Fool Me Once(87)

He smiled and openly looked her up and down. “You’re stunning and you give off that air of unattainability. Like you’re above it all.” He shook his head. “I bet Joe couldn’t resist you the moment he saw you, am I right?”

Now was not the time to play a feminist card or get offended. She needed him to keep talking. “Pretty much, yeah.”

“Let me guess. Joe gave you some cheesy pickup line, something funny but maybe self-deprecating and vulnerable. I’m right, aren’t I?”

“You are.”

“Swept you off your feet, didn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“Oh man, that Joe. The dude was three steps above charismatic when he wanted to be.” Swain shook his head again as the smile started to fall away. “So is he really dead? Joe, I mean.”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t know. No news in here. One of the rules. No social media, no Internet, no outside world. We get to check our email once a day. That’s how I saw your message. Once I did . . . Well, my doctor said it would be okay to read the news report. I have to say, I was shocked to hear about Joe. Would you like to sit down?”

The solarium was clearly a more recent addition that was trying to fit in with the old and not totally succeeding. There was a snapped-together vibe about it. The roof was a dome with faux stained glass. There were plants, sure, but fewer than one might imagine in a room dubbed a solarium. Two leather chairs sat in the middle of the room facing each other. Maya took one, Swain the other.

“I can’t believe he’s dead.”

Yeah, Maya thought, she was getting that a lot.

“You were there, right? When he was shot?”

“Yes,” Maya said.

“The news reports said you escaped unharmed.”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“I ran away.”

Swain looked at her as though he didn’t entirely believe that. “It must have been scary for you.”

She said nothing.

“The news outlets described it as a robbery gone wrong.”

“Yes.”

“But we both know that’s not true, don’t we, Maya?” He put his hand through his hair. “You wouldn’t be here if it were just a robbery.”

His manner was starting to unnerve her. “Right now,” Maya said, “I’m just trying to put together what happened.”

“It’s incredible,” he said. “I still can’t believe it.”

There was an odd smile on his face.

“Believe what?”

“That Joe is dead. Sorry for harping on that. It’s just that he was . . . I don’t know if it would be right to say he was ‘so full of life.’ That’s so hackneyed, isn’t it? But let’s say Joe was a life force. You know? He seemed so strong, so powerful, like a fire that raged so out of control you could never put it out. There was almost something—I know this is silly—immortal about him . . .”

Maya shifted in her seat. “Christopher?”

He was gazing out a window.

“You were on the yacht the night Andrew went overboard.”

He didn’t move.

“What really happened to his brother Andrew?”

Swain swallowed hard. A tear escaped from his eye and slid down his cheek.

“Christopher?”

“I didn’t see it, Maya. I stayed on the lower deck.”

There was a chill in his voice.

“But you know something.”

Another tear.

“Please tell me,” Maya said. “Did Andrew really fall?”

His voice was like a stone dropping down a well. “I don’t know. But I don’t think so.”

“So what happened to him?”

“I think . . . ,” Christopher Swain said before taking a deep breath, summoning some inner resolve, and starting again. “I think Joe pushed him off the boat.”





Chapter 30


Swain sat with both hands gripping the chair arms.

“It started when Theo Mora came to Franklin Biddle Academy. Or maybe that was when I started to see it.”

They had pushed their chairs closer together, almost knee-to-knee, somehow needing to be physically closer in this room that seemed to be growing ever colder.

“You probably think it was the old cliché about the rich not wanting the poor sullying their elite institutions. You can almost picture it, can’t you? We rich kids all ganged up on Theo or picked on him. But that wasn’t how it was.”

“How was it?” Maya asked.

“Theo was funny and outgoing. He didn’t make the mistake of backing off or kowtowing to us. He fit right in. We all liked him. He didn’t seem all that different in many ways. I know people want to paint the rich one way and the poor another, but when you’re kids—and that’s what we were, or what I thought we were, just kids—you just want to hang out and belong.”

He wiped his eyes.

“And it didn’t hurt that Theo was a great soccer player. Not good. Great. I was thrilled. We had a chance to win it all that year. Not just the state as a prep school, which we did, but win the entire state tournament outright, including all the big public and parochial schools. Theo was that good. He could score from anywhere. And maybe that was the problem.”