Keep Them Close(48)
“Ms. Brice? This is Ken Ratliff. The baseball coach at Benedictine?”
Oh, right. I’d forgotten. I reached out to him after Luke was arrested five weeks ago, just to get some preliminary information. Benedictine was the squad that Luke’s team was supposed to scrimmage the day Luke drove Trinity’s car. The scrimmage had been canceled, freeing up Luke’s time. I just wanted to confirm the cancellation, cross my t’s and dot my i’s.
“Sorry it took over a month to call back,” he says. “I was confused about your message.”
“How so?”
“Well, you said you wanted to confirm that I canceled the scrimmage. But I didn’t cancel. Luke did.”
I sit forward in my chair. “Luke canceled,” I say. “He canceled the scrimmage, not you.”
“Yeah, that’s right. Like a week in advance. Does that make a difference?”
For my purposes, it makes all the difference in the world. It means…
Luke wanted to drive that car the day the cops pulled it over.
It wasn’t Finley who helped Trinity set me up. It was my brother.
* * *
It was you, Luke. You were working with Trinity. You took my grocery bag and tube of my lipstick from my house.
You planned this. You didn’t just happen to have some free time after your scrimmage was canceled. You created that time. You canceled the scrimmage to free up that Monday.
You knew, presumably from Trinity, from some video that captured me in the act, that I stuffed that bag of Oxy in Trinity’s trunk. But did you confront me? Did you ask me why I would do something so extreme? Did you give me the slightest benefit of the doubt, a chance to explain myself?
No. You just opted for revenge served cold.
All for a woman who doesn’t even love you back.
You dumped those Oxy pills into my grocery bag, dropped a tube of my lipstick in there, and stuffed it in Trinity’s trunk. You’d heard my suspicions about Trinity’s trips down to Olivet Nazarene on Mondays. And you’re not dumb—you figured, someway, somehow, with my connections to law enforcement, I’d make sure that the police were on the lookout for Trinity’s car traveling on a Monday morning down Interstate 57. So you picked whatever Monday was convenient for you. One scrimmage aside, Presidents’ Day fit your schedule pretty well.
You drove that car that day, figuring it would be pulled over and knowing that, sooner or later, they’d find my DNA and my prints on the contraband. And with that, plus whatever video Trinity had, you would be exonerated, vindicated in the most public and dramatic of ways—a frame-up! a frame-up, I say!—with me playing a starring role as the villain.
Yeah, I know, I get it—I initiated this thing by planting the drugs. I started it. But I did that to Trinity, not to you. And I did it because she was screwing my husband.
But you? You did this to hurt me.
Well, I have to hand it to you, big brother. You played this perfectly. You and Trinity must be having quite a hearty laugh. But guess what, Luke? Two can play that game.
And I don’t play nice.
39
Luke
I step into Trinity’s second bedroom, which feels more like the inside of her brain—restless, organized in its own chaotic logic, and single-minded of focus. The walls are covered edge to edge in printouts and pinned clippings: newspaper articles in varying shades of yellow, some crisp from recent research, others brittle from being dug out of archives:
Baseball Phenom Hit by Drunk Driver
DUI Accident Leaves Star Pitcher Critically Injured
“He May Never Pitch Again”: Local Star’s Recovery Uncertain
Woman Who Hit Teen Pleads Guilty to DUI
Photos of my bike, bent and twisted, after the accident. Expert reports blown up to poster size, margins filled with Trinity’s handwritten notes in red ink. Tire-mark analyses. Diagrams of impact angles. A reprint of the New York Times article last summer, one paragraph highlighted:
The driver, Carmela Muller, 37, a loan officer from nearby Berwyn, submitted to breathalyzer testing at the scene and was arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol. After being charged with multiple crimes, including aggravated reckless driving, Ms. Muller pleaded guilty to driving under the influence and served 18 months in prison. When reached at her home in Kankakee, Illinois, Ms. Muller would not comment on this story.
A mug shot of Carmela Muller after her arrest, front and profile, looking like someone who knew her life had suddenly and irrevocably changed. Photos of men who were boys back then, my buddies, the ones with me on the hill that day: Kevin Galloway, Jimmy Wilding, Charlie Gennaro, Andy Frerichs, and, of course, Finley.
A plat of survey of the hill we rode before the village renovated that entire block, with dimensions and measurements and angles penciled in. Old photographs of that hill in the winter, when people used it for sledding, and in the summer, though she has no photos of bikes.
On another wall, alone, is a second excerpt from the Times article:
“I don’t think she was treated fairly,” said Mr. Rankin. “I’m the one who came wildly into the road. It was much more my fault. I don’t think she deserved to go to prison at all.”
“I’m working on the text for the narration.” Trinity walks into the room, reading glasses perched on her nose, finding yet another way to look sexy. “Wanna read it?”