CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
JAMES COULDN’T STAND THE SIGHT of the lucent New Years streamers in the Common Room. Knowing Elliott almost lost his life, his best friend nearly taken from him, suffocated with cuts and bruises, made James retch until his head cleared.
The barren campus was Soviet gray outside the solitary buildings and abandoned athenaeums in early January.
The desolate fog conjured itself through desiccated trees, skeletal leaves, and hoary mountainside that thickened with lumber freight trucks and rusted road salt trucks.
There was no one on the muted college grounds that existed to him.
The earth was deathless and stilled, a tundra of wind and sleet, hardened and sterile to him.
He barely made it through his speech in front of Congressman Pittman and his staff.
All he could think of was Elliott.
James thought of how he didn’t mind the mornings where he brushed his teeth next to Elliott in the dormitory sink.
He didn’t mind waking up next to Elliott’s nest of riotous bed hair, and his watercolored eyes that crinkled at him in a lazy smile beside him.
He didn’t mind shaving his jawline with a straight razor while Elliott tamed his waves with pomade in the mornings.
With a thread of pain, he realized that the three years of college spent with Elliott had been the best years of his life.
During his inarticulate speech, he compared paired swans to the State of the Union Address, and then he rambled a comparison of intimate friendship to the laws of nature, all while Congressman Pittman gave him a gaze of complete perplexity.
Hesitantly, his head of staff told him they’d be in touch. Mystified.
However, by the first week of January, James needed to concentrate for an entirely separate reason.
He was under investigation for the disappearance of Lucien Claude Montclair.
Before even the end of December, the Montclairs immediately reported Lucien missing after forty-eight hours when he was absent from the financier meetings for his father’s 40th Philharmonic Orchestra Philanthropy Reception. A fucking financier meeting for a philanthropy reception.
James endured a nineteen-hour interrogation with two state detectives from the State Bureau of Investigation.
The men were a pair of plain-clothes detectives without the affinity and familiarity for James that Sheriff Sangerfield favored him with through the Yule midwinter festival of ale and mead.
I’m sorry as hell to bother you through the Yuletide, James.
I only have a few questions. Keep in mind–you’re only a person of interest, you’re not a suspect, alright?
The Montclairs contacted the state department.
The SBI detectives wanted to wear him down into a confession. They wanted to know where James had disposed of Lucien’s body. Did he put it in a dumpster? Was Lucien rotted underground in the national park?
James maintained a curated expression of puzzlement. Why would there even be a body at all? What made anyone think Lucien was dead?
The detectives informed him that due to the prior stabbing of Lucien Montclair in October, it had escalated from a missing person’s case to a murder investigation.
The detectives scheduled to meet with James for the tenth time tomorrow at seven in the morning.
The entire The Paean of the Villains of Winter production readily provided statements that confirmed James’s alibi that he had been on stage at the time of Elliott’s murder and Lucien’s disappearance.
However, the Montclair family hired private investigators to examine the disappearance of their son, and already, James heard the distant engines of the PI sedans that followed him everywhere like flies on shit.
James had not been charged or indicted.
His alibi had been practically ironclad.
Practically. Any breakthrough evidence could change his luck at any moment. He trudged through the freezing campus snow, past the atramentous academic structures that were trimmed in ice and garland, until he entered Winterthur Hall.
Kitty threw her arms around him before he even shut the door to his dormitory room. “How is he? Is he okay?”
She kissed him. Her lips warm against his frozen cheekbone.
James nodded. “He’s alright. Knox has been keeping his eyes on him.”
Their method of communication was absurdly complex.
Elliott and James didn’t directly correspond at all.
It involved telephoning Knox from a secluded rest stop diner on the end of the freeway in nearby New York with the telephone call connected to an empty rest stop diner in rural Oklahoma, where Knox would relay, never mail, any information.
James kept his end short, under five minutes, but he always asked after Elliott.
If Elliott was eating. If Elliott remembered to drink water.
If Elliott was taking his medications. He asked if Knox could check on him between the hours of midnight and three am—every hour at least. If Knox’s wife could slip sleeping pills into his dinner.
A sensation of guilt punched James between his thoracic cage. After all, Elliott thought he was getting better all on his own. Elliott believed he slept five hours a night by himself because of his inner strength. Five hours wasn’t much, but it kept him alive.
James was grateful for the invention of high-dosage doxylamine.
However, he didn’t want to worry Kitty with any of it. She already needed to pretend she was in a state of severe depression and mourning.
Which was why he picked her up for grief counseling every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Afterwards, they grabbed fries and a milkshake. As though to regain a sense of post-funeral normalcy in their lives.
At Milton’s Milkshakes, Kitty dipped her fry into his milkshake. “Is he scared?”
She had on her ear muffs and an ice skating skirt. She was bouncing her knee, anxiously. She kept tucking her hair behind her ears, which tangled her tight curls in the earmuffs. She reminded James exactly of Elliott. She couldn’t sit still.
She even bit her lip the same way as him.
“Is he staying up all night?” She asked.
“No. He’s sleeping enough.” That much was true. Knox only had to restrain Elliott every couple of nights, and his wife would increase the dosage right after. The Pearsons had no neighbors, but they were under surveillance.
If it wasn’t for the newborn, Knox’s wife would’ve divorced him.
However, Knox felt the weight of taking a man’s life at a young age and he made his reparations through sheltering Elliott.
Due to the private investigators, Elliott couldn’t be seen from the outside, so the Pearsons converted the garage to a window-less guest bedroom and the baby slept with them.
Elliott showered in the make-shift tub in the nursery where no one could inadvertently catch sight of him.
He ate his meals in the garage when Knox worked on his tractors there.
“Is he happy there?” Kitty’s eyes watered.
“He’s alive. That’s all that matters.”
“Are you sleeping well…” She twisted her lip as if searching for the right words. “Without him?”
A waitress served another fresh basket of hot, salted fries.
He burnt his tongue with a fry. “I sleep fine at night. Why do you ask?”
“You seem…afflicted. Your hair. You’re clothes.
Your eyes.” She watched him barely eat their shared dinner of king-sized hamburgers and fries.
He kept glancing at the payphone hanging on the wall as though he wanted to call to check in on Elliott.
“You seem fine whenever the Lucien Montclair news is on the television. However, when I mention Elliott, you start to get agitated without him.”
“I am not agitated.” James frowned, releasing his stern grip on his fork, picking up the menu instead.
He didn’t even like milkshakes. He just had to be seen with milkshakes by the private investigators, which was why he gave most of his drink to Kitty.
He was not raised with fattened hamburgers.
James needed to appear like a personable, caring young man.
A loving man looking after his late friend’s little sister and making sure she enjoyed small things in life as she picked up the broken pieces.
Milkshake and fries. Grief counseling. Ice skating at the park rink.
“Did you still want to watch the anniversary of Cruel Women?” He asked.
“Do you mean Mean Girls?” Kitty had no idea how he wasn’t fifty years old. But she couldn’t concentrate on a film. She nibbled on a fry instead. “What did the police want?”
“What?” James lifted his head from the menu. He glanced around at the swarms of diners, the rollerbladers that filled their gullets with grease, the teenagers that awkwardly flirted on their first dates. The tired parents with infants.
“Everyone saw the police search your dorm room for the second time. What did they want?” Kitty asked, oblivious she was sharing an order of hot fries with a killer.
“Nothing. They’re hung up over the October incident.”
Kitty sipped his milkshake. As soon as he felt the private investigator’s eyes on him, as though the investigator could hear their conversation, he finished the milkshake after her. He had other matters on his mind.
She was right that he wasn’t disconcerted over Lucien.
He was composed. That was exactly what made the SBI detectives suspicious of him. Even though they had no hard evidence, no eyewitnesses, and no statements otherwise, James was too at ease with the discussion of manslaughter. He didn’t flinch. He never grimaced.
He remained unfazed, bored even.
He was a murderer and they’d been in the presence of countless murderers. He had the aura of one. There was simply no human body to force him into a criminal trial.
There was no murder weapon.
Without a murder weapon, without a body, there was no case.