The Pinebox Vendetta Read online

  “That is awful. What was your distro strategy? Just on the network or something like VOD or direct sale?”

  “Just our network.”

  Laurel made an ambiguous noise as they passed into East Rock Park proper, leaving behind Victorian buildings for tree-rimmed meadows.

  “I know people,” she said. “People in serious film, who could help expose it to a broader audience. If that interests you.”

  Sam wondered who these West Coast people were and how their “serious” films differed from the ones she and her colleagues in New York had been producing for decades.

  “Thanks. Yeah, I’ll let you know.”

  Soon they reached the summit. Laurel cruised to a stop at their traditional break point, where two coin-operated binoculars overlooked New Haven. Sam slowed in the last ten yards to let Joss catch up. Her daughter had managed admirably but fallen back as the grade had increased. They huffed together into a line with Laurel.

  Laurel unstuck two reusable bottles from the small of her back. “Water?”

  Sam accepted one and twisted off the cap. She took a swallow and handed it to Joss, who drank hard.

  As they took in the view—distant New Haven Harbor, the bright bricks of Kline Biology tower looming over the leafy campus quads—Sam was keenly aware that she still hadn’t filled Laurel in on the pinebox documentary.

  Every time she opened her mouth to do it, she felt her whole body clench against what she knew would come next.

  The murmured “Oh really?” The commentary about the piece’s marketability. And laced like some gummy preservative through every word, the comparison—implied if not explicit—to Laurel’s own achievements.

  Why does it have to feel like this?

  She didn’t want friendship with Laurel to be a chore. She didn’t want to engage in passive-aggressive quibbling. Part of her had figured this weekend would be different, that forty-somethings were past the subtle digs and one-upping. Another part of her, though, had known they weren’t.

  Sam found it occasionally unbelievable two people who’d lived together as long as she and Laurel had—two years here, plus another six months in the city before Laurel headed west—could have so much latent tension between them.

  The factors that’d placed and kept them together in college had always been superficial: politics, gender sensibilities, shared interests in the arts. Their personalities fit imperfectly at best. Sam admired Laurel’s spirit and desire to improve herself—and others’ selves—but just couldn’t join in without feeling silly.

  At Yale, the dynamic had benefited from the presence of Jamie Gallagher—the third leg of Sam’s primary social triangle. Jamie had Laurel’s same earnestness, and belonging to the first family of American Liberalism raised him above the pissing contests that had so turned off Sam.

  The triangle held marvelously until the very end. There’d always been something in Sam and Jamie’s bond, an easy depth that threatened to tilt the triangle. They would end up on stone steps at two in the morning, or wasting some rainy afternoon across a table at the Daily Cafe, Jamie’s rucksack between them.

  Jamie had serious demons stemming from his family situation, which explained—and took the edge off, in Sam’s mind—his extreme idealism. He had some deep wound or need, and the mystery of that void drew Sam to him. Here was a guy with the means to possess anything in the world except what he wanted: purity.

  Moral and intellectual purity.

  Sam had seen it coming in the spring—Jamie’s feelings growing beyond friendship. It was a completely natural and predictable phenomenon, pairing up as college wound down. Sam felt the urge too but resisted. Jamie was headed to the Peace Corps; she was headed to New York to cut her teeth on minor Chekhov productions. What was the point? Why bother?

  Remembering now, as she took in the vista once more before starting the run back down to Silliman, Sam ached at her twenty-two-year-old idiocy.

  Despite Sam’s restraint with Jamie, Laurel had picked up on the new vibe. The last couple months in their suite were chippy. They bickered over laundry and computer time—Sam didn’t have one and had always shared Laurel’s laptop, a practice Laurel ended without explanation.

  They did have one moment, she and Jamie. That final night at Yale, when people had danced and toasted and told stories and been bowled over by emotion—longing, hope.

  Sam had gotten swept along, too. She’d celebrated with old castmates at Mory’s and sat around the Davenport courtyard talking, crying, gaping at all that was behind and ahead. Nobody wanted to give up and sleep. They headed up to their rooms at one or three or four-thirty a.m.

  Sam had been sitting beside Jamie from about midnight on. Their bodies angled toward each other. Their knees touched. They were sitting on a cobblestone ledge.

  Then, with no clear impetus, her leg was draped over his—or maybe the other way around—and her fingers had found his palm.

  They kissed in the entryway. Once, and just a kiss—but it was the best she’d had before or since. Soft and full and savoring, carried along by months of tension and expectation.

  Sam went to bed feeling close to perfect, like she’d stolen air from a balloon without it deflating.

  Her disappointment had been mild when Jamie didn’t write as he’d pledged to in the entryway. She had only sent a single postcard herself, and who knew if mail addressed “c/o Peace Corps Macedonia” even got delivered?

  Sam never imagined a future in the Gallagher clan. A month bumming through Europe together, a long weekend hiking the Appalachian Trail? These could’ve been cool. They just weren’t to be.

  The run down went quickly, though Sam’s blister flared up and Joss kept grimacing in a way that suggested inner-thigh chafing. (Sam knew better than to ask in front of Laurel.) Things were busier back on campus. Despite herself, Sam felt good slipping through crowds in trim-fit running duds.

  At the gate, Laurel nodded to the event schedule. “What’s this on Saturday morning, ‘Candle ceremony?’”

  “The memorial,” Sam said. “For classmates who died.”

  Laurel shrank from the schedule. “Is that…I wonder how many that is.”

  “There were something like fifteen.”

  Suspicion flashed in Laurel’s face. She took only a second puzzling out Sam’s inside information. “Are they doing one for Jamie?”

  Sam nodded. “We decided to.”

  She’d said nothing but the truth—and not meant it as any sort of brag—but Laurel seemed to infer one. Her lips folded back into her mouth, the skin going white.

  Sam was about to pooh-pooh the incidental disclosure, to explain the reunion chairperson also lived in Brooklyn and that was probably why they’d consulted her, when Laurel perked back up.

  “Speaking of politics,” she said, laying her key card against the gate reader, “how thrilling is Sayed’s campaign? I’m in his Circle of Champions fundraisers. He’d be such an important voice on Capitol Hill…”

  And like that, they were onto Laurel’s contributions across a range of bodies—Bay Area zoning boards, Sausalito artist co-ops. She recapped her relationships with prominent class of ninety-six influencers, people who wrote for Slate or led alumni ex-pat groups overseas.

  Listening, Sam felt suddenly tired.

  Is something wrong with me? The two most extensive relationships in her life, with Abe and with Laurel—the only adults she had cohabited with—didn’t provide joy. In fact, they were train wrecks. Sam didn’t think she was uncaring or a serially dissatisfied person, but maybe from an objective point of view, she was.

  “Mom’s working on a documentary about the pinebox vendetta.”

  The words jolted Sam from her thoughts. She and Laurel both whirled to the speaker: Joss.

  The trio had passed through the courtyard and nearly reached their entryway.

  “Right, Mom?” Joss said. “It’s going to be This American Life-ish, about the feud and how it impacted your guys’ class.”

  Sh
e fanned her dancer’s fingers, seeming to try enlarging the description—and Sam in the process.

  Sam felt a rush of warmth. She’d barely mentioned last night’s interviews to Joss, just in passing while tucking her into bed. Joss didn’t know about Rock and the aquarium. She simply wanted Laurel to think her mother was doing important stuff.

  Sam breathed out her nose. Time to quit being meek and own this.

  “Right, I have this idea,” she said, and gave the gist of the project.

  Laurel observed, “That’s a big hunk of source material.”

  Sam nodded. “I’ll have to wrestle it down, find a focus.”

  “You could talk about Jamie and Africa…” Laurel had just let them into the room. She pulled her key from the lock and unlaced her shoes. “…or Rock Pruitt, all the controversy with his roommate. Are you leaning a particular way?”

  Joss was watching with unblinking eyes, eager to hear her mother’s answer.

  Okay, Samantha. Own it means own it.

  “Actually, I am,” Sam said. “I heard something last night about Rock. Something new.”

  She told them about Gabe Navarro and the aquarium. When Joss asked what had happened to Derek Dickerson, Laurel looked hesitant. It occurred to Sam she had no frame of reference on children and didn’t know what could be discussed in front of a fourteen-year-old.

  “I think I’ve mentioned it before,” Sam said. “Derek Dickerson, he died in an accident? Or maybe a not-accident?”

  As Joss considered this, she dug at her inseam—an unflattering gesture she’d had for years. Sam crooked a finger for her to stop, but she didn’t see.

  “So maybe your research would actually solve the case?” Joss said. “Like the Innocence Project?”

  Sam weighed different answers as she stripped out of sweaty clothes. She knew she should temper Joss’s expectations, but the run up East Rock had her blood pumping.

  “I’m gonna poke around,” she said. “Maybe there’s more out there. Maybe there’s a way to surface the truth.”

  Chapter 5

  Rock’s head felt like it was inside an oil drum, soaking in viscous, sticky crude. Muscles behind his eyes hurt. His tongue and the roof of his mouth were fused cotton.

  The last time he could remember waking up like this, he’d been in a Thai brothel. Two girls sleeping across his face and his scrotum in a leather cinch-bag.

  Today? In his reunion dorm room.

  Man-alive, what a ride.

  Rock had hung out occasionally in the Skull and Bones tomb as an undergraduate—and of course he knew his family had had Bonesmen dating back to the mid-1800s. But finding Marshall Pruitt there was a shock. The old man, who’d led the clan’s off-books paramilitary operations for the better part of a half century, had said he was in the area for the Pruitt event on Long Island.

  “Right, but what’re you doing here?” Rock had said.

  New Haven sucked, and the secret society’s tomb—dank, built half out of limestone—wasn’t exactly the Ritz.

  Marshall sat back in his wheelchair and frowned. His face was like the sepia-stained leaves of an ancient book.

  “Keeping an eye on you,” he said. “Which, it would appear, was a wise deployment of resources.”

  Rock hung his head. His name was already sludge among the family elites. If word of this stunt got out? It’d be toxic sludge.

  As if reading his mind, Marshall said, “Rock, Rock. Of all the reckless pursuits…”

  They sat across a pocked wooden table, flanked by stone busts and a broad ivory mantle. Group shots of the first classes of Bonesmen—a dozen suits standing over an actual skull and crossbones—adorned the walls.

  Rock’s eyes stung. The lighting was weak, from wan yellow candles set deep in the walls. He could barely make out the corners of the tomb. In one, there seemed to be a jagged artifact of some kind.

  Hey. That wasn’t—

  “In the bushes below,” Marshall said, reading Rock’s eyes as easily as his mind. “My men beat the police to the spot.”

  Rock stalked over to see the Sterling Library reader’s severed head. Its neck had cleaved in wild Z shapes. Both ears had chipped off, and its eyes were dumb voids from Rock’s sledgehammer blows.

  Rock, recalling the orgasmic feeling of battering the thing, had an urge to punch it anew with his bare fist.

  “Brilliant,” he said.

  Marshall Pruitt kept a stern expression. He swiveled his chair, thumbs shaky on a black joystick, to face Rock. “If people knew about this, they would question your mental fitness.”

  “Those would be damn fair questions.”

  Finally, the old man couldn’t hold back. A grin busted across his seamed face—a grin that said if he weren’t stuck in that cursed chair, he would’ve been right up on that roof with Rock last night, hacking away. He wheeled over for an embrace.

  Marshall Pruitt had a man’s grip, working legs or not. Above all else, he was that: a man.

  Marshall had brought down Central American governments. He’d stolen elections in the South, bold as a bandit in a bandanna, and exacted capital revenge for offenses a lesser man would’ve laughed off.

  And when some thorny issue had landed on Jonathan Pruitt’s Oval Office desk, who had he turned to? Where had that upright, pristine brand of his gone?

  Out the window. The president had called Marshall, his older brother, and ridden him and his Black-Ops teams like thoroughbreds over a muddy track.

  “Sterling Library does have cameras,” Rock said. “To be safe, someone probably ought to—”

  “Done. The tapes reside with me.”

  Rock exhaled with relief, but noted the distinction between “reside with me” and “were destroyed.” The old man was a collector of leverage.

  “And as far as the Saint goes,” Rock said, “this isn’t the sort of business he’d care to know about. Don’t you think?”

  Marshall Pruitt smiled thinly at the nickname. “Jonathan just had a stent placed in his right coronary artery. Let’s do spare him the aggravation.”

  Although Jonathan Pruitt was the unquestioned leader of the clan, there existed other power centers. There were Michigan Pruitts, rougher, ideologically libertarian. There was Pruitt Capital, which just wanted to keep collecting its bags of money and stay out of the newspaper. There was legendary Coach Pruitt, whom Mississippians had been begging to claim their governorship for a decade.

  And of course Marshall and his spooks.

  These factions toed the line with many of the former president’s conventions—ties or female-equivalent dress on TV, no Twitter, all that—but otherwise made their own ethics.

  Rock asked, “Is he on Long Island for the event? Or has he delegated the judging?”

  “No, he is judging—he’s already arrived in the Hamptons. The Virginia Senate seat is heady stuff. Quite winnable. Rest assured, Jonathan will handpick a candidate of unassailable moral fiber.”

  Disdain dripped off the words. The aforementioned event was a Pruitt tradition widely known as the Choosing. Rock hated the name—it sounded like some dystopian young-adult turd.

  At its base, a Choosing was an audition for whoever wanted the clan’s backing in an upcoming race. Jonathan and other greybeards would gauge the hopefuls’ command of a room, see how well they glad-handed donors. There were wonky candidate v. candidate issue debates, and murder boards where you were forced to explain every last vote and misdemeanor. The person who emerged with the fewest warts won the clan’s blessing and full support.

  Choosings weren’t staged for every election. Only the biggies—and the Virginia Senate was certainly a biggie.

  “Velasquez?” Rock asked.

  “She will be formidable.”

  “More than formidable—she’d have to lay an egg to lose. Pro-life female. Latina. Military service. You kidding me? Peel back that brown skin, ten to one says she’s a cyborg.”

  Marshall wheeled over to a mahogany sideboard and poured himself. He of
fered nothing to Rock. “Could be room for a dark horse.”

  At this, Rock’s heart began hammering. “How dark?”

  Marshall gave another thin smile. “Tell me, what else do you have planned for reunion weekend? Besides nearly falling twenty-three stories to your death.”

  He wasn’t about to give Rock a straight answer on Virginia. No surprise there.

  “Ah, drink. Spread the Pruitt seed far and wide.”

  The skeletal man took a sip, licked his lips. His eyes, deep-socketed like snake holes in a lawn, closed with a yearning air. When he and Rock had worked on past operations together, Marshall had enjoyed hearing of the younger man’s exploits.

  Rock said, “Taking the chopper down to Long Island this morning?”

  Marshall returned to himself. “No, I’m here today.” He raised a ring that tripled the girth of his knuckle. “This is my reunion weekend, too.”

  “Jesus H. Christ, so it is! Fifty—is that right?”

  “Fifty-five.”

  “Pickings must be getting slim. What do you do, go raid the thirty- and forty-year tents for tail?”

  Marshall shook his head, grinning. “In fact, I have other business in New Haven this weekend. An opportunity.”

  He let this waft between them. With Bonesmen of centuries past looking on from pewter frames, Rock tried to imagine what coals the old man could have in the fire. Alcohol still riddled his thought processes.

  It came to him anyway.

  “Gallagher College.”

  The spymaster recoiled at the name, but nodded.

  Rock said, “Surely they wouldn’t let a Pruitt show his face at a Gallagher naming ceremony.”

  “Surely. But they can’t stop us from participating by other means. They expect a laurel-wreathed coronation from the media. We can challenge that narrative.”

  Marshall explained the clan’s coordinated push to “smudge up” the Gallagher brand ahead of the coming elections. Gallaghers in Congress would be painted as out-of-touch radicals. The outreach efforts of the Gallagher Foundation were being combed for cronyism and extremist ties. Some of this research was of the push variety, volunteers questioned aggressively or filmed responding to underage girls wanting abortions, or job applicants openly professing their love of God and desire to display this love at the office.