20
KEEGEN
AS MUCH AS I HOPE she ends up in jail, I can’t picture Tabby there. I mean, can you see that girl eating prison food? She used to bitch and complain about the restaurants Mark took her to, like she was too good to be seen there. Made him feel like shit for not feeding her steak every night. Do you know how that makes a guy feel, when he’s busting his ass and it’s still not good enough, and it’ll never be good enough?
I’m at the Stop & Shop today, working a double because I need the cash, and because I do happen to know how a guy feels when he busts his ass and isn’t enough. Kyla doesn’t have expensive taste. She’s the chick who’s just happy that you’re paying any attention to her. (Don’t tell her I said that.) Except lately the more attention I give, the more she needs.
If Mark were here, he’d tell me not to waste my time. He’d tell me to find something I could win at. Mark hated being anything other than first. He once came in second at a meet in high school, the fifty fly, which wasn’t even his main event. There was this bonfire after, and I watched him take his silver medal out of his hoodie pocket and shove it in the fire, right underneath everyone’s roasted marshmallows and hot dogs. I was wasted, but I’ll never forget that moment. Mark hated losing.
I smile at the old lady I’m ringing up. You can always judge a person on what they buy. This granny is all about marked-down meat, stuff that’s going to spoil tomorrow, red pulp that’s leaking bloody juice all over the conveyer belt. I smile anyway because I need this shitty job, because I don’t have enough money to get the hell out of town.
Mark came over to my place only a couple times all summer. He was always busy doing other shit. Tabby, I guess, or swimming. The Coldcliff Heights Aquatic Center has this Olympic-sized swimming pool. He was so pissed about what happened at the NCAAs. Typical Mark, he only blamed himself, but it was her fault, her calling him up the night before and saying all the stuff she did. It was like she did it on purpose to make him lose.
I don’t even look up at the next customer, not until I realize he isn’t buying anything. Then I see the uniform, and the stern face.
“Keegan Leach,” he says. “Do you have a break coming up so we can talk?”
I already talked to the cops. It came up on Mark’s phone that I was the last person he talked to before he left with Tabby. I was pretty brutal with them. I mean, I told them how Mark felt about the whole hiking idea. That he was worried about it. I showed them the text he sent me, which I’m sure they had already seen.
Officer Oldman, that’s this guy’s name. He isn’t the one I talked to before. After my shift, I sit in a hard chair at the police station and sweat, because I hate talking to cops. Find me one person who doesn’t feel guilty by proximity, even when they have nothing to hide.
“Keegan.” He sits down across from me. “Thanks for coming in. We’ve been made aware of some new information in the Mark Forrester case, and I was hoping you’d be able to shed some light on it.”
I sit back in the chair. It’s, like, exceptionally hard, and I guess that’s probably on purpose, to make you uncomfortable.
“Someone has come forth saying he saw Tabitha Cousins at Crest Beach on the morning before Mark’s death, loading rocks into a picnic basket.”
“Okay.” I’ve already read the article. I still can’t picture Tabby with a picnic basket, all wholesome.
“We believe these were the rocks that were intended to anchor Mark to the bottom of Claymore Creek. I’m sure you know that we found the weighted backpack, the one that was filled up with rocks, in the creek with Mark’s body.”
With Mark’s body. I can’t fucking think of him like that, as two different things. Mark and body. It’s so messed up. I’d rather not think at all.
“Yeah,” I say. “I heard about the backpack.”
Oldman leans forward, all bulk. An intimidation tactic. I wonder if he was the one who questioned Tabby. I wonder if she broke down in front of him. Knowing her, she’d be more likely to break him down.
“We believe Mark was wearing the backpack that day. Some hikers verify that they saw a girl with a picnic basket and a boy with a backpack walking up toward the Split.” Oldman’s face goes a bit softer. I wonder if he works on his expressions in the mirror at home, like they used to tell us to do for school picture day. “Something just doesn’t add up. Why would he carry a pack that heavy without knowing what was in it?”
I shrugged. “That’s Mark. He’s an athlete. I mean, was an athlete. He probably didn’t even notice the weight. He used to go for runs every morning over the summer with a backpack full of his mom’s soup cans. Thought it helped his back muscles. Plus, he was just one of those guys who carried his girlfriend’s shit without asking. Sorry, I mean stuff.”
Oldman nods and gives me a look as if to say, Women and their mysterious shit.
“That makes sense,” he says. “What doesn’t is that we found the backpack underwater, almost directly beneath the drop-off point from the Split. Mark was found almost fifty meters away.”
Fifty meters. The hundred-meter freestyle was his specialty. I remember us in high school swim club those early mornings, me sometimes hungover, chugging water bottles filled with a water-Gatorade mixture, because Mark read somewhere it was the best thing for your system before getting in the pool. Mark lapping almost everybody else, in his own league. People saying he was the next Michael Phelps.
“So you’re saying…,” I start, and Oldman watches me put it together, the whole goddamn mess. Everyone knows Tabby pushed Mark off the Split, even though she’s saying he fell. But nobody believes her. I mean, she says he lost his balance. What does she expect? Just like she doesn’t have the patience for anything else, she didn’t think murder through.
“The fall wasn’t what killed Mark. We already knew his cause of death was drowning. But presuming he fell with the backpack on, and it was intended to weigh him down, he would have been found that way, with the pack still on. Mark managed to swim away.”
I gulp back the acid in my throat. He was alive. He fought for it. Just like he fought for everything he wanted. Most people think stuff came easily to Mark. Grades, sports, girls. But he had to work for it, just like everyone else.
Oldman folds his hands in front of me. He’s wearing a wedding band, a gaudy one with diamonds. “This doesn’t prove anything. But it does lead to suspicions that somebody could have held Mark under the water.”
“You mean Tabby?” I blurt out.
“We’re investigating all leads,” he says, calm and professional, the opposite of me.
“Maybe he got tired,” I say, because it’s too sickening to think Tabby dragged someone else in on this with her, that someone else hated Mark enough to want him dead.
“The creek is rocky leading up to the area where Mark was found. Any traces of wet footprints would have vanished on the rocks. We’re working to pick out any shoe prints in the surrounding area that would definitively identify a suspect.”
I rub my face with my hands. Mark almost didn’t go on that hike. I could have talked him out of it—I was with him that day. But I didn’t try at all.
“What I’m wondering,” Oldman continues, “is what you might know, as Mark’s best friend and arguably the closest person to him. Did he have any enemies? Is there anyone you can think of who might want Mark dead?”
“No,” I say. “Everybody loved Mark.”
Except maybe the one person who was supposed to love him the most.
THE COLDCLIFF TRIBUNE
September 20, 2019
Text message history reveals jealousy, possible motive
By Julie Kerr
New evidence has been revealed in the death of Mark Forrester, 20, a Princeton championship swimmer whose hiking accident in mid-August is now being treated as a possible murder. Forrester’s girlfriend, Tabitha Cousins, 17, who was with him at the time of his death, asserted that Forrester fell. However, text messages retrieved from Forrester’s phone, found in the creek, show a tumultuous relationship with a possible motive for murder. Cousins frequently sent messages to Forrester accusing him of cheating, and she sent an ominous text the day of the hike.
Cousins’s lawyer declined to comment on the story.