had something to do with the Yanko boy’s death, forget it. You didn’t. I’ve seen his records, and he was a kid with serious problems. Home problems, school problems, psychological problems. I don’t know what happened, and I don’t want to know, but I see a blessing here.”
“What?” I asked. “That he can’t beat me up anymore?”
She laughed, exposing teeth as pretty as the rest of her. “There’s that Ptolemaic view of the world again. No, Craig, the blessing is that he was too young to get a license. If he’d been old enough to drive, he might have taken some other kids with him. Now go back to gym and shoot some baskets.”
I started away, but she grabbed my wrist. Eleven years later I can still remember the electricity I felt. “Craig, I could never be glad when a child dies, not even a bad actor like Kenneth Yanko. But I can be glad it wasn’t you.”
Suddenly I wanted to tell her everything, and I might have done it. But just then the bell rang, classroom doors opened, and the hall was full of chattering kids. Ms. Hargensen went her way and I went mine.
* * *
That night I turned on my phone and at first just stared at it, gathering my courage. What Ms. Hargensen had said that morning made sense, but Ms. Hargensen didn’t know that Mr. Harrigan’s phone still worked, which was impossible. I hadn’t had a chance to tell her and believed—erroneously, as it turned out—that I never would.
It won’t work this time, I told myself. It had one last spurt of energy, that’s all. Like a lightbulb that flashes bright just before burning out.
I hit his contact, expecting—hoping, actually—for silence or a message telling me the phone was no longer in service. But it rang, and after a few more rings, Mr. Harrigan was once more in my ear. “I’m not answering my phone now. I will call you back if it seems appropriate.”
“It’s Craig, Mr. Harrigan.”
Feeling foolish, talking to a dead man—one who would be growing mold on his cheeks by now (I had done my research, you see). At the same time not feeling foolish at all. Feeling scared, like someone treading on unhallowed ground.
“Listen . . .” I licked my lips. “You didn’t have anything to do with Kenny Yanko dying, did you? If you did . . . um . . . knock on the wall.”
I ended the call.
I waited for a knock.
None came.
The next morning, I had a message from pirateking1. Just six letters: a a a. C C x.
Meaningless.
It scared the hell out of me.
* * *
That autumn I thought a lot about Kenny Yanko (the current story making the rounds was that he had fallen from the second floor of his house while trying to sneak out in the middle of the night). I thought even more about Mr. Harrigan, and about his phone, which I now wished I’d thrown into Castle Lake. There was a fascination, okay? The fascination with strange things we all feel. Forbidden things. On several occasions I almost called Mr. Harrigan’s phone, but I never did, at least not then. Once I’d found his voice reassuring, the voice of experience and success, the voice, you could say, of the grandfather I’d never had. Now I couldn’t remember that voice as it had been on our sunny afternoons, talking about Charles Dickens or Frank Norris or D. H. Lawrence or how the Internet was like a broken watermain. Now all I could think of was the old-man rasp, like sandpaper that’s almost worn out, telling me he would call me back if it seemed appropriate. And I thought of him in his coffin. The mortician from Hay & Peabody had no doubt gummed down his eyelids, but how long did that gum last? Were his eyes open down there? Were they staring up into the dark as they rotted in their sockets?
These things preyed on my mind.
A week before Christmas, Reverend Mooney asked me to come into the vestry so we could “have a chat.” He did most of the chatting. My father was worried about me, he said. I was losing weight, and my grades had slipped. Was there anything I wanted to tell him? I thought it over and decided there might be. Not everything, but some of it.
“If I tell you something, can it stay between us?”
“As long as it doesn’t have to do with self-harm or a crime—a serious