Chapter 18 #2
PT had decided he would not speak to anyone until he knew if it was true. He canceled class to drive to the lake and dig. He dug and he dug and then, he hit bone. He fucking found her. Not all of her. But a piece that was most definitely human. He drove back to campus in a daze.
“He wanted us to be men and own up to everything,” Henry says with this stunned, distant look in his eyes, like he is remembering something from a very long time ago. “He wanted to know how Emma knew about this and why the fuck she would choose to write about it.”
I find I am regarding Henry with anger, with disgust, but not necessarily for what he’s done.
I resent that he is telling the story in a way that forces me to pepper him with questions, like some kind of wide-eyed damsel tied to the train tracks, like a female character written by a man not that long ago. “But how did she know?”
Henry taps out an irregular rhythm on his knee, trying to decide how to answer. “She used to go out with Win, Corrine’s younger brother. Did you know that?”
I did not. But I should have. The tit-for-tat way they spoke to each other that night at the fraternity house. I was so focused on my own history with Henry that I could not see they had one of their own too. “So, what, Campbell told Win? And then Win told Emma?”
Henry stops tapping his knee. He goes very still and he holds my eye. “Emma knew because Campbell told her. Because he was fucking his brother-in-law’s mistress for the last year.”
I gasp. A sharp, stereotypical inhalation.
In a flash, I remember looking over at Emma that night at the fraternity house and finding she had reapplied a coat of lip gloss sometime between when we spoke to Win outside and when he took us to the room where Campbell was.
She was trying to look nice for him. And—oh my God.
Oh my God. That voice. Calling out to me on the lake.
I knew I knew that voice. “She’s here,” I say, and there is a pressure in my ears, a piercing whistle in my skull, like a kettle come to boil.
Henry sighs heavily, like he wishes he could tell me otherwise.
“What the fuck? What does she think happened to Campbell? What are we going to do?”
“I have it under control for now.”
My laugh is shrill. “You call this under control?”
“I went to see her,” Henry speaks over me, but he somehow manages not to raise his voice, to sound like the reasonable one.
“After I got you back here.” After I stripped you naked and tied you up, he cannot say, certainly not in the excessively calm tone he’s affected.
“I explained Campbell had to head back home unexpectedly and that I’ll take her to the train station so she can get back to the colleges in the morning. ”
I am irritable and impatient that I still do not understand. “But why would Emma write about this? Why would Campbell tell her about this?”
“You know what he’s like when he’s fucked up.
He blabs. He tells you things to keep you close.
He took Emma for a ride. One day he loved her, he was confessing his deepest, darkest secrets to her, he was leaving his family for her, the next he was dodging her.
She was hurt. She wanted to hurt him back. ”
Fine. Passable answer. Next terrible question. “Did PT die in front of you?”
Henry bows his head as though the answer itself is a holy one.
“He was crying. We were all crying. In one breath he would be gasping how much he hated us for letting him think Sarah had taken her own life, and in the next he would ask us what he was supposed to do now. If he was supposed to go to the police and send us away from our children, and if he didn’t, what kind of husband did that make him to Sarah?
” Henry stares into the black hole of hurt he created a long moment, looking lost and resigned to staying that way.
“It was late. He told us to go get a hotel. Get some rest. We’d have to figure this out, some way, somehow.
He’d have to talk to Emma. He had to see where her head was at, what she was thinking, just, how the hell to handle this. ”
“How could you leave him alone like that?” I am seething with disdain. “You knew he had a heart problem. You knew he had overexerted himself, that he had just had the shock of his life. You knew what would happen.”
Henry does not look away from me. He takes it—my judgment, my scorn. “It is one of two things in my life,” Henry says, “that I will never forgive myself for.”
I search the firelit contours of Henry’s face.
I thoroughly vet him. I think about our time at the lake when we were younger; only a few months before, Henry’s earthly axis had shifted.
I had chalked it up to more quotidian change.
Graduating college. Living together in all but isolation.
Not knowing what we were going to do with our lives and how we would make it work between us.
Henry had always been someone with control issues, but they had kicked up during our time here and turned our relationship untenable.
What he has told me has made sense of things.
It has a ring of truth to it. I’ve always wondered if that’s the phrase because it’s like searching for a ringing phone in a strange house with a long corridor of seemingly endless rooms. You get closer, the ringing gets louder.
The caller is persistent, the message urgent—they will keep trying until you pick up.
I am nearer to an answer; that much I am sure is true.
Henry clears his throat roughly. “After we learned he had died,” he says, “Campbell made this comment.”
I tense, knowing it will be bad.
“ ‘Two birds, one stone.’ ”
My insides slop around my stomach. “Because I would come back for the funeral?”
“He asked you to speak, for added insurance.” Henry fingers a loose thread in the faded needlework on a throw pillow.
Wraps it around his finger as many times as it will go, cutting off circulation and turning the top of his finger purple with trapped blood.
“That night that I apologized to you. You looked so surprised. Disappointed almost. Like you expected more of a challenge. But I needed a reason to leave while your hotel room was unoccupied. Campbell wanted to drug you right there, but I thought we could sort this out without you getting hurt. My hope was that I’d get into your room, find your laptop, just, make sure you hadn’t read it and recognized anything and then delete the thing and you’d at least be one less person we had to worry about. ”
The scuff marks at the base of my hotel room door. “You actually got in,” I say, astounded.
Henry says, somewhat wryly, “Not that it mattered. You were locked out of your account.” He presses the top of his finger, the one he has coiled in the pillow’s thread. It must be numb by now. It must be dead. “You keep telling me you’ve changed, but.”
“Some things still feel too hard for me to figure out,” I concede.
Again I test my braided black restraints, with more curiosity than fight.
They have a sharp, plasticky feel to them, like those clear heels that briefly came back into style and made my legs look a million miles long in red carpet photos.
“You spoke to someone,” I remember, “the day you came to my hotel room. You said to come back later. I thought it was maybe a hotel employee.”
“Campbell,” Henry says.
“But why come back later? He must have helped you get me to the car.”
“Because he was on a very short fuse. I did not want him knowing yet that I could not access your account, that I didn’t know what you knew.
He was panicked. I was panicked. I just said, okay.
I’ll bring you here. I’ll figure it out.
Every day, I went to shore, hoping, praying that would be the day I could recover your account.
When I came back and found the window popped out, I was terrified for you, Faye.
Campbell was coming undone.” He snaps the loose thread free of the pillow and I watch, with immense satisfaction, as his finger returns to its normal size and fleshy color.
When I look up, I find Henry’s eyes fastened on mine.
“For the record, Faye, I carried you out to the car alone. I told Campbell I didn’t need his help, because I did not want him laying a finger on you.
He kept saying it would take two people and I said will you look at her? ”
Jesus, you’re light, Campbell had said to me before we said goodbye at the dock. He had picked me up. He had weighed me.
A shudder jerks my shoulders and moves to tingle the top of my scalp.
I am thinking about speaking to Campbell outside the church, the way he held my bag for me and how warm that moment felt, and all the while he must have been looking at me as an impediment to blast right through.
“What’s going to happen when Campbell doesn’t come home? ”
“Corrine isn’t expecting him until Monday. When that doesn’t happen, I assume she will start calling around, and when no one knows where he is, they will look for him. What they find…” Henry takes a deep breath, as though envisioning their grisly discovery. “It will look like an accident.”
“Emma knows we’re here,” I remind him angrily. “Isn’t she going to wonder why you told her he was okay when he was dead? What if she goes to the police?”
“She won’t.”
“How do you know?”
“Because tomorrow morning, you are going to talk to her.”
I stare at Henry, agog. “About?”
“Her future. How talented she is. How much you would like to help her, but you are going to need her to keep quiet about some things.”
I am speechless a moment. Then I hit each note in an impeccable demonstration of a guffaw—high, and higher still. “Henry,” I say. “You’ve lost it if you think I’m doing that. You need to call the police. This has gone too far to try to cover up.”
Henry does not budge. “That isn’t an option.”