Page 133 of I Will Ruin You

Bonnie was clearly waiting for me to explain myself, and when I didn’t say anything, she said, “Talk to me.”

I focused on the road ahead. “Something’s not right,” I said. “I haven’t quite put it together, but something’s not right.”

“What? Tell me?”

“When I get home, there’s something I have to check.” My mind was racing. “Something Stuart said.” I paused. “If I find it, if I can clear this up in my head, I’ll explain.”

“And just for the record, you didn’t hear from Rachel? She’s not sick.”

“She’s fine, far as I know,” I said.

“We could pick her up on the way home anyway.”

“No, I have to do this thing. When we get back, you can go get her.”

Bonnie decided she’d pushed hard enough. We were home a few minutes later, and once I had the front door unlocked, I gave the set of keys back to Bonnie and she drove off to Mrs. Tibaldi’s.

I went straight to the kitchen, where we had a laptop on the counter, plugged in and fully charged. I disconnected it, brought it to the table, flipped it open, and brought up Chrome. I entered some key words into the search field to find local news video reports about what had happened at Lodge High School the day Mark LeDrew blew himself up.

Stuart’s entire blackmail scheme was based on a false premise. He thought I was the one who had sexually abused Billy Finster. They’d been watching TV. The news item had come up, a shot taken from the street at a moment when I and other members of the staff had been out front, talking to the police.

Only one station had sent a video team to the school in time to catch a shot of us in person, in real time. It was aired by a Fox affiliate in Hartford. When I found the segment on the station’s archived news items, I clicked play.

A woman was standing in front of the school, mike in hand. Across the bottom of the screen were the words school bombing averted. Captured in the footage were Marta and some uniformed officers. There was me, bandaged, a quick glimpse of Herb Willow. Ronny Grant was there, too, but they were all quick, almost impossible to recognize unless you already knew who you were looking at.

“It could have been much worse,” the reporter said. “The would-be bomber, a former student whose motivations remain unclear at this time, ended up taking his own life, perhaps accidentally, but not before threatening to come into the school and kill an undetermined number of people. Police said...”

More general footage. A broad shot of the school. The woman talking into the camera.

“...from here we can see teachers and administrators from Lodge High, including some of the staff we believe stood up to the bomber and persuaded him not to come into the school. Much credit goes to this teacher here.”

There was already a close-up on the screen of Trent, without any identifying information, like his name, at the bottom of the screen, but the second she said “this teacher” there was another close-up, again unidentified, of me.

That was how it must have happened.

Billy said something like “That’s the guy,” when Trent was on, but by the time Stuart looked, I was the one on-screen. And then he’d gone to Billy’s high school yearbook and picked me out like someone in a police station’s catalogue of suspects.

Trent was Billy’s abuser. And Mark’s, too. Maybe Billy had sloughed it off in a way that Mark couldn’t. Billy hadn’t shown up at the school with a bomb, and Billy hadn’t blackmailed me. But Trent had done Mark a more serious emotional injury.

Shit.

I heard the front door open. I called out: “Bonnie! In here! I found it!”

When she didn’t respond, when Rachel didn’t come running into the kitchen, I knew something was wrong. I was getting up from the table when I saw Trent standing in the doorway. He was red-faced and out of breath. He must have hopped in his car seconds after we’d left.

“Trent,” I said.

“I should have just said something at the beginning,” he said. “When you told me Mark had been going on about a lawnmower man, I should have said, yeah, that was his nickname for me, and come up with a reason for why he had it in for me. But covering it up, that was my mistake, wasn’t it?”

I stood there.

“It wasn’t my only one,” he said. “I should have gotten rid of the gun. I shouldn’t have had it with me. Bonnie and her big mouth, telling me to give it to her sister. I’m worried that might be a problem. I haven’t been able to sleep since that night, like waiting for the other shoe to drop. You have to understand, Richard, that what I did, part of it was for you. It wasn’t fair, you being victimized that way by that Stuart Betz guy.”

I didn’t quite understand, but the tumblers were slowly falling into place.

“It made no sense to me,” he said. “Why would Billy be going after you when you never did anything to him? Yeah, I believed you when you told me you were blameless, because it was me.” He looked down to the floor briefly, sorrowfully. “After you told me you were being blackmailed, you came to the office looking for those yearbooks. I asked Belinda about it, she said you were trying to track down Billy Finster.”

“You went to see him,” I said slowly. “That night.”