“God, I didn’t think this through,” I said. I’d had some vision of staking the place out all day, but it was already three p.m., and I didn’t want to make Britt retrace these mountain roads in the dark.
She messed around on her phone, then put it on speaker, deftly navigating the phone menu of the resort spa until she reached a silken-voiced woman. “Yes,” Britt said, “my name is Beth Docherty. I believe my husband made an appointment for me today, but he forgot to tell me what time.”
Shuffling and confusion on the other end, and the woman said, “I have you as already checked in for your 2:30 facial. Are you not—”
Britt hung up on her and tossed me her phone like a hot potato, and we sat gasping with laughter.
I said, “My friends and I could’ve used you at Granby. We spent so much time pranking people on the dorm phones. You never knew who’d pick up.”
29
I waited on a cushioned bench outside the second-floor spa, a place called Seasons! that emanated a soothing shea butter scent even through its marbled glass doors. Britt had sauntered into the business center like she lived there and headphoned up to work on edits.
Something I wish I’d figured out earlier in life: Walk into any place like you belong, and you will.
I killed time watching a video Jerome had sent of Silvie jumping rope on our driveway. Her legs were so strong, her face so jubilant with concentration and success. She jumped normally, then crossed her arms, then normal, crossed, normal, crossed. A new trick.
I thought of a friend in LA who’d said recently, of her own daughter, “It feels wrong to give her all this happiness and confidence when we know what’s coming. Seventh grade’s gonna hit like a wall. It feels like fattening a pig for slaughter.”
But what was the alternative? Starving the pig?
Beth emerged from the spa looking down at her phone. She was makeup-less, her face raw but glowing, and she wore spa-issued green foam flip-flops, cotton between her freshly magentaed toes. She carried her shoes in her hand. I stood from the bench with enough urgency to attract her attention.
She looked me fully up and down, as if the bottom half of my body might explain what I was doing here. She said, “What. The fuck.”
I had considered whether I’d explain or apologize or try to pretend it was all a coincidence, but what I’d settled on was “I’m going to buy you a drink downstairs and then I’ll get out of your hair forever. But you need to come with me right now.” When you’re kidnapping someone, it’s best to be assertive.
And despite muttering to herself and sending a voice message to her husband that “some incredibly stupid shit just came up,” she did follow me down the long hallway, down the grand curving staircase, and into an oak-and-red-leather bar lined with photographs of celebrities who’d stayed at the resort over the years.
We sat at a small, sturdy table under a signed picture of Bing Russell in a cowboy hat. A waiter was immediately upon us, filling glasses with ice water and telling us they were short-staffed but he’d be right back, which Beth seemed put out by; it implied we were staying more than thirty seconds.
She said, “Well?” Her eyes were the crystalline blue of a movie villain’s; her pupils had shrunk to pinpricks.
“Okay.” I placed my hands palm-down on the table and then, thinking about body language, turned them faceup. “I appreciate how open you were the other day. I was thinking about it afterward, how awful that must have been for you—the thing about Stiles’s house. That was assault.”
“Sure.”
“It was assault from all of them, from everyone who saw it.”
“By modern standards, sure.” She brought her ice water halfway to her lips but put it down again.
“There was such a code of silence around things like that. All those boys. They made an impenetrable wall together, wherever they went.”
She shrugged. “Well, the girls, too.”
“I was thinking,” I said, as if I’d been driving by this resort and it had just occurred to me. “The night of March third. You were there in the woods.”
“You want to ask about that? Yes, I was in the woods. I was not in the pool with Thalia or whatever the fuck you’re thinking.”
“It’s only one thing, hang on. You remember walking back with Robbie at the end of the night, along with everyone else.”
“Sure.”
“Do you remember walking there with him? Like, do you have specific memories of him being there on the walk out?”
She squinted at me like I was crazy, then looked up at Bing Russell’s photo.
“What I remember,” she said, “is he jumped out from behind a tree and scared the shit out of me.”
This was new.
“How so?”
“Like—we were all up there, drinking, and suddenly he’s jumping out at us, like, Ha ha, I was hiding back here and you didn’t even know, what if I was an axe murderer, blah blah blah.”
“So he just appeared?”
“That thing—you remember how in middle school, boys were always riding their skateboards straight at you, and at the last minute they’d swerve and laugh at you for being scared? Or they’d cover your eyes from behind and if you didn’t find it funny you were frigid or something? You just have to roll with the abuse, otherwise you’re a crazy bitch.”
“So, how long, would you say? Before he popped out?” My heart was an entire percussion section.
“Long enough that it was weird and funny. Not five minutes. Like half an hour.”
“And you hadn’t seen him up there before then?”
“No. That was the joke.”
I said, “Okay. Okay.”
“Why. What.”
“Let me show you something,” I said, and I brought up the photo of Robbie’s sweatshirt back, zoomed in on the streak of mud splatter, explained Alder’s theory and what that would mean for the timing.
She said, “I see what you’re seeing, but I think you’re grasping at straws.”
“You don’t think this might be interesting to the defense team?”
“Jesus.”
“I don’t mean—”
“Jesus. You’re not, like, recording this, are you?”
I wasn’t, this time, but just to prove my point I set my phone on the table, pressed the side button till it powered down.
She said, “What I do not want, Bodie, is to be, like, a key witness or something. I wanted nothing to do with this. I would like to forget those entire four years completely. You know that movie where they erase people’s memories?”
“No one asked for this. No one asked to be a witness.”
“Well, you kind of did.”
“Absolutely not.” I felt the need to explain myself, but also felt like the less I said, the better. What I did say was, “Between us, I remember Robbie being awful to her, too. When I roomed with her, I noticed a lot. Or at least, I look back as an adult, and I notice things.”
Here was the waiter, and I ordered us both glasses of Malbec as Beth gazed over my head.
When he was gone she said, “He was always accusing her of stuff. He’d wait outside her class and walk her to her next one, and everyone thought that was so cute. I did not. He always had one hand on her. He stole her retainer.”
“He what?”
“You know how she was supposed to wear her retainer at night? She was planning to go with some of us to Anguilla for spring break junior year. Puja’s family invited everyone. There were other guys going, Dorian and Kellan and all them. But we had to pay for the flights, and Robbie wasn’t going to be able to pay. So he took Thalia’s retainer and told her if she went, he was keeping it the whole time. She’d come back two weeks later with her teeth all fucked up. And she was scared of what her orthodontist would say.”
“So she stayed back?”
“Yeah, I think she went home instead. It’s not even like she was with him, she just wasn’t with us.”
“I’d forgotten,” I said, “but I remember you all talking about Anguilla. I’d never heard of it, and I thought you were saying Aunt Willa. Like, you were going to Puja’s Aunt Willa’s place.”