Again the stare. Then Wesley exhaled loudly.
“Wow,” he said. “I’ve waited a whole year for someone to take me seriously about that night. I guess better late than never.”
Yes, Phoebe thought with excitement. Here we go.
“Would you have a few minutes to talk now?” she asked. “I really want to hear your version of the events.”
“Uh, sure,” Wesley said. “Why don’t you come in? Though you’ll have to excuse the mess. I didn’t have a chance to tidy up before I left this morning.”
As he dug through his coat pocket for his keys, Phoebe crossed the rest of the lawn and climbed up the stoop steps. Wesley unlocked the door, and Phoebe followed him into the house. For one brief moment, as they were both standing side by side in the darkened space, Phoebe wondered nervously if it was wise to walk into a strange man’s house this way, but as soon as Wesley flicked on the light, she relaxed.
The comment about tidying up seemed absurd in light of how the town house looked. The L-shaped living room was incredibly neat, except for the Eagles mug on the coffee table. The place was pleasantly fixed up, too, with a leather sofa and matching chair.
“What a nice spot you’ve got,” Phoebe said. “I take it you found gainful employment, unlike other recent college grads.”
“I’m pretty lucky,” Wesley said, slipping off his coat and dropping it over a wooden coat peg behind the door. He was thinner than she’d realized outside—his coat had added bulk, and his head, which was disproportionately large for his body, had helped foster the illusion. He was wearing a gray crewneck sweater that matched his eyes, and underneath, a crisp white button-down shirt. Not exactly a dork, but neither what any girl would describe as a hottie. “My dad owns a feed company in the area, and I’m managing it right now. Don’t get me wrong, though. I work my butt off.”
“Feed company?” she asked.
“We make feed for livestock—cattle, pigs, chickens. Of course, with all the farms around here dying off, it isn’t exactly a booming business, but I’ve added a lawn care department, which is going gangbusters. In fact, I’m going to be doing business with the college. I just signed a deal with them.”
Suddenly she realized where she’d seen him. He had been one of the two guys standing next to her in the crowd in front of Lily’s dorm that night.
“That’s terrific. Though it sounds like you had a tough time convincing people from the school to take you seriously last year.” She wanted to maneuver back to why she was here.
“Yup,” Wesley said, easing past the coffee table to sit on the couch. He let his legs fall apart and rested a hand on each knee. “I suppose I can’t totally blame them, though. They figured I’d been drunk, your typical college boy, but it was still—if you’ll excuse the expression—frustrating as hell.”
“Would you mind if I took notes?” Phoebe asked, slipping a pen and pad from her purse.
Wesley flipped over his palm in a gesture that said she could do as she pleased. “I’m just glad someone’s finally listening,” he said.
“So tell me what happened that night,” Phoebe said, her pen poised above an empty page. “You just came to and realized you’d ended up in the river somehow?”
“Not somehow,” Wesley said, narrowing his eyes. “Someone dumped me in there.”
15
WAIT A MINUTE, Phoebe thought, Hutch hadn’t mentioned that part. Were there details about the incident that Hutch wasn’t privy to?
“Did you see the person?” Phoebe asked.
Wesley shook his head defensively, as if he’d detected a trace of doubt in her voice.
“No, I didn’t see anyone, and I don’t remember anything about going in. But I would never, ever have ended up in that river on my own. I had one beer that night. I’m not a drinker.”
Not a drinker. Those were the same words that the friends of Scott Macus, the student who had drowned over a year ago, had apparently said about him.
“Start from the beginning, will you?” Phoebe said. “You were at Cat Tails, right?”
Wesley pursed his thin lips together and then blew out a sigh.
“Yup. It was around this time a year ago—November 16. When I got back from the library that night, a couple of guys on my floor said they were going out, so I decided to tag along. We ended up walking into the place around ten.”
“Is it mostly kids from Lyle who hang out there?”
“On weekends, yes, but not so much on weeknights. The place was pretty full that night, but I’d say over half the crowd was townies.”
“Okay, so what did you do when you got there?”
“We bought a round of beers at the bar and just stood there for a little while, shooting the breeze,” he said. “There were a couple of local women at the bar—at least ten years older than we were—and they started chatting us up. I had zero interest, but my buddies seemed pretty into them. After I’d played wingman for a while, I wandered over to the other side of the bar and ended up throwing darts with a couple of guys I recognized from school but didn’t know by name.
“After a few games I looked over and saw that my buddies were still talking to those cougars. I could have just taken off, but I didn’t feel like walking back to campus—one of the guys had driven. I bought another beer but only had a couple of sips.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“It’s the God’s honest truth. I needed to get up pretty early the next day to finish a paper, so I wasn’t taking any chances. Once I’d bought the second beer, I wandered over to this old jukebox against the wall and pumped a few quarters in it. Played a few Stones songs. Then all of a sudden this guy I didn’t know came over to the jukebox and asked me if the machine gave change. I said I didn’t think so. I remember he just stood there, and then he said, ‘Well, at least someone had the good taste to play the Stones.’ And that’s the last thing I remember. Until I came to in the river.”
“That must have been terrifying.”
He stared off for a minute, massaging his forehead with one hand.
“I thought I was in a dream, some kind of nightmare,” he said, looking back at Phoebe. “I’m a good swimmer, but I felt so weighed down in my clothes, I could barely keep my head up. Thank God I had loafers on. I kicked them off and swam to the shore. I was about half a mile farther south from Cat Tails. There’s a fair amount of trees around there, so somebody could have pushed me in without anyone noticing.”
“What time was this?”
“My phone was dead, but I had a waterproof watch on. It was half past one when I made it to shore. I’d lost, like, two hours. Cat Tails was closed by then, and there was no one around. I tried to flag down a couple of cars, but the drivers wouldn’t stop. I looked like the swamp monster, so why would they? I walked back to campus and went right to the security office. There was some young kid on duty, and you could tell he thought I’d probably been pounding back Buds all night. The next day the head guy—that geezer who’d been there for years—stopped by my dorm and talked to me, but he obviously thought I’d been hammered, too.”
“What do you think really happened?”
Wesley made a sharp tiih sound as he exhaled air. “Someone must have drugged me,” he said. “Not with a drug that knocked me out, but one of those date-rape drugs where you still seem to be functioning but you don’t actually know what the hell is going on, and you don’t remember a thing afterward. Whoever it was talked me into going outside and away from the bar and then pushed me into the river.”