“You fucker,” said Josh. He spit a mouthful of blood onto the floor.
Rolling painfully onto his side, he moved over to Claudia. Blood ran like a river from her nose and over her mouth. He used his shirt to wipe it away, her eyelids fluttering. A big bulb of regret lodged in his throat. He ached all over from his struggle with Rhett.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. Why didn’t he let her hit him? What kind of an idiot was he?
Her pulse was steady, her breathing shallow. Josh took off his jacket and rolled it up, placing it under her head. He should have just let her kill him with that hammer. But it had always been that way with Rhett and Josh. They’d beat the crap out of each other, but God help the outsider that tried to hurt either one of them.
“Why didn’t you just let me handle this?” said Rhett.
But it wouldn’t have mattered. He knew the night that Rhett walked back through the front door that bad things were going to happen and that Josh would be a part of it. It was just like Lee said. Having certain people in your life was just like keeping a bottle of booze hidden in the house. It was only a matter of time before you twisted off the top and started to drink for whatever reason you’d given yourself. Now that the forty he’d drank in the car had burned off, that guy was gone. And Josh was sick, weak from fighting with Rhett, crippled by regret. Seven years sober. All gone.
“Just open the goddamn door and let’s get out of here,” said Josh.
“Where’s that girl?”
“She must be out,” said Josh, hoping that he was right. He hadn’t seen her when he came in.
Rhett held the key up.
“This is it, brother,” he said. He always had a flare for the dramatic. “We’ve waited for the payout all these years. And now we’re here.”
“Just open it and let’s go,” said Josh.
Rhett frowned at him, disappointed in Josh’s lack of enthusiasm, apparently having forgotten that they were trying to kill each other just a few minutes earlier, that he’d punched Josh so hard in the face that he’d knocked him unconscious. His whole face throbbed, his right eye swelling shut.
Claudia stirred, issuing a distressed whimper. “Raven,” she whispered.
“Shh,” said Josh.
He listened as Rhett struggled with the lock. Then there was silence. “There’s something jammed in here. Got it.” A moment passed, then, “Shit.”
“What?” said Josh.
“It’s empty,” said Rhett. “And the door’s too small. I can’t get in.”
“Empty?” said Josh. “There’s nothing there?”
Maybe part of Josh had believed it could be there. Otherwise, why did he feel this crushing wave of disappointment? Maybe that’s why he’d come here ahead of his brother, even though he told himself he was just trying to keep anyone else from getting hurt. That night, what they did, it stayed with him, poisoned his whole life. It came up in his dreams, hit him every time the table saw hit that high panicked note it sometimes hit. It was why he’d spent so many nights drunk, why he never left for college, why he hid in his old man’s shop fixing up tables pretty housewives found at flea markets.
We can’t outrun our sins. His old man had been right about that and about so many things.
Maybe on some level, Josh had been hoping for a payday, too.
He moved in next to Rhett and peered into the darkness. The opening was about the size of a microwave oven. He was narrower through the shoulders than his brother, about thirty pounds lighter. He pushed his way in.
The deep black seemed to shift and move. Was there a hint of light? Did he hear something, a shuffling, a voice? If this was a tunnel, then that meant that there was an opening somewhere else. There was a high-pitched note. The rumble of a deeper voice. Holy shit.
“I think there’s someone in there,” he said, incredulous. Who? The old man? That slut Missy?
“What?” said Rhett. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
With effort Josh got himself through the opening and started to crawl. He heard Rhett thunder up the stairs.
thirty-five
I parked by the bridge and approached the property from behind. The same place I went to meet Seth that night, where I waited with Catcher. I left the Suburban in a little turnaround that was tucked back in the trees. No one would see the truck until they’d passed it, figure it was left by hunters or fishermen looking to pull some trout out of the river.
I was a teenager the last time I stepped on that bridge. Ten years later, I didn’t feel like I’d come very far. I was still stuck in that night in so many ways.
They’d hate me, Paul had said, for how I’ve failed you.
He hadn’t failed me. He’d taken me in, took care of me with as much love as any parent. He’d helped with homework, found help when things got beyond him. He paid for my education.
“How?” I’d asked him when I first started to understand the size of the expense. I didn’t know how much he had saved or what kind of pension he had. But I didn’t think it was much, not enough to cover tuition at NYU and still live. “How are you affording this?”
It was a Sunday; I discovered the bill from the university sitting on top of a stack of others. Prior to that, I hadn’t even thought about it. In my house, it wasn’t if I went to college, it was where. There was no talk about how it would get paid for. I would strive to get into the best possible school and, somehow, it would get managed. My parents didn’t talk about money.
“Your mother had some money saved,” he said that day. “When you graduate, whatever is left will go to you. That’s what she wanted.”
“How much?”
He went into the bedroom and came back with an envelope, a statement that had been opened and stuffed back in the envelope with my name on it. He’d scrawled a user name and password in blue ink.
“She wanted you to go to college,” he said. “She worried that if you knew there was money, you wouldn’t go to school.”
I lifted the statement out and stared at the numbers. The balance, the large withdrawals that coincided with tuition payments, money I had needed for books, room and board, more than $60,000 a year. There was a little more than $300,000 still.
“You’ll need another hundred fifty or more to finish school,” he said. “But the rest is yours. Don’t get your head turned. It’s a head start. It’s not as much money as it seems.”
There was something wrenching my stomach.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “Where did she get this money?”