Robert B. Parker’s Fallout

Fifteen

Molly and Suit sat with Ainsley Walsh in the living room of the home she shared with her parents on Stiles Island. Their office was four blocks away, closer to the bridge. The house they were in was the biggest of a gated community, one of a handful of gated communities on the island, called The Dunes, even though Molly knew that with beach erosion the way it was these days they might end up calling it The Former Dunes before much longer.

For now, she thought, personalized medicine was being very, very good to the Walshes.

Suit had asked if he could come along, now that Molly’s interview with Ainsley had been pushed back to today, the students of Paradise High having been given the day off in Jack Carlisle’s memory. Before they’d left the station Jesse had signed off on Suit accompanying Molly on the condition that he would behave himself.

“I’m not the high school kid here,” Suit said. “You don’t have to treat me like one.”

“Prove it,” Jesse had said.

“It’s not like I never saw you lose your shit on the job,” Suit said.

“Perk of being chief,” Jesse said.

The girl looked enough like Molly’s daughters to be one of them. Dark hair worn long. Great skin. Flawless skin, truth be told. Bright blue nails looking as if they’d been professionally done in the past couple days. Her shirt was blue with white stripes, the sleeves rolled up. Distressed jeans. Golden Goose sneakers looking distressed, too, which was apparently part of their charm.

If she isn’t the prettiest girl in school, Molly decided, Ainsley had to be in the conversation. She and Jack must have gone through Paradise High looking like the perennial king and queen of the prom.

“I don’t want to make this more difficult for you than it already is,” Molly said.

Ainsley was at a corner of the couch, feet tucked underneath her, sneakers still very much on. The mom in Molly resisted the urge to tell her no shoes on the furniture.

“No need for you to stress,” she said to them. “I’m pretty much all cried out.”

“I know how you feel,” Suit said.

Molly said, “The vigil last night was lovely. You all did a wonderful job putting it together.”

“Thanks,” the girl said. “But all’s I kept thinking was that Jack should have been there to hear all the nice things people were saying about him.”

She sighed. It was a gale-force sigh. Then she said, “We all should have said more of those things to him when he was alive.”

“You guys went out for a long time, right?” Suit said. He smiled at her. “Is it okay to say ‘went out’? Or does that make me sound older than I already am?”

“It’s okay,” Ainsley said. “There’s really no way to say it that doesn’t sound sketchy. But, yeah, we pretty much started hanging out at the beginning of junior year.”

She shrugged now. Teenagers, Molly knew, were good at it. Shrugging. It usually meant boredom, sometimes a way to punctuate a thought. By the time Molly’s daughters were Ainsley Walsh’s age they had elevated shrugging to an art form.

“But we both knew it was going to end when we graduated,” Ainsley said. “It was already starting to end.”

“Happens that way a lot,” Molly said. “I sent four daughters through your school. And went there myself.”

“We hadn’t made it official yet,” Ainsley said. What came out of her next came out in an exaggerated form of what was once called a Valley Girl voice. “At least not Insta official.”

“I did the same thing with my senior-year girlfriend,” Suit said.

Molly sighed now.

“I married my high school boyfriend,” she said.

She knew what she and Suit were doing, trying to relax the kid, maybe get her to drop her guard, having no idea at this point about what, exactly.

Suit leaned forward now, like he was kindly Uncle Suit to Ainsley, too.

“Jack hadn’t said anything to me about you two breaking up,” Suit said.

“Guys don’t talk,” Ainsley said, “even to other guys sometimes. We didn’t care if everybody else knew. We knew.”

Going in, Molly thought.

“So why did Jack think there was something going on with you and Scott Ford behind his back? Scott says that’s what the fight was about the night of the party.”

“Nothing was going on!” Ainsley said, the words coming out hot.

“I’m not suggesting that there was,” Molly said. “I’m just wondering why Jack seemed to think so.”

Ainsley reached forward for the plastic bottle of water on the coffee table, and drank some.

“My mom keeps telling me it’s more important than ever right now for me to stay hydrated.”

“Words to live by,” Molly said. “But getting back to the party, why did Jack think you were cheating on him with one of his teammates?”

“He saw Scott and me coming out of Daisy’s one day at lunch,” she said. “I’d been there with one of my girlfriends. Scott was picking up a to-go. My friend had to leave, but I’d already ordered. Scott offered to eat his lunch there and keep me company. A few hours later Jack texted me, being sarcastic, and congratulated me on already moving on to the next guy.”

High school, Molly thought.

The pandemic in high school, from the beginning of time, had been drama.

Ainsley pulled her phone out of the back pocket of her jeans, checked it, put it back.

“You have to be someplace?” Suit said.

“Kind of.”

“We won’t keep you much longer,” Molly said. “Why were you even at the party if things were ending with you and Jack?”

Ainsley looked at Molly, eyes big suddenly, tears forming. Molly had known from the start that it was bullshit about her being all cried out.

“Because I loved him,” she said. “Because he’d just had the best day he’d ever had in baseball, and when he asked me to come, I wasn’t about to say no.”

“When did you find out about the fight?” Suit said.

“When Scott came back.”

“And he told you what happened?” Molly said.

The girl nodded. “That’s when I went looking for Jack. But I couldn’t find him.”

Ainsley put her hands to her face and rubbed hard. Molly could never do that without ruining her makeup. Maybe Ainsley Walsh didn’t need it.

“It wasn’t just me who loved Jack,” she said, her eyes big and red and focused on Suit now. “Everybody did.”

Molly thought that it hadn’t done Jack Carlisle much good on the last night of his life.

“We’re still trying our best to love him now,” Ainsley said. “Can you understand that?”

Molly wasn’t sure she did. But telling this girl wasn’t going to do anybody any good.

So they left.