CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

As it turned out, Kevin Kelly had had more than five hundred plants growing in his basement. Had he lived, he could have easily earned a million a year on the pot alone—that wasn’t counting all the oxy and the E and the Vicodin. I was a key witness for the police investigation into Kevin Kelly and Lester Briggs’s shooting of him, but I had asked to be allowed to convalesce at my parents’ house in North Carolina. I had ruptured my Achilles tendon when I stepped down into that puddle in Kevin’s underground grow room, and surgery was required. I turned over my passport to the court and agreed to commute back for the trial.

Briggs, in the UVA hospital for a broken arm and ribs and a herniated disc, said the DA was making a circus out of it because he had his eyes on a bigger desk. “Big bust, lots of press, why wouldn’t the DA make hay out of it?” Briggs said to me as I stood on crutches beside his hospital bed. “Probably run for office one day. They all do.” He assured me that everything would be fine, especially as Pelham Greer was cooperating.

THE SURGERY ON MY Achilles was amazingly quick, only about an hour and a half long, for something that was so debilitating. One ruptured tendon and I was on crutches, banging off the walls of my parents’ house, unable to carry anything unless it was in a backpack, unable to drive to the store to buy milk, unable to do much of anything except sit and prop my foot up and think, which I did not want to do. I had had enough intrigue and adventure, thanks—I didn’t want to relive it in my head. I was having occasional nightmares in which Kevin Kelly chased me with a knife that sometimes became a machete, sometimes a broadsword. The dream always ended with me on the ground looking up at him as he raised the blade and swung down. That was when I would wake up.

Seeing someone killed in front of me had undoubtedly taken a toll. Briggs had even suggested I talk to someone about it. But I didn’t want to see a therapist—that would mean I would end up having to talk about Fritz, and I wanted to brood on him a little while, keep him to myself a little longer. The fact that Briggs had shot and killed Kevin in order to save my life meant a lot to me, but it also meant that now Kevin could not tell me where Fritz was. His “clown” comment stayed with me. Did he mean Fritz had become a clown? Was he in a circus? The idea just seemed utterly ridiculous. But Kevin had said the word in a mocking sort of way, too, so maybe he had just been calling Fritz a fool.

Blackburne reached out to me in their official sort of way. I received a letter on their trademark red-and-gold stationery, the envelope unmistakable. I opened it and saw with some surprise that it was from Travis Simmons. He did not offer me my old job back, but he did offer his apologies for my being let go due to charges that seemed to be “erroneous,” although “the circumstances at that point had warranted the school’s action,” and he concluded by saying that, if I were found not guilty of those charges, the school would deposit the remainder of my year’s salary as stipulated by my contract into my bank account. My heart actually rose at this gesture until I realized that in all likelihood Blackburne was trying to head off a potential lawsuit. My speech to Kevin Kelly about Blackburne being scared of me turned out to have been a bit prophetic.

The same day the letter from Travis Simmons arrived, I got an e-mail from Sam Hodges. It was from a Gmail account, not his school one. It consisted entirely of a short block of verse:

Sir, in this audience,

Let my disclaiming from a purposed evil

Free me so far in your most generous thoughts,

That I have shot my arrow o’er the house

And hurt my brother.

It was from the last scene in Hamlet, when Hamlet asks Laertes for forgiveness for the pain he has caused him. I stared at the screen. Sam was apologizing. But he hadn’t done anything with regard to the drugs in my room—which, I realized after a moment, was his point: he hadn’t done anything, said anything, until now. For a moment, I recalled sitting in jail, no one other than Briggs coming to see me, and resentment stirred. Then I remembered that Sam and Gray Smith had packed up my belongings and brought them and my car to Staunton for me, and my resentment vanished. Sam had, after all, done something, although he clearly felt it hadn’t been enough. I sat in front of my laptop, thinking, and then composed and sent the following response, quoting from the point in the play when Hamlet is dying and speaks to his friend:

But let it be. Horatio, I am dead,

Thou livest; report me and my cause aright

To the unsatisfied.

I figured Sam could help restore whatever reputation I had left at Blackburne.

Of course, I heard nothing from Ren Middleton, which suited me just fine.

I’M NOT SURE WHAT led me to e-mail Abby. Boredom would be the easy response, and it’s true I was getting rather tired of staring out the window and watching Matlock reruns. But it’s hardly a satisfactory answer. Love? A need for sympathy? A desire to reconnect after our kiss at the winter dance?

I typed:

Less than two hours later, while trying to reread a favorite Tim Gautreaux story, I got her response:

I typed. Then I attached a picture of the scar from my Achilles surgery, an ugly two-inch pink centipede behind my ankle, and sent the e-mail.

Three minutes later:

After sending this last e-mail, I sat with my fingers touching my keyboard, uncertain what to type next. I hoped what I had already written wouldn’t make Abby want to close her laptop. Then I received another e-mail from her: She included a link to her Facebook page, abbydabby1983.

Her page consisted of a blank profile pic, bare-bones info (Lives in Fairfax, Virginia), and nothing else. I saw I had a new friend request—Abby. I accepted, and then messaged her:

[she said],

Somehow, telling Abby via Facebook messaging was cathartic, almost therapeutic. I could cast events in a brighter light, gliding past the dark horror of the basement and the wild stink of fear from Pelham Greer as he tried to fight me for the keys. But behind the snarky joking lay the fact that, once we had exhausted my adventures in drug busting, I would have to find something else to talk about, something that wouldn’t drive Abby away again. For the moment, though, it was enough to message her about the joys of being on crutches and having her reply by calling me Gimp.

IN APRIL, AS FLOWERS began to bloom from the spring rains, my cast was removed, and I began walking around in what looked like a space-age ski boot, complete with inflatable balloons on the inside to support my ankle. I handed my crutches to my mother and asked her to throw them in a Dumpster. Tutting, she placed them in a coat closet, saying you never know when they might be needed. I reveled in my newfound freedom of movement, in my ability to walk from the kitchen to the dining room carrying my own dinner plate.

In the midst of congratulating myself on recovering the ability to walk, I received another letter from Blackburne. This one was a reminder of my tenth class reunion in June. I almost tossed it in the trash before I noticed that Trip Alexander was one of the reunion cochairs. I stood in the foyer, the glow of the late-morning sun falling through the sidelights by the front door, and thought of Trip and Diamond and the rest of my classmates whom I had cut off like someone going deep undercover. I hadn’t even called Trip or Diamond since I’d last seen them in that hotel room in Culpeper. Before I could change my mind, I ticked the “Yes” box that I would attend, shoved the invitation into the return envelope, and stuck it in the mail.

That spring rolled on, sometimes swiftly and sometimes like watching ice melt. Rehabilitating my Achilles, and my calf muscle, which was ridiculously atrophied, took only a couple of hours a week with a physical therapist. The rest of the time I spent lounging around on my parents’ couch, reading old issues of the New Yorker and goofing around on the Internet. Lester Briggs and I started e-mailing, mostly comparing hospital stories and empathizing with each other on the indignities of recovery. But no official business. Neither of us was in the mood for it. Abby and I still exchanged e-mails and messaged on Facebook, usually about her classes at Saint Margaret’s or how her mother was doing better. We avoided talking on the phone altogether, although there were times I wanted very much to hear her voice. The closest I got to it was taking out the CD she had sent me and listening to it, her voice announcing what she was about to play.

Eventually, my father, ever the pragmatist, made a pointed reference to my seeking gainful employment. Truth to tell, I had found myself gazing at online job postings in the Asheville area. UNC-Asheville wanted a creative writing teacher for two summer sections. Abby, thinking it was a great idea, messaged me:

I replied:

There was a brief pause, two minutes that felt like an hour as I stared at the laptop screen. Finally, she typed:

The phone rang. I looked away from my laptop and stared at the phone. It rang again. My palms suddenly moist, I picked up the phone and nearly dropped it. “Hello?” I said. “Abby?”

“Next guess,” Lester Briggs said in his honey-graveled voice. “Got some news for you—an update on Kevin Kelly’s business deals. You busy?”

I looked back at my laptop screen. Abby had signed off Facebook. I hesitated, and then said, “No, I’m good. What’s up?”

“They keep finding more on Kelly. He had dealers in other private schools in Virginia. Manassas Prep was one of them, if you can believe that. Spent a fair amount of time out west, too, in the past year or so. California, Colorado, Nevada.”

“What was he doing out west?”

“The DA thinks he was meeting with other pot growers, maybe planning to branch out.”

“He said something about medical marijuana being the future. That was before he threw you down the stairs. How are you doing, by the way?”

I could picture Briggs shrugging. “Finally out of the cast,” he said. “Arm’s all shrunk, looks like a twelve-year-old’s. Back hurts every time I have to sit on the john. Don’t get old, Matthias.”

“So you shouldn’t have come rescue me, is that what you’re saying? You should’ve just let him gut me in his basement, save me the agony of getting older?”

There was a pause.

“I’m joking, Deputy,” I said. “Ha-ha, a little laugh in the face of death.”

“Everyone’s a comedian,” Briggs grumbled.

“Seriously, I’m glad you didn’t let a guy in a moose shirt kill me. Never would have lived that down.”

Briggs uttered something between a snort and a chuckle. “The DA’s in seventh heaven,” he said. “He’s like a bull in a field of cows, trying to figure out which one he’s gonna screw first.”

I laughed, but it was automatic. My joke had inadvertently rung a bell deep in my own head—a moose shirt . . .

I pulled my laptop over to me, opened a new tab, and started a Google search. Briggs was going on about the DA when I interrupted him. “Where all did you say Kelly had been out west?”

“Why?” Briggs’s voice was sharp, interested.

“What about Jackson Hole?”

“Wait a minute. Where?”

“Wyoming,” I said. On my laptop was one result of my search: an image of the same tee shirt Kevin Kelly had been wearing, with a cartoon moose on skis. I clicked it, and a new page loaded. I scanned it quickly. “Chase the Moose,” I said. “It’s a ski race near Jackson Hole. Was Kelly out there?”

“Hold on,” Briggs said. I could hear him typing on a keyboard. “Yeah, he was, last May. What’s going on?”

“He said something about a clown . . .”

“Matthias, what the hell are you talking about?”

“Pelham Greer told me that Kelly knew where Fritz was, that he’d seen him last spring. And when I mentioned it to Kelly, he said, ‘The clown.’ Just like that, all . . . derisive.”

“I was wondering when you were going to finally tell me about Fritz,” he said. “That’s the whole reason you went up to Kelly’s house, isn’t it? Unless you wanted to get stabbed and snap your Achilles tendon—”

“Are you still online? Can you help me look up circuses around Jackson Hole?”

“You think Fritz is a clown?”

I had already started typing. “Got any better ideas?”

Five minutes later we had hit a wall. There were no circuses based in or around Jackson Hole, not ones with clowns and tents at any rate. Of course, clowns could be hired for children’s parties. But somehow I didn’t see Kevin Kelly flying out to Jackson Hole to build his drug empire and making the time to stop by some kid’s birthday party and running into Fritz wearing an orange wig and gigantic shoes. It was beginning to feel a bit ludicrous. “Can you find out who Kelly met with in Wyoming?” I asked Briggs. “Maybe they could tell us where Kelly could have seen Fritz?”

“It’ll take time,” Briggs said. “DA might not want to share.”

“You’re resourceful.”

“He didn’t just go to Wyoming, Matthias. There’s California, Nevada, Oregon, Colorado. You want to look at all the circuses in those places, too?”

“If I have to, yes,” I said, though I felt deflated. Jackson Hole had felt so right, somehow.

After a pause, Briggs said, “Maybe we’re thinking about the wrong kind of clowns.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s the kind of clowns with the face paint and the rubber noses who honk horns at kids in a big top. Then there’s the kind who keep bulls from stomping all over their riders once they throw them off.”

“A rodeo clown,” I said, sitting up. I leaned forward and started typing again. “When was Kelly out in Jackson Hole, specifically?” I asked, looking at my laptop screen.

“Last May,” Briggs said. “Memorial Day weekend, actually. Why?”

“Because,” I said, my voice trembling with excitement as I stared at the screen, “the Jackson Hole Rodeo starts on Memorial Day weekend.”