Leaving Yesterday (18 page)

He was suspended twice during his tenure at Santa Barbara High School. One of these episodes involved beating another student with a hockey stick.

I thought of the contrast between this boy and my Kurt. Much like the contrast between Rudy Prince and Kurt, there was no comparison. Kurt had turned his life around, looked forward to a productive future, and was finally overcoming the tragic past that had weighed him down for so long. Gary Singer had lived a life that showed nothing worthwhile. Not only was society better off with him behind bars, but you could even say he was better off, as well. They’d help him get clean, perhaps teach him a trade.

I had one person who might help me get some perspective on this, and thankfully we hadn’t met on Tuesday morning as usual. Lacey had rescheduled for this morning, and I was more than grateful. She was the one person who didn’t judge me on my status as women’s ministry director or busy PTA mom or all the other usual tags I was constantly trying to live up to. Lacey simply took me for who I was, without all the tags, without all the expectation of perfection.

As I walked up her driveway, a debate warred inside me. I desperately wanted to unload all this on someone, someone who wouldn’t immediately send me packing to the police station, someone who could look through all the angles. But if I told her and she didn’t step forward, that would make her guilty, too. I couldn’t lay that kind of burden on her.

“Are you just going to stand there all day, or are you coming in?”

I’d been so engrossed in my internal debate, I hadn’t even noticed that she’d opened the door. I wondered how long she had been standing there, waiting. “Sorry. Lost in thought.”

From her expression it would be impossible to tell if she was annoyed or amused. The twinkle in her eyes was the only giveaway. “Obviously.” She opened the door a little wider in invitation.

I followed her inside, sat at the table, and poured us both some coffee while she removed the scones from the oven. “Smells like apple today.”

“Cinnamon raisin.”

“I guess it was the cinnamon that threw me off, since you put it in your apple, too.” My mouth had switched into overdrive, just like it did after Nick’s death. For months I carried on scads of perfectly normal-sounding conversations with dozens of people. Each of them probably went home amazed at how well I seemed to be doing. What none of them seemed to recognize was that, while my lips might have been speaking, my mind was nowhere in the vicinity, and my heart … well, my heart was obliterated. Amazing how the feeling changed so little from one life trauma to the next.

“So, you gonna tell me what’s eating you, or are we just going to sit here and indulge and pretend like everything’s status quo? Just let me know, because I’m content either way.”

I folded my arms on the table and laid my head on it. “I don’t know if I can.”

“If you can what?”

“Oh, Lacey, if I unload all this on you, then it will be your burden, too. You’re too good a friend for me to do that.”

“Sounds to me like you and I have different ideas about exactly what a friend does. I’ve always thought friends carried one another’s burdens and that’s what made them friends.”

“Yeah, well, this is different.”

She stirred her coffee with a small spoon. “I see.” She continued to stir, the metal of the spoon clinking against the white bone china. “What shall we discuss, then?” She drummed her fingers across her chin in mock concentration. “I know, the weatherman says that we’ll likely be in the low seventies all week, with the possibility of early morning fog. There’s something we can discuss.” She pulled the spoon from her cup and set it across her saucer as prim as you please.

I started to cry. Just a few tears at first, until the entire Pacific Ocean seemed to spew from somewhere inside me. Somewhere during the deluge, I felt the gentle pressure of a hand on my shoulder. “It’s okay, baby, it’s okay.”

At some point I finally calmed myself enough to raise my head. I wiped my eyes on my napkin, then looked at her and shrugged. “I can’t tell you. It wouldn’t be right.”

“You know,” she said, pulling her chair directly over by mine, “I
am
a lawyer. You could hire me.”

I looked at her, even more confused than I had been before. “Huh?”

“That’s right. There’s this thing called lawyer-client privilege. You give me a retainer, I become your lawyer, and then anything you say to me would have to be held in strictest of confidence. It’s the way our system works.”

I looked at her and once again wondered at her ability to read me so completely. “I don’t have any money with me.”

She walked across the kitchen, picked up her purse, and removed a five-dollar bill from her leather wallet. “Here, I’ll let you borrow this.” She put the money in my hand, then took it away again, looking at it as if she was surprised. “Are you kidding me? You want to retain a lawyer of my caliber for only five dollars?”

“Well, I … I could go get more.”

“You sure drive a hard bargain, that’s all I’ve got to say. Five dollars it is, but don’t you dare spread the word. It’s highway robbery.” She smiled at me then and put her hand on top of mine. “Now, my newest and cheapest client, tell me what’s on your mind.”

“I’m not sure where to start.”

“Well, I can’t tell you that, either, but I’ll bet it ends somewhere with this morning’s paper. Do you want to start there and go backward?”

“How do you know?”

“Honey, any second grader could work that puzzle. After Kurt came back you told me you’d found something from his past and weren’t sure what to do with it. Not long ago, there was a blazing inferno in your chimney, in which there was obviously something you never wanted found. Now, another boy has been arrested for the murder that Kurt was once suspected of, and you come over here all teary. I’m thinking, if what you found earlier was only drugs or something like that, you’d be coming over here today all ecstatic. The guilty party is in jail, and the police will finally be getting off your back for good, and Kurt can go on with his life. Instead, you show up looking like someone just kicked the hope right out of you. I’m thinking there’s no way that all these things are not related.”

Somehow, knowing that she already knew, maybe not the details, but the heart of the truth, made the confession slide right out. “It was the bat. The thing I found, it was the bat.”

She nodded her head. “And I’m guessing there are Louisville Slugger ashes in your fireplace right about now?”

“Not exactly.” I looked at the white lace of the placemat. “The ashes got picked up with the trash a few weeks ago.”

“I see.” She nodded and stared off into the distance. “Does Kurt know you found the bat?”

“No. When I brought all his things from the cabin up to Templeton, he looked through it and asked, ‘Is this all?’ I wanted to hear what he had to say, so I said, ‘Yes, there was nothing else.’ ”

I looked at Lacey and saw her studying me closely, no trace of judgment or condemnation on her face. “Had you already destroyed the bat by this point?”

“No. After I found it, I hid it in the attic because I couldn’t decide what to do at first. But when I saw how hard he was working and how much he had changed already, I came home and built a fire.” I twisted the lace between my fingers. “I don’t know, I guess I’ve kind of convinced myself that he didn’t do it. I mean, maybe someone else put it there. And you know, maybe this guy they’ve arrested really is the killer.”

“And Kurt, how’s he doing? Is he staying on track?”

“Yes. He’s getting his transcripts together to get back in college. My brother-in-law keeps telling me how hard he’s working.”

“Let me do some checking around. I know some people who usually have a good idea what’s going on. I’ll find out what I can about this other boy that’s been arrested, what kind of evidence they have, things like that. We’ll have a better idea of what we’re dealing with when we have a few more of the facts, not just what they’re telling us in the news.”

“Thanks, Lacey.”

“That’s what friends are for.”

“You’re not my friend anymore. You’re my lawyer.”

She smiled. “That’s right. I knew I couldn’t stay in mothballs forever. I’ll shake them off and we’ll get down to the truth in no time.”

I think that’s what I was afraid of.

Twenty-Three

After breakfast, I spent an unproductive day at work before saying my good-byes just after lunch. The best thing about my part-time hours was their flexibility as long as I was efficient, but today I was in for the longest two hours of my life as I headed to Templeton.

I thought about what I would say to my son and worried about how he would react. I had lied to him, trying to reassure him. Now, I was going to drop the truth on him with all of its inherent baggage, including an innocent man locked up in the Santa Barbara county jail. I wanted to know the truth about his involvement, and I needed to know it now.

Would this send him straight to the arms of drugs for relief? Is that what he’d been doing with the money he’d been borrowing from both Rick and me anyway? Were there signs of the glossy cover-up of semi-permanent change, or had he really had the true, cell-level life change that I had believed? Yes, his change was real, I knew it was. Jodi’s intuitive nature would have sensed if it were otherwise, and I couldn’t imagine that Monte wouldn’t notice anything as they worked side by side every day.

Today when I drove up the driveway, I bypassed the house altogether. If I stopped and talked to Jodi for too long, I might lose my resolve. I needed to go through with this before I changed my mind.

I was certain Kurt and Monte would be out in the orchards somewhere, so I drove as far as my car would take me in that direction. I took a deep breath and walked toward the orchards, while everything inside me screamed to get back in my car and go home before I wrecked Kurt’s life. And Caroline’s. And mine.

I heard the sound of their voices coming from the middle of the trees. Kurt said something I couldn’t quite make out, followed by Monte’s rumbling laugh. The sound of scraping and cracking led me in the general direction. I finally saw them between a couple of trees, covered with dirt from head to toe, dragging loose branches into a pile. They looked up as I approached and smiled in greeting. I didn’t return it. I nodded at Monte. “I need to talk to Kurt for a minute.”

He nodded. “ ’Course you do. I was just about to take the quad up the hill anyway. I’ll leave you guys to your privacy.” Without another word, or even a readable expression, he walked over to the ATV that was parked a few feet away and climbed aboard. The motor roared to life and he disappeared behind a trail of dust.

“What’s wrong?” Kurt’s voice seemed deeper than usual.

I knew that things would only get worse from here. The weight of this visit would drag everything down, until his voice would be the least of my worries. I reached out and touched his cheek, so warm and soft, with the grainy texture of dirt and bits of wood chips clinging to the mix. I looked into his eyes, searching for any sign that drugs had been part of the reason he was borrowing money. They looked clear. My hand fell away and I turned my back on him, wrapping my arms around myself. “I’m not sure where to start.”

“Why don’t you start with what’s bothering you?”

“Kurt, did you play any part in what happened to Rudy Prince?”

The question hung in the air between us, taking all the oxygen with it. Somewhere in the distance, I heard birds chirping a happy song, completely out of tune with the deepening tension so nearby.

“I don’t know, Mom. I don’t think so.”

This was not the answer I wanted. I wanted to hear “No, nothing at all.” Or just the truth, straight and plain. I was tired of wondering, exhausted with vague.

“You don’t
think
so? I wouldn’t think that would be the kind of thing you would forget.”

“Well, if I did something, I don’t remember it. But I keep having these dreams.”

“What kind of dreams?”

“When I was in rehab, I kept dreaming about waking up back at my cabin with a baseball bat in the bed beside me.” His voice trailed off, leaving no sound but the horses neighing from the next property over. Or maybe it was the blood rushing through my ears.

His “dream” was bringing me face-to-face with a truth I did not want to know. “A baseball bat?” Still, to this day, I have no idea how I managed to squeak that question out of me.

“Yeah. A Louisville Slugger, and a bloody one at that.” He turned to face me, but he kept his eyes focused on the ground. “Rudy Prince always carried a Louisville Slugger with him—he used it to hurt anyone who crossed him, and intimidate everyone else. Anyway, the night before I left, I either dreamed he came to me—or maybe he did, I’m still not sure which—wanting some of the money I owed him. Of course I didn’t have any.”

“Did you dream that, or did it really happen?” Hysteria was descending on me.

“When I first started having the dream, I thought it was just that because it always morphed into Rudy beating some homeless guy, and me getting so angry I was somehow beating Rudy instead. But when it kept coming back, I started to wonder if maybe there was something to it. I … uh … well, I’d been really wasted the night before, and sometimes after a night of partying I used to have memory blackouts, so I wasn’t sure what to believe. The day I got out of rehab, I stopped by my old place before I even came to your house. I wanted to see if the bat was there, so I would know for sure.” He shrugged. “They had already bulldozed the thing and there was nothing left. I had assumed all my stuff had gone with it, and in a way I was relieved. I figured that if I had done something stupid, but the evidence was gone, I could leave it buried in my past.”

This was the part where I was supposed to tell him about the bat, about Gary Singer’s arrest, but there was more of a reason I’d come here. Something else I needed to ask, and I wanted the answer now. “Kurt, there’s one more thing I need to ask you, and I want an honest answer.”

“Okay.” He sounded unsure.

“Why have you been borrowing money? From your father
and
me?”