Chapter Eight

A Bad Idea

VINCENT CALLED SAM immediately. Only after she answered the phone and silence filled his ear did he think about how he’d left things with her when he fled from Pittsburgh nearly a week ago. He didn’t know what she’d said in all those unanswered voice mails. Was she angry? Sad? Maybe she didn’t want anything to do with him anymore. While any and all of those reactions were justified, each seemed to warrant a different approach to this conversation.

Fearing she might hang up on him if the silence continued much longer, he settled for “Sam, you there?”

“Yep.” She wasn’t giving him anything.

“I’m sorry. I feel like I’m always apologizing to you, and I’m sorry about that too. I’ve been a mess. I’m staying at Henry’s,” he rambled.

“I know. I called him when you ran off.”

Of course, she had. He wondered how much she and Henry had talked about him. He knew they cared about him, but he couldn’t help feeling embarrassed that they treated him like he needed to be cared for around the clock. Then again, maybe that was because he had since he’d woken up in the hospital. “How’ve you been?”

He wasn’t sure if she had intentionally sighed loud enough for him to hear her or if her breath had just caught the microphone. After another moment of silence, she said, “Fine. Busy with school. What’s up?”

Figuring out how to ask her what he needed to know was yet another thing he had failed to consider before calling her. “I, ah, have a question to ask you.”

“Yeah?”

“Did you see him? After what happened?”

More silence.

“Come on! Are you blind?” Henry’s screams about whatever game he was watching in the living room traveled down the hall.

Vincent shut his door and sat down in bed. “You there?”

“I didn’t see him. His parents had a closed casket. The last time I saw him was the morning before it happened. I was in a rush to get to class. Barely said ‘hi’ and ‘bye’ before I ran out the door. Don’t even remember what he was wearing.”

Questions swarmed his mind. James’s parents had a closed casket? That didn’t make any sense. He’d seen enough episodes of Six Feet Under to know that morticians could work magic with all sorts of injuries, and James’s parents didn’t seem like the type to invite the questions a closed casket warranted, especially when they had plenty of money to throw at such a problem.

James’s parents must have been the ones who identified the body because Sam hadn’t seen him since—it hit him then. Not just the information about James, but what she’d said about the last time she’d seen him. He thought back to the pile of clothes in the doorway of their bedroom. “He had on that dark-blue dress shirt with a gray tie and matching pants. The ones that let everyone know he had a nice ass. Not that you could see it through his lab coat.”

Sam laughed. “His ass did look nice in those pants.”

“Right? I was ready to steal them myself.” Vincent let out a laugh that was cut short by the sharp pain in his ribs.

“You okay?” Her voice was tinged with concern.

“Yeah.” The pain sobered him. Reminded him there was a task at hand. “You wouldn’t happen to know his parents’ address?”

“I do. Why?”

Her reservation was justified. James’s parents might be fine with turning a blind eye to their son’s sexuality, so long as he took Sam to their annual Christmas party, but they had drawn the line at a boyfriend. Vincent had never met them, and he’d never intended to until now. “I just want to talk to them.”

“You want to call them? I have their number,” she offered, her words stilted.

Vincent knew they’d never answer his questions over the phone. They might not in person, but he was hoping the social niceties that governed much of James’s youth would force them to talk to him. “I want to see them in person.”

“I have Greta’s number. If you—” Sam went quiet.

Vincent checked his phone. The call hadn’t disconnected. “Sam? You there?”

“Sorry. I thought I heard something. Anyway, I have Greta’s number if you want to talk to her?”

Greta was James’s nanny and the family’s maid, and as far as Vincent knew, she was the one who’d raised him outside of mandatory family dinners and other social events. He’d much rather talk to her. From what James had told him, she seemed like a lovely woman. That being said, he seriously doubted she’d identified the body. “I need to talk to his parents.”

“I can come with you. I have class tomorrow at two thirty, but I am free after that until seven.”

“I need to do it alone.” He’d depended on Sam far more than he should’ve when he was in the hospital, and he couldn’t ask James’s parents about what he needed to know with her at his side.

The silence stretched on for so long that he checked the screen to ensure she was still on the phone. Finally, she said, “Okay then. Tell me when you’re ready for it.”

Vincent switched the call to speaker and opened Notes on his phone. “I’m ready.”

“Let the record show that I think this is a bad idea.”

He readied his thumbs to type in the address. “I couldn’t agree more.”

 

VINCENT STOOD ON the road in front of the house. This cul-de-sac had no sidewalks. There was a break in the lawn for the driveway leading up to a two-car garage and another path that wound its way up to the wraparound porch. The house looked nearly identical to every other one on the street except for the navy siding and maroon trim.

Vincent tried to picture James riding his bike in the driveway or rolling around in the grass as a child, but something told him James’s parents probably didn’t allow such nonsense.

He checked the time. A quarter after five. From what little James had told him about his parents, they only stomached each other’s presences for family dinner at five o’clock. Whether or not they still upheld this tradition after James went to college wasn’t clear, but it was the best chance he had to talk to them both at the same time.

He caught something moving out of the corner of his eye. A woman in the house next door watched him from a part in her lace curtains. When he made eye contact with her, she quickly drew them shut, but he could still see her outline standing in front of the window.

Was it so obvious that he didn’t belong here?

His racing heart and sweating palms seemed to have come to that conclusion from the second he parked his beater in front of James’s childhood home. Fox Chapel was only a twenty-minute drive from their apartment in Oakland, but it might as well have been a different planet. One alien to his life of cracked sidewalks and dilapidated houses.

It didn’t matter if he didn’t belong in suburbia. He wasn’t here to settle down. He had come to get answers. No matter how disastrous the meeting would surely go, a lifetime of not knowing what had happened that night would be far worse.

He forced his body up the path to the front door. A little gold knocker was fixed to the door. He nearly used it until he spotted the doorbell. He pressed it, and windchimes rang out in the house.

From inside, a deep voice said, “Greta, get the door!”

Within a minute, the door swung open. An old Italian woman stood in the doorway. The top of her curly gray hair barely reached his chest. Her eyes lit up with recognition. James must have shown her photos of them together. She glanced over her shoulder before she shooed him back and cracked the door behind her. “What are you doing here?”

“I need to speak with them,” Vincent said with as much authority as he could muster.

“No, you don’t. You need to leave, trust me, ragazzo.”

“Greta, what’s going on out there?” a woman called from inside.

“I’m not leaving until I see them.” He meant it. He’d give the woman behind the lace curtains next door a show before he left without answers.

Greta looked up at the sky, clutching the gold cross around her neck. “Dio mi aiuti.”

While he didn’t know a word of Italian, he understood her sentiment. “Please get them.”

“Greta, tell them we don’t want whatever they are selling.” The door opened. A tall, slender woman stood in the doorway. She had James’s blond hair and his bright-blue eyes. She held a glass of white wine in one hand. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing, Mrs. Beaumont.” Greta turned back to Vincent. Her eyes bored into him, pleading with him to leave. “Like she said, we are good. Thanks for stopping by.”

James’s mother turned around and started back into the house.

Every molecule of his body told him to drop it and go back to Butler. Told him nothing good would come from this. But he couldn’t. He refused to leave empty-handed. “Mrs. Beaumont, I’m James’s boyfriend. I need to speak to you and your husband.”

She stopped in her tracks. The glass of wine lifted to her mouth. He wasn’t sure she’d heard him, and he was about to repeat himself when she said, “Greta, get rid of him.”

The disgust in her voice was almost tangible.

“I just need a few seconds of your time. Please.” He tried to walk inside after her, but Greta blocked the doorway.

“You need to go.” She pressed a hand to his chest and pushed him back.

Pain exploded through his ribs. He barely noticed it. He didn’t know what was worse—that James’s mother dismissed him without a moment’s hesitation or that she didn’t have the decency to look at him when she said it. Like her eyes would rot out of their sockets if she saw such a disgusting excuse for a human being. He clenched his fists. “Look at me!”

“What’s going on?” A man hurried into the entry from another room. He had the same tall lean build as James.

Mrs. Beaumont turned around. Her eyes were wet, and she glared at him with a hatred he had only seen in the eyes of their attackers. He half expected her to grab an aluminum bat so that her husband could beat him with it. The sound of metal hitting flesh rang in his ears, echoing off the tunnel walls. A face flashed before his eyes. Not James’s mother. Another face. One wrapped in shadows and filled with disgust—the moment before a rusted crowbar sent him into the nightmare that had become his life since that night.

“Get the hell off my property, or I’ll call the police,” she said.

Greta rushed inside. “Nothing is going on, Mr. Beaumont. And we don’t want to make a scene, Mrs. Beaumont. Why don’t you two get back to dinner, and I’ll deal with him? The alfredo is no good cold.”

Before either of James’s parents could answer, Greta stepped back onto the porch and shut the front door behind her. “You need to go now.”

He couldn’t hold back the tears. “No. Let her call the police if she wants. I’m not going until they talk to me.”

Something in Greta’s face softened. “Look, come back in an hour. I’ll be on the back porch. Don’t show your face until you see me. Capisci?”

“Okay,” he managed to say.

“Then go. Get out of here.”

Vincent hurried down the porch steps, clutching his ribs. There was movement again beside him. The woman peered out from her window once more with the interest of a child gawking at a monkey exhibit at the zoo.

“Enjoy the fucking show?” he mouthed to her.

The curtains snapped shut.

He was so mad he couldn’t breathe. He needed to get out of here. He got in his car and drove off. He parked on a nearly identical street a few blocks away in the hope of avoiding nosy neighbors or the cops if James’s mother actually called them. He barely got his key out of the ignition before he collapsed in a fit of tears.

She’d treated him like a criminal. No, something less than human. An animal. He wanted to hit something. Break something. Make something feel as destroyed as he felt. His chest stung with every sob, but he couldn’t stop the tears from coming.

He didn’t understand how James could grow up with such a terrible woman and still turn out so kind and generous. The answer was obvious. Greta. He couldn’t imagine the person James might have become without her. How cold and detached he might have acted with his mother as his main role model. But Greta had raised him. And she was going to talk to Vincent in an hour. Maybe she had his answers.

 

GRETA WAS WAITING for him on the back porch, leaning over the railing. A silhouette in the light from a fixture above the sliding glass doors behind her. He was about to start up the stairs to meet her when she said, “Stay down there. Come stand in front of me.”

He walked over to her. She looked older from this angle. Tired from a long life of hard work.

She pulled a pack of cigarettes and a lighter from her pocket. “I’m sure Mrs. Beaumont is watching me from her perch to make sure I don’t throw a butt in her precious yard.” Greta motioned her head behind her to what he presumed was a window. “She won’t be able to see you with me standing here.”

“Okay.” Even thinking about her rubbed salt into the fresh wounds of her loathing.

Greta tapped out a cigarette and lit it. “This is my only smoke break, so you have until I finish this one. What do you want?”

There was a no-nonsense attitude about her that reminded him of James. He took a deep breath and held back a cough from the smoke in the air. “I never got to see him. After what happened. I just wanted to know what he looked like when they found him. Sam said they had a closed casket, so I figured whoever identified him was the only one who did.”

Greta took another long drag. She blew the smoke out over his head. “Neither did I. His father identified the body. When he came home, he said they were having a closed casket, and that was that.”

A flicker of hope. Maybe he didn’t need James’s mother to get his answers. “Do you think he’d talk to me?”

“No, he won’t. She’s the better of the two, if you can believe it.”

Vincent couldn’t imagine how anyone could be worse than the woman he met earlier, but Greta didn’t have a reason to lie. His answers were inside the house. So close. And as aloof as the smoke that twisted and twirled through the night sky overhead. He wanted to stomp his feet like a child and scream until he got his way, but the reality that James’s parents would never talk to him, that he’d never know what had happened that night, was too crushing for such anger.

Greta said something he didn’t catch.

He tore his eyes from the smoke. “Huh?”

“Was he happy?”

Vincent thought back to before the attack. When James had returned from his classes and labs, excited to detail the latest thing he learned that day. When they’d cuddle on the couch and watch TV and hold one another. “I think he was. Yes.”

“Good. I’m glad.”

“He talked about you. Said he had you to thank for every success.”

She smiled. A warm, loving smile. “He did, did he?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Ma’am? Don’t make me feel older than I already am. Call me Greta.”

“Sorry, Greta.”

“You’re forgiven.” She flicked her ashes, and they fell on him. “Shit. Sorry. Wasn’t even thinking about what I was doing.”

“Don’t worry about it.” He ran his hands through his hair and brushed off his shoulders. She was nearing the filter, and she didn’t have what he needed anyway. “Thank you. For talking to me.”

“My pleasure.” She took one last puff and stubbed out the cigarette on the railing.

She was still breathing out the smoke when a window snapped open and yellow light poured onto the porch. Greta was right. She blocked the window from his sight.

Mrs. Beaumont’s shrill voice stung his ears. “Greta, make sure you throw that butt away in the outside garbage. I don’t want to find it in the lawn again.”

Greta rolled her eyes. “Of course, Mrs. Beaumont.”

“And make sure to lock the door when you come inside. Someone left the deadbolt unlocked last night.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The window shut, and the light disappeared.

“Puttana,” Greta said under her breath. She flicked the cigarette over his head and into the yard.

Vincent had a pretty good idea what that meant.

“He loved you, you know,” she said, staring ahead at something he couldn’t see. “Never shut up about you when he called. It was always Vincent this or Vincent that. If he was happy, then I have you to thank for that.”

Vincent bit his lip to fight back tears. “I loved him so much.”

“If you want to say goodbye, they buried him in Greenwood Cemetery. First left when you drive in and another when the road forks in three. He’s buried under the first pine tree on the right.”

“Thank you.”

“Goodbye, Vincent.”

The tears came long before he made it back to his car.