Smoke (17 page)

I look down at the shirt again. I know this place. This teetering tone we take with each other, which could tip into a fight if we don’t take care but probably won’t if we do.

We haven’t been taking care. Not for a long time.

But I’m so sick of fighting, and I can still feel the pressure of Ben’s lips on mine from yesterday.

So.

“I know you won’t,” I say. “Here’s your shirt. Ready for the day.”

He starts to put it on. I stand in front of him like the traditional wife I’ve never been and take over doing up the buttons. When I get to the top, I smooth it out and give him a light kiss on the mouth.

“There you go, all set.”

He smiles at me, amused and momentarily distracted from his phone, which is still pinging every few seconds. My own phone starts to vibrate in the pocket of my robe, but I ignore it.

“About yesterday,” he says.

“I’m glad it happened.”

“You are?”

“Aren’t you?”

“I thought, you know, because of . . .” The divorce, he’s going to say but doesn’t. Saying that word once was enough. “This is confusing.”

“It is.”

“We should . . . try to figure this out.”

“We should.” My hands are resting on his shoulders. He’s tall enough that I have to crane my neck back a bit to look directly into his eyes. “I didn’t think it would be this complicated.”
I didn’t think it would be this hard.
“Maybe . . . Why don’t we see this as an opportunity.”

“How so?”

“Like a vacation or something,” I say. “Maybe we can put all that stuff to the side for right now and concentrate on what’s in front of us.”

“That doesn’t sound like you.”

“But that’s the problem, isn’t it? Me? Us?”

“Where are you going with this?” Ben asks. “You’re the one who wanted . . .”

“You know I’m not any good at this sort of thing.”

He looks me straight in the eye for a moment, holding my gaze in a way he hasn’t in a while. Then there’s a low thrumming sound outside that builds and builds until another plane empties the contents of its reservoir, and the moment, if it was a moment, is lost.

CHAPTER 18

I Know What You Did

Mindy

Outside of family matters,
one of the things Mindy regretted most in her life was saying those few simple words to Elizabeth:
I think I may be pregnant again
. Oh, what a stupid, stupid thing to say to a friend who she knew longed to have a child and had been trying so hard to do so. And then to compound it by revealing that she was thinking of not keeping it . . . Mindy had no idea what she was thinking. Of course, she wasn’t thinking, she was panicking. Panicking at the thought that she might have another baby whose heart was missing a central piece growing inside her. Panicking at the thought that this one might not make it. Knowing full well she couldn’t survive going through that again.

But it was stupid and thoughtless just the same, and when Elizabeth had thrown her words back in her face and stormed out of the dinner, Mindy laid her head down on the greasy Formica and wept.

When she’d gotten her period the next day, she’d e-mailed Elizabeth to let her know. She felt like she owed her that much, at least. But she wasn’t going to apologize. Elizabeth had revealed what she really thought of Mindy, and there wasn’t any going back from that. Of course, they had both said cruel things, so cruel Mindy surprised herself. How long had it been since she’d argued with someone like that? When had she ever done so? But she wasn’t going to apologize, just the same. Especially after Elizabeth didn’t even write back to acknowledge that the thing that had sent them spiraling out of friendship had never even existed at all.

Mindy was still frozen in front of the computer when the rest of her family finally stirred to life.

She had spent hours reading through what she found and still didn’t feel like she could process it. Angus had said that kids could be “mean.” Mindy knew mean. This wasn’t mean, it was cruel. Manipulative. Deliberate. In fact, the more Mindy thought about it, the more the word
sociopath
skittered through her mind. Or was it
psychopath
? She could never remember the difference. Regardless of the terminology, the important thing was that, for the better part of a year now, the kids Angus was hanging out with, who Mindy thought were his friends, were using him as a whipping post.

The fact that she’d missed what was going on filled Mindy with shame. Even though she’d known there was something wrong with Angus, she hadn’t pushed. She hadn’t made it her business to get to the bottom of it, even though it was supposed to be her occupation. Her children. Their happiness. That was her going concern. And now Mindy had that same feeling she’d had all those years ago when she found out about Carrie’s illness. As if she were the cause. That some flaw in her mothering had left her son vulnerable, had made it so he would not only be the target but keep it to himself.

Oh, Angus,
she thought.
Why didn’t you say anything
?

But Mindy knew the answer to that question. It was all over the pages she was reading. Angus had clearly decided that keeping the lowest profile possible was the only way to survive. That going along with it all, being the toe kick of his little gang of thugs, was preferable to the alternative.

Angus was, quite simply, afraid.

It rang through in his tentative exchanges with Tucker and the others, and in the difference in tone when he wrote to Willow, whose interest he’d been sure for months was some ruse. Mindy had cried when she read the exchanges between them when Angus had finally decided to trust Willow and open up about what was going on. She cried and then she stopped reading because those messages were innocent and belonged to her son.

But that certainly wasn’t true about the others, the ones from those boys.

As her family moved around upstairs and the planes droned constantly outside, Mindy’s whole body quivered with rage as she read through the last exchange, the one that started Tuesday morning on Ask.fm, their current instrument of torture.

The way it was set up (a simple ask-one-of-your-friends-a-question mechanism) seemed to Mindy to be the perfect device for bullying with plausible deniability. Because if it’s phrased as a question, you’re not actually saying something happened, you’re just asking. Just asking! Just asking things like,
Is it true that Willow hooked up with Tucker last night? Is it true you were watching? Did Angus start the fire at John Phillips’s house?

That last question made absolutely no sense to Mindy until her e-mail pinged with an alert about the latest article in the
Daily
. The headline said it all, really. “Local Teen Should Be Interviewed.”

Mindy scanned the article, her eyes stopping on the word “Voyages.” She felt sick to her stomach. So many possibilities skittered through her mind. Tucker was an awful child, and he could be using the mystery around the fire as one more arrow in his quiver of abuse. Or he could be trying to cast blame on Angus for something he himself had done. Or . . . But Mindy’s mind couldn’t take her any further.

Because she couldn’t help thinking that maybe, just maybe, what Tucker was asking was true.

Mindy was bumped from her thoughts by the reality of Peter and Carrie coming downstairs in all their usual noise for breakfast.

“There you are,” Peter said, looking relieved. “Have you been up all night?”

Mindy finished shutting off the computer. She wasn’t sure what error in the system allowed her to get past Angus’s defenses and see into his account; she only prayed that rebooting the computer would hide her tracks and that Angus couldn’t tell that she’d taken screen shots of the messages and forwarded them to her own e-mail account. Even though she knew she’d have to confront him with what she’d found soon, she needed some time to think about the implications.

“The planes woke me up,” she said as another one shook the house for emphasis. “How did you sleep through it?”

“If years of crying babies didn’t get through . . .”

“Oh, right. How’d I let you get away with that again?”

“Beats me,” Peter said, kissing her on the cheek. “But why don’t I make it up to you by taking care of the monsters this morning while you go back to bed?”

“Like one sugar-cereal breakfast is going to make up for years of sleepless nights.”

“A man can dream, can’t he?”

Mindy kissed him back with a pounding heart. Why hadn’t she told Peter? Right then, in the kitchen, while Angus was still in the shower?

Mindy went upstairs determined to print the messages in the office nook in their bedroom so she could show them to Peter after he’d taken the kids to school. She’d go to his office and they’d talk this through like they did everything. And then they’d come up with a plan.

Mindy felt calmer once she decided this. Another plane passed by. Mindy pressed her face to the window that faced Nelson Peak to see if she could observe it dumping its load. There was too much smoke to see that far, but not too much to see that someone was hanging out by their trash cans, looking hesitant.

Mindy hurried down the stairs and shoved her feet into the first pair of sneakers she could find. She was still in her nightgown, but she wasn’t worried about that at the moment. A teenage girl was standing by the garbage cans, shifting her feet nervously as she looked up at Angus’s window.

“Willow?” Mindy said. “What are you doing here?”

Willow started like a doe. She looked ready to run away on her thin legs, encased in those ankle boots Mindy couldn’t understand the appeal of. Her thin, almost white-blonde hair was straight as a pin and covered half of her angular face.

“Willow?” Mindy said again.

“I thought I’d . . . wait for Angus. He said he might want to walk today.”

“Does your mother know you’re here?”

Mindy was close enough to her now to feel Willow’s trembling.

“Noooo. You won’t tell her, will you?”

Willow’s mother was notoriously strict even in the best of circumstances, and these were anything but—though, of course, Mindy wasn’t supposed to know that.

“You’re not doing anything wrong, are you?”

Willow shook her head emphatically.

“Then I see no reason for your mother to know you want to speak to Angus. But, Willow, if there
is
something, well, I wish you would tell me.”

“You’re so nice, Mrs. Mitchell.”

“Perhaps you could tell Angus that.”

“Oh, but I do. You know, like, all the time.”

Willow was putting on an act, Mindy knew. Acting like she thought a grown-up would expect a kid to act in this kind of conversation. She wasn’t going to tell Mindy anything. There weren’t going to be any confidences. But this girl had been kind to Angus, so much kinder than Mindy had known, and she wanted to return the favor. If she was being completely honest with herself, she needed Willow on her side if she had any chance of figuring out what kind of trouble Angus was really in.

“We’re running a bit behind this morning, Willow. So why don’t you run and get your bus and you’ll see Angus at school, all right? Unless you wanted a lift?”

Willow chewed on the edge of a lock of hair. “No, I’d better not.”

“I’ll tell Angus you were here.”

Willow started to leave. Mindy watched her take a few tentative steps before she turned around.

“Angus is a good kid, Mrs. Mitchell.”

“Why are you telling me that?”

She shrugged. “People don’t say that sort of thing enough, you know?”

CHAPTER 19

The Box

Elizabeth

There’s no proper interrogation room
at the sheriff’s office, so the questioning of John Phillips takes place in one of the jail cells in the basement.

I’ve wondered before, and I wonder again today, whether this was actually a deliberate tactic of whoever designed the station. If you’re already in jail, so to speak, when you’re only being questioned, does that speed things up? Are people more likely to spill the beans in that environment or less? Nobody’s ever been able to give me an answer, and I don’t think they allow those kinds of psychological experiments anymore, but it would be interesting, I bet.

Someone has found John Phillips some clothes, not ones that fit, mind, but it’s still better than the hospital scrubs that somehow had the opposite effect on him than they did on doctors. Like they robbed him of his authority, rather than gave it to him. Not that the clothes he’s wearing now are much better. His brown pants are two inches too short, and there’s a stain above the breast pocket of the shirt that takes a bit of imagining to explain how it got there.

But his eyes are clearer today, focused, and the hints of intelligence I’ve heard during his rambles are there in the silences and shorter answers he’s giving to the detective’s questions than he did to mine.

Good for you
, I can’t help thinking.
Don’t let the bastards intimidate you
.

“So,” says Detective Donaldson as he takes a seat on a metal chair he’s brought into the cell with him. John Phillips is sitting on the bed, his hands on his knees, his back ramrod straight. “You didn’t think it was relevant to tell us that the bank was foreclosing on your house?”

“Nobody asked me anything about that.”

“Well, sir, that’s not such a nice attitude to take now, is it?”

John looks at Donaldson without blinking.

“Mr. Phillips?”

“Did you want me to answer that?”

I can feel Donaldson’s flash of rage from across the room. I’m standing in the hallway, leaning against the adjacent cell. The bars are digging into my back, but I have a feeling this won’t go on too long.

Donaldson closes his eyes briefly. When he opens them he’s got a big grin on his face.

“Mr. Phillips, I think we got off on the wrong foot.”

“If you say so, Detective Donaldson.”

“I do.” He opens his palms wide. Nothing to hide here. Now watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat. “I’m sure you can see it from my position, right? I’m trying to figure out how all this got started and obviously, as one of the people affected, I’m sure you want the same thing. Am I right?”