Summer Sons(67)
Riley said, “I can go first, if you want.”
“Wait out here,” Andrew said.
He turned the knob and the door sagged into his grip, worn on its hinges. He let it swing open. The high walls of the carrel and the wan track lighting overhead turned the compact space into a chiaroscuro relief. He flicked on the lamps, one for each corner, and braced his hands on the solitary chair tucked under the desktop. The carrel had two long, pale wooden desks with drawers at one end, joined at the far corner in an L-shape.
Books, as he’d expected, scattered the far desk: historical survey texts, local journals, a lone mismatched graphic novel with an envelope sticking out of it as a bookmark. Two more composition books, flat and pristine, were tucked into the top corner. Andrew sat in the chair, laid his hands on the working desktop, and thought where the fuck are these notes?
“Riley,” he said.
The other man peered around the edge of the door, a briefly disembodied head and one shoulder. “Sup?”
“What’s missing?”
Riley pulled the door shut behind him as he crammed into the small space. The light flashed on his glasses as he turned his head to inspect the full range of the carrel. He said, “Check the drawers.”
Andrew pulled out the bottom drawer and found a package of granola bars, unopened. The middle contained nothing but a binder clip and a pen, while the top offered a spiral-bound purple notebook, battered and dog-eared, but it had Riley’s handwriting on the cover. The chair spun when he kicked the floor to face the other man again, empty-handed. Riley stood near his knees, leaning against the other desktop in the confined space. Neither spoke, but Riley’s face had gone a hectic scarlet, scar standing out in silvery relief across his cheek and nose.
Andrew’s hands clenched and unclenched on his knees. He’d almost expected to find Eddie’s phone, his notes, a neat trail that said met with a crazy old man in the woods, here’s his address, he tells good stories. Clean answers to an impossible situation. The disappointment outweighed his understanding that the lack of material was also significant.
“Andrew,” Riley started, sounding on edge already.
He wasn’t ready to be interrogated while his brain continued to spin its emotional gears, so he pointed to the bridge of his own nose at the same spot Riley’s scar was and asked, “Where’d that come from again?”
“Someone hit me and I fell on some glass,” he said, undeterred by the redirection. “Andrew, there’s nothing here.”
“Sam take care of that person for you?”
“There’s nowhere else his notes should be,” Riley said, doggedly having the conversation Andrew wasn’t participating in.
“I’ll ask Troth first thing on Monday, it doesn’t … mean shit yet. Not yet,” he said.
Riley shook his head. Andrew stood, curving his chest and hips to avoid contact in the one-person room.
“West said she wanted me to follow up with her, and she was talking about his research at the party, before she gave me the ring. She definitely wants me to keep working on it. The notes might be with her, might be somewhere else. Don’t get your hopes up.”
He was reminding himself as much as telling Riley, who nodded.
Next to the door, pinned to the cloth wall from top to desk, were a set of eight-year-old newspaper articles, some clipped, some printed, some scanned. Local Boys Found After 72-Hour Search, read one headline paired with a black-and-white photograph of two skinny-limbed kids in cargo shorts and sneakers posing for a camera. The picture had been taken at his twelfth birthday. Eddie had pushed him into the swimming pool with his flip-phone still in his pocket an hour later and they’d had a muddy fistfight in the yard. The other headlines weren’t much different. He shoved his hands in his pockets to keep from tearing it all down.
18
Andrew lowered himself into the same cracked vinyl chair in front of Troth’s desk from his last visit. The professor had left a note on the tiny square whiteboard hanging on her door: Be back shortly! As he waited, implications spooled out inside his head one after another, unforgiving like a corpse under hospital lighting, like how he’d seen Eddie in the identification photographs. Men who had violent squabbles over cocaine shot each other; someone desperate to cover up an overdose would pose a body, maybe. In neither of those scenarios would the perpetrator tie someone up, slit their wrists, and drive their corpse to a scenic location for a dog-walker to find. Nothing qualified him to investigate an actual murder, but if he took his handful of suspicions and bad dreams to a cop they’d pity-laugh him out of the room.
Something drastic was missing—maybe in the field notes, maybe in the phone. He didn’t know what it would mean if Troth had the notes—it might mean nothing at all. But without access to the fieldwork he’d have to retrace Eddie’s steps himself, and she could help with that better than anyone.
From the foyer Dr. Troth said, “Andrew, I’m glad you could make it.”
“I’m sorry it’s taken a while,” he said as she entered the office.
He crossed one ankle over the other, attempting to loosen his posture to an approximation of normal. Professor Troth lowered herself into her utilitarian chair. She rested her wrists on the edge of the desk, fine-boned fingers interlocked, to regard him. Overhead vents kicked on with a muffled roar, and a burst of chilly air rattled the papers scattered over her blotter.