“She was a runner at Syracuse, you know,” Maeve said, staring numbly at Crystal. “She told me about it last night when I said I was going to be up early for a run. This is . . . it’s just . . . tragic.”
“It should have been me,” Keith said.
“You’re lucky it wasn’t,” I said sharply. “You should remember that.”
We were silent again.
“We’re not going to do this,” Keith said finally. “Not again. Call the police, Stephanie. Maybe jail will be good for me.”
“How is you going to jail going to make anything any better?” Maeve protested. She motioned to Stephanie. “Tell him! Something like this— it’s not like for a few months.”
Stephanie crossed her arms. “Potentially, it could be very, very bad, Keith. Especially if there’s other evidence in your life of drug use. Something back in your apartment, people you called, maybe.”
“You mean like my dealer, forty-three times yesterday?”
“Yeah, like that,” Stephanie went on. “They could try to claim you’re working for him.”
“Sure they could. Maybe they even will,” Keith said. “But you guys can’t— ”
“Let us decide what we can and can’t do,” Jonathan said. “I’m not thrilled about having the police here for my own reasons. And I can’t imagine the partners in your law firm would like you being mixed up in any of this, Stephanie.”
“Hey, let me worry about myself,” she snapped.
“What if we just took her home?” Maeve offered gently.
“To the city?” Jonathan sounded skeptical.
“No— Maeve means to her home,” I interjected. Maeve gave me a grateful look, and nodded as I went on. “It’s where she would have OD’d if she hadn’t been here. This could have happened wherever she was last night.”
“Do we even know where she lives?” Jonathan asked.
“She said something about that Farm place,” Keith said.
“That doesn’t exactly sound like a home,” Stephanie said.
We were all quiet again, looking at Crystal.
“She OD’d,” I said finally, shaking off the guilt that was starting to creep up on me. “This isn’t our fault. It isn’t anyone’s fault.”
“It’s never our fault, is it?” Stephanie raised her eyes to meet mine. “When are we going to stop pretending these are things that are just randomly happening to us. Our regret doesn’t do shit for anyone.”
Stephanie wasn’t wrong. The way we all blamed ourselves for what happened to Alice did sometimes strike me as perversely selfish. Like the penance was actually a way to let ourselves off the hook. For sure I’d only been thinking of myself when Alice turned up in my room that night, asking to borrow my car.
“I’ll explain when I get back,” she’d said. “I just— I want to see if I’m right first.”
I didn’t like the smell of it— the way Alice’s tiny body was vibrating as she stood there, her refusal to get into details. For days she’d been so upset about everything that had happened on the roof, and now suddenly she seemed almost excited? But then I remembered: if Alice was gone for the night, that would leave just Maeve and me to watch the movie the three of us had planned to see together. And so I’d said, “Yes, take my car. Take it for as long and as far as you want, Alice.” In the end, Maeve had wound up having to work the information desk in Main that night anyway, so our intimate movie night had never even happened.
“Thank you, Derrick,” Alice had said, the last words of hers I’d ever hear. “You’re the best.”
No matter how tightly I gripped the wheel as we drove toward the Farm, I could still feel the weight of Crystal’s body in my hands. Keith and I had carried her downstairs, wrapped in the sheets, while Jonathan pulled my car around the side of the house up to the back door. We drove in silence until we reached the crushed farmhouse. There was no choice but to get through this as fast as we could. The sooner it was over, the faster we could get back to the business of forgetting.
I rolled down a dirt road just past the main entrance to the Farm and pulled over behind the dilapidated barn, in a place where we could park out of sight then cut through the short stretch of woods to the building, which somehow looked even more menacing in the daylight.
“Maybe we should come back when it’s dark?” Jonathan suggested. “This doesn’t feel especially clandestine.”