I took biology my sophomore year, and there was Ms. Hargensen, as pretty as ever, but no longer my love. I had switched my affections to a more available (and age-appropriate) young lady. Wendy Gerard was a petite blond from Motton who had just gotten rid of her braces. Soon we were studying together, and going to movies together (when either my dad or her mom or dad would take us, that was), and making out in the back row. All that sticky kid stuff that's so absolutely fine.
My crush on Ms. Hargensen died a natural death, and that was a good thing, because it opened the way for friendship. I brought plants into class sometimes, and I helped out cleaning the lab, which we shared with the chem kids, after school on Friday afternoons.
On one of those afternoons, I asked her if she believed in ghosts. "I suppose you don't, being a scientist and all," I said.
She laughed. "I'm a teacher, not a scientist."
"You know what I mean."
"I suppose, but I'm still a good Catholic. That means I believe in God, and the angels, and the world of the spirit. Not so sure about exorcism and demonic possession, that seems pretty far out there, but ghosts? Let's just say the jury's out on that one. I'd certainly never attend a séance, or mess around with a Ouija board."
"Why not?"
We were cleaning the sinks, something the chem kids were supposed to take care of before they left for the weekend but hardly ever did. Ms. Hargensen paused, smiling. Maybe a little embarrassed. "Science folks aren't immune from superstition, Craig. I don't believe in messing with what I don't understand. My grandmother used to say a person shouldn't call out unless they want an answer. I've always thought that was good advice. Why do you ask?"
I wasn't going to tell her Kenny was still on my mind. "I'm a Methodist myself, and we talk about the Holy Spirit. Only in the King James Bible, it's the Holy Ghost. I guess I was thinking about that."
"Well, if ghosts exist," she said, "I'll bet not all of them are holy."
* * *
I still wanted to be some kind of writer, although my ambition to write movies had cooled. Mr. Harrigan's joke about the screenwriter and the starlet recurred to me every now and then, and had cast a bit of a pall over my show biz fantasies.
For Christmas that year Dad got me a laptop, and I started to write short stories. They were okay line by line, but the lines of a story have to add up to a whole, and mine didn't. The following year, the head of the English Department tapped me to edit the school paper, and I got the journalism bug, which has so far never left me. I don't think it ever will. I believe you hear a click, not in your head but in your soul, when you find the place where you belong. You can ignore it, but really, why would you?
I started getting my growth, and when I was a junior, after I had shown Wendy that yes, I had protection (it was U-Boat who actually bought the condoms), we left our virginity behind. I graduated third in my class (only 142, but still), and Dad bought me a Toyota Corolla (used, but still). I got accepted at Emerson, one of the best schools in the country for aspiring journalists, and I bet they would have given me at least a partial scholarship, but thanks to Mr. Harrigan I didn't need it—lucky me.
There were a few typical adolescent storms between fourteen and eighteen, but actually not that many—it was as if the nightmare with Kenny Yanko had in some way frontloaded a lot of my adolescent angst. Also, you know, I loved my dad, and it was just the two of us. I think that makes a difference.
By the time I started college, I hardly ever thought of Kenny Yanko at all. But I still thought of Mr. Harrigan. Not surprising, considering that he had rolled out the academic red carpet for me. But there were certain days when I thought of him more often. If I was home on one of those days, I put flowers on his grave. If I wasn't, Pete Bostwick or Mrs. Grogan did it for me.
Valentine's. Thanksgiving. Christmas. And my birthday.
I always bought a dollar scratch ticket on those days, too. Sometimes I won a couple of bucks, sometimes five, and once I won fifty, but I never hit anything close to a jackpot. That was okay with me. If I had, I would have given the money to some charity. I bought the tickets to remember. Thanks to him, I was already rich.
* * *
Because Mr. Rafferty was generous with the trust fund, I had my own apartment by the time I was a junior at Emerson. Just a couple of rooms and a bathroom, but it was in Back Bay, where even small apartments aren't cheap. By then I was working on the literary magazine. Ploughshares is one of the best in the country, and it always has a hotshot editor, but someone has to read the slush pile, and that was me. I liked the job, even though many of the submissions were on a par with a memorably, even classically bad poem called "10 Reasons Why I Hate My Mother." It cheered me up to see how many strivers out there were worse at writing than I was. Probably that sounds mean. Probably it is.
I was doing this chore one evening with a plate of Oreos by my left hand and a cup of tea by my right when my phone buzzed. It was Dad. He said he had some bad news and told me Ms. Hargensen had died.
For a moment or two I couldn't speak. The stack of slush pile poems and stories suddenly seemed very unimportant.
"Craig?" Dad asked. "Are you still there?"
"Yes. What happened?"
He told me what he knew, and I found out more a couple of days later, when the Gates Falls Weekly Enterprise was published online. BELOVED TEACHERS KILLED IN VERMONT, the headline read. Victoria Hargensen Corliss had still been teaching biology at Gates; her husband was a math teacher at neighboring Castle Rock. They had decided to spend their spring vacation on a motorcycle trip across New England, staying at a different bed and breakfast every night. They were on their way back, in Vermont and almost to the New Hampshire border, when Dean Whitmore, thirty-one, of Waltham, Massachusetts, crossed the Route 2 centerline and struck them head-on. Ted Corliss was killed instantly. Victoria Corliss—the woman who had taken me into the teachers' room after Kenny Yanko beat me up and gave me an illicit Aleve from her purse—had died on the way to the hospital.
I'd interned at the Enterprise the previous summer, mostly emptying the trash but also writing some sports and movie reviews. When I called Dave Gardener, the editor, he gave me some background the Enterprise hadn't printed. Dean Whitmore had been arrested a total of four times for OUI, but his father was a big hedge fund guy (how Mr. Harrigan had hated those upstarts), and high-priced lawyers had taken care of Whitmore the first three times. On the fourth occasion, after running into the side of a Zoney's Go-Mart in Hingham, he had avoided jail but lost his license. He'd been driving without one and operating under the influence when he struck the Corliss motorcycle. "Stone drunk" was the way Dave put it.
"He'll get off with just a slap on the wrist," Dave said. "Daddy will see to it. You watch and see."
"No way." Just the idea of that happening made me feel sick to my stomach. "If your info's correct, it's a clear case of vehicular homicide."
"Watch and see," he repeated.
* * *
The funerals were at Saint Anne's, the church both Ms. Hargensen—it was impossible for me to think of her as Victoria—and her husband had attended for most of their lives, and the one they had been married out of. Mr. Harrigan had been rich, for years a mover and shaker in the American business world, but there were a lot more people at the funeral of Ted and Victoria Corliss. Saint Anne's is a big church, but that day it was standing room only, and if Father Ingersoll hadn't had a microphone, he would have been inaudible beneath all the weeping. They had both been popular teachers, they were a love-match, and of course they had been young.
So were most of the mourners. I was there; Regina and Margie were there; Billy Bogan was there; so was U-Boat, who'd made a special trip from Florida, where he was playing single-A ball. U-Boat and I sat together. He didn't cry, exactly, but his eyes were red, and the big galoot was sniffling.
"Did you ever have her for class?" I whispered.
"Bio II," he whispered back. "When I was a senior. Needed it to graduate. She gave me a gift C. And I was in her birdwatching club. She wrote me a recommendation on my college app."
She had written me one, too.
"It's just so wrong," U-Boat said. "They weren't doing nothing but taking a ride." He paused. "And they were wearing helmets, too."
Billy looked about the same, but Margie and Regina looked older, almost adult in their makeup and big-girl dresses. They hugged me outside the church when it was over, and Regina said, "Remember how she took care of you the night you got beat up?"
"Yes," I said.
"She let me use her hand cream," Regina said, and began to cry all over again.
"I hope they put that guy away forever," Margie said fiercely.
"Roger that," U-Boat said. "Lock him up and throw away the key."
"They will," I said, but of course I was wrong and Dave was right.
* * *
Dean Whitmore's day in court came that July. He was given four years, sentence suspended if he agreed to go into a rehab and could pass random urine tests for those same four years. I was working for the Enterprise again, and as a paid employee (only part-time, but still). I'd been bumped up to community affairs and the occasional feature story. The day after Whitmore's sentencing—if you could even call it that—I voiced my outrage to Dave Gardener.
"I know, it sucks," he said, "but you gotta grow up, Craigy. We live in the real world where money talks and people listen. Money changed hands in the Whitmore case somewhere along the line. You can count on it. Now aren't you supposed to be giving me four-hundred words on the Craft Fair?"
* * *
A rehab—possibly one with tennis courts and a putting green—wasn't enough. Four years of piss-testing wasn't enough, especially when you could pay someone to provide clean samples if you knew ahead of time when the tests were going to come. Whitmore probably would.
As that August burned away, I sometimes thought of an African proverb I'd read in one of my classes: When an old man dies, a library burns. Victoria and Ted hadn't been old, but somehow that was worse, because any potential they might have had was never going to be realized. All those kids at the funeral, both current students and recent graduates like me and my friends, suggested that something had burned, and could never be rebuilt.
I remembered her drawings of leaves and tree branches on the blackboard, beautiful things done freehand. I remembered us cleaning the bio lab on Friday afternoons, then doing the chem half of the lab for good measure, both of us laughing about the stink, her wondering if some Dr. Jekyll chemistry student was going to turn into Mr. Hyde and go rampaging through the halls. I thought of her saying Don't blame you when I told her I didn't want to go back into the gym after Kenny beat me up. I thought of those things, and the smell of her perfume, and then I thought of the asshole who'd killed her graduating from rehab and going about his business, happy as a Sunday in Paris.
No, it wasn't enough.
I went home that afternoon and dug through the drawers of the bureau in my room, not quite admitting to myself what I was looking for . . . or why. What I was looking for wasn't there, which was both a disappointment and a relief. I started to leave, then went back and stood on tiptoe to explore the top shelf in my closet, where junk had a way of accumulating. I found an old alarm clock, an iPod that had busted when I dropped it in the driveway while skateboarding, a tangle of earphones and earbuds. There was a box of baseball cards and a stack of Spider-Man comic books. At the very back, there was a Red Sox sweatshirt much too small for the body I now inhabited. I lifted it and there, underneath, was the iPhone my father had given me for Christmas. Back in my shrimpsqueak days. The charger was there, too. I plugged the old phone in, still not quite admitting what I was up to, but when I think of that day now—not so many years ago—I believe that the motivating force was something Ms. Hargensen had said to me while we were cleaning the chem lab sinks: A person shouldn't call out unless they want an answer. That day I wanted one.
It probably won't even take a charge, I told myself. Been up there gathering dust for years. But it did. When I picked it up that night, after Dad had turned in, I saw a full battery icon in the upper righthand corner.
Man, talk about your trips down Memory Lane. I saw emails from long ago, photos of my dad from before his hair started to go gray, and IMs back and forth between me and Billy Bogan. No news in them really, just jokes, and illuminating information like I just farted, and incisive questions like Did you do your algebra. We'd been like a couple of kids with Del Monte cans connected by a length of waxed string. Which is what most of our modern communications amount to, when you stop to think of it; chatter for the sake of chatter.
I took the phone to bed with me just as I had back before I needed to shave and when kissing Regina was a huge deal. Only now the bed which had once seemed big seemed almost too small. I looked across the room at the poster of Katy Perry I had put up when she had seemed, to junior high school me, the epitome of sexy fun. I was older than that shrimpsqueak kid now, and I was just the same. Funny how that works.
If ghosts exist, Ms. Hargensen had said, I'll bet not all of them are holy.
Thinking of that almost made me stop. Then, once more thinking of that irresponsible asshole playing tennis in his rehab, I went ahead and called Mr. Harrigan's number. It's okay, I told myself. Nothing will happen. Nothing can happen. This is just a way of clearing your mental decks so you can leave the anger and sorrow behind and move on to the next thing.
Except part of me knew something would happen, so I wasn't surprised when I got a ring instead of silence. Nor was I when his rusty voice spoke in my ear, originating from the telephone I'd put in his dead man's pocket almost seven years before: "I'm not answering my phone now. I will call you back if it seems appropriate."
"Hello, Mr. Harrigan, it's Craig." My voice was remarkably steady, considering that I was talking to a corpse and the corpse might actually be listening. "There's a man named Dean Whitmore who killed my favorite teacher from high school and her husband. The guy was drunk and hit them with his car. They were good people, she helped me when I needed help, and he didn't get what he deserved. I guess that's all."
Except it wasn't. I had at least thirty seconds or so to leave a message, and I hadn't used them all. So I said the rest of it, the truth of it, my voice dropping lower still, so it was almost a growl: "I wish he was dead."
* * *
These days I work for the Times Union, a newspaper that serves Albany and the surrounding area. The salary is peanuts, I could probably make more writing for BuzzFeed or TMZ, but I have that trust fund as a cushion, and I like working for an actual paper, even though most of the action these days is online. Call me old-fashioned.
I made friends with Frank Jefferson, the paper's go-to IT guy, and one night over beer at the Madison Pour House, I told him I'd once been able to connect with the voicemail of a guy who was dead . . . but only if I called from the old phone I'd had when the guy was still alive. I asked Frank if he'd ever heard of anything like that.
"No," he said, "but it could happen."
"How?"
"No idea, but there were all sorts of weird glitches with the early computers and cell phones. Some of them are legendary."
"iPhones, too?"
"Especially them," he said, swigging his beer. "Because they were rushed into production. Steve Jobs never would have admitted it, but the Apple guys were scared to death that in another couple of years, maybe only one, BlackBerry would achieve total market dominance. Those first iPhones, some of them locked up every time you typed the letter l. You could send an email and then surf the web, but if you tried to surf the web and then send an email, your phone sometimes crashed."
"That actually happened to me once or twice," I said. "I had to reboot."
"Yeah. There was all kinds of stuff like that. Your thing? I'd guess the guy's message somehow got stuck in the software, same way you can get a piece of gristle stuck between your teeth. Call it the ghost in the machine."
"Yes," I said, "but not a holy one."
"Huh?"
"Nothing," I said.
* * *
Dean Whitmore died on his second day in the Raven Mountain Treatment Center, a luxury spin-dry facility in upstate New Hampshire (there were indeed tennis courts; also shuffleboard and a swimming pool). I knew almost as soon as it happened, because I had a Google Alert on his name, both on my laptop and my Weekly Enterprise computer. No cause of death was given—money talks, you know—so I took a little trip to the neighboring New Hampshire town of Maidstone. There I put on my reporter's hat, asked a few questions, and parted with some of Mr. Harrigan's money.
It didn't take long, because, as suicides went, Whitmore's was more than a bit out of the ordinary. Kind of like strangling to death while beating off is out of the ordinary, you could say. At Raven Mountain the inpatients were called guests instead of dopers and alkies, and each guest room had its own shower. Dean Whitmore went into his before breakfast and chugged down some shampoo. Not to commit suicide, it seemed, but to grease the runway. He then broke a bar of soap in two, dropped half on the floor, and crammed the other half down his throat.
I got most of this from one of the counselors, whose job at Raven Mountain was to work at breaking drunks and druggies of their bad habits. This fellow, Randy Squires by name, sat in my Toyota drinking from the neck of a Wild Turkey bottle purchased with some of the fifty dollars I'd given him (and yes, the irony was not lost on me). I asked if Whitmore had perhaps left a suicide note.
"He did," Squires said. "Kind of sweet, actually. Almost a prayer. 'Keep giving all the love you can,' it said."
My arms broke out in gooseflesh, but my sleeves covered that, and I was able to manage a smile. I could have told him that wasn't a prayer, but a line from "Stand By Your Man," by Tammy Wynette. Squires wouldn't have gotten it, anyway, and there was no reason why I'd want him to. It was between Mr. Harrigan and me.
* * *
I spent three days on that little investigation. When I got back, Dad asked me if I'd enjoyed my mini-vacation. I said I had. He asked me if I was ready to go back to school in a couple of weeks. I said I was. He looked me over carefully and asked if anything was wrong. I said there wasn't, not knowing if that was a lie or not.
Part of me still believed that Kenny Yanko had died accidentally, and that Dean Whitmore had committed suicide, possibly out of guilt. I tried to imagine how Mr. Harrigan could have somehow appeared to them and caused their deaths, and couldn't do it. If that had happened, then I was an accessory to murder, morally if not legally. I had wished Whitmore dead, after all. Probably in my deepest heart, Kenny too.
"You sure?" Dad asked. His eyes were still on me, and in the old searching way I remembered from early childhood, when I had done some small thing wrong.
"Positive," I said.
"Okay, but if you want to talk, I'm here."
Yes, and thank God he was, but this wasn't a thing I could talk about. Not without sounding like a lunatic.
I went into my room and took the old iPhone off the closet shelf. It was holding its charge admirably. Why, exactly, did I do that? Did I mean to call him in his grave to say thank you? To ask him if he was really there? I can't remember, and I guess it doesn't matter, because I didn't call. When I powered up the phone, I saw I had a text message from pirateking1. I tapped with a trembling finger to open it and read this: C C C sT
As I looked at it, a possibility that had never so much as touched my mind before that late summer day dawned on me. What if I were somehow holding Mr. Harrigan hostage? Tying him to my earthly concerns by way of the phone I had tucked into his coat pocket before the lid of his coffin went down? What if the things I had asked him to do were hurting him? Maybe even torturing him?
Not likely, I thought. Remember what Mrs. Grogan told you about Dusty Bilodeau. She said he couldn't have gotten a job shoveling henshit out of old Dorrance Marstellar's barn after stealing from Mr. Harrigan. He saw to it.
Yes, and something else. She said he was a square-dealing man, but if you weren't the same, God help you. And had Dean Whitmore been square-dealing? No. Had Kenny Yanko been square-dealing? The same. So maybe Mr. Harrigan had been glad to pitch in. Maybe he even enjoyed it.
"If he was ever there at all," I whispered.
He had been. In my deepest heart I knew that, too. And I knew something else. I knew what that message meant: Craig stop.
Because I was hurting him, or because I was hurting myself?
I decided that in the end it didn't matter.
* * *
It rained hard the next day, the kind of chilly no-thunder downpour that means the first autumn color will begin to show in a week or two. The rain was good, because it meant that the summer people—those who remained—were all tucked up inside their seasonal hideaways and Castle Lake was deserted. I parked in the picnic area at the lake's north end and walked to what we kids had called the Ledges, standing there in our bathing suits and daring each other to jump off. Some of us even did.
I went to the lip of the drop, where the pine needles gave out and the bare rock, which is New England's ultimate truth, began. I reached into the right pocket of my khakis and brought out my iPhone 1. I held it in my hand for a moment, feeling its weight and remembering how delighted I'd been on that Christmas morning when I unwrapped the box and saw the Apple logo. Had I screamed for joy? I couldn't remember, but almost certainly.
It was still holding its charge, although it was down to fifty per cent. I called Mr. Harrigan, and in the dark earth of Elm Cemetery, in the pocket of an expensive suit coat now speckled with mold, I know Tammy Wynette was singing. I listened to his scratchy old man's voice one more time, telling me he would call back if it seemed appropriate.
I waited for the beep. I said, "Thank you for everything, Mr. Harrigan. Goodbye."
I ended the call, cocked my arm back, and threw the phone as hard as I could. I watched it arc through the gray sky. I watched the small splash as it hit the water.
I reached into my lefthand pocket and brought out my current iPhone, the 5C with its colorful case. I meant to throw it into the lake as well. Surely I could make do with a landline, and surely it would make my life easier. So much less chitter-chatter, no more texts reading What are you doing, no more dumb emojis. If I got a job on a newspaper after I graduated and needed to keep in touch, I could use a loaner, then give it back when whatever assignment had necessitated it was finished.
I cocked my arm back, held it that way for what felt like a long time—maybe a minute, maybe two. In the end I put the phone back in my pocket. I don't know for sure if everyone is addicted to those high-tech Del Monte cans, but I know that I am, and I know Mr. Harrigan was. It's why I slipped it into his pocket that day. In the twenty-first century, I think our phones are how we are wedded to the world. If so, it's probably a bad marriage.
Or maybe not. After what happened to Yanko and Whitmore, and after that last text message from pirateking1, there are a great many things I'm not sure of. Reality itself, for a start. I do know two things, however, and they are as solid as New England rock. I don't want to be cremated when I go, and I want to be buried with empty pockets.