EIGHTEEN

Dooley sat on the bench-like swing on his uncle’s porch, a near-empty cup of coffee in his hands. Eight o’clock in the morning, and it was pleasantly warm. There were some flowers coming up in the strip alongside his uncle’s front walk. That was something he had never got used to, his uncle down on his hands and knees, fiddling around with flowers. He commented on them, too, sometimes, when he sat out there on the porch after work.

“Zinnias are looking good this year,” he’d say. To which Dooley would think, what the hell is a zinnia? Or, “I think I’m going to pull out those Shastas, put in more Echinacea.” Okay, sure, whatever.

And now here was Dooley, drinking his coffee outside, looking at the shoots of flowers poking through the earth, and thinking. How does that happen, year after year? How do they know when it’s time?

He’d sat out here last night with Beth. He’d gone over to her place and pressed the buzzer, and when her mother answered, he’d given his name politely, respectfully, for once not thinking what a controlling, narrow-minded, pain-in-the-ass bitch she was. And she’d answered if not respectfully, then at least not disdainfully. She’d buzzed him up. She’d stood back out of the way when Beth came to the door. She hadn’t argued when Beth reached for his hand and he took it. She hadn’t warned Beth that she’d better be back at a certain time, or else. It was Dooley who had spoken up on that. He’d said, “I’ll bring her back before midnight.” Beth’s mother had nodded. She’d held Dooley’s eyes for a moment. Then she’d closed the door behind them, softly, letting the door speak for her like she always did, only this time, making it say something different.

They’d walked back to his uncle’s house hand in hand. His uncle had come out to say hello, but otherwise had let them be. They’d sat out on the porch, just the two of them, watching the sun go down and then sitting in the dark, Beth’s hand slipped through one of his arms, her body pressed up close against his, her head half of the time on his chest. They didn’t say much, but Dooley knew it was okay. He walked her home and took her upstairs. She kissed him lightly on the lips. He accepted it and didn’t press for any more. And then she clung to him. She wrapped her arms around his neck and held him and made his shirt wet with her tears.

“I’ll call you tomorrow,” he said when he finally got her to stop crying. “Okay?”

“Okay,” she said.

She went inside. He stood out in the hall for a moment. Was she going to be okay? He knew it wasn’t all over yet. Was she going to get through it? She wasn’t going to do anything crazy, was she? It was going to be okay, wasn’t it?

He’d barely slept for thinking about that, for wanting to call her and hear her voice and know for a certainty that she was okay.

He’d finally got up and made some coffee and had come outside to watch the sun get up. He was still there when his uncle stuck his head out the door.

“You okay?” he said.

Dooley nodded.

“And Beth?”

“I think so,” Dooley said. “I hope so.” He swallowed down the rest of his coffee. It was cold in the cup. “There’s something I have to tell you.”

His uncle came all the way out onto the porch.

“There’s this kid I used to know,” Dooley said. “His name was Tyler Brock.”

His uncle sat down next to him.

“Was?”

“He died—killed himself.”

His uncle waited.

“There was this guy at this group home I was in. Jeffie was in there one time, too.”

He felt his uncle tense on the bench next to him. Neither of them had mentioned Jeffie in a long time.

“This guy, his name was Ralston.” He still couldn’t say the name without his gut clenching. “He’s the reason Tyler offed himself.” He was breathing hard now, even though he was willing himself to stay calm. “He was a predator, you know? He had all this power. All he had to do was report you for something and he could make your life a living hell. He had other ways to do it, too. He came at me.” It was the best way he knew to say it without actually saying it. He couldn’t, even now. He just couldn’t.

His uncle looked at him.

“Did he—”

“No. He tried. But no. So then he went after Tyler.”

“You didn’t report it?” his uncle said.

Dooley looked at him. Didn’t he get it? Then his uncle nodded, a curt little gesture. Yeah. He got it.

“I knew what was happening,” Dooley said. “But I didn’t do anything.” Not a thing except, once in a while, tell himself: Better him than me. “I guess I thought—” But he couldn’t say it, not that part, anyway. “I thought, I got him off me. Tyler could do the same thing if he wanted to.” Because he’d thought that, too. He didn’t think it anymore, had given up that notion a long time ago. But back then, seeing what a mouse Tyler was, yeah, he’d thought that. He’d thought, if the guy wasn’t such a mouse, he could get Ralston gone.

His uncle didn’t say anything.

“The thing is,” Dooley said after a little while, “it wasn’t all me. I didn’t make him back off all by myself. And Jeffie was the one that finally got rid of him.”

“We’re talking about Jeffrey Eccles, right?” his uncle said.

Dooley nodded.

“He told Ralston he had pictures.”

“And did he?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. You could never tell with Jeffie. But, yeah, I guess maybe he did, because Ralston resigned. But by then Tyler ... Tyler had done it.”

He hadn’t shown up for breakfast one morning, and Dooley, for some reason, had been sent up to get him. He’d checked the john first. A lot of times when a guy was late for breakfast, it was because he was on the john. But Tyler wasn’t there. So Dooley went to his room and found him hanging from one of the exposed pipes that ran through the building. He was cold to the touch. Dooley had pulled his hand away and stepped back. He stood there for a few moments, not believing what he was seeing.

“I haven’t thought about it in a while,” he said. “Then a couple of weeks ago, I was at work and I looked out and I saw him on the street.”

“Ralston,” his uncle said.

“Yeah. He was carrying a duffle bag. It said Little League on it.”

His uncle was staring out at the street now.

Dooley wished he hadn’t looked out the window that day. He wished he’d been in the back of the store, re-shelving product. That way, maybe right this second, he’d be blissfully unaware of Ralston’s presence in town.

“I wasn’t going to do anything.”

His uncle’s eyes came back to him.

“Then I went to Parker’s place that night, the night he died. I talked to him.” Jesus, if you’re going to tell the story, tell it right. “I was pissed at him. I wanted to let him know. I wanted—” I wanted to kill him. “I talked to him and then I left. I went down into the ravine.”

“The one behind his house?”

“Yeah. I looked up there, too. And then I headed home. That’s when I ran into him.”

“Parker?”

“Ralston. He was walking up the ravine. He had a kid with him. He’d looked a year or two older than Tyler had been.”

“Anyway, when he saw me, he told the kid to go on ahead. Then he asked me how I was.” His eyes raked over Dooley: Well, well, Ryan Dooley. How are you? How’s your friend Tyler? Like he didn’t know. “I hit him,” Dooley said. “With a piece of tree branch I picked up.” Swinging it like it was a Louisville Slugger.

“Jesus, Ryan.”

“I hit him pretty hard,” Dooley said. At the time, filled with rage and regret, he’d hit to hear the sound of the connection—bark on bone. “He was bleeding.”

“That’s why you came home and washed your clothes?” his uncle said. “It’s probably why Randall wanted to see you. They probably found blood. They didn’t have enough time for a DNA analysis—the request was probably in at the lab, though. This guy Ralston—you didn’t—”

“He was on the ground when I left him,” Dooley said. “He was bleeding but he was okay.” Dooley knew that for a fact because Ralston had been laughing. Dooley hit him, as hard as he could, knocked him right off his feet, and the guy lay there laughing at him. Dooley knew why, too. Because he’d just been rash enough and dumb enough to hand his life over to Ralston. All the guy had to do was put in a call, and Dooley would be scooped up off the streets. “I thought he was going to turn me in.”

“He still might,” Dooley’s uncle said.

“I don’t think so,” Dooley said. “He skipped out on his landlord. And the Little League team he was coaching.”

They sat in silence for another few moments. Then his uncle said, “What do you want to do about it?”

What did he want to do? He wanted to forget it, that’s what. But that wasn’t really the question.

“I was thinking maybe I should talk to Randall,” he said.

“You sure?”

He’d thought about it from the time he left Beth’s place last night.

“Yeah, I’m sure.”

“You want me to come with you?”

“Yeah.” In fact, he’d been hoping his uncle would offer.

Annette Girondin went with them because Dooley’s uncle thought it would be smart for them to have a lawyer handy. The three of them, Dooley, his uncle, and Annette, sat on one side of the table, and Randall sat on the other. Dooley told Randall what he had already told his uncle. Randall didn’t interrupt and remained silent for a few moments after Dooley had finished. Then he let out a long sigh, leaned back in his chair, and stared across the table at Dooley. Finally he pulled out a notebook and a pen.

“You have the address where Ralston lives?”

Dooley gave it to him. “But he’s not there anymore. He’s gone.”

Randall wrote down the address anyway.

“And this kid he was allegedly with?” he said.

“I didn’t get a good look at him. Ralston sent him up ahead.”

“Would you recognize him again if you saw him?”

“Maybe. I doubt it.”

“How old was he? You think he was a Little Leaguer?”

“Not the ones he was coaching. They’re all ten or eleven. This kid was a lot bigger. He must have been fourteen or fifteen, something like that.”

Randall stood up.

“Give me a few minutes,” he said.

He left the room.

Dooley’s uncle glanced at Annette Girondin. Annette’s face was unreadable. Dooley stared at the tabletop. He’d told his uncle. He’d told Annette. Now he’d told Randall. Sooner or later he was going to have to tell Beth. Jesus, what would she think? That kind of stuff was supposed to be behind him now. He was supposed to be a solid citizen. And yet, when faced with Ralston, he’d forgotten everything he’d struggled so hard to learn over the past two years, and he’d lost it. He’d reverted back to what he thought of with disgust as his true self.

He’d have to tell Beth.

It was out there now. He had to face the consequences. And one of those consequences was Beth.

Maybe he should have kept his mouth shut. What had possessed him to come clean to his uncle? What had made him think it was a good idea to come down and bare it all for Randall?

Only everything he’d supposedly learned in the past two years.

His only hope: she would come to visit him.

Or—talk about clutching at straws—maybe they would take his recent past into consideration. Maybe they wouldn’t lock him up. Maybe they’d put him under house arrest. He could deal with that. Or—if you’re going to dream, dream big—maybe just a stricter supervision order.

It seemed like forever before the door opened and a somber-faced Randall walked back into the room. He dropped down onto the chair directly opposite Dooley.

“You’re a piece of work, Ryan, I’ll give you that,” he said.

Out of the corner of his eye, Dooley saw his uncle straighten in his chair, bracing himself.

“You waltz in here and spin me some yarn about where you were the night Parker Albright was murdered—putting in batting practice on some guy’s head, is that it?”

Annette glanced at Dooley.

“I go and check, and what do I find out? Nobody named Ralston has made a complaint against you.”

“Yeah, but—”

“I talked to the guy last year,” Randall said. “You remember?”

Dooley did. Randall had spoken to Ralston in relation to what had happened to Lorraine.

“The man does not have a high opinion of you. He made that perfectly clear. You’d think if you had done what you told me, he’d have been in here within ten minutes, pressing charges against you.”

Randall looked like he always did—hard-nosed, businesslike, no-nonsense, kind of like Dooley’s uncle, only a decade and a half younger.

“If I were you, Ryan,” he said, “I’d make a few changes in your life. The number one change I’d make would be to stop lying to the police. All it does is cause problems—for everyone. For you, for your uncle, everyone. From a police perspective, well, we don’t like it when people aren’t straight with us. And we sure as hell don’t like it when they come in here with a bullshit story and waste our time.”

Dooley’s uncle shifted in his chair.

“Get out of here, Ryan,” Randall said. “Stop spinning me. You got it?” He stood up.

Dooley stared at him. He looked at his uncle, whose face, like Randall’s, wasn’t giving anything away. But he stood up, too. Annette followed his lead. Dooley stumbled to his feet.

“Now, if you all will excuse me,” Randall said brusquely, “I have real police work to do.” He showed them to the door.

“Don’t ask,” Dooley’s uncle said a few moments later when Dooley opened his mouth to ask what the hell had just happened. “Just be grateful.”

Dooley was that, for sure.

When Dooley came out of school a week and a half later and saw Randall leaning against a nondescript car at the curb, he thought: Shit. The feeling of doom in the pit of his stomach intensified when Randall pushed himself off the car and came toward Dooley. He imagined that same look of smug satisfaction appeared on Randall’s lips every time he was about to throw the cuffs on someone.

“Another couple of weeks and you’re done here for the summer, am I right?” Randall said pleasantly. Dooley had to hand it to him—he enjoyed his work. “Step into my office a moment, Ryan,” he said, gesturing toward his car.

Warren came down the steps. He stopped and watched as Dooley walked to the car with Randall. Dooley tensed a little more with every step he took.

“Get in,” Randall said, opening—surprise!—the front door for him before circling around to get in behind the wheel.

Dooley glanced at Warren as he shut the car door behind him. Warren waited on the concrete walkway.

When Randall turned to Dooley, his face was somber.

“Ralston never showed up at his place to claim his stuff,” he said. “Wherever he went, it looks like he went in a hurry.”

Dooley waited.

“I checked out the team he was coaching. All the kids are ten and eleven, and not a single one looks like he could be mistaken for a fourteen or fifteen year old. I asked around. One of the Parks and Rec outdoor workers thinks maybe he saw Ralston with an older kid a couple of times. He described the kid as best he could. He didn’t know the kid but was pretty sure he wasn’t a park regular. Apart from that—” his shoulders heaved up in defeat—“maybe he’ll surface again. Maybe I’m kidding myself, but I like to think that guys like that always float back into view, kind of like the crap people throw into a lake or an ocean. Sooner or later, it always washes up.”

Maybe, Dooley thought. But if Ralston did come up high enough and for long enough to register on police radar, it would be because of something he had done. Something bad.

“Keep your nose clean, Ryan,” Randall said. “And do me a favor—don’t figure in any of my investigations ever again. You got it?”

Dooley nodded. No problem. He climbed out of the car and watched as Randall drove away. When he turned again, Warren was behind him.

“Is everything okay?” he said.

“So far, so good,” Dooley said, smiling.

Dooley stepped out of the elevator and, for once, bypassed Beth’s door and walked to the window at the end of the hall. The building was on an elevation, and even though Beth’s place was only on the tenth floor, still, it had a view of the city to the south, clear down to the water and, a little to the west, the downtown core.

Ralston was out there somewhere. Maybe not in the city. Maybe he was hundreds of miles away. Maybe thousands. Dooley wished he’d said something back when Ralston had tried for him. Or that he’d talked Tyler into saying something, maybe even gone with him to back him up. For sure, it would have stopped for Tyler. It might even have put an end to Ralston.

But he hadn’t done that.

And now Ralston was out there again, trolling for another kid that no one else cared about. A kid like Tyler.

He heard the ping as the elevator doors opened behind him, but he didn’t turn around until he heard someone say, “Ryan?”

It was Beth’s mother, two plastic shopping bags hanging from each arm, a look of alarm on her face.

“Is something wrong? Isn’t Beth—”

“She’s fine,” Dooley said. He took the shopping bags from her. “She texted me a couple of minutes ago.”

Beth’s mother relaxed.

“I was just ... just looking at the view.”

Beth’s mother unlocked and opened the apartment door.

“Hello?” she called.

“In here,” came Beth’s voice.

Dooley set the bags down and pulled off his boots. He picked up the bags again to carry them through to the kitchen.

Beth was where she always was when Dooley came over after school. She was in the dining room, her school books spread out around her, a laptop computer open in front of her. She’d quit going to school. It was too hard, she told him, being around all those people, knowing what they had thought. Her mother hadn’t argued with her. She’d arranged for Beth to work from home for the last few weeks of school and for Beth’s teachers to grade her work. Dooley smiled at her as he passed her with the bags of groceries. He set them down on the kitchen counter and then went back through to the dining room and wriggled out of his backpack.

“You’re not working tonight?” Beth said.

“No. But I’m on tomorrow night and the night after that.”

He sat down beside her. “What are you working on?”

“English essay.”

God, she was beautiful. She’d lost some weight and still looked fragile. And because she spent most of her time indoors, she was paler than usual. But all he had to do was look at her, and he could hardly breathe.

“I brought you something,” he said. He dug in his backpack for the envelope he had wedged between the pages of his math book for safekeeping. He opened it and handed her the small photograph inside. He’d found himself thinking about Lorraine last night—he didn’t even know why. The next thing he knew, he was thumbing through the old photo album he’d found in her apartment. Beth had never seen it. He’d paused when he came to a photograph—Lorraine, with Dooley on her lap, in one of those photo booths in the train station. He thought maybe ...

Beth frowned as she studied the photo. She glanced at him.

“Is this—”

He nodded. “Age four. Doing my thing. Point a camera at me, and I made a face—it was automatic. It drove my mother—” It felt funny saying that word, even now. “It drove her crazy.”

Beth looked down at it again, and a miracle happened. She laughed. It made his heart stop. It made her mother, busy putting groceries away, appear in the door to the kitchen. Her eyes went from Beth to Dooley, and she nodded.

“You were adorable,” Beth said.

“I was a pain in the as—in the butt.”

She ran a thumb lightly over the surface.

“Can I keep it?” she asked.

“Of course.”

She set it into the corner of her computer screen.

“Are you staying for supper, Ryan?” her mother asked.

Beth looked expectantly at him.

“Sure,” he said. “Thanks.”

Beth pulled her chair closer to his and laid her head on his shoulder. One of her hands slipped under his arm, and he basked in her warmth. She’d had him from the very first time he’d set eyes on her. She’d had him every day since. Now he knew that, no matter what happened, no matter how much things changed, she would have him for the rest of his life.