“Sometimes I think I went crazy,” she says, and when she finally turns in my direction I see she’s crying and I’m so shocked I can’t say anything. “Do you have any children, Ms. Williams?”
I shake my head. She gets control of herself, finally, stands up and moves to the desk. She comes back with her phone and passes it to me: on the home screen, a beautiful girl, a teenager—as dark as her mother, with the same large eyes and bone structure.
“That’s Amy,” she says. “She’s a junior in high school this year.”
“She’s pretty,” I say, after a quick look, and hand back the phone. I feel oddly resentful of her for unraveling in front of me. That’s the agreement we make with strangers, that we’ll pretend, and they’ll pretend, so we can slide away from each other quickly and with no guilt.
“She’s doing great now.” She slides the phone into the pocket of her jacket. “During the audit, I was stressed. Working all the time. Trying to keep my head above water. She was on her own a lot. Her father only has her on the weekends.” She closes her eyes and opens them again.
“I see,” I say, even though I don’t.
“She was a freshman,” she goes on. “Sneaking around, drinking, nothing crazy, but she needed attention and I wasn’t there. She spent a lot of time online, talking to people she’d never met. I didn’t know any of it, of course. I only found out…after.”
“After what?”
“One of her online friends…” Her voice breaks and she takes a breath. “He asked her to send some pictures. She did. Like I said, she wanted attention.”
The image comes to me again of a girl, calling for help, floundering in the water, her voice nearly buried by the pitch of laughter.
“The next day, the pictures were all over school. Sent through a class e-mail blast. Even her teachers got them. Even the principal. I—” But she stops, overwhelmed.
“I’m sorry,” I say, and I really am. “That’s awful. Teenagers can be awful. Believe me.” I try and force everything I know, everything I’ve carried, into those two words. “But you can’t blame yourself. It wasn’t your fault.”
She looks up sharply. “I know that,” she says. “It was Colin’s fault.”
“You’re not serious.”
“Colin’s son is in school in Crossville. They play against Barrens all the time. They share friends on Facebook.”
“That’s hardly evidence of…” I trail off, unsure exactly of what she believes. That Colin pressured his son into getting pictures from Lilian’s daughter? All to keep her from pushing on his connection to Optimal? “What you’re talking about…I mean, that’s a felony. She was—what? Fifteen at the time?”
“Fourteen. I know it sounds insane. It is insane. I never would have made the connection. But then…” She stands up abruptly and moves to her desk. Slides open a drawer and fumbles for something out of sight.
“In the pictures, Amy was wearing socks. Nothing else. They were argyle. Pink and green. I always buy her at least one pair for Christmas.”
She straightens up. Comes around the desk. Suddenly I don’t want to know, and wish I hadn’t asked, hadn’t come, hadn’t ever heard of Lilian McMann.
Mutely, she extends her hand, letting the socks hang loose as if they’re a corpse that might still come alive. Argyle. Pink and green. Unworn, and still tagged.
“He gave them to me when I left,” she says. “He left them on my desk with a note. Great socks make a great outfit. Hope these keep you warm through cold nights ahead.”
Her words trigger a long-buried memory: Jake Erickson, one of Brent’s friends, elbowing into my lab space during senior year chemistry. He was always messing with me, switching my chemicals, knocking over my test tubes, turning off my Bunsen burner so I could never finish in time, but that day he was too busy bragging about feeling up a sophomore behind the Dumpsters between classes.
She’s totally fucked in the head, he said, and I could tell he knew I was listening. The crazy ones are always the easiest. They just open up for business the second you even look at them.
“He wanted me to know.” Now her voice leaps to a note of high anguish. “Not just that he’d seen the photos. But that he’d gotten them from her in the first place.”
We can do anything we want with them. Jake Erickson’s voice fills up my head. They let us. And why not? It’s not like they’re going to complain afterward.
I stand up, suddenly dizzy. “I’m sorry,” I say, without knowing exactly what I’m sorry for.
For her daughter, for her job, for that sophomore behind the Dumpsters, men who get to do anything they want, and the people who are taken advantage of.
Because isn’t that, ultimately, what the case comes down to?
There are the people of the world who squeeze and the ones who suffocate.
Chapter Nineteen
The closest bar isn’t nearly close enough. Ray’s Tavern—a dump that shares a parking lot with a Fireworks Emporium—is already half full, despite the fact that it’s only four P.M. Some of the customers look like they may have been crusted on those same stools since the beginning of time. They appear to be grown into the décor, like alcoholic barnacles. I can’t stop scraping my palms with a cocktail napkin, as if Lilian McMann’s story has embedded itself in my skin.
I don’t know that I can believe her: not because she’s lying, but because she might simply be wrong. The problem with spending a lifetime looking for patterns is that it teaches you to see them everywhere; but coincidences happen. Colin Danner might simply have known about the pictures through his son, and decided to give one final twist of the knife before Lilian left. In all likelihood, that is what happened.
But her story has left me with a bad feeling, like I’ve just swum through oily water, and the sink in the bathroom is so filthy that washing my hands only makes me feel dirtier. My first whiskey-soda does little to help and the second only makes me sad. I can’t help but think of Becky Sarinelli, and of that poor fluttering photo that landed in the aisle at that pep rally: her skin a glare in the camera flash, her exposed body. And that was before photos could be instantly shared the way they are now.
Thinking of Becky Sarinelli gets me back to thinking about Condor, and wondering why and how he could have done that to her.
Old mistakes, he’d said, about Hannah’s mother. But old mistakes are never old. We relive them again and again. We repeat them, and hope this time things will turn out differently.
I don’t want Condor to be a mistake.
Or maybe I just don’t want to be alone. Being in Barrens is reminding me of how lonely I was here. It’s reminding me I’ve never really stopped being lonely.