The Heavens Rise

“Boyfriend?”

“Yeah . . .” Then he noticed she was studying him closely and he realized her words might have been some kind of trap. “Her boyfriend.”

“I see,” she said calmly. Apparently she would have had no problem hearing that Anthem was Ben’s boyfriend. The idea was absurd, of course, but the fact that she would have accepted it so easily made Ben feel exhilarated and terrified at the same time.

For a while, they sat listening to the nearby fountain’s gurgle and then the sustained wail of a train blowing its horn as it traveled the Mississippi’s crescent.

“You can’t blame me for thinking that if you’re chewing me out over a column about Marshall Ferriot, you think there’s some connection between what he did to himself and your friend’s disappearance?”

“Remember how this isn’t an interview?”

“I remember. But if you think there’s a connection, I’d be curious to know why you wouldn’t want it made public.”

Ben looked away, ashamed by his inability to answer. All he could think of was the flask Anthem had brought him yesterday; silver, freshly polished, sloshing with bourbon. There’d been almost no time to savor their quick escape from that awful little bar before Anthem began to drink himself into a full-blown vomit fest.

Almost as bad as the sudden loss of his best friend was the dawning realization that his next-closest friend in the world was becoming completely unglued because of it and that in just a week’s time, Anthem Landry had been sent the way of his bar-brawling, jail-visiting older brothers.

“Why are you here?” he asked her.

“You made an impression today.”

“And you don’t get a lot of chances to visit the Garden District?”

She flinched. It was slight, but he noticed it, and even though it wasn’t much, it was more emotion than she’d shown him on the sidewalk that day, even when he was really laying in to her.

“That’s offensive, Ben,” she said quietly.

“I’m sorry.”

She nodded but there was no awkward, placating smile, no real need for her to let him off the hook right away. She wasn’t his teacher or his mother. And there was no denying it; he’d hurt her feelings. But he’d only been able to do that because she’d let her guard down. And if she’d let her guard down that meant her motives for being there were more pure than he’d imagined.

The idea that she might be genuinely concerned about him left him at a loss for words; worse, it threatened to undam a tide of emotions he’d held at bay for a good four or five hours now. He knew his mother loved him and cared about him, but as always she thought she could save him from his feelings by barking a bunch of sensible orders at him. And Anthem? Had Anthem once turned to him and asked him how he was handling everything? And for Christ’s sake, he’d only been with Nikki for three years; Nikki had been Ben’s closest friend in the world for fifteen.

He didn’t want to go down that road. He really didn’t. But he was so damn tired, and when he wasn’t absorbed in some obsessive quest to find another person who had been sitting at Marshall’s table that night, the inside of his head felt like a jar full of wasps.

“I think he caused the accident,” Ben said.

It was the first time he’d said the words aloud, and their effect on Marissa was instantaneous. Her eyes widened and she leaned forward so far she had to place her fleshy elbows on the edge of the table. “Marshall Ferriot?”

“Yes.”

“Start at the beginning.”

“Nikki and Anthem broke up about a month ago because they had a big fight and this girl at our school claimed Anthem hooked up with her afterwards. The girl was lying. I got to her admit it. Then, when Marshall did his thing, the girl called and told me Marshall was the one who asked her to lie about it.”

“Why’d she agree to lie?”

“The bottle of Vicodin Marshall lifted from his mother’s medicine cabinet helped.”

“Okay . . . Keep going.”

“The night the Delongpres went missing, I went to the house before the cops got there. I knew where the key was. I didn’t tear apart her room or anything. Mostly, I just wanted to see if any of her belongings were there. Like her cell phone or anything. There was a phone there, all right, but it was in her desk drawer and it wouldn’t turn on, which was weird because it looked okay. But after a few minutes, I realized it had been soaked in water.”

“Wait a minute. You think she came home after the accident and—”

Ben shook his head. “That’s what I thought at the first. But the cops checked the records and saw the last call she’d made on it had been the week before. And I know she had another phone on her the night she went missing because I talked to her on it before Anthem and I left to go meet up with them at Elysium.”

“So she replaced her phone, the week before she went missing?”

“Yep. Because it got soaked. Not wet. Soaked. And she didn’t tell me where or how. And we told each other everything. But that wasn’t all . . .”

“I’m listening.”

“There was a card. It was on her desk. Can’t wait to see Elysium. XO, M. I didn’t make much of it at that time. There was going to be a party at Elysium that weekend, the weekend they . . . I mean, that’s why we were all driving out there that night. But the more I thought about it, it just didn’t seem right. And she only had one relative I know of whose names start with M, an uncle. And he died two years ago. Besides, the card had hearts all over it.”

“But you’ve got no real proof the two of them went out there together.”

“I’ve got the card.”

“A card that says M on it.”

“Marshall uses drug dealing and lies to try to break them up. Days after they get back together, her entire family disappears. A week later he throws himself out a thirty-one-story window and no one knows why. Remember his last words? The ones you couldn’t remember until today? I . . . put . . . a . . .”

“I remember,” Marissa said.

“I think he was trying to confess. I think he put something in their car. Maybe it was in the gas tank or the brakes, I don’t know.”

He could tell from the way she was staring openly at him, without any apparent regard for how her mouth was hanging open and her nostrils were flaring, that he almost had her. That she was more convinced by his theory than she would like to be. But all she said was: “Well, Mister Broyard, you are imaginative and articulate.”

“Only when I have to be.”

“Do you have to be?”

“You expect me not to find out the truth?”

“I think the truth is always good. And if that’s what you’re after, you’d be jumping at the chance to give me an interview. But you’re not. Do the police know everything you just told me?”

“They know about the phone and the card.”

“But not what Marshall did to try to break up your friends?”

Ben hoped it was dark enough that she couldn’t make out his flaming cheeks.

“So you’re keeping this all to yourself because you’re afraid if your pal Anthem gets wind of it he’ll yank Marshall Ferriot off life support.”

“Marshall’s in a coma, but he’s not on life support.”

“Still . . .”

“Something like that,” Ben whispered.

“You really think Anthem’s capable of that?”

“I didn’t think he was capable of what he did to that bartender yesterday. But he did it. And I just stood