Promise Me

CHAPTER 51

It was not Drew Van Dyne driving the car.

It was Jake Wolf.

Jake drove fast. He made a few quick turns, but he only drove about a mile. He had a big enough lead. He hit the old Roosevelt Mall, sped around back, shifted into park. He walked across the dark soccer fields in the general direction of Livingston High School. He figured that Myron Bolitar was following him. But he also figured that he had enough of a head start.

He heard the party noises. After a few more steps, he could start to see the glow of lights. The night air felt good in his lungs. Jake tried to look at the trees, the houses, the cars in the driveways. He loved this town. He loved his life here.

As he came closer, he could hear the laughter. He thought about what he was doing here. He swallowed and moved behind a row of pine trees on the neighboring property. He found a spot between two of them and looked out at the tent.

Jake Wolf spotted his son right away.

It had always been like that with Randy. You never missed him. He stood out, no matter what the circumstance. Jake remembered going to Randy’s first soccer program when the boy was in first grade. There must have been three, four hundred kids, all there, all running and bouncing around like molecules in heat. Jake had arrived late, but it took mere seconds to find his radiant boy in the waves of look-alike children. Like there was a spotlight coming down from above, illuminating his every step.

Jake Wolf just watched. His son was talking to a bunch of his pals. They were all laughing at something Randy said. Jake stared and felt his eyes well up. There was plenty of blame to go around, he guessed. He tried to think where it all started. With Dr. Crowley maybe. Damn history teacher calls himself doctor. What kind of pretentious crap was that anyhow?

Crowley was a small, meaningless man with a bad comb-over and slumped shoulders. He hated athletes. You could smell the envy a mile away. Crowley looked at someone like Randy, someone so good-looking and athletic and special, and he saw all his own adolescent failures.

That was how it all began.

Randy had written a wonderful essay on the Tet Offensive for Crowley’s history class. Crowley had given him a C-minus. A goddamn C-minus. A friend of Randy’s, a guy named Joel Fisher, had gotten an A. Jake read both essays. Randy’s was better. It wasn’t just Jake Wolf who thought so. He tried them both out on various people. He didn’t let them know which essay was his son’s and which was Joel’s.

“Which is better?” he’d asked.

And almost all agreed. Randy’s paper — the C-minus paper — was superior.

It might have seemed like a small thing, but it wasn’t. That paper was three-quarters of the grade. Dr. Crowley gave Randy a C. It kept Randy off the honor roll for that semester, but more than that, more than anything else, it knocked him out of the class’s top ten percent. Dartmouth had been clear. With Randy’s SATs, he needed to be in the top ten percent. If that C had been a B, Randy would have been accepted.

That was the difference.

Jake and Lorraine had gone in to talk to Dr. Crowley. They had explained the situation. Crowley wouldn’t budge. He had been dismissive, enjoying his power play, and it took all Jake’s willpower not to put the man through a plate-glass window. But Jake was not about to give up that easy. He’d hired a private eye to dig into the man’s past, but Crowley’s life had been so pathetic, so nothing, so obviously unremarkable, especially next to the bright beacon that was Jake’s son… There was nothing he could use against the man.

So if Jake Wolf had played by the rules, that would have been it. That would have kept his son out of an Ivy League education — the whim of a nothing like Crowley.

Uh-uh. No way.

And so it began.

Jake swallowed and stared. His son stood in the middle of the party, the sun with dozens of orbiting planets. He had a cup in his hand. Randy had such natural ease. Such poise in everything he did. Jake Wolf stood there, in the shadows, and wondered if there was any way to save it all. He didn’t think so. It was like holding water in your hand. He had tried to sound confident for Lorraine. He thought that maybe he could dump the body in Drew Van Dyne’s house. Lorraine would clean up the stain. It could have still worked.

But Myron Bolitar had showed up. Jake had spotted him from the garage. He was trapped. Jake hoped to speed away, lose them, dump the body somewhere else. But when he made that first turn and saw that Lorraine was in the backseat, he knew that it was over.

He’d hire a good attorney. The best. He knew a guy in town, Lenny Marcus. Great defense lawyer. He’d call him, see what they could work out. But in his heart, Jake Wolf knew that it was over. For him, at least.

That was why he was here now. In the shadows. Watching his beautiful, perfect son. Randy was the only thing he had ever gotten right. His boy. His precious boy. But that was enough. From the first time he had laid eyes on the baby in the hospital, Jake Wolf was mesmerized. He went to every practice he could. He went to every game. It wasn’t just to show support — often, during practices, Jake would stand behind a tree, almost hide, as he was doing now. He just liked to watch his son. That was all. He liked getting lost in this very simple bliss. And sometimes, when he did, he couldn’t believe how lucky he was, how someone like Jake Wolf, also a nothing when you thought about it, could have been part of creating something so miraculous. The world was cruel and awful and you had to do all you could to get that edge, but then every once in a while, he’d look at Randy and realize that there was something other than the dog-eat-dog horror, that there had to be something better out there, some higher being, because here, in front of him, there was indeed perfection and beauty.

“Hey, Jake.”

He turned at the sound of the voice. “Hi, Jacques.”

It was Jacques Harlow, the father of one of Randy’s closest friends and the party host. Jacques came up next to him. They both looked out at the party, at their sons, soaking it in for almost a full minute without speaking.

“Can you believe how fast it went by?” Harlow said.

Jake just shook his head, afraid to speak. His eyes never left his son.

“Hey, how about coming in for a drink?”

“I can’t. I just had to drop something off for Randy. Thanks though.”

Harlow slapped his back. “Sure.” He headed back toward the porch.

It took another five minutes. Jake enjoyed every second. Then he heard the footsteps. He turned and saw Myron Bolitar. Myron had a gun in his hand. Jake Wolf smiled and turned back to his son.

“What are you doing here, Jake?”

“What’s it look like?”

Jake Wolf did not want to move, but he knew that it was time. He soaked up one last look at his son. That was what this felt like. The last time he would see him like this. He wanted to say something to his son, offer some words of wisdom, but Jake wasn’t good with words.

So instead he turned and raised his hands.

“In the trunk,” Jake Wolf said. “The body is in the trunk.”