“Perry,” Craig’s father said later, in front of the apartment house, pressing both of Perry’s hands in his own as the boy bid them farewell, “I’m so glad Craig’s—”
“Craig will be fine, Mr. Clements,” Perry said.
“Son,” Rod Clements said, turning to Craig, “I—”
“Be careful driving, Dad.”
They stood in the middle of the sidewalk. A few feet away from them a couple kissed with abandon under a dead streetlamp. A sad foursome of ugly guys parted around the couple, and then around Perry, Craig, and his father.
“Love ya,” Craig’s father said, and clapped Craig to him, patting him hard on the back.
“I love you, too,” Craig said.
They held the embrace for at least three seconds, long enough for Craig to notice, just beyond his father’s shoulder, hanging above the couple kissing, far over the place where the streetlamp should have been shining, the moon, which appeared to be made of either solid rock or the softest of human flesh, floating in an ink-blue sky.
2
Shelly Lockes called the newspaper after the first article, full of inaccuracies about the accident, came out, and although the reporter to whom her call was forwarded assured her that he would “set the record straight on the details of the accident as reported in our paper right away,” no corrections ever appeared.
After that, Shelly asked to speak to the newspaper’s editor, and her call was passed on by a receptionist, who said, “Well, he doesn’t take calls from the public, but this person is one of our editors, and she could speak to you.”
On the phone, this person sounded like a child:
“You mean, like, you were the first one at the scene of the accident?”
“Yes. I was. Why hasn’t anyone spoken to me? My name’s part of the public record. The paramedics and the police took all my information. I’d like to correct the record.”
The editor stammered a bit before she said, “Wow. Okay. Well, I’ll have someone call you this afternoon.”
No one called, and the next day, again, there was a front-page story that described how the girl had been found in a “lake of blood” in the backseat of the car. How she’d been thrown there by the impact. How she hadn’t been wearing a seat belt. How she’d already bled to death before the ambulance arrived, and that she was unrecognizable. That her face had hit the front windshield, and then the rear window. That her roommate had identified her at the morgue from the black dress and jewelry she’d been wearing that evening, and that the boyfriend who’d been driving the vehicle was found hours later wandering down a rural road, covered in his girlfriend’s blood.
The newspaper said that medical professionals could only wonder at how he’d managed to stumble so far with a broken arm, a dislocated shoulder, a closed-head injury, and a ruptured spleen.
But Shelly Lockes had been there.
She’d called the ambulance herself within minutes of the accident. She’d waded through a ditch full of water and stood above the boy and girl. The girl had been thrown into the grass. She was not in the car. The light of the full moon had been plenty bright for Shelly to see it all—and she knew for a fact that the only blood at the scene had been her own.
The gash to her hand.
Admittedly, it was a nasty gash. She’d needed stitches, and bandages, and if she’d ever played handball or mandolin, she’d probably never be able to play again. The scar still surprised her every time she looked at it. How had she not felt the cut when it happened? It wasn’t until she was in the Emergency Room, holding it up, wrapped in her own sweatshirt, that her hand had started to hurt like hell.
But it had not created a “lake of blood.”
There had been no lake of blood.
“Maybe they’re all like this,” her friend Rosemary suggested. “Maybe every goddamn article about every event in the local newspaper is completely made up, but we don’t know because we didn’t witness most of them. ‘A lake of blood’ sells a lot more newspapers than no blood.”
The next article described the “first person at the scene of the accident” as a middle-aged woman who came upon it hours after it had happened, and made a call to 911 but left the scene before the paramedics arrived, and could not be reached by police. After that article, Shelly called the newspaper and the police.
“Not one word of what’s being reported is accurate. This needs to be looked into. For the record. There are implications here, for all of us.”
The officer in charge of the case assured Shelly that he had all her information, that her help with this was invaluable, that he himself would contact the newspaper and make the correction. But he also said, “It’s a rag, you know. I wish I had a dime for every time they slaughtered a story. I’d be a very rich man.”
The managing editor of the paper promised Shelly that a correction would appear the next day: “We have so many sources of information, ma’am. I’m sure you understand that with so much effort put into each story by so many people, mistakes can and do occur.”
Shelly waited for the correction—scoured the next week’s newspaper, every day—and never found it.
3
“Her name’s Nicole Werner,” Perry told his roommate, whose mouth was open, staring at her. Perry was hoping that if he distracted him with information, Craig would close his mouth and quit leering. “Her whole family’s from Bad Axe, for generations. She’s got about four hundred cousins. Our elementary school was called Werner Elementary.”
“Farm slut?” his roommate asked. “Dumb blonde?”
“She was our valedictorian,” Perry said, sounding more defensive than he felt. He had no particular stake in Nicole Werner per se, but everything Craig Clements-Rabbitt had said about everything since spreading out his high-tech sleeping bag on his bare mattress in their dorm room on move-in day had been either annoying or infuriating.
“Huh. Valedictorian? I thought that would have been you, Perry-my-man. What the hell happened?”
“She was the better student.” Perry nodded with what he hoped looked like sincerity, not bitterness.
There’d been, certainly, a period of bitterness. Nicole Werner, in addition to being valedictorian, had also gotten the Ramsey Luke Scholarship—the first time in Bad Axe High history that it hadn’t been given to the president of the senior class, which had been Perry. But Perry had told himself that they couldn’t really give the Ramsey Luke and the E. M. Gelman Band Scholarship to the same student, and he’d clearly been the leading candidate for the latter.
They were in the cafeteria. It was the end of their first week in Godwin Honors Hall. Craig was eating chili piled so high with chopped onion that every time he put his spoon in the bowl, onions fell onto the laminate table. “What do her parents do?”
“They own a German restaurant in town. Dumplings.”