Chapter 4

Bellingham, Washington

Saturday to Monday, February 15–17, 2020

After a surprisingly extensive shopping spree, we spent the remainder of Saturday and all of Sunday getting Kyle moved in

and settled. After some discussion, we decided that, for the time being, the best place for the drum set would be in the far

corner of the garage, tucked in among Mel’s moving shelves of Christmas decor. That’s the part of the garage farthest from

the house itself and also from Hank and Ellen’s place next door. If he was going to be doing his drumming in the garage, and

since it’s generally icy cold in February, I added a space heater to our Kyle-related shopping list.

When we sold the condo in downtown Seattle, we had dragged some pieces of furniture from there to here. I’d been unwilling to part with two of the easy chairs from the family room, and they had been literally gathering dust in the garage ever since. I was glad to haul them inside and put them to good use in the guest room. The sixty-inch flat-screen TV from the condo had also ended up in there, perched on an oversize dresser. It had been sitting that way for a couple of months. I hadn’t exactly rushed out to get another cable box to hook it up, but now it was time.

I spent most of Monday in the uncompromising purgatory known as public education. Mel had made getting Kyle enrolled in school

sound easy. It wasn’t. Rather than simply walking him onto the campus and signing him up, we had to jump through all kinds

of hoops. As an eighteen-year-old, he could enroll without parental permission, but we had to be able to prove that he really

was eighteen and also that his residence would be inside district boundaries. The second matter was solved by a simple phone

call to the chief of police, who just happens to be my wife. The first was much more challenging and involved several difficult

conversations with Kelly and Jeremy. Since Kyle had been living with Jeremy, I tried him first. He quickly and unhelpfully

informed me that Kelly always handled all the “paperwork junk” and that I should ask her. My call to Kelly didn’t go much

better.

In the old days, Kelly used to be something of a daddy’s girl, but that counted for nothing when it came to laying hands on

Kyle’s birth certificate and school vaccination records. Right that moment, as far as Kelly was concerned, I was public enemy

number one, and considering everything that was happening in her life, that was to be expected.

Her initial response to my request was to say that she had no idea where those documents might be, but I didn’t buy that story for a minute. My daughter may be stubborn as all get-out, but she’s always been levelheaded. I knew she would never go off and leave important paperwork behind in a house that was about to be occupied by her soon-to-be-former husband’s new girlfriend.

I finally played my trump card. “Look, Kelly, I’m sure you remember how hard it was when you had to start from scratch with

a GED instead of a high school diploma. I know you’re pissed at me right now, and considering the circumstances, I can’t say

that I blame you, but we’re talking about your son’s future. Kyle either finishes his senior year here in Bellingham or he

can kiss his high school diploma goodbye. So how do you suggest we go about fixing this?”

For a good ten to twenty seconds the line went dead silent. At first I thought she had hung up on me again. Finally I heard

her sigh. “Okay,” she said, caving. “I can make copies and send them. Where do they need to go?”

I gave her the registrar’s email.

“What about his school transcripts?” she asked.

Kyle had previously managed to obtain those on his own. “They’re already here,” I told her.

“All right,” Kelly said. “I’ll have to leave work and go back to the apartment to get them. It’ll take about half an hour.”

Half an hour was a hell of a lot better than never. “Thanks,” I said. “Appreciate it.”

Even with the proper documents in hand, it took another two hours to get the job done, but eventually we prevailed. With Kyle successfully enrolled as a Bellingham Bayhawk as opposed to an Ashland Grizzly, we drove home with everything we needed: a class schedule, all required textbooks, an ASB—Associated Student Body—card, and even a parking permit. That’s something I never had when I was in high school—a parking permit. Back then, unlike Kyle, I didn’t have my own car.

Once back at the house it was time to deal with the television issue. In the old days, if you wanted a new TV set, you bought

one, dragged it home, plugged it in, slapped a pair of rabbit ears on top, and you were in business. That’s not the case now.

So after all the rigamarole of getting Kyle signed up for school, we came home and went to work getting the cable box and

TV set hooked up and working. We also connected to and initialized all preferred streaming services, both his and ours. Since

Mel had agreed to bring home takeout, at least I didn’t have to worry about dinner.

Kyle was a cheerful enough worker but not a talkative one. We had been dealing with various electronics issues for some time

when suddenly, out of the blue, he muttered, “She came on to one of my friends—to Gabe.”

Mrs. Reeder, my senior English teacher at Ballard High, was a killer when it came to faulty pronoun references. Pronouns aren’t

designed to stand on their own two feet. They’re supposed to refer back to the nearest noun. In this case, there wasn’t one,

so I wasn’t sure which “she” we were discussing, and I hadn’t the foggiest notion about who Gabe might be.

“Gabe who?” I asked.

“Gabe Lawson. He plays bass guitar in our band—the Rockets.”

“And who came on to him?”

“Dad’s girlfriend, Caroline. I mean, Gabe’s just a kid. He’s only a sophomore. They were getting it on, right there in our

house. The band was down in the basement hanging out. I came upstairs and caught them in plain sight, right there in the kitchen.”

“Caught them doing what?”

“They were all over each other. Her top was pulled up, showing off her belly, and her hand was inside his pants, feeling him up.”

My face must have registered shock. “Really?”

Kyle nodded. It was clear that he was still terribly upset by what he’d witnessed, but with that in mind, his sudden exit

from Ashland made a lot more sense.

“When was this?”

“A couple of days ago,” he answered. “Wednesday afternoon after school.”

“Did you think they were only making out or were they going to have sex?”

“Making out, I guess,” Kyle muttered uncomfortably, “but if I hadn’t shown up right then...”

I couldn’t help wondering if my old-fashioned terminology translated understandably into the current vernacular.

“Anyway,” he continued finally. “I didn’t know what to do, so I stood there like I was frozen. Gabe saw me and pushed her

away. When Caroline spotted me, she was angry. ‘What are you staring at?’ she demanded, like I was in the wrong, and she wasn’t.”

“What happened to Gabe?”

“He took off. He didn’t even go back down to the basement to say goodbye to the other guys.”

“Did you tell your dad about what had happened?”

Kyle shook his head. “I didn’t bother. As far as he’s concerned, Caroline can do no wrong. Anyway, it would have been my word

against hers. He probably wouldn’t have believed me even if I had, and I doubt Gabe would’ve backed me up. He was too embarrassed.”

There it was. The old he said/she said dichotomy. “You may be right about that,” I conceded. “People might not have believed

you.”

“I mean, like, you hear of this kind of thing happening with older men and young girls,” Kyle continued, “but I didn’t know it could happen to boys, too.”

“Believe me,” I said. “It happens.”

As a former cop, I know the statistics. In the course of their lifetimes, three out of ten girls will fall victim to a sexual

assault of some kind. For boys it’s more like one out of ten. If Gabe was under sixteen, the kind of behavior Kyle was talking

about constituted sexual assault.

“Exactly how old is Gabe?” I asked.

Kyle shrugged. “I’m not sure. Fifteen, maybe. He doesn’t have his driver’s license yet.”

“And Caroline?”

He shrugged again. “Twenty-five maybe? She’s a lot younger than Dad.”

“From what you’ve told me, it sounds as though Caroline might be a sexual predator, someone who preys on younger men. Those

sorts of offenders seldom limit themselves to a single victim. Is this the first time she made any overtures to one of your

friends?”

“As far as I know,” he said. “If she did, nobody ever mentioned it, at least not to me.”

“But they wouldn’t, now would they?”

Kyle thought about that for a moment. “Probably not,” he finally agreed. “But she’s always, like, you know, flirting with

the guys when they’re at the house, and that’s where we usually practice—down in the basement.” He paused before adding regretfully,

“At least that’s where we used to practice.”

“And that’s why you left—because of what happened to Gabe?”

Kyle sighed. “I thought if I was gone, he wouldn’t be hanging around the house anymore, and that would make it harder for her to lay her hands on him.”

“What happened next, after you saw them together?”

“When I went to bed that night, I couldn’t sleep. I stayed awake worrying about it, thinking it was all my fault. And I kept

wondering what I’d do if she came after me. That’s when I decided that the best thing for me to do was leave, but at first

I didn’t have any idea about where I’d go. The next day at school I finally hit on the idea of coming here. I left in the

middle of the night on Thursday while Dad and Caroline were asleep. I wanted to be sure I was across the state line before

they woke up and called the cops.”

He needn’t have worried too much on that score. Ashland cops might have taken an immediate missing persons report on an eighteen-year-old

runaway, but it was unlikely—if a report had even been called in, that is. As a local educator, Jeremy Cartwright might not

have wanted to call outside attention to his somewhat unconventional living arrangements.

“Good thinking,” I said aloud.

“Are you going to tell Grandma Mel about all this?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Do you have to?”

“Yes, I do. This is her house, too, and she needs to know the whole story. She’d already figured out there had to have been

something seriously out of whack at home for you to up and leave the way you did. That’s why she agreed right off that we

should let you stay.”

“I thought that was you.”

“No,” I told him, “it was definitely Mel, and believe me, we’re both lucky as hell to have her in our corner.”