“I’m not going to hit you,” I said.
“I just— I just, I don’t know why I did it.” He sobbed quietly. “I could have just made up the difference with my own money, you know? And thrown the shit out. I should have flushed it or something. But I was thinking... I don’t know what I was thinking.”
His shoulders began to shake. I raised my arms tentatively, then put them around him and pulled the boy to me. I held him close, tightened my arms around him as he wept into my chest.
I felt Donna watching me as I did. Felt it was what she would want me to do.
“Everyone’s done some pretty dumb things lately,” I said.
I felt him slip his arms around my back. “I hate myself,” Scott said. “I hate myself so much.”
We all hated ourselves these days.
Holding Sean, this boy about the same age and size as Scott, I could almost imagine he was my own. I remembered the feeling of taking him into my arms, of the father-son hugs we once shared.
If I forgave Sean, would I be forgiving Scott, too, for what he’d put us through? And wasn’t there less to forgive Scott for, anyway, than what I’d once believed?
“It’s okay,” I whispered again. “It’s okay.”
Because I no longer believed Scott jumped. I knew, in my heart, he was pushed.
Thrown.
And there was one person I was now ready to talk to, in hopes that she might be able to shed some light on what happened that night.
Her name was Rhonda McIntyre.
I’d first heard it when I got a ride home with Annette Ravelson the night I’d found her in Bert Sanders’ bedroom. Annette said she’d been one of the mayor’s other flings, and she’d also been seeing a Griffon cop who didn’t know she had a thing going on with Bert. I remembered Annette saying Rhonda had broken it off with the cop, that she’d found him kind of “freaky.”
That cop had turned out to be Ricky Haines. Her name had come up as the Griffon police did a full investigation into his background. They’d found her e-mail address on his home computer, and in his phone.
When she broke things off with Haines, which was around the time she’d also stopped seeing the mayor, she quit her job at Ravelson and moved back in with her family in Erie.
I wanted to talk to her.
So I drove to Erie. I did the trip in just under an hour and a half. I’d gone back to Cayuga Lake one day, turned in my rented Subaru, and gotten my Honda back from the cottage where Dennis and Claire had been hiding out.
Rhonda McIntyre was living with her parents in a beautiful lakeside house on Saybrook Place, just west of the industrial city’s downtown. I didn’t call first. I had no idea whether she would want to talk to me, and I didn’t want to give her a chance to disappear.
I knew it was a long shot, but I was hoping Haines might have told her something, if not actually confided in her, some of the details surrounding Scott’s plunge off the roof of Ravelson Furniture.
Maybe, I thought, if she had some idea of what he’d done, it was the reason she’d broken things off with him and gone back to the safety of her family.
I found the house behind a tall, well-manicured hedge that shielded the McIntyres from the prying eyes of passersby. I drove up the long, paved drive and parked within steps of the front door.
A handsome woman in her fifties answered. “Mrs. McIntyre?” I said. When she nodded, I told her who I was, and that I was here to speak with Rhonda.
“About all this sordid mess,” she said.
“Yes,” I said.
“I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” she said.
“It might be easier talking to me than the police,” I said. An implied threat that sometimes worked.
This time, it did the trick.
She led me through the house to a sunroom at the back that looked out over Lake Erie. The sky was overcast, and there was a north wind raising whitecaps. I could feel cold drafts of air sneaking their way around the windows.
“I’ll get Rhonda,” she said.
Moments later, a small, wispy woman of twenty-five entered the room anxiously, her mother right behind her.
“Yes?”
“Hi, Rhonda,” I said. “I need to ask you a few questions.”
“I’m sorry. I forgot your name,” the mother said.
“Weaver,” I said. “Cal Weaver.”
Rhonda blinked. Her anxiety level appeared to have taken a jump. I thought it would be easier for her to talk to me without her mother present.
“Mrs. McIntyre, would you mind if your daughter and I spoke privately?”
“Well, I think I need to be here if—”
“It’s okay, Mom,” Rhonda said. “I’ll be okay.”
The woman withdrew reluctantly. Rhonda and I sat in white wicker chairs with puffy yellow-flowered cushions.
“You should have called ahead,” she said.
“Rhonda, we know an awful lot now about Ricky, and his mother, and what they’d been up to for more than a decade. But there are still a few gaps in what we know — in what I would like to know — and I know that for a while there you were going out with Ricky.”
She became defensive. “We went out a few times, but I could never... I was never really all that serious. There were things not right with him.”
I waited.
“First of all, this relationship with his mom, it was kind of sick, you know? He was always trying to please her, always rushing over to the house. Of course, I sort of get now why he was always there, because he was helping his mom look after his stepdad, in the basement there. I mean, that kind of explained a lot.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’d never take me to his mother’s house. I mean, he wanted me to meet his mother once, but we did it at a coffee shop. We never went out to her place. One time, I was going by there and saw Ricky’s pickup in the driveway, so I turned in and knocked on the door, just figuring I’d say hello, and he came out on the porch and went crazy on me.”
“They couldn’t take a chance of anyone going inside,” I said.
“No kidding. But there was more. He was like two people. He could pretend to be all nice when it suited him, but underneath, he didn’t really feel anything. Except maybe anger. Sometimes you could tell it was just simmering under the surface. I don’t think he ever understood what it meant to be someone else.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like, to be in someone else’s shoes. He had no, you know, empathy. Everything was about how it felt to him. He didn’t care if he hurt you — like, your feelings, mostly — because he didn’t feel the hurt himself. Except where his crazy mother was concerned. She could hurt him. Like I said, he was always worried about pleasing her.”
Rhonda looked out over Lake Erie.
“I really don’t see how I can help you,” she said. “That’s really all I have to say.”
“The thing is,” I said, “I’m not really here about any of that. I’m here about a more personal matter.”
Her head moved ever so slightly in my direction. “What sort of personal matter?”
“My son. I had a son named Scott. A couple of months ago, he died. Maybe you heard about that.”
Rhonda nodded. “Of course. I was still working at Ravelson Furniture then. Everybody felt just awful about it. He was a nice boy.”
Her voice started to get shaky. I leaned in closer to her.
“I drove down here today, hoping you might know something about what happened on the roof that night. For the longest time, I’ve believed Scott went off that roof because he was high on drugs. That’s not what I believe anymore.”
Her face looked as though it might shatter.
“Why would I know anything?” she asked.