Eighteen

Bonnie and I went into the weekend pretending everything was fine.

She tried to put the death of Allison's mother out of mind. I made no mention of the lawsuit. And I continued to keep Bonnie in the dark about the blackmailer.

Rachel, however, did not pretend to be anything other than what she was, and that teacher had it right: sullen.

I couldn't count on Jack buying the boat so I posted the photos, a detailed description, and an asking price of eleven thousand dollars, on Craigslist. I was finishing up the process on the laptop in the kitchen when Bonnie, wrapped up in a bathrobe after her soak, walked in. Before she could see what was on my screen I hit the yellow dot in the upper left corner and minimized the page.

"What's up?" she asked.

"Just a dumb video."

My phone, which was sitting on the table next to the computer, dinged. A text. I read it quickly. Bonnie wore a who-is-it expression.

"Trent," I said. "Inviting us for dinner tomorrow. Burgers and beer."

While I'd known Trent for several years, we'd socialized little out of school. A few weekday lunches, but we'd never gotten together with our spouses. Bonnie had met Trent a few times through work, what with both of them being principals for the same school board.

"What do you think?" Bonnie asked.

"He's saying it's been a long week for all of us and maybe we need to kick back."

"What's his wife's name again?"

"Melanie. I've met her a couple of times. She's kind of a nervous flibbertigibbet."

"Boy, there's a word I haven't heard since God's bike had training wheels. Might do us some good to go."

I took a moment. I wasn't thinking so much that this was a chance to unwind, as it was an opportunity to pull Trent to one side and tell him about my situation. I had to tell somebody, and he might be my best option.

"But only if Rachel can come," Bonnie added. "I want to keep her close right now."

I got that. I tapped out a few quick words in reply and waited while the dancing dots did their thing. "He says sure. They've got a daughter, couple years older."

So it was settled. We were invited to come at five.

When Bonnie went back upstairs, I finished posting the ad. Then I went hunting online for anything I could find on Billy Finster.

There wasn't much, not even when I searched for "William Finster." Combing through social media and other sites, I managed to turn up a real estate agent out in Arizona who also handled time-shares, a special effects expert in Hollywood, an expert in unplugging toilets north of the border in Ottawa, and a Billy Finster on Twitter with two followers whose mug shot didn't look anything like my blackmailer. There was no local phone listing for a B or W Finster, but that wasn't surprising, since most younger people only had cell phones.

When I returned to school Monday, I'd search the office's stockpile of old yearbooks and see what more I could learn about this guy. I was looking for anything that might give me leverage, something that might give me an idea how to handle this.

Because I definitely needed some points on my side of the board.

The next day, Bonnie was behind the wheel, I was up front next to her, and Rachel was in the back, all of us on the way to Trent's house. Rachel was playing some game on her tablet that we had asked her to mute so we wouldn't be driven mad by relentless beeps and explosions. Bonnie glanced my way.

"You're pretty quiet today."

"I'm fine. Wrapped up in my own thoughts, I guess."

"You've been glued to your phone."

I'd been checking to see whether there'd been any nibbles on the boat. None so far.

"Wasting time, is all."

"I get why you're stressed. But is there anything else going on you need to talk about?"

"Not really."

"I've been wondering whether you should go for the counseling."

She was aware the board was offering it for those of us impacted by the LeDrew incident.

"I'm okay."

"You had another nightmare last night. You were kicking your legs, like you were fighting off somebody. Do you even remember?"

I didn't.

"Really, I'm fine."

"Okay, then," Bonnie said, and nothing else was said until we reached our destination.

Rachel and the Wakelys' daughter, Amanda, who was ten, hit it off immediately. Amanda, it turned out, was into bugs. An aspiring entomologist. Amanda asked Rachel whether she wanted to come inside to see her beetle collection, which she kept in the garage because her dad didn't want any bugs—alive or dead—in the actual house. Rachel was uncertain at first. Like, really? Beetles? But once she was gone, we didn't see them again until it was time to eat.

We sat out back on their deck. We'd brought a six-pack of Modelo and some flowers Bonnie spotted at a roadside stand along the way. Melanie went into something of a tizzy trying to find the perfect vase for them.

"So nice to finally meet you," Melanie commented several times to Bonnie, as if she'd forgotten she'd already expressed the sentiment.

Trent had fired up the barbecue. There was a second one tucked up close to the house, no longer in use. Couldn't control the flame very well, Trent said, so he'd bought another one. While we waited for the new one to get hot enough to start cooking the hamburgers, Melanie invited Bonnie to join her in the kitchen while she pulled together a salad.

"You seem preoccupied," Trent said when we were alone. Bonnie wasn't the only one to notice.

"Kinda," I said.

"What you went through, something like that doesn't fade away in a few days."

"It's not that." Trent waited while I opened a second beer. "Let me bounce something off you. A hypothetical."

His brow furrowed. "Okay."

"This is between us. I haven't discussed this with anyone. Not even Bonnie."

Trent nodded his understanding of the conditions.

"Suppose you had a former student, someone you hadn't come in contact with for several years, actually maybe never taught at all, but you might have had some interactions with at the time. And now this kid—an adult—shows up out of nowhere and makes an accusation against you."

"An accusation."

"Yeah. A serious one. Life-altering. Career-destroying."

"Can you even give me an idea of the nature of the accusation?" A pause. "Hypothetically speaking?"

I hesitated. "Interfering with a student."

Trent raised an eyebrow. "Interfering?"

"Molesting. Sexual abuse. Hypothetically speaking."

Trent went quiet. He looked at the barbecue's temperature gauge. "Almost time to put these on," he said. He opened the lid, a wave of heat hitting him in the face, and took a brush to scrape down the grill while he thought about what to say next.

He put the lid back down and said, "Go on."

"Let's say this person offered to keep quiet in return for a substantial sum of money."

"How much?"

"Ten thousand."

"Not pocket change."

"What do you do?"

Thoughtfully, he said, "Whether there's any truth to the accusation might have some bearing on the issue."

"Does it matter?"

"What do you mean?"

"Even if it's unfounded, if it goes public the person's reputation will be ruined. There will always be people who believe it to be true. And for the record, it's not."

He glanced again at the temperature reading. "Why now? After all this time?"

"Guessing? He saw the news reports about Monday. Memories rekindled. Saw an opportunity." I managed a wry smile. "Who am I kidding? This guy's saying I assaulted him when he was on the Lodge wrestling team."

"The wrestling team," Trent repeated.

"I wasn't the coach, but I filled in some when he was away. Anson Reynolds was on that leave."

Trent did some recollecting. "His wife was ill."

"Right. A few us picked up the slack. This guy, I told him it wasn't me, that maybe it was somebody else. And, Trent, if somebody did do this to that kid, efforts should be made to find out who it was. Not just to save my ass, but to do the right thing."

"Not much can be done if it was Anson. He's dead."

"Still, be worth maybe asking some questions. I don't like smearing a dead guy more than anyone else does, but if that's what happened..."

"I don't see how someone could get that wrong," Trent said. "I mean, if it happened when you were, like, five or six or even a little older, you could end up accusing the wrong person. But we're not talking the distant past."

I told him I had thought about that, too. "Maybe it was Anson, and this guy knows it, so he's decided to go after someone else. He wants payback, and doesn't care who he gets it from."

"That's just not right."

I couldn't help but laugh. "No kidding. I didn't know whether to tell you. But I don't know that I can solve this on my own. I haven't told Bonnie for, well, a whole bunch of reasons."

"Can't you just give me a name, Richard?" Trent asked.

I hesitated. "I've already compromised you, telling you this much, that I'm the target. Let's say this kid—this man—really is a victim of someone. His coming after me could be the product of some very fucked-up thinking."

"You're giving him too much benefit of the doubt."

"Let me think on it. The thing is, like I said, an allegation like this, even baseless, could be devastating. I've already got one strike against me."

Trent cocked his head, like he knew what I was referring to. "The Lyall Temple thing," he said.

"I was vindicated, but you know there are people out there who still think there was something to it. A new allegation comes along, I guarantee that photo will resurface. Those who vouched for me at the time will start wondering, wait a minute, maybe he really was a little too friendly with that kid. It'll be two strikes. You'll have people with pitchforks and torches storming the school."

Trent was slowly shaking his head. "I want to say you're wrong, but I don't think you are. You try to control the narrative but you can't, and yet..."

"I've thought about talking to Bonnie's sister. But what if she believes the allegation, or at least isn't sure? I'm her sister's husband. Whose interests you really think she's going to care about?"

"Something about this," Trent said, more to himself than to me, "doesn't make any sense."

The glass door to the deck slid open. Bonnie and Melanie, a large salad bowl in her hands, emerged from the house. Melanie smiled and said, "Haven't you got those burgers on the grill yet? What on earth have you been talking about?"

Bonnie gave me a look that suggested she was wondering the same thing.