on the floor, and crammed the other half down his throat.
I got most of this from one of the counselors, whose job at Raven Mountain was to work at breaking drunks and druggies of their bad habits. This fellow, Randy Squires by name, sat in my Toyota drinking from the neck of a Wild Turkey bottle purchased with some of the fifty dollars I’d given him (and yes, the irony was not lost on me). I asked if Whitmore had perhaps left a suicide note.
“He did,” Squires said. “Kind of sweet, actually. Almost a prayer. ‘Keep giving all the love you can,’ it said.”
My arms broke out in gooseflesh, but my sleeves covered that, and I was able to manage a smile. I could have told him that wasn’t a prayer, but a line from “Stand By Your Man,” by Tammy Wynette. Squires wouldn’t have gotten it, anyway, and there was no reason why I’d want him to. It was between Mr. Harrigan and me.
* * *
I spent three days on that little investigation. When I got back, Dad asked me if I’d enjoyed my mini-vacation. I said I had. He asked me if I was ready to go back to school in a couple of weeks. I said I was. He looked me over carefully and asked if anything was wrong. I said there wasn’t, not knowing if that was a lie or not.
Part of me still believed that Kenny Yanko had died accidentally, and that Dean Whitmore had committed suicide, possibly out of guilt. I tried to imagine how Mr. Harrigan could have somehow appeared to them and caused their deaths, and couldn’t do it. If that had happened, then I was an accessory to murder, morally if not legally. I had wished Whitmore dead, after all. Probably in my deepest heart, Kenny too.
“You sure?” Dad asked. His eyes were still on me, and in the old searching way I remembered from early childhood, when I had done some small thing wrong.
“Positive,” I said.
“Okay, but if you want to talk, I’m here.”
Yes, and thank God he was, but this wasn’t a thing I could talk about. Not without sounding like a lunatic.
I went into my room and took the old iPhone off the closet shelf. It was holding its charge admirably. Why, exactly, did I do that? Did I mean to call him in his grave to say thank you? To ask him if he was really there? I can’t remember, and I guess it doesn’t matter, because I didn’t call. When I powered up the phone, I saw I had a text message from pirateking1. I tapped with a trembling finger to open it and read this: C C C sT
As I looked at it, a possibility that had never so much as touched my mind before that late summer day dawned on me. What if I were somehow holding Mr. Harrigan hostage? Tying him to my earthly concerns by way of the phone I had tucked into his coat pocket before the lid of his coffin went down? What if the things I had asked him to do were hurting him? Maybe even torturing him?
Not likely, I thought. Remember what Mrs. Grogan told you about Dusty Bilodeau. She said he couldn’t have gotten a job shoveling henshit out of old Dorrance Marstellar’s barn after stealing from Mr. Harrigan. He saw to it.
Yes, and something else. She said he was a square-dealing man, but if you weren’t the same, God help you. And had Dean Whitmore been square-dealing? No. Had Kenny Yanko been square-dealing? The same. So maybe Mr. Harrigan had been glad to pitch in. Maybe he even enjoyed it.
“If he was ever there at all,” I whispered.
He had been. In my deepest heart I knew that, too. And I knew something else. I knew what that message meant: Craig stop.
Because I was hurting him, or because I was hurting myself?
I decided that in the end it didn’t matter.
* * *
It rained hard the next day, the kind of chilly no-thunder downpour that means the first autumn color will begin to show in a week or two. The rain was good, because it meant that the summer people—those who remained—were all tucked up inside their seasonal hideaways and Castle Lake was deserted. I parked in the picnic area at the lake’s north end and walked to what we kids had called the Ledges, standing there in our bathing suits and daring each other to jump off.