Bonfire: A Novel

by Krysten Ritter

I get lost, circling several times around the address she provided before giving up and phoning again.

  “There’s nothing here but a sports equipment store and a Chinese restaurant,” I say. “I must have written the address wrong…”

  “You didn’t. We’re behind the restaurant. Just circle around to the back and you’ll see a sign.”

  Inside, she’s done everything she can to smooth the cheap edges into something elegant and professional. She’s almost succeeded.

  Lilian comes to greet me herself. The secretary, if there is one, has abandoned her post. There is no other word for Lilian than manicured. She is practically uniformed in an earth-tone pencil skirt, blazer, and kitten heels. Her makeup is flawless, albeit a little heavy on the eyeshadow, her nails are done, and her hair is sleek despite the heavy must of the office, which is chasing the heat by means of a whimpering window A/C unit.

  Her office is small but very orderly. She takes a seat across from me and I look for something to compliment—a kid, a husband, a dog—but find nothing personal at all. It’s bare.

  “Thank you for seeing me,” I say. “I know you must be busy.” This is so obviously untrue, to both of us, I feel immediately embarrassed.

  “You’re looking at Optimal?” she says, with careful politeness. And with those simple words, I understand she has given me permission to short circuit at least a half hour of painstaking bullshit.

  I could kiss her feet.

  “I’m with the Center for Environmental Advocacy Work, based in Illinois,” I tell her, and explain what brought us into town in the first place. “Before Optimal moved to Indiana, the company had to settle a case that involved chemical leaching. It seems to us like they’ve bought their way out of trouble several times—and not just to skirt environmental regulations, either.” She doesn’t blink. “The county prosecutor’s office dropped an investigation they were planning—for labor violations—after Optimal cut a check. I don’t like the pattern.”

  Still, she says nothing. She doesn’t act surprised, either. I can’t tell how much of this she already knew.

  I clear my throat. “You were the compliance branch chief at IDEM, is that right?”

  “Co-chief,” she corrects me immediately. Then she smiles. Even her smile is deliberate. “There were two of us. Colin Danner was my partner.”

  I can tell she has more to say. But again she just sits there. I try a different tack. “What brings you to the private sector?” I ask. “That’s quite a shift—going from public policy to contracting for the private sector.”

  “You mean quite a downgrade,” she says calmly—and though that is exactly what I meant, I feel another rush of embarrassment. “It’s all right,” she says. “I’m happy enough.” She uncrosses her legs and leans forward, practically pouring her words in my direction. “Look, I didn’t choose to leave. I was forced out. I’ll say it, and they would say it, too, though not for the same reasons. One day I was co-head, and the next day I couldn’t take a step that wasn’t crossing some kind of line or violating public policy or abusing my position. They buried me under an internal audit—I had to dig up duplicate receipts for all my expenses for the tenure of my time with IDEM. Random monitoring, they said. Bad luck.” She shakes her head and allows a look of rage to surface before she harnesses it. “I got shut out of all the big projects. Then, when I missed deadlines—deadlines I didn’t know existed—I was threatened with termination. I left instead.”

  “What happened?” I say.

  “Colin sold me out,” she says matter-of-factly. “I’m not sure exactly what he said, or what complaints he filed, but I’m sure he was the one who launched the audit.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  Now she looks at me as if the answer is so obvious she hates to have to point it out. “Optimal,” she says. “Of course.”

  A buzz of excitement notches up my pulse.

  “We butted heads almost from the start on how and when the environmental review should take place. I thought it was just his usual shit. He didn’t like that they appointed a co-head. He especially didn’t like that they appointed a woman.” She says this with no inflection at all, not even a catch of anger in her voice, as if it had nothing at all to do with her. A true pro.

  “So he steamrolled you?”

  “That’s what I thought at first—he always challenged my recommendations, questioned my reports. But this was different. It was as if he didn’t want to look at all. But that didn’t make sense. The compliance branch of OWQ had done an inspection, several years earlier, before I arrived. An inspection every two years is standard, unless issues of permitting or expansion make it necessary to test even more. So he wasn’t against it in principle. But when I checked the report, I knew something was wrong. Plastics manufacturing uses some of the most toxic chemicals in the world—and a lot of them. But there wasn’t a single fine. Not a single notice, zero safety concerns. No infractions at all. That never happens.” Her voice hangs there, climbing toward a peak. “There’s always something. I’ve never seen a report that clean, in my whole career. It isn’t possible.”

  My pulse has turned into a joyful shout. Yes, yes, yes. “You think Colin was ignoring whatever he’d found in the inspections? Only one inspection was submitted into ICIS from your office,” I say. I’ve read through the same stack of briefs so many times I could probably tell her exact dates. “The other two inspections were subcontracted.”

  She shakes her head. “Sure. But we depend on a third party to input reports into the system. A liaison who flows state information back to the federal level.”

  “You’re saying even if the inspections were originally legit, they might have been changed afterward?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. Both reports were actually entered by the same person. An agency coordinator named Michael Phillips. Lives in Indianapolis now.” Her eyes flare with a warning. “But he’s from just outside Barrens originally. I looked him up. He and Colin were together at the University of Indiana.”

  Click. Another piece comes together. But it’s not enough—not nearly enough. Everything I learn makes the picture clearer, but also bigger—like climbing out of a ditch only to find myself at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. “I don’t understand why you didn’t report him.”

  “The fact that they went to school at the same place at the same time doesn’t necessarily mean anything,” she says. “IU is a big school. And a popular one. Besides, their education wasn’t a secret. It obviously hadn’t raised flags before.”

  “Sure. But in combination with the inspections, it looks suspicious. It is suspicious. If regulations are as strict as you say, you had more than enough, at least to launch an audit.”

  She looks away again. She’s silent for so long I start to get uncomfortable. And then, finally, just as I’m about to thank her for her time, a shock rolls through her and she begins to laugh. Little bursts of sound, like hiccups—like she’s choking on the laughter.

  “Sometimes I think I went crazy,” she says, and when she finally turns in my direction I see she’s crying and I’m so shocked I can’t say anything. “Do you have any children, Ms. Williams?”

  I shake my head. She gets control of herself, finally, stands up and moves to the desk. She comes back with her phone and passes it to me: on the home screen, a beautiful girl, a teenager—as dark as her mother, with the same large eyes and bone structure.

  “That’s Amy,” she says. “She’s a junior in high school this year.”

  “She’s pretty,” I say, after a quick look, and hand back the phone. I feel oddly resentful of her for unraveling in front of me. That’s the agreement we make with strangers, that we’ll pretend, and they’ll pretend, so we can slide away from each other quickly and with no guilt.

  “She’s doing great now.” She slides the phone into the pocket of her jacket. “During the audit, I was stressed. Working all the time. Trying to keep my head above water. She was on her own a lot. Her father only has her on the we
ekends.” She closes her eyes and opens them again.

  “I see,” I say, even though I don’t.

  “She was a freshman,” she goes on. “Sneaking around, drinking, nothing crazy, but she needed attention and I wasn’t there. She spent a lot of time online, talking to people she’d never met. I didn’t know any of it, of course. I only found out…after.”

  “After what?”

  “One of her online friends…” Her voice breaks and she takes a breath. “He asked her to send some pictures. She did. Like I said, she wanted attention.”

  The image comes to me again of a girl, calling for help, floundering in the water, her voice nearly buried by the pitch of laughter.

  “The next day, the pictures were all over school. Sent through a class e-mail blast. Even her teachers got them. Even the principal. I—” But she stops, overwhelmed.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, and I really am. “That’s awful. Teenagers can be awful. Believe me.” I try and force everything I know, everything I’ve carried, into those two words. “But you can’t blame yourself. It wasn’t your fault.”

  She looks up sharply. “I know that,” she says. “It was Colin’s fault.”

  “You’re not serious.”

  “Colin’s son is in school in Crossville. They play against Barrens all the time. They share friends on Facebook.”

  “That’s hardly evidence of…” I trail off, unsure exactly of what she believes. That Colin pressured his son into getting pictures from Lilian’s daughter? All to keep her from pushing on his connection to Optimal? “What you’re talking about…I mean, that’s a felony. She was—what? Fifteen at the time?”

  “Fourteen. I know it sounds insane. It is insane. I never would have made the connection. But then…” She stands up abruptly and moves to her desk. Slides open a drawer and fumbles for something out of sight.

  “In the pictures, Amy was wearing socks. Nothing else. They were argyle. Pink and green. I always buy her at least one pair for Christmas.”

  She straightens up. Comes around the desk. Suddenly I don’t want to know, and wish I hadn’t asked, hadn’t come, hadn’t ever heard of Lilian McMann.

  Mutely, she extends her hand, letting the socks hang loose as if they’re a corpse that might still come alive. Argyle. Pink and green. Unworn, and still tagged.

  “He gave them to me when I left,” she says. “He left them on my desk with a note. Great socks make a great outfit. Hope these keep you warm through cold nights ahead.”

  Her words trigger a long-buried memory: Jake Erickson, one of Brent’s friends, elbowing into my lab space during senior year chemistry. He was always messing with me, switching my chemicals, knocking over my test tubes, turning off my Bunsen burner so I could never finish in time, but that day he was too busy bragging about feeling up a sophomore behind the Dumpsters between classes.

  She’s totally fucked in the head, he said, and I could tell he knew I was listening. The crazy ones are always the easiest. They just open up for business the second you even look at them.

  “He wanted me to know.” Now her voice leaps to a note of high anguish. “Not just that he’d seen the photos. But that he’d gotten them from her in the first place.”

  We can do anything we want with them. Jake Erickson’s voice fills up my head. They let us. And why not? It’s not like they’re going to complain afterward.

  I stand up, suddenly dizzy. “I’m sorry,” I say, without knowing exactly what I’m sorry for.

  For her daughter, for her job, for that sophomore behind the Dumpsters, men who get to do anything they want, and the people who are taken advantage of.

  Because isn’t that, ultimately, what the case comes down to?

  There are the people of the world who squeeze and the ones who suffocate.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The closest bar isn’t nearly close enough. Ray’s Tavern—a dump that shares a parking lot with a Fireworks Emporium—is already half full, despite the fact that it’s only four P.M. Some of the customers look like they may have been crusted on those same stools since the beginning of time. They appear to be grown into the décor, like alcoholic barnacles. I can’t stop scraping my palms with a cocktail napkin, as if Lilian McMann’s story has embedded itself in my skin.

  I don’t know that I can believe her: not because she’s lying, but because she might simply be wrong. The problem with spending a lifetime looking for patterns is that it teaches you to see them everywhere; but coincidences happen. Colin Danner might simply have known about the pictures through his son, and decided to give one final twist of the knife before Lilian left. In all likelihood, that is what happened.

  But her story has left me with a bad feeling, like I’ve just swum through oily water, and the sink in the bathroom is so filthy that washing my hands only makes me feel dirtier. My first whiskey-soda does little to help and the second only makes me sad. I can’t help but think of Becky Sarinelli, and of that poor fluttering photo that landed in the aisle at that pep rally: her skin a glare in the camera flash, her exposed body. And that was before photos could be instantly shared the way they are now.

  Thinking of Becky Sarinelli gets me back to thinking about Condor, and wondering why and how he could have done that to her.

  Old mistakes, he’d said, about Hannah’s mother. But old mistakes are never old. We relive them again and again. We repeat them, and hope this time things will turn out differently.

  I don’t want Condor to be a mistake.

  Or maybe I just don’t want to be alone. Being in Barrens is reminding me of how lonely I was here. It’s reminding me I’ve never really stopped being lonely.

  That was what drew Kaycee and me together as kids: we were the two loneliest best friends in the history of the world. My father was lost in his religion, and hers lost in his alcohol, his rages, his black-market economy and the people who bought and sold from him. My mother was dying. Hers might as well have been dead.

  But being best friends with Kaycee could be just as lonely as having no friends at all. She was so unpredictable, even back then. She could be cruel and distant, explosive. She could hit you and then stroke the bruise, promising to make it better. Either way, I soaked up the attention. I remember building forts with her in the woods, and how I would always turn tree stumps into crowds of friends, into imaginary siblings who comforted me and cheered me on. Kaycee wouldn’t invent friends, but subjects. That way, she said, they would never disobey her when she ordered them to stay.

  Sometimes I think Chestnut—a stray, just like me, skinny and desperate and fearful until I managed to coax him to me with a handful of shredded chicken—was the only real friend I ever had.

  In a sick way, it made sense that Kaycee had to kill him.

  —

  By the start of my third drink I know that calling is a very bad idea, but by the bottom of it, I don’t care.

  Pick up, I think. And: Don’t pick up.

  He does, on the second ring. He sounds clean, even over the phone.

  “Abby,” Brent says, and I try to pretend that he’s the one I wanted to call all along. “So crazy. I was just thinking of you. What’s up?”

  I shred the damp napkin beneath my now empty drink and eye the clock over the bar. Four forty-nine. “I’m just leaving the office,” I say. “How about a drink?”

  —

  “How did you even find this place?” Brent asks, as he fumbles onto the stool next to mine. In his collared shirt and suit jacket, he looks out of place.

  “A friend recommended it,” I say. No one in their right mind would recommend this place.

  “I like it.” He makes it sound convincing. But rather than feel reassured, I feel a quick pulse of anxiety. Brent is a good liar.

  He orders a tequila and I get another whiskey-soda, pretending it’s my first, and the bartender, with a face worn from hard living, doesn’t comment.

  “I was gonna call you,” he says. “When you saw Misha at my place…I didn’t want you to
get the wrong idea…”

  “What idea is that?”

  “Misha always had a thing for me,” he says bluntly. Somehow, hearing the words out loud is a relief. Because, of course, thinking back on it, I see that he’s right, that it was always so obvious.

  “For a little while, after Kaycee disappeared, she pushed us to…” He trails off, shaking his head. “But I never thought of her that way.” He adds, a little more quietly, “I like you. A lot.”

  “I like you, too,” I say. But as soon as I say it, I know it’s not true. In high school, I would have said I loved him. I dreamed of all the improbable ways I might find myself alone with him—a sudden fire that forced just the two of us into one portion of the school, waiting for the fire department to reach us; a flat tire that might leave me stranded only a few yards from his street. But it occurs to me now for the first time that I’m not sure how much of that feeling was simply because Brent belonged to Kaycee. Maybe I always intended revenge. Maybe I wanted to take from her, like she had taken from me.

  Or maybe, in a weird way, I thought that if Brent could love me, Kaycee would have to love me, too.

  “Why did you kiss me that day in the woods?” I blurt out.

  “It was the last day of school,” he says. I can tell I’ve surprised him. “I guess…when I saw you there, in the woods, like you’d just appeared…” He smiles. “It felt like a sign.”

  That’s what he said the other night, at the bonfire: that my arrival was a sign. “You were my first kiss.” Immediately, I could punch myself for telling him this. My tongue is slipping. I set down my drink.

  Brent smiles, big-wattage. The smile that used to knock the wind out of me in the cafeteria. “You know, back then it seemed like we were really at the end of something. All those girls getting sick, and no one could explain it. It was like Kaycee turned a lie into an actual infection. Like we might all catch it eventually.” He brings his hand to my face, just like he did that night at the bonfire. “Not you, though. I always knew you were just beginning.”

  I shift away from him. Does he really believe that? Does he really think I can believe it? “You really never tried to find her, after she left?”