Wednesday morning, 11:00 A.M.
NATE AWOKE TO HIS CELL PHONE RINGING. HE GROPED FOR IT AND, pressing it to his ear, heard his sister Alice say brightly, “Hi. It’s me. I’m at Grand Central.”
Nate was lying in the bottom bunk of Ben’s bunkbed. His eyelashes were stuck together with crud. At four he’d woken up in that horrible way when your eyes fly open and immediately your brain goes from zero to sixty, picking up exactly where it left off before you fell asleep, crazy, scary thoughts blasting away at you like hard-packed snowballs. He’d already spoken to his sister last night, telling her, “Al, I’m serious…. they think I threw Hollins off the roof.” When he was leaving school with Ben’s mom, Nate had seen Peratta giving him the once-over. The cop’s eyes had swept over Nate, sizing him up, as if he was making up his mind whether Nate was big enough, strong enough to push a large woman over the ledge. And the answer on Peratta’s face was yes.
“Meet me for lunch. My treat,” Alice said.
He was fully awake now. “Wait. Did Ma put you up to this? I can hear her, ‘Alice, your poor brother went through something very traumatic.’”
“Jesus. Is it so hard to believe I’m just being nice? I am a nice person. I even called Dad to see how he was because I knew it would make Mom happy.”
An hour later Nate met her in Grand Central Station at the Oyster Bar. Alice was already seated at a table. She held up the front page of the Post. The headline read, it ’s fall semester! second body found at horror high!
“I don’t want to read it. And I don’t want to talk about it either.” He didn’t believe Ms. Hollins jumped, and there was no way she could have fallen, not unless she decided it’d be fun to try her luck tiptoeing along the rim of the parapet.
Al ordered their favorite, huge platters of fried clams with fries and cole slaw. Once the waitress cleared their plates, Al pushed him to have dessert too. It was when she was scooping out the last of her fudge sundae that his sister came clean.
“Uh, so you know Grant Werner bolted from rehab?” she began cautiously.
“Yeah.” Olivia had called to tell him last night. “And I also know he was at Chaps last Monday. But he won’t tell the cops what he knows. Great boyfriend you picked, Al.”
She ignored the comment. “Grant came by yesterday. He was really worked up.” Alice bit the inside of her cheek and kept circling her spoon slowly around the inside of the ice cream dish. “He kept going, ‘Alice, you’ve got to let me stay here! The cops are gonna think I killed Tut.’”
“Maybe he did.”
“I told him, sorry, there was no way he was hiding out in my room. I mean, what? Did he think he’d hole up in Davenport, and the police would just forget about him? So he stole forty bucks off my dresser and left. He was acting crazy.”
There was something about her tone that made him ask, “Crazy how?”
Alice pressed her lips together, then put down her spoon, and took off her sweater.
“That fucking asshole!” There were marks, like purplish fingerprints, on both her upper arms. “Don’t you ever see him again!”
“Believe me. I don’t plan to…. Look, I honestly don’t think he meant to hurt me; he just got so worked up—he was practically crying—and he like grabbed me too hard.” She pulled on her sweater quickly and glanced around, as if to make sure other customers hadn’t seen the bruises.
“Do the cops know?”
“Yeah. I told the Yale cops, and they called the New Haven police. A cop came and I had to go over everything with him.” Alice let out a long gusty sigh and shivered. She suddenly looked particularly small; sitting in a chair, her legs barely touched the floor. However, she was always reminding him that she was his big sister and Nate worried that patting her hand might be breaking some rule in their relationship. Instead he muttered, “That prick.”
Alice cocked her head, nodding. “Yeah, it shook me up. I didn’t want to stay at Davenport so I went and slept at a friend’s in Pierson, but this morning when I woke up, I don’t know, I kind of wanted to get away from Yale and see you.” Al picked up her spoon again, playing with it. “Eleventh Commandment, okay? Don’t tell Ma.”
“I won’t.” Nate promised. Grant Werner was a fucked-up, nut-job junkie, and Olivia was a fool to believe a word out of his mouth.