The Pinebox Vendetta Page 23

  “Mory’s has a reputation to uphold, and I—”

  “Mory’s closes with one phone call from me.” Jamie paused, his palm twisting Rock’s chin into the floor, to meet the bartender’s eye. “My family has a college named for it. You want to try, our legacy versus yours? Go ahead.”

  The bartender took a step back, crossing his arms behind his cummerbund.

  Now Rock shoved Jamie off. He scrambled up and grabbed a water carafe by the neck, breaking it against a table. The body burst in a spray of water and glass.

  “That’s a senior citizen you’re talking to,” he said, wielding a ring of shards. “What happened to that famous Gallagher compassion?”

  Jamie circled, feeling no fear, waiting for an opening. He was going to tackle this monster. He didn’t care if he came away with a few nicks. He’d trade nicks for the chance to drive Rock into the hardwood.

  And when he finished here—when the man in front of him surrendered or fled or closed his eyes for good—Jamie was going to find Sam Lessing and tell her he was moving to New York City, that he wanted her, that her crumb-bum husband didn’t mean a thing.

  He charged forward.

  Chapter 21

  Next door to Mory’s, Yorkside Pizza still stayed open until one a.m., same as in Sam’s undergraduate days. She helped Joss along the sidewalk, catching her when she faltered.

  Oy, she’s grown this year.

  Sam headed them toward the buzzing neon beer signs of Yorkside, and managed to get Joss into a booth without toppling either one of them.

  She grabbed an empty pitcher off a nearby table and set it before Joss. Just in case.

  A waitress swung by.

  “Water, please,” Sam said. “Lots of water and an order of breadsticks.”

  Mother and daughter sat across from each other. Joss held the table with two hands, steadying, swallowing, burping, her eyes focusing alternately near and far.

  Sam asked, “Are you hurt anywhere?”

  Joss shook her head.

  “Did he do anything to you?”

  “Hmm-nn.”

  “Touch you?”

  Joss shrugged. “My knee. It—erm, it was icky but I don’t care.”

  Sam felt a flash of anger, but as it passed, she decided the news was good on the whole. Non-terrible.

  “Okay. You’re safe now, that’s the main thing.”

  She took her daughter’s hands in both of hers. They felt brittle. Sweaty. Slow spasms passed through Joss’s body like escaping poison.

  Sam didn’t know if she would ever let go.

  “I’m s—sorry I lost…” Joss tried.

  “Lost what?”

  Joss struggled to remember what she’d been saying, or maybe to find a word—Sam couldn’t tell.

  Now the breadsticks came. Joss waved them off with a pained expression but did take a drink of water.

  “The Zoom!” she remembered. “I took it, it’s gone. He smashed it.”

  Sam dipped a breadstick in marinara sauce and took a bite. She shook her head as she chewed.

  “So doesn’t matter,” she said. “It’s a bunch of plastic and wires.”

  “But the footage, the audio you took—”

  “I can re-interview if I want, which I probably don’t. What matters is you. That you’re here, safe. That’s it.”

  Joss twisted her mouth regretfully. Sam considered reading her the riot act about how risky it’d been tracking down Rock Pruitt, sneaking into a place that served alcohol, putting herself in such a dangerous spot.

  Not tonight, she decided.

  Joss, who would brighten every couple minutes at some new memory, said, “He pl-nned the fish tank.”

  “He what?”

  “He pla-aaa-anned,” she over-articulated, “the fish tank.”

  Her eyes were intense, trembling and serious. Combined with the phrase “fish tank,” it almost made Sam laugh.

  Sam said, “He who? You mean Rock?”

  Joss nodded. The eyes became still more serious.

  Fish tank, Sam thought. Fish, fish, fish…

  Oh!

  “The Derek Dickerson thing?” Sam said. “What Gabe Navarro said about them fighting the night he died?”

  “Yes.”

  “They planned it? Rock getting pushed into the fish tank?”

  Joss nodded again. “It wasn’t a fight.”

  Sam could see her daughter felt the information was monumental, but she didn’t want to discuss it. She didn’t want Rock Pruitt and Derek Dickerson anywhere in her head. She didn’t want to go backwards twenty years, to consider them at all.

  “Ready for carbs yet?” She raised a breadstick.

  Joss tentatively accepted.

  Over the next fifteen minutes, Sam got all the calories and water she could into her daughter. She talked about whatever Joss cared to talk about. There was no rush. They’d missed the 8:32 train and had three hours to kill. If Joss missed school tomorrow, she missed school.

  Unless and until Sam heard something more sinister when Joss sobered up, she wasn’t involving the police. Could Joss face legal jeopardy for her Mory’s jaunt? Sam didn’t know, but it seemed at least equal to whatever they might manage to pin on Rock—and Sam had zero interest in taking on the Pruitts in legal realms.

  They sat in their oregano-smelling booth and talked, and drank, and chewed, and let the night turn quiet and boring again.

  Sam asked what her highlight had been for the entire trip. Joss, working on breadstick number three, said probably the dance-physics lecture. Or the art gallery. It was hard to pick. Both were cool in their own way.

  At ten o’clock, a figure with a rucksack appeared in Yorkside’s front window. His shirt was torn.

  Sam tapped the glass.

  Jamie Gallagher flinched to a ready crouch, then relaxed, seeing Sam. He closed his eyes and joined them inside.

  He moved slowly, one elbow dragging behind, the opposite-side stride boosting up in a limp. Half his face was black-and-blue.

  He was smiling.

  “Yikes,” Sam said. “What’s the other guy look like?”

  Jamie lowered his rucksack and himself onto Sam’s side of the booth, wincing.

  “About the same.”

  As he recounted what’d happened, Jamie kept wiping a cut on his neck, smearing blood onto his collar. The fight seemed still vivid in his mind. Even with blood vessels cracked through, the whites of his eyes glowed.

  Sam asked what Rock had meant when he’d said the thing about burying Jamie’s side. “He said they’d ‘drop the pinebox’ on you—it was the last thing I heard. What was that? Is there actually some ancient relic?”

  “Nah,” Jamie said. “It’s a hoax. The dagger, the old coffin—it’s never the same twice. Both sides have their kooks. Once this aunt told me and Charlotte there was some horse bone floating around that held the secret to the whole feud.”

  Sam kept pushing water on Joss. Once she’d gotten three full tumblers down, Sam said, “I should get her in bed.”

  Jamie offered to walk them back to Silliman.

  Sam said, “Sure.”

  Campus felt majestic and brooding. Most of Sam’s Yale memories were in cold or at least autumn-crisp weather, and experiencing it at the height of summer unsettled her. The thick air gave breath to the stone gargoyles of Sterling Library and menace to the quads’ Gothic arches. She walked between Jamie and Joss, holding hands with one and smelling the other’s wounds.

  The journey was dim. Sam thought through the weekend’s events, new information and old. Truths she’d learned about herself and the people closest to her. Some fit with what she’d already believed and filled her with pride, or sadness. Joss’s determination. Abe’s basic irredeemability.

  Others didn’t fit at all.

  Sam used her key at the college gate. She asked a passing maintenance worker if the rooms had been re-keyed and he said no, the dorms were vacant for the next month—they could take however long they wanted.
>
  Sam paused at the entryway bathroom, thinking Joss might need a trip, but she staggered directly inside for bed.

  Sam pulled the covers up her cheek like Joss was a baby. She’d have to rouse her in a couple hours, but even a short rest would do her good.

  Jamie waited back in the common room. When Sam rejoined him, he smiled easily—incongruous on that bruised, gashed face—and leaned against the windowsill.

  He seemed different. The arm at the sill looked wiry, muscled—not skinny like she might’ve said yesterday. Since Mory’s, he hadn’t once said he was sorry.

  “I was too hard on you before,” Sam said.

  “No.” Even in this word, there was firmness. “I deserved it.”

  “It must be insane, all these emotions you’ve been through.”

  “Yeah.” He hitched his bag up his shoulder. “But you’ve had stuff going on, too. Everyone does. I didn’t handle it…” He shook his head thoughtfully. “I didn’t handle it.”

  Sam looked into his eyes. She felt lucky. Every once in a while, filming in Nicaragua, riding the subway, she would feel it—her advantage, the opportunities she’d been given. Everyday comforts. The lack of physical distress.

  She had survived the bloody brick and Joss’s flight. Her marriage had dissolved without a single broken dish.

  Now she was talking emotions with Jamie Gallagher.

  He said, “So your husband, Abe—he left?”

  Sam glanced around, stretching her arms through the empty air.

  “Then you guys’re,” Jamie began, “I mean, not to be presumptuous, but is it…”

  “Over,” she said. “Blessedly.”

  He bobbed his head, a sweetly goofy response to the news.

  Sam decided it would be over-dramatic to leave off there, and explained briefly how she’d stayed in the marriage for Joss—toughing it out, switching off that part of herself—but it turned out Joss didn’t need her to.

  “Wow,” he said. “That’s a lot to figure out in a weekend.”

  She chuckled.

  In a playful voice Jamie asked, “What now?”

  “Hm, I don’t know,” Sam said with some pluck of her own. “How about you? Where do you go from here, back to Juba?”

  “It can be hard to get a flight.”

  “Oh?”

  “Very. Could be weeks, months.”

  Sam felt the ends of her mouth rising. Jamie smiled, too, and in that moment he was perfect: the grin animating his skinned-up face like somebody had taken the road rash he used to get biking—that he’d seemed to live for—and painted it across his best self.

  He said, “What do you want, Sam?”

  She teared up. “That’s broad.”

  “I know.”

  “I—I think something. Pretty sure I’m going to want something.”

  He slipped off his rucksack and laid it beside his foot. “Seems fair. We all deserve something.”

  They stepped together and kissed. Her moist lips wet his cracked ones, a touch, another touch, then both their mouths opened. Sam’s head fogged with heat and release from her first kiss—real kiss—in a decade. It unfolded like the opening images of your favorite film, slow-growing and wonderful. She gripped his back and felt him feeling her.

  When their heads tipped opposite, the kiss broke for a beat and resumed urgently.

  Sam lost her brain a little. When it came back and she found herself entwined with Jamie, not an inch of space between them, the world felt sharper. She saw more details. She saw connections she hadn’t seen before.

  She saw the fish tank.

  She saw a fight that wasn’t a fight.

  The kiss finished. Sam opened her eyes. Her body felt brand new, awake, but the dorm was still eighty years old. The walls’ plaster stayed in her nose. Dark-grained wood loomed from the mantle and recesses of the room.

  She looked in Jamie’s eyes. They were a mile deep.

  She looked.

  And now she felt, wrapping the softness inside her like razor-edged thread, fear.

  She said, “The Pruitts didn’t steal that brick.”

  The fingers of Jamie’s left hand were still laced with the fingers of her right.

  He paused. Calculating? Weighing options?

  “No,” he said. “Not the Pruitts.”

  Sam was glad he hadn’t lied. Glad that their intimacy had been real.

  “Charlotte?” she said.

  He took a dispirited breath. “My mother, more likely. She has more of those people.”

  Their fingers stayed together.

  Sam said, “Why did she leave the brick there all these years?”

  “She never knew,” Jamie said. “After I—er, it happened, I almost wanted to get caught. I thought the police would discover it.”

  “The Pruitts stonewalled.”

  Jamie nodded. “Then the university boarded up the flues.”

  Their hands had slipped to a fingertip grip—a sad, stubborn contact.

  Sam wished she didn’t know. She wished the feud was a relic instead of a pulsing, contemporary force, devouring its combatants like some smoke-belching factory eats gasoline.

  She wished Jamie had grown beyond that seventeen-year-old boy, righteous, crazed by ideology.

  But look at this face.

  “Why?” she said. “To take down Rock?”

  “No,” Jamie shook his head insistently. “Dickerson—I knew one of his victims. She…was in my hall freshman year.”

  The name came to Sam at once. “Norah Fowler.”

  How many other classmates had Jamie asked for information about Norah this weekend?

  He said, “I told someone in my family about the assault. About how dangerous Dickerson was.”

  “And I suppose,” Sam began, “you would’ve mentioned he was Rock Pruitt’s roommate…”

  Jamie’s mouth twisted. “Two birds. One stone.”

  The words chilled Sam—even though they echoed her own thoughts at the candle ceremony, of the paradoxical goodness of the crime.

  “Who could even suggest such a thing to a seventeen-year—”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Jamie said. “I did it. Me.”

  Sam stood rooted to the hardwood for a while, unable to respond. Puzzle pieces zoomed through her brain. That Jamie was taking responsibility, that he’d been motivated by Norah—both these counted in his favor.

  Still, he’d killed a college freshman in cold blood.

  Then he’d killed a second man with cobra venom.

  It was insane. Maybe it wasn’t insane in a world where podiums got hijacked and threats were made with ancient relics, but in Sam’s world? The world she and Joss lived in?

  It was. Insane.

  “Goodbye,” she said.

  Their fingers separated. Jamie rubbed his eyes clear.

  “But what if I…” He trailed off, then started over, “It happened so long ago, it’s history. Couldn’t we—”

  “No,” Sam said. “It isn’t history. It’s here.”

  Jamie lowered his head. Dishwater-blond hair fell across itself in tangles.

  His disclosures hadn’t stopped the questions in Sam’s mind. They’d only started more. Did an elder Gallagher feed him the idea to kill Dickerson? Did Charlotte? But Charlotte would’ve been thirteen.

  How did Jamie keep his secret those last three years at Yale without losing his mind?

  Did he lose his mind?

  As Jamie turned and slinked away—maybe forever, this time—Sam wanted all these answers. But she also didn’t want them. Because these answers, she knew, came packed in two hundred fifty years of blood.

  Sam locked the door behind Jamie and walked to the dorm bedroom where Joss slept. Her daughter looked tiny. Curled into a comma, a sheet twisted through the crook of her elbow. Taking breath after peaceful breath.

  Sam felt tired herself, but also lighter.

  Abe would fight for custody. She would have to fight back, or find a way not to. They’d both have to m
ove—their two salaries barely covered one Brooklyn rent, let alone two.

  She would have to remake her life, break through the callouses that had grown up around so many of her parts. It would take courage, and time, and will, and friends holding her hand through the worst of it. It would be the great challenge of her life, and she didn’t know if she would succeed.

  She refused to be distracted.