Sixty-Four

I had to force myself to look away from the lawnmowers and give Melanie a smile. I held out a hand and took the beer from her.

"Thank you so much," I said.

I couldn't look at Trent. I didn't want to look at Trent. All I could think about was how, when I first told him how Mark LeDrew had gone on about the "lawnmower man," Trent acted as baffled as I'd been. He pretended to have absolutely no idea who LeDrew might have been referring to.

And then there was what LeDrew's mother had told me, earlier on that evening when all hell broke loose. How Mark had been abused by someone at the school, someone he would only refer to as the "lawnmower man."

It was Melanie who'd mentioned that there was a summer when they'd hired Mark LeDrew to maintain their property while they were away. He'd been here. He'd been in this utility shed.

I exited the structure and started walking back toward the deck, getting ahead of Melanie. I took one sip from the beer and set it on the patio table. Bonnie could read my expression and see that something was wrong.

"What is it?" she asked quietly.

"We're leaving," I said.

"Why? What—"

"Richard!" Trent shouted. I glanced back, saw him coming out of the shed with the new barbecue brush in his hand. "Wait up!"

When Melanie reached the deck, I turned to her and with a look of apology on my face said, "I'm so sorry, but we have to go. Bonnie just got a text that Rachel isn't feeling well, so we're going to have to pick her up."

"Oh no, that's terrible," Melanie said. Trent was at her side now, an excessively jovial smile on his face.

"You're leaving?" he said. "I won't hear of it."

Melanie said, "Rachel's sick."

Bonnie, reading the signals, tried not to look confused, stood up from her chair, and played along. "That's right. We're so sorry."

"You must take the steaks home with you," Melanie said. "Let me wrap them up."

"It's okay, really," I said. "Enjoy. You can make it up to us next time."

I didn't think there would be a next time.

Bonnie and I made our way through the house, heading for the front door, Melanie and Trent trailing us.

"Why don't you bring Rachel back here," Trent suggested, his voice on the verge of pleading.

"I think she'll want to go home," I said.

We were out front now, by the car. Melanie, all smiles, giving Bonnie a hug as she got into the passenger side, expressing hope that Rachel would feel better soon, you know how kids are, they can be sick to their stomach and an hour later devour a hot dog, and while that was happening Trent was following me to the driver's side, trying to engage with me.

"Richard," he said with quiet urgency. "I think you may have gotten some idea into your head that's wrong."

I shook my head. "I have to sort some things out." I was behind the wheel now, turning on the engine. My window was down and Trent wouldn't give up.

"Please, come on, we should talk," he said. He leaned his head in so only I could hear him. "I know Rachel's not sick." And then, "What I did, I did for you."

Whatever the hell that meant, I wasn't waiting around to find out. The car was in reverse. As soon as Bonnie got in, I took my foot off the brake, backed out onto the street, and sped off.

Bonnie was clearly waiting for me to explain myself, and when I didn't say anything, she said, "Talk to me."

I focused on the road ahead. "Something's not right," I said. "I haven't quite put it together, but something's not right."

"What? Tell me?"

"When I get home, there's something I have to check." My mind was racing. "Something Stuart said." I paused. "If I find it, if I can clear this up in my head, I'll explain."

"And just for the record, you didn't hear from Rachel? She's not sick."

"She's fine, far as I know," I said.

"We could pick her up on the way home anyway."

"No, I have to do this thing. When we get back, you can go get her."

Bonnie decided she'd pushed hard enough. We were home a few minutes later, and once I had the front door unlocked, I gave the set of keys back to Bonnie and she drove off to Mrs. Tibaldi's.

I went straight to the kitchen, where we had a laptop on the counter, plugged in and fully charged. I disconnected it, brought it to the table, flipped it open, and brought up Chrome. I entered some key words into the search field to find local news video reports about what had happened at Lodge High School the day Mark LeDrew blew himself up.

Stuart's entire blackmail scheme was based on a false premise. He thought I was the one who had sexually abused Billy Finster. They'd been watching TV. The news item had come up, a shot taken from the street at a moment when I and other members of the staff had been out front, talking to the police.

Only one station had sent a video team to the school in time to catch a shot of us in person, in real time. It was aired by a Fox affiliate in Hartford. When I found the segment on the station's archived news items, I clicked play.

A woman was standing in front of the school, mike in hand. Across the bottom of the screen were the words school bombing averted. Captured in the footage were Marta and some uniformed officers. There was me, bandaged, a quick glimpse of Herb Willow. Ronny Grant was there, too, but they were all quick, almost impossible to recognize unless you already knew who you were looking at.

"It could have been much worse," the reporter said. "The would-be bomber, a former student whose motivations remain unclear at this time, ended up taking his own life, perhaps accidentally, but not before threatening to come into the school and kill an undetermined number of people. Police said..."

More general footage. A broad shot of the school. The woman talking into the camera.

"...from here we can see teachers and administrators from Lodge High, including some of the staff we believe stood up to the bomber and persuaded him not to come into the school. Much credit goes to this teacher here."

There was already a close-up on the screen of Trent, without any identifying information, like his name, at the bottom of the screen, but the second she said "this teacher" there was another close-up, again unidentified, of me.

That was how it must have happened.

Billy said something like "That's the guy," when Trent was on, but by the time Stuart looked, I was the one on-screen. And then he'd gone to Billy's high school yearbook and picked me out like someone in a police station's catalogue of suspects.

Trent was Billy's abuser. And Mark's, too. Maybe Billy had sloughed it off in a way that Mark couldn't. Billy hadn't shown up at the school with a bomb, and Billy hadn't blackmailed me. But Trent had done Mark a more serious emotional injury.

Shit.

I heard the front door open. I called out: "Bonnie! In here! I found it!"

When she didn't respond, when Rachel didn't come running into the kitchen, I knew something was wrong. I was getting up from the table when I saw Trent standing in the doorway. He was red-faced and out of breath. He must have hopped in his car seconds after we'd left.

"Trent," I said.

"I should have just said something at the beginning," he said. "When you told me Mark had been going on about a lawnmower man, I should have said, yeah, that was his nickname for me, and come up with a reason for why he had it in for me. But covering it up, that was my mistake, wasn't it?"

I stood there.

"It wasn't my only one," he said. "I should have gotten rid of the gun. I shouldn't have had it with me. Bonnie and her big mouth, telling me to give it to her sister. I'm worried that might be a problem. I haven't been able to sleep since that night, like waiting for the other shoe to drop. You have to understand, Richard, that what I did, part of it was for you. It wasn't fair, you being victimized that way by that Stuart Betz guy."

I didn't quite understand, but the tumblers were slowly falling into place.

"It made no sense to me," he said. "Why would Billy be going after you when you never did anything to him? Yeah, I believed you when you told me you were blameless, because it was me." He looked down to the floor briefly, sorrowfully. "After you told me you were being blackmailed, you came to the office looking for those yearbooks. I asked Belinda about it, she said you were trying to track down Billy Finster."

"You went to see him," I said slowly. "That night."

"I never meant... he had a gun. I found him in the garage and asked him what the hell he was doing, putting you through that ordeal, what was he thinking? He said he had no idea what I was talking about, and we know now he really didn't, but at the time... He grabbed the gun and started waving it around, threatening me, and what he didn't know was, I had my own. Ever since Mark came to the school, I'd been pretty freaked out, was carrying it with me everywhere I went."

"You killed Billy Finster," I said.

"I ended up doing you a favor," Trent said, and managed a wry smile. "I'm not expecting a thank-you or anything, but once he was dead, your problems kind of went away."

That prompted a laugh from me. "Oh yeah, they just vanished. Everything's been fucking great since then."

"I'm sorry," Trent said. "I'm sorry about all of it."

"How many boys were there?" I asked. "How many did you take advantage of? How many did you assault?"

He couldn't look me in the eye. "Not... that many. I tried to keep it under control."

I thought back to that fateful Monday, how Trent had tried to get into position to shoot Mark LeDrew.

"You wanted to shoot Mark," I said. "When you saw him, you had to have a pretty good idea what his grievance was. He had his list, but you had to rate pretty high on it."

"No," he said vehemently. "He could have killed all of us, if he'd had the chance. It wasn't just about me."

I thought I noticed some tiny movement, something out of the corner of my eye, on the floor behind Trent. It was there, and then it was gone.

"I don't recall you ever filling in to oversee the wrestling team," I said, taking a step closer to him.

"A few times," he admitted. "When you, or Herb, weren't available."

"That was when you assaulted Billy. Was that a one-off? But with Mark there was more, wasn't there?"

"He was kind of a lost kid," Trent said. "I tried to help him. I tried to boost his confidence. Took him under my wing. His father didn't give a shit about him. Had high expectations Mark couldn't begin to meet. The boy was looking for a father figure and I wanted to be that for him."

"You exploited that need."

"I know... I know what I did was wrong, but I was good to him. I... I gave him work. Paid him well for looking after our place that summer. I... I came back a few weekends, alone, when I knew he would be there. So I could spend time with him. Mentor him."

He said it like he almost believed it. I could guess other ways he boosted that boy's confidence. With free beer, maybe, video games, companionship. All to get what Trent actually wanted. I took another step in his direction. We were no more than four feet apart now.

"Does Melanie know?" I asked, "About your extracurricular interests?"

I saw that movement again. I saw what it was.

He shook his head. "I've been a good husband to her. I'm a good father."

"You're a parasite," I said. "You used your position of authority to exploit a student. Everything that's happened, all of it, finds its way back to you. Your abuse of Mark, how it tormented him and drove him to consider something horrific. The subsequent mix-up that led to my blackmail, to Finster's death, to Herb's. All of it has its seeds in your sickness."

Trent reached into his pocket and brought out a small handgun and pointed it at me. I was surprised to think the police had returned to him the weapon he'd let Marta use.

"It's not the same one," he said, as though reading my mind. "You know I like to have backups of pretty much everything."

"What's the plan, Trent? Kill me? Then Bonnie when she gets home? You going to kill Rachel? Will that cover your tracks? I doubt it. Like you said, you've been waiting for the other shoe to drop. When they connect your gun to Finster's death, it'll be all over."

Trent's hand was shaking, but the gun was still leveled at me.

The thing that I'd seen was now crawling up his pant leg. A weird-looking bug. A three-inch-long stick with long, slender legs. Some kind of praying mantis, I thought. Its long legs were taking it higher and higher. I remembered Ginny putting it into a jar for Rachel when we went to visit.

"It's mean to keep things locked up," she'd said. "They should all be set free."

"I could disappear," Trent said.

"If you're going to do that, you hardly need to kill me."

"I'd need a head start. A few hours."

"They'll find you," I said. "It's time to pay for your sins."

I stopped looking him in the eye, and instead focused on the creature that was nearly up to his belt. Eventually Trent would have to look, would have to know what had caught my attention.

"You were always a good friend," he said. "I don't want to have to do this."

I said nothing. Instead, I stayed focused on the praying mantis.

Trent finally had to follow my gaze. He glanced down at his side, saw the creature, and acted as I had hoped, and expected, he would. Rachel had told us how freaked out he was about bugs.

"Fuck!" he said, and swept his left hand down, swatting the bug, knocking it from his belt and to the floor.

I only had a second.

I charged him, grabbing him around the waist and bringing him down to the floor. I reached for his right arm, got both hands around it between wrist and elbow, and slammed it onto the floor once, twice, three times, before the gun shook loose from his hand.

I scrambled over him to grab it, landing on it as though it were a live grenade I was trying to save the rest of my unit from.

Trent scrambled to his feet, and instead of attacking me to get the gun back, he bolted, heading for the front door.

I didn't want to chase him with the gun. He was unarmed now, there was no need to shoot him as he fled. But I didn't want to leave it lying on the floor, either. I picked it up and quickly placed it on a high cupboard shelf, atop a stack of plates.

And then I ran out after him.

He was standing in the front yard, hands in the air. Marta's unmarked cruiser was at the curb. She was out of the car, standing by the front bumper, hands clasped around a gun she had pointed at Trent.

"Don't move, Mr. Wakely," she said.

Driving up the street and coming to a stop behind the cruiser was Bonnie. She got out of the car and was about to open the back door for Rachel when she saw her sister training a weapon on my boss.

We all heard a rumbling.

One of those huge dump trucks was making its way up the street, the driver taking a shortcut once again through our neighborhood between the construction site and wherever he was taking all that landfill.

Trent saw it, too, and when the truck was only two houses away he dropped his arms and darted into the road. His timing could not have been better.

The driver hit the bullhorn not a millisecond before Trent ran in front of the beast, the bumper knocking him down like he was made of straw. The truck didn't come to a full stop until the right front tire had rolled over Trent and ended whatever life might have been left in him after being hit by the bumper.

I ran to Bonnie, who was standing there, hand to mouth, eyes wide. I scooped up Rachel from the back of the car, pressing her head down onto my shoulder so she wouldn't be able to see what had happened, and then the three of us went into the house where we would start the hard work of getting our lives back to normal.

I was thinking, Trent was right. We needed a break. Maybe a trip up to the lake. We'd take the boat.