Page 23 of I Will Ruin You

“It’s not for me to say.”

“No, no way. No fucking way. Lucy wouldn’t do that.”

Stuart nodded. “Of course not. You’re right. She wouldn’t.”

Billy bit his lip and looked away.

Ten

Richard

The day was over and I was heading for the parking lot when I ran into Trent in the hall.

“You got five?” he asked.

I followed him to his office. He had his suit jacket off and his sleeves rolled up, not a look he adopted very often but a sign that it had been as long a day for him as it had been for me.

“New watch?” I asked.

It had a blue face with white numbers and a brown leather band. I caught a glimpse of the name timex on the face. He glanced at it, rolled his eyes, and said, “Yeah, the battery on the last one died.”

Classic Trent. It was easier to buy a cheap new watch than take a dead one someplace to have a battery replaced. As long as I’d known him, I’d rarely seen him fix anything. He wasn’t mechanically minded and, more than that, he couldn’t be bothered. Toaster broken? Don’t try to determine what’s wrong with it. Pitch it and get a new one. Your stick vacuum won’t suck because it’s clogged? Replace it. It drove his wife, Melanie, crazy. “At least he hasn’t replaced me yet,” she’d said on more than one occasion.

He’d already told me about the available counseling services, so I didn’t know what this meeting was about. He asked Belinda to hold his calls for the next few minutes, then waved me to come around to his side of the desk. I stood at his shoulder as he dropped into this chair and opened a browser on his computer screen.

“Guessing you haven’t seen this,” he said.

“Seen what?”

“Noon news.”

He was on one of the local TV news sites. Trent clicked on an item.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Oh hell,” he said. Before he could show me the news item, we had to wait for one ad to finish, and another to start. As soon as he was allowed to skip the rest of the ad, he did so.

I saw a familiar face. It was one of the news reporters who’d been here Monday. She was standing on the street in front of a house I did not recognize.

“Whose house is—”

Trent raised a hand to quiet me.

The reporter said, “Angus and Fiona LeDrew buried their son yesterday, but their ordeal is far from over. Their boy, Mark, died tragically on Monday at Lodge High School, and his parents want to know why.”

“Boy?” I said.

“While they acknowledge Mark came to the school with an explosive device, which subsequently detonated, no one else was harmed. They believe Mark could have survived if greater care had been taken in dealing with the situation.”

Then Mark’s parents were on-screen, sitting in their living room, the mother dabbing at tears on her cheek, the husband’s head bowed as he spoke.

“We want to know what that teacher who talked to Mark said exactly, whether he told him the best thing to do was take his own life, to go ahead and blow himself up outside the school to save others. Why weren’t the police called? Why wasn’t there a bomb specialist there? Why aren’t teachers trained to deal with these kinds of situations?”

Back out front of the house, the reporter summed up: “The LeDrews have launched a multimillion-dollar suit against the teacher, Richard Boyle, the school’s administration, and the quarry where their son once worked, where it is believed he acquired the dynamite. This is Lorraine Wilders reporting.”

Trent stopped the video and swiveled around in his chair to look at me. A bird could have flown into my mouth.

“I know,” Trent said. “It’s nuts.”