18

Eleanor Walsh was a surprise. Knowing Jeb Walsh like I did, I’d expected a former beauty queen with a mean streak, but instead I found a pleasant, middle-aged woman, who frankly seemed a little frightened by me and the clandestine nature of our meeting.

We met at an old gas station not too far from Backslide Gap and its shaky suspension bridge.

“I appreciate this,” I said, climbing into the passenger’s seat of her Volvo. “I hope we can work together to help your boy.”

She nodded, taking me in with a cautious yet hopeful gaze. “I’d like to know what this is all about,” she said.

“Let’s drive, and I’ll tell you.”

She nodded and eased the Volvo forward. It was a nice vehicle, all leather, the latest technology, good air conditioning. I appreciated that last one, especially on a day like this.

I pointed at the lake on our right. “When I was a boy, my daddy took me fishing over there. We camped out up on the top of that rise. I hadn’t thought about it much until I came out here to meet you today, but I’m pretty sure it’s one of the best memories of my life.”

“What does this have to do with Edward, Mr. Marcus?”

“Maybe more than you think. See, I have a soft spot for boys who disappoint their fathers, especially boys whose fathers are demagogues.”

I tried to read her face, to see how she felt about me referring to her ex-husband as a demagogue. Ex-spouses could hate their former partner one minute and the next feel beholden to defend them. After all, nobody wanted to admit they’d been foolish enough to marry an asshole, much less a demagogue. Her expression remained neutral, so I decided to press on.

“In the course of another investigation, I came across some records indicating you’d made some complaints against the Harden School, and eventually they referred you to Sheriff Argent. I wanted to follow up with you about that. I think your situation might not be unique at the Harden School.”

She slowed the car, making a right onto an overgrown side road. “Jeb was right about you,” she said.

“How’s that?”

“He said you were the kind of man who couldn’t hear a sound in the middle of the night without getting up to see what caused it. He said you were broken, that you weren’t the kind of man to let other men live their lives.”

I thought that through for a moment. It sounded like an indictment, but I wasn’t so sure I saw it that way. Hell, I wasn’t so sure she saw it that way. What kind of man would I be if I let Jeb Walsh and men like him do what they pleased? Sometimes, I thought, if it wasn’t for men like him, I’d have no purpose at all, no reason to exist save for getting drunk and the pleasure I felt being near Mary Hawkins.

And maybe there was a kind of brokenness in that. Maybe. But I thought we were all broken in one way or another. It was one of the truths of existence, like gravity or aging. Death or taxes. Both.

“Guilty,” I said.

She watched the road. It seemed to narrow as we went deeper into a part of the Fingers I hadn’t been to in years. It was a shady part, covered with layers of trees and dense foliage that seemed thorny and alive. I knew this road would eventually lead us to Backslide Gap, where I’d played as a young boy, where my father claimed all backsliders went to die.

He’d once promised me that it would be my fate too. And the thing about it was, I’d never for a second doubted him.

“Can you tell me about Edward?” I asked.

The only sound was the road crunching beneath the tires, the wind against glass, the tireless pitch of time outside the car. I saw the dead man in my yard, his car sliding neatly between the rows of corn in the Devil’s Valley. I saw my father standing in front of the congregation, about to hand me the cottonmouth that would ultimately bite me and change my life, an endless journey of time in the twitch of a synapse. All of it winding down to this. What could I do to make my life meaningful, to fulfill the promise of hope I’d once felt before I’d seen the corrupt underbelly of the world?

“I’ll tell you,” Eleanor said, at last, “but you have to promise me you’ll find a way to help him, even when you hear how impossible it is.”

“I promise,” I said, knowing there were some promises you made because you had to and not because you thought you could keep them.

“Edward told me he was gay when he was twelve,” she said, keeping her eyes on the road. “I knew before that, of course, but I dreaded the day when he figured it out. When he accepted it himself. I actually prayed that the day would be delayed, that it would dawn on him in his twenties sometime after he was far removed from his father’s control, but none of my prayers have ever been answered. That’s probably why Jeb and I aren’t married anymore. I mean, sure there was some abuse and the affairs, but I knew that was part of the deal going into the marriage. I wanted to believe Jeb was onto something greater, that even if he was a flawed man, he was right about something bigger. I wanted to believe he believed in God, that he was a sinner, sure, but also a man who aspired to more.” She slowed the car around a sharp bend, and I took a moment to try to process what I’d heard. Edward was gay? She said this as if this bit of news was already understood, as if it were common knowledge.

“Anyway, when he told me, I tried to keep it a secret from Jeb, of course. We were already divorced at the time, but still in constant contact because of the two boys and the alimony payments he was always trying to stiff me on. I kept my mouth shut and encouraged Eddie to do the same, but when Eddie turned fourteen, he had a boyfriend, and he wasn’t shy about it at all. I mean, he knew not to bring him around his father or even to act ‘gay’ around him.” She made a face. “That probably sounds terrible, but Eddie does act the part sometimes. He plays it up. Fine. Wouldn’t bother me except for the possibility of his father finding out, so I tried to encourage him to tone it down. He wouldn’t do it unless he was around his father. But eventually, word got back to Jeb. You know how these things work in small towns.”

I nodded. I did indeed.

“Jeb lost it. I mean, he really lost it. He showed up at my place, demanding to see Eddie. I thought he was going to kill him, so I told Eddie to lock his door. Jeb broke it down. I called the police, but Jeb called them too. He told them not to come. Can you believe that? He told them not to come and they didn’t.”

I could believe it. If I had my timeline correct, this would have all happened under the last sheriff, a man named Doug Patterson, a man who’d found himself quickly and easily corrupted by Walsh’s influence.

“The only good thing that came out of me calling the police was it calmed Jeb down a little. When he went back to Eddie’s room, he just ranted and raved. He told him being gay was a myth, that it was my fault for babying him too much. He said he’d fix it. And then he left.”

“So he sent him to a reform school with a bunch of other boys? Did he really think that would fix him?”

“You’re not serious, are you?”

“What?”

She shook her head but didn’t explain. We’d come to a sharp rise in the road, and she dropped the Volvo into second gear. A small ramshackle building with a crooked sign hanging out in the front window lay at the end of a dirt drive. The sign said Open, Come on in.

“What’s this?”

“A place Jeb used to bring me when we were dating. After the divorce, I started coming here again. It’s quiet and the beer is cold.” She looked over at me. “You do like beer, right?”

I nodded, once again amazed by all the hidden places there were in Coulee County. For such a small area, it was brimming with secret places, like a cabin you find in the woods whose cellar opens up into a cavernous and subterranean world. It was one of the only places I could think of where a man could lose himself and still be within ten miles of everything else.

She parked, and I held the broken screen door for her as we went in. The place had plank wooden floors and wooden siding covered with old paintings of fishermen and hunters in cheap plastic frames. A small bar jutted out from one wall and had room for exactly three stools, two of which were occupied. One man sat, nursing a nearly empty glass of beer. He was somewhere north of sixty, I guessed. His skin was thick with wrinkles and his jowls were heavy, giving him the appearance of a man tortured by his own age. Two seats over sat a young slip of a man dressed in a dark suit at least a size too large. His blond hair was slicked back, revealing large blue eyes framed by red cheeks. He looked too young to be drinking, but he had a can of Miller Lite sitting in front of him, and when he saw me looking at him, he picked it up and drank half of it, his eyes never leaving mine.

The bartender was an obese, middle-aged man who didn’t bother to look up from his magazine as he said, “Cans are two-fifty, bottles three. A glass is extra.”

Eleanor looked at me. “Can or bottle? Glass or no glass?”

“Can, no glass,” I said, and reached for my wallet.

“It’s on me,” she said. “Sit down somewhere. Maybe near the back?”

I found the table closest to the restroom in back. Of the three men in the bar, only the youngest seemed interested in us, and his interest seemed confined to me. He continued to give me what I could only call challenging looks as I settled in.

I ignored him and tried to think through what Eleanor had told me in the car. Had Jeb’s reaction to Eddie’s sexuality driven Eddie to act out in some way, landing him at the Harden School? Or maybe Jeb had used the school as a way to hide his son, to send him away so he wouldn’t be an embarrassment. My bet was on this second option.

Eleanor returned with two cans of cheap Mexican beer. “It’s my favorite,” she said. “Drinks like cold water but packs a little punch. Nothing better on a hot day.”

I thanked her, and we both opened the beers and drank deeply. I was aware that the young man at the bar was still eyeing me aggressively. What was it with young males, so many of them always looking for a fight? I couldn’t help but wonder how he’d react if I stopped ignoring his intensely aggressive gapes and stood up, walked right over to him, and looked him in the eye.

Instead, I turned to Eleanor. “Neat place.”

She lifted her can. “The beer’s always cold, and I like the memories. I suppose it’s strange to treasure memories with a man I can’t stand now.”

“I don’t think it’s so strange,” I said.

“I figured you’d be a nice guy,” she said, and I thought from the look in her eyes that maybe the alcohol was already getting to her.

“Why’s that?”

“Simple. Jeb hated you so much. It got to the point he’d become so twisted that he loved evil and hated good. The worst part of it was that in his own mind, he believed it was the other way around.”

“Most men tend to believe they are working toward the good. It’s human nature. Some men just have the capacity to fool themselves more than others.”

“I thought that too, at first. But not anymore. He’s not fooling himself. His eyes are wide open. He knows what he’s doing and he likes it. That’s the very definition of evil, if you ask me.”

I couldn’t disagree with that either but wondered why we were spending so much time on Jeb. “I want to go back to Edward,” I said. “You seemed surprised a moment ago at my description of the school. What was that about?”

She gave me an odd look. “What do you think the Harden School is?”

I shrugged. “Reform school. A place where they try to straighten bad boys out, I guess.”

“That’s what it used to be. But then Jeb changed it.”

“Excuse me?”

Well, Jeb didn’t change it single-handedly, but he did help fund the change. The school was losing money in the late 1990s. Apparently, there weren’t as many ‘bad’ boys. Or something. Whatever the reason, it was going under, and Harden came to Jeb with an idea. Change the mission of the school.”

“Why would he come to Jeb?”

“They’ve been friends for years. And, more importantly, he knew if he could get Jeb on board, everything would go more smoothly.”

“Okay, so what was the new mission?”

“Reparative therapy.”

“What’s that?”

“Conversion therapy. The Harden School specializes in converting gay boys. Trying to make them straight.”

I drank the rest of my beer and put the empty can down on the table gently. Conversion therapy? I’d heard of such places, but they’d always seemed far away in states like Kansas or Arizona, not right here in Coulee County. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized I shouldn’t have been surprised. Coulee County was, in many ways, the ideal spot for something like this.

“So, Dr. Blevins—”

“He’s the therapist, the man they brought in to fix these kids. And because of his reputation, which is somehow good, people keep sending their boys there, and the school is now making a lot of money. And I do mean a lot.”

“So …” I said, trying to piece it together. “You said Jeb helped change the mission of the school. So he loaned them money?”

“That’s right.”

“And now that the school is successful, I assume he’s getting repaid several times over?”

“That would be my guess. Is there anything you can do to help Eddie?”

“Maybe. Tell me more.”

I had to force myself to focus as she began to talk. The problem was my mind kept going back to Joe. Maybe I’d finally stumbled upon the connection. One line from the letter that was lodged in my memory told me I was right: “The authorities believe in the same tenets we do, tenets as old as time and as unshakable.”

Joe had been a former student at the Harden School. And if my instincts were correct, he’d been a former student with a story to tell.