know? I can’t say as I’ve really given it all that much thought.”
“Seriously?”
Jeff narrowed his eyes and took a sip of rum, luxuriating for a moment as he swallowed. The liquor warmed his throat and stomach, and he had no doubt it was going to his head. He was already a bit unsteady on his feet.
“Really. I mean … Come on. We were just kids, and it was what? Like, thirty-five years ago.”
“Yeah, but—”
“It’s not like any of us really knew Jimmy Foster or anything. He wasn’t an important part of our lives all the time or anything. He was just like the rest of us—some kid from some town we’d probably never even heard of who showed up at camp for two weeks, and then went back home for the rest of the year.”
“Hmmm …” Jeff said. “He was gone, all right.”
“We came from all over New England. It’s not like we lost our best friend from our school or neighborhood or something.”
“I know, but—”
Jeff interrupted himself to take another swallow of rum. He knew he was getting good and buzzed, and should stop now, but he convinced himself this was a good thing. It would blunt some of the more unsettling memories this conversation was dredging up.
“Look, Jeff. I didn’t see what you saw.” Tyler’s voice dropped to a low, calm pitch … or maybe, Jeff thought, the rum was hitting him a lot harder and faster than he realized. “None of us saw what you saw. And I can understand how you might be a lot more freaked out about the whole thing than the rest of us. Christ, you were practically a celebrity because of what you did.”
“But I didn’t do anything.”
“Bull. You actually got to see Jimmy after he was dead. Do you have any idea how pissed off Bloomberg and some of the other counselors were?”
“It wasn’t that big a deal,” Jeff said, but even as he said it, he knew he was lying. The image of Jimmy Foster lying there on the stretcher—cold, pale, and dead—was seared into his brain. He had carried it with him his whole life, but it was something he simply didn’t like thinking about.
“But you can’t say it didn’t creep you out?” he said, lowering his voice as he stared at the rum in his glass. “Even after you found out what had happened?”
Tyler sniffed over the phone, and Jeff could just imagine him shaking his head.
“No one really knows what happened to him. My parents never told me what—if anything—they heard.”
“You ever ask them?”
“Hell, no. They both died quite a few years ago now, in a plane crash. I never got the chance to … if I had wanted to. I never thought about it.”
Jeff didn’t hear even the slightest hesitation in his friend’s voice, and he wondered how deeply his parents’ death had affected him.
Is it something—like Jimmy Foster’s death—that he never thought about?
Or had it affected him so deeply he doesn’t allow himself to think or feel anything about it?
“But the police came to your house and talked to you about it once you got home from camp, didn’t they?”
“Of course they did. As far as I know, they talked to everyone who was at camp when it happened—campers, counselors, staff. You must know what happened to Mr. Farnham.”
Jeff was in the middle of taking another sip of rum, and he started to choke on it when he tried to speak. The liquor burned the back of his throat and nasal passages.
“I know that was the last summer Camp Tapiola was open.” Jeff’s nose was still stinging, and his eyes started to water. “They closed the place down, but my parents told me they’d never let me go back there no matter what. Years later, I heard that Farnham was sued by Jimmy’s parents.”
“His mother, anyway,” Tyler said. “His father had died a few years before Jimmy did.”
“Really? How do you know that?”
“Jimmy told me.”
It surprised Jeff that Tyler knew something about Jimmy that he didn’t.
“Anyway,” Jeff said. “From what I understand, things got so messed up because of the legal shit-storm surrounding Jimmy’s murder he had to—”
“Whoa. Hold on a second, bucko.”
“What?”
“You just said Jimmy’s murder.”
“I did?”
Tyler grunted.
“Yeah. I guess I did.” Jeff hesitated a moment and sneaked another quick sip of rum. “But he was murdered. I saw his throat, and it was cut wide open.”
“As far as I know, no one official ever concluded that’s what happened.”