2
They spent hours at the hospital. The worst part had been the beginning—the vividness of it all, every detail imprinting because Auggie’s brain was still in panic mode. He remembered the ridiculousness of Theo in a borrowed Wroxall wrestling tee, courtesy of Orlando. He remembered Theo holding his hands under the sink in the men’s room, Theo’s callused touch as he soaped and scrubbed blood away, and then the rasp and smell of wet paper towels as Theo dried each finger. He remembered wearing his Jordans, which didn’t make any sense because his feet still felt bruised from his stockinged run over the frozen concrete. And he remembered Theo’s arms around him, he remembered shaking, the tile of the men’s room giving back the sound of his ragged breaths.
After that, things evened out. They sat in the waiting room, which someone had cheerily decorated with a floral border and walls the color of shit. A TV in the corner was tuned to the weather channel, and it looked like sunny skies were coming. The guy—white, the kind of middle-aged that involved lots of tanning and Botox and trips to the gym—couldn’t have been happier about those sunny skies. He could have been a model for dental implants.
At some point, exhaustion must have taken Auggie because the sound of the waiting room door made him jerk upright, wiping his mouth. Theo rotated his shoulder and stretched his arm and offered a small smile before turning his attention toward the door.
Auggie had met Detective Somerset before. A few times, actually, although none of them, Auggie guessed, had left the young detective with a favorable impression. Somerset was around Theo’s age, and he was annoyingly hot—golden skin, even in winter; blond hair with that bedhead muss that probably caused mass panty drops whenever he flashed his perfect smile; a swimmer’s build that tonight’s suit showed off to good advantage. The suit was the right blue to complement his eyes, of course. So, yeah, Auggie thought. Pretty. But he couldn’t hold a match to Theo.
The detective came across the room with a tired smile. “Hello, Auggie. Hello, Theo.” He brought a chair around and sat. “Have you talked to a doctor?”
“They say they can’t tell us anything,” Auggie said. “Is Ethan ok?”
“He’s stable.” Somerset watched Auggie. On TV, the weatherman was worried maybe it was going to be a little too sunny. Hey, folks, wouldn’t that be something? In an even voice, Somerset asked, “Do you have any idea why someone would have attacked Ethan?”
“What does that mean?” Theo asked.
“Auggie?” Somerset asked.
“Answer my question,” Theo said. “What are you suggesting?”
“Theo, I’m asking Auggie right now. I understand you’re both upset—”
“You understand?” Theo’s voice rose. “Someone tried to kill Auggie, and you want to make it sound like—” He cut off, and he glared at Somerset as though the blond man had somehow tricked him. He didn’t look at Auggie.
“The coat,” Auggie said. “My coat. Is that what you mean? Someone saw Ethan in my coat, and you think they were trying to kill me?”
“Right now,” Somerset said, “I’m just asking a question. Do you have any idea why someone would have wanted to hurt Ethan?”
Auggie shook his head.
“I understand you gave a description to the responding officer—a man dressed in black with a knife. You think he was average height, maybe a little taller, but the clothes made it difficult to judge his size.”
“Or sex,” Auggie said. “It could have been a woman.”
Somerset nodded, but his eyes were another question.
“I don’t know,” Auggie said in answer. “I don’t, I swear. Ethan is a great guy. Everybody likes him.” Turning to Theo, he asked, “Do you really think someone was coming after me?”
Theo covered his face with both hands.
“Theo?”
“Yes.”
Auggie turned to look at Somerset.
The detective nodded, but he said, “It’s possible. Of course, it’s also possible that someone attacked Ethan by chance. It could have been a mugging gone wrong—”
“It wasn’t. I was right behind him; I would have heard if they asked for money.”
“Or it could be a random attack.” Somerset’s jaw tightened. “Those are the worst, you understand, because there’s no motivation behind them, no logic. Until we know otherwise, it’s more effective to assume that someone had a reason for the attempt tonight.”
“But—” Auggie glanced at Theo, who was still covering his face, and back to Somerset. “Why?”
Somerset took out his phone. He opened an app, and a moment later, Auggie saw himself. It was one of the videos he’d made back home, talking out his ass about finding Sue’s and Harley’s bodies. He heard himself saying, “—yeah, I mean, I’m definitely not ruling out the possibility that we could solve this murder.”
“But—” Auggie stared at himself, frozen on screen where Somerset had paused the video. “But I was just saying that. My audience eats up that kind of stuff.”
Theo stood so suddenly that his chair skittered backward, the sound enormous in the waiting room. He stalked toward the door, threw it open, and disappeared down the hall.
“Auggie,” Somerset inched forward in his seat, “what were you talking about?”
Auggie shook his head. “I swear to God!”
“This is your opportunity to tell me what’s going on. You and Theo have gotten caught up in some bad stuff before. I don’t want to see it happen again. And I’m not just saying that as police. You seem like a nice kid, and Theo’s still one of our own, and if you keep it up, you’re going to get hurt. Now, what’s the deal?”
Looking away, Auggie said, “Nothing.”
“So, you found Suemarie Gilmore in that hidden room in the Varsity Club, what? By chance?”
Auggie pressed his lips tightly together. He remembered Lender on the rutted dirt road, the honeysuckle closing in around them, and Theo standing there like he was a mile away. He remembered, from the year before, Lender beating him with Theo’s cane until Auggie lost consciousness. If they talked, Lender knew people who could take care of it. Hell, if they talked, Lender would probably want to take care of them himself. Then something made its way through the fog, and his eyes cut back to Somerset. “You don’t believe she killed herself either. You think it was a murder too.”
“I’d like you to start at the beginning. How did you get involved in this?”
“Why? Is it something about, you know, the gunshot wound? Could you tell it had been staged?”
“Why were you looking for Suemarie Gilmore?”
Auggie set his jaw and met Somerset’s eyes. They were tropically blue. “You don’t believe it was a suicide. Why?”
“Here’s what I don’t believe, Auggie: I don’t believe you were in the Varsity Club by chance. I’ve asked around, and that’s not your crowd, and it’s certainly not Theo’s. And I don’t believe the cock-and-bull story you two fed me about getting caught up in a fistfight. Someone tried to clean Theo’s clock that night, and someone tried to drug you. If you don’t want to tell me, I can’t force you, but this is my job, and I’m going to get to the bottom of it one way or another.”
On the wall behind Somerset, the clock showed a little after two. The little red hand ticked. Auggie followed it with his eyes.
“I can’t help you if you won’t tell me the truth,” Somerset said softly.
“I am telling you the truth.”
Somerset let out a breath, offered a pinched smile, and stood.
“Do I have to go to the station?” Auggie asked.
“Would that help?”
The question made Auggie turn his face down, and he studied the linoleum between his Jordans.
“I didn’t think so,” Somerset said. “Auggie, when you’re ready, I’ll listen.”
Auggie didn’t hear the door swing shut, but when he looked up again, he was alone. His eyes felt hot, but he wasn’t crying, and after a moment, he made his way to the hall. He wandered toward the elevators and the parking lot, and he found Theo pacing in the cramped vending machine alcove. His boots squeaked every time he turned on the linoleum. In one of the machines, a bag of Fritos hung halfway off its hook. Auggie stared at it. He figured that had probably pissed somebody right the hell off.
When Theo saw him, he turned and headed for the stairs, and Auggie had to jog to keep up.
“Theo?”
Theo’s boots hammered down the concrete steps and echoed up the stairwell.
In the car, Auggie put the keys in the ignition.
“We’re going to your place,” Theo said.
“Theo, I was bored. I don’t know. I shouldn’t have made those videos, but I mean, I thought we were done looking for Harley. We agreed it was over.”
Theo wrapped his hands around his knees. He was breathing faster, now—harsh, deep breaths.
“Will you say something? Please?”
“Start the car.” Then, his voice straining towards something that might have been softer, he said, “It’s been a long night.”
Auggie started the car. He turned them toward Wroxall and his apartment, and they drove in silence. The town had a bubble-wrap quality, pockets of light glowing around the streetlamps, the sense of a hermetic seal reinforced because everything was still, everything was empty, even the sky. Even me, Auggie thought, and it had a nightmarish clarity.
He started to talk because he couldn’t stand the stillness anymore. “Theo, it’s not just the video. There’s something else, something Somerset isn’t telling us, something that makes him believe Suemarie was murdered. That’s what you meant, right? When you said someone tried to kill me? You think it was whoever killed Suemarie, and now they’re trying to, you know, hurt me because they’re afraid I know something. Well, I was thinking if we could figure out what Somerset knows—”
Theo laughed, scratching his beard, and the sound crawled up Auggie’s spine. “It’s like this is a game to you. It’s like you have absolutely no fucking idea that people could get hurt.”
“It’s not a game—”
“Did it feel like a game when you were covered in Ethan’s blood?”
Auggie flexed his hands around the steering wheel. Something was playing on the radio too low for him to hear under the rushing noise in his head. On the next block, a sign for a Lee’s Chicken spun slowly; it was crooked, and it gave the rotation a limping quality. Someone moved inside the Lee’s, and part of Auggie wondered why, at this hour, someone needed to worry about fried chicken. But then, everybody needed to worry about something. An exhausted giggle, on the brink of hysterics, threatened to slip free. Maybe that person could tell Theo. Maybe Theo could add the fried chicken to the list of everything else he worried about.
“I asked you a question,” Theo said.
Auggie shook his head. The Lee’s sign swam as he blinked his eyes. “How was I supposed to know that Ethan—”
“I’m not talking about Ethan!”
Auggie jolted at the shout. When he looked over, Theo was staring rigidly out the windshield. He was still clutching his knees. “Ok, you’re right, I’m sorry. I didn’t think about you. I know, um, people have threatened Lana before—”
“For fuck’s sake.” Theo laughed again, and his whole body relaxed, his hands loosening around his knees, his back softening so that he slumped in the seat. “You, Auggie. I’m talking about you. How can you be so fucking selfish?”
The words faded into the background hiss of whatever was playing on the stereo. Auggie brought one hand up from the steering wheel and ran the back of his hand across his face. He could hear himself breathing, the thick raspiness of it. They floated past the Lee’s sign. At the next intersection, a sign for WCCU—Wahredua Community Credit Union—glowed green and white. Then the Chinese takeout place where, more than once, Theo had gotten them dinner. And then the apartment building. It looked different in the bubble-wrap nighttime. It took Auggie a moment of staring at it, at how new and out of place it looked, to understand that he was seeing it the way Theo saw it: unnecessarily expensive, tacky, the perfect design for spoiled undergrads with money to blow.
He started to make a U-turn. “I’ll take you home.”
Theo grabbed the wheel and locked it in place. “Park the car.”
Auggie struggled to turn, and then he gave up and stomped on the brake. “I don’t want you staying over.”
“Really? Because you threw a fucking fit earlier when I asked you to go to my place. Now it’s too late.”
“Why are you being like this? I said I’m sorry. What do you want me to say? I’ll say it again: I’m sorry. I fucked up. I am the biggest fuck-up of all time, and I’m a stupid kid, and this has been such an awful night, and—and I’m sorry.”
Theo rubbed his eyes. He looked like he might be crying, or close to it. “You’re sorry,” he said, shaking his head. And then he opened the door and got out of the car.
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