He turned, startled. The redhead barged past me into the office. “Oh, my God. Mr. Ornato. Are you okay? I’m going to call the police.”
“No, no, it’s all right.” Gasping, he rolled upright, his face sweaty, his hair standing on end. “There’s no need. It’s just a misunderstanding. Let’s get back to work.”
Jim wiped his face in the crook of his arm, dimly surveying the demolished room.
Then he began to sob. I stepped toward him and put my arms around him.
“Let’s get out of here,” I whispered into his ear.
We sat on the curb outside Fu Mao Noodle. We watched the cars speed past in the closing day, the sky going blue and black, traffic lights changing from red to green to yellow. We watched small black birds land on telephone wires and fly away, heard the giggling wheels of shopping carts. All that ordinary life—vending machines belching up sodas, stock boys taking cigarette breaks, cars backing in, backing out.
I watched it all as Jim told me everything.
I listened in shock. It made perfect sense—his father’s obsession with security, Jim’s distraction and moodiness, his decision not to tell anyone, not even me. If he had told me the truth before, would it have changed everything? Would he still be alive?
It had to do with the boating accident. Jim and a friend had taken out a speedboat on Mecox Bay, and they’d crashed into a fisherman in a skiff. When Jim woke up in the hospital, he heard the story from his family and the police—all corroborated by articles in the East Hampton Star. No one except Jim was hurt.
The fisherman happened to be none other than Alonso Ornato, the owner of Honey Love Fried Chicken. But this wasn’t the whole truth. Alonso had had his four-year-old daughter, Estella, in the boat with him. She was killed on impact.
This should have resulted in a charge of manslaughter against Jim, which meant, as a minor with his father’s connections, at most, given that he’d been drinking, he’d have gone to a juvenile facility for a few months, maybe even weeks, and would have been released on probation.
That wasn’t good enough for the Masons.
Instead, they decided the incident shouldn’t have happened at all. So they decided to erase it from history and redesign the past. They struck a deal with Alonso Ornato. They would take care of him and his family for the rest of their lives—monthly allowances, new houses and cars, Ivy League educations for his other kids, bottomless loans for his business—all in exchange for erasing Estella from the boat that day. She would die in a car accident instead.
Mr. and Mrs. Mason arranged the whole thing with the assistance of Torchlight. They drove Alonso’s car into a tree, artfully inflicting the right kind of damage so the police wouldn’t ask any questions.
“Wipe the spill off the kitchen counter,” said Jim. “Remove all signs of rot. Fumigate the foul odors seeping through the basement. All for me. So I’d suffer no shame. No heartache. No pain. I could continue my life guilt-free, like a diet drink. I could soft-shoe toward my golden destiny.” He stared blankly at the pavement. “They don’t realize they’ve destroyed me.”
I touched his arm. “That’s not true. You can still do something.”
You are such a liar, whispered the voice in my head. What can he do now? He’s dead.
“Like what, Bee? It’s gotten inside my head. It’s why I’ve been sick, why I can’t write a goddamn decent note anymore. I’ll never pick up another instrument. Because their poison is inside me.” He hit the side of his head scarily, over and over. I grabbed his hand to make him stop. “They’ve killed me, don’t you see?”
“You should contact a newspaper. Turn them in to the police.”
He laughed bitterly. “Sure. I’ll turn them in. That’ll solve everything. My family will be destroyed. My brothers and sisters will have convicts for parents. The whole world will loathe us. We’ll become poster children for all that’s depraved. All to placate my guilty conscience. What good would it do? That girl will still be dead. That’s the worst part. I can’t do a goddam thing. I’ve gone over it and over it.”
He began to cry again, head in his hands.
I stared out into the parking lot with a strange feeling of desolation and calm. Jim was right. Even if he were alive and this moment were real, what could he do? Start a foundation in Estella’s name? Write a musical about it all? The awful thing was, what the Masons had done was like toxic gas, pervading everything.
We stared ahead in silence, holding hands. It felt as if we’d both removed our glasses, and now we saw for the first time that the world had never been as beautiful as we’d always thought. It was a vision lost, never to come back.
“At least I have you, Beatrice,” said Jim, squeezing my hand. “You save me.”
But you don’t have me. I’m not even alive. Neither are you.
We’re ghosts. We’re air. We’re approximations.
I felt a painful lump in my throat. I wanted to cry, for him, for myself. My legs were growing heavy. It was the wake. I didn’t know how much time I had left. It seemed to be moving through me faster now. My head felt as if it were melting.
Jim frowned, surveying me. Perhaps he was wondering how I’d known to follow him here. Then I realized he had noticed the black mildew covering the cracked curb we were sitting on, and the pavement quietly splintering under our shoes.
I lurched to my feet, staring down at him. There was one last thing I had to know.
“You wouldn’t, because of this, do something terrible, would you?”
He squinted up at me.
“You wouldn’t throw your life away.”
“You mean commit suicide?” He looked insulted.
No.
“I have to go.”
I turned and took off running, though when he began shouting my name, asking where I was going, I threw back my head and turning, laughing crazily, I shouted, “I love you, Jim Mason. I always have.”
I ran out of the parking lot into the six-lane highway. Cars honked. A woman in a passing car rolled down the window and started to scream at me. “Get out of the way! Honey, what are you doing out here? Honey?” I could hear Jim calling me, but I stepped in front of a cement truck and closed my eyes.
August 30. Wincroft. 6:12 p.m.
“Beatrice? Bee! Beatrice!”
Martha, Kip, and Whitley were waiting for me in the library.
There was no sign of Cannon.
“You made it, Bee,” said Whitley, hugging me.
“What happened after we left?” asked Kipling.
I didn’t answer. Instead, I slipped past them, heading straight to an upstairs bedroom. Minutes later, returning downstairs, my suspicions confirmed—I’d found what I’d been looking for—I explained where I’d gone. I told them about the connection I’d made between the man in the chicken costume handing out heart balloons, whom Vida had mentioned, the Honey Love fried chicken coupon left in Jim’s case file, and the email in Edgar Mason’s in-box.
I told them about Estella Ornato.
No one said a word for a long time. Whitley opened her laptop and Googled the name, then read aloud the only information that appeared about Estella’s death, a four-sentence mention in the South Shore Sentinel.
“?‘Officials have released the name of a four-year-old child killed Wednesday night in a car accident in Water Mill,’?” she read.
“S.O.,” I said to Martha. “I think it’s Alonso Ornato’s son.”
Sure enough, a search of Ornato and Princeton turned up a Facebook page belonging to Sebastian Ornato, about to start his sophomore year. On his page there was a photograph of him sitting in Firestone Library wearing a Princeton sweatshirt, grinning and making a goofy peace sign.
“Poor kid thinks he got into Princeton on his own steam,” said Kipling.
“I can’t believe it,” said Whitley, solemn. “I knew Jim’s family was capable of anything. But erasing the existence of an entire person? Designing a new death that’s more elegant and acceptable to all involved? And getting away with it?”
“It proves Jim’s suicide, doesn’t it?” suggested Kipling, taking a deep breath. “Jim probably felt so alone. Lost. So he rode his bike out to Vulcan Quarry and jumped.”