“This will hurt,” he said.
There was a loud bang like a detonation—I thought something had happened to the generator until Kevin, who had frozen in the act of plunging his knife down into me, opened his mouth. Blood stained his lips. He fell forward onto his face just beside me, his body no longer obstructing my view of the doorway, where I saw Briggs leaning against the door frame. A revolver was in his hand, smoke curling lazily from the barrel.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
As it turned out, Kevin Kelly had had more than five hundred plants growing in his basement. Had he lived, he could have easily earned a million a year on the pot alone—that wasn’t counting all the oxy and the E and the Vicodin. I was a key witness for the police investigation into Kevin Kelly and Lester Briggs’s shooting of him, but I had asked to be allowed to convalesce at my parents’ house in North Carolina. I had ruptured my Achilles tendon when I stepped down into that puddle in Kevin’s underground grow room, and surgery was required. I turned over my passport to the court and agreed to commute back for the trial.
Briggs, in the UVA hospital for a broken arm and ribs and a herniated disc, said the DA was making a circus out of it because he had his eyes on a bigger desk. “Big bust, lots of press, why wouldn’t the DA make hay out of it?” Briggs said to me as I stood on crutches beside his hospital bed. “Probably run for office one day. They all do.” He assured me that everything would be fine, especially as Pelham Greer was cooperating.
THE SURGERY ON MY Achilles was amazingly quick, only about an hour and a half long, for something that was so debilitating. One ruptured tendon and I was on crutches, banging off the walls of my parents’ house, unable to carry anything unless it was in a backpack, unable to drive to the store to buy milk, unable to do much of anything except sit and prop my foot up and think, which I did not want to do. I had had enough intrigue and adventure, thanks—I didn’t want to relive it in my head. I was having occasional nightmares in which Kevin Kelly chased me with a knife that sometimes became a machete, sometimes a broadsword. The dream always ended with me on the ground looking up at him as he raised the blade and swung down. That was when I would wake up.
Seeing someone killed in front of me had undoubtedly taken a toll. Briggs had even suggested I talk to someone about it. But I didn’t want to see a therapist—that would mean I would end up having to talk about Fritz, and I wanted to brood on him a little while, keep him to myself a little longer. The fact that Briggs had shot and killed Kevin in order to save my life meant a lot to me, but it also meant that now Kevin could not tell me where Fritz was. His “clown” comment stayed with me. Did he mean Fritz had become a clown? Was he in a circus? The idea just seemed utterly ridiculous. But Kevin had said the word in a mocking sort of way, too, so maybe he had just been calling Fritz a fool.
Blackburne reached out to me in their official sort of way. I received a letter on their trademark red-and-gold stationery, the envelope unmistakable. I opened it and saw with some surprise that it was from Travis Simmons. He did not offer me my old job back, but he did offer his apologies for my being let go due to charges that seemed to be “erroneous,” although “the circumstances at that point had warranted the school’s action,” and he concluded by saying that, if I were found not guilty of those charges, the school would deposit the remainder of my year’s salary as stipulated by my contract into my bank account. My heart actually rose at this gesture until I realized that in all likelihood Blackburne was trying to head off a potential lawsuit. My speech to Kevin Kelly about Blackburne being scared of me turned out to have been a bit prophetic.
The same day the letter from Travis Simmons arrived, I got an e-mail from Sam Hodges. It was from a Gmail account, not his school one. It consisted entirely of a short block of verse:
Sir, in this audience,
Let my disclaiming from a purposed evil
Free me so far in your most generous thoughts,
That I have shot my arrow o’er the house
And hurt my brother.
It was from the last scene in Hamlet, when Hamlet asks Laertes for forgiveness for the pain he has caused him. I stared at the screen. Sam was apologizing. But he hadn’t done anything with regard to the drugs in my room—which, I realized after a moment, was his point: he hadn’t done anything, said anything, until now. For a moment, I recalled sitting in jail, no one other than Briggs coming to see me, and resentment stirred. Then I remembered that Sam and Gray Smith had packed up my belongings and brought them and my car to Staunton for me, and my resentment vanished. Sam had, after all, done something, although he clearly felt it hadn’t been enough. I sat in front of my laptop, thinking, and then composed and sent the following response, quoting from the point in the play when Hamlet is dying and speaks to his friend:
But let it be. Horatio, I am dead,
Thou livest; report me and my cause aright
To the unsatisfied.
I figured Sam could help restore whatever reputation I had left at Blackburne.
Of course, I heard nothing from Ren Middleton, which suited me just fine.
I’M NOT SURE WHAT led me to e-mail Abby. Boredom would be the easy response, and it’s true I was getting rather tired of staring out the window and watching Matlock reruns. But it’s hardly a satisfactory answer. Love? A need for sympathy? A desire to reconnect after our kiss at the winter dance?
I typed: Hey. So, I got arrested, fired, and crippled since I last saw you.
Less than two hours later, while trying to reread a favorite Tim Gautreaux story, I got her response: Is that supposed to be funny?
Hardly, I typed. Then I attached a picture of the scar from my Achilles surgery, an ugly two-inch pink centipede behind my ankle, and sent the e-mail.
Three minutes later: Oh my God. Are you okay? What happened?
Former classmate chased me with a knife.
And he cut your foot?
I tore my Achilles tendon trying to get away from him.
You must have pissed him off?
I found out he was growing pot and selling it to students at Blackburne. Tried to frame me for it.
After sending this last e-mail, I sat with my fingers touching my keyboard, uncertain what to type next. I hoped what I had already written wouldn’t make Abby want to close her laptop. Then I received another e-mail from her: Message me on Facebook. She included a link to her Facebook page, abbydabby1983.
Her page consisted of a blank profile pic, bare-bones info (Lives in Fairfax, Virginia), and nothing else. I saw I had a new friend request—Abby. I accepted, and then messaged her: abbydabby?
Shut it [she said], you’re lucky I have a Facebook page.
Is that what this is? Looks like the Internet equivalent of an abandoned condo.
I just set it up, okay? Easiest way to IM. E-mail too slow.