“Hey,” he said, smiling. “Remember me?”
Jack looked him over. He had longish brown hair, wore an expensive-looking suit, and looked like he was in his late forties.
“Um, no.”
He laughed. “I’m not surprised. I was in pretty sad shape last time you saw me.”
“Wait,” Jack said as recognition flashed. “You’re the man—”
“Right! Ted Collingswood. You and your girlfriend rescued me from those godforsaken woods last month.”
“She’s not my girlfriend.”
Mom entered then, drying her hands on a dish towel. “Who’s not your girlfriend?”
Jack introduced them. She’d heard about the “rescue,” of course. She invited him in.
“I can only stay a minute,” he said, stopping just inside the threshold. He pulled a white envelope from inside his jacket. “I just stopped by to give you this.”
Jack took it, lifted the unsealed flap, and pulled out a check. He didn’t believe the amount the first time, so he read it again.
“Five hundred dollars!”
“All yours and you deserve every penny.”
Jack felt giddy, ready to burst out laughing. Five hundred bucks! He’d conquered the Toliver dragon, and now this. What a day!
“Yow! I—”
“Oh, he can’t accept that,” he heard his mother say.
What? He couldn’t believe his ears.
Mr. Collingswood said, “Your son saved my life. If he hadn’t found me I’d have died in there.”
“Well, from what he told me, you found him.” She touched Jack’s shoulder. “You can’t take money simply for helping a stranger find his way. It would be like charging for directions.”
Jack wanted to protest—after all it was five hundred bucks!—but knew she was right. Still …
“But Mom, if he wants to give it…”
“He’s just being gracious and a gentleman. You did the right thing by helping him out, now do it again.”
The right thing …
Jack had to force his hand forward to give it back.
Mr. Collingswood looked him in the eye. “You’re sure?”
Jack shrugged. “Yeah.”
If a reward had been offered and he’d gone looking and found him, no way he wouldn’t take the money. But Mom was right. He’d been hanging out in the Pines on his own time.
The man shook his head. “What is it around here? Your girlfriend wouldn’t take it either.”
Mom said, “She’s not his girlfriend.”
He pulled out his wallet and removed a card.
“At least take this,” he said, handing it to Jack. “If you ever need anything—anything—you call me. I owe you.”
He shook hands with Jack, then headed for the Land Rover parked at the curb.
He glanced at the card. Everyone seemed to be giving him cards. Mr. Drexler, the strange Mr. Grossman, and now the normal Mr. Collingswood. Might as well start a collection.
He sighed as he watched the Land Rover pull away. “There goes five hundred bucks, Mom.”
She was already halfway back to the kitchen. “You can always make money, Jack. You don’t get many chances to help out a person in need.”
Yeah, he thought, but wouldn’t it be great to be able to do both?
Now there was a thought …
TUESDAY
1
“All right, everybody, settle down,” Mr. Kressy said. “I’ve got an important announcement to make.”
Jack had just slid behind his desk. The bus trip to school had been what it should always be: uneventful. All the talk had been about the Carson Toliver show yesterday and how he’d stayed out the whole day. Not a single “Easy Weezy.” Jack had to work hard to keep from grinning like an idiot.
Mission accomplished.
He focused on Mr. Kressy. Whatever announcement was coming must be important. He usually saved them for after attendance.
When everyone was quiet, he said, “Carson Toliver is missing.”
Jack felt a cold lead weight form in his stomach as he remembered Eddie’s “bad feeling” yesterday.
“He left school yesterday morning after some incident at his locker—no need to go into that since it’s all you’ve been talking about ever since—and never returned. No one knows where he went after that. He might have gone home, but no one can say so for sure since both his parents were out all day. He wasn’t there when they came home and he never returned last night. His car is gone, but none of his clothes are missing, so he does not appear to have run away. The sheriff’s department is searching for him but they’ve requested that we ask the student body if anyone has seen him since he left school.” He raised his eyebrows and looked around. “Hmmm? Anyone?”
Jack sat frozen in silent shock and dread as the classroom erupted in a burst of excited chatter—talking to one another or asking Mr. Kressy for more information. He didn’t have any.
Toliver … gone? Didn’t come home last night? Where could he be? Where could he have gone without extra clothes?
Yeah, he’d been embarrassed, sure, but to run off like this … it seemed so out of proportion.
That was what bothered Jack the most.
All the earlier pumped-up feelings deflated with a whoosh, leaving him feeling small and cold and worried.
Had he pushed him too far?
2
Mrs. LeClaire, Jack’s French teacher, dropped a hydrogen bomb right after lunch.
He knew something was wrong the instant he saw her. She looked pale, wobbly, and her eyes were red.
“I have terrible news,” she said in a shaky voice. “Carson Toliver is dead.”
As the classroom exploded with wails of shock and grief, Jack’s blood turned to sleet. He saw the whole thing play out in his head: Toliver leaving school, buying some applejack or some other kind of booze, getting drunk, then racing along a back road and wrapping his car around a tree or a bridge abutment.
He closed his eyes and fought a wave of nausea.
In response to a chorus of kids asking how, when, and where, Mrs. LeClaire held up her hands to quiet things down. Quiet wasn’t going to happen, not with a couple of girls crying, but the volume dropped enough to allow her to be heard.
“Here is what I know. A search has been on for him and a helicopter spotted his car in the Pines.”
I knew it, Jack thought. I knew it, I knew it, I knew it!
“When the deputies arrived, they found him…” She covered her mouth and sobbed once into her hand. “They found him hanging from a tree. It appears … the police think he committed suicide.”
The new outburst of dismay from the class dwarfed the previous one. Jack felt the room spin. Bile and acid surged into his throat.
Suicide!
No-no-no! It can’t be!
He’d pushed him, tried to embarrass him, give him a taste of his own medicine, but he’d never intended to push him this far!
Carson Toliver was a bad guy, a violent phony. He’d earned a comeuppance, but he was only seventeen years old. He didn’t deserve this.
It was Jack’s fault he’d killed himself.
He’d pushed him too damn hard!
3
Except for some sobbing now and again, the school bus ride home was silent. Even Weezy looked dejected.
It had been tough just getting to the bus, what with passing Toliver’s unlocked locker, and worse, seeing knots of weeping girls and stunned-looking guys.
“You’ve barely said a word,” Weezy said after they’d been dropped off. “What do you think? How do you feel?”
She, Jack, and Eddie were making their daily after-school trek up Quakerton, with Eddie lost as usual in his headphones. Jack wondered if he was listening to something sad. Some of the dark, gloomy music Weezy liked would have been appropriate.
“How do I feel?” He searched for an answer. How could he tell her about the massive guilt weighing him down, hunching his shoulders, bowing his back
? “I don’t know. You?”
She shook her head. “Strange. I started out with a crush on him, then I was scared of him for what he tried that night, then I hated him—really hated him for the lies he told, and then I wasn’t afraid anymore and was going to report him—”
“Did you?”
“No. I was going to do it today, but now … doesn’t seem much point. You know, during all that Easy Weezy stuff I hated him so much I wanted him dead. I wished him dead. But now that he’s really dead—killed himself, of all things—I feel really, really bad for him.”
“Yeah. I know what you mean. Somehow, some way, considering what he did to you and did to himself, he must have had some loose wires in his head.”
Jack had begun telling himself that during the long afternoon. He hoped it might lessen the guilt. And it did, but not much.
“I know all about that,” Weezy muttered.
Jack realized immediately what she meant, but hid any sign that he knew what she was talking about. He pretended he hadn’t heard. But he wondered if Carson Toliver had been going to a psychiatrist. Maybe even the same one as Weezy.
“You saw how he was acting Sunday night. No way you can call that normal.”
Weezy nodded. “Yeah. That was bizarre. I think the wheels were coming off then. Someone was making a fool of him, he blew the game, he was drinking, he was alone in the woods screaming at no one … all the signs were there.”
“Of what?”
“Of a breakdown. Maybe we should have said something.”
“How could we know? We’re not shrinks.”
They were passing USED. He was supposed to put in a couple of hours today. Usually he didn’t mind spending the afternoon alone in a store full of musty old stuff, but today that was the last thing he felt like doing.
“Wait here a sec,” he said as he trotted up to the store’s front door.
He stuck his head inside and saw Mr. Rosen at the counter, reading the paper and listening to his classical music station.
“Mister Rosen, is it okay if I don’t come in today?”
He looked up over his reading glasses. “Of course it’s okay. I heard about your friend at school. What a terrible tragedy.” He shook his head sadly. “So young and yet nothing to live for? Such an awful thing to lose a child. His parents must be inconsolable.”
Jack hadn’t thought about Toliver’s folks. His dad had a weekly TV show on the local channel. Thinking about them now made him feel even worse. He tried to imagine his own mother’s reaction if someone ever came to the door and told her that her miracle boy had hung himself. His mind shied from the picture.
“Thanks, Mister Rosen.”
“Take a couple of days already. It’s slow now, so don’t worry.”
Jack waved and returned to the street where he resumed walking with Weezy. Eddie was way ahead of them now.
After a while she said, “Mrs. Morton told us something this afternoon.”
“Who’s she?”
“Social studies. Her husband’s an EMT. He helped remove … the body. He said he had a note on him.”
A suicide note? Jack stopped and grabbed her arm.
“What did it say?”
Please, he thought. Nothing about his locker. Please!
“She said he only got a glimpse at it, but he saw the words ‘I hope you’re happy.’”
“‘Happy’? Happy about what?”
She shrugged. “If it said, he didn’t see it.”
“About him committing suicide?”
“Jack,” she said with a trace of annoyance, “I only know what she told me.” She looked at him as they started walking again. “You’re acting kind of strange.”
He knew he was, but couldn’t help it. He felt strange.
“It’s not every day that someone you know hangs himself.” Mentally he added, And you’re possibly—probably—to blame.
She only nodded.
After a while Jack said, “Did Mrs. Morton say where he … where it happened?”
“No … but I can guess.”
“Me too.” He made a snap decision. “I’m going out there. Want to come?”
She stared at him. “Are you crazy? That’s a … what … a crime scene or something. You can’t go out there.”
“Watch me.”
They could shoo him away, but he wanted a look—needed a look—at where it happened.
“And you call me morbid.”
“So you’re not coming?”
She sighed. “Of course I am.”
4
They found a sheriff’s department patrol car and two state police cruisers parked on the firebreak trail near where he and Weezy had spied on Toliver’s strange behavior.
Yellow crime-scene tape surrounded the big oak where the pine lights had performed their loop-the-loop.
His tongue felt dry as sand as he stared at the tree, wondering which branch Toliver had used, and what kind of rope, and how he’d gone about it, and what had been going through his mind the whole time up until the final …
Something flashed in the shade. Someone was taking pictures, but Jack couldn’t see what the others were doing. Two sheriff’s deputies stood outside the tape, watching. Jack recognized one of them as Tim Davis.
“Maybe we’d better go,” Weezy said in a hushed voice.
Jack shook his head. “I want to see what they’re doing.”
He led her along the rutted path for a closer look. From the new angle he saw that someone was digging a hole near the tree. He wondered why.
No one had noticed them yet. If they could find a place where they could see without being seen …
He glanced around and saw the dead zone amid the ebony spleenwort. He remembered the vague uneasiness he’d felt in there before, but it offered perfect concealment.
He nudged Weezy and pointed toward the spot. She shook her head and pointed back to the bikes. Jack took her arm and guided her toward the clearing. She came along with no protest other than an unhappy expression.
As they arrived at the edge of the dead zone, Jack noticed a disturbance in the sand near its center. He pointed it out to Weezy.
“Look,” he whispered as he spotted a line of scuff marks going toward it and coming away. “Footprints.”
“Well, that makes sense,” Weezy said. “That’s where we saw him kneeling Sunday night.”
Jack frowned. That sounded perfectly logical on the surface, but something wasn’t clicking.
He was about to step through the spleenwort when he realized what was wrong and froze. Weezy angled to move past him but he stopped her.
“What’s the matter?” she said.
“Don’t you see? It—”
“You two!”
Jack whirled around at the sound of a voice behind them and saw Deputy Tim Davis. His eyes were invisible behind his sunglasses, but the rest of his face did not look happy.
“Why is it,” Tim said, “that whenever anything strange happens, you two are never far away. What are you doing here?”
Jack said, “We were passing by and saw the cars.”
He didn’t want to tell him about following Toliver here.
“Why don’t I believe you? I know you two like to trespass on Foster’s land, but how did you just happen to end up here on this particular afternoon?”
Jack tried to change the subject. He jerked his thumb over his shoulder.
“We were just looking at something strange in that clearing.” He turned and pointed. “See? The sand’s messed up in one spot and there’s one set of footprints going in and out.”
Tim stared at the dead zone. “So?”
“So it rained like crazy yesterday. That means those footprints were made after the rain.”
“Yeah,” Tim said, nodding slowly. “That’s exactly what it means.”
He looked around at the ground and picked up a three-foot piece of broken branch.
“You two stay here.”
With that, he stepped through
the spleenwort and entered the dead zone. He dragged the tip of the branch through the sandy soil about a foot to the right of the footprint trails, around the area of disturbed sand, and then all the way back on the left side of the prints.
Then, staying outside the line, he went back and squatted by the disturbed area and started poking at it with the stick. Jack saw him stiffen as he lifted the stick. A dirty pink sock dangled from its tip.
He dropped the stick and hurried toward Jack and Weezy.
“Okay, you two,” he said, his voice and expression tight. “Time to take off.”
Jack couldn’t take his eyes off the sock where it lay in the clearing.
“But—?”
Tim grabbed one of Jack’s shoulders and one of Weezy’s. He turned them around and began propelling them away from the clearing.
“No buts, no nothing. This whole area’s about to be taped off. You don’t belong here. Skedaddle home. Now.”
“But Tim—”
“Now, Jack. This is serious. You can’t be here. And don’t think you’ll get special treatment because of Kate. You push me, I’ll arrest you.”
Jack could tell from his tone that he wasn’t kidding, but he had to tell him. He twisted free and faced him.
“That sock—I saw it or one just like it fall out of Toliver’s locker last week.”
Tim stopped. “You’re sure?”
“Very sure. He grabbed it and stuffed it in his pocket.”
Tim stood silent a moment, then said, “Thanks. That helps. But you’re still outta here. Get!”
“Okay, I’m getting,” he said, moving slowly, “but can I ask you about the suicide note?”
“Damn it!” Tim said. “Where did you hear about that?”
“Rumors.” He didn’t want to get Mrs. Morton’s husband in trouble. “It said, ‘I hope you’re happy.’ What does—?”
Tim raised his arms. “Where did you hear that?”
Jack ignored the question. “Did it say who he hoped was happy or why he did it?”
The answer was important to Jack. If he’d done it because of the locker tricks or because he’d blown the game to the Greyhounds, then the blame for Toliver hanging himself rested squarely on Jack’s shoulders.