of slush pile poems and stories suddenly seemed very unimportant.
“Craig?” Dad asked. “Are you still there?”
“Yes. What happened?”
He told me what he knew, and I found out more a couple of days later, when the Gates Falls Weekly Enterprise was published online. BELOVED TEACHERS KILLED IN VERMONT, the headline read. Victoria Hargensen Corliss had still been teaching biology at Gates; her husband was a math teacher at neighboring Castle Rock. They had decided to spend their spring vacation on a motorcycle trip across New England, staying at a different bed and breakfast every night. They were on their way back, in Vermont and almost to the New Hampshire border, when Dean Whitmore, thirty-one, of Waltham, Massachusetts, crossed the Route 2 centerline and struck them head-on. Ted Corliss was killed instantly. Victoria Corliss—the woman who had taken me into the teachers’ room after Kenny Yanko beat me up and gave me an illicit Aleve from her purse—had died on the way to the hospital.
I’d interned at the Enterprise the previous summer, mostly emptying the trash but also writing some sports and movie reviews. When I called Dave Gardener, the editor, he gave me some background the Enterprise hadn’t printed. Dean Whitmore had been arrested a total of four times for OUI, but his father was a big hedge fund guy (how Mr. Harrigan had hated those upstarts), and high-priced lawyers had taken care of Whitmore the first three times. On the fourth occasion, after running into the side of a Zoney’s Go-Mart in Hingham, he had avoided jail but lost his license. He’d been driving without one and operating under the influence when he struck the Corliss motorcycle. “Stone drunk” was the way Dave put it.
“He’ll get off with just a slap on the wrist,” Dave said. “Daddy will see to it. You watch and see.”
“No way.” Just the idea of that happening made me feel sick to my stomach. “If your info’s correct, it’s a clear case of vehicular homicide.”
“Watch and see,” he repeated.
* * *
The funerals were at Saint Anne’s, the church both Ms. Hargensen—it was impossible for me to think of her as Victoria—and her husband had attended for most of their lives, and the one they had been married out of. Mr. Harrigan had been rich, for years a mover and shaker in the American business world, but there were a lot more people at the funeral of Ted and Victoria Corliss. Saint Anne’s is a big church, but that day it was standing room only, and if Father Ingersoll hadn’t had a microphone, he would have been inaudible beneath all the weeping. They had both been popular teachers, they were a love-match, and of course they had been young.
So were most of the mourners. I was there; Regina and Margie were there; Billy Bogan was there; so was U-Boat, who’d made a special trip from Florida, where he was playing single-A ball. U-Boat and I sat together. He didn’t cry, exactly, but his eyes were red, and the big galoot was sniffling.
“Did you ever have her for class?” I whispered.
“Bio II,” he whispered back. “When I was a senior. Needed it to graduate. She gave me a gift C. And I was in her birdwatching club. She wrote me a recommendation on my college app.”
She had written me one, too.
“It’s just so wrong,” U-Boat said. “They weren’t doing nothing but taking a ride.” He paused. “And they were wearing helmets, too.”
Billy looked about the same, but Margie and Regina looked older, almost adult in their makeup and big-girl dresses. They hugged me outside the church when it was over, and Regina said, “Remember how she took care of you the night you got beat up?”
“Yes,” I said.
“She let me use her hand cream,” Regina said, and began to cry all over again.
“I hope they put that guy away forever,” Margie said fiercely.
“Roger that,” U-Boat said. “Lock him up and throw away the key.”
“They will,” I said, but of course I was wrong and Dave was right.
* * *
Dean Whitmore’s day in court came that July. He was given four years, sentence suspended if he agreed to go into a rehab and could pass random urine tests for those same four years. I was working for the Enterprise again, and as a paid employee (only part-time, but still). I’d been bumped up to community affairs and the occasional feature story. The day after Whitmore’s sentencing—if you could even call it that—I voiced my outrage to Dave Gardener.
“I