38. Jonny
Chapter thirty-eight
Jonny
The Suzannah Drumm Memorial Park is a strip of ground out where the Farley High school field used to be, and until about six weeks ago it was scrub and a chain-link fence.
Now it has laid turf you can still see the seams in, nine young oaks staked and guy-wired against a wind they aren’t old enough for, and a wall.
Four hundred folding chairs in rows on the new grass.
A stage at the front with a lectern and the university seal on it.
Cameras from three local stations. A white awning off to the right where the dignitaries are being given coffee in the shade, and at the edge of the crowd, two Virginia State Police troopers in uniform standing where they can see everything and doing absolutely nothing, because the Lieutenant Governor made the drive.
And the wall.
It’s low and long and dark, and there are thirty-one names cut into it, and Henry Drumm has spent two years raising the money for it.
Lance and I walk up through the October morning, and I can feel him vibrating with a tension he is not letting anywhere near his face.
“She’ll be here,” he says, for the third time.
“And if she isn’t?”
“Then we wait. We don’t do anything stupid.”
I look at him. “Define stupid.”
“Jonny.”
“I’m not going to do anything stupid.”
He gives me a look that says he doesn’t believe me, and honestly, I don’t blame him.
Rex Harlow is under the awning shaking hands with somebody from the Lieutenant Governor’s staff. He sees us and smiles—that controlled, benevolent smile. My father. The man whose jaw I wear. The man who paid my mother twenty thousand dollars and never came to find me.
He doesn’t come over. Of course he doesn’t come over.
Margaret Vane is in the second row. Bree and Jackie are somewhere behind her. Aunt Shelley texted that she’s running late. Lydia Drumm is at the end of the front row in a good coat, holding a program with both hands, and I have to look away from her.
Henry has put Lance on the stage with the speakers, because Lance is the other half of the photograph and Henry has never once passed up a photograph.
There are five chairs up there. Henry’s, mine, the university president, a woman from the county, and Lance, on the end, directly behind the lectern.
My phone buzzes on my knee.
Joe Ishikawa
Boss @ golf tournament @ Hilton Head on the day u asked about. Was a PITA about it for two weeks beforehand. Called the hotel. They have him on camera at breakfast + the 8th tee.
Sorry, can’t put him in jail for u yet. But if u ever need 2 push him down a well, I'm your guy.
I read it twice. Then I look over at the awning, at a silver-haired man laughing at something a stranger has said.
So he didn’t kill her. I don’t know why, but I’m a bit relieved about that.
I’m not a murderer’s son. I like those odds.
He’s just a man who did nothing for twenty-seven years and got away with it.
There’s no law against that, and there never has been.
My phone vibrates again.
Rita Cadwalader
Found it. Suzannah Clemmons-Drumm, October of that year. Alice, I don’t know how you did it but they’ve approved the whole twelve weeks. You have no idea what this means to us. S.
Us.
And then, thirty seconds later, from a number I have only had in my phone for three weeks:
Det. Morgana Van Hoek
Analysts confirm the object on the hallway floor is consistent with a human hand. Position consistent with where the body was recovered. He knew. We are on our way.
I turn the phone so Lance can see it. He reads it. He doesn’t say anything at all. He puts his hand flat on my back for about two seconds, and then he takes it away and sits up straight.
Henry takes the lectern and I have to control my rage.
He’s in a dark suit and tie, his silver hair combed back, his face composed into an expression of dignified sorrow.
He thanks the sponsors. He thanks the Lieutenant Governor for making the drive.
He thanks the Governor’s office for the proclamation.
He thanks the Phoenixes for their tireless advocacy.
He thanks Alice Cadwalader, whose absence leaves a hole in our hearts that will never be filled.
I watch him say her name and feel my stomach turn.
Then two men in coveralls draw the cloth off the wall, and thirty-one names come out into the light at once. Four hundred people make a sound I will hear for the rest of my life before bursting out into applause.
I don’t look for my mother. I don’t have to. I know exactly where she is, third from the left in the second row, because I have been looking at the plans of this wall on a website for three weeks like a man checking a seating chart for a wedding.
“Suzannah must surely be up there looking down on us today,” Henry says, when the sound has died away. His voice breaks with practiced emotion. “Sending her blessings to each and every one of you. She would be so proud of what we’ve built from the ashes.”
Applause. Somebody two rows back is crying. Margaret dabs her eyes. The cameras find Henry’s grief-stricken face and hold on it, and behind him, on that wall, with his wife’s name on it, is a park he has spent two years building for her.
I think about Suzannah Clemmons, twenty-nine years old, always coming or going in scrubs, who wrote to a woman in HR to say thank you and signed it from the two of them.
I think about Alice, who spent her whole working life making sure people got what they were owed, and who took a rock to the back of the head on a wet boardwalk because a man thought she was going to show me a video.
And I think about ten years of this man weeping into microphones about the wife he misses, second Sunday after second Sunday, while every one of us sat there and grieved along with him.
“And now,” Henry says, “I’d like to invite a very special young man to share a few words. Someone who has been on an incredible journey since that terrible day. Ladies and gentlemen—Jonny Bishop.”
I stand up.
I reach the lectern. The microphone hums. Four hundred people are sitting on folding chairs on new grass. Cameras are rolling. Henry sits down to my left with his hands folded and his face arranged into benevolent expectation, and Lance is directly behind him, where Henry cannot see him at all.
I could have given all of this to Van Hoek and let her take him on some gray morning with nobody watching.
But Henry has spent ten years making sure nobody watches—Suzannah under a wildfire, Randy under a bottle, Alice under a rock, and every single time the silence held.
A man like that does not fall to a whisper.
He has lawyers and a Lieutenant Governor and a community that loves him, and the second this becomes my word against his behind a closed door, I am the broken boy who ran and he is the saint who stayed.
There is exactly one place he cannot bury it, and that is out loud, on camera, in front of all of them.
So I am going to do the one thing I have spent ten years teaching myself to do in front of a lens.
I take a breath.
“There are many people we wish could be here today,” I begin.
“My mother, Angela Bishop. My brother, Elliott. My grandmother, Laurel. Eloise Jones. Martha Gillibrand, who fought cancer with the same grit she used to fight city hall.” A ripple of warm laughter.
“Randy Dare, who we lost too soon. Alice Cadwalader, who founded this society and gave it her heart.”
“Ten years ago, a fire tore through this community and took everything from us. Our homes, our families, our sense of safety. We were told it was a natural disaster. An act of God, beyond anyone’s control.
And for ten years we have mourned together and rebuilt together and trusted each other with the most fragile thing we have, which is the belief that we are all carrying the same grief. ”
I look at Henry. He is still smiling, and it makes me want to be sick.
“And yes, Henry. I believe Suzannah is looking down on us today.”
His smile deepens. He nods graciously.
“But I don’t think she’s sending blessings. I think she’s asking why you killed her.”
Four hundred people go absolutely silent. Somebody gasps. Henry’s smile freezes on his face like a mask that has been glued there.
“She was pregnant, wasn’t she.” I hold up my phone. “Twelve weeks of maternity leave, approved three weeks before the fire, signed off by Alice Cadwalader. But the baby wasn’t yours. It couldn’t have been. You told me yourself. You can’t have children.”
Henry gets to his feet. “Now, hang on—how dare you sully my dead wife’s name—”
Behind him, without any hurry at all, Lance stands up out of his chair.
“I always wondered why you were taking things out of Suzannah’s car and putting them into yours,” I say.
“Everybody else on that street was shoving things in as fast as they could. You were the only man in Fairhaven unpacking. You don’t leave belongings in a car you know is never going to be used again, do you? ”
“You are a deeply disturbed young man.” His voice is louder now. “You’ve been through an unspeakable trauma, and I think you need help—”
For a moment it works. I feel the crowd tilt toward him—the pivot from horror at Henry to doubt about me, the old reflex to protect the man who stayed over the boy who ran.
Margaret is looking at me like I am something breakable.
My throat closes, and every clean line I lined up scatters into static, and I am seventeen again, and quiet, and the kid nobody believes.
So I stop trying to sound like a lawyer, and I play my ace.
“It’s on film, Henry.”
He stops with his mouth open.
“Alice filmed the whole street that morning. You have spent three weeks doing everything you could to stop anybody seeing it, because you knew exactly what was on it.” I let that sit for a second. “The police have had it since Friday night. They found it this morning.”
Henry has gone the color of the cloth they just took off that wall. Nobody is looking at me like I might shatter anymore.
“And don’t take my word for any of it,” I say.
“Take yours. You put your hands on my shoulders in the gymnasium at Farley High that day. You shook me, and you begged me to tell you whether I had seen your wife.” It comes up whole—his hands on my arms, his frantic voice, that performance.
“You already knew exactly where she was. You were the one who left her there.”
“No. No, I didn’t—”
“Suzannah was dead before that fire ever reached Denning Court,” I say, “and you let the fire do the rest. You let every single one of us grieve her as one more thing it took from us.”
“What happened, Henry? If you told me it was an argument that got out of hand, I would believe you. She was going to tell you about the baby, wasn’t she? And when you worked out that it couldn’t be yours—”
Henry starts toward the lectern and Lance moves half a step and is simply there, between him and me, not touching him. Henry looks at his face and stops.
Four hundred people are frozen on folding chairs. Margaret’s hand is over her mouth. Lydia Drumm has stood up in the front row and nobody is looking at her.
“Do you even know who the father of Suzannah’s child is?” I goad him.
Henry loses what color he had left. He shakes his fist and looks down the row of speakers’ chairs. “This is your fault, Harlow,” he says. “You couldn’t be satisfied with your own wife, so you had to have mine.”
There is a gasp from the audience. Lance and I look at each other.
I look back at Henry Drumm, but he’s gone white.
There are three people coming up the side of the rows.
Both troopers have stepped away from the awning and turned to watch, and between them, taking her time, in no hurry whatsoever, is Detective Van Hoek with two uniformed officers behind her.
“Mr. Drumm,” she says. “I’d like you to come to the station with me, please.”
Henry looks at her. Then at me. Then out at four hundred people on folding chairs—the cameras, the Lieutenant Governor, the Phoenixes, the community he built on the ashes of his own crime.
“This is outrageous,” he says, and there is nothing behind it at all.
Van Hoek takes his arm.
He goes with her. He doesn’t resist. We watch in silence as he is escorted across the open grass of the park he built for his wife, in the middle of a Saturday morning. Nobody in that entire place makes one single sound.
I stand at the lectern in front of four hundred people and three television cameras. I don’t know what to say next. The speech I prepared is useless.
Lance comes down off the stage. He doesn’t come to the lectern. He stands at the front, in the aisle between the chairs, looking up at me, and waits.
I lean into the mic.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “That wasn’t the speech I prepared. But I think Alice Cadwalader would have wanted the truth more than she wanted a ceremony.”
I step down and walk to Lance and take his hand, and behind us, as we go, the silence breaks into noise.