Robert B. Parker’s Fallout

Thirty-Two

Molly was on Instagram herself only to keep up with her daughters, as well as any mother could keep up with her daughters on social media, especially now that they were all out of college and, blessedly, supporting themselves.

That meant keeping up on them without drone tracking or twenty-four-hour surveillance, both of which Molly had occasionally considered when they were college students, one after another.

Her youngest was now living in New York City, in the West Village, with three of her college roommates.

All things considered, Molly had liked it much better when they were in a dorm.

By now Molly felt as if she were well schooled, mostly by her kids, in the basics, the protocols, of proper Instagram behavior. It had become the platform of choice for kids, more than Facebook or Meta or whatever Marky Mark Zuckerberg was calling it these days.

Just about all of the boys on the Paradise High baseball team were on Instagram. So were the girls that Molly and Suit knew by now were hanging out with — or hooking up with — the players.

Tonight she was continuing to look for any relevant posts about Jack Carlisle, something or anything that might give her a better idea about what had happened to the kid that night, when he basically wandered away from the campfire and never came back.

She wasn’t really looking for deep, dark secrets, because only an idiot teenager would post those. Or even put them in a story knowing they’d be gone tomorrow. This was, after all, the public square for the modern world. One of them, anyway. Molly liked the old world better, when high school kids like the one she’d been a thousand years ago actually got by passing notes to each other.

This wasn’t the first time Molly had speculated about exactly when having an unspoken thought — or having an untaken snapshot — turned out to be against the law.

Jimmy Alonso had told her that she should look into TikTok, too, but Molly was certain that might be above her pay grade — let her try becoming the queen of Insta first.

She poured herself a glass of wine. Her one and only for the night. She wasn’t going to start drinking alone, at least not in excess, with her husband gone. Molly hated clichés, and wasn’t about to become one.

She went through the accounts randomly, not alphabetically, jumping back and forth between the boys and the girls. She had a list of names on the table next to her, and kept checking them off, one by one.

Tonight she had begun with the three kids she considered her headliners: Ainsley Walsh and Scott Ford and Matt Loes. Scott Ford posted hardly any pictures of himself away from baseball. Some included him posing with Jack Carlisle, sometimes in a goofy way. But there were just as many with other players. The last post, from him, about Jack had come the day after the accident:

Accompanying that was a picture of what Molly assumed to be Jack’s baseball glove, his bat, his PHS cap, sweat-stained and looking well worn.

Matt Loes hadn’t posted a picture in months.

Miss Ainsley Walsh, though, she was so active on Instagram, hyperactive really, posting so many shots of herself, that Molly wondered how much time she had left to actually live her life once she stopped posing.

There were a lot of pictures of her and Jack Carlisle, at least up until a couple weeks before the accident. The accident. Molly was still thinking of it that way, while waiting for new information to come in. Or bring the information in her own damned self. It wasn’t even summer yet, but it had been an unusually warm spring, so there were a lot of bikini shots of Ainsley, the bikinis amazingly skimpy. Molly was suddenly feeling the urge to call her daughters and apologize for the comments she’d always made about their bikinis.

There was a picture of Ainsley and Jack at Fenway Park, mugging for somebody’s phone, the Green Monster in the background.

There were pictures of them at an Ed Sheeran concert at the Garden, for which they had great seats near the stage.

Once again looking ridiculously happy.

Impossibly young.

Michael and I looked that way once, just at a Stones concert.

Something else Molly wondered as she sat at the table: How in the world she would have survived high school if there had been social media then, and cell phones, and everybody knew every single move everybody else was making?

Or would she have been Ainsley, turning her life into one long photo op?

Not Ainsley, she told herself.

Not even the teenage me.

Definitely not.

Molly had liked having secrets, until there came the secret that might end her marriage.

She sipped wine. Kris. Her new favorite white. A generous pour, no doubt. But just the one.

So much of what she was reading, and seeing, made her sad, the desperation for some of these kids, even the boys she knew to be the stars of the team, to be noticed, looking for validation or approval or something under the guise of likes they were getting. As if they needed to be told that they Mattered.

But not all of it made her sad.

Some of it made Molly envy these kids, especially the girls who simply seemed to be having a blast, as if they got the joke and if you didn’t, that was on you.

Some had mourned Jack Carlisle in a touching way. Some were overwrought.

Molly looked up and realized she had been at this for more than two hours. It didn’t bother her. It had shortened another long night here alone.

There was a lot going on at her old school, so much of it making her feel older than the fight song. But nothing on her night of Instagram that resembled a clue.

She was about to close her laptop and head to bed when she decided to visit Ainsley Walsh’s page one last time, to see if anything new had shown up.

A new comment had shown up five minutes earlier.

It had come from someone calling themselves Pepsquad1234.

It made Molly think of the old Robert Frost poem about the woods dark and deep, and promises to keep, and miles to go before sleep. She didn’t remember many poems from when she was in high school. But felt as if everybody remembered that one.

She reached for her wine.

When she looked back at her screen, Pepsquad’s comment was gone.