Burning Blue

mom. To laugh, you know? This guy Pete, my uncle sort of, said he’d drive us home, just give him a minute to get his coat. He got hung up talking to his boss, and after a couple of minutes my father was like, I’m exhausted, I have to get home, let’s go. My mom voted we wait for Pete, but Dad was on his way to the car.”

“Oh Jay.”

“My father says the car hit black ice, but my mother was looking at me, in the rearview, right before the crash. Her eyes weren’t on the road. Whatever happened, she swerved to avoid an oncoming truck, and the car spun out into a light pole, head on. The airbags deployed, and my Dad was okay except for some minor neck trauma and a broken collarbone, but Mom hadn’t been wearing her seat belt. I didn’t do too well in the backseat. The doctor defined it as ‘serious head trauma.’ The swelling in my brain went away a couple of weeks later, and then they came on fast. The seizures.”

“He’s trying, though, right?” she said. “Now, I mean. Trying to stay sober. He’s there for you as much as he can be. He didn’t abandon you. He created a situation, and he’s owning up to it.” We were facing each other. She turned to hide her left cheek.

I put my fingers to her chin and gently turned her face to mine. “I won’t run away. You don’t have to hide from me.”

“I do, though. You don’t want to see it. Trust me. I’ll be right back.” She went into the bathroom. The door closed softly, the lock clicked.

I flipped the textbook to a page she’d flagged, the chemical diagram for hydrochloric acid.

FORTY-SIX

Nicole didn’t come “right back.” She was in the bathroom for a while. She was pale when she came out. She said she was feeling under the weather. I checked the window: perfect sunset, balmy breeze. “I’ll let you get some rest,” I said.

“Stay.”

“I have to go to work anyway.”

She walked me to the door. We hugged, and when I broke to leave, she held on a little longer before she let me go.

I was on one of our archaic computers, checking to see if BJ’s online had an item we had sold out of in the store, a forty-dollar piece of junk chiminea. The customer I was trying to help was practically leaning his head on my shoulder, trying to see the computer screen. His breath reeked of the onion rings we try to get you to buy when you walk in, because of course everybody needs to have his mouth stuffed with fried junk food while shopping for staircase bunk beds with a merlot finish.

I was about to log out when the sidebar ad changed from one that tried to sucker you into thinking that only a 99-inch television was acceptable when watching X-Factor to one about weed killer. A cartoon spider climbed a daisy. The spider was a happy little guy. He lay back on the flower, put four of his arms behind his head and winked.

Why didn’t Barrone seem at all happy after Angela Sammick’s arrest?

“Jay.” Dave Bendix gripped my hand and clapped my shoulder. “Thank you, man. For everything you did for Nicole.”

“How’d you know I work here?”

“Nic told me. I told her I had to talk to you. Look, I want you to know it’s okay. You and Nic, I mean.”

“Dave, again, we’re just friends. Seriously, nothing’s going on.”

“Maybe not on your end. I heard it in her voice.” He teared up. “I want her to be happy. You’re a good dude. I just wanted you to know that we’re still cool, okay? You have a tissue?” I gave him my coffee napkin. He blew his nose. “What gets into somebody’s head that they ruin somebody like that? Did you get any sense from Detective Barrone why Angela did it?”

And that’s when I knew Dave Bendix was hiding something big. “No,” I said. “It’s a mystery.”

Ten minutes before we closed, I picked up the cheapest laptop BJ’s offered, came to a hundred and eighty bucks cash with my employee discount. The police had seized my computers, but fortunately not until two hours after the kill call, according to our building super, who had to let them into the apartment.

I rode my bike home, two blocks past my building to this house that had been foreclosed on and abandoned. In the basement was a bucket of filthy rags. Beneath those were a bunch of computer parts and one totally sexy bandwidth thief I’d picked up at swap meets, all untraceable. I mixed and matched them into the crappy laptop shell, and in half an hour the machine was built. I was invisible again.

The next day, Friday, the story went wide under the title GOTH GIRL BURNED BEAUTY. The detectives found Angela’s laptop in her backpack. She’d done it all, the chem lab video post, the emails to Mrs. Marks, to me. I was particularly grateful to her for the one with the strobe lights. I was betting that at her size, she wasn’t having a good time in jail. No bail for Angela Sammick, obviously. The more I thought about her, the madder I got, and not just at her. I was disgusted with myself for having let her dupe me. Not wishing serious pain on her was a challenge.

Nicole invited me over for lunch, but I was going to have to pass. Her father was spending the day at the house. I admired him in some vague way, but in the end he had to land on my jerk list. I just didn’t want to be around the guy, his intensity, those eyes that cut right through you and made you feel like you were hiding something, even if you weren’t. I had some digging to do anyway.

I had hit Dave’s Facebook page at least twenty times in the past couple of weeks. I’d scanned everything he’d posted, and I’d never found anything out of place. Yet I went at it again, reviewing every picture, clip and comment for anything I might have missed. Nothing. I shifted over to what wasn’t there anymore. You might think you deleted that goofy picture you slapped onto your wall when you were huffing Magic Markers, but the moment you clicked it up there, it was and is there forever and for the taking by anybody with kindergarten-level hacking skills. Once you post, you’re toast.

Sure enough, Dave had deleted a video from his gallery. He’d pulled it from his wrestling videos folder the day after the attack. It was a recording of one of his matches from the previous spring. In the video, he finishes crushing his opponent with a savage pin job. Nicole, watching from the first row of the bleachers, jumps up clapping and screams, “Woohoo.” She leans out from the bleachers toward the home team wrestlers’ bench. Dave is sitting now, and Nicole whispers something into his ear. He turns to her, glares, and then turns back to watch the next match. Nicole leans back into the bleachers. The whole exchange lasts less than two seconds.

I replayed the video again and again. Sure, every couple has arguments, but Dave was treating Nicole coldly. They’d only been going out for a couple of months at that time. No way Dave would disrespect her like that. I zoomed in. The girl whispering into Dave’s ear wasn’t Nicole. She was a dyed chestnut Angela Sammick.

My quandary: Do I tell Nicole that Dave was cheating on her? No, she has enough sadness in her life.

Dave had held back information from the police, the kind that could have led them to Angela a lot sooner. That’s obstruction of justice, the same charge I was facing. If I’d seen this video, so had Detective Barrone. Did Dave know she was onto him? And why hadn’t Barrone arrested Dave?

FORTY-SEVEN

“Perhaps it fascinates you,” Schmidt said.

I was still suspended, but as part of my bail agreement I was required to honor my obligation to meet with her once a week.

“You mean she, don’t you, Doctor?”

“I was referring to her disfigurement.”