Harlan Coben: Don’t Let Go

Augie says that’s why I obsess over the details and won’t accept what is so obvious to others.

I stare at your face. When I speak, my voice is a little funny. “Why are you showing me this?”

“Look at Leo’s lapel.”

Ellie reaches across the table and points with her finger to a small silver pin. I smile again.

“It’s crossed C s,” I say.

“Crossed C s?”

I’m still smiling, remembering your dorkiness. “It was called the Conspiracy Club.”

“Westbridge High didn’t have a conspiracy club.”

“Not officially, no. It was supposed to be some kind of secret society kinda thing.”

“So you knew about it?”

“Sure.”

Ellie takes hold of the yearbook. She flips toward a page in the front and spins the book so I can see. It’s my photo now. My posture is ramrod, my smile tight. God, I look like a frigging tool. Ellie points to my empty lapel.

“I wasn’t a member,” I say.

“Who else was?”

“Like I said, it was supposed to be a secret society. No one was supposed to know. It was just this goofball group of like-minded nerds...”

My voice trails off as she flips the page again.

It’s Rex Canton’s picture. He’s sporting a crew cut and a gapped-tooth smile. His head is tilted to the side like someone just surprised him.

“So here’s the thing,” Ellie says. “When you mentioned Rex, I looked him up in the yearbook first. And I saw this.”

She points again. Rex has the tiny CC on his lapel.

“Did you know he was a member?”

I shake my head. “But I never asked. Like I said, it was supposed to be their little secret society. I didn’t pay much attention.”

“Do you know any other members?”

“They weren’t supposed to talk about it, but...” I meet her eyes. “Is Maura in the yearbook?”

“No. When she transferred, we pulled her picture out. Was she a member...?”

I nod. Maura moved to town toward the end of our junior year. She was a mystery to all of us, this superhot aloof girl who seemed to have no interest in any of the high school conventions. She liked to go to Manhattan on weekends. She backpacked through Europe. She was dark and mysterious and drawn to danger, the kind of girl you figured dated college guys or teachers. We were all too parochial for her. How did you get to be friends with her, Leo? You never told me that. I remember coming home one day, and you two were doing homework at the kitchen table. I couldn’t believe it. You with Maura Wells.

“I, uh, checked Diana’s picture,” Ellie says. There’s a catch in her throat here. Ellie was Diana’s best friend since second grade. That’s how Ellie and I formed a bond too — in grief. I lost you, Leo. She lost Diana. “Diana doesn’t have the pin. I think she would have told me about this club if she was in it.”

“She wouldn’t have been a member,” I say, “unless maybe she joined after she started dating Leo.”

Ellie grabs hold of her sandwich. “Okay, so what’s the Conspiracy Club?”

“You have a few minutes when we’re done with breakfast?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s take a walk then. It might make it easier to explain.”

Ellie takes a bite, gets yolk on her hands, wipes her hands and face. “You think there’s any connection between this and...?”

“What happened to Leo and Diana? Maybe. You?”

Ellie picks up a fork and spears her yolk. “I always thought Leo and Diana died in an accident.” She looks up at me. “I thought your other explanations were, uh, far-fetched.”

“You never told me that.”

She shrugs. “I also thought you could use an ally instead of someone else saying you were crazy.”

I am not sure how to respond to that so I just say, “Thank you.”

“But now...” Ellie scrunches up her face in deep thought.

“Now what?”

“We know the fate of at least three members of the club.”

I nod. “Leo and Rex are dead.”

“And Maura, who disappeared fifteen years ago, happened to be at Rex’s murder scene.”

“Plus,” I add, “Diana may have been a member too after the school picture was taken. Who knows?”

“That would make three dead. Either way, to believe it’s a coincidence — to believe that their fates aren’t somehow connected — well, that’s far-fetched.”

I pick up my sandwich and take another bite. I keep my eyes down but I know Ellie is watching me.

“Nap?”

“What?”

“I went through the entire yearbook with a magnifying glass. I checked every single lapel for that pin.”

“Did you find any others?” I ask.

Ellie nods. “Two more. Two more of our classmates were wearing that pin.”

We start up the old path behind Benjamin Franklin Middle School. When we were students, this path was called the Path. Clever, right?

“I can’t believe the Path is still here,” Ellie says.

I arch an eyebrow. “You used to come up here?”

“Me? Never. This was for the rowdy kids.”

“Rowdy?”

“I didn’t want to say ‘bad’ or ‘rebellious.’” She puts her hand on my arm. “You used to come up here, right?”

“Senior year mostly.”

“Drinking? Drugs? Sex?”

“All three,” I say. Then with a sad smile, I add something I would add only when talking to her. “But I wasn’t much for drinking or drugs.”

“Maura.”

I don’t have to reply.

The wooded area behind the middle school is the place kids went to smoke, drink, get high, or hook up. Every town has one. Westbridge is no different on the surface. We start climbing up the hill. The woods are windy and long rather than deep. You feel as though you are miles from civilization, but in fact, you’re never more than a few hundred yards from a suburban street.

“Our town’s make-out point,” Ellie says.

“Yep.”

“Except more than making out.”

No need to reply. I don’t like being here. I haven’t been here since “that night,” Leo. It isn’t about you. Not really. You were killed on those train tracks on the other side of town. Westbridge is pretty big. We have thirty thousand residents. Six elementary schools feed two middle schools, which feed one high school. The town is almost fifteen square miles. It would take me at least ten minutes to drive from here to the spot where you and Diana died, and that’s only if I got lucky with the lights.

But this wooded area makes me think of Maura. It makes me remember the way she made me feel. It makes me remember that no one since her — and, yeah, I know how this sounds — has ever made me feel that way.

Am I talking about the physical?

Yep.

Label me a pig; I don’t care. My only defense is that I believe the physical is entangled with the emotional, that the ridiculous sexual heights that this eighteen-year-old boy reached with her weren’t just about technique or newness or experimentation or nostalgia but about something deeper and more profound.

But I’m also savvy enough to admit that could be bullshit.

“I didn’t really know Maura,” Ellie says. “She moved in, what, end of junior year?”

“That summer, yeah.”

“She kinda intimidated me.”

I nod. Like I said, Ellie was our class valedictorian. There is a photograph in that yearbook of Ellie and me because we were voted “Most Likely to Succeed.” Funny, no? We knew each other a little before posing for that picture, but I’d always figured that Ellie was a Little Miss Priss. What would we have in common? I could probably go through a mental timeline and figure out the steps that led to Ellie and me being friends after that photo was taken, how we grew closer after losing Leo and Diana, how we stayed friends as she went off to Princeton University and I stayed home, all of that. But off the top of my head, I don’t remember the details, what we saw in each other outside of grief, where the signposts lay. I’m just grateful.