MAY
“You didn’t say that to Leo.”
We’re at the Wildwood exit. Baxter, blue lights, the body of Chris Jenkins lay behind. The castle story—the case against my father—rolls around the Civic floor mats and drifts in and out the vents like the smell of dead skunk.
“I did.” I remember the precise way I’m gonna kill him tasted on my tongue.
“You never told me that before.”
I’d tucked the detail away, ashamed. Guess Dad’s not the only one who skims when handing out keys to the basement. To be fair, when the story was the freshest, I didn’t know Nick well enough to confess.
Nick Jones appeared at my door last June 3rd wearing baggie athletic shorts, a Harvard Law T-shirt with the sleeves hacked off, and those blue, not blue, earnest eyes wanting to know if I knew where Aulus was. My cousin had promised to quiz him for some big criminal justice test and hadn’t shown.
I knew of Nick. I’d never met him until he rang the bell.
I clung to the doorframe, peering through the mesh screen. The air conditioning whooshed by us into the street. When he asked to come in, I stepped aside, begrudging my ratty tank top as he walked through the living room straight to the kitchen bar. He pulled out a chair for me and a chair for him. “I’m sorry to barge in.” He patted the seat. “But you care like I do.”
Care overcame his face. Every pore. Every gathering of skin around his eyes and mouth. Every clenched muscle. While I know a number of guys who fall into the “caring category,” I don’t know any who express it unabashedly the way Nick does.
I took the offered seat and Nick explained that he and Aulus met a few months before in a junkyard off Old Nashville Highway; Nick looking for a spoiler, Aulus, a tire for the quattro. Paths crossed, phone numbers swapped. Aulus told a similar story. I was also aware that Aulus ditched Tank and Gladys and me, his best friends on the planet, to drive around back roads with Nick. I’d say, “What do y’all do out there that’s so great?” and Aulus would say, “Nothing.” Which never satisfied me until I too had done nothing with Nick. Nick is very good at nothing.
“Something’s wrong.” He sounded very sure as he added, “Something happened to him.”
I took this as a gross overreaction. “He’ll turn up,” I said. But then Nick told me he’d spoken to Aulus’s uncle Leo, who claimed Aulus hadn’t come home yesterday; and to Aulus’s boss, Mr. Rachelle, who was also concerned and a bit peeved Aulus had missed his morning shift at the Quik Mart; and also to Griff and Ruby at the WCC, and nope, Aulus wasn’t working a spare job for them either. When Nick went back to Leo’s, Leo sent him here.
My insides twisted. I thought he was avoiding me because he knew I knew about the castle.
“Aul wouldn’t disappear,” Nick said. “He hates that crap because of his dad.”
But he had and he did and he stayed gone.
And all the details of that final fight with Aulus slipped away. Silent. Steadfast. Like ants carting crumbs to their hills.
“If the castle is point number one for your dad’s guilt, what’s point number two?” Nick asks.
I wasn’t intending to have a point two.
Thunder rips the air. Then lightning. Nick and I groan in unison, momentarily distracted by similar thoughts: every low area that flooded last weekend will fill again. We exchange sympathy and then irony. The weather. We’re thinking about the weather. I say, “That’s my whole case.”
“But the key chain?”
I take mine from my pocket and ignore my fluttering heart. “Only a key chain.”
“Tell that to Dana.”
“Happily.”
“Thee, we have to consider that Aul put that key chain in Chris’s mouth after he died so—”
I take over. “So an FBI agent he doesn’t know is working the case will tell her brother who will put it together that—”
“Stop.” He drums the steering wheel. “I’m just saying, you better be ready for her questions, because let me tell you, they’re coming.”