The Moon Pool (11 page)

She forced the image out of her mind.

“Ma'am,” Jennie said quietly. “What you got to understand is some of the families don't have the money for the hospital bills. And the burial. If the company ain't going to cover it, it's a powerful reason for them to make a deal. I'm not saying they're happy about it. I got this friend from school, her boyfriend got his hand crushed last year, he can't work now. She told him to sue, but the company lawyers sat him down and laid out how if he took them to court they were going to get this whole team from Minneapolis to fight it, and even if he eventually won they'd make sure it took years. And they got a baby coming. So he took the settlement. And it was a lot of money, almost two hundred thousand dollars. They're building a house south of town.”

“But—” Colleen did the calculation—a few hundred thousand dollars was no compensation for the years ahead that the boy wouldn't be able to earn. She didn't know what to say. She settled for, “I'm very sorry for your friend's boyfriend.” It hardly seemed adequate.

“Mrs. Mitchell, can I ask you something?”

“Yes, of course.”

Jennie took a breath and looked down. “Did your son have some sort of like... problems?”

Colleen froze. The habit of years, the defensiveness, surged up instantly.
He's just an active boy, just like all the other boys
—the old chant, the one she recited in her mind like a mantra since preschool, echoed in her brain. This was it, the thing they spent all the money on, making sure he could pass for
just like everyone else.
Money and a raft of tutors and coaches were what allowed him to get into the college prep track and then—miracle of miracles—Syracuse. His success was proof it had worked. No teacher had sent home notes with the names of specialists in the last few years; Paul hadn't returned home despondent over teasing since before puberty. But paradoxically, the more successful the ruse became, the more insistent the voice:
Please just make him like all the other kids, don't let them notice.

“Can you be more specific?” she asked faintly, stalling for time, trying to figure out where the greater betrayal lay—telling his secrets or letting even the tiniest sliver of a clue slip through her fingers.

“I'm sorry, I don't mean anything by it, but did he like to gamble? Like did he have a gambling
problem
?”

“What? Oh, Lord, no,” Colleen said, her relief so great she lost her composure. “I mean, he's never gambled, that I know of. Maybe a few slots in the Las Vegas airport.”

“Oh. Because why I ask is, there's been a few guys that get hooked on the casino up on the reservation. It sounds crazy, but they'll go up there and run through their whole check and keep going. I just thought, I don't know. If he'd got in trouble that way. Him or Fly.”

“Fly?”

“I mean Taylor. Sorry. It's these nicknames they give each other.” She smiled sheepishly and shrugged.

“Jennie, why did they call my son Whale?”

“Well, because of those shirts,” Jennie said with what seemed like fondness. “With the little whale on them? Nobody had ever seen those before. Especially that one he had? It was yellow and blue, I think.”

Colleen got it. The shirts she bought at the preppy little shop downtown, the one that the local kids were so crazy about. They were way too expensive, seventy-five dollars for a polo shirt, but Colleen had always felt it was well worth it to buy the trappings that would help Paul fit in. The yellow and blue—well, yes, she could see why that one wouldn't play well here, color-blocked and turned-up-collared and looking like a parody of a Ralph Lauren ad. But Paul had never cared about his clothes—he wore what Colleen bought him and, that night when he'd lit out for North Dakota the first time, he would have simply taken the bags he'd already packed for Syracuse, the suitcase full of preppy clothes.

“Does he still wear those?” she asked softly.

“Oh, no, ma'am, not after the first couple of weeks.”

Oh, Paul.
Colleen felt regret for her error, longing to go back and do it right. If only she'd known that she couldn't keep him from Lawton, she would have found out what they wore up here and made sure that her boy had it, that he had everything he would need to get by. Suddenly she understood why Paul had refused Andy's offer, over the holidays, to take the Cayenne since Andy was getting a new car. Paul was bound and determined to buy a truck when he got back to Lawton. A truck! It had struck her as so outlandish, when they were offering him a vehicle that could handle the weather, and all he had to do was drive it out there.

But now she got it. Everyone else had trucks. So Paul would have wanted a truck.

Jennie dug her phone out of her pocket and checked the time. “I'm sorry, I just have to make sure I'm back in time so they don't wonder where I got to. But we have a few more minutes.”

“Jennie, listen. Ms. Capparelli says that the boys' things might have been saved. Their belongings, from the rooms.”

“Well, what I heard, the police are supposed to pick up F—Taylor's stuff, only they haven't come by yet. And ma'am, there wasn't anything in your son's room.”

She looked away when she said it, embarrassed or reluctant to add to Colleen's pain.

“What do you mean, there wasn't anything?”

“Like he packed up before he left? I didn't see it but I talked to Marie, she's the one who cleaned the rooms on their wing that Friday, the day after they went missing. They clean on Tuesdays and Fridays. And she said Paul's room was done up neat, he made his bed and left the towels hung up off the floor and there wasn't anything else in the room, not even in the trash.”

“Oh,” Colleen said. The news felt significant, but what did it mean? In a way, it was hopeful: her son had deliberately packed his things and taken them away. He'd
planned
to leave, in the middle of a hitch. But why? And why were Taylor's things undisturbed?

A sharp twist in her stomach signaled a very specific terror, and she pushed back against it. No. No, she was
not
going to allow her mind to leap to fantastical conclusions, scenarios she had no business entertaining, given how little information she had.

She had to focus on what she
could
do, now. One step at a time. The past was done, and the future, if she could influence it at all, was going to require all her attention.

“Listen,” she said. “I don't know how to say this to you, Jennie, and I know we just met and you have no reason to trust me. But I am going to ask a favor of you, and I just have to hope that you'll understand I am asking you as a
mother.
You're—you're someone's daughter, and I hope your mother loves you and would do anything to keep you safe. So. I know this is breaking rules, a lot of rules, and exposing you to risk—but could you give me Taylor's things?”

Jennie's lips parted in protest.

“Wait, wait, don't say no yet. Hear me out. We've just been to see the police. Chief Weyant, he practically came out and told me they don't have the resources to work on this case. You know they aren't going to be happy to investigate what you just told me, the possibility that someone at Hunter-Cole is covering up safety issues. I mean, that doesn't even sound like a police thing, that's got to be federal or OSHA—or, I don't know, but if the boys got tangled up in something like that, the Lawton police aren't going to be any help at all. But Shay—she
knows
her son. Knows him the way only a mother can.”

She paused, trying to gauge the effect her words were having, desperately hoping Jennie's mother wasn't one of those women who turned their nearly grown children out into the world with indifference, who'd parented her with resentment or worse. “If there's anything, any clue, to be found in his things, it's Ms. Capparelli who will be able to figure it out, don't you see? If there's something out of the ordinary, something that showed he strayed from his habits or got into something new—if there's names on his phone that she doesn't recognize—things like that.”

“But...” Jennie wouldn't look at her. “There could be DNA... all kinds of evidence. I don't think you're even supposed to touch stuff without gloves and, I don't know. It's supposed to be
processed.
”

Colleen nodded, wincing because the girl had a point. Maybe she was making a mistake here, risking destroying clues that could lead to the truth.

But Weyant had been very clear: no one was lighting a fire to process the things Taylor had left behind. Even if they had the lab, the equipment, they weren't making an effort to examine a bunch of dirty laundry for clues. And they wouldn't, unless the unthinkable happened... and then, what would it matter?

And the other
, the terrible little voice inside her nagged. The other reason. The one she would
not
give credence to, that she would not entertain for one second, because it meant a breach of faith in her son so wide and deep that she wasn't sure she could ever come back from it.

“Sweetheart, I think that's mostly on TV,” Colleen said shakily. And then she told a lie which, since it was a point of some honor with her to be as truthful as she could, always—a core family value, so to speak—surprised her with the ease with which it tripped off her lips. “I saw a documentary where they were saying that eighty percent of what we see on those shows is either impossible or police departments aren't equipped to handle it. In most cases evidence ends up in lockers and is never even looked at unless a case goes to court, and even then it gets lost or damaged way more often than you'd think. And I just can't—Taylor's mom and I can't take the risk of that happening. You understand... don't you?”

Jennie bit her lip, but she didn't look away.

“There's one more thing,” Colleen said, reaching for her purse. “Now I know you'll try to say no, because I can tell you were raised the way I raised my own son. You want to help just out of decency, but I also know you're a young woman starting out, and it's so hard these days, isn't it? I am going to give this to you whether you decide to help me get Taylor's things or not. It, well, it means something to me, more than you can imagine, that you remember Paul and that you—”

Her voice broke, and suddenly the line between lie and truth blurred, and she was speaking more deeply from her heart than she'd intended. “That you said he was a nice boy,” she finished in her broken voice. She took Jennie's hand and pressed the folded bills into her palm, closing her fingers over the money and squeezing. It was three hundred dollars, everything she'd withdrawn from the ATM.

“Oh, ma'am... I couldn't,” Jennie said.

“Yes. Yes, you can, sweetheart. Let me do this. Let me do a nice thing for you, it will help
me
, don't you see? I need—I need to do something nice for someone today. To make a difference, even a little. If you like, you can use it to buy a nice gift for your friend's baby,” she added with a smile.

For a moment their hands stayed clasped, and Colleen thought,
This—this is enough
, this knowing that she could be what a child needed.

But the young woman who tucked the bills into her jeans without looking to see how much, who stood up resolutely while digging the keys from her pocket, who paused with her hand on the door and turned to nod briefly at Colleen, was not a child at all.

“Stay here,” she said. “I'm going to get what you need.”

SHAY HAD MANAGED
not to smoke a second cigarette. Well, third, counting the one first thing in the morning. Just two, and it was almost noon. Half a day. Two in half a day, four in a whole day; if she could manage that, it was all right. Not perfect, not by a long shot, but under control.

She jumped when Colleen rapped on the passenger window. She turned the ignition on and leaned across to unlock the door, the automatic control having quit on her last year.

Colleen slid into the seat. In her hand was a large plastic Walmart bag.

“Is that the boys' things?”

“Yes,” Colleen said tensely. “But can we go? I don't want to look at them here.”

Shay headed up the road out of the camp and back through town. She focused on staying under the speed limit. Halfway back, Colleen spoke again. “It's only Taylor's. Paul's was—there wasn't anything in his room.”

“He took it all with him? Or someone cleaned it out?”

“Well, it wasn't there, that's all we know. Whether he took it or... or something else.”

There was something in her voice, some sharp splinter of fear, and Shay didn't push. Instead, she thought about what it might mean. The boys disappeared the same day, as far as anyone knew... but the maid didn't come until Friday. Could Paul have stayed back, for some reason? Or—it seemed impossible—could it be unrelated, some fantastic coincidence, the boys deciding separately—for their own different reasons—to leave? Maybe not even aware that the other—