“Dad, were you out there last night? Did you help them throw that brick?”
“You don’t want to tattle. Imagine what would happen if they took me away.”
Dave imagined. His life would be a lot easier with one of them gone. He’d have a whole house again.
Tim read his mind. “You’d have the house, but you and Adam would be all alone with her. No buffer.”
Dave approached his mom after that. Jane was his practical parent, who paid bills and got groceries and set boundaries. When Tim first got sick, she’d been really upset. Cried herself to sleep and all that. But she cried herself dry. All her sympathy ran out. And not just her sympathy for Tim.
Jane wore her hair in a loose bun and dressed in pretty floral outfits and spoke softly because she was the headmaster of the Hillcock Preschool. She read lots of child rearing books and had a PhD in early childhood education, too. You never got the real Jane when you talked to her; just this textbook automaton semblance of sweet compassion.
He found Jane in his parents’ bedroom. The fucked-up part? They’d even split the bed. Some nights, neither giving an inch, they both slept in it. Her side was made and she was sitting, papers neatly stacked all around. She kept her things clean, in order. No bitumen. No crumbs.
“We should go to the police before anyone else gets hurt.”
Ringlets of hair streamed down from her loose bun. She was going through a roster for next year’s class. “You think we should go to the police?”
“Yeah. Because it’s not true. That story about Mr. Wilde. It’s not true. But everybody’s acting like it is true. We don’t even know for sure that Shelly’s dead. You went to a service for her and we don’t even know for sure.”
“You think Mr. Wilde is innocent?”
“I told you that. I’ve always been telling you that.”
Same calm voice. Except she wasn’t a calm person, not really. Because she’d been the one to divide the house with a Sharpie. It went all the way into the kitchen, bisecting it so they each used different cupboards. He got the microwave; she got the stove. They’d been to court only once. The lawyers said it would last for years unless she signed a paper allowing him half of everything, including her huge inheritance, because he was too sick to work. But she wouldn’t do that. She just kept redrawing the lines every time the Sharpie smudged. She used an online ruler app to make them perfect.
“You’re scared that unless you help him, he might hurt you?”
“No, Mom. You’re not listening.”
“You’ve said that twice, honey, that I’m not listening. But I am. What makes you think I’m not listening?”
Tears of frustration ran down Dave’s face. She had the power to do this to him. No one else. Which was why he only ever talked to her when it was house-on-fire-absolutely-necessary. “Mom. Please. Dad’s sick and Adam can’t say shit unless FJ Schroeder tells him to. It’s just us and you know that. Please, Mom. Listen to me. The Rat Pack are lemmings and so are their parents and because of them Mrs. Wilde is in the hospital. What do we do?”
She turned a page. He noticed that there was sand oil underneath her fingernails. Which meant she’d been out with the mob last night, too. For once, his parents had agreed on something. A terrible something.
“So you think worse things will happen. That must be scary. Is that scary for you?”
“You’re a piece of shit,” he told her.
Her expression was dumbfounded.
* * *
The mean Markles took the incident with the brick hardest of all.
Crash!
Mark whaled his pillow into a Tiffany lamp that shattered against his father, Dominick Ottomanelli’s, bare, swollen feet. Pieces of painted glass specked the floor and his miraculously uncut skin. “Jesus! What’s wrong with you?” Dominick asked.
Mark dropped his pillow and started laughing. Michael followed. It wasn’t good-humored laughing. It was hysterical, Shelly Schroeder–brand laughing, because they’d sneaked out last night and followed the adults. They’d thought it would be funny. An adventure. Life-and-death, but not really. Life-and-death in Deathcraft, when the creepy things crawl out and you have to hide until morning.
And then the bricks, and Arlo Wilde’s horrible, low-pitched moan as he’d helped Gertie into the ambulance while she held her fragile baby belly, and the knowledge that it was their fault. They’d known, even when confessing, throwing out the word rape like it meant nothing, that their mother would tell everyone. They’d known this and done it anyway, for a free PlayStation.