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.

After the game I lose ten minutes with Brent making an excuse for why I can’t go out for a drink. He kisses me again, but this time he lands it right on the corner of my mouth, as if he wants me to think it might have been an accident. By then, the players have disappeared and there’s a chokehold of cars funneling out of the lot.

I backtrack to the gym, hanging back near a picnic table scored with decades’ worth of carved-in graffiti. The kids are in no hurry to get home: dozens of them circulate in packs, like wild animals, visible only by the flash and wink of their phone screens in the dark. A group of girls hunker down in the grass not far from where I’m sitting, and a group of guys doesn’t leave them alone too long before arriving to spark up a joint and start passing around a water bottle that must be full of something else. Eventually, the stream of traffic onto County Route 12 slows to a dribble and the parking lot clears out. But the kids remain, disrupting the quiet with a Morse code of teenage shouting and laughter.

The football players, now showered and changed and carrying duffel bags, emerge from the locker room in pairs. But Monty comes out alone. I have to shout his name three or four times before he looks up, already scowling, as if he’s still on the field and expecting to take a blow.

But then his face clears and splits into the exact same smile I remember from when he was a kid.

“Hey, Abby,” he says, shyly, which is just how he used to greet me as a kid. As if all these years, he’s just been waiting for me to show up.

I feel awkward hugging him, this half-grown giant, and remember anyway he didn’t like it, so instead I just nudge him with my elbow.

“You’ve been doing some growing,” I say.

He shrugs, but he looks pleased. “Football. What are you doing here?” he says.

“I came to watch you play,” I say, and when a smile steals over his face I really wish it were true. “Good game.”

“You shoulda been here for the real season,” he says. Then his face darkens. “I haven’t been playing as much. Not since…” He sucks back whatever he was going to say.

“You got in trouble, right? With Walter Gallagher?”

“You heard about that?” He looks at me sideways, and then, reading my face, says, “You talked to my mom?”

“I called her, yeah,” I say. Monty shuffles his feet. “What happened?”

For a long minute, he just stares down at the space between his ragged sneakers, suddenly morphing back into a kid. “Last Halloween me and some friends snuck onto Gallagher’s.” He looks up at me through his eyelashes—dark, long for a boy’s. “My friend Hayes wanted to steal one of Gallagher’s four-wheelers. We weren’t really gonna take one,” Monty hurries to explain. “It was just talk. We were just pretending we were going to. You know what I mean?” When I nod, he seems to relax. “Anyway, it was kind of a tradition to mess with Gallagher on Halloween, we weren’t even the first ones to do it.”

“And you got caught,” I say.

Monty nods miserably. “He let the dogs on us. Hayes almost got his leg taken off. But we were just messing around.”

“And you were pissed,” I say. He nods. “You said some stuff about Gallagher, threatened to get even.”

He nods again, so droopy with obvious misery he looks like a cartoon bloodhound. “I wasn’t serious, though,” he says.

“Did you start that fire at Gallagher’s?” I ask him, as gently as I can.

“No,” he says immediately. “Hell no.” And I believe him. “Sheriff Kahn’s just got it in for me,” Monty says, on a roll now, huffing with anger. “He’s never liked me, ever since sixth grade he caught me spray painting this old wall behind the plant. No one even goes back there.”

I take a deep breath. “Look, Monty, I have to ask you something. I need you to be honest, okay?” He nods. Despite the fact that he’s six foot three, minimum, and broad as a plank, his face is sweet as a baby’s. “What happened between you and Tatum Klauss?”

“Nothing happened,” he says. He barely gets the words out. “How’d you hear about Tatum?”

I don’t answer, and I don’t let the thread drop, either. One of my law professors once told me you could defend any liar on the planet, so long as he didn’t lie to you. “Did you threaten to hurt her?”

“I would never hurt Tatum,” he says quickly, and he winces, as though the idea is painful.

“Sheriff Kahn says Tatum complained about you,” I say. Poor Monty. “According to Tatum, you wouldn’t leave her alone.”

“Yeah, well, I was just trying to get her to listen.” A hoot of laughter from the group of high schoolers seems to startle him.

I know that kind of laughter: like the hooting of an owl sighting a mouse. Sharp. Predatory.

“Listen to what?”

He looks away. A muscle tightening in and out across his jaw. “It was nothing. Some stupid game with her friends. But they aren’t her friends. They don’t give a shit about her.”

The Game. A bad feeling scratches my neck. Probably coincidence. But still. “What kind of game?”

But Monty feels the currents changing. Despite his size, despite his football jersey, in Barrens, Monty isn’t a hawk, but a mouse: and like all prey everywhere, he knows when there’s danger in the air. The black mass of high schoolers is restless, shifting, swelling with sudden sound. “Look,” he says, and I can tell he’s impatient now. “It was just some stupid-ass game with some older dudes, piece-of-shit nobody suckfaces. But Sheriff Kahn didn’t ask them, did he? Just because they got flashy cars and tighty-whities.” He shakes his head. “I was just trying to help her. I was just trying to—”

He breaks off suddenly, as the mass of kids lobs a single word in our direction, again and again. Freak. Freak. Freak.

“Tatum’s friends,” he says, in a strangled voice. Then: “I gotta go.”

He takes off to the parking lot at a half jog, sticking as close to the gym as possible, head down, as if he might slide by, invisible. Not that easy. Never that easy: a water bottle misses his head by inches, then an empty beer can, clattering off the side of the gym just as he disappears around the corner.