What was on his mind was something Jenny’s friend Denise had said the night before when a bunch of them had gone across the bridge into Auburn to have a few drinks at Gritty’s. Clearly, Denise wasn’t aware that Jason and Jenny had been a thing in the last month, that Jenny had even slept over at Jason’s three times, because if she’d been aware of that, she probably wouldn’t have asked Jenny if she’d slept with Carson yet.
It wasn’t like she’d shouted the question. She’d asked it when she was sitting to Jenny’s left, and Jason was sitting on Jenny’s right, but Denise had asked it loudly enough that Jason heard it loud and clear.
Carson? Who the fuck was Carson?
So the second they were outside Gritty’s, heading home, he’d asked her. She’d shrugged it off. Denise was kidding around, she said. Or confused. She’d known a guy named Carson once, but that was a long time ago.
But Jenny hadn’t been able to look him in the eye.
Jason got this very sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. When he got back to his place — a century-old house about four blocks from the campus that he shared with three other guys — he went online to see if he could track down this Carson dude.
He’d had no luck, but as he ran down Main Street, heading for the footpaths that ran along the banks of the Androscoggin River, he promised himself he’d do more research when he got back.
Maybe if he hadn’t been so preoccupied with his love life, and if Garth hadn’t been crooning in his ears, he would have noticed the black four-door sedan that had been riding along about fifty feet behind him.
The car suddenly sped up, then pulled over to the curb ahead of Jason, brakes squealing. The car hadn’t finished rebounding from the sudden stop when the passenger door opened and Rhys leapt out, flashing a badge in the palm of his hand just long enough for it to register with Jason.
“Jason Hamlin?” Rhys said.
Jason stopped, yanked the buds out of his ears, and said, panting, “What?”
“Are you Jason Hamlin?” he asked again.
He chose to nod instead of speak, still catching his breath. He saw a woman getting out now from behind the wheel. She flashed her badge, too, as she came around the back of the car.
“Is this Mr. Hamlin?” Kendra asked her partner.
“Yeah,” he said.
Now less winded, Jason said, “What’s this about?”
Kendra said, “This is Detective Mills and I’m Detective Collins. I’m afraid we have some bad news for you, Mr. Hamlin.”
“What?”
“Am I correct that Margaret and Charles Hamlin, of Baltimore, are your parents?”
That sick feeling he’d had in his stomach the night before was nothing compared to what he felt now.
In the distance, they could hear sirens.
“Yes?” he said weakly, glancing for a half a second over his shoulder, where the sirens were coming from.
“We were asked to track you down. If you come with us we can give you a ride back to your residence.”
“Why? What’s happened?”
Rhys said, “We’re guessing you’re going to want to go back there.”
“Just tell me,” he said.
“There was a car accident,” Rhys said. “We don’t have all the details.”
Kendra walked over to the car and opened the back door. An invitation. Jason, his legs rubbery, got into the back of the car. Kendra closed it, went around, and got back in behind the wheel. Rhys went around to the driver’s side but opened the back door, taking a seat next to a visibly distraught Jason. He closed the door.
They sat there for several seconds, the car not moving. Jason was not so overwhelmed by the distressing news that he failed to notice they weren’t going anywhere.
“Um, what are we waiting for?”
As Kendra shifted around in her seat, Rhys pressed himself up against his door and quickly put his arm over his own face. Kendra raised her hand above the seatback. In it was a small tube, not much bigger than a lipstick, with a button on top. She aimed it at Jason’s face and pressed the button with her index finger.
A misty spray enveloped Jason’s face.
“The fu—”
But then he started to cough and gag. His eyes began to sting, and he closed them. That was when Rhys jabbed the needle into his neck.
A fire truck went racing up the street in the opposite direction.
Kendra glanced in the rearview mirror.
“I can see the smoke,” she said.
Jason drifted into unconsciousness almost immediately, slumping in the seat. Rhys adjusted the man’s body to move his head below the windows, then powered his window down to bring in some fresh air.
Kendra put the car in Drive and slowly pulled away from the curb. She’d already consulted her map app to find the quickest way out of town. They’d set up a disposal site about ten miles out of Lewiston.
She glanced in her mirror one more time, not to check on the smoke or whether Jason was dead yet, but to look at Rhys. He had his head half out the window, face to the wind, like a dog enjoying all the scents the world had to offer.
The house Jason shared with his friends burned to the ground. Some sort of gas leak, followed by an explosion. Jason’s three friends survived, although one spent two weeks in the hospital with serious burns to his arms and upper torso.
Jason usually jogged in the morning, but the fact that he was missing had led authorities to speculate he could have been in the home when it exploded, and that the subsequent inferno had incinerated him. They were still looking through the ashes for any trace of him, however, and until they did find something, his whereabouts was treated as an open question.
And a week later, in what was seen as a tragic coincidence, Jason’s family’s home in Baltimore burned to the ground. An electrical fault was blamed.
Eighteen
Providence, RI
Chloe usually worked the evening shift at the Paradise Diner, but today she was filling in for one of the other girls, who was sick — Chloe had a theory she was pregnant and experiencing the first indications — so she’d started at seven in the morning and was going to work through the crazy breakfast hours, have something of a lull between nine and half past eleven, and then do her best to survive the lunchtime madness. With any luck, she could hang up her apron and walk out the back door shortly after one.
So things weren’t too crazy around ten when, glancing out the window, she saw the black limo pull into the lot. Didn’t get a lot of limos stopping by the Paradise, she mused, and turned her attention to clearing off some tables.
Seconds later, the bell on the door jingled. A guy came in and looked about, as if waiting to be shown to a table.
“Wherever you want,” Chloe said.
He nodded and slipped into one of the booths by the window. If it had been a busier time, Chloe might have steered him to a stool at the counter, or maybe a table for two, but this time of day, if he wanted a whole booth to himself, that was fine.
He didn’t exactly look like someone who’d be chauffeured around in a limo. But then again, what did she know about people who took limos? But this guy was what she thought of as “professor casual.” Jeans, sports jacket, collared shirt. Couple of decades ago, that jacket would have had patches on the elbows.
The Paradise didn’t exactly appeal to a high-end clientele. You could get three eggs, toast, and home fries, as well as a choice of bacon, ham, or sausage, for $6.99, and that included coffee. A BLT at lunch was $5.99, or $7.99 if you wanted a side of fries. Most of the folks who ate here arrived in pickup trucks, a few outfitted with a set of truck nuts dangling off the back bumper.