A Matter of Trust

Chapter 25





To Charlie, Shiloh Arnold’s living room did not seem to be meant for living at all. Instead it looked like a furniture showroom display. The two couches sitting at right angles were cream colored, without a single spot or even strand of hair to mar their perfection. Each was decorated with three mustard-colored throw pillows set at precise angles. Even the accent rug was cream colored, with a mustard yellow border. The blond coffee table was centered in the middle of the rug, far out of reach of either couch.

And in Charlie’s hand was a delicate cup filled to the brim with black coffee that Shiloh’s mom had offered them. Feeling the weight of the long day, Charlie had said yes. Even though he knew Mia was exhausted too—she had told him that her daughter had had another one of those attacks—she had declined. Maybe she had glimpsed the room.

Rainy Sibley and Shiloh Arnold lived next door to each other, only a block and a half from Darin Dane’s house. Their parents had agreed to let Charlie and Mia interview the two girls together at Shiloh’s, and they hadn’t protested when Charlie had asked them not to sit in on the interviews. Afterward he and Mia planned to repeat the process at Jeremy Donaldson’s.

Mia was already sitting on one couch, with Shiloh and Rainy on the other. “So how long have you two known Darin?” she asked.

As he held the thin loop of the cup’s handle, Charlie decided that if he tried to take a seat he would manage to slop the dark liquid on the carpet or the couch. Or both. It was too big a risk, so he stayed where he was and waited for the girls to answer.

After looking at Shiloh, Rainy said, “I don’t know. Since first grade, maybe?” Rainy had high cheekbones, light brown skin, and stick-straight hair that fell past her shoulders.

Charlie raised the cup to his lips and sucked, too afraid to risk tilting it. The coffee was only a few degrees below boiling, but he ignored the pain.

Shiloh said decisively, “We all met in kindergarten. I remember us sitting on the mat for story time.” She was a little bit plump, with blond corkscrew curls springing out from her head.

Charlie forced himself to take another sip and managed to lower the coffee to a half inch below the rim. He raised his head, walked five careful steps forward, and sat down next to Mia. As he did, hot coffee splashed his thigh. He bit his scalded lip and didn’t make a sound. Better his pants than the couch.

“I still can’t believe Darin’s dead, you know?” Rainy nibbled on her thumbnail. “I’ve never known anyone who was dead before.”

Had Charlie ever been this young? By now, it seemed that the dead he knew outnumbered the living.

“At school everyone’s been asking about him.” Shiloh shook her head. “They all looked the other way when those boys were picking on him, but now Darin’s a lot more interesting because he’s dead.”

“They had an assembly and talked about him for, like, an hour, even though none of the teachers at school really knew him yet,” Rainy said. “And they had this room full of grief counselors? And we all got a list of warning signs to watch for, you know, to tell if people were suicidal?”

“Did you ever see any of those signs in Darin?” Mia asked gently.

“No!” Shiloh leaned forward. “He never talked about wanting to kill himself or how he would do it or anything!”

“Darin was just, you know, all unicorns and rainbows?” Rainy said. “He was almost always happy. Except for, like, the last six months.”

“Tell us more about Darin.” Charlie took another sip. “What was he like?”

“He’s really sweet,” Shiloh said. She touched her dangling earrings, gold and ruby red. “He bought me these earrings at a flea market.”

“He makes cupcakes all the time and hands them out to people at the bus stop.” A smile lit up Rainy’s face. “One time he bought me hot cocoa at Starbucks? And because he knew I like it with marshmallows, he brought a little plastic bag full from home. Just for me.”

“In fifth grade we started our own Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants club,” Shiloh said. “It was Darin’s idea.”

“What’s that?” Charlie asked.

“There’s this book?” Rainy said. “And in it these four friends find, like, a magic pair of jeans at a vintage store? And the jeans fit all of them. So Darin went to Value Village and got this pair of jeans and said they would be just like in the book. Except they really didn’t fit him? He was already too tall. But when it was his day to wear them, he did anyway. And he didn’t care if people made fun of him. He said those pants were magic and good things always happened to him when he wore them.”

Shiloh blinked and tears ran down her face. She made no move to wipe them away.

Mia had brought along a photocopy of one of the notes, and she offered it to the girls now. “Do you recognize this handwriting?”

Shiloh and Rainy bent their heads over it, but when they looked up there was no recognition.

“It kind of looks familiar,” Rainy offered. “Maybe.”

“It looks like a boy’s handwriting,” Shiloh said. “All square and blocky. But I don’t know which boy.” She exhaled sharply and turned to Rainy. “Rain—remember when Darin got beat up after school last spring? I wonder if that’s what happened. Maybe some jerk sent him a note, and then when he came they jumped him.” She turned back to Charlie and Mia. “He would never say how, but somehow he ended up with bruised ribs and a split lip.”

Charlie had heard that chickens would peck at an injured chicken, peck and peck until it stopped moving. Were human beings any better?

“What happened to Darin’s Facebook page?” he asked.

“Kids are always doing stupid stuff on Facebook,” Rainy said. “But this was the worst.”

“What kind of stuff do they do?” Mia asked.

“You know, people will post something mean? And then just say, ‘Oh, I was joking around.’” Rainy bit the end of her finger, thought better of it, took it out. “Or one of the really popular girls might put down that she’s married to another girl, you know, to show that they’re friends? And then the next day she will, like, unfriend her and start talking trash about her.”

Shiloh said, “Whoever hacked into Darin’s Facebook page unfriended me and Rainy so we couldn’t tell him. I heard the kids at school talking about some crazy kid, but I didn’t realize they were talking about Darin. And Darin hasn’t been going on Facebook that much lately, so he didn’t know at first.” Her eyes shone with fresh tears. “Darin would never hurt anyone, so why did those boys want to hurt him? It’s only because of those terrible boys that he’s dead.”

Mia said softly, “What else did they do besides alter his Facebook page?”

Rainy rolled her eyes. “What didn’t they do? In the hall, kids would walk right behind him and pretend they were him, you know? They would walk like him, but, like, all exaggerated, swinging their hips.” She swayed from side to side, arms raised, loose hands flapping at the end of limp wrists.

Shiloh ticked things off on her fingers. “They shoved him into lockers. They kicked his books down the hall. They left him these terrible notes. They squirted maple syrup and ketchup through the vents in his locker. They called him names.”

“They talked about him, like, right in front of him?” Rainy contributed.

Their words were setting off echoes in Charlie. His hand was starting to shake, but he told himself it was simply a reaction to a long day and little sleep. He rested the coffee cup on his knee.

Bright red spots of color had appeared on Shiloh’s cheeks. “And I’ve seen people push him and trip him, but I know when I wasn’t around it was worse. I already told you about that one time last spring. And I heard it was really bad in PE, that they even punched him. I’ve seen bruises on his arms when he forgot and pushed up his sleeves.”

“And this all happened in school?” Mia sounded horrified.

“It wasn’t in class so much,” Rainy said. “It was, like, you know, in PE or hallways or in the bathrooms, or waiting at school for the bus.”

“Who do you think the main offenders were?” Charlie asked in a colorless, just-the-facts voice.

Rainy and Shiloh looked at each other, and then Shiloh said, “Two of the guys on the football team were always going after Darin. It was bad in eighth grade, but it’s gotten a lot worse since school started. It’s like they figured that now they’re in high school they had something to prove. Brandon Shiller and Reece Jones. I’ll get my yearbook and show you their pictures.” She jumped to her feet.

“Reece is just, like, really bad?” Rainy said. “He likes to beat people up and call them Reece’s Pieces.”

Shiloh came back with the yearbook and handed it to Mia. Charlie looked over her shoulder as she found the two boys. Brandon had wide-spaced eyes and light brown hair that had been gelled straight up so that he looked like the cartoon character Tintin. Reece Jones had blue eyes, dark hair, and a smile that hovered on the border of a smirk.

Charlie winced. That smile brought back memories. Looking away from the yearbook, he caught sight of his reflection in the flat-screen TV. He looked like a ghost, a shadow, a frightened boy. As if the specter of who he used to be had been summoned back to this room.

Abruptly he got to his feet, desperate to get some distance from his old self. Only then did he remember the half-empty cup of coffee—just as it splashed on the formerly pristine rug.



Charlie had offered to scrub the rug clean, but Shiloh’s mom had insisted it was fine, fine, fine. When it was clearly not, not, not.

Twenty minutes after their very awkward exit, they were sitting in Jeremy Donaldson’s living room with a tray of Ritz crackers topped with cheddar cheese. Jeremy’s mother had offered it to them before scurrying from the room.

Jeremy had close-cropped, dirty-blond hair that emphasized his high forehead and long face. He looked unfinished, like modeling clay that needed some sharp edges cut into it.

“So we understand you and Darin used to be close?” Mia slipped a Ritz cracker into her mouth.

He looked down at his oversized feet. “Yeah, we were friends in grade school, but in middle school we kind of grew apart. I mean, you can’t really base a friendship on your last names starting with the same letter of the alphabet.”

“Were you aware of Darin being harassed at school?” Mia asked.

After a moment he nodded. “I tried to tell him if he just changed a few things it would get better. Like you don’t show up on the first day of high school wearing a rainbow-striped scarf. I mean, didn’t he want to have a life?” His knees began to bounce. “To do that, you’ve got to fit in. You don’t want to be noticed, at least not for something like that. But Darin wouldn’t listen.”

Everything was rawer when you were a kid. Your terrors, your joys, your humiliations. You hadn’t learned how to put a good face on things. You hadn’t learned the importance of plodding forward, of ignoring even the deepest wounds. You hadn’t learned that no one was paying as much attention as you thought. Not even you.

“What kinds of things did they do to him?” Charlie asked.

“Once they locked him in the supply closet with a girl and said he couldn’t come out until he’d gotten to second base. That was last year. This year from day one they’ve been going after him in PE, you know, teasing and pushing him in the showers. Pinching his chest and twisting. The PE teacher just stays in his office, so he doesn’t see what happens. But then he heard Darin wasn’t taking showers, and Darin got in trouble.”

Jeremy took a shaky breath. “The day before he died, I saw Darin at the end of a hallway after school. He was down on his knees and crying, and blood was coming out of his nose and dripping onto the floor. Two guys were standing in front of him. They had their backs to me.”

“Who were they?” Charlie asked.

His eyes swung from Mia’s face to Charlie’s.

“Jeremy, we need you to help us,” Mia said. “Do you know the kids who did these things to Darin?”

He bit his lip.

She added, “We also heard that someone might have beaten up Darin after school on the track last year. Do you know who that was?”

Jeremy swallowed. His knees were still going.

After a long moment Mia said, “We heard it might be some boys named Brandon and Reece.”

She gave Jeremy a long look. Charlie wondered if it had been practiced on her own son. It would be hard to hide much from those blue eyes.

“Maybe . . . ,” Jeremy said slowly. “If I say anything, will you tell them who said it?”

“Don’t worry,” Charlie said. “We can keep your name out of this.” They certainly didn’t need another victim.

“But how much trouble can they really get in?” Jeremy twisted his hands together. “It’s not like they killed Darin. What if it was like a joke?”

“It’s a joke to hurt people? To mock them and hit them and say those terrible things on Facebook? It’s not a joke,” Mia said fiercely. “What it is, is harassment and cyberstalking and assault, and Washington State has clear laws about it. Don’t you worry, Jeremy, we can take care of these bullies so that no one will ever be tempted to do what they did.”

With every word of Jeremy’s, Charlie had felt his muscles getting tenser. He could picture what had happened to Darin so well.

He could picture it because he had lived it.