“And you found him.” I could already see it unfolding. A quarrel. A threat. A shove. Too much.
“Not at first,” he said. “I stumbled around in the dark like an idiot, calling for him. Then I had the idea that he might have gone down to the dock.” He shrugged, and the motion was so powerless and pathetic that I felt the knot in my chest loosen, just barely. “I climbed down the hill, but I didn’t see him. I went as far as the boathouse, just to make sure he hadn’t done something stupid, like jump in the water, and when I turned around to go back up, there he was. He’d been following me around in the woods the whole time, like it was some sick sort of game.” He was talking faster by then, all the words he’d kept stopped up for months flooding out at once. “And I said, ‘There you are. Let’s go back up, your cousin’s a wreck.’ And he said, you can guess what he said, it was ‘Don’t you worry about my cousin.’ So I said, ‘Fine. Everyone’s upset. Come back and we’ll sort it out.’ And he gave me that look again—God, Oliver, I’ve been dreaming about it for weeks—it was like all the hate in the world at once. Has anyone ever looked at you like that?” For a moment the same stupefied fear seemed to seize him, but then he shook his head and continued. “And that’s when it started. The pushing. The—taunting.” His voice climbed to a high, nervous pitch, and he rubbed at his arms, stamped one foot on the ground like he couldn’t keep his body warm enough. “And he wouldn’t stop. It was Halloween again— C’mon, let’s play a game. I didn’t take the bait and it just got worse. Why don’t you fight back? Why won’t you get your hands dirty? Let’s play a game, little prince, let’s play a game. That’s all it was to him, but I was so scared, and I tried, I said, one more time, why don’t you just come back to the Castle and we’ll talk to Wren? We’ll talk to Meredith, we’ll fix it. And then he just—he said—” He stopped, his face flushed an ugly red, as if the words were so vile he couldn’t repeat them.
“James, what did he say?”
He looked up at me sharply, his head tilted back, his mouth a cruel, flat line, eyes dark and fathomless. He looked like Richard; he even sounded like him when he spoke. “‘Why can’t you and Oliver just admit you’re queer for each other and leave my girls alone?’”
I stared at him, throat tight, the cold sweat sensation of dread spreading slowly through my limbs.
“So I said,” James went on, in his own voice again, “‘I don’t know who told you otherwise, but you don’t own Meredith and you certainly don’t own Wren. Drink yourself to death if you like. I’m going.’ And he wouldn’t let me.”
“What do you mean?”
“He wanted a fight. He wouldn’t let me leave without one. I tried to walk past him, but he grabbed me, and he threw me against the doors of the boathouse. They’re not solid, it’s so old, and I kind of crashed inside, fell against all the stuff piled up in there. And he came at me again and I just reached for the nearest thing, and it was the boat hook.”
He stopped, pressed his hand over his eyes, like he wanted to wipe the recollection away. His lip trembled. His whole body was trembling.
“And then what?” I didn’t want to ask, didn’t want to know, didn’t want to hear another word.
“And then he laughed,” James said weakly, from behind his hand. I could almost hear the sound, Richard’s deep, dangerous laugh, ringing in the dark. “He laughed and said, do it, pretty boy, little prince, I dare you. And he pushed me again. Pushed me down to the end of the dock, saying, ‘I dare you, I dare you, you won’t do it.’ And I looked behind me and the water was right there and all I could think of was Halloween, and who would keep him from drowning me this time? And he wouldn’t shut up, he just kept saying it, you won’t do it, I dare you I dare you I dare you, and I—” His hand slid down to cover his mouth, eyes wide with horror, as if he had just in that moment realized what he’d done. “I didn’t mean to,” he said, a soft little moan from behind his hand. “I didn’t mean to. But I was so scared, and so angry.”
I could see it just as it must have happened. A wild, unplanned blow. The painful jolt of impact. Surprise at the hot spray of blood on his face. Richard falling in slow motion toward the water. A sickening splash and even more sickening silence.
“Oliver, I thought he was dead,” he said, so faintly I almost didn’t hear him. “I swear, I thought he was already dead. And I didn’t know what to do, so I just … ran. I think I lost my mind, for a minute. I ran back into the trees and I might have kept running all night if I hadn’t run right into Filippa.”
I felt numb, frozen, stunned into stillness. “You what?”
He nodded, distractedly, like he couldn’t quite remember how the rest of it had happened. “I guess she was worried that I hadn’t come back and came out to look for me and I ran right into her. It’s a miracle I didn’t hurt her, I still had the fucking hook in my hand—I don’t know what made me take it.”
“She knew,” I said, that one fact skipping and repeating in my brain. “She knew?”
“She was so calm, it was like she expected it. She didn’t even ask questions, really, just got me inside and up the stairs, somehow. I was shaking so badly she had to help me out of my clothes, but as soon as she left me in the bathroom, went to burn everything with blood on it, I just started throwing up and I couldn’t stop until—” He fell abruptly silent, made a strange gesture toward me, like I was supposed to finish the sentence.