Page 10 of I Will Ruin You
Jack offered a thumbs-up just as a fully-loaded dump truck rumbled down the street and past our houses. Jack gave it a scornful, disapproving shake of the head. There’d been a regular stream of trucks going by lately. The excavation for some new apartment complex a few streets over was underway, and the trucks loaded with fill had been a regular thing of late.
Rachel hopped into Bonnie’s car and I got behind the wheel of mine. Once we were both on the street, pointed in different directions, we usually glanced in our rearview mirrors and waved to each other.
Bonnie did not wave this morning.
I had sent a text to Trent the night before to let him know I was coming back today.
Use the main door, he wrote back. West entrance still being repaired. Even if that hadn’t been the case, I wouldn’t have been entering the school that way. I’d be avoiding that set of doors for as long as possible. Maybe forever.
For more mornings than I could count, I’d pulled into this staff parking lot, but today felt like a first time. This was not the same school I’d entered a thousand times before.
I’d almost died here. I’d watched someone die here.
I pulled into my spot, killed the engine, hit the button to retract my seat belt, and went to reach for the door handle.
And I began to shake.
Four
“I appreciate this is a difficult time for you, but I do have a few more things I need to go over,” Detective Marta Harper said, standing at the front door of the LeDrew residence, a modest bungalow in the northeast part of Milford on a tree-lined street.
She had been met at the door by Angus LeDrew, a skinny, pale man in his fifties with thin wisps of hair over a liver-spotted head, and shoulders weighed down by invisible cinder blocks.
“We’ve told you people everything,” he said wearily.
“Is it them?” said a woman’s voice from inside the house. “The TV people?”
Over his shoulder, he said, “No, the police.”
His wife, Fiona, was as thin as he was, but with features as brittle and delicate as faded, dried flowers. She viewed Marta through dead eyes.
“Oh,” she said.
“It’s just...” Angus said. “We have... an appointment shortly.” He opened the door wider and allowed the detective to enter the living room.
Everyone took a seat. Marta noticed both of them were unexpectedly dressed up, for how early it was. Angus was in a white shirt and tie, minus a jacket, and Fiona was in a black knee-length dress with a small gold necklace draped around her neck. The detective wondered whether the funeral for their son was this morning.
As if reading her mind, Fiona said, “We buried our boy yesterday.”
Angus, grim-faced, added, “What was left of him.”
Fiona visibly winced. Marta was well aware that their son’s remains had been scattered far and wide by the blast. She didn’t have to ask whether they’d opted for a closed casket.
Fiona said, “No one came to the funeral. Not his friends, not his cousins, not one person came.”
“My brother,” Angus said. “You forgot he was there.” He looked at the detective. “He drove all the way down from Syracuse. But his wife, she stayed home.” He mouthed the word Bitch.
“But no one else,” his wife said. “Mark was a good boy. People should have come and paid their respects. My son didn’t hurt a soul. He was never really going to hurt anybody. Did anyone at that school die other than my son? Did they?”
Marta sat there, solemnly, and let them talk.
“He just wanted to talk to people,” Angus said. “That’s what that teacher said. He told you people Mark wanted to set a few things straight, that’s all.”
“We’ve had to take the phone off the hook,” his wife said. “Hateful calls. Awful people. Saying terrible things about us.”
Marta thought it was time for a question. “Did your son discuss problems he had with anyone at Lodge? Students or staff?”
Angus shook his head. “He didn’t say anything to me. And it’s been a long time since he was there. Don’t see what the point was in going back after all this time. You have to move on. If you have a problem, you deal with it. You don’t let it fester over time.”