The only thing she could recall vividly was that two a.m. surprise. Feeling Eric reach across, sleepily grazing the small of her back, the tenderness turning so quickly into something else, his hands between her thighs. Something different about it that she couldn’t put her finger on, but it made her face warm now just thinking about it.
By then, she realized with a jolt, Ryan Beck was probably already dead. The thought was so odd and ugly, she shivered.
“So how is Devon dealing with all this,” Gwen asked, looking closely at Katie, “with Ryan?” As if she could read her mind.
“It’s hard for all of us.”
“You know how dramatic girls can be at that age. With their crushes.”
“Crushes?” Turning too quickly, Katie nearly lost her footing on the bottom step.
Gwen paused, looking at Katie, blinking three times.
“Well, who didn’t have a crush on that sexy young man?”
“Everyone liked him,” Katie said, dropping her foot to the floor.
“Didn’t you?” Gwen added, head tilting like a debutante.
“I wasn’t the one who bid a hundred bucks for a dance with him at the spring booster auction,” Katie said, returning the head tilt.
Gwen’s eyebrows lifted. “The things I do for BelStars,” she said, laughing throatily. “Though he couldn’t samba to save his life.”
Katie flinched, but Gwen seemed not to notice. “As for Lacey,” she continued, relentless, “she appears to be constructing a kind of pagan memorial altar.”
“Well,” Katie said, “that’s not really Devon’s way.”
“No,” Gwen agreed. “That girl’s all head. Ice, ice, baby.”
Katie started to nod, and then stopped.
Radio crackling, antenna thwacking in the wind, Katie turned the key over and over again, knowing she was flooding the engine but anything to shake Gwen Weaver’s voice from her head. Every conversation, she dropped in a half dozen tiny bombs. You only realized after, when the ticking grew louder.
Neck snapped. Skull crushed.
Crushed.
And crushes. Had there ever been a more perfect word for a feeling? The way the girls looked at Ryan—sometimes it had made Katie’s heart hurt. She wished she could spare all of them the pain of those infatuations. The ones doomed from the start.
They were all, including Devon, young for their age in many ways. And so inexperienced in the countless ways boys could break your heart.
Her phone rang, the violin strokes of “Assassin’s Tango.”
“Eric,” she said, fitting on her headset, “I’ve been calling you all day.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, sounding tired. “Was I supposed to get Drew? The car’s been giving me trouble. That goddamn alternator. It’s going to cost us another two hundred when that goes. And it’s been so busy.”
When Eric first started as an audio engineer at SoundMasters, back when Katie got pregnant and they decided to get married, it was going to be temporary. But everything happened so quickly, Katie’s growing belly and the city hall nuptials and a mortgage. Except it turned out he was good at it, very good, with his way with people and his “sensitive ear,” and eventually he’d taken over the business.
Sometimes Katie convinced herself there were parts of the job he liked, in the dark studio, that cocooning, the way he could curl into himself, ears trained, and eyes sometimes shut.
Occasionally, he seemed lost in it, in sound, and it was hard to shake him out.
Devon’s concentration, her single-mindedness, it came from him, from Eric.
“Frank from WKBR called,” he said. “You know how last-minute he is. And they use these cheap mixers, so I had to go back to the studio and get one of our own.”
“For tonight’s news?”
“Yeah.” A pause so long she thought she’d lost him. “They sent me over to Ash Road.”
“Oh,” Katie said. Neck snapped, skull crushed.
“They were shooting that redheaded reporter. A standup in front of that crooked tree, her talking about the accident.”
Katie knew the tree, an elm that always seemed to erupt from the ground just as you made the turn, springing up like a giant’s claw.
At night, though, you could barely see it.
“There were some wreaths and flowers leaning against the trunk.” His voice was slightly breathless. “You never think you’ll know the person.”
“He hit that old elm?” Katie asked. A picture came to her, blood on the asphalt, like those driver’s ed movies. Ryan’s long golden arm hanging from an open car door. “It can jump out at you after the turn if you’re—”
“He wasn’t driving,” Eric said. He sounded very far away, like he was talking through wind or his hand was over his mouth. “He was walking.”
“Walking? On Ash Road?” This revelation seemed worse still to Katie in ways that would prod and tear at her in the hours to come. “Was he…do they know if he was drinking or something?”