33. Lance
Chapter thirty-three
Lance
The cop knocks on my door Monday morning just as I’m looping my tie. I open it and the key falls from where Jonny wedged it in the doorframe. I pick it up and hold it in my palm for a second before letting Van Hoek in.
She scans the studio with her cool eyes, taking in the empty liquor bottle on the counter. The apartment smells like a man who spent two days drinking himself into an early grave and only stopped when the bourbon ran out. My head throbs.
“Five minutes,” I say. “I was just heading to work.”
“It won’t take long.” She sits at the table. “This is also concerning Mr. Bishop.”
I go to the window. His curtains are drawn. They’ve been drawn for two days. “Second floor across the street, with his aunt. Nash is still in custody, right?”
“We have him for aggravated assault and battery against you and stalking. Our DA thinks we can make a strong case for premeditation.”
“Good.”
“But we need Mr. Bishop to pursue the matter in court.”
I stare at her. “You’re kidding.”
“We’ve tried reaching out. He seems resistant to pursuing the matter at this time.”
Of course he is. He wants it to go away. He wants all of it to go away—Nash, the charges, and me. “I’ll see what I can do,” I say, knowing I can’t do anything.
“One more thing.” She opens her notebook. “I know you were hoping we could connect Mr. Nash to the Cadwalader case. We can’t. He was arrested for drunk and disorderly and held overnight. He was released at 8:02 AM.”
8:02. By that time, Jonny was sitting at this table telling Van Hoek about Alice.
“So whoever killed Alice—”
“—is not Roger Nash. We’re still investigating.” She closes the notebook and stands. She looks at the room again—the empty bottle, the unwashed dishes, the dead roses. “Clean this up,” she says. “Jesus.” She leaves without saying goodbye.
I stand in the quiet apartment. The spice jars are gone from the cabinet. The shirts are gone from the closet. The sketchbook is gone from the desk. He left the roses, wilting in their glass.
I throw the bottle in the trash and run the roses under the tap, but they’re past saving.
I dump them too—and that’s when I see it.
A flash of green at the bottom of the bin.
The Kermit bracelet. He didn’t take it with him.
He threw it away. I stand there for a long moment.
Then I fish it out, wipe it dry, and close my hand around it.
I wash the dishes. I make the bed. None of this helps.
The apartment is clean and empty, and clean and empty is worse than dirty and alone.
I feel the guilt rising like bile. I led Nash to Jonny. Everything that happened—the collision on the sidewalk, the photograph on the door, the taser—that was my past reaching into Jonny’s present and trying to destroy it. And then, when he was at his most vulnerable, I attacked his mother.
His mother. I stood in a room and said those things about a woman who has been dead for ten years, to the son who buried her. Parentification. Free childcare. Elliott. I said the word abuse to him about his own mother.
I think about how I’d feel if a man said that about my own mother. Somebody standing in my kitchen taking her apart, telling me what she really was, explaining my own childhood to me with his hand on my arm.
I would put him through a wall.
I’m a horrible person.
When I get to work, Joe looks pointedly at the clock.
“Has he noticed?” I whisper.
“Not yet. But I wouldn’t push it.” He looks me up and down. “You okay?”
“Bad headache.”
He looks like he wants to say more. He doesn’t. I slide past the desk into my office and close the shutters against the light. Two pills, dry-swallowed. Today is going to be a slog.
But there is something I have to do first.
I spend the best part of an hour on it, which is fifty-five minutes longer than I have ever spent on anything to do with my own head. Most of what comes up is useless—wellness centers, life coaches, a man with a website in three shades of lavender who wants to talk about my inner child.
Then I find one. Gregory Elion. Office on Third. Combat trauma, complex PTSD, some combination of EMDR and other things I don’t understand yet. I read every review twice.
I pick up the phone and put it down again. Then I pick it up and dial before I can stop myself, and a receptionist answers.
“I need to talk to somebody,” I manage. “I hurt a man last week and I’m not sure I could have stopped.”
She doesn’t miss a beat. “When would you like to come in? We have a cancellation on Thursday.”
“I’ll take it.” I don’t ask for a time that works for me. All times work for me. I don’t care.
I write it on the back of my hand like a coward, where I can’t lose it and can’t pretend I didn’t.
There’s a knock on my door. Rex Harlow peers in without waiting for an answer. I pull up a spreadsheet.
“There you are, hard at work,” he says. “May I?”
He settles into the chair across from my desk and folds his hands across his chest. “I wanted to discuss that nasty business over the weekend.”
“It was pretty bad,” I say carefully.
“But your quick thinking averted a serious problem. If there had been an incident concerning Mr. Bishop, especially after the warnings we were given—”
“Warnings, sir?”
He looks at the closed door. “Confidentially, there was an anonymous tip-off from a friend of Mr. Nash’s in Asheville who said he’d formed an unhealthy fixation on Mr. Bishop. We passed it along to campus security, but—” He spreads his hands. “These things are hard to act on preemptively.”
I stare at him. Seven minutes. That’s how long it took from the moment Jonny disappeared behind that curtain to when the police arrived. Seven minutes in which, if I hadn’t followed him, Nash would have had Jonny alone, backstage, with no witnesses.
“You knew,” I say. “And nobody told us.”
“It was a possibility, not a certainty,” Rex says smoothly. “Nevertheless, you were cool under pressure. I’m really proud of you, son.”
Son. There’s that word again. The same word he used with Jonny in the classroom. Just a verbal tic, I tell myself. Some men call everyone son. I keep my face still so that I don’t betray my rage.
“Has anyone told Mr. Bishop about the tip-off?” I ask.
“I don’t think so. That would be a matter for the police, not for us.” He straightens. “Are you ready for our lunch? In the light of everything that happened, we have a lot to talk about when it comes to your future here.”
“Do we?”
He looks pained. “There were some…unfortunate allegations about excessive force that we should discuss. Nevertheless, I believe—and I’ve said exactly this to the Chancellor this morning—that your actions were more than justified.
Now, the country club has a fantastic lunch,” Rex says.
“I’d be honored if you’d be my guest.” He leans forward.
“Have I ever told you about my double eagle? Hole seven at Meadowbrook. Most beautiful shot of my life.”
I look at my desk drawer. The Kermit bracelet is not in there. It’s in my jacket pocket. He threw it away—after ten years, he threw it away—and I’m the one who couldn’t let it stay gone. I’m not sure what that says about either of us.
I won’t chase him. But I look at the man across my desk—the man who knew Nash had fixed on Jonny and sat on it, who let him walk backstage into seven minutes alone; who calls me son and once wired twenty thousand dollars to a single mother to make a boy disappear; and who is, I am increasingly sure, three feet and a golf trophy away from a woman with her skull caved in on a boathouse floor.
Nash is cleared. Whoever did that to Alice is still out there, and my best guess signs my paychecks every two weeks.
I can’t guard Jonny anymore. He won’t let me.
I can’t even make him press the charges that would keep Nash in a cell—he wants all of it gone, and I have to stand here and let a thing I hate happen.
But this, I can do. I can sit across a table from this smiling son of a bitch and let him think I’m grateful.
I can get close enough to know exactly what he is—and if he is what I think he is, close enough to make him pay for every piece of it.
It isn’t letting go. I know that even as I tell myself it is. It’s just the only way I’ve got left to stand between Jonny and the thing that’s hunting him.
“I’m looking forward to it,” I say.