Locust Lane(18)

Celia looked at her son. The muscles on his back rippled as his right arm pistoned. She quickly backed out of the room, the still-warm laundry pressed to her chest. She spoke with Oliver the moment he came home and he had a word with the boy. They were in the study for a long time. When Jack emerged, he looked chastened and wouldn’t meet his mother’s eye for days.

“It was just natural curiosity,” he explained. “Goddamned internet.”

Celia said nothing more. But she couldn’t help but think about the frenzied way her son’s arm moved. And as for being natural, the only other male in her life she could imagine watching such a thing was her father. Which was hardly a source of comfort.

This was not the only time Jack had been summoned to Oliver’s study. If the goal of his bad behavior was to get his father’s attention, it worked. Whenever he acted out, Oliver would conduct him behind his closed door, where he’d have a quiet word with him. He never raised his voice, he never lost his temper. He certainly never struck him—Oliver abhorred violence. He’d simply explain what was expected of a Parrish. Jack would take his medicine, but it would only be a matter of time before he acted out again. Father and son were locked in some generational male struggle from which she and the rest of the world were excluded.

Finally, after Scotty went off to Hanover, things changed. Jack’s temper abated. He began to read voraciously. His grades improved. He grew interested in his classes, psychology in particular. Dinners became disquisitions on Laing and Jung. His expression took on the furtive, self-satisfied cast of someone in the process of figuring things out for himself. He smiled more, but in a knowing, inward manner that left you wondering what exactly he found funny.

By his sixteenth birthday he’d come into his own. The man he was to become was taking shape. A thinker. An intellectual. Strong-minded, decisive, commanding. When people asked what he was planning to study in college, he’d simply answer “the mind.” He could be a little too opinionated and argumentative, his views often a tad extreme for Celia’s taste. But these were things that would change as he grew older. He’d finally put his difficult boyhood behind him. In the stuff that mattered, he’d become every bit a Parrish.



* * *



Her mother called. Katharine had heard about the killing through the grapevine. Not surprisingly, her Dubonnet-fueled views on the matter tended toward the apocalyptic. Celia’s mother had spent her whole life waiting for the murderous hordes to descend and always seemed disappointed when they didn’t. Now, she was in no doubt that they had struck a blow against all that was pure and good, and that more widespread havoc was coming. Celia was able to escape the call when the landscapers knocked on the sliding glass door to let her know they were finished for the day. They’d flattened the ground; stones would be laid tomorrow. Once they were gone, she watched a blue jay land on the newly exposed dirt, hopping and pecking frantically, unable to believe its good fortune.

Finally, just after three, an alert arrived announcing that the lockdown had ended. She texted Jack and instructed him that she wanted him to come right home so they could discuss last night before Oliver got back. There was no response. She tried him again fifteen minutes later, and then a half hour after that. Still nothing. Four o’clock came and went without Oliver’s return. She called him but it went straight to voice mail.

At four-thirty she tried Jack again. Still nothing; nor was there anything from Oliver when she called him for the second time. She phoned Alice to see if Jack was there, but she wasn’t picking up either. This was getting ridiculous. Meanwhile, the victim was identified—a brightly smiling twenty-year-old Watertown girl named Eden. Such a hopeful name. If Twitter was to be believed, a “person of interest” was now being questioned. At least the women who’d been whipping themselves into hysterics on the Emerson Moms Facebook page were simmering down now that it was clear that no one was marauding through the township’s streets, cutting down their young.

Five o’clock passed in silence. Celia was now officially worried. She called Oliver’s office, but his assistant was under the impression he was traveling straight back to Emerson. Finally, just when Celia was thinking about contacting the authorities, she heard the garage door rumble. Oliver entered, followed by Jack. Her husband looked grim. His middle finger traced that decades-old scar on his temple, like it always did when he was stressed. Her son was ashen. Neither seemed very eager to meet her eye.

“What is it?” she asked. “Oliver, what’s wrong?”





ALICE


She’d lingered at Papillon after Celia left, trying to look plausible as she sipped a refill of coffee she neither wanted nor needed. What the hell was going on? The situation with Michel was getting out of hand. He wouldn’t even meet her eye when he came to the table. And the way he simply left her was totally unacceptable. Granted, it had to be alarming for him to learn that his beloved boy had lied to him. But that was no excuse to abandon her, especially since Hannah was involved as well.

She checked her phone for the first time since arriving. Nothing from him, but there was a message announcing that the school had gone into a lockdown. She experienced a short pulse of panic, but it faded quickly. She’d need to hear sirens and the shudder of helicopters to get truly concerned. They had a couple of these things every year and they invariably turned out to be nothing more than soundings of the current depths of communal paranoia.