I Will Ruin You

Sixty-Two

“Another beer?” Trent asked.

I’d already had two and was okay for now. I was feeling, more or less, pretty good. The swelling on the right side of my face had shrunk and the bandages on my neck and forehead were gone. Bonnie was on her second white wine spritzer. Trent’s wife, Melanie, had just brought it out to her on their backyard deck. Bonnie took a sip and proclaimed it to be perfect.

So here we were again, gathered together early on a Friday evening in the wake of another catastrophic week. There had been a funeral that afternoon for Herb Willow. We’d all attended. His elderly mother was there, but it wasn’t clear that she had any real sense of what was going on, or even understood her son was dead. It was all very sad. Fortunately, she had a sister in Vermont who was going to either take her in, or arrange for her to be moved to a seniors’ residence up her way.

Trent had invited Bonnie and me over to talk about the future. Neither Bonnie nor I had been back to work all week, and Trent believed we both qualified for stress leave. At first I was inclined to fight him on this, but Bonnie had urged me to reconsider. I knew she wanted some time off. While she hadn’t been abducted at gunpoint, she’d been through a hell of a lot that night.

We all could have died.

This time, we’d offered to bring some steaks for Trent to throw on the grill, and Rachel had been left with Mrs. Tibaldi, once again, for the evening. Trent and Melanie’s daughter was at a friend’s house for a sleepover, so it was just the four of us.

“I’m feeling a little tipsy,” Bonnie said.

“I’ve been there for a while,” Melanie said. I wasn’t keeping track, exactly, but I had a feeling she was on her fourth spritzer.

“Maybe you should go away,” Trent suggested, firing up the barbecue. “Paris or someplace.” The steaks were sitting on the plate to the side.

“Yeah, well, that’s kind of costly,” I said. “Maybe something this side of the Atlantic. San Francisco or L.A. or San Diego. We could take Rachel to Disneyland. We’ve never been to the West Coast.”

Bonnie nodded. “We couldn’t go for long. Two weeks is about the max I’d ever want to take Rachel out of school. She can’t afford to miss any more time than that.”

Trent was scraping down the grill with a barbecue brush.

“You could get some lessons in advance,” Melanie said.

Bonnie shook her head. “What kind of trip would that be for her, and us, if we have to spend time doing homework? No, I’m not crazy about that. I don’t know. Maybe we just need some time at home, do things locally, go into Manhattan. See some shows, go to museums. Rachel would love that. Anything to make us forget, even for a while.” She looked at me. “If you can even do that.”

“Won’t be easy,” I said. “And there’s still things we don’t know, that we’re never going to know. Like, who really molested two—or maybe even more—Lodge students? Mark LeDrew’s mother said someone assaulted him, and Billy Finster was evidently victimized by somebody. He’d told Stuart Betz about it, and Betz used that story to go after me. Hate to speak ill of the dead, but I’ve wondered about Herb. Or maybe Anson. And there’s still Ronny, although I don’t have anything more than a feeling about him.”

“Ronny,” Trent said, shaking his head. “He’ll drink himself to death before the truth’s ever known.”

He had stopped scraping the grills and was now examining the barbecue brush. “The bristles are coming off this thing,” he said. “Last thing we want is little bits of metal in our steak.”

“Didn’t you buy a new brush?” Melanie asked him.

“In the shed,” Trent said. “I got half a dozen of them.”

Melanie looked at Bonnie and smirked. “Trent never fixes anything. He won’t even let things wear out. Battery dies in his watch, he buys a new one. Gets a hole in his sock and he throws it out.”

“Well, hang on,” Bonnie said. “Who darns socks anymore?”

Melanie turned to me. “Richard, are you sure you wouldn’t like another beer?”

“You talked me into it,” I said.

Trent said, “Back in a sec.”

He stepped off the deck and headed for a metal garden shed located in the back corner of the yard. I decided to accompany him. As we walked across the yard, I said, “I’m worried that if I take a leave of absence, in about a week I’ll be bored anyway and want to come back.”

“Maybe,” he said. “So ask for three weeks or something like that. Honestly, I think you should take the rest of the semester.”

We’d reached the shed. He slid a metal door to one side and we stepped in. It was crammed full of gardening and other implements. Various rakes and shovels hung from hooks on the wall. Two battery-operated weed trimmers. I was guessing one had conked out and Trent bought a backup. There was yet another barbecue in here, the lid and supporting structure rusted with age. Bags of fertilizer and topsoil. A wheeled spreader for distributing grass seed or weed killer.

And three lawnmowers.

There were two gas-powered ones tucked toward the back that didn’t look to have been used lately, and an electric one within reach. A coiled extension cord lay on the floor next to it.

My eyes were on the lawnmowers. I couldn’t stop looking at them.

“You know me,” Trent said. “Like Melanie said. Something breaks down, I just buy a new one. Gotta admit, I’m a bit of a hoarder. I never get rid of the old stuff. I have this delusion that one day I’ll get around to fixing it. Oh, here we go.”

He’d found the new barbecue brush, still in its cardboard packaging, the price tag still dangling from it, hanging from a nail tapped into the wall.

I wasn’t aware Melanie had followed us out.

“Here you are, Richard,” she said, and I turned around to see her standing there with a beer in her hand, beads of moisture bubbled on the cold bottle.

I guess she must have seen what had caught my attention and laughed.

“I guess it’s no wonder that sad boy was always calling Trent the lawnmower man.”