The Pinebox Vendetta Read online

  Laurel took several shaky breaths. She didn’t quite seem to believe the assurance.

  Sam said, “Do not worry another second about this. Jamie and I weren’t going to get together after college. We weren’t like that—I had my acting, he had his family stuff. It had zero chance. Okay?”

  Finally, Laurel nodded, and they embraced, Sam rubbing circles in her friend’s back. In another minute, they went back to their slices.

  Joss had been talking animatedly to another teen, but now turned to her mother with a question in her eyes.

  Sam mouthed, it’s fine.

  For fifteen minutes, they ate and joined larger conversations. The reunion proper was halfway through and easy topics had been exhausted, giving way to touchier ones like child-rearing styles and current events.

  The subject of the Pruitts and Gallaghers was bound to come up. When it did, Sam drank water and became very interested in her pizza crust.

  Maybe she should’ve mined the moment for footage, sneaked the Zoom from her purse up onto the table. With all today’s emotion, though—and now Laurel’s admission, which she couldn’t help but cast back over the last twenty years of her life, no matter what she had just said—Sam couldn’t. She couldn’t bring herself to care about a documentary.

  Everybody knew about Jamie’s reemergence. Troy Fickert thought it was amazing and wondered how he’d wriggled out of “that crazy Africa thing.” When neither Sam nor Laurel spoke up, though, he took the cue and dropped it.

  “Big news on Rock Pruitt, too,” Troy said after a pause. “You guys hear?”

  The friend group assembled here was mostly Democrat. Somebody said, “Do we want to?”

  “Ha ha,” Troy laughed. “Probably not. But I’ll tell you anyway. He’s running for that open Virginia Senate seat.”

  Laurel reared up in her chair. “How? I thought the family quit supporting him after Derek Dickerson.”

  “Supposedly he blew away the competition in that Choosing, you know the contest they do? I have a buddy in DKE, he told me.”

  Troy pulled another slice of sausage-mushroom off a tin plate.

  Sam had intended to stay ten million miles away from the subject, but she couldn’t help herself now.

  “Wasn’t Jonathan Pruitt’s campaign slogan, Returning Dignity to the White House, to Your House?” Her teeth were grinding. “What a crock. They’re really going to let that psycho represent them? A guy who probably bludgeoned his roommate to death?”

  Her language chilled the group. Sitting at a corner of the table, Joss pushed bangs behind her ears.

  Troy said, “Yeah, I was surprised. I guess in this day and age you can fudge past stuff. The truth’s fungible, right? It happened a while ago. People forget.”

  A gloom settled over the table, dark as if somebody had closed every blind in the room.

  They’d all read articles about—and witnessed on live television—the decay of political discourse, the coarsening of the culture. It sucked. Nobody had expected the late nineties to feel more enlightened than sixteen years into the next century.

  But this?

  The idea that Rock Pruitt, whom they’d all suffered firsthand, could be dragged up from the bottom of the swamp, slime hosed off, and made into an American leader?

  Laurel nudged Sam under the table. Joss was looking at her, those fourteen-year-old eyes passionate, blistering.

  Sam knew exactly what they were feeling. She felt it, too.

  The reunion schedule had a gap after lunch. Sam decided to kick her cold-case research into high gear.

  “Joss, you don’t need to be involved,” she said, packing up the Zoom. “I know you’ve made some friends here—you could check out the Peabody, or just hang.”

  Her daughter looked like it’d just been suggested she quit guitar.

  “Are you kidding? I have to be involved! We have to remind people who he is.”

  “I’m with you there,” Sam said, “but I didn’t want your weekend to be about this. I wanted you focused on Yale, on seeing what a college campus was actually like.”

  “I have been.” Joss was in full indignant mode, squeezing the cuffs of her shirt. “Isn’t this campus all about progress? About social justice? What better way to participate than stopping Rock Pruitt?”

  Sam could’ve said more to discourage the idea—should have, maybe—but her heart wasn’t in it.

  She felt the same anger Joss did. It sickened her to see Rock Pruitt ascendant while Jamie Gallagher pieced his life back together from shards.

  Because even though she’d been overjoyed to learn he was alive, even though he’d seemed fulfilled from his decade in Africa, Jamie had scars. Sam had witnessed them, even in the few hours they’d had together. Certain topics flummoxed him. His sentences looked back over their shoulders, fearful of what they did or didn’t imply.

  Joss, clearly reading the decision in her mother’s face, smiled and clapped in front of her waist. “What do we do, how do we start?”

  Sam pushed into the entryway.

  “You start at the start,” she said over her shoulder, “like my first film studies professor used to say. And this started with Derek Dickerson.”

  The police had recovered Dickerson’s body in his and Rock’s dorm room, an exclusive suite called “The God Quad.” Sam led Joss down College and Elm to Branford, the residential college that contained the God Quad. She used her phone to take a few stills of the courtyard, wide shots emphasizing the peaks’ height and variegated stone.

  She tried the door to J, the God Quad’s entryway, but found it locked.

  Too bad the undergraduates were on break—somebody might’ve let her in or at least answered a few questions on tape about the current student body’s knowledge of the event.

  Joss twisted on the ball of her foot. “Now what?”

  Sam put her phone away and looked around the courtyard. Today’s weather was fair, the cloudless blue sky matching the deserted dormitories here.

  “Hm. I wonder if Branford has the same dean. It used to be Henrik Schumer, the poet. Maybe he’s still around.”

  They headed for the administrative entryway, near the Branford dining hall. A heavy plank door was propped. Sam held it open for Joss, who stayed back shyly, possibly intimidated by Schumer, whose poetry still appeared on high school syllabuses. Placards designated the left office as master’s and the right as dean’s.

  Sam approached the latter. “Hello? Professor Schumer?”

  A voice from behind answered, “Right name. Wrong office.”

  She whirled to find Henrik Schumer walking stiffly from his desk in the master’s office.

  “They moved me across the hall,” he explained. “Five, six years now. Dean of students is a young person’s job.”

  He ushered Sam and Joss into leather armchairs.

  “I must apologize,” he said. “I’ve had so many Branford ninety-sixers through today that I’m afraid my recall of names is eroding. You were…?”

  “Oh, I wasn’t in Branford,” Sam said. “I came here hoping you might chat with me for a documentary I’m working on.”

  She raised the Zoom from its case and briefly described the project. She didn’t know quite how the poet would take her request to be recorded. There was no question his politics leaned left, but would he feel it was appropriate to comment? A college dean is dean for all students, after all, and twenty years ago, Rock Pruitt had been a member of Branford College.

  Sam need not have worried.

  “By all means,” he said in his starchy accent. “Bring out your recorder, have at it.”

  A giddy chirp escaped Joss. She quickly crossed her arms.

  Sam said, “After Derek Dickerson’s death, you were involved in the police investigation, correct?”

  “I was. It was I who coordinated the authorities’ access to the dormitories, to students they chose to interview.”

  “And were you contacted by members of the Pruitt family?”

  Henrik S
chumer took on an affronted air. “From the very first moment they became aware of the incident—the following morning—to the time the coroner declared the cause of death ‘Undetermined,’ essentially clearing their man, not a day passed without my hearing from either the Pruitt’s legal counsel or one of their number directly.”

  “You were pressured?”

  “Relentlessly.”

  “Asked to conceal things? Witnesses? The scope of a forensic investigation?”

  “The witnesses had all been tampered with,” Henrik said. “By the time the police came calling, the Pruitts had already spoken with anyone who’d seen Mr. Pruitt or Mr. Dickerson that evening.”

  “And you know that, er, because—”

  “The students told me.” Henrik used his arms to cross one leg over the other. “It was shameful. I registered complaints with Yale and the state police. I stopped returning the Pruitts’ calls.”

  Sam chuckled. “How did that go over?”

  “Not well,” the poet said. “I was threatened with legal action, and at least two literary journals were compelled to stop publishing my work.”

  Sam could feel Joss coiling beside her, stewing, angry.

  “Okay, well that’s…disheartening,” Sam said. “Do you mind if we talk about some of the forensic details on the record? They’re all more or less public domain, but it helps—just for audio, for the documentary—to have somebody voice them.”

  She’d been mulling who would be best to lay out these block-and-tackle facts. She could have done it herself in voiceover, but Henrik was turning out to be such a rockstar source that she figured it was worth asking.

  He agreed.

  “Great—thank you, I appreciate it,” Sam said, flipping through a notepad to her page of known facts.

  They talked through the baseline story. The coroner’s declaration. Rock being the last person to be seen with Derek Dickerson alive. His claim to have returned at two a.m. and discovered his roommate’s dead body.

  “Belated claim,” Henrik said. “Initially, Mr. Pruitt said he couldn’t recall returning home. He’d been too inebriated. He’d blacked out. Two weeks later, after corroborating with the Pruitt legal team, the night’s events returned serendipitously into focus.”

  “I’ll bet,” Sam said. “And did he ever give any hypotheses about where Dickerson’s injuries came from?”

  “It was Mr. Pruitt’s assertion,” Henrik said, “that Mr. Dickerson must have fallen against the corner of their coffee table.” He slowed his words incredulously.

  “Was any blood recovered from the table?”

  “None.”

  “Was it a really, I dunno, sharp coffee table?”

  Henrik Schumer dipped one shoulder, concessionary. “The table was, indeed, a rough and quite heavy concrete slab. Mr. Pruitt and Mr. Dickerson had lifted it from a campus construction site.”

  Sam stopped herself from saying lovely.

  “So there’s no blood on the table, despite the fact that Derek Dickerson lost significant blood from a head wound?”

  “Yes.”

  Sam checked the Zoom’s battery. Still going strong. It occurred to her the interview would have its greatest force if she maintained an objective stance.

  “That is consistent with the official determination,” she pointed out. “If Dickerson had died first from alcohol poisoning, an impact post-mortem might’ve created less blood.”

  Henrik said, “Marginally, perhaps.”

  “And I spoke with one witness who saw them arm in arm that night, all but incoherent. A condition that could make it difficult to pull off a murder—much less cover it up so well it stays under wraps for two decades.”

  The poet didn’t seem to appreciate Sam’s objectivity. He frowned, drawing in breath through craggy yellowed teeth.

  “The cover-up was perpetrated by the entire Pruitt machine. Whatever mistakes Mr. Pruitt made that evening, his brethren whitewashed.”

  Sam started a follow-up but Henrik, barely pausing for breath, continued, “The police were operating under the same stresses I was. At every step of the process, the Pruitts intimidated. They did not want thoroughness. They did not want the truth to out. They wanted an expedient end.”

  Remembering had clearly piqued his outrage. He grimaced and drove a square fingertip into the table.

  Sam thought of the stories she used to hear about Henrik Schumer, who’d cultivated a somewhat clichéd hot-blooded, important-male-artist ethos in younger days. People had said he defied the Yale administration and doled out his own discipline, that he’d even let the occasional petitioners settle their squabbles with fists.

  Sam understood that a man in this state was receptive to plenty. Now she mirrored his mode, head shaking, sighing Joss’s way, like she hated her child seeing the world’s warts laid bare.

  She gestured to a brass keyring hanging from a nail. “I don’t suppose we could see the God Quad, just for a moment?”

  Henrik charged out of his chair.

  The God Quad had a huge common room, which its inhabitants had a tacit duty to fill with revelers on Saturday nights. Branford College voted each year on which foursome—seniors, traditionally—would occupy the suite. Sam had no idea how Rock had gotten it as a freshman.

  Joss stepped hesitantly to the middle of the room. “So, the coffee table would’ve been here.” She aimed her index fingers straight down. “Where did they find the body?”

  “By the fireplace,” Sam said, “but who knows whether Rock moved it before the police showed up.”

  She circled the quad on soft, careful feet, snapping more photos. The top-floor suite featured a peaked ceiling, handsome curlicue chair rails, and a fireplace with similar detail work to those in Silliman. Sam could almost smell the dirty cleats and keg foam.

  Joss asked, “Did you ever go here?”

  “Not as a freshman,” Sam said. “But yeah, I went to a party or two here.”

  “So you were in that, like, crowd?”

  “It was just a few parties,” Sam said, running her fingers along the walls for no apparent reason. “College isn’t as socially hierarchical as high school. You do what you do.”

  Joss, noticing what Sam was doing, knelt and began inspecting the baseboards. “What’re we looking for?”

  Sam yawned. It had been an exhausting day, and she’d had only the one cup of coffee at the dance-physics lecture.

  “I don’t know,” she admitted.

  Henrik Schumer had left them—“Take whatever time you need, I will lock up later”—and they’d been poking around now for ten minutes. As the rush of her noontime conviction waned, Sam thought more deeply about the documentary. Whether the Pruitt cover-up angle made sense.

  Was the aquarium story enough? Did it tell a fresh story—the kind that would make some producer shout, THIS is why people must hear the story?

  What would she do, shade all her footage against Rock Pruitt? Leave out the testimony about him and Dickerson stumbling arm in arm that night? Layer in spooky organ music?

  Also, could she accept all Henrik had said at face value? The man’s animosity toward the Pruitts was clear. Deserved, sure, but clear. It was likely Henrik, as dean, would’ve been familiar with or even presiding over Dickerson’s many sexual assault complaints. Wasn’t it possible parts of the narrative in his own head were invented, like those postmodernist odes that’d launched his career in the sixties?

  “One of these boards is loose.”

  Sam’s mind was thick with doubt and barely registered her daughter’s voice.

  “Huh?”

  Joss was bent around by the fireplace. At first, Sam thought she was using it as a barre, practicing poses.

  “This board,” Joss said, reaching up inside the flue, “one end is real jiggly.”

  “It’s old wood—I remember when they closed off the fireplaces freshman year.” Sam waved her down, an instinct leftover from visits to museum gift shops during the toddler years. “Leave it, Master Sc
humer trusted us to—”

  “It’s off! It came off when I touch—”

  Joss’s voice was muffled as she ducked into the long-dormant ash pit. A thunk sounded, then an “Oww!”

  “That’s property of the university,” Sam said. “Whatever we break we’ll have to pay for.”

  Joss was visible from the waist down, the rest of her hidden in the fireplace. Soot had fallen onto her pants.

  She was saying something.

  “Come on, get outta there,” Sam said. “There’s probably asbestos all over.”

  Sure enough, when Joss lowered herself, she had gray eyebrows and coughed. “Where’s, ahem—can I have your phone flashlight? There’s this, like, heavy thing behind a flap.”

  Sam’s primary mode was still motherly annoyance, but it was pricked by something else now. Some glint of possibility.

  “Joss, out. Right now.”

  “There’s something up there, Mom! I saw, you have to—”

  “Okay, you’re getting a lungful of carcinogens,” Sam said. “Out of there, please.”

  But Joss’s eyes pulsed with excitement. She disappeared back up into the flue.

  What happened to that skittish teenager of mine?

  Sam walked to the fireplace. She heard crunching and creaking within. Several screws plinked to the ground.

  “Joss, out!” she repeated.

  Now a board was hanging down vertically into the fireplace, rotted, shedding dust. Sam’s insides burned at her daughter’s disobedience, at the property they were destroying.

  Even as she winced at the damage, though, Sam felt a tickle of intrigue. This fireplace had surely been boarded up in the same project as all the others.

  Nobody’s seen up here for years.

  When were these boarded up? Our freshman year, wasn’t it?

  Yes.

  Yes, it had been freshman year. The knowledge slipped into context with Joss’s discovery, with the history of this suite, and suddenly Sam was spiraling—up, high, hot.

  “Listen, Joss!” she said. “If there actually is something important like evidence up there, we’re gonna have to be careful and think—”