The Black Hour (16 page)

Someone nudged into the slim space between me and the next seat. The bartender, a bald black guy with muscles that made me wonder if he dead-lifted full kegs, took that moment to ask me what I wanted, and the other guy, bumping into me, reached in. “The weiss ale,” he said.

“Hey,” I said.

It was Phillip from the suicide watch.

“And whatever he wants,” Phillip said.

“The same,” I said.

The bartender stepped away, and I shot Phillip a look. “Leave a little room, will you?”

“Could tell you the same thing.” Here, among the fake IDs, Phillip seemed tired, more weathered, older than I’d thought. A wizened grad student who never left? Maybe he was a professor. His arms were thin and roped, like the guys from my high school who took advanced shop classes. His voice was easy and confident, but he couldn’t seem to sit still. He tapped the bar, bounced his knee. I wondered how a guy like Phillip got involved in the campus suicide brigade. That couldn’t be a good story. “He’s at risk, you know,” he said. “I’m just trying to ensure he makes it.”

“He doesn’t seem like the kind to off himself.”

“They never do.” Our beers came, and Phillip waved me off. “You can get next.”

The implication being that Phillip and I would be having another beer together, either tonight or at some future event. I took a regretful drink. As much as I needed to meet new people, I couldn’t imagine hanging out with a suicide counselor. That, I didn’t need.

“What about Leo Lehane?”

Phillip cut his eyes at me over the rim of his beer, taking his time. At last he thumped his glass down. “What business is it of yours?”

“Not my business. Except that you were trying to educate me, and I need an example. Did Leo Lehane seem like the kind of—”

“Leo was a troubled guy.”

“You’re the expert,” I said. “What kind of trouble?”

“Are you one of those guys who stops at accidents to gawp and get in the way?”

I had to think about what to say, because I was. Not car accidents or if a kid ran his motorbike into someone’s grandma, but if blood and guts had spilled, I was interested. But only if the guts had long been cleaned up, the players gone to hell and infamy. In my desk drawer, along with my dossier on Dr. Emmet, I also kept a list of locations to visit while I lived so near Chicago. Capone’s grave, a speakeasy that had been turned into a neighborhood sports bar, the places where the bad guys had gotten theirs from other bad guys. Dark alleys and bright courtyards and little unassuming bungalows in the suburbs, places that had been swept of their history and spots that had sunk only lower since they’d made their way into the books.

“Violence is a social construct.”

Phillip wiped his face with his hand. “Have you ever been in a violent situation?”

Somehow I didn’t think being shaken down for lunch money back in junior high counted. “James said that Leo used to cry,” I said.

“James might be a liar. Did you think of that?”

“He says he’s fine. Truly, he seems like a dude who thinks too highly of himself to deprive the rest of us of his company.”

Phillip shot me a look. “You seem like that to me, too. Have you ever had suicidal thoughts?”

I concentrated on my glass. “Hasn’t everyone?”

“Not real thoughts. Not serious ones. If you’d had serious thoughts—”

“I’d know?”

“You’d know how lucky you are to be sitting here.”

Sitting with Phillip didn’t make me feel lucky at all. Less than a week into the best years of my life, and all I did was dangle off precipices and hang out with the teacher. Or whatever Phillip was. But I knew what he meant.
I want to disappear. How do I disappear?
Lucky to have come to Rothbert, lucky to have met Dr. Emmet and people like Cara and Kendall, lucky to take a deep breath and be able to notice things like being able to take a deep breath, being able to make decisions as simple as whether or not to shave. To get out of bed. And then to progress so far as to move to a new city, to step out of the dark place and find something that interested me. I’d been down the rabbit hole, but I didn’t want to tell this nut about it. Besides, that was behind me. “Have you had suicidal thoughts? Real ones?”

“Yes.”

He waited for me to ask. Great effort went into not asking.

“These students,” he said. “Sometimes they’re a mess. Sometimes they fool you. Sometimes they convince you. I had to let myself into a student’s room once because he’d convinced everyone else that he was fine. He wasn’t fine.”

So Phillip wasn’t a student. I didn’t think he was a professor either. I was beginning to understand that the suicide watch wasn’t his activity or his hobby but his life. Somehow this was worse than hanging out with the teacher. “Is he fine now?”

“I believe he’s an investment banker now.” He nodded at my empty glass. “Next time?”

“Yeah.”

Phillip slid off his stool and hitched his bag over his shoulder. “No matter how healthy you think James is, he shouldn’t be in that class.”

“He said he’d drop it.”

“If he doesn’t,” Phillip said. “Could you please let me know? As a friend?”

Friend of mine, friend of James. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be either. “He’ll drop.”

“You seem pretty sure of how well you know James.”

Maybe that was what I meant, that I knew the kid already. Or I recognized him. James liked his comforts, and being near Dr. Emmet hadn’t given him anything but a rash.

“I’ll let you know.”

Phillip thanked me and left. I stared at my empty pint glass until the bartender came back. I either had to order another or head out, and my head was too full to shut myself into my claustrophobic corner of my room. I held up a finger for another and reached for my wallet.

Over the bartender’s shoulder, I saw someone else gesturing toward the bar.

Dr. Emmet.

She hadn’t caught the bartender’s eye, but she caught mine, and blinked at me as though she were sending semaphore messages.

Dr. Emmet, and some guy.

Rory McDaniel proved to be sharper than I’d hoped.

We’d slid into the booth at the back of the Mill and settled what we wanted with Joe, who gave me an inscrutable look, and then the reporter turned on me, on the record from the word go. “I figure you’ve got very little to bring to the table.”

“I am the table, pal.” That didn’t sound exactly how I’d wanted it to. “This is my life. I own this.”

“I would have said that Leonard Lehane owned this.”

“I’m his heir, and this is my legacy.” I reached for my cane and tapped it on the underside of the table.

“What do you remember?”

“Not a thing.”

He shrugged. “Not very useful. I could do this without you.”

“Drink both the beers, then. I’ll go home.” I started my retreat from the booth. He didn’t stop me. “Are you going to call me back just as I get to the door? Because you could help a handi—a disabled lady out and not make her get up if she doesn’t have to.”

“Fine.” He tented his hands at me. “Tell me what you remember —
really
.”

I sat back. I’d spent the last ten months trying not to remember anything from that high back shelf of memory. Now I’d sit here with a stranger and let myself relive the trauma? After the day I’d had?

But the highlight reel engaged anyway. Black hallway, gun rising. A face above me as I lay on the floor—just beyond memory’s reach.

Joe came with our beers. I watched the muscles in his arms. When he left, I steadied my hand and reached for my bottle. “What are you bringing to this endeavor, then?”

“Mobility?”

“Screw you,” I said.

“Checking for a sense of humor. That’s a no, then.” He picked at his beer wrapper with a thumbnail, his jaw set. “I’ve been working this story since the first siren, read every word written about it—wrote the rest—and I have to tell you: Something stinks.”

“Did you seriously just say, ‘Something—’”

He flicked a hand at me. “You know what I mean. What does your gut tell you?”

My gut had a hole in it, an affliction never more than a few seconds from the top of my mind. If I’d ever had any intuition to speak of, it had probably leaked out along with ninety percent of my original blood supply, most of my reproductive organs, and six inches of my intestines.

“I’m feeling pretty literal these days,” I said. “You don’t want to talk guts with me. Why don’t we stop asking each other questions and start talking?”

“That was a question.” He took a long draw on his beer, his mouth twisted into a smirk on the bottle, and then put it down with what looked like resolve. “Leonard Lehane didn’t have any friends to speak of, didn’t do too well in school, probably died a virgin. He kills himself. I can believe that. I can willingly believe that. But he didn’t seem like the kind of guy to take anyone with him. And if for some reason he thought the afterlife would be lonely, why did he decide to march over to a corner of campus he didn’t visit often, if ever, and take along someone he’d never met?”

“That’s also a question.” This was the exact doubt on my mind, but I felt pressured to take the other side. This reminded me of Sunday mornings with Doyle, the paper spread out between us. We hadn’t been one of those lovey-dovey couples. When we talked, we locked horns, even if one of us had to slip into devil’s advocate to hold up the banter.

I missed him. What would he tell me to do about all this? I didn’t want to know. “Maybe Leo didn’t want to kill someone he knew,” I said. “Too difficult. Too messy.”

“Why did he want to kill anyone at all?”

Virginia Tech. Northern Illinois. The shooting from the bell tower at that university in Texas back in the ’60s that had forever marred the concept of having a bell tower around. Campuses like Rothbert attracted lots of high-strung people unaccustomed to concepts like failure. They wanted to stand out and found themselves in a crowd of people just like themselves or worse—smarter, more driven, more connected, more successful. “If he kills himself, who cares? If he takes someone with him, people notice. Kilroy was here?”

“That’s the typical theory, but I’m not sure it fits.”

Typical. At first I thought Rory had zeroed in on my train of thought. Everyone wanted to fit in, but no one wanted to be average.

But he didn’t mean Leo was typical. He meant I was.

I taught at one of the preeminent higher education institutions in the country. I had a doctorate. I had theories that were far beyond
typical
. This McDaniel person, this reporter? I was supposed to take him seriously, with his messy haircut and his big brother’s suit jacket? He didn’t know how thin the ice under his feet had become. I couldn’t make a smooth exit, but I could still leave.

“Typical theories are typical not because they’re pedestrian,” I said, “but because the simplest theory is often the right one. It’s not bad science to think about the general by looking at the particular. It’s sociology. Are you buying?”

Rory, for the first time, looked as though he’d lost his script. He blinked at me, fumbling for his wallet. “Sure, OK. I didn’t mean to—”

“Let me get his attention.” I watched Joe’s profile, waiting for him to look my way. He was a profile sort of guy, chiseled, aloof. He’d never needed to hire a bouncer for the bar. But he’d always looked my way. My first years at Rothbert, before dating Doyle, I’d been a more
regular
regular of the Mill. Joe and I’d had lots of time to build up to, execute, and recover from a raging, no-strings-attached affair. He harbored a sixth sense for when I sat on the other side of an empty bottle.

The bar was busy, everyone standing shoulder to shoulder. That’s when I saw Nath. He looked miserable, wedged in between strangers at the bar.

“I didn’t mean to offend you,” Rory said.

“You could never offend me.”

“I’m not sure you mean that in the good-natured way of friendship. Let me start over—”

“Don’t bother,” I said. “I’ve had the typical response, but you—you’re special.”

“At last she notices.” He sank the rest of his beer and sat his empty bottle next to mine. I couldn’t help thinking he’d turned the bottles into symbols, aligning us. I resisted the urge to move mine away. “I think the kid had a reason for shooting you. I just can’t figure out what it was. And I don’t know how to.”

“Besides asking me. Which you haven’t done.” I glanced back at the bar, but Joe was busy. Nath was talking to someone I couldn’t see, looking squeezed and put-upon.

“Did you have a relationship with Leonard Lehane?”

“Nope.”

“You’d never met him before?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Never had him as a student?”

“Surely you checked that out.” Joe was turned steadfastly away. We didn’t have our understanding any longer.

The cane. The cane changed everything.

“Am I not asking the magic question?” Rory said.

He had my attention. “What does that mean?”

“The unasked. The one question no one has asked you that you would answer yes to. Instead of nope, no, no way.”

Doyle, our bed, my head lying on his arm, asking me again.
Will you never say yes to me?

I struggled to fold that memory, put it away. That one could go to the back of the shelf, no problem.