BABES DIDN’T STOP RUNNING UNTIL HE REACHED ONE OF THE
oldest cemeteries in Rhode Island, a good two miles away. He was headed for his favorite hiding spot.
Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the North Burial Ground dated back to the eighteenth century and was the final resting place for everyone from the founders of Brown University to former governors and senators. Babes’s destination was a huge nineteenth-century stone crypt that was like a small chapel. Everyone buried there was named Dawes. The last member of the Dawes family to be laid to rest there died in 1921, and the surrounding graves were even older, so no one ever visited this section. Only Babes.
Please, God. Make Dr. Fisch be okay.
Unfamiliar places were generally tough for Babes, especially after an event as stressful as his visit to Dr. Fisch’s office. But the Dawes family crypt was like his home away from home. Babes had been going to the crypt since he was eleven years old, and it was his secret. He happened upon it after a particularly brutal day of teasing in sixth grade. He wished he were dead, so naturally he had walked to the cemetery to select a burial plot. Soon he was fascinated. He started memorizing names and dates on tombstones, and this special (albeit morbid) interest eventually led him to the oldest part of the cemetery, where he first laid eyes on the impressive Dawes family crypt. It was the most quiet, beautiful place he’d ever seen, completely removed from the chaos of the real world, with no one to tease or bully him.
Babes enjoyed his time alone. While other kids had play dates or after-school activities, Babes would come to the Dawes crypt and design a highly complex fantasy world. As a teenager, he pretended that the crypt was an individual town, which he populated with make-believe people and characters, some from TV sitcoms and cartoons and others from the tombstones he saw in the cemetery. Throughout high school, these people were Babes’s
real
friends, and he liked them because they were exactly what he wanted them to be. He pretended that he was popular, owned a car, and had a girlfriend. These fantasies changed as he moved into adulthood—he dreamed of being a successful adult, married with children, living in another perfect world. He started fantasizing about the future, hoping for a better life in a better town with a woman who loved him and a job that paid him immense amounts of money.
But one thing in the crypt remained the same throughout his childhood and into adulthood: the baseball-card collection that he stashed away there. He would spend hours memorizing the statistics on the back of each card and converting the players’ names into anagrams. One that still made him giggle was the fabled inventor of baseball, Abner Doubleday. “A barely nude bod,” he said aloud now, bringing back the memory.
Babes adjusted the volume on his pocket radio. Babes loved his radio. It had cost him all of twenty dollars, and he would never get rid of it. Every morning he clipped it onto his belt, connected the earbuds, and started his day. A single nine-volt battery lasted forever. He could have purchased a more expensive digital model with a more precise tuner, but those were for music freaks who liked to change channels. Babes listened to
A.M.
all day long, two or three different stations at most, and nothing but sports talk radio.
Jocks in the Morning
was playing, but Jock was flying solo at the moment.
“The intelligent half of
Jocks in the Morning
is back, knuckleheads,” he heard Ryan say over the air.
Babes surveyed the crypt for a place to sit and listen to the last fifteen minutes of Ryan’s show. Rain from the night before had left the marble floor wet in spots. He found a dry corner near the rose-shaped window of stained glass, drew his knees up to his chest, and listened.
“Got a special message for a special friend of mine,” said Ryan. “This goes out to my brother-in-law. We call him Babes.”
Babes stiffened.
“Babes, if you’re listening, we love you and we miss you. We want you to come home. There’s nothing to be afraid of. We’ll even come get you, wherever you are. So, come on, buddy. Give us a call.”
Babes switched off the radio, drew up his knees even tighter, and began to rock on his tailbone while biting down on his lower lip.
Come home, says Ryan. There’s nothing to be afraid of.
Yeah, right.
Then why was that undercover cop waiting for him at the Modern Diner? Ryan would deny it, of course. He’d say the guy wasn’t a cop. But Babes knew he was one. He just knew it. And now Dr. Fisch was hurt.
Babes screamed at the top of his lungs. It was one of those long and shrill screams that could curl a person’s hair—the kind that, as long as Babes could remember, had forced his mother to grab him by the hand and run for the exit at restaurants and movie theaters.
He felt better now. But he still didn’t know what to do.
The secret is coming out.
He was sure of it. It was a terrible, dark secret. He was tired of living with it, and he wanted it out. Why else would he have contacted Emma Carlisle in the first place?
Don’t know what to do.
The rocking started up again. It wasn’t as if he could control it. Like a reflex, his knees came up to his chest again, his arms wrapped tightly around his shins, and his body was in motion. He was biting down on his lip so hard that he could taste a little blood in his mouth.
The secret is coming out soon.
He might have been okay with coming clean, except for one person. His father. Babes knew his father loved him. But neither of his parents had been the same since Chelsea’s accident. Sure, it was a tragedy. They had lost their daughter. But it also drove home the point that a big strapping man like Paul Townsend deserved someone like Ryan James as a son, not a grown man who threw a baseball like a sissy and couldn’t even look another man in the eye when he shook hands. He should have been the one, not Chelsea, who’d been killed in the car accident.
Babes closed his eyes tightly, very tightly, until he finally forced himself to stop rocking. He checked his watch. Almost ten o’clock. Ryan would be on the air only a few more minutes.
Babes drew a deep breath. Weird, but even though thousands of people would be listening, the idea of calling Ryan at the station and talking live on the air—letting his secret be known that way—was less scary than speaking to him face-to-face. Especially when he could call from the safety and familiarity of his favorite hiding spot.
He removed his earbuds and let the radio play through its loudspeaker. Ryan was still jabbering, and the sound of his voice was comforting.
Babes knew the call-in number. He’d heard Ryan say it so many times on the air, he could have repeated it in his sleep. He took another long breath and powered on his cell phone.
Slowly, one fateful digit at a time, he punched out the studio phone number for
Jocks in the Morning.
EMMA TUNED IN TO
JOCKS IN THE MORNING
JUST IN TIME TO HEAR
Ryan’s on-air appeal to Babes. Some of her favorite
F.M.
stations aired out of Boston, but this was her first visit to this end of her
A.M.
band. Sports talk radio was not her thing.
Sorry, Ryan.
Apologies seemed to be the order of the day. That mean retort about Chelsea—“Have you considered the possibility that the accident was Chelsea’s own fault?”—was completely unlike Emma. But Ryan had no idea how much it had hurt to hear him question her objectivity, to have him throw the Brandon Lomax conflict of interest in her face. It stung for so many reasons. Because it mattered to her what Ryan thought of her. Because she was committed to finding out what really had happened to Chelsea. Because she prided herself on her professionalism. And because she feared that her personal feelings for Brandon Lomax might indeed be getting in the way. Childhood memories aside, Lomax had hired Emma right out of law school and groomed her to be one of the top felony prosecutors in his office. Their lives were completely intertwined, personally and professionally.
“We’re back, knuckleheads,” she heard Ryan say after the commercial. “Shake out the cobwebs, light up the phone lines, tell me what’s on your mind.”
She stopped her car at the red light and listened. Oddly enough, hearing Ryan on the radio made her feel good. Just the sound of his voice was enough to make her forgive him for bringing up the Lomax issue. And that worried her. Ever since the party at Marble House—when Ryan had asked if she was with someone, and then looked so disappointed when she’d told him that she was—she’d felt somewhat off balance around him. It had already gotten her into trouble when she’d slipped and mentioned Brandon Lomax and the tipster’s e-mail in the same sentence.
Maybe that was a blessing.
Ryan had forced her to be a little more sensitive to her biases. He was right about the alibi: Sarah Lomax was beyond reproach, but plenty of good wives have lied to save their husbands. Now, thanks to his wife, Sarah, Brandon Lomax had an alibi that was airtight.
Too
airtight.
“Lines are still open,” said Ryan. “Okay, let’s talk sports and corporate sponsors. TV announcers are forced to say the full name of stadiums every time they mention a venue: AT&T Park, Coors Field, and so on. It’s no longer the Home Run Derby, it’s the State Farm Home Run Derby. We don’t have replays, we have Aflac replays. Soon we’ll be hearing routine plays called like this: ‘Top of the first Holiday Inn-ing. Josh Becket on the Boone’s Farm strawberry hill. He shakes off the 1-900-
ASTROLOGY
sign from the catcher, hurls a Jiffy Lube slider, and it catches the outside corner of the Wedgwood china plate for a Don Carter Bowling Lanes strike.’”
Emma wasn’t listening. She was busy trying to heed Ryan’s earlier words and to be more objective about Brandon Lomax. Her effort suddenly brought to mind a strange conversation with the case manager right before the attorney general left office to run for the Senate. During their talk, Emma had felt pushed to send the Chelsea James vehicular homicide off to the cold case files sooner than normal. But maybe the pressure hadn’t been coming from the Criminal Division’s case manager. Maybe it was coming from Lomax himself, in an attempt to make sure that the case didn’t rear its ugly head after he was gone.
“Dude, you there? You’re on
Jocks
.”
There was garble on the radio.
Ryan said, “Caller, you have to turn your radio off. I can hear it in the background.”
There was silence.
“That’s better,” said Ryan. “Now what’s your question, pal?”
Finally, the caller spoke. “Hi, Ryan. It’s me.”
Ryan froze. He had been keeping an eye on his cell phone, hoping Babes would call. He hadn’t expected him to dial in to the station. The producer had put him through without realizing who it was.
“Hold on a second, Babes. We’re going to take our listeners straight to a commercial, and then you and I can talk in private.”
“No! I want this on the air.”
His shrillness both chilled and worried Ryan. “Okay, Babes. Take it easy. We’ll stay on the air.”
“Don’t think you can lie to me! I turned my radio down, but I didn’t turn it off. I’ll know if we go off the air.”
Ryan could hear the echo of their conversation in the background. “That’s fine,” he said. “But you need to turn the radio way down, Babes. There’s a few seconds’ delay between our phone conversation and what you hear on the radio. I don’t want you getting confused.”
The producer barged into the studio, nostrils flaring, her face red with anger. She flashed the cut sign across her throat.
Ryan spoke into the microphone. “Bear with me, Babes. My producer wants me to hang up, but I’m not going to let you go. I know she wouldn’t want it on her head if you were to hurt yourself.”
Beatrice glared at Ryan, flashed two fingers, and left. Ryan had control of the airwaves for only a couple of minutes.
“Babes, where are you?”
“I can’t tell you,” he said, his voice quaking.
“Why not?”
“Because I
can’t
.”
“Where are you going?”
“I—I don’t know.”
“Why don’t you come home?”
“No! I can’t.”
“Why can’t you?”
“Because…” His voice cracked. Ryan could tell that he was crying.
“Babes, why can’t you come home?”
“Because I did something bad.”
“Dr. Fisch is going to be fine. He knows you weren’t trying to hurt him. You don’t have to worry about that.”
“Well, that’s good. But that’s not what I’m talking about. I did something else that’s even worse. Much, much worse.”
“That doesn’t matter,” said Ryan. “You can always come home, no matter—”
“No, you’re wrong! You don’t know, Ryan. You just don’t know!”
“You’re right, Babes. I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me about it?”
“I—I’m trying.”
“Do you want to go off the radio?”
“No! This is how I want it.”
Ryan wasn’t sure what to do. Part of him wanted to take the rest of the call in private. But he was afraid Babes would hang up if they went off the radio. Babes obviously had something bottled up inside of him, and he wanted it broadcast for everyone to hear.
Babes was ready, Ryan realized, to lose his anonymity.
“Babes, was that you outside the Modern Diner this morning?”
“Yes.”
“How did you know to go there?”
“Because I got a phone call yesterday.”
It wasn’t the answer Ryan had expected. He knew about the link on the attorney general’s Web site—and that there was a password that only the tipster would know.
“Somebody called you?”
“Yes, on my cell. They said that they knew what I had done, and that if I wanted to stay out of trouble with the police, I had to go to the Modern Diner at nine o’clock Monday morning.”
“Who called you?”
“I don’t know.”
“He said he knew what you had done. What does that mean? He knew you were sending Emma anonymous tips?”
“Well…no. Maybe that’s what he meant. But that’s not what I thought he was saying.”
“What did you think he was saying?”
“I can’t tell you. You’re going to hate me.”
“I will never hate you, Babes. I love you. Your mom and dad love you. We’re your family. We will always love—”
“No, you won’t! You’ll hate me. You
should
hate me!”
“Babes, what did you do?”
“I…” His voice broke again.
The sobbing was audible, and in his mind’s eye, Ryan could see the tears streaming down his brother-in-law’s face. Babes seemed to be slipping beyond reach. The only person Ryan had ever known to calm Babes in a meltdown like this one was Chelsea, and for the millionth time since her death, Ryan wished she were there.
“Babes, I’m listening.”
“I—that’s why I put the flowers on her grave that said it was no accident. I did it,” he said softly.
“You did what?” said Ryan, bracing himself.
More sobbing. Finally, Babes answered in a booming voice that shook Ryan to his core.
“I killed my sister!”