The Pinebox Vendetta Read online

Sam couldn’t stop the breaths from coming. One after another barged up her throat. She felt pressure in her ears, a high whinny destroying all sense of balance.

  She staggered onto her side. Then—feeling watched, violated, marked—crawled across the room.

  Maybe I put it back under the other bed, or Joss moved it there.

  But the space under the other bed’s box spring was bare, too. The brick had vanished.

  Sam stayed prone on the hardwood, propped by her elbows, stomach flat to the floor. Her head dropped like the power had been cut. Waves of emotion crashed through her body.

  Shock. Heartache. Rage.

  Her worst suspicions about the Pruitts had borne out. Somehow they’d learned about her discovery. Whether they had the God Quad bugged, or had caught wind of Sam’s project and tailed her, or by some other means—Sam didn’t know. They had waited for her to leave the brick unattended, and then they’d taken it.

  The naming ceremony had lasted two hours, plenty of time to pick a college dorm lock and find the evidence. Underneath the bed was probably the first place they’d looked.

  Sam stalked to every corner of the room, checking for fingerprints or smudges or a left-behind crowbar, anything. Anything she could show the police.

  She searched ten minutes. She ripped both bedspreads to the ground. She rattled drawers. She kicked walls. There was no logic to it, and she expected no results.

  Finally, she laid on her back in the center of the floor.

  Sam felt hatred unlike any she had known. All the stress, the ordeal she’d been through, the work she’d put into the project—which had become a shared experience with her daughter. Which had produced such cataclysmic downstream effects on her personal life.

  Everything had been for naught.

  This loss—this heist—would define reunion weekend. For Sam. For Joss.

  It wouldn’t be the weekend of quarks or New Haven boys or breaking through with Laurel. When they thought of this weekend, they would think of Rock Pruitt first.

  Always.

  Sam thought of his smug face. The uncouth jokes and language Rock believed elevated him over the caring, empathetic herd. He thought he was better than everyone he laid eyes on. He thought he could get away with anything. Maybe he could.

  She wished for every bad thing to happen to him.

  A rustle sounded in the common room. Sam instinctively cast about for something to defend herself with—cover, a weapon. The best she could find was a sharp pencil.

  “Sam? Sam, you in here?”

  It was Abe.

  She unclenched her fist around the pencil. “Yep. You found me.”

  Her husband looked beat, his eyes unfocused, taking short steps like a nursing-home ward missing his walker. His hair seemed sparser.

  Sam remembered his band’s last gig. Seven, eight years ago. They had been at Arlene’s Grocery, a dive they’d played often over the course of their thirty-odd year run. Abe’s voice held through the first set, but during “Your Shoes Are Stupid!” in the second, it thinned out and became like (as Abe later put it) dogs whimpering for table scraps.

  Afterward, he looked offstage to Sam. Things weren’t super between them at that point, but they were still offering support and discussing plans with each other.

  His face then—weary, hangdog—reminded Sam of his face now.

  He saw her tears, then saw that both beds were upset. “What—what happened? The brick?”

  Sam nodded.

  She felt suddenly—unexpectedly—glad it was Abe who’d come rather than Joss or, God forbid, Jamie Gallagher.

  Abe knew disappointment. This shared life of theirs had been one—and for as crummy as it had turned out, they had lived it together. On the same tired carpets and mattresses. She had seen him through liver disease. He’d been there when her mother had died, in the maddeningly plain hospital room that’d been her world for the last months of life.

  They’d even loved each other once. For eighteen months—in that hovel she’d lived in on Broome Street, eating at restaurants with five tables.

  Eighteen months was the shelf life of Abe’s cool, detached cynicism. His looks lasted longer—those rough, young-Keith-Richards edges that felt good to rub against even if they gave you blisters—and Sam tried desperately to keep loving him for another four years. She fought and stayed.

  Then, for another four, she convinced herself this was simply what marriage was. She learned to not fight, and stayed.

  Which took Joss up to eight years old.

  It had been this shared history, Sam realized now, that had compelled her to stick up for him in front of Charlotte Gallagher.

  He asked, “You didn’t give it to Jamie?”

  Sam swallowed, gathering herself to speak.

  But Abe continued first, “Because I think that was dumb, if I’m being honest. They have no obligation to take it to the police. They might just keep it, use it for blackmail.”

  She inhaled and, again, was about to correct him.

  But he kept talking. “See, you’re nothing to them. They don’t care about you—whether some documentary gets made or not.” Pacing now, like he was working out the chorus for some new song. “You should’ve gone straight to the cops. Now you’ll never see that brick again. What did you think, the Gallaghers would lavish praise upon you?”

  He finished with a nasal huff. Or seemed to finish—maybe he was only pausing to think up more invective.

  Sam felt her blood rising, pushing at its veins. She’d shifted up onto her knees and now had visions of launching herself like a missile, of driving her head through his mouth—through that small, disingenuous mouth.

  Instead she said, “Go.”

  “Be mad at me all you want, but don’t say I didn’t tell you exactly—”

  “Go!” She got to her feet and pointed to the courtyard. “This is my school, my place. Was my place. And I want you out. I want you the hell out now.”

  “So you can be with Jamie, right?” Abe backpedaled into the common room as he spoke, parceling out more hurt. “Did the bloody brick seal the deal—you’re back together, like it was supposed to be twenty years ago? Ready to take your rightful place with the Gallaghers?”

  “Please go. Just go.”

  “Of course, yeah. I’ll go. I’ll get out of your—”

  “Now! Get on a Goddamn train to Brooklyn and hole up with one of your Fiverr ladies, and suck the life out of her—or yourself. I want away from you. You’re poison.”

  Classmates in the courtyard listened through open windows, craning their necks to see who was screaming—and what about.

  Abe said, “You’ve been checked out of this marriage for years. You’ve faked it forever.”

  “How could I not? Tell me—how could I not? You cheat, you’re indifferent.”

  “Let’s talk about indifference. Let’s talk about how you completely lost interest in me once the NYC music scene passed me by.”

  Passed him by? It was just too Abe—the self-importance, all of it.

  “Believe it or not, I couldn’t have cared less about this…music scene, whatever. I just wanted to sit across a table Saturday mornings eating eggs without hating each other.”

  But Sam didn’t believe this. She was grasping for words, for any plank of wood to hold up against his arrows.

  The summer evening was quiet as death. Any courtyard farewells had paused so people could rubberneck.

  Of course, this was the least of Sam’s worries. Her life had imploded. Her marriage, this fragile rigging off which hung schedules and insurance forms and last names, was done. She’d protected it so studiously over the years that its dissolution stunned her.

  How did this happen?

  What do we do now?

  It’d been dust, sure, but they needed that dust. Losing it shook Sam as deeply as if her apartment or WNYC had burned to the ground.

  Her family. Her whole identity.

  Finally Abe stood in the door, holding his toilet
ry bag.

  “Personally, I’m glad,” he said. “I’m ready to get out and live my life. Meet people. I woulda never put this on Joss, but hey, it’s all about you. Right? All about you.”

  And off he went, not quite managing to keep a stiff lip.

  Joss.

  She’d been lurking in Sam’s mind, right below the tumult and sting of the fight, but as soon as Abe said her name, Sam stopped hearing anything else.

  She rushed to the windowsill—dimly aware of her husband leaving—and leaned out into the courtyard to find her daughter.

  Here was Troy Fickert, watching unabashedly from the cobblestone path. A dozen others seemed to have just averted their eyes, ambling away, holding onto a suitcase or child’s hand.

  Where is she? Sam leaned through the open window.

  “Joss!” she called.

  More classmates looked over. Sam was about to shout again when she spotted a red hoodie by the gate.

  “Joss!” she tried again.

  The hoodie—and the slender, skulking form inside—kept moving for the street. Sam ran from the common room, pounding through the entryway, possibly brushing by Abe—if she did, she didn’t know or care.

  “Come back, Joss, hey…”

  She caught up on Wall Street, Joss kicking a deli wrapper.

  “Listen, I’m sorry.” Sam circled ahead of her daughter. “You shouldn’t have heard—er, had to hear a thing like that, your parents…”

  She was at loss for how to describe it. Severing ties? Shattering their own lives and yours in one last sad burst of acrimony?

  She flashed back to herself all those years ago, in her mother’s car after Arsenic and Old Lace rehearsal.

  Was this any better?

  “I just…am so, so sorry we did that to you,” Sam managed. “Me and Dad.”

  Joss clutched her elbows even though it was seventy degrees out. “You were really loud.”

  Something in her eyes—was it irony?—gave Sam hope.

  “I know, we were so, so loud.” Sam felt about three inches tall, but she knew she had to keep explaining, keep fighting. “There’s some bad stuff between me and Dad, and you—and it has nothing to do with you, or how we feel about you—”

  “I know, Mom.”

  Again, there was an encouraging note here—an airiness you wouldn’t expect from a teenager experiencing the worst moment of her life, which Sam feared she’d just inflicted.

  “You know…that we love you?” Sam said. “That even if things aren’t great between us, between ourselves, that we’d both do absolutely anything for you?”

  “Well, yeah.” Joss twisted the ball of her foot into the sidewalk, the start of a nervous pirouette. “I know that.”

  “Because that’s important.”

  Joss inhaled at length and looked up with a pinched expression, like her six-year-old-self saying she didn’t want to play soccer anymore.

  “He’s horrible to you,” she said. “I mean, seriously, you two are an awful match.”

  Sam had a panicky instinct, like she’d walked onto the balcony in underwear, but made herself pause before answering.

  “Getting married was different than…I guess, living together,” she said. “Being a married couple, it’s not easy. At least not for us.”

  Joss started forward, and they hugged. Sam cried into her daughter’s hoodie, crying for old mistakes and lousy life outcomes, but also with relief, because Joss was crying mostly for her—for Sam—and not herself.

  Sam knew this from the strength of her daughter’s clutch. It had happened in smaller moments before, the child comforting the parent. When Sam had lost a cousin to cancer. When her Nicaraguan bird trade film hadn’t won the IDA award it’d been nominated for—so not a big deal, but Joss had picked up on Sam’s disappointment and eaten every bite of asparagus that night.

  It had always surprised Sam, the capacity of this girl whose diapers she’d changed to think beyond her own needs and wants. It surprised her now.

  “Thank you,” she croaked.

  Joss stepped back. “You should be happy, Mom. Like this weekend? You’ve been so totally alive, it’s been amazing watching you here.”

  Sam nodded. She felt spent, and like she could sleep forever—but also looser in the shoulders.

  It wasn’t the same, Joss now versus herself a quarter-century ago. Joss was stronger, or at least more ready to accept a world where her parents weren’t together.

  “I want you to be like this all the time,” Joss said. “I wish…I mean, I just wish…”

  Her face bent and scrunched and got red from straining.

  Sam pulled her into another embrace. “We’re going to figure it out. Families deal with lots worse. I love you. And he loves you.”

  After several rickety breaths, and complex looks, and hand squeezes that stood in for further words, they started back to the dorm room.

  Sam told her about the brick.

  If Joss took the other news easier than expected, this news proved there was no predicting teenagers: it walloped her.

  “Gone?” she repeated. “It can’t be! You hid it under the bed, we made sure—”

  “They stole it from the room,” Sam said. “The Pruitts. I think they were following us. At the gallery, there was this guy, and then a car…I don’t know. I don’t know how they did it. But it’s gone.”

  Joss’s face cycled from disorientation, to fear, to anger.

  “The Pruitts took it?”

  “It’s my fault. I should’ve never left it alone.”

  By now, they were back in the dorm. Joss looked to the corners of the room, up to the ceiling, along the plaster moldings, arms stiff at her sides.

  When the brick didn’t materialize or otherwise present itself, she looked back to Sam. “We have to go to the police!”

  “How? With what?”

  Joss stomped about with none of her typical dancer’s grace.

  “We can…testify!” she said. “We saw the brick—we found it. This is insane! We can describe where it was and testify they took it.”

  “The police aren’t going to—”

  “Mom, we have to! We can’t let them—we can’t let him”—her face blanched at the reference to Rock Pruitt—“just erase our evidence. We can’t. We have to fight this!”

  “Fight it how?”

  “I dunno, maybe we could figure out where they have it! You said the Pruitts were big into that one secret society, right? Skull and Bones?”

  Sam, who’d traveled these same rhetorical paths herself after discovering the brick missing only to end in despair, sighed.

  Joss went on, “Or get him to admit it on tape! He’s such a bigmouth. He loves bragging—I’ll bet if we told him what we found, he’d admit it! He’d brag. As long as we keep the recorder hidden…”

  Sam laid a hand on her daughter’s back, feeling quick breaths rise and fall.

  “He’s not going to admit anything, baby,” she said. “I’m sorry. We aren’t living in some movie.”

  As Joss railed they had to do something—something!—Sam walked them back to the common room and looked out upon the courtyard again. The lawn was deserted.

  She’d come here hoping to reclaim her life—to find friends, to find some spark or new purpose.

  Had she? It was hard to say in all the rubble. Her life had changed irrevocably. Abe was probably gone from the picture. They’d recovered from lots in the past—screaming fights, thrown mugs—but always Joss had brought them back together.

  Without the brace of her welfare—the presumed apocalypse binding them—they were free.

  So her life…was what? Reclaimed? More like blown up.

  “There’s nothing to be gained fighting people like the Pruitts,” Sam said, and found she believed it. “They thrive off fighting. They’re built for it. We’re not. We’re built to live. So let’s just live, okay? We can watch them on TV.”

  The words had the intended effect on Joss, who leaned back into the win
dow sill and closed her eyes, seeming to accept the brick’s disappearance.

  “After all that work, you’re just scrapping the documentary?”

  “Not necessarily,” Sam said. “I still have plenty of audio. I could do something like I was thinking before—smaller, atmospheric.”

  Joss exhaled without opening her eyes.

  “I know, I know,” Sam said. “It stinks. Rock Pruitt gets off. Really, though—who cares? The guy he murdered was a jerk. Two jerks. Better we stay out of the whole jerky thing.”

  This, finally, made Joss smile. Mother and daughter both wiped their eyes. Joss dangled one foot above the hardwood floor and, after a long beat of apparent thought, smiled bigger.

  It was release, Sam thought, finding humor in that too-human inability to change the world. Joss was growing up. She had accepted the situation—accepted all the situations, like Sam had, and finally understood they were going to muddle through. Maybe with less, maybe not taking the route they’d planned, but they would survive.

  Chapter 17

  Joss told her mother she needed to meet a boy to say goodbye and exchange numbers, then stood around the common room fussing with her skirt, pulling strands of hair behind her ear.

  Come on, come on! she thought. Go use the bathroom. Or duck away to text your friends. Anything.

  Mom noticed she was stalling and asked if she wanted her to walk her downstairs. “You’re just meeting across the street, that coffee place?”

  “Right,” Joss said. “No, it’s okay. I don’t want to be, you know, too on the nose. Time-wise.”

  Her mother smiled like she understood how it was, and Joss—fresh off seeing her go through basically the end of her marriage—felt a little guilty.

  So she wouldn’t have to look her in the eye, Joss busied herself packing, cramming dirty clothes into the plastic reunion bag Mom had said was for laundry, finding her butterfly necklace and spending way longer than necessary doing the clasp.

  Finally, her mother left to get their toothbrushes and stuff from the bathroom. The second she disappeared to the entryway, Joss got to it.

  The Zoom recorder was in Mom’s duffel bag. She snagged it from the main compartment, re-fluffed nearby items to cover the hole, and stashed it in her jangly purse—which she’d brought in case Saturday night was dressy.