Monday morning.”
“Kip?” Ryan repeated. “Is that who lived here?”
Suddenly the atmosphere in the room changed. “Yeah,” Tim Kennedy said, his voice oddly hollow.
Ryan frowned slightly. “What happened to him?”
The three boys glanced uneasily at each other, each of them waiting for someone else to speak first.
“I heard it might have been drugs,” Darren Bender finally said.
“It wasn’t drugs!” Clay Matthews instantly countered. “Kip didn’t do drugs, and you guys know it.”
“Then what do
Clay’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t know. Nobody knows.”
“Nobody knows what?” Ryan asked. “What happened to him?”
Once again the other three boys glanced at each other, but this time it was Clay Matthews who broke the silence. “Kip died,” he said, his voice so quiet that Ryan thought he hadn’t heard the words right. But the expressions on Tim’s and Darren’s faces told him he had.
“What do you mean, ‘died’?” he asked, his eyes flicking from Clay to Darren and Tim, then back to Clay. “You mean, like, he got sick or something?”
“He killed someone,” Clay said, his voice still barely above a whisper. “Some woman. And the police shot him. But it doesn’t make any sense — Kip wouldn’t do anything like that.”
“How does anyone know what anyone’s gonna do?” Tim asked. “It’s like…”
But Ryan was no longer listening. What kind of school was St. Isaac’s? Even the worst of the kids at Dickinson had never gone out and just killed someone, at least not that he’d ever heard of. Then he remembered the people he and his mother had seen on the front steps this morning. They had to have been Kip’s parents. And suddenly he remembered the last words the man had spoken:
Suddenly Ryan McIntyre just wanted to go home. There might not be the kind of threat from the Frankie Alitos of the world here, but after hearing what had happened to Kip Adamson, he wasn’t sure he would be any safer here than he’d been at Dickinson High after all.
CHAPTER 14
TERI MCINTYRE SIPPED HER glass of wine and finally began to relax on the couch. There had been a terrible hollowness in the house when she came home after work that afternoon — it was as if the house itself knew that not only was Ryan not home, but he wasn’t coming back, at least for several weeks.
The house felt worse than empty, worse than vacant.
It felt haunted. Haunted by the memories of Ryan and Bill and all the moments the three of them had shared under this roof.
She’d called Tom, and now he was sitting in the chair on the other side of the coffee table, and though the house still didn’t feel right, at least it felt a little better. “I’m trying to remember the last time I was alone here,” she said. “I think it was when Ryan went to hockey camp in Toronto. He was eleven, and it was the same year Bill was sent back to Kuwait.” She forced a wry smile she didn’t quite feel. “I’d forgotten how much I don’t like it. Always before, no matter where the army sent Bill, I still had Ryan. In ninety-one, when Bill went to Kuwait, Ryan was just a baby, but at least he was here. Now…” Her voice trailed off.
Tom moved from the chair to the sofa and put his arms around her. Let’s just enjoy some quiet time together,” he said, and pulled her close.
But the ghosts in the room were too real tonight. Ryan was only sixteen, and he should be living at home. She pulled away from Tom and picked up the remote from the coffee table, flicking the television on. “Let’s just watch the news, okay?” she said, suddenly wondering whether calling Tom had been the best idea. His company certainly helped fill the emptiness of the house, but now she had the distinct feeling he might be expecting to spend not just the evening with her, but the night as well.
The television flashed to life, and Gordy Adamson’s image filled the screen, his expression a mixture of grief and anger.
Teri gasped as she recognized the man she’d seen at St. Isaac’s that morning, and turned up the volume.
“Kip was a good boy,” Gordy was saying. “I know what the cops say happened, but that doesn’t make any sense to me. I’m not saying Kip was perfect — he was at St. Isaac’s for a reason. He was a teenager, you know? We thought sending him to St. Isaac’s would help him through those years. I guess we were wrong.”
Gordy’s face was replaced by a shot of the front entrance of St. Isaac’s Preparatory Academy, the same steps Teri and Ryan had walked up that morning.
“St. Isaac’s has been accepting at-risk youths since 1906,” the reporter said. “While this isn’t the first violent incident that has involved one of their students, it is the first that has ever resulted in a student’s death.”
The shot of the front door cut to one of Father Laughlin sitting at his desk, his hands folded somberly. “We don’t know why these things happen,” he said. “We do our best with these troubled teens, but unfortunately we are not infallible. There is evil in this world, and it sometimes overwhelms us no matter how hard we try. All of us mourn both these tragic deaths, and it is our intention at St. Isaac’s never to allow such a thing to happen again.”
“No motive has been attributed to Kip Adamson’s apparently random attack on Martha Kim,” the reporter intoned as the camera cut away from St. Isaac’s headmaster.
Feeling as if she’d just been struck by something she’d never seen coming at all, Teri snapped off the television, and turned to face Tom. “Did you know about this?” she demanded, her voice trembling.
Tom recoiled as reflexively as if she’d slapped him. “How could I know about this — I’ve been with you almost every minute since we got the call about Ryan being in the hospital. Neither of us have been watching the news.”
Teri’s eyes narrowed slightly. “You mean your friend didn’t even mention it when you talked to him?” It seemed utterly impossible.
But Tom shook his head. “Not a word. All he said was that he’d do what he could, and then he called to say there was an opening. That’s all I know.”
Teri stared at the darkened television. How was it possible? How could Tom’s friend not have told him? “A boy died to make a place for Ryan? And they didn’t even tell you?”
Tom held up his hands as if to fend off her words. “Wait a minute — there might have been half a dozen openings. I don’t know and you don’t know.”
But Teri only kept hearing the echo of Gordy Adamson’s voice as he’d warned her this morning.
“Teri—” Tom began, but Teri cut him off.
“I should go pick him up right now.”
“Now wait a minute,” Tom said, putting a hand on her arm, but this time not letting go when she tried to pull away. “Just slow down, take a breath, and let’s figure this out, all right?” When she seemed to relax just a little, he went on. “The fact that one troubled boy went out and did a bad thing — a really terrible thing — doesn’t make St. Isaac’s a bad place,” Tom said. “You even heard that reporter say as much.”
“It was still a bad decision,” Teri sighed, the familiar feeling of approaching tears roughening her voice. “Bill
