The Pinebox Vendetta Page 6

  He took his time replying, and Sam could visualize him perfectly—pacing, grinding two fingers into his bare head until the knuckles bowed concavely. If he was really pissed, if the client was one of those “fantastically promising” singer-songwriters he hoped to sleep with, he might slap their ratty futon in frustration.

  Nowhere in his mind, of course, was the consideration that she might need the charger for her Pruitt-Gallagher documentary.

  Finally, he replied.

  can’t do my job without juice

  Sam felt dragged down. She couldn’t slog the adapter back to Brooklyn. Which he knew. There were adapters to be had, from either of the friends she’d mentioned or, absolute worst case, by heading into the city and borrowing one from WNYC. She had inflicted a minor, completely inadvertent inconvenience upon him, and now he was grilling her.

  He was, basically, being an ass.

  Oh, it wasn’t much. Many days she endured worse. In this moment, though, looking out on the stately brick courtyard of Silliman College, she and Joss reading descriptions of talks by world-famous scholars? The cruelty was exquisite, like some mossy boulder chucked into the middle of a pristine pool.

  Five years.

  Five more years of this.

  In five years, Joss would leave for college—and Sam would leave Abe. She would be forty-eight years old. Regularly coloring her hair. Done having kids, staring menopause in the face.

  But free.

  The thought of another half decade of bickering was soul-sucking, but Joss had shown enough signs of fraying that Sam felt she had no choice. Her daughter’s bond with Abe was too strong. Last spring when he’d been away six days moving his mother into an Arizona nursing home, she’d suffered. Suddenly, the sleeves of all her shirts were too long. When an ant infestation swarmed their kitchen—a thing Abe always took care of—she’d had something like a panic attack, sobbing, hyperventilating.

  Sam’s own parents had divorced when she was a senior in high school. The news blindsided her. She’d stopped doing her schoolwork. Her GPA nosedived. It might’ve even cost her Yale—her admission had been pending second semester marks—if Sam’s guidance counselor hadn’t called the admissions office and pleaded on her behalf.

  And Sam had been seventeen then. Joss was fourteen. Losing Abe would devastate her.

  If she lost Abe. Sam supposed the custody choice would be Joss’s, and it seemed like no slam-dunk she would pick Sam. Joss didn’t understand, couldn’t understand at her age, so many of her father’s shortcomings. Sam had shielded her from the worst: his infidelity, his total cowardice when it came to the tough business of telling their child no.

  To Joss, her father was mellow and centered, the man who’d taught her to ride a bike and finger E minor.

  Sam ignored Abe’s last text.

  “Let’s hang our clothes, alright?” she said. “We don’t want our dresses looking like elephant hide for Saturday.”

  Joss agreed, walking her bag toward the two bedrooms. “Which one do I sleep in?”

  Sam pointed to the door whose laminated label read Samantha Lessing (Isaacson). “That one. It’s both of ours.”

  Joss’s shoulders sagged and she was assuming a facial expression that conveyed just how lame she found the idea of rooming with her mother, when the common-room door burst open.

  “Oh my God, Sam Lessing, you made it!”

  Laurel Trowbridge rushed in, leaving her gold-buckled bag in the entryway, wrapping Sam in a hug. The two had roomed together junior and senior years, and they had arranged to room together here. Laurel looked every bit the San Franciscan she was, classic platinum hair framing her face, stud earrings, athletic slim pants ready for yoga or a hike up Mount Tamalpais.

  “It’s so refreshing to see you,” she said. “My travel day was nuts, but it’s all worth it now.”

  The two women looked at each other. Sam felt more emotion than she’d expected. Laurel had been such a fixture in her life, and seeing her brought that part of her youth screaming back. Laurel’s eyes, that sparkly squint, were hopeful as Friday night or first rehearsal.

  They also made her think of Jamie Gallagher.

  Laurel, after a gushing sigh, turned to Joss. “And you! Look how stylish. Last time I saw you, you thought jeans were evil. I heard you’re becoming quite the serious dancer?”

  Joss kicked one foot behind the opposite heel. “I just went to five-day-a-week practice.”

  “Wow, good for you. Last month I was at a writer’s retreat with a woman who choreographs for the ballet, NYC. Absolutely brilliant—so many interesting things to say about how dance is evolving.”

  “Evolving?”

  “Yes, I’ll tell you all about it!” Laurel ducked out to the entryway for her bag, fluttering her fingers at some other arrival, and ducked back in. “I am so excited we all get to be roomies. Won’t this be fun?”

  She flopped her wrists open at her chest, a cheesy gesture that, coming from Sam, would’ve earned Joss’s best gag-me face. Sam figured she would cut Laurel some slack, possibly swell her eyes and turn slowly away—a lesser expression of disdain.

  Instead, Joss did a half pirouette and said, “So fun!”

  Dinner was roast turkey or veggie lasagna in the courtyard. Sam staked out a table with Laural and Joss—who thankfully got no scrutiny from the woman carving turkey onto plates—but ate most of her food on the move, finding classmates.

  It was her first chance to have those conversations she’d imagined back in Brooklyn, to recover that core enthusiasm for life.

  And?

  There were nice moments. Keenan from the dining hall talked about loathing the advertising work he did but liking his coworkers. They both agreed that college, this Utopian situation financed by your parents or your own future insolvency, teed you up to get knocked flat by adult reality.

  The wife of Sam’s friend Sanjay shared stories of their teenager’s scatter-shot choices about peer groups that made Sam struggle to keep wine from shooting out her nose.

  Still, there was too much resume. You went where from grad school? Into private equity?

  Well, I did a summer in finance too…

  It was also Sam’s first chance to record audio for the pinebox documentary.

  She took about an hour warming up to it, deciding whom to interview. She found herself not wanting to do it in hearing range of Laurel, who’d been telling everybody how she was “growing her brand” by publishing short opinion pieces around the web.

  Finally, with Laurel at the bar station and Joss having found a group of other teens—as teens will—Sam broached the topic with Eliana Rowe.

  “How the feud affected me?” Eliana said, as though Sam’s opening question had a grammar error.

  “Right,” Sam said. “You were political back then. Did it motivate you, being near two people whose families were so influential?”

  Eliana’s face only pinched more.

  Sam added, “Or did it turn you off, all the drama?”

  Because she sure looked turned off. Sam had picked Eliana assuming her background as a UNICEF director would make her a cooperative source.

  Bad assumption.

  “I was aware of the dynamic, vaguely,” Eliana said. “I was busy with Shelter House. It wasn’t something I thought much about.”

  She glanced down at the recorder in Sam’s hand—disdainfully, it seemed to Sam. Sam asked a throwaway follow-up about whether she recalled her first time crossing paths with Rock Pruitt or Jamie Gallagher—“Not especially, no”—then switched off the Zoom.

  Maybe Eliana was right. Maybe this was petty, sticking a mic in people’s faces at a reunion. Small-minded. Sensational.

  She decided to try again. Eliana had been kind of a downer during college—her opinion alone shouldn’t decide this.

  Gabe Navarro was hovering nearby. Gabe hadn’t been politically involved at Yale, but he’d been in that same social set Rock and—to a lesser extent—Jamie had. Plus, he was standing right
here.

  She gave her opening spiel.

  Gabe said, “You mean that old rusty dagger? Or the coffin buried on Thomas Jefferson’s farm?”

  “No,” Sam said. “Well, sure—if that’s what you associate with the feud.”

  And here was the other problem: “pinebox vendetta” meant different things to different people.

  Sam thought of it as a catchall reference to the families’ long-running feud, this Hatfield-McCoy fight writ large. But there was also Gabe’s conception of “pinebox,” this dark mythology of the feud’s origin. Some claimed it traced back to an ancient double-cross involving the Declaration of Independence. Others said a dagger bearing the Pruitt crest had killed an important Gallagher heir.

  The clans’ leaders downplayed this talk. When Jonathan Pruitt had been running for president, he’d famously joked, “I pledge to keep the family pentagrams out of the White House, locked up safe in my attic.”

  Rumors persisted, though. CNN still dusted off its five-part Secrets, Relics, Betrayal: Unpacking the Pinebox Legend every so often, stoking the intrigue.

  Gabe said, “I dunno. If it was real, don’t you think it would’ve come out by now? Two-hundred-however-many years?”

  “Probably,” Sam said. “Now that we have Instagram.”

  Gabe laughed, swaying a little. He’d had a cocktail or three. “Is your documentary going to go into Rock Pruitt and his roommate, that whole ‘accident’ deal?”

  “Depends. I’m just planning to talk to people, see what comes out of conversations—conversations like the one we’re having now.”

  Gabe stood up taller, seeming flattered. Sam felt a little guilty—she’d mentioned her WNYC affiliation in passing earlier. He probably thought this was some network project green-lighted to air next month.

  Which it definitely wasn’t.

  He said, “I was around that night, you know. When Dickerson died? I saw them both, him and Rock.”

  “Really? What do you remember?”

  “I remember they were outta-their-heads drunk. Standard operating procedure for them, of course.”

  “Of course.” Sam shifted, moving the Zoom’s mic closer. “The story was they’d argued, right?”

  “More than argued.”

  Sam felt spider feet on her spine.

  “You…and you saw it?”

  “Yeah, I saw. It was at this party on Old Campus. Dickerson shoved Rock into an aquarium.”

  “Like a fish tank?”

  “Uh-huh. I forget whose party it was, but they had this aquarium? Uh, what a mess. All their fish and water, and these little purple pebbles. Rock got drenched.”

  “He was mad?”

  “He was livid,” Gabe said. “They almost came to blows right there.”

  Implying with his voice that later on, as they both understood, it had come to even worse.

  Sam asked if he’d ever told this to the police.

  “Sure, the police knew. They interviewed a bunch of us from the party.” Gabe made a dubious face. “But they knew what answer they were coming back with. They were in the tank from the start.”

  An ex-teammate of Gabe’s approached for a loud, back-slapping hug—effectively ending the interview.

  Sam packed the Zoom away in its case and went looking for Joss.

  Wow. Gabe had been infinitely more helpful than Eliana. She would have to Google it later, but Sam felt confident the shattered aquarium had never gotten into the public record in ninety-three.

  Which meant one of two things: either the Pruitts had suppressed the incident, or the police had decided on their own to be discreet with the investigation’s details.

  What other details were out there about Derek Dickerson’s death? How many other witness testimonies had been swept under the rug?

  The official cause of death had been “Undetermined.” Dickerson’s head had displayed evidence of blunt-force trauma, but the coroner hadn’t been able to rule out alcohol poisoning as the fatal factor—with any wounds coming after the fact, perhaps in a fall. Rock Pruitt’s story was that he’d returned to his Branford College dorm at two o’clock in the morning and found the body.

  Was it possible somebody—somebody at this reunion—had seen Rock getting back to Branford? Who could verify that two o’clock claim?

  Or refute it?

  How about somebody who’d seen the next phase of the roommates’ quarrel—after the busted aquarium?

  Sam hadn’t come expecting to investigate a cold-case murder this weekend. She hadn’t even come with the idea of damaging the Pruitts. She didn’t mind the Pruitts generally. She’d never voted for Jonathan Pruitt, but she felt like he’d been a reasonable president and actually preferred the clan’s upright discipline to the many flavors of crazy populating today’s right wing.

  Rock Pruitt wasn’t just any Pruitt, though. Rock was different. A known megalomaniac. A proud misogynist.

  Sam wasn’t sure quite how this fit into “recovering core enthusiasm for life,” but she felt pretty confident it was worth doing.

  Sam woke at six forty-five the next morning. She’d arranged beforehand to run East Rock with Laurel—the route they used to jog as undergrads on those preciously free afternoons, just because the sky was blue and their muscles called them to.

  Slipping quietly from bed to the common room so she wouldn’t rouse Joss, Sam dug running shoes out of her bag. She hadn’t worn them in months and the laces felt weirdly tight across the bones of her foot. Shoes, spandex, sports bra—she geared up, tapped some Grapenuts into her mouth from a baggie, and sat on the couch waiting for Laurel.

  She felt, eh, decent. She should’ve gone to bed an hour earlier and drunk less wine, but the night had been too full of possibility—especially after what Gabe Navarro had told her.

  Though nobody had quite topped Gabe’s aquarium nugget, other classmates had been willing to talk about Rock Pruitt on tape, like Kim Jaffe who remembered him laying “it” on a friend’s shoulder in the dining hall.

  Now, as noises started coming through Laurel’s door, Sam imagined how she might describe the project to her former roommate. They’d gone all last night without talking about it, but Sam would have to today. It would be weird to keep keeping it from her.

  It was going to be weird telling Laurel, too.

  Sam figured she’d just do it now. Get it over before the run, push past any weirdness, carry on with the day. What she didn’t figure was that her own door might open first.

  “Mom, did you pack any white socks?” Joss asked, shuffling out with sneakers and fuzzy eyes.

  Sam did a doubletake. Joss was athletic enough but just didn’t…run. Recreationally. When Sam had mentioned her and Laurel’s East Rock plan on the train yesterday, she’d shown no interest. Apparently, all Laurel’s talk about marathons and Big Sur fun-runs had opened her mind.

  “I did,” Sam said, digging a pair from her bag. “Sure? I’m happy to bring you—thrilled, in fact—but you’re in no way obligated.”

  “No, I’ll go. It’ll be refreshing.”

  Soon Laurel emerged in shorts and a Davenport College T-shirt, and Joss had cobbled together runnable clothes, and they headed out.

  And, again, Sam had failed to mention her documentary.

  Laurel held them up in the entryway when she remembered she needed to briefly confirm a timeline with her editor. “Sorry, they’re rabid to get my next draft,” she explained, tapping out a reply, then stashing her phone inside and leading them out by the College Street gate.

  The morning was clear but not yet hot, the sun nudging into a white-wisped sky. Sam hopped from foot to foot, a bit chilly, eager to move.

  Laurel held a button on her Fitbit. “What sort of pace are we thinking?”

  Sam chuckled in Joss’s direction. “We aren’t what you’d call regular runners. Be gentle.”

  Joss huffed at her as they spread out three abreast on the sidewalk.

  The run was spectacular. They had Whitney Avenue all
to themselves at this hour, not a car in sight. Crisp air swelled Sam’s lungs as they headed due north up Science Hill, passing Victorian homes repurposed into graduate department buildings. Sam’s legs stretched out pleasurably before her, each step like the first off a crowded train. She didn’t give a single thought to breathing or heel strike or arm motion, just going, pavement zooming by underfoot.

  Maybe exercise should be a cornerstone of these next five years. Clarissa from WNYC ran—they could be run buds. Sam could take up tennis or join that ultimate Frisbee game, Saturday mornings in Prospect Park.

  They were on Science Hill, so why not do some math? Exercise plus more substantial friendships, plus Joss. Could that equal a life? A life worthy of years forty-three to forty-eight, arguably the tail end of her prime?

  Once they had settled into a pace, Sam asked, “Still loving San Francisco?”

  “Immensely,” Laurel said. “No way I could go back.” She’d grown up around Boston. “All the causes I’m involved in, my professional network…the Bay Area’s home now.”

  “Makes sense.” They passed the bronze horned dinosaur of Peabody Museum on their left. “You’re still seeing that civil rights lawyer?”

  “He didn’t work out,” Laurel said. “It got strange—he ended up being very jealous of my critique partner, who I’ve been friends with forever, way before him.”

  “Guys can be like that.”

  “But, you know, I’m out there. Dating.” Laurel glanced left then right at a cross-street. “How’s Abe?”

  Sam thought her tone contained a hint of gloat, but she might’ve just been reading into it.

  “Jamming along,” she said with a glance at Joss.

  “He was doing those Fiverr gigs.”

  “Right. He actually does well there. I thought it was kind of bogus at first, honestly, but I guess enough people need these freelance music services.”

  “And you’re still happy at WNYC?”

  “Most days,” Sam said. “We produced this piece on the exotic bird trade in Nicaragua. God—it’s awful, from every possible angle. Ninety percent of the animals die in transit.”