those records I picked up at Glenlake.”
Andi was silent for a moment. He wanted to push back and look at her, but she continued to hold him closely, maybe so he couldn’t.
“Do you ever wish . . . that you actually had killed Dallas?” she asked.
The answer came to him easily. “He’s taken up enough room in my life without that. What about you?”
She lifted her head and kissed him. “I feel exactly the same way.”
Chapter Fifty-Eight
The morning after, Ian tagged along as she dropped the kids off for school, and then both of them went to a nearby coffee shop to look over the packet he’d picked up from Glenlake. Neither of them had spoken much while getting ready, but there was a comfort between them Andi couldn’t remember having for years, if ever. Revisiting the worst year of her life in such vivid detail had been hard, and it would continue to be hard until the memories subsided again, but now she imagined gaining something she’d never believed could happen: closure.
At the coffee shop, she stood in line for drinks while Ian found a secluded table.
By the time she sat down, he had already organized the paperwork and was starting to go through it.
“So this is everything they had on the infamous Roy,” she said.
“It’s not much, given that he worked there for almost twenty years,” he confirmed.
“Why ‘Roy’?” she mused. “What was wrong with ‘Curt’?”
“People don’t always choose their own nicknames,” he said. “Could have been a friend, a gym teacher, anybody, and it just stuck.”
Leaving unsaid the fact that David Dallas Walker had deliberately left his own first name behind.
“So what’s in the piles?” she asked, moving on.
“Original job application, medical and insurance records, salary, W-2s, performance evaluations, and a few other things.”
“Let’s get started.”
They divvied up the work and went through every page, comparing notes as they did, looking for anything out of the ordinary. It seemed like a long shot—what could these impersonal files possibly tell them about what Roy did outside of work?—but at least it was something. Though she still di
dn’t understand what had compelled Roy to suddenly seek gainful employment, at Glenlake no less, even these dry bureaucratic records helped make him seem more real and less like a phantom of her memory.
“Look at this,” said Ian suddenly. “He started in June 1997. Just a few months after everything happened.”
“That’s definitely curious.”
She went through the performance evaluations, all of them perfunctory and mostly blank. The necessary boxes were checked, the required lines were signed, but the boxes for additional comments were uniformly empty.
“And check this out,” said Ian. “He was hired at a flat thirty thousand per year, which honestly seems a little high for an assistant groundskeeper in 1997. And it’s a weirdly round number, too. This sheet that lists other salaries shows someone else receiving twenty-seven thousand eight hundred forty dollars.”
“So he was hired at a higher rate than someone else?”
“Higher than the two other assistants.” Ian flipped through W-2s, checking something. “But it never changed. The other salaries went up, even surpassed his, but his didn’t. It’s always been a flat thirty grand.”
Andi sipped her coffee, which was cooling off faster than she liked, thinking how strange it was that so much suspicion had centered on Roy. Yes, he had a propensity for violence, and she’d been there the night he turned on Dallas, but for the most part the two had seemed like friends. “Who hired him?”
He found the paperwork stapled to Roy’s original application. “The head groundskeeper, Ted Orzibal.”
“Is he still working there?”
“We need to find that out.”
They kept digging, scanning pages. When Andi reached the end of the performance evaluations, she found a few handwritten letters, all from the 1997–1998 school year, in which Orzibal had complained to his supervisor, the head of operations, that Roy was an unreliable employee. When he did show up, he arrived late, left early, and performed his tasks erratically. Worse, he was insubordinate, giving sarcastic replies or refusing to answer at all.
