Widowmaker (Mike Bowditch #7)(32)

He rubbed his chin and nodded, but he didn’t seem entirely convinced. “What is it you want to know?”

“Tell me about the fight.”

“The fight?”

“You confronted Adam when you found out he’d been having sex with Alexa. You two got into it.”

Davidson touched the corner of his eye. “He broke my eye socket. My orbital bone.”

“And that was how the school found out?”

He knocked his head back against the window of the cockpit so hard, I could hear it. “The nurse asked me what happened, and I was so pissed off, I said some things I shouldn’t have. The next thing I knew, the headmaster was there, asking me all these questions, and a detective showed up, and I got freaked out.”

“What did you tell them?”

“That I was mad at Adam because he was my friend, and he’d been banging my little sister.”

I could imagine what had happened next. The detective would have gotten the parents’ permission to confiscate Alexa’s phone, and they would have found texts (almost certainly lewd) and photographs (even worse). Then, after they’d managed to convince Alexa to cooperate, the cops would have orchestrated a pretext call. It was a recorded conversation between the boy and the girl to get him to admit what he’d done. A simple “I’m sorry” was all it took to send people to prison for statutory rape.

“I would have been pissed if someone had raped my little sister,” I said.

“Yeah, but it wasn’t rape. I don’t know what the right word for it is, but it wasn’t rape. They’d been having sex for a month. Alexa wasn’t even a virgin when they started going out.”

Davidson had begun to perspire from the heat inside the cockpit.

“It’s still against the law,” I said. “You did the right thing by coming forward.”

“But I didn’t know what was going to happen to him!” He let out a groan, as if overcome with nausea. “If I’d just made up some story about how I’d broken that bone, Adam would have moved on to some new girl, and Alexa would have been sad for a while. But she’s always had her skiing to focus on anyway. Just talk to my dad for two minutes, and he’ll tell you who’s the champion skier in the family. Alexa just made the U.S. Ski Team. And here I am working on the Widowmaker ski patrol, trying to figure out what to do with my life.”

Davidson really did seem to be a sensitive, emotional kid. Not at all like other college athletes I had known. I had a hard time believing it had been his idea to attend ASA.

“Did you end up testifying at the trial?” I asked.

“They didn’t need me,” he said. “My dad got Alexa to do it. He convinced her, like he always does. Plus, the police had that phone recording, and some dick pics Adam had sent her. They didn’t need me to testify. I never even went to the courthouse. I was too ashamed to look my friend in the eye.”

“You still consider him your friend?”

He laughed bitterly. “I’m not sure the feeling’s mutual.”

“Adam’s mom said you kept in touch with him in prison.”

“I sent him some letters, apologizing for what happened. But I never heard from him until after he’d gotten out. That was a couple of weeks ago. He was living at some kind of logging camp over in Kennebago with a bunch of other— It sounded horrible. The guy who ran the place was a slave driver, Adam said. He asked if I could meet him at the Snow Bowl. That’s the bowling alley in Bigelow.”

“When was this, exactly?”

“Two weeks ago Thursday,” he said, stroking his lips with his long fingers. “He was waiting for me in the lot. It kind of spooked me, because I didn’t know how angry he was going to be.”

“Were you scared of him?”

“Fuck yeah! He’d just gotten out of prison. I almost didn’t recognize him. Someone had bitten off part of his ear! His hair was real long, and he was bigger than before he went inside. The guy was f*cking jacked.”

Prisoners in Maine no longer had access to barbells or pull-up bars, but some of them compensated by maxing out on body-weight exercises in their cells. A friend of mine named Billy Cronk, who was serving out a manslaughter sentence in the Maine State Prison, had told me that plenty of ex-cons were still coming out of the joint stronger than before they’d gone in. Meaner, too.

“So what happened that night?” I asked.

“He asked me for some money,” Josh said. “I only had a twenty on me, but he asked if I could use the ATM inside the bowling alley. I took out the max—three hundred bucks—and I gave it to him. Then he drove off in a truck I didn’t recognize.”

“Do you remember what kind of truck it was?”

“An old Ford, maybe. Or a Chevy. I don’t know trucks. I am pretty sure he was all alone, though.” He let out another groan. “I was relieved after he’d gone.”

“Did he threaten you?”

“No. But—”

“But what?”

“He wasn’t very talkative. Not like the old Adam at all. I used to be his sidekick. I’ve always been someone’s sidekick, I guess. But he was really cold and quiet. I asked if I could buy him a beer, and he said he wasn’t allowed to go to bars or drink alcohol as a condition of his release. He said there was a long list of things he would never be able to do again. He said I should appreciate all the privileges I had in my life.” He sat forward, sweating, with a strained look on his face. “There was one other thing, too.”