Summer Sons(55)

Halse said dryly, “It’s an hour and a half drive, so it’s going to be real boring if you sit there quiet the whole time.”

“Hour and a half?” he questioned, turning a fraction toward him against his better judgment. “What the fuck?”

“They found him out in the woods, edge of a national park I guess,” Sam said.

He kept a hand and one knee touching the wheel, the other hanging a measure above the gearshift. Traffic passed behind them at a steady clip, going the compulsory twelve miles per hour over the limit. Periodically his fingertips twitched to rub the edge of the peeling sticker.

When it became apparent that Andrew wouldn’t continue, Halse said, “He had Riley listed as his emergency contact through Vandy. I guess the cops looked that up when some lady out walking her dog or whatever found him. I asked to see where, after they brought him back and called his parents and shit.”

“Why?” Andrew asked, packing weight into that one word.

Sam said, shrugging, “Because I needed to know.”

Sober and strained, the pair lapsed out of conversation. Andrew scrolled on his phone with nerves jangling, typed a brief email to Dr. Troth to apologize for missing their arranged time. Without his hat, Halse was a younger-looking man, still unfinished around the edges of his stubbled jawline and prominent cheekbones. The mantle of his persona hung looser on him than usual. Andrew swallowed a knot of uncertainty, his earlier aggression dissolving from the simple awkwardness of the situation and the lack of continued provocation.

Sam took his eyes off the road to catch Andrew staring and said, “I’m not stupid. I’m guessing you think something bad happened with him and us. Like we did something to help him along. Riley has buried himself ass-deep in guilt. He didn’t see shit wrong, and I didn’t either. Eddie was acting kind of manic at the end there, but who doesn’t sometimes?”

The responses that rose to his mouth and died there formed a block of clutter. Andrew grunted and nodded instead of offering an explanation. Halse hadn’t quite hit the nail on the head, but he was too close to the truth of the suspicions knocking around Andrew’s skull. Something bad covered a whole manner of sins.

“It doesn’t sit right with me that his phone is missing. Odds it’s out there in the woods?” Sam asked.

The question sounded rhetorical, but Andrew said, “Not strong.”

“Maybe it landed in someone’s pocket,” Sam said slowly, testing the idea.

“Yeah, maybe,” he said to the man he thought might’ve taken it.

“You’re crazy,” Halse said. It didn’t sound like a real disagreement.

After another drag of tense quiet, Sam turned on the radio and spun the dial to loud. Andrew sat gnawing his nails in sequence to pass the drive. He had come with Sam alone, friendless, far from the city, and he hadn’t bothered to so much as text a person his whereabouts. Ethan’s monologue lingered in Andrew’s head: protective of his cousin, disapproving of the gothic obsession that selfsame cousin shared with Eddie, prone to clashing with Eddie bad enough that other people noticed. He recalled the scabs on Halse’s jaw the first time they’d met, and West’s observation about Eddie’s fights. The fact that the pair of them had been running Halse’s business routes together. All the secrets Eddie had hidden from Andrew. He was starting to feel like every one of Eddie’s lies and evasions had something to do with Halse.

At a turnoff with a national parks sign, Sam spun the wheel and took a hairpin turn faster than he needed to, with a noisy scatter of gravel. He parked at a service road that said NO PARKING. Their doors slammed in the birdcall-split solitude of the wood’s edge. The total absence of other humans was notable in the density of the quiet. His skin crawled. If Halse was the one responsible, despite his performed ignorance—

“Down here,” Halse said as he set off walking, interrupting Andrew’s uneasy hesitation.

Andrew followed him onto the hiking path. The trees closed over their heads, undergrowth lush on either side of the packed dirt track. At a sharp curve in the trail, split with a snarled ankle-thick root, Sam grabbed a tree branch for balance and clambered off the path. He waved an unconcerned hand through a dreamcatcher of a spider’s web at face-level. Andrew picked through the underbrush at a more sedate pace. He drank in the gloaming-dimmed forest around him for signs, for some necromantic twinge, and scuffed his feet through the leaf litter in pursuit of more tangible evidence. Then Halse stopped. Andrew halted two feet behind him.

Halse laid his palm over the trunk of a broad, craggy white oak with its bottom branches curved almost to the ground. The tree was as broad as Sam’s wingspan, Andrew guessed, a monster planted in the middle of a ring of skinnier growth. It had a certain poetic weight. He hated it with a fierce, scouring depth.

“Cops said here.” Halse moved his hand from the trunk, uncovering a freshly scarred carving, EF. “Under this tree. Might’ve taken weeks to find him, if that dog hadn’t helped.”

Andrew swallowed. “Has Riley seen this?”

“No,” Sam said. “I wouldn’t bring him out here.”

Without waiting for a response he turned and paced around the side of the tree to give Andrew some privacy, scuffing his boots through the ground cover, as Andrew had been doing on his approach. He disappeared behind the trunk. Andrew sidled up to the tree with the caution he’d use for a skittish horse. The bark was rough and warm, but inert under his hands where he traced the scarred memorial letters he presumed Halse had left, the only other man to visit Eddie’s resting place. Andrew expected to feel a stab of recognition, the riffling wail of his spectral hanger-on, but there was nothing—the cold knot inside him didn’t even stir in response to the supposed site of Eddie’s death.