Small town. You forget that. The locals all grew up together, know one another.
I flip to the index, then find the page for Isaac Marks. Isaac, my former partner and new boss, asswipe that he may be, was the same age as Noah and Aiden. In his photo, he is wearing a stern expression, like he’s trying to look tough. That feels about right. Isaac, back then, probably dreamed of being important, of having the respect he probably didn’t receive in school. All speculation, of course, but it fits with the kind of guy he is now—and we don’t really change that much, do we?
I look up. Noah, Aiden Willis, and Isaac Marks. Isaac and Noah, the same age, the same class; Aiden, one year older. They all would have known one another back then. A tiny school. Everyone knew everyone.
I pick up my phone and dial the extension for the school principal. After a moment, they put me through.
“Ms. Jacoby?”
“Please, it’s Paulina,” she says.
“Paulina,” I say. “Do you have anyone on staff who was here during that school shooting in 1995?”
47
THE SOUTH SIDE of Bridgehampton School is over an acre of open grass, with a baseball diamond closer to the school and a playground next to it for the younger kids. To my right, but a healthy distance away, are the woods, a thick layer of trees providing the eastern border of the school grounds. As I move closer to the school, to my left—northwest—I see the parking lot that bends around from Main Street.
“Here,” says Darryl Friese, walking with me. “I was right here. I didn’t even know what happened at first. I mean, my first thought? I thought, like, an insect had flown into my eye or something. Dumb, right?”
I shake my head. “There’s no such thing as dumb in a situation like that.”
Darryl turns to me. He was nine in 1995, which makes him twenty-six, maybe twenty-seven now, but these seventeen years have not been kind to him, his hair receding badly, an unhealthy gut hanging over his slacks. His left eye looks odd because of the color, grayer than his other eye, which is solid blue, but otherwise there’s no lingering trace of the BB injury.
“Okay, so let’s get this exactly right,” I say. “Stand at exactly the same angle, the same position.”
He adjusts himself. “It was just like this. I remember because this girl, Angela Krannert—God, haven’t thought about her for a long time—anyway, Angie was standing by the back entrance of the school, and I was walking toward her. I remember—the last thing I was thinking, before the BB hit me—I was trying to think of something that would make Angie laugh.”
He is facing directly north. If he walked straight forward from this angle, he’d eventually walk right into the school’s back door.
He points over by the woods. “You see that little alcove there?” he says. “Kids used to go there to make out or smoke cigarettes. Because you were technically still on school property, but you were hidden.”
I nod. I see it. A tree stump, a small clearing. “That’s where Noah was set up?”
“Yeah.”
I line it up. Noah, from his position, would have been almost directly to Darryl’s right.
“So how did he shoot me in the left eye?” Darryl laughs. “Believe me, I’ve always asked that. They just chalked it up to the pandemonium. I mean, it was chaos. I was out of commission, basically. I was on the ground screaming. But nobody could hear me because they were all screaming, too. Nobody knew it was a BB gun, not at first.”
“They said you must have spun around, giving him a clear shot at you.”
He laughs. “That’s exactly what they said. And I get it, I was just a punk kid, nobody believed me. I have a seven-year-old now, and the things that come out of his mouth?” He shakes his head with conviction. “But I’m telling you, I got hit with the BB before anybody knew what was going on. There was no screaming, no chaos, nobody scattering in different directions. I was probably the first one shot. No,” he says, “I was walking straight for Angie at the back door.”
I survey the place again. The woods, Noah’s perch, directly east, to my right.
And to the northwest, the school parking lot.
With a healthy row of shrubbery separating the parking lot from the south grounds. A perfect place to hide.
“Is this part of some investigation?” Darryl asks me. “Are you investigating the Halloween shooting again?”
“No,” I tell him. “Nothing like that.”
Which is technically true. I’m not investigating the 1995 Halloween shooting per se. I’m just trying to learn more about Noah Walker, and by extension the people with whom he associated. I don’t know, yet, who ran with Noah back then, back when they were preteen punks.
But I do know this much: One of them was the second shooter that day.
48