Mira put her hand to her temple, feeling it again—that dull ache in the dark at the back of her head—and managed to say, again, “My husband called you? Clark called?”
Was it possible? Was that why he’d left? Was that why he’d seemed not to feel any guilt about taking her children away from her, and then not even calling to tell her where they’d gone?
Dean Fleming lifted a shoulder as if he weren’t sure what his answer should be.
“Where is he?” Mira asked. “Where did Clark call you from?”
“Mira, this was some time ago, and your marital problems, although regrettable, aren’t the reason why—”
She stood up, although she could not feel her legs beneath her. She said, looking down on his bright spot, his bald spot, his soft spot, “What is the reason, then, Dean Fleming? Because all of this, whatever this is, has been—no offense, Dean Fleming—utter bullshit.”
She felt the shock of her own words register in the look on his face, but didn’t wait for him to react. She held up a hand, and said, “I’m sorry. Forgive me. But there’s something else happening here. This has nothing to do with Jeff Blackhawk, and certainly nothing to do with Perry Edwards. This has to do with Nicole Werner, and the sorority, doesn’t it? It has to do with Nicole Werner, and my research, and my class, and Lucas and Perry, yes—but it’s not what you’re saying it is.”
But what was it? She found herself saying it before she’d even thought it:
“The runaway.”
Jeff’s story was coming back to her now.
A new sense was being made of everything.
She said, as if in a trance, “The girl from the music school. The other sorority girl. No one’s looking for her. Why is that, Dean Fleming? Why would the university so quickly drop—?”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Mira. Don’t become a conspiracy theorist now on top of everything else. Frankly, and I’m sorry to be so blunt here, you were always a wild card. When we hired you we didn’t know, really, what we were hiring. We had no way of knowing. I’ll admit I, like your students, was intrigued by the material and your passion for it, but this simply can’t be allowed to go on. I’m sure I don’t have to remind you here that you don’t have tenure, so if you’re interested in keeping your position, Professor Polson, I suggest you take what I’ve had to say here very seriously, and, and, and…”
But Mira had left his office before finding out whether this time the word for which he was so desperately searching ever found its way to him.
76
People laughed as they passed him in the hallway, but when they saw the expression on his face and the blood smeared across it, they stopped. Only Megan Brenner spoke:
“You okay, Craig? Did someone punch you in the face or something? What’s on the back of your shirt? That’s not blood, too, is it?”
Craig said nothing to her. Megan was perhaps the most petite fully grown human being he’d ever known. He could have wrapped his arms around her waist twice. He could have carried her across the Sahara and not even gotten thirsty or winded. He and Perry had taken to calling her Mega, because it was so absurd. He looked at her—that face peering up at him, the size of a cat’s—and all he could do was nod.
He went to the boys’ bathroom. No one else was in there. Just the slick, bright, urine-colored tiles (Perry had suggested they’d once been white; Craig had said the tile people had simply been thinking ahead) vaguely reflecting him at the sink as he washed the blood off his face, careful to avoid the actual mirror and his actual reflection in it, and tossed the T-shirt with the manicotti on it into the garbage can, and headed to his room to put on a new one.
Perry was back from the cafeteria himself, sitting at his desk chair with his head in his hands. He didn’t look up when Craig came in, but he cleared his throat. For a terrible second Craig thought maybe Perry was going to say something, that maybe he’d even try to apologize, or explain, and if that happened, there was no way Craig was going to be able to take it:
He would have to kill Perry, or die trying.
But that wasn’t what he wanted to do, not at all.
Perry had been on top of him, straddling him, not that different, really, from the way what’s-her-name, the girl in the hot tub (what was her name?) had straddled him in the MacGuirres’ pool house back in Fredonia, looking down on him, staring him in the eyes, except that he’d been inside that girl, and she’d been looking into him, pretending that fucking was some big spiritual experience.
He doubted it was, since she had the same experience every Saturday night in Fredonia with a different guy. She’d been stoned as hell, and so was he, but Craig remembered her saying as she stared into his eyes, “I know what you’re thinking. You and I are one…”
And how she’d slapped him hard when he started to laugh.
Even then, with his dick seven inches into her, Craig couldn’t remember her name, and he’d told her that.
But Perry.
Craig had known something at that moment. Something transcendent. Truly, this time, as Perry was straddling him, staring down at him, slamming him into the floor, Craig had felt his whole life grabbed like his T-shirt in Perry’s fist, and yanked, and shoved back down, and it was a spiritual experience.
“Fucker. Asshole. Listen. You stupid, stupid idiot.”
Perry was his friend. His first real friend.
He didn’t want to kill Perry. He wanted Perry to be Perry. Underlining shit in a book like his life depended on it, giving Craig advice on how to keep his side of the room a little bit tidier, piling up his salad bowl with things his mother must have threatened him for eighteen years to eat, and that he was still eating. He wanted Perry to be his roommate, his friend.
But what he had to do was see Nicole.
That had nothing to do with Perry.
Luckily, Perry didn’t speak.
Craig grabbed his coat and closed the door more carefully than usual behind him—not slamming it, but not leaving any doubt that he was closing it, either.
He headed for Lucas’s room.
He didn’t have time to walk to the OTT house.
He needed a car.
77
Jeremy purred in her lap as Shelly sat at the computer and scrolled through the articles. There were a hundred of them, and she was familiar with all of them, but they were cast in a new light now.
The lake of blood, the beyond recognition, the burned over ninety-percent of her body, the driver of the car fleeing the scene on foot, and herself: the middle-aged woman who was the first to arrive on the scene, and who failed to give the emergency operator enough information about the location of the accident for the paramedics to locate it in time to save the victim.
According to the articles, by the time the EMTs had arrived, the victim had been abandoned, lying in a lake of her own blood, burned beyond recognition, in the backseat of the vehicle for over an hour.