Authors: Unknown Author
As they made the slow, shuffling walk back to Stockton, his head found her shoulder and by the time they made it to the entrance she assumed he was about to pass out. But instead, he cried silently into her shoulder as she led him, as briskly as she could, up the stairs and down the hallway. At the door to his room, she turned him and propped him against the wall.
“I need your key.”
Randall’s chin met his chest, upper back sliding against the cin-derblock.
She knocked on the shut door. “Jesse?” she called.
“Gone,” Randall slurred.
“What?”
Across the hall, April cracked the door, read the scene instantly, and stepped across the threshold. “I’ve got it,” Kathryn said sharply.
“Cozumel,” Randall mumbled as he slid to a seated position on the floor. “The phone lines end ... He went there when he was little ... A hurricane destroyed one ... one half of the island. The phone lines ended.”
April shook her head and ducked back inside.
“I need your key, Randall.”
He slapped a limp hand against his pants pocket. After she dug it out, she hoisted him to his feet, leaned him against her, and opened the door onto a pitch-dark room. After several seconds of blind shuffling, Randall’s breath Came out of him in a grunt, he collapsed, and she landed on top of him on the bed. She groped until she found the halogen lamp. Harsh light hit the ceiling, and Randall rolled over onto one side, bringing his forearm over his eyes.
Kathryn lifted his legs off the floor and dropped them onto the mattress before taking a seat at the foot of the bed and unlacing his boots. When she looked up, Randall’s arm had gone to his side and he was staring at her through hooded, bloodshot eyes.
“It’s perfectly all right for you to hate me,” he slurred, his voice long and twangy, sounding almost Southern.
“I don’t hate you,” She slid one boot off his socked foot and dropped it to the floor.
“Liar.” A woozy grin curled his cheeks. “Sorry. That’s me.” Laughter seized him, lifting his chest slightly off the mattress. “Do you think it’s all just a bunch of... bullshit? Like college is supposed to be this great place where we find out who we really are ... How is that great? If who we are sucks.” His head fell back to the bed.
Drunken groveling might have inspired pity in her, but drunken self-pity just fueled her frustration. She yanked the second boot off his other foot and the sock caught, sliding down his ankle. She dropped the boot to the floor and tugged the sock all the way off.
The skin on his ankle was marred by a raised area of pinkish skin. She lifted his bare foot with both hands, examining it in bewilderment.
Bravely, she prodded the area—it didn’t look like a bruise—with one finger.
Randall didn’t stir.
She pushed up the cuff of his jeans and was shocked to see that the mark extended up his shin with the same consistency and color.
“Randall?”
But he was down for the count, his breaths slow and deep and his head tilted to one side against the pillow. She released his foot and rose from the mattress. April stood in the open door.
“He just needs to sleep it off. He’ll be all right.”
But April was staring past her. Kathryn followed her gaze.
Jesse’s mattress was stripped, the wall above it a shock of white cinder-block. The surface of his desk was clear. The large desk calendar was missing.
Kathryn looked to April for confirmation that she wasn’t hallucinating.
April just shook her head.
Kathryn went to his closet and pulled back the curtain. Even the hangers were gone. She let the curtain fall, turned to April, and lifted both arms in a gesture of silent belief.
Randall started to snore.
“I don’t know,” April said, more agitated this time. “Some people just flip out, Kathryn. One of my lab partners lost her shit over the break and told her parents she’d rather die than come back. I mean, think about it—it’s not like Jesse had any friends here.”
Kathryn watched April shove her arms hurriedly into an extra large T-shirt. By contrast, Kathryn was almost placid, sitting on the edge of her bed with her hands folded in her lap.
“Maybe he withdrew?” April asked.
“You’re more upset than I am. I don’t even like him.”
April’s face clouded. She sat down on the edge of her bed, maybe hoping to find Kathryn’s calm by matching her pose.
“This might not have anything to do with anything. And I wasn’t going to tell you.”
“But you are. Right now.”
April gave one last sigh. “The night I left, I ran into Randall standing outside the door, listening. Jesse was obviously with someone.”
“You do realize that Randall, every time he wanted to go in his own room, he had to stop and figure out if Jesse was screwing someone?”
“Yeah, well. This time it was a guy.”
Kathryn grunted and lowered her eyes from April’s, afraid of where this was headed, even though she had suspected it for months now. “How do you know?”
“I heard. And so did Randall.”
“Well, I always thought Jesse had it in him,” she said wryly. “Is that all?”
“Randall went in the room.”
Kathryn focused on April again, as if the sight of her was an anchor amid the swirl of her revelation. “How do you know?”
“Because I pretended to leave, but I waited down the hall, went back, and checked.”
“Congratulations. You were right.”
“That is not why I told you, Kathryn!”
“Why, then?”
“Because . . .” April paused, obviously thinking on her feet. “
Maybe it’s poetic justice,” Kathryn said brightly. “Jesse screws whoever he wants and gets rid of them whenever he wants. Maybe this time he picked someone he couldn’t get rid of.”
Kathryn raised her eyebrows. As the larger implications of her words settled over them both, April snapped her mouth shut. “That is so not what I meant. I’m not saying Randall
did
—”
“What are you saying?” Kathryn asked sharply.
“Maybe Jesse went home, Kathryn. Maybe once he got there—”
“He told me he wasn’t going home.”
“Maybe someone made him go home. Look, we might all waltz around here like we’re independent adults, but we’re not the ones writing the check for this place.” It was a tempting theory. Maybe Jesse had simply feigned self-possession and independence, and maybe his father, who he had described to her with a strange detachment, had decided to yank the rug out from under Jesse’s new life.
What exactly was it that Jesse had said? Kathryn tried to remember. It was time for him to move on, but his father hadn’t realized it yet.
Cozumel
,
Randall had slurred only a moment earlier. Jesse went to Cozumel to escape his father?
Her head hurt.
April killed her desk lamp. “Just ask Randall in the morning. I’m sure he’ll know.” She buried herself in the comforter.
After several seconds of staring at the floor, Kathryn got up and went back to Randall’s room.
Everything was as she had left it, including Randall, who was still stuporously asleep. She went to Jesse’s desk and opened the middle drawer. Empty. So were the other three. She scanned the place again. Not one single shred of Jesse, and that was what bothered her. What-. ever the reason for his departure, it had to have been hurried. Wasn’t there one thing that would have been too heavy to pack? Moreover, if Jesse was leaving Atherton, why did he bother to take all his textbooks with him?
He didn’t, moron, said a voice inside her head. He threw them in the trash.
Disgusted by her swelling suspicion, she sat down on the mattress. It didn’t give the way she knew it should and she heard springs squeak, the sound slightly choked. Off. Down on all fours, she peered under the bed, scanning the underside of the bed frame through shadow. Finally, she saw what had caused the strange sound.
Something was wedged between the mattress and the springs, shoved back to the far left corner, almost to the headboard.
She got to her feet, glanced again at Randall to make sure he was still out, and then lifted the extra long twin with both hands. Hidden there was Jesse’s laptop computer.
She held up the mattress with one arm and removed the laptop from the bed of coils.
Why would Jesse bother to get rid of his textbooks and leave behind a brand-new computer he could use anywhere? Considering the thoroughness of the job he’d done, she found it almost impossible to believe that he just forgot it.
There was only one logical answer, and even though she didn’t like it, she had to be the one to ask the question.
Jesse wasn’t the one who cleaned out his room.
SECURITY LIGHTS THREW HALOS OUT FROM THE GARAGE DOORS ONTO
the expansive parking lot between both banks of storage lockers. Randall crouched down over the padlock, working the bolt cutter with short punches. Behind him, Tim had moved in as close as he could get to Randall, safely out of the nearest corona of harsh, bluish light. Of all nights, this one was clear, windless, and, Randall thought, oppressively silent in a manner that only amplified the grating of the bolt cutter chewing against the padlock.
“Shit,” Tim finally said in a panicked whisper.
“Calm down.”
Tim stepped closer, adjusting the flashlight’s beam. In his other hand, he held the new padlock they’d use to replace this one. If the son of a bitch ever came off. “So far this whole thing’s been too easy. Our luck is bound to run out.”
“Say that again and .. .” Randall clenched his teeth as if it would add torque. There was a loud snap and before Randall knew it the lock clattered to the concrete.
“Inside!” Tim commanded.
Randall yanked the lever and held on to it as the garage door ascended. Tim ducked through and Randall followed into the darkness, groping to find the interior lock. He shoved the door down. It hit the concrete, bounced, and then settled an inch above the pavement.
All Randall could see was the flashlight beam angled purposelessly toward the ceiling. He grabbed for it and Tim grunted as Randall pulled it from his grip. “We’re safe,” he assured Tim.
“Bullshit,” Tim hissed. “I bet we’re about to make a bunch of new four-legged friends.”
“Any rat stupid enough to stick around here is frozen solid.”
“I’d still fell better if I was . . .
Fuck
!”
Randall swung the beam just in time to catch Tim righting himself, his hands braced against something massive concealed by a canvas tarp.
“You all right?”
“It’s a car,” Tim said, catching his breath.
Tim remained hunched over in the beam’s halo, but he wasn’t injured. He drew the tarp up with both fists until a rear bumper and license plate came into a view.
“Make that a van. An
A
erostar
.
Christ, my mom drove one in, like, 1983.”
“The Volvo was new.”
“You think this was Lisa’s?”
“Maybe.”
“The plates haven’t expired. It can’t be that old.”
Randall swung the flashlight beam away from Tim, who let out a frightened, “Hey!”
In a slow, sweeping motion, Randall revealed empty pavement and a corrugated metal wall—and a pile of cardboard boxes that might contain everything Lisa wanted to keep a secret from her husband. Breathless, he approached them. They were all empty. He kicked one of them into the others and they toppled. “Dammit.”
“Over here!” Tim ordered. The van was obviously the only thing inside the entire locker. Randall complied, angled the beam onto the Aerostar as Tim pulled back the tarp, yanking it from the van’s roof before sending it sliding down the rear window.
“Fuck me,” Tim whispered. “Give it over.”
Randall did, and Tim aimed the flashlight through one of the van’s side windows. The two backseats were filled with cardboard boxes, some taped securely, others spilling sleeves through their top flaps. More clothes than Randall had found in Paula Willis’ guest bedroom, and personal belongings too, it looked like. Several open flaps revealed what looked like scrapbooks, as well as hardcover books left over from Lisa’s brief postgraduate career. When they came to the driver’s side door, Tim pulled the handle. The door popped open.
“Get in,” Tim ordered, and Randall rounded the nose of the van before climbing into the passenger seat.
For a relative antique of a minivan that had spent extended time inside a locker, the Aerostar was surprisingly clean. The seats and carpet were vacuumed, and the flashlight beam glinted over a full, capped bottle of water wedged between the cup holders.
“She was on her way here,” Randall said.,
“What?” Tim jerked forward in the driver’s seat, angling the beam toward the ceiling, which filled the van with diffuse light. The words had come out of Randall’s mouth before he even had time to process the thought. “Keep going,” Tim urged him.
“She doesn’t want him to know she was leaving until he gets the note. This way it can be a big surprise. She rents the locker so she can take her sweet time packing up all her things. A couple boxes at a time, never so much that Eric gets suspicious. Then, when she’s ready, she hops in the Volvo like she’s going to her sister’s, but instead she comes here. And Eric doesn’t have a clue until he gets her little good-bye note. And it’s the perfect revenge. Because he’s ignored her for so long, just assumed she would always stick around. And she’s gone before he even has the chance to know what hit him.”
“If only she could have skipped the scotch,” Tim muttered.
They sat thinking through this scenario for a few seconds before Tim began sweeping the flashlight across the rear of the van. “So what now? We go through her scrapbooks?”