You set up an FB page for me? I’m touched.
Says the prep school pot dealer. Tell me again—were you framed, arrested, or crippled? Oh, right, all three. Do tell.
Somehow, telling Abby via Facebook messaging was cathartic, almost therapeutic. I could cast events in a brighter light, gliding past the dark horror of the basement and the wild stink of fear from Pelham Greer as he tried to fight me for the keys. But behind the snarky joking lay the fact that, once we had exhausted my adventures in drug busting, I would have to find something else to talk about, something that wouldn’t drive Abby away again. For the moment, though, it was enough to message her about the joys of being on crutches and having her reply by calling me Gimp.
IN APRIL, AS FLOWERS began to bloom from the spring rains, my cast was removed, and I began walking around in what looked like a space-age ski boot, complete with inflatable balloons on the inside to support my ankle. I handed my crutches to my mother and asked her to throw them in a Dumpster. Tutting, she placed them in a coat closet, saying you never know when they might be needed. I reveled in my newfound freedom of movement, in my ability to walk from the kitchen to the dining room carrying my own dinner plate.
In the midst of congratulating myself on recovering the ability to walk, I received another letter from Blackburne. This one was a reminder of my tenth class reunion in June. I almost tossed it in the trash before I noticed that Trip Alexander was one of the reunion cochairs. I stood in the foyer, the glow of the late-morning sun falling through the sidelights by the front door, and thought of Trip and Diamond and the rest of my classmates whom I had cut off like someone going deep undercover. I hadn’t even called Trip or Diamond since I’d last seen them in that hotel room in Culpeper. Before I could change my mind, I ticked the “Yes” box that I would attend, shoved the invitation into the return envelope, and stuck it in the mail.
That spring rolled on, sometimes swiftly and sometimes like watching ice melt. Rehabilitating my Achilles, and my calf muscle, which was ridiculously atrophied, took only a couple of hours a week with a physical therapist. The rest of the time I spent lounging around on my parents’ couch, reading old issues of the New Yorker and goofing around on the Internet. Lester Briggs and I started e-mailing, mostly comparing hospital stories and empathizing with each other on the indignities of recovery. But no official business. Neither of us was in the mood for it. Abby and I still exchanged e-mails and messaged on Facebook, usually about her classes at Saint Margaret’s or how her mother was doing better. We avoided talking on the phone altogether, although there were times I wanted very much to hear her voice. The closest I got to it was taking out the CD she had sent me and listening to it, her voice announcing what she was about to play.
Eventually, my father, ever the pragmatist, made a pointed reference to my seeking gainful employment. Truth to tell, I had found myself gazing at online job postings in the Asheville area. UNC-Asheville wanted a creative writing teacher for two summer sections. Abby, thinking it was a great idea, messaged me: You’re too good a writer not to do something with it.
I replied: Says the girl who never read my novel. (Boom!)
Actually, not true now.
What?
I read it.
You did?
There was a brief pause, two minutes that felt like an hour as I stared at the laptop screen. Finally, she typed: Like I said, you’re too good a writer not to do something with it.
The phone rang. I looked away from my laptop and stared at the phone. It rang again. My palms suddenly moist, I picked up the phone and nearly dropped it. “Hello?” I said. “Abby?”
“Next guess,” Lester Briggs said in his honey-graveled voice. “Got some news for you—an update on Kevin Kelly’s business deals. You busy?”
I looked back at my laptop screen. Abby had signed off Facebook. I hesitated, and then said, “No, I’m good. What’s up?”
“They keep finding more on Kelly. He had dealers in other private schools in Virginia. Manassas Prep was one of them, if you can believe that. Spent a fair amount of time out west, too, in the past year or so. California, Colorado, Nevada.”
“What was he doing out west?”
“The DA thinks he was meeting with other pot growers, maybe planning to branch out.”
“He said something about medical marijuana being the future. That was before he threw you down the stairs. How are you doing, by the way?”
I could picture Briggs shrugging. “Finally out of the cast,” he said. “Arm’s all shrunk, looks like a twelve-year-old’s. Back hurts every time I have to sit on the john. Don’t get old, Matthias.”
“So you shouldn’t have come rescue me, is that what you’re saying? You should’ve just let him gut me in his basement, save me the agony of getting older?”
There was a pause.
“I’m joking, Deputy,” I said. “Ha-ha, a little laugh in the face of death.”
“Everyone’s a comedian,” Briggs grumbled.
“Seriously, I’m glad you didn’t let a guy in a moose shirt kill me. Never would have lived that down.”
Briggs uttered something between a snort and a chuckle. “The DA’s in seventh heaven,” he said. “He’s like a bull in a field of cows, trying to figure out which one he’s gonna screw first.”
I laughed, but it was automatic. My joke had inadvertently rung a bell deep in my own head—a moose shirt . . .
I pulled my laptop over to me, opened a new tab, and started a Google search. Briggs was going on about the DA when I interrupted him. “Where all did you say Kelly had been out west?”
“Why?” Briggs’s voice was sharp, interested.
“What about Jackson Hole?”
“Wait a minute. Where?”
“Wyoming,” I said. On my laptop was one result of my search: an image of the same tee shirt Kevin Kelly had been wearing, with a cartoon moose on skis. I clicked it, and a new page loaded. I scanned it quickly. “Chase the Moose,” I said. “It’s a ski race near Jackson Hole. Was Kelly out there?”
“Hold on,” Briggs said. I could hear him typing on a keyboard. “Yeah, he was, last May. What’s going on?”
“He said something about a clown . . .”
“Matthias, what the hell are you talking about?”
“Pelham Greer told me that Kelly knew where Fritz was, that he’d seen him last spring. And when I mentioned it to Kelly, he said, ‘The clown.’ Just like that, all . . . derisive.”
“I was wondering when you were going to finally tell me about Fritz,” he said. “That’s the whole reason you went up to Kelly’s house, isn’t it? Unless you wanted to get stabbed and snap your Achilles tendon—”
“Are you still online? Can you help me look up circuses around Jackson Hole?”
“You think Fritz is a clown?”