“At the burial site,” she said.
“You sound excited.”
“I am.”
“Why?”
“I found something in the dirt,” Tara O’Neill said.
“And?”
“And it changes everything we thought about this case.”
One of those random hospital beeping noises woke me. I stirred slowly, blinked open my eyes and saw Mrs. Perez sitting with me.
She had pulled the chair right next to my bed. The purse was in her lap. Her knees touched. Her back was straight. I looked into her eyes. She’d been crying.
“I heard about Mr. Silverstein,” she said.
I waited.
“And I also heard that they found bones in the woods.”
I felt parched. I looked to my right. That yellow-brown plastic water pitcher, that one unique to hospitals and specifically designed to make the water taste awful, sat on the stand next to me. I was about to reach for it, but Mrs. Perez was up before I could do so much as lift my hand. She poured the water into a cup and handed it to me.
“Do you want to sit up?” Mrs. Perez asked.
“That’s probably a good idea.”
She pressed the remote control and my back began to curl into a sit.
“Is that okay?”
“That’s fine,” I said.
She sat back down.
“You won’t leave this alone,” she said.
I didn’t bother responding.
“They say that Mr. Silverstein murdered my Gil. Do you think that’s true?”
My Gil. So the pretense was down. No more hiding behind a lie or a daughter. No more hypothetical.
“Yes.”
She nodded. “Sometimes I think Gil really did die in those woods. That was how it was supposed to be. The time after that, it was just borrowed. When that policeman called me the other day, I already knew. I’d been expecting it, you see? Part of Gil never escaped from those woods.”
“Tell me what happened,” I said.
“I thought I knew. All these years. But maybe I never learned the truth. Maybe Gil lied to me.”
“Tell me what you do know.”
“You were at the camp that summer. You knew my Gil.”
“Yes.”
“And you knew this girl. This Margot Green.”
I said that I did.
“Gil fell for her hard. He was this poor boy. We lived in a burnt-out section of Irvington. Mr. Silverstein had a program where children of workers got to attend. I worked in the laundry room. You know this.”
I did.
“I liked your mother very much. She was so smart. We talked a lot. About everything. About books, about life, about our disappointments. Natasha was what we call an old soul. She was so beautiful but it was fragile. Do you understand?”
“I think so, yes.”
“Anyway, Gil fell very hard for Margot Green. It was understandable. He was eighteen. She was practically a magazine model in his eyes. That’s how it is with men. They are so driven by lust. My Gil was no different. But she broke his heart. That too is common. He should have just suffered for a few weeks and then moved on. He probably would have.”
She stopped.
“So what happened?” I asked.
“Wayne Steubens.”
“What about him?”
“He whispered in Gil’s ear. He told him that he shouldn’t let Margot get away with it. He appealed to Gil’s machismo. Margot, he said, was laughing at Gil. You need to pay that tease back, Wayne Steubens whispered in his ear. And after a while—I don’t know how long—Gil agreed.”
I made a face. “So they slit her throat?”
“No. But Margot had been strutting all over camp. You remember this, yes?”
Wayne had said it. She was a tease.
“There were many kids who wanted to knock her down a peg. My son, of course. Doug Billingham too. Maybe your sister. She was there, but that might have been because Doug talked her into it. It’s not important.”
A nurse opened the door.
“Not now,” I said.
I expected an argument but something in my voice must have worked. She backed up and let the door close behind her. Mrs. Perez had her eyes down. She stared at her purse as though afraid someone would snatch it.
“Wayne planned it all very carefully. That’s what Gil said. They were going to draw Margot out to the woods. It was going to be a prank. Your sister helped with the lure. She said that they were going to meet some cute boys. Gil put a mask on his head. He grabbed Margot. He tied her up. That was supposed to be the end of it. They’d leave her there for a few minutes. She’d either escape from the rope or they’d untie her. It was dumb, very immature, but these things happen.”
I knew that they did. Camp was full of “pranks” back then. I remembered one time we’d taken a kid and moved his bed into the woods. He woke up the next morning alone, outside, terrified. We used to shine a flashlight in a sleeping camper’s eyes and make a train noise and shake them and yell, “Get off the tracks!” and watch the kid dive off his bed. I remembered that there were two bully campers who used to call the other kids “faggots.” Late one night, when both were deep in sleep, we picked one up, took off his clothes, put him in bed with the other. In the morning, the other campers saw them naked in the same bed. The bullying stopped.
Tying up a total tease and leaving her in the woods for a little while…that wouldn’t have surprised me.
“Then something went very wrong,” Mrs. Perez said.
I waited. A tear escaped Mrs. Perez’s eye. She reached into her purse and pulled out a wad of tissues. She dabbed her eyes, fought them back.
“Wayne Steubens took out a razor blade.”
I think my eyes widened a little when she said that. I could almost see the scene. I could see the five of them out in the woods, picture their faces, their surprise.
“You see, Margot knew what was going on right away. She played along. She let Gil tie her up. Then she started mocking my son. Made fun of him, said he didn’t know how to handle a real woman. The same insults women have thrown at men throughout history. But Gil didn’t do anything. What could he do? But suddenly Wayne had the razor blade out. At first, Gil thought it was part of the act. To scare her. But Wayne didn’t hesitate. He walked over to Margot and slashed her neck from ear to ear.”
I closed my eyes. I saw it again. I saw the blade going across that young skin, the blood spurting, the life force leaving her. I thought about it. While Margot Green was being slaughtered, I was only a few hundred yards away making love to my girlfriend. There was probably poignancy in that, in that most horrible of man’s actions running adjacent to his most wondrous, but it was hard to see it now.