Fourteen

This couldn't be happening.

I went into the house in a daze, unable to get my head around the situation I found myself in. On Monday I felt myself perched on the edge of the abyss. Now I felt as though I had fallen in. I felt light-headed, almost dizzy. Like stepping into traffic without looking and having a car whip past you at sixty miles per hour, missing you by inches.

I was shell-shocked.

I wandered into the kitchen, still too fazed to consider my options. I went to the fridge for some vodka and soda and made myself a drink. Downed it and made another. I had to settle my nerves before I began to think about how to handle this.

Ten thousand dollars. By Tuesday. Four days from now.

It was ridiculous. Of course I wasn't going to pay this man off. It was unthinkable.

Right?

I wouldn't do it. Someone I don't remember accuses me of something I didn't do, and I'm supposed to hand over ten thousand dollars to him? Of course not.

And when I refused to comply, what would happen? I call his bluff. Would he really go public? Would he go to Trent? The police? The media? He'd be running an enormous risk if he did. Wouldn't I then tell the world that he was nothing more than a common blackmailer?

Of course I would.

And people would believe me.

Except...

What proof did I have? I didn't have our conversation recorded. There were no witnesses. It had just been the two of us. My word against his. Not only the conversation, but what he was alleging had transpired years earlier.

Shit.

None of this was as simple as it looked. When it came to an allegation like this, it didn't matter whether there was any truth to it. Once it was out there, once it was public, it could finish you. Even if your accuser could eventually be discredited, charged, tried, and convicted of blackmail, there'd still be those who believed there was something there, some kernel of truth. Just because someone's an extortionist doesn't mean his story is bogus.

I could think of half a dozen celebrity cases to prove the point. That guy who made all the funny movies. That congressman from Florida. Convicted in people's minds, even if never in a court of law. And for a teacher, well, the stakes were even higher. The rumors would be enough to end my career. They'd follow me for the rest of my life.

Again, Shit.

This could do more than finish me off. It could destroy Bonnie. It would scar Rachel.

How would Bonnie be able to continue overseeing a school, to hold a position with that level of authority, with her husband accused of molesting a student? I could imagine the attacks on her already.

If you'd cover up for your husband, you'd cover up for your staff.

If you didn't know, you should have. And if you did, you shouldn't be in any job where you're working with kids.

Yeah, she'd be finished.

Rachel would be teased, ridiculed, tormented. We'd have to move her to another school. Or worse. We'd all have to move to another town, start over, find new, different jobs. And what if the accusation prompted an investigation that could remove Rachel from our home?

The potential fallout was immeasurable.

I was giving myself a nervous breakdown, imagining the various possible scenarios.

So then, what if I did pay him?

He'd made it sound like he was looking for a onetime payoff, but what was to stop him from coming back for more? I'd have to find a way to get money I didn't have. If, at some later date, his extortion became known to the police, the big question would be: Why did you pay him off if you weren't guilty?

If only he could step in front of a bus between now and Tuesday.

Maybe, just maybe, if I hadn't dodged a similar bullet three years earlier, I'd have told him to fuck off, taken my chances calling his bluff.

But there was the issue of Lyall Temple.

He was a thirteen-year-old kid in my ninth-grade English class. Small for his age, barely five feet tall, freckled, with reddish brown hair. And he was, whatever this word means these days, gifted. The only one in the class who'd read Moby-Dick, and that included the teacher. He devoured books the way his classmates went through pizza. He took oboe lessons. He collected vintage SF digest magazines like Analog, Galaxy, and Asimov's Science Fiction. He had at least fifty different models of robots from movies and TV shows. He could multiply three figures by two figures in his head. I once saw him solve a jumbled Rubik's Cube in under a minute. He was quiet and hard to read emotionally. Not a demonstrative kid.

Lyall was an original, and I had some familiarity with his sense of being an outsider. When I was his age, I didn't feel that I fit in. Few of my contemporaries shared my obsessive, albeit passing, interests in Ed Wood movies, or the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, or real-life sightings of UFOs.

But my heart really went out to him when his father, coming back from a business trip in Buffalo, was cut off by a tractor-trailer on the New York Thruway and went into a bridge abutment at seventy miles per hour west of Albany. He died instantly. He was forty-nine.

Lyall was off school for more than a week. There was a funeral, of course, which Bonnie and I attended. When he returned, he tried to act as though nothing had happened. He'd never been one to show his feelings. He was quiet before, and he was quiet now.

At the end of one class, he came to me as I sat at my desk and asked what assignments he needed to get caught up on. I told him not to worry about them. But he was insistent. I was going through my lesson planner, looking for a couple of token things he could do that would make him feel better, when he whispered something to me.

"I heard them say his brains were on the windshield."

I put aside my lesson planner and shifted around to face him. He was a dam ready to burst.

"I'm so sorry, Lyall."

Still whispering, he said, "It's in my head."

"It'll take time," I said. "You're a strong kid. But holding it together is hard. You may have to let it out sometime. You can't keep everything bottled up. When you get home—"

His arms went around my neck and he began to sob. Instinctively, I put my arms around him. Held him. Felt his body shake.

My door happened to be open, and it was at that moment that Evan Hayle, an eleventh-grade student and a true shit if there ever was one, caught sight of my attempt to console Lyall, fired off a couple of quick shots with his phone. Within minutes he had shared it online with the comment How to get an A from Mr. Boyle!

My face was clearly visible in the shot, but Lyall, visible only from behind, could have been anyone. It was the next morning when I learned how widely the picture had been distributed. It had gone viral, at least within the Lodge High School community. And as it spread, it garnered more salacious comments. Mr Boyle LOVES his kids and Boyle's Butt Boy and Gives new meaning to sucking up to the teacher were some of the milder ones.

It was another student who brought it to my attention the following morning. I was seething with anger, not so much for myself but for Lyall. What a cruel thing to do to someone who'd already been through so much. Trent had me come down to the office, said he was already getting calls from parents wanting to know what the hell was going on.

It got cleared up, eventually. Lyall himself told Trent what had happened. Evan, tracked down as the culprit, said he was only goofing around, that he didn't know it was Lyall, claimed to not even be aware that Lyall's father had died. He was suspended for a week. The dust settled, the truth came out.

That didn't stop people I didn't even know, for some time, from giving me the side-eye. At the grocery store, the gas station. Not everyone got the follow-up memo. Which was why I was struggling with what to do now. I could stand fast. Let this son of a bitch go public. State my denials, fire back with accusations.

But something always sticks. Especially when there's a history.

I needed to talk to somebody. Bonnie would normally have been the most obvious, logical one, but this shit couldn't have come at a worse time.

My personal entanglements, despite the best of intentions, had consistently backfired. That episode with Lyall. That kid who stole my wallet. And most spectacularly, my near-death experience with Mark LeDrew.

Add Billy the Blackmailer to the list.

It wouldn't matter that it wasn't my fault. It'd be one more stupid mess I'd gotten myself into, as far as Bonnie was concerned. And what if, somehow, I was to blame? I certainly hadn't abused this guy in the way he'd alleged, but you see a thousand students in your time and make more than your share of mistakes. Had I wrongly accused him of cheating on a test? Given him a D when he'd earned a B in some class I couldn't recall?

There was another reason not to tell Bonnie. The professional one. Considering her position, was it fair to involve her? Could this blow back on her if this whole mess ever did become public, and she had to admit she'd known about it from the beginning?

And, really, did I want to have to sit Bonnie down and tell her what someone was alleging I'd done?

There was her sister, Marta. A police detective. Could I tell her? Would she believe my side of the story, or be more concerned about how this would affect Bonnie?

A lawyer, maybe. Or Trent. But I'd be putting him in a tough spot, too.

God, what a clusterfuck.

Was paying my blackmailer the worst option, except for not paying him? And how would I go about it? Bonnie and I had joint accounts. She kept a close eye on where the money went.

A lot of people might think ten thousand dollars doesn't sound like a lot, at least when it comes to blackmail. If this were a movie, or if I were a politician in the real world, any extortionist worth his salt would ask for a hundred thousand, maybe a million.

But this wasn't the movies, and I wasn't running for office. For regular people, ten grand was a fair chunk of change, no question, even for Bonnie and me, and we both had good jobs and a house and two cars in the driveway. But we'd just paid off the mortgage on that house, scraping together most of our savings to make it happen. We'd had to redo the roof five months earlier when a powerful storm swept through Milford and ripped off half the shingles. And then there was that three grand I gave to my cousin Stan without running it past Bonnie first.

We were not, at this point in time, awash in cash. Banks didn't typically extend loans to blackmail victims.

But I did have one idea.

The boat.

I could sell the boat. I didn't know what it was worth, exactly, but surely it would bring ten grand. I'd kept it in good shape. The fifty-horsepower outboard was well maintained. I had all the service receipts. I could do some quick research on its value, post ads online. But how quickly could I sell it? I had a deadline that was only four days away.

I heard a car pull into the driveway.

Bonnie.

I'd been so preoccupied I'd forgotten to go for Rachel. I came charging out the front door before Bonnie had her seat belt unbuckled. She had the door half open as I raised a hand and walked past.

"Hey, hold up," she said.

"Just going for Rach."

"I'm sorry. I got your text and never got back to you. I had a bitch of a day."

She looked, as she sometimes liked to say of me when I'd had a rough one, like she'd been ridden hard and put away wet. Her face sagged, her eyes were dark. I opened the door the rest of the way for her. Getting out seemed to take every ounce of strength she had.

"What happened?" I asked.

"Allison."

It was all she had to say. I knew the backstory.

"Her mother died. Overdose. Marta came to the school. We had to get the girl's aunt to come down from Hartford."

"Oh honey, I'm so sorry." I took her into my arms.

She shook her head slowly. "What some of these kids have to deal with. Fuck."

"I know," I said.

She gave me an apologetic look. "I'm sorry. Your text. First day back. How'd it go?"

I couldn't, for a moment, recall why I'd texted her. It had been about the LeDrews' decision to sue me. If there was any upside to being blackmailed, it had made me forget Mark LeDrew's parents considered me somehow culpable in the death of their son.

"Great," I said. "Just great. I just wanted to let you know everything went just fine."