He kept saying that-that part about being here for her. It was maddening. "So you did all that," she said, "you went after all these guys, just for revenge?"
He lowered his head. His answer surprised her. "No."
"Don't be easy on yourself, Phil. You lost everything, so you decided to take down the innocent with you."
"The innocent?" For the first time, anger crept into his voice.
"They weren't innocent."
"You mean because of what they did that night at the dean's house."
"No, that's not what I mean. I mean, because they were guilty."
Wendy made a face. "Guilty of what?"
"Don't you get it? Farley did sleep with hookers. He was a horrible womanizer. Everyone knew. And Steve did use his standing as a medical doctor to illegally sell and dispense prescription drugs. Ask the cops. They couldn't nail him for it. But they knew. See, I didn't set them up. I exposed them."
There was silence now, a deep hum, and Wendy felt her body shake. They were coming to it now. He waited, knowing that she would prompt him.
"And what about Dan?" Wendy asked.
His breathing got a little funny. He tried to get himself under control, but the past was coming at him fast now. "That's why I'm here, Wendy."
"I don't understand. You just said Farley was a womanizer and that Steve was a drug pusher."
"Yes."
"So I'm asking the obvious question-was Dan Mercer really a pedophile?"
"Do you want the truth?"
"No, Phil, after all this I want you to lie to me. Did you set him up so he could be brought to justice?"
"With Dan," he said slowly, "I guess nothing went as planned."
"Please stop with the semantics. Was he a pedophile, yes or no?"
He looked to the left and summoned up something inside him. "I don't know."
That was not the answer she'd been expecting. "How can that be?"
"When I set him up, I didn't think he was. But now, I'm not so sure."
The answer made her head spin. "What the hell does that mean?" "I told you I went to Farley and Steve," he said. "And that they weren't interested in helping me."
"Yes."
"Then I went to Dan." Phil lifted the gun, switched it to his other hand.
"How did he react?"
"We sat in his crappy house. I mean, I didn't even know why I bothered. What could he do? He had absolutely no money. He worked with the poor. So Dan asked me if I wanted a beer. I took one. Then I told him what had happened to me. He listened with a sympathetic ear. When I finished Dan looked me in the eye and said he was so glad I came by. Why, I asked him. He told me how he'd visited Christa Stockwell all these years. I was shocked. And then he told me the final truth."
Wendy saw it now-what Christa Stockwell had kept from her.
"What did Dan tell you when he first came?"
"That's between us."
Wendy looked up at him. "Dan threw the ashtray."
Phil nodded. "He saw me duck down behind the bed. The other guys-Farley, Steve, and Kelvin-they had started sneaking out already. They were halfway down the stairs by the time Christa Stockwell started reaching for that light switch. Dan just wanted to distract her. Give me a chance to run. So he threw the ashtray."
"And it smashed the mirror into her face."
"Yes."
She imagined the moment. She imagined Dan confessing and Christa merely accepting it. They were college kids on a scavenger hunt, after all. Was it all that easy to forgive? For Christa, maybe it was.
"And all these years," Wendy said, "you never knew."
"I never knew. Dan lied about it. He tried to explain why. He was a poor kid, he said. He was on scholarship and scared. It wouldn't help me anyway. It would just destroy him-and for what?"
"So he kept quiet."
"Like the others, he figured I had money. I had family and connections. I could pay off Christa Stockwell. So he never said a word. He just let me take the fall for what he'd done. So you see, Wendy, Dan wasn't so innocent. In fact, in many ways, he was the guiltiest of all."
She thought about it, about the rage Phil must have felt when he learned that he had paid for the crime committed by Dan.
"But he wasn't a child molester, was he?"
Phil thought about that one. "I didn't think so, no. At least, I didn't at first."
She tried to sort through it, tried to make sense of it. And then she remembered Haley McWaid.
"My God, Phil. What did you do?"
"Those guys are right. I'm done. Whatever else was left of me- whatever good was there-it's gone now too. That's what revenge does to you. It eats away at your soul. I should have never opened that door."
Wendy didn't know what door he meant anymore-the one to the dean's house all those years ago or the one to the hatred that made him seek revenge. Wendy remembered what Christa Stockwell had said about hatred, how holding on to it makes you let go of everything else.
But they still weren't done. There was still the matter of Haley McWaid.
"So when Dan got off," Wendy began, "I mean, when the judge let him go…"
The smile on his face chilled her. "Go on, Wendy."
But she couldn't. She tried to follow it, but suddenly none of it made sense.
"You're wondering about Haley McWaid, aren't you? You're wondering how she fits in."
Wendy couldn't speak.
"Go on, Wendy. Say what you were going to say."
But she saw it now. It made no sense.
His expression was calmer now, almost serene. "I hurt them, yes. Did I break the law? I'm not even sure. I hired a girl to lie about Farley and play a part with Dan. Is that a crime? A misdemeanor maybe. I pretended I was someone else in a chat room-but isn't that what you do? You said that the judge let Dan go. That's true, but so what? I wasn't necessarily trying to send them to jail. I just wanted them to suffer. And they did, didn't they?"
He waited for an answer. Wendy managed a nod.
"So why then would I set him up for murder?"
"I don't know," she managed.
Phil leaned forward and whispered, "I didn't."
Wendy couldn't breathe. She tried to slow it down, think it through, take a step back somehow. Haley McWaid had been murdered three months before she was found. Why? Did Wendy think, what, that Phil had killed her just in case Dan got off so Phil could pin it on him?
Did that make sense?
"Wendy, I'm a father. I couldn't kill a teenage girl. I couldn't kill anyone."
It was, she realized, a huge leap between viral trashing and murder, between getting back at some old classmates and killing a teenage girl.
The truth started to sink in, numbing her.
"You couldn't have planted the iPhone in his room," Wendy said slowly. "You didn't know where he was." Her head wouldn't stop spinning. She tried to focus, tried to make sense of this, but the answer was now so obvious. "It couldn't have been you."
"That's right, Wendy." He smiled, and the look of peace returned to his face. "That's why I'm here. Remember? I told you that I came here for you, not me. That's my final gift to you."
"What gift? I don't understand. How did that iPhone get in Dan's room?"
"You know the answer, Wendy. You're worried you ruined an innocent man. But you didn't. There's only one explanation why that phone was in his hotel room: Dan had it the whole time."
She just looked at him. "Dan killed Haley?"
"Of course," he said.
She couldn't move, couldn't breathe.
"And now you know everything, Wendy. You're free. I'm sorry for it all. I don't know whether it makes up for what I did to you, but it will have to do. Like I said in the beginning, that's why I came here-to help you."
Phil Turnball lifted his gun then. He closed his eyes and looked almost peaceful. "Tell Sherry I'm sorry," he said. Wendy raised her hands, shouted at him to stop, started toward him.