Dennis Lehane - Since We Fell

She sat with that a bit, wishing she hadn’t heard it because it actually made her like the lying prick again, if only for a moment. “What happened to the other student? The one who was being abused?”

“You mean Caleb?”

She chuckled in sadness and surprise and Gattis refilled their coffee cups.

She said, “When’s the last time you saw Brian before the other night?”

“Ten years ago, maybe twelve.” He looked out the window for a bit. “Can’t remember exactly.”

“Any idea where he’d go if he didn’t want to be found?”

“That cabin he has in Maine.”

“Baker Lake.”

He nodded.

She showed him one of the satellite photos. He looked at it for a bit and took a Sharpie from a cup on the windowsill. He circled the cluster of three rooftops.

“Those other eight cabins over here? They’re part of a hunting camp. These three, though? Brian owns them. We had a Trinity reunion there around 2005. Not too many showed up but it was fun. Don’t ask me where he got the money for them because I didn’t ask. Brian preferred the middle cabin. It was painted green when I was there, had a red door.”

“And that was 2005?”

“Or 2004.” He nodded at the bathroom door. “I got to shower.”

She returned the satellite photo to her bag and thanked him for his time and the coffee.

“I don’t know if this is worth anything,” he said as she reached the door, “but he looks at you different than I’ve ever known him to look at anyone.” He shrugged. “Then again, he’s a very good actor.”

He remained in the bathroom doorway. She held his gaze and saw his eyes change as, she presumed, he watched hers do the same.

“Wait,” she said slowly.

Andrew Gattis waited.

“He paid you to crash our party that night, didn’t he? He staged the whole fight, everything.”

Andrew Gattis stroked the jamb of his bathroom door, a jamb that looked to have been painted so many times over the decades she bet the door never latched correctly. “And if he did?”

“Why are you helping him?”

His shoulders rose and fell in a half shrug. “When we were young, at a crucial time in the development of our selves, Brian and I were great friends. Now he’s where he is and I’m where I am” — he looked around the room, which suddenly appeared grim and insignificant — “and I’m not sure who we are anymore. When you spend so much time in the skins of others that you don’t even recognize the smell of your own anymore, maybe the only allegiance you owe is to the people who remembered you before the makeup and the stagecraft took over.”

“I don’t follow,” she said.

He gave that another half shrug. “You remember how I told you that at Trinity we studied every discipline, no matter what our focus — dance, acting, writing, what have you?” He gave her a soft, distant grin. “Well, Brian was a hell of an actor, like I said. But you know what his real passion was?”

She shook her head.

“Directing.” He disappeared into the bathroom. He closed the door behind him, and she was mildly surprised to hear it latch.

I-95 took her through Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and what she would have previously described as deep into Maine, up all the way to Waterville. But from there, she had to leave the interstate and hop onto Route 201, after which everything grew first rural, then desolate, then slightly ethereal, the air and sky turning the cast of newspaper, the land eventually disappearing in thickets of trees as tall as skyscrapers. Soon the sky was gone, and all she knew of the world was the brown trunks and the dark treetops and the ashen road feeding into the space between her thrumming wheels. It felt as if she moved under heavy cloud cover; soon that gave way to the sensation of driving at night, even though it was three in the afternoon in late May.

She reached a clearing between two forests. Miles of green. Farmland, she presumed, though she couldn’t see any houses or silos, just swaths of well-tended fields, spotted with cows and sheep and the occasional horse. Her phone was propped in the cup holder and she looked down at it long enough to confirm it no longer received service out here. When she looked up again, the sheep — or goat, she’d never be sure which — stood six feet from her bumper. She spun the wheel and swerved off the road, bounced into a small ditch hard enough to bang the top of her head off the roof and the bottom of her chin off the steering wheel. All four wheels detached from the earth. She shot back out of the ditch like something strapped to a booster rocket and hit the road on the front quarter of her left bumper. The air bag punched her in the face as it deployed, and she could taste blood after she bit her tongue. The back of the vehicle rose and the front lifted off the pavement again. It flipped twice to the soundtrack of breaking glass, grinding metal, and her screams.

It came to a stop.

She was upright. She shook her head several times and small chunks of glass, dozens of them by the sound of it, flew out. She sat where she was a while longer, chin resting on the air bag like it was a pillow, until she ascertained that she wasn’t in any pain, nothing felt broken, she didn’t seem to be bleeding anywhere but her tongue. The back of her head throbbed and her neck felt stiff and the muscles closest to her spine had turned to rock, but otherwise it seemed possible she was all in one piece. The console compartment and glove compartment had divested themselves of their contents and they were strewn across the dashboard and passenger seat and foot wells — maps, insurance cards, registration, packets of handkerchiefs, loose change, pens, a key.

She unlocked her seat belt.

She bent over the passenger seat. She pushed aside a pair of cracked sunglasses and lifted the key off the mat. It was small and thin and silver. Not a house key, not a car key. A locker key, or padlock key, or safe deposit box key.

Was this the key? Which would mean Caleb had had it, not Brian. Which would mean he’d died rather than give it up.

Or it was just a key.

She pocketed it and got out of the SUV. It sat dead center in the middle of the road. The sheep or goat was long gone. The black crescents of her skid marks snaked from the center of the road, off the edge, and vanished where she’d left the road. A shower of glass — some clear, some red — marked her return and littered the road along with pieces of chrome, hard black plastic, and a detached door handle.

She got back in and tried starting the SUV. The engine turned over followed by a repetitive ding-ding-ding to remind her to fasten her seat belt. She used the paring knife she’d packed to cut away the air bag. She popped the hood. She checked under there and couldn’t find any obvious danger. Checked the tires and they looked fine. She turned on the lights — that’d be a problem. The right headlight was shattered. The left was cracked but functional. In the rear, it was the reverse — where the driver’s-side brake light had been, only a metal cavity remained. The passenger’s-side brake light, on the other hand, looked fit for a brochure photo.

She considered the endless stretches of farmland, the forest behind her and the one ahead. It could be hours before any help arrived. Or it could be minutes. No way to tell.

The last time she’d looked at the trip meter she’d been seventy miles away from Baker Lake. And that had been ten minutes before the accident. So sixty-five then. Brian had paid Andrew Gattis to show up that night at their party and leave her a series of clues. He’d wanted her to know about Baker Lake. It’s possible his motive had been to draw her up here and kill her. She’d mulled that over a lot. But if he wanted to kill her, he could have done it on the boat. Instead he’d faked his own death at her hand. Every time she’d looked at Baker Lake on the maps, it felt like a door. If you crossed the lake, you reached another country. Was Brian leading her to the door?