Robert B. Parker’s Fallout

Thirty-Nine

Suit told Jesse later that his sister, Laura, his only sibling, didn’t know anything about a play Jack had been writing. Gabe hadn’t found any document like it in the files on Jack’s laptop.

“So where is it?” Jesse asked Suit.

“You’re asking me? Maybe he hadn’t started it yet. There’s still a few weeks before graduation. Maybe he’d just been outlining it, or taking notes.”

“Gabe said he didn’t find anything like that in his desk at home.”

“The kid kept to himself, Jesse,” Suit said. “As much as the other kids liked him, he really only had a few people he was really close friends with. And the girlfriend. As much as Ainsley Walsh said everybody loved the guy.”

“By the way? She ever mention why she took down that comment about promises to keep?”

“I asked her,” Molly said. “She said it had popped up before and just made her more sad than she already was.”

“Back to Jack,” Jesse said, “He had to be working on that assignment somewhere.”

“If he was.”

“Let’s assume he was, for the sake of conversation.”

“So where?” Suit said.

“I’ve been meaning to pay a visit to your sister,” Jesse said to him. “Maybe now’s as good a time as any. Maybe everybody who went to the house missed something.”

They were in the conference room. Molly was with them. Gabe had just left.

“I thought you wanted us to concentrate on Jack’s case,” Molly said. “Or is this one of those fluid-type situations you like to talk about.”

“It is,” Jesse said. “And as I am currently doing a rather shit job on finding out who killed Charlie Farrell, I thought I might help out on Jack.”

He stood now. It meant they were done in here for now. Molly grinned. “Who asked for your help?”

“See how she talks to me?” Jesse said to Suit.

“Wish I could get away with that,” Suit said.

“I need to get to know this kid as more than a shortstop. And maybe just put a new set of eyes on it,” Jesse said.

“You were a lot less controlling when you were still drinking,” Molly said.

“No way for me to be a good judge of that.”

“Why is that?”

Jesse put out his hands in a helpless gesture. “I was drunk.”

An hour later Laura Carlisle was walking him up the stairs to her son’s bedroom, in their house on Earl Avenue. Laura said that she’d spent enough time in the room, at least for now. And maybe forever. Every time she went back in she felt as if she couldn’t breathe.

“I thought it would be a comfort,” she said. “Being in there, I mean, with all of his stuff, being able to feel his presence. But it just made me sadder and angrier and hurt more than it already did, if such things are even possible.”

The door to the bedroom was closed. They were standing in the hall.

“Thank you for not being the latest person to tell me it will get easier with time,” she said.

“Haven’t said it to Suit,” Jesse said. “Certainly not going to say it to you.”

He could see the family resemblance. Laura had a softer, feminine version of Suit’s face. Nearly six feet tall. The air inside the house, before he was even inside the kid’s room, was so heavy with sadness Jesse felt the urge to go around opening windows.

“Thank you for that,” she said.

She’d already given them permission to go through Jack’s MacBook Air. Gabe had done what Gabe did with searches like this, treated the laptop like a crime scene. When he was done he told Jesse that it seemed like the usual mess you’d find with a high school boy, much of it sports stuff on Safari, which seemed to be his primary browser. But when he’d switched over to Google Chrome, Gabe had said, the kid may have used something called Incognito.

“The kid knew his way around Safari’s privacy mode,” Gabe said. “And if he was using that deal called Incognito, which doesn’t record anything you do, there’s no way for us to know that.” Gabe had grinned at Jesse. “Why they call it ‘Incognito’ chief.”

“So we’re talking about an extremely private kid,” Jesse had said to Gabe.

“Hell, yeah.”

Before Jesse entered Jack’s bedroom, Jesse had asked Laura Carlisle why she thought her son might have been using something like Incognito.

“Well, he wasn’t afraid of me spying on him,” she said. “I’m not that mom. I mean, I know kids use Snapchat to send texts these days, because they disappear almost before you’ve finished reading them, the way I understand it.”

“Like they’re all trafficking in state secrets.”

“Exactly.”

“But does it make sense to you, the Incognito thing?”

“Have you ever heard the expression interior self?” Laura Carlisle asked.

“It’s often applied to me by Molly Crane, among others.”

“That was my son,” she said. “I’m not surprised to find out that he might be a budding playwright and not mention that to his mother.”

“I know you’ve been asked this,” Jesse said. “But did he seem depressed lately?”

“No. Maybe a little quieter than normal, which is saying plenty, believe me. But he had a lot going on with baseball and school. The only way I can explain it is that he was just being a slightly more interior version of Jack.”

She put a hand to her mouth. Jesse could see tears forming. She said she had things to do downstairs, and to take as much time as he needed.

Jesse opened the door and walked into Jack’s bedroom and remembered what it was like when he’d been in his own room in the small house in Culver City they’d moved to when he was in high school, when he could close the door and keep the world out, before the world could come find you because of the phone in your pocket and the laptop on your desk.

He’d told Laura he was looking for a hard copy of the play he might have printed. She told him she’d already looked through his room, come up empty, but to have at it, maybe she hadn’t looked in all the right places.

Jesse made a meticulous search of the room, which featured a huge color poster of Red Sox shortstop Xander Bogaerts over the desk. Jesse liked watching Bogaerts play. He was good, didn’t go out of his way to be flashy, made all the plays you were supposed to make and plenty you weren’t. He just wasn’t Ozzie Smith, Jesse’s guy, because nobody was, because Ozzie was the best who ever was.

He should have seen my poster of the Wizard of Oz, stretched out in midair, body parallel to the ground, glove extended.

Jesse went through the desk and the dresser. He checked under the mattress and under the bed. The only thing he found beneath the mattress was a new glove the kid had obviously been breaking in, a ball in the pocket, a string around all of it. A sight that squeezed Jesse’s heart.

The way kids playing ball had done it from the beginning of time.

Still no app that could do that if you wanted to get a glove broken in right.

He went through the books in the small standing bookcase. A lot of baseball books on the top shelf. And Playwriting: Structure, Character, How and What to Write, by Stephen Jeffreys. There was A Separate Peace, too, Jesse’s one true favorite, above all others, when he was in high school. He’d even named the one dog he had in high school Phineas, after one of the main characters.

If he had finished his play, why hide it, even if he was his mother’s secret boy?

Say the kid had taken his own life, and knew he was going to do it, would he have written about that, like a last will and testament, even for a high school senior?

His mother was right about one thing.

This room was a very sad place. Like the saddest place in the whole town. Jesse understood why Laura Carlisle didn’t want to be in here any longer, even though Jesse knew she would come back, again and again. And again. He wondered how long she would keep things the way they were in here. Or if she was already thinking about selling the house and moving to another one in Paradise. Or just moving out of town for good, even though Suit was all the family she had left.

Jesse went to the door, which Laura had closed behind him.

Turned around.

Something wasn’t right.

Didn’t fit.

He went back and sat down at the swivel chair at Jack’s desk and went through the drawers again.

Then knew what was bothering him.

Too neat.

Way, way too neat.

Jack Carlisle was a high school senior. He was a guy. Even if he’d been neater than most guys his age, no one was this neat, or this organized. He could be wrong. But didn’t think he was. Jesse was sure the mother had neatened things up before he came. Or had done that in the days after Jack was found in the water.

But everything in these drawers was too neat and too organized.

Would his mother have done that?

Or would she have just cleaned up the room, and not the inside of the desk?

Go ask her.

Jesse went back downstairs and found Laura Carlisle at the kitchen table, writing in a journal of her own. She smiled up at Jesse. “Like mother, like son.”

“Need to ask you something,” Jesse said. “Other than you and my people, has anybody else been alone in Jack’s room lately?”

She shook her head. “Sorry, no.”

“I’m sorry to have intruded,” Jesse said.

“Take care of Luther.”

“I will.”

She started to get up. Jesse told her to stay where she was, he could see himself out. He was already outside when Laura Carlisle opened the front door and called out to him.

“There was one other person,” she said.