“Okay.”
“If Hank’s body had been hung up on that tree all that time, don’t you think someone would have spotted it by now? Or noticed that smell? We aren’t that far away from civilization, right?”
Augie doesn’t reply.
“Augie?”
“I hear you.”
“Something isn’t right.”
He finally stops and turns back toward the crime scene in the distance. “A man was castrated and hung from a tree,” he says. “Of course something isn’t right.”
“I don’t think this is about that viral video,” I say.
Augie doesn’t reply.
“I think it’s about the Conspiracy Club and that old military base. I think it’s about Rex and Leo and Diana.”
I see him flinch when I say his daughter’s name.
“Augie?”
He turns and starts walking again. “Later,” he says.
“What?”
“We’ll talk about it later,” Augie says. “Right now I just need to tell Tom that his boy is dead.”
—
Tom Stroud stares down at his hands. His lower lip trembles. He has not spoken, not one word, since he opened the door. He knew. Right away. He looked at our faces and knew. They often do. Some claim that the first step in the grieving process is denial. Having delivered my share of life-shattering news, I have found the opposite to be true: The first step is complete and immediate comprehension. You hear the news and immediately you realize how absolutely devastating it is, how there will be no reprieve, how death is final, how your world is shattered and that you will never, ever be the same. You realize all that in seconds, no more. The realization floods into your veins and overwhelms you. Your heart breaks. Your knees buckle. Every part of you wants to give way and collapse and surrender. You want to curl up into a ball. You want to plummet down that mine shaft and never stop.
That’s when the denial kicks in.
Denial saves you. Denial throws up a protective fence. Denial grabs hold of you before you leap off that ledge. Your hand rests on a hot stove. Denial pulls your hand back.
The memories of that night rush in as we enter Tom Stroud’s home, and part of me longs for that protective fence. I had thought that it was a good idea to come, but seeing Augie deliver bad news—the worst news, just as he did that night you died—is hitting me harder than I had anticipated. I blink and somehow Tom Stroud becomes Dad. Like Dad, he stares down at the table. He, too, winces as though absorbing punches. Augie’s voice—a blend of tough, tender, compassionate, detached—brings me back more than any sight or smell, the nightmarish déjà vu, as he tells yet another father about the death of his child.
The two older men sit in the kitchen. I stand behind Augie, maybe ten feet back, ready to come off the bench but hoping the coach doesn’t call my number. My legs feel wobbly. I am trying to put it together, but it is making less and less sense. The official investigation, the one undertaken by Manning and the county office, will, I’m certain, concentrate on the viral video. It will seem simple to them: The viral video goes public, the public is outraged, someone takes matters into their own hands.
It is neat. It makes sense. It may even be correct.
The other theory, of course, is the one I will follow. Someone is killing off the old Conspiracy Club members. Of the six possible members, four have been killed before their thirty-fifth birthday. What are the odds that there is no connection? First Leo and Diana. Then Rex. Now Hank. I don’t know where Beth is. And of course, there’s Maura, who saw something that night that caused her to run away forever.
Except.
Why now? Let’s say somehow they all saw something they shouldn’t have that night. Again, this may sound like paranoid thinking, even if the group was called the Conspiracy Club, but I need to play it out.
Suppose they all saw something that night.
Maybe they ran—and the bad guys only, what, caught Leo and Diana? Okay, stay with that. So then—again, what?—they dragged Leo and Diana to the railroad tracks on the other side of town and made it look like they were killed by a train. Okay, fine. Let’s assume the others ran. Maura they couldn’t find. That all works.
But what about Rex and Hank and Beth?
Those three never hid. They stayed in high school and graduated with us.
Why didn’t the bad guys from the base kill them?
Why would they wait fifteen years?
And talk about coincidental timing—why would the bad guys finally kill Hank around the same time that viral video came out? Did that make sense?
No.
So how is the viral video tied into this?
I’m missing something.
Tom Stroud finally starts to cry. His chin goes down to his chest. His shoulders start to spasm. Augie reaches across and puts a hand on Tom’s upper arm. It’s not enough. Augie moves closer. Tom leans forward and starts sobbing onto Augie’s shoulder. I see Augie in profile now. He closes his eyes, and I see the pain on his face. Tom’s sobs grow louder. Time passes. No one moves. The sobs start to subside. Eventually they fade away. Tom Stroud pulls back and looks at Augie.
“Thank you for telling me yourself,” Tom Stroud says.
Augie manages a nod.
Tom Stroud wipes his face with his sleeve and forces up a smile of some sort. “We have something in common now.”
Augie looks a question at him.
“Well, something horrible,” Tom continues. “We’ve both lost children. I know your pain now. It’s like . . . it’s like being members of the worst club imaginable.”
Now it is Augie who winces as though absorbing blows.
“Do you think that awful video had something to do with it?” Tom asks.
I wait for Augie to answer, but he seems lost now. I take the question for him.
“They’ll certainly be looking into that,” I say.
“Hank didn’t deserve that. Even if he did expose himself—”
“He didn’t.”
Tom Stroud looks at me.
“It was a lie. A mother didn’t like Hank hanging around the school.”
Tom Stroud’s eyes grow big. I think about those grieving steps again. Denial may be quickly giving way to anger. “She made it up?”
“Yes.”
Nothing in his expression changes, but you can feel his temperature rising. “What’s her name?”
“We can’t tell you that.”
“Do you think she did it?”
“Do I think she killed Hank?”
“Yes.”
I answer honestly. “No.”
“Then who?”
I explain how the investigation has just started and offer the expected “doing all we can” platitudes. I ask him if he has someone he can call to be with him. He does—a brother. Augie barely says a word, hanging by the door, rocking back and forth on his heels. I settle Tom in as best I can, but I’m not a babysitter. Augie and I have been here long enough.
“Thanks again,” Tom Stroud says to us at the door.
Just in case I haven’t uttered enough banalities, I say, “Sorry for your loss.”
Augie heads out first, starting up the walk. I have to hurry to catch up with him.
“What’s up?”
“Nothing.”
“You got awfully quiet in there. I thought maybe you got an update on your phone or something.”
“Nope.”
Augie reaches the car and opens the door. We both get in.
“So what gives?” I ask.
Augie glares through the front windshield at Tom Stroud’s house. “Did you hear what he said to me?”
“You mean Tom Stroud?”
He keeps glaring at that door. “He and I have something in common now.” I see a tremor hit his face. “He knows my pain.”
His voice is thick with disdain. I can hear his breathing thicken and grow labored. I don’t know what to do here, how to play it, so I just wait.
“I lost a beautiful, vibrant seventeen-year-old daughter, a girl with all the promise in the world. She was my everything, Nap. You get that? She was my life.”