Harlan Coben - Hold Tight

“And now you’re going to Columbia Law.”

“Yup.”

“And then? I mean, after you graduate.”

“I’m staying in the neighborhood. I didn’t do this to get out. I like it here. I just want to make it better.”

“Good to be a stand-up guy.”

“Right, but bad to be a snitch.”

“You can’t walk away from this, Anthony.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Under different circumstances, I’d love to keep chatting about our alma mater,” Mike said.

“But you got a kid to save.”

“Right.”

“I’ve seen your son before, I think. I mean, they all look alike to me, what with the black clothes and the sullen faces, like the world gave them everything and that pisses them off. I got trouble sympathizing. Out here, you get stoned to escape. What the hell do these kids have to escape from-a nice house, parents who love them?”

“It’s not that simple,” Mike said.

“I guess.”

“I came from nothing too. Sometimes I think it’s easier. Ambition is natural when you don’t have anything. You know what you’re driving for.”

Anthony said nothing.

“My son is a good kid. He’s going through something right now.

It’s my job to protect him until he finds his way back out.”

“Your job. Not mine.”

“Did you see him last night, Anthony?”

“Might have. I don’t know much. I really don’t.”

Mike just looked at him.

“There’s a club for underage kids. Supposedly it’s a safe place for teens to hang out. They got counselors and therapy and stuff like that, but that’s supposed to be just a front to party.”

“Where is it?”

“Two, three blocks down from my club.”

“And when you say, ‘just a front to party,’ what do you mean exactly?”

“What do you think I mean? Drugs, underage drinking, stuff like that. There are rumors of mind control and crap like that. I don’t believe them. One thing though. People who don’t belong stay clear.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning they got a rep as very dangerous too. Maybe mobbed up, I don’t know. But people don’t give them trouble. That’s all I mean.”

“And you think my son went there?”

“If he was in that area and he was sixteen years old, yeah. Yeah, I think he probably went there.”

“Does the place have a name?”

“Club Jaguar, I think. I have an address.”

He gave it to him. Mike handed him his business card.

“This has all my phone numbers,” Mike said.

“Uh-huh.”

“If you see my son…”

“I’m not a babysitter, Mike.”

“That’s okay. My son isn’t a baby.”

TIA was holding the photograph of Spencer Hill.

“I don’t see how you can be sure it’s Adam.”

“I wasn’t,” Betsy Hill said. “But then I confronted him.”

“He might have just freaked out because he was seeing a picture of his dead friend.”

“Could be,” Betsy agreed in a way that clearly meant, Not a chance.

“And you’re sure this picture was taken the night he died?”

“Yes.”

Tia nodded. The silence fell on them. They were back at the Baye house. Jill was upstairs watching TV. The sounds of Hannah Montanawafted down. Tia sat there. So did Betsy Hill.

“So what do you think this means, Betsy?”

“Everyone said they didn’t see Spencer that night. That he was alone.”

“And you think this means that they did?”

“Yes.”

Tia pressed a little. “And if he wasn’t alone, what would that mean?”

Betsy thought about it. “I don’t know.”

“You did get a suicide note, right?”

“By text. Anyone can send a text.”

Tia saw it again. In a sense the two mothers were at odds. If what Betsy Hill said about the photograph was true, then Adam had lied. And if Adam had lied, then who really knew what happened that night?

So Tia didn’t tell her about the instant messages with CeeJay8115, the ones about the mother who approached Adam. Not yet. Not until she knew more.

“I missed some signs,” Betsy said.

“Like?”

Betsy Hill closed her eyes.

“Betsy?”

“I spied on him once. Not really spied but… Spencer was on the computer and when he left the room, I just sneaked in. To see what he was looking at. You know? I shouldn’t have. It was wrong- invading his privacy like that.”

Tia said nothing.

“But anyway I hit that back arrow, you know, at the top of the browser?”

Tia nodded.

“And… and he’d been visiting some suicide sites. There were stories about kids who had killed themselves, I guess. Stuff like that. I didn’t look too long. And I never did anything about it. I just blocked.”

Tia looked at Spencer in the photograph. She looked for signs that the boy would be dead within hours, as if that would somehow show on his face. There was nothing, but what did that mean?

“Did you show this picture to Ron?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“What did he make of it?”

“He wonders what difference it makes. Our son committed suicide, he said, so what are you trying to figure out, Betsy? He thinks I’m doing this to get closure.”

“Aren’t you?”

“Closure,” Betsy repeated, nearly spitting the word out as though it tasted bad in her mouth. “What does that even mean? Like somewhere up ahead there’s a door and I’ll walk through it and then close it and Spencer stays on the other side? I don’t want that, Tia. Can you imagine anything more obscene than having closure?”

They went quiet again, the annoying laugh track from Jill’s show the only sound.

“The police think your son ran away,” Betsy said. “They think mine committed suicide.”

Tia nodded.

“But suppose they’re wrong. Suppose they’re wrong about both of our boys.”

NASH sat in the van and tried to figure his next move.

Nash’s upbringing had been normal. He knew that psychiatric types would want to examine that statement, searching for some kind of sexual abuse or excess or streak of religious conservatism. Nash thought that they would find nothing. His were good parents and siblings. Maybe too good. They had covered for him the way families do for one another. In hindsight some might view that as a mistake, but it takes a lot for family to accept the truth.

Nash was intelligent and thus he knew early on that he was what some might call “damaged.” There is the old catch-22 line that a mentally unstable person can’t know, as per their illness, that they are unstable. But that was wrong. You can and do have the insight to see your own crazy. Nash knew that all his wires weren’t connected or that there might be some bug in the system. He knew that he was different, that he was not of the norm. That didn’t necessarily make him feel inferior-or superior. He knew that his mind went to very dark places and liked it there. He did not feel things the way others did, did not sympathize with people’s pain the way others pretended they did.

The key word: “pretended.”

Pietra sat in the seat next to him.

“Why does man make himself out to be so special?” he asked her.

She said nothing.

“Forget the fact that this planet-nay, this solar system-is so in- significantly small that we can’t even comprehend it. Try this. Imagine you’re on a huge beach. Imagine you pick up one tiny grain of sand. Just one. Then you look up and down this long beach that stretches in both directions as far as the eye can see. Do you think our entire solar system is as small as that grain of sand is to that beach in comparison to the universe?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, if you did, you’d be wrong. It is much, much smaller. Try this: Imagine you’re still holding that tiny grain of sand. Now not just the beach you are on, but all the beaches all over the planet, all of them, all down the coast of California and the East Coast from Maine down to Florida and on the Indian Ocean and off the coasts of Africa. Imagine all that sand, all those beaches everywhere in the world and now look at that grain of sand you’re holding and still, still , our entire solar system-forget our planet-is smaller than that compared to the rest of the universe. Can you even comprehend how insignifi- cant we are?”