“Hand on heart,” he replied, “I know nothing more about how Colby died than you do.”
He moved a knight, protecting his queen from my bishop, and then closed his eyes for a minute. Was he merely resting, or trying to blot me out?
I could see I wouldn’t get anything else out of him, so I fished my notebook out of my handbag and, rummaging for a pen, came up with Colby’s — the one with his name on the side. Had I put that in my bag? I had no recollection of it.
“Here.” I wrote my name and number on a page, tore it out and handed it to him. “If you think of anything else or remember something, will you let me know? You can trust me to do the right thing with the information.”
Armstrong fingered the piece of paper thoughtfully before dropping it into his bedside drawer. “One of the consolations of death is that one isn’t here to see the fallout afterward.”
“Huh?” I said, confused.
“Forgive me, I was just pondering the nature of life, death and families. Your move, I believe?”
I pushed one of my few remaining pawns forward a block, but Armstrong shook his head. “You’re putting yourself in check.”
I moved it back, tried to figure any move that wouldn’t get more of my army obliterated.
“Have you visited the Beaumonts?” he asked. “How’s little Cassie doing?”
“Not much better than you, I think.”
“It’s an unspeakable tragedy,” he murmured. “And have you seen Jessica yet?”
“No, but I plan to. Soon. How is she?”
“She can catch you up on all her own news herself. You still have her contact details?”
“No.” I’d deleted all the old numbers, cut the old ties.
“Hand me your notebook and pen,” he said. In a shaky script he wrote a name and number. “She’s Jessica Mantovani, now.”
“She’s married?” I asked.
“Indeed. She has two kids, too.”
“Wow.”
I took the notebook and stared down at the unfamiliar name. The last time I’d seen Jessica, she’d been throwing her graduation cap in the air and hugging her new group of friends. I couldn’t imagine her married, let alone being a mother. I was beginning to realize that most of my cohort had moved on. I was the odd one out, single, childless, not yet even settled in a career — a case of fixated development if ever I saw one.
Armstrong gestured to the chessboard and our all-but-abandoned game.
“My turn, again?”
He nodded. “The only way to stop playing is to surrender.”
Screw that. I moved my queen to the side of my knight; they made a handsome pair. “And how is Mrs. Armstrong?”
“Oh, I’m sure she’s fine; she always takes good care of herself,” he said, bitterness creeping into his voice for the first time.
So, MILFy Michelle clearly wasn’t big on visiting her dying husband.
“And Blunt? James, I mean. How’s he doing these days?”
Doc Armstrong blew out a long sigh. “I don’t see my boy as often as I’d like to.” He took my queen and said, “Check.”
“Oh, dear.”
“Who told you where to find me if it wasn’t Jessica?” he asked.
“Hugo.”
Armstrong looked blank.
“From the hardware store?”
“Ah, yes. Hugo.”
I moved my king a space to the side, tucking it behind a pawn. “He had lots of interesting things to say about Pitchford folks.”
“Hugo is an incorrigible gossip.”
“He said James has a trailer out at the new golf estate, that he was given special permission to stay when everyone else was evicted. Is that true?”
“Evicted? Ha!” Armstrong smiled wryly. “They were well-paid for their land.”
Which, I noticed, didn’t answer my question.
“Did he also tell you about bright lights hovering over the development? That it’s being surveilled by government drones or UFOs?” Armstrong asked, chuckling.
“Nope, he just said that James lives up there.”
Armstrong gave the smallest of shrugs. “That much is true.” He swept his queen across the board, placing her on a clear diagonal path to my king. “Checkmate, I believe.”
“Well, I lasted longer than I thought I would. I suspect you went easy on me.”
He smiled enigmatically. “Would you help me put these away?”
I shot him an appraising glance. His face looked drawn and tired, and his breaths were shallow pants. I should have felt guilty for exhausting a sick man, but Doc Armstrong was right — it was too late to save him now.
Frustrated that he’d held back on possibly critical details, I helped him pack away the game, slotting every piece into its designated slot and folding up the board. “Hugo also said that old man Dillon died foaming at the mouth. Implied that he’d been poisoned by Pete.”
Doc Armstrong gave a short bark of laughter. “The foam was due to pulmonary edema. Randolph Dillon died from an ordinary heart attack. And it wasn’t his first, I might add — that man’s arteries were more clogged than the drains in this place. If you value truth, Garnet, then take my advice and don’t believe half of what that old crackpot tells you.”
I said: “Sure.”
But I thought: which half?
Back inside my Honda in the Roseacres’ parking lot, I checked Colby’s phone. I’d left it plugged in, but it seemed like no charging had occurred while the engine was off. Was that usual, or had Hugo sold me a dud adaptor? Either way, the iPhone was as dead as a dodo. I started the car’s engine, and a minute later the charging icon appeared on the phone’s screen. I sat with the engine idling, eyes on the phone, willing it to suck up power faster so I could explore whatever information it held.
While I waited, I mused on everything I’d heard that day. Professor Perry’s theories on my mental health (or lack of it); Hugo’s gossip about the dodgy land deal and his suspicions about some of the town’s finest citizens; Doc Armstrong’s warning, and the way he’d told me a little and withheld much more.
He was clearly on the way out and seemed lonely. His wife appeared to have abandoned him, and he’d given up on his son. I didn’t know the state of play between him and Jessica, but I knew it was past time for me to speak to her directly. I keyed the number Armstrong had supplied into my own phone, hesitated a moment, then tapped the call icon. She answered on the third ring.
“Hi, Jessica, it’s Garnet,” I said.
“Garnet? Garnet McGee?” She sounded more astounded than delighted to hear from me.
“The one and only.”
Silence.
“I’m back in town visiting my parents, and I wondered if we could get together and have a chat? Do coffee or something, and catch up on old times?”
The other end of the line was quiet for so long that I wondered if she’d hung up on me, but she was probably only debating whether to play nice or to advise me to go jump in the lake. Again.
Finally, she said, “When?”
“Today?”
“Well, I'm at the gallery, getting things ready for the opening tonight. It’s my husband’s latest exhibition. You can come around, if you don’t mind talking while I set up.”
It wasn’t an enthusiastic sure-I’ll-drop-everything-to-accommodate-you sort of invitation warmly extended to an old friend, but rather a polite, reserved offer to a remote acquaintance. It was what I deserved.
“Sure, okay. Um, the gallery?” I asked.
“Art on Main,” she said. “It’s on Main Street.”
“You work there?”
“I own it.”
Awkward.
“Wow, that’s great,” I said, trying to remember if I’d ever heard Jessica express any interest whatsoever in art.
Almost as if she could hear my thoughts, she said, “My husband is Nico Mantovani. The famous artist?”
“Right! Wow!” I’d never heard of him, but that meant nothing; my knowledge of a
rt was limited to a fondness for Van Gogh and Monet. I’d have been hard-pressed to know the name of any twenty-first-century painter. “Should I come over now?”
“Yes, if you want some time alone with me. The guests will start arriving after five. You’re welcome to stay for the exhibition, of course. Bring a plus-one, if you have one.” Was there a sarcastic edge to the last words?
“I’m on my way,” I said, and ended the call.
But I didn’t put the car in gear and head back into town, to Jessica and my past. That would have to wait, because Colby’s phone now showed one bar of charge in its battery display.
Holding my breath, I pressed the on switch. When the prompt to enter the passcode displayed, I typed 4EVA. And punched the air in triumph as the screen lit up.
30
NOW
Wednesday December 20, 2017
With trembling fingers, I navigated to the call log on Colby’s old phone. There it was, a record of calls received and made ten years ago. I scrolled through them slowly, trying to fit them into what I knew of his life in those last few days.
Missing were all the calls made to Colby’s number after Cassie took the phone and switched it off, preventing any further updates on the phone. Had it been on then, or connected to a service now, it would have shown a barrage of calls from me, trying to find out where he was, why he hadn’t come around. Then there would have been his family, friends and the cops’ futile attempts to get hold of him. Last of all would have been the calls into the void that I’d made in those weeks between when his body had been found and his phone service had been cancelled, hopelessly calling over and over again just to listen to his voice on the voicemail message. I sighed, remembering those days of feeling adrift on a sea of deadness, not wanting to see anyone, unable to contemplate a future without Colby.
Colby’s last outgoing call had been made to me, at just after four o’clock on the afternoon of December sixteenth, the day he’d disappeared.
Sadness settled in my heart like a fog. What had we spoken about during that call? I’d been panicked that I might be pregnant, and probably hadn’t been very patient or loving. He’d been preoccupied with something those last couple of days, too. Could it have been something related to his death, or was it just the increasing pressure from his father and uncle to do college applications to business schools before the looming deadlines? We must have said we loved each other; we always did. And we would have ended the call with one of us saying “always” and the other “forever.” Shit. Now it seemed to me that we’d been tempting fate, holding out a red rag to a bull universe every time we so blithely uttered those words. Nothing is always, no one is forever.
I wiped the heel of a hand across my eyes and redirected my attention to the activity log. On the same day, he’d received a call from his mother which had lasted four minutes, and he’d made a long call to his uncle Roger. Thumbing back in time through the list, I saw calls to and from his family, friends, people I’d either never heard of or had forgotten in the last decade — Seth, Antoine, John — and nameless numbers which meant nothing to me.
Had the cops checked these at the time? I’d ask Ryan when I handed over the phone — I planned on doing that soon. But not immediately. There was no guarantee I’d be allowed access to it once it became official police evidence, so I was first going to harvest every last bit and byte of information for myself before turning it in. The cops hadn’t had it for ten years, another day couldn’t make much difference.
I’d either find a way to download the contents of the phone, or I’d do it the old-fashioned way, writing down every incoming and outgoing call before going through it with a fine-tooth comb, identifying every person he’d had contact with, analyzing the data in the hope of gleaning some meaningful information. But that would take hours and was a task for later tonight or tomorrow. Right now I wanted to quickly check a few more things before the phone ran out of juice.
Doc Armstrong’s comment about Colby’s inquisitiveness landing him in trouble was niggling at me. What had Colby been nosy about? Nosy. The word triggered another memory. In the flashbacks Colby had sent me—
No, I had to stop thinking that way. In the vision-type episodes I’d had, I mentally corrected myself, one of the attackers had yelled at Colby to keep his nose out of other people’s business. I could easily imagine Colby investigating something that offended his strong sense of justice — had it gotten him killed?
I navigated back to the phone’s home screen and then to his internet browser, wondering whether his search history would still be stored and available even though the phone was offline. It was. The web browsing log comprised a simple list of sites visited, often with half the name and usually with most of the address cut off.
Maybe, before I turned the phone over to the cops, I’d buy a new prepaid SIM kit, fire up the phone, and click on the links so I could see exactly where he’d been online. Then again, maybe installing a new chip and number would automatically erase the old call and browsing logs. I wished I knew more about technology. What the hell use was it to know the difference between transference and counter-transference, or regression and repression, instead of how cell phones worked?
It would be safer to manually capture Colby’s browsing history, too, just in case. That would take quite some time — the list went back months — and it would take careful analysis to determine what might possibly have been relevant to his death, versus what was just the day-to-day surfing of a teenage boy thrilled to be the owner of the hottest new cell phone.
I read through the lines slowly, taking in what I could read of the truncated site names. In the last two weeks of his life alone, Colby had visited maybe a hundred sites, including YouTube and the iTunes music store a score of times, and Amazon twice. He’d visited Myspace and Funny Or Die every day, and regularly checked hockey results.
There were several visits to sites that I thought might have been related to his schoolwork: SparkNotes pages on Hamlet for his English Lit homework, and Wikipedia pages dealing with water quality and pollution as well as an FDA site about standards for bottled water for his AP Chemistry project. I was sure he’d visited at least one site for my benefit — the uses on zinc in dairy farming. The details were cut off, but I knew it would have been about using zinc ointment to treat bovine eczema. He’d seen how distressed I was by the sick cows I’d seen when doing deliveries for my father’s store to the local dairy farms, and he’d no doubt been researching if there was anything else that could fix the problem.
Oh, Colby, you were the best, I thought. I didn’t deserve you.
It looked like he’d also researched the admission requirements for a bachelor’s degree in law enforcement at colleges in Boston; he’d been trying to find one there, so he and I could still be together after we graduated high school. I puzzled over the fact that he’d visited several pages dealing with financial assistance for studying the degree — had his family threatened to cut him loose financially if he didn’t study business and take up his place at Beaumont Brothers? He’d also gone to the official FBI website, which made me wonder if he’d had ambitions beyond being a small-town cop.
The search history showed several visits to the Pitchford town clerk’s website, specifically to pages with the words “budget” and “minutes” in the web address. Either he’d been an eager-beaver employee, or he’d been checking out official information related to the land deal Hugo was suspicious about.
I had no clue why he’d visited some of the sites, like one on heavy metal (I hadn’t known his musical tastes ran in that direction), a wiki page on something, or some place, called Itai Itai, and another listing annual rainfall in Vermont. Perhaps he’d been helping Jessica with her project. He’d looked up the definition of the word hypophosphatemia; I’d need to look it up, too, since I had no idea what it meant. And he’d been researching street drugs — Oxycontin, crystal meth, heroin, Molly. Sticking his nose into Blunt’s business?
With a pang,
I saw that the final site he’d visited that last day had been a post titled “How to support your pregnant friend.” So, he had known, or guessed, what I wanted to talk about that night. He’d been reading up on the options and resources available before we met to discuss it. Ten years after that date, I could still honestly swear that Colby Beaumont was the best and most decent human being I’d ever known.
God, but I loved him, still. And I missed him so badly, yearned for him from the marrow of my bones to the scratched and picked surface of my skin. I wasn’t over him, not at all. Stubbornly and impossibly, I still wanted him back. Whether the words, images and sensations I’d been experiencing were visitations or hallucinations, I wasn’t ready to part with them.
“Colby, are you there?” I whispered aloud. “Are you?”
Like an immediate reply, the words were in my mind. Always. Forever.
For the first time, I felt — or imagined I did — a real sense of his presence, as insubstantial yet undeniable as air. He was with me in the car, and it felt good, comforting.
Wait, what was I thinking? Like a needle-scratch on an old record, my inner scientist interrupted the irrational thinking, mounting a fight-back against my slide into the supernatural. I needed to stop this insanity. Colby was not with me in the car. Colby was nowhere. He was gone, had been gone for years and years. I simply had to accept that.
I needed to fight the delusions and hallucinations, not succumb to them. The images and sensations were merely products of my own fertile subconscious, which was determined to fill in the blanks of my memory, mollify my sense of guilt, and appease my long-denied needs for human intimacy. I wasn’t in my right mind. I was, in fact, merely suffering from an acute adjustment disorder, co-occurring post-traumatic stress, and delusional thinking.
I turned the car heater down and opened my window a crack, breathing in the frosty air for several long moments to clear my head before turning my attention to the old phone. Immediately my eyes were drawn to the icon for messages. Even though there were no new notifications showing, it was an obvious place to look. Why hadn’t I searched them yet?
The First Time I Died Page 19
