‘That’s all true, but Halliday threatening me wasn’t the only reason I wouldn’t talk to you. I still thought I had a chance to keep the notebooks, see? That’s why I wouldn’t talk to you. And why I ran away. I wanted to keep them. It wasn’t the top thing on my mind, but it was there underneath, all right. Those notebooks … well … and I have to say this in the piece I write for The New Yorker … they cast a spell over me. I need to apologize because I really wasn’t so different from Morris Bellamy.’
Hodges takes Pete by the shoulders and looks directly into his eyes. ‘If that were true, you never would have gone to the Rec prepared to burn them.’
‘I dropped the lighter by accident,’ Pete says quietly. ‘The gunshot startled me. I think I would have done it anyway – if he’d shot Tina – but I’ll never know for sure.’
‘I know,’ Hodges says. ‘And I’m sure enough for both of us.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah. So how much are they paying you for this?’
‘Fifteen thousand dollars.’
Hodges whistles.
‘It’s on acceptance, but they’ll accept it, all right. Mr Ricker is helping me, and it’s turning out pretty well. I’ve already got the first half done in rough draft. I’m not much at fiction, but I’m okay at stuff like this. I could make a career of it someday, maybe.’
‘What are you going to do with the money? Put it in a college fund?’
He shakes his head. ‘I’ll get to college, one way or another. I’m not worried about that. The money is for Chapel Ridge. Tina’s going this year. You can’t believe how excited she is.’
‘That’s good,’ Hodges says. ‘That’s really good.’
They sit in silence for a little while, looking at the trunk. There are footfalls on the path, and men’s voices. The two guys who appear are wearing almost identical plaid shirts and jeans that still show the store creases. Hodges has an idea they think this is how everybody dresses in flyover country. One has a camera around his neck; the other is toting a second light.
‘How was your lunch?’ Pete calls as they teeter across the creek on the stepping-stones.
‘Fine,’ the one with the camera says. ‘Denny’s. Moons Over My Hammy. The hash browns alone were a culinary dream. Come on over, Pete. We’ll start with a few of you kneeling by the trunk. I also want to get a few of you looking inside.’
‘It’s empty,’ Pete objects.
The photographer taps himself between the eyes. ‘People will imagine. They’ll think, ‘What must it have been like when he opened that trunk for the first time and saw all those literary treasures?’ You know?’
Pete stands up, brushing the seat of jeans that are much more faded and more natural-looking. ‘Want to stick around for the shoot, Mr Hodges? Not every eighteen-year-old gets a full-page portrait in The New Yorker next to an article he wrote himself.’
‘I’d love to, Pete, but I have an errand to run.’
‘All right. Thanks for coming out and listening to me.’
‘Will you put one other thing in your story?’
‘What?’
‘That this didn’t start with you finding the trunk.’ Hodges looks at it, black and scuffed, a relic with scratched fittings and a moldy top. ‘It started with the man who put it there. And when you feel like blaming yourself for how it went down, you might want to remember that thing Jimmy Gold keeps saying. Shit don’t mean shit.’
Pete laughs and holds out his hand. ‘You’re a good guy, Mr Hodges.’
Hodges shakes. ‘Make it Bill. Now go smile for the camera.’
He pauses on the other side of the creek and looks back. At the photographer’s direction, Pete is kneeling with one hand resting on the trunk’s scuffed top. It is the classic pose of ownership, reminding Hodges of a photo he once saw of Ernest Hemingway kneeling next to a lion he bagged. But Pete’s face holds none of Hemingway’s complacent, smiling, stupid confidence. Pete’s face says I never owned this.
Hold that thought, kiddo, Hodges thinks as he starts back to his car.
Hold that thought.
CLACK
He told Pete he had an errand to run. That wasn’t precisely true. He could have said he had a case to work, but that isn’t precisely true, either. Although it would have been closer.
Shortly before leaving for his meeting with Pete, he received a call from Becky Helmington, at the Traumatic Brain Injury Clinic. He pays her a small amount each month to keep him updated on Brady Hartsfield, the patient Hodges calls ‘my boy.’ She also updates him on any strange occurrences on the ward, and feeds him the latest rumors. Hodges’s rational mind insists there’s nothing to these rumors, and certain strange occurrences have rational explanations, but there’s more to his mind than the rational part on top. Deep below that rational part is an underground ocean – there’s one inside every head, he believes – where strange creatures swim.
‘How’s your son?’ he asked Becky. ‘Hasn’t fallen out of any trees lately, I hope.’
‘No, Robby’s fine and dandy. Read today’s paper yet, Mr Hodges?’
‘Haven’t even taken it out of the bag yet.’ In this new era, where everything is at one’s fingertips on the Internet, some days he never takes it out of the bag at all. It just sits there beside his La-Z-Boy like an abandoned child.
‘Check the Metro section. Page two. Call me back.’
Five minutes later he did. ‘Jesus, Becky.’