started tapping involuntarily on the arm of the couch. I tried to breathe slow and deep.
“Do you remember the last time you saw him?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m not going to ask you about the pills, Cary,” she assured me. “You’ve been asked about it enough. It’s public knowledge that the sleeping pills were prescribed to you and you admitted that you gave them to him. I have all the facts in the book. But what I don’t have is your point of view.”
I was silent for a moment, gathering my thoughts. Trying to remember that day, as objectively as I could.
“The tour was bigger than we expected,” I started. “Everything was bigger than we expected, including the pressure we were under and the intensity of the schedule. We were overworked. Overstressed. I don’t think we had good enough management, people watching our backs, making the right decisions for us, and we were probably afraid of complaining and rocking the boat too much, losing everything. We’d already had so many band breakups. We’d already been dropped from a label. We didn’t know how many chances we were gonna get, and here we’d hit the big time, so fast. We were afraid of capsizing. We were just trying to stay afloat. We were coping in all the ways we knew how to cope, and we didn’t have many. Alcohol. Drugs.” I went silent for a moment, and Courteney waited for me to go on. “I just wanted him to get some sleep that day. That was all I wanted.”
“You went to do an interview for him so he could sleep,” she supplied.
“Yeah. Me and Dean. And partway through the interview, we got interrupted. Our tour manager was with us and he got the call. Someone had called in a bomb threat at the hotel. We didn’t even know if we could take it seriously. We cut the interview short and headed back to see what was going on, and Dean even slept in the car. But I had a bad feeling. I was so used to feeling anxiety back then, though, and I was medicated. I couldn’t distinguish one bad feeling from another. I figured I was just anxious because I knew Gabe was at the hotel, plus a lot of our team was there. But we were in contact with some of them, and everyone seemed to be accounted for. The bomb threat turned out to be bullshit, as you know. We’d had a bomb threat at the hotel we stayed at a few days prior, in the next city over. We didn’t know it at the time, but it turned out we had this crazy fan, this guy named Joseph Fetterman.”
“It’s in the book,” Courteney said. “You don’t have to say much about him.”
“I don’t know much about him,” I said. “He’d called in both bomb threats. At the trial, he said he did it because he wanted to meet us. Me, actually. He said he wanted to meet me.” Fuck, that still stuck in my throat. I tried to swallow past it, but it was hard to do. “He tried to get the hotel evacuated. I guess he thought we’d come running outside, and that would be his chance to get an autograph?” I laughed darkly, because it still made me fucking angry. “When that didn’t work, he set a fire.”
All trace of humor left me, and I went silent.
“Do you want to keep going?” my sister asked me after a moment.
“Yeah. I’m okay.”
I wasn’t okay. Some psycho killed my best friend, and it was my fault. Even though the court held Fetterman legally responsible for Gabe’s death, and he died in prison a year ago, I knew Gabe’s death was on me.
How would I ever be okay?
I cleared my throat a little. “It wasn’t until we got back to the hotel and connected with our crew that we realized Gabe was missing. Some people thought he was with us. Other people thought he was somewhere else. They’d checked his room and he wasn’t there. The police and hotel management went door to door clearing people out, but they didn’t make it to my room before they had to evacuate because of the fire. Or so they said.” I met Courteney’s eyes. “I guess whatever they said is all in the court documents.”
“It’s okay. I’m not worried about that right now. Just tell me your truth.”
“The truth is someone fucked up. Or maybe a whole lot of people fucked up, including Gabe.”