I hate dogs, was all Kaycee said.
“Do you know where she is now?” I ask him.
“No idea.” He’s watching me closely. “She rang me up maybe a few weeks after she left. Told me she was in Chicago then. But that was ten years ago.”
“She called you? Here?” This surprises me. “Why?”
He shrugs again. “Must’ve heard I was looking for her. Her friend Misha talked to her a few times.”
I wonder if there’s a possibility that even now, Misha is covering for Kaycee—and knows exactly where she is. “What did she say?”
“That was ten years ago, Ms. Williams.” His voice turns flinty. “Things dead and buried are best left that way.” He peels his lips back from his long teeth into a smile. “They don’t look none too pretty when they come up.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Even before Optimal came to town, there was one place we never cut corners: for more than thirty years, the Barrens Tigers have always played in a two-thousand-seater stadium donated by the great-great-grandson of the town’s original founder. Barrens loves its football. And the team was always really good, too, competing against bigger schools in the state and putting Barrens on the map. More energy went into football and the team than anything else. From a distance, it looks like a gigantic spaceship landed in the middle of a plowed field. It dwarfs the high school next to it, and when I was in school it sometimes doubled up as an auditorium for assemblies.
The whole of Barrens has turned out for the end-of-year PowerHouse game, a tradition that mixes JV and varsity and pits the teams against each other, and includes all the swagger, name-calling, and end zone dancing typically barred at real games. The teams paint their faces and wear costumes over their padding. One person, typically the quarterback, wears a dingy set of fairy wings passed down from class to class.
When I was in high school, I would have killed to walk into the PowerHouse with Brent O’Connell. Now I feel almost embarrassed—as if I’m squeezing into clothes that don’t quite fit anymore.
My hands are raw, sore from scrubbing them too hard before I left home.
Ever since I came home to Barrens, I can’t shake the sensation of dirt embedded beneath my fingernails. Handling Optimal’s documents just makes it worse. It’s like they’re covered with a chemical film that leaves me raw and itching.
When Brent reaches for my hand, I pretend not to notice and stuff my fists deep into my pockets.
Five hundred people, all funneled into the stadium seating, drum their feet along to the rhythm of the marching band—but the crazy thing is I spot Misha right away, or she spots us, one or the other. At the exact same second my eyes pick her out of the crowd, she lifts a hand to wave—a quick spasm that could be either an invitation or a desire to ward us off. Only when I see Annie Baum sitting next to her do I realize she’s sitting exactly where she always sat, four bleachers up, right next to the aisle. There’s even a little gap, a break in the arrangement of people, right next to her—as if an invisible Kaycee is still occupying her spot. A stranger has taken Cora Allen’s place.
For a second, we lock eyes. She gives me a funny little smile.
I’m afraid Brent will want to go and sit with them—Misha converts her wave into a frantic, two-handed come here gesture—but he only lifts a hand and, placing one hand on my lower back, steers me toward an entirely different section of bleachers. I feel a rush of relief.
The game kicks off: a blur of green and white bodied players collide on the field. I find Monty and lose him again in a scrum of players. I know little about football except what I’ve absorbed from years of living in Indiana and from watching Friday Night Lights, and he seems like a more than decent player, although after he fumbles a pass from the quarterback his coach benches him for a quarter. High school cheerleaders shimmy with their pom-poms, and every time they leap or backflip, they seem to remain suspended momentarily in the air, hung like Christmas ornaments on a dark backdrop of sky. I always think about what will happen if they twist a few inches in the wrong direction; I see them landing on their necks, breaking like porcelain dolls.
“We weren’t that small when we were in high school, were we?” Brent leans in to speak to me over the roar of the crowd and the stamping. “Do you think they’re shrinking? I definitely think they’re shrinking.”
That makes me laugh. I never knew that Brent was funny, but he is. He tells me that when he played football, he invented a technique so he wouldn’t be nervous: he’d pick a random guardian angel from the crowd, a stranger, the weirder the better, and name him or her. If he ever got nervous he’d just find the Angel of Lost ’90s Hats or the Patron Saint of Handlebar Mustaches and say a quick prayer.
“Did it work?” I ask him.
He winks. “We were undefeated our senior year.”
Weirdly, I find that I’m almost enjoying myself. With Brent. At a football game. In Barrens.
I have to remind myself again and again that I’m here for information. And yet the first quarter slips by, then the second, and then the third, and though we’ve talked almost continuously, the closest we’ve come to discussing the investigation is to debate the best junk food for powering through a long work night. Brent swears by Skittles. I’m a peanut M&M’s girl. Protein and caffeine—can’t beat it.
It’s not until the fourth quarter, when the conversation turns to our families, that I see an opening. And by then, I’m almost sorry to take it.
“You told me you have a cousin at Optimal, too, right?” I ask, as casually as I can. “Byron Grafton?”
“You are good.” Brent looks at me with either admiration or exasperation or a little bit of both. “Byron’s not at Optimal, though. He’s a subcontractor. But I bet you know that. Byron’s the one who got me in with the CFO, Wally Rush. They went to college together.”
Of course, I know this, too. “Byron’s a good guy deep down. He had some problems back when he was drinking. Married, divorced, married again, had a kid, made some bad business decisions. Pie-in-the-sky kind of things, too much ambition and too little sense. Wally helped push him in a new direction.”
And promised him a fluffed-up contract for waste disposal services that, as far as I can tell, never took place: a cozy arrangement. “So Optimal is a real family kind of operation, huh?”
Brent doesn’t answer right away and I can feel his gears shifting. Then he leans in to me, voice hushed. “I’m beginning to think you’re right about Optimal. Not about the waste. But there’s something funny going on in accounting. Now, this has to be confidential…”
“Of course,” I say.
“Optimal has been thinking of going public. It might be important. I’m trusting you.”
“Thank you,” I say, and mean it.
If Optimal is going public, why risk violating compliance laws, why risk investigation and censure? There must be something bigger at stake. More and more, I’m convinced that Optimal’s been using its power and connections to bully, silence, and sway—and to keep everyone who might investigate them looking the other way.
The thunderous noise of cheering and stamping shakes the stadium and sends a vibration all the way to my chest: it’s the end of another school year, the start of a long, brown summer. Brent turns and kisses me without warning. Today his lips are warm, and his chest is warm, and he smells like soap and grass shavings: a clean, hopeful smell. I try to find my way down into some good feeling, but the crowd is too loud.