The Black Hour (35 page)

I looked up from the photo. I thought I might know why Corrine hadn’t wanted me to have it.

“We study violence,” I said quietly.

“You’re OK with this? You didn’t see the postcard he had hanging up, like it was a vacation snap. The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. I mean, come on. A pile of dead gangsters is not wall art.” He was getting red in the face. “And I didn’t even tell you that when I ran into him downtown—yes, fine, I followed him. I found him standing outside Holy Family with his finger in an old Capone bullet hole like he was the Dutch boy stopping up the dike. There was also a photo of a girl in a bikini in the kid’s desk, and you better believe they’re checking to see whether that chick’s alive.”

The front door banged shut. We both looked over.

Nath stood there, his head hanging crookedly. “Sergeant Miller from the Rothbert campus police reports that Bryn is quite well. Engaged to be married, actually,” he said, raising his voice over the TV until Joe cut the sound abruptly, and we could hear the last few quiet words. “Good for her.”

“Sorry, kid,” McDaniel said. “But you have to know what it looks like.”

I should have seen what it looked like a month ago. It’s OK, he’d said, and it couldn’t have been.

I grabbed a fistful of money from my wallet and threw it on the table. I stood, fighting every exhausted cell in my body. No choice but to walk home, though there was no one left in the world to care if I made it. Corrine pushed to the surface of my attention. I needed to find her—now.

“I can explain,” Nath said, reaching to stop me as I brushed by. I felt the light touch of his fingers and felt sick for both of us.

“Nath, I don’t even know what to say—no. I have one question for you. I told you to drop it. How is this dropping it?” I pointed to the clipping lying on the table in front of McDaniel.

Nath swallowed hard, glanced at McDaniel. “I didn’t—”

“Did you drop it, or did you stick your nose where I didn’t want it?”

“That’s from before—” He couldn’t look me in the eyes. “I dropped it.”

It was a lie. We both knew it. McDaniel knew it. Joe knew it. We could have polled strangers passing by, and they could have seen the lie on the kid’s face. What did he have to gain from it? Or hide, by holding to it?

What had McDaniel asked? Did we sit around and take bets about students and guns? It wasn’t a joke, and we didn’t treat it that way. When a student’s personal struggles showed themselves, there was protocol, there were people specially trained on campus to help them gain control. That ultra-sincere guy from Psych Services who’d handed me his card seven times over the last year. There were people who handled this stuff, and it wasn’t me.

“Rothbert has a very far-reaching ethics policy,” I said. “Dishonesty of any kind—” But I couldn’t think of what to say. The far-reaching ethics policy was suddenly something I had to worry about myself. “We also have a renowned mental health center—”

I still owed him an apology.

I’m sorry I trusted you. I’m sorry I started this stone down the hill.

The sight of him made me crazy with regret. All the parts of myself I’d let this kid see. Like the title of the book I hadn’t published—what he knew would live on forever. What he knew—was everything. Some of it not true, and some of it more true than I could ever explain away. “I’m not going to try to understand,” I said. “Do us both a favor. Drop the program. Drop the program and go home, Nathaniel.”

I turned and started out, ready to deflect excuses, apologies, tears. But nothing came.

He watched me leave, and had nothing to say.

Everything had gone to crap. Dr. Emmet disgusted with me, sending me home. That reporter looking at me like he’d seen the bottom rung for sure. And Kendall in the hospital, and nobody saying whether he’d make it or not.

I didn’t know anything about that, but that’s not the way the campus cops had acted in our room, especially once they found the postcard on the bulletin board and then the file on Dr. Emmet in my drawer.

“Got a little hobby, do we?” one had said, all of them trading not-so-subtle glances over my head. “Or two?” He’d pulled out Bryn’s snapshot with the tips of his fingers, as though I might have been using the photo for—special projects.

They managed to get Bryn on the phone, confused and concerned, but alive and well. When they’d finally let me go, I’d torn down the stairs past all my gape-mouthed housemates, knowing I had to get to Dr. Emmet before that file got loose, before things spun out of control. I checked her apartment—the code burned into my brain—then her office. Her officemate opened the door an inch or two, looking like she’d just woken up. I thought I heard someone moving on the other side of the door, but she swore Dr. Emmet hadn’t been in. It was Saturday, too early for the Mill, but then I went to the Mill anyway only to find that the jerk journalist was all over it like I was the story of the century. If the university police wanted to find a stalker, I knew where to find one.

Now the door shut behind Dr. Emmet, and he and I looked at each other. The bartender shrugged and cranked the TV volume.

McDaniel waved me over with a glass. I should have turned around and gone, and was almost surprised to realize I was making a beeline for his booth.

“It’s not at all what it looks like, right?” he said. He gestured at the bartender, who came with two cold bottles before I could think of a thing to say. I saw the clipping from the
Willetson Courier
on the table, my handwriting all over it, and fell into the booth.

“How—where did you get that?”

“I wrote it. The better question is where did you get it? I thought you didn’t show up at Rothbert until this fall.”

“Back issues online.”

He looked impressed. He shouldn’t have been. His paper had a pretty elaborate system and reasonable prices. “So you’ve been looking into this for some time.”

I noticed the notebook at his elbow. “Interview over.”

He smiled. “No problem. My friend over on the campus police force will be happy to explain to me anything I need to know.”

“Will he explain how you got that clipping out of a crime scene?”

His smile slacked. Ah ha. They were such pros on the campus force. Now I had something to work with.

“Crime scene, huh. Their guess is he overdosed.” He slid the clipping at me across the table. “Did he party?”

“Shut up.” I took a deep gulp of my beer. Free drink, after all, and now I needed one. I had to go home? Drop the program, start over. Start over doing what? Abandon sociology? Abandon everything. Go home, take up a bank job or become a manager of the local discount grocery. A bachelor’s degree went far at home. But that wasn’t what I wanted.
Go home, Nathaniel.
That’s not who I wanted to be. “I don’t know Kendall all that well.”

“That’s what Leo Lehane’s roommate said about him. You don’t play nice with others, either?”

I sank back in the booth and pretended I was there alone. I hated that anyone would lump me and Leo together. He’d shot someone. I wasn’t going to forget that, even if I’d come to feel sorry for him. The guy had become the sad mascot of a team of poorly trained do-gooders. How many times had he called? As many times as Win? More than that Summer Hightower, or—I thought for a minute and couldn’t come up with the other name. Jazz. If I’d had more time with the list, would it have yielded more super-users of the Hope Hotline services, more special notations? Whatever it meant, one fact still stood. Leo hadn’t gone quietly. He’d shot someone before he shot himself.

Shot himself.
That night in my dad’s bathroom, and I’d only found out-of-date cold medicine. A gun took courage, in a way. During my own dark night, I didn’t even have the guts to go the pill route. I guess Leo had something to him, after all. He’d had the guts to forgo the easy—

“Overdosed on what?” I said.

“What?”

“You said Kendall overdosed. What did he take?”

“Some kind of pills.”

Pills, pills. I thought about that for a while. “Do you cover Rothbert all the time? Like, is that all you write about?”

He sniffed at me, took his time. “Rothbert is a very complex organism.”

“I’m not dicking around. Are you the only one who writes Rothbert news? Would you have written about—like, misfortunes that have happened on campus? Before Dr. Emmet’s shooting, I mean.”

“Misfortunes? Rothbert students rarely suffer misfortunes. But yeah, I guess if any had happened in the last six or seven years—God, seven years.” He flopped backward and threw his arm over the back of his side of the booth.

“A Rothbert student killed herself last year. She took some pills. I think maybe they belonged to someone else.”

“Her roommate. Prescription pills.” His attention was mine. “Pretty girl, student government. What about her?”

Pills, pills, car, gun. “And some kid rammed his car into a tree? Did you write about that?”

“You seem strangely conversant with Rothbert’s woes for someone so new to the community.” He lifted his chin at me. “Two or three years ago, I think, the kid in the car—frat president, honor society, perfect grade point average. You’ve been hanging out with the death brigade, haven’t you? Is this what they talk about? The ones who don’t bother to call?”

“And then an athlete. I can’t remember—he overdosed on steroids, but he might have died at home—”

“I wrote about him,” McDaniel said. “Rothbert doesn’t lose students lightly. I mean, I’m sure most universities commemorate, but this is Rothbert we’re talking about. I’m surprised there wasn’t a parade and twenty-one-gun salute when Jazz died.”

I must have jerked in my seat. McDaniel gave me a careful look.

I swallowed. “Jazz?”

“Promising quarterback, real star. He was supposed to be this hardship success case from south LA, but the truth came out not too long after he got red-shirted. Rich kid like the rest.” He shook his head. “The NFL already sniffing around. All I’m saying: he never would have been a hardship case.”

I reached into my pocket, pulled out the crushed note, and spread it open on the table.
Jazz Starling.

McDaniel ripped the note away and gave it and then me a series of hard looks. “Jazz. Kanowski, Hightower. These are—these are the kids. What kind of research are you doing? Who’s Win Harlan?”

I grabbed it back. “Nobody.” I needed to go somewhere and think. Not my room—Kendall’s side torn up and mine raked through—but somewhere quiet.

“You know him, don’t you?” McDaniel said. “Is he in trouble? This is not a good list to be on.”

I put my hand on the marked-up newspaper clipping to take it with me. “I don’t know.” I’d noticed something about the clipping I’d never noticed before, something I couldn’t have noticed until recently. A couple, close to the camera, arms around one another. What a touching scene, love in a time of terror.

“What?”

I shook my head, downed the last of my beer.

McDaniel followed me out of the booth, grabbing at his coat. The bartender nabbed him. He hadn’t paid his tab. I saw the golden opportunity and took it, letting the door slam and taking an alley to hurry out of sight. I knew where to go, a place that would be quiet as long as I didn’t bring the loudest mouth I knew.