Too Close to Home

THIRTY-EIGHT

Somehow, I pulled myself back onto the bridge,” Ellen said. “I think I must have been in some sort of shock, I don’t know. I still had the laptop. I looked down, hoping for some sign of Brett, but there was nothing. I ran to the end of the bridge, where there’s that set of stairs that goes all the way to the bottom?”

She looked at me and I nodded. I knew the stairs.

“I ran down there as fast as I could, looked all along the water’s edge, and I knew in my heart that no one could survive a fall like that. Not with all the rocks at the bottom of the falls. And then I thought I saw Brett, part of him, his back and one of his legs, on a rock, the water falling down on him, and I knew he was dead.”

She stopped. “I’d done such a horrible thing.”

“You were trying to do the right thing,” I said. “What happened was an accident, plain and simple. You did do the right thing, warning him about Conrad, what he was going to do. For all you know, Conrad was planning to do him in himself. Maybe, if you hadn’t followed Brett out to the bridge, he might have taken his own life. Thrown himself off along with the laptop.”

“If I hadn’t followed him, I think he’d still be alive.”

I would have said more to try to assuage Ellen’s feelings of guilt, but I sensed there was still more to the story. “What happened after?” I asked.

“I didn’t know who else to go to,” she said, “except Conrad.”

“You should have come to me,” I said.

“God, I wanted to,” Ellen said, her eyes pleading. “But where would I have started? You didn’t know, at this point, that I had been… seeing Conrad. To tell you about this would have meant, ultimately, confessing to everything, and, Jim…” She reached out and touched my arm. “I didn’t have it in me.”

I nodded.

“But I felt I had to tell someone, and that had to be Conrad, because what I’d done, I’d done because of him — not for him — but because of what he was going to do. I’d fucked it all up royally, but I was angry at him, I wanted him to share the blame, because he was the one who’d set this in motion. I went to his house. He had a place just outside the college where he lived alone, not the house he has now, of course. I just walked in through the front door and found him at the kitchen table, marking papers. I threw the laptop right in front of him, and he said, ‘What the hell is this?’

“I told him what had happened. How I’d tried to warn Brett, told him how his professor had betrayed him, and Conrad was getting red in the face, like he was going to explode. And then I told him what had happened, how Brett had tried to throw his own computer over the railing, how I’d gone after it, nearly falling to my death, how Brett had died trying to save me.”

“And his reaction to all that?”

“When I got to the part where Brett was dead, Conrad suddenly changed. He went into this kind of dead calm. He asked me if I was kidding. He asked me if that computer was Brett’s, whether it had Brett’s book on it. I assumed so, but hadn’t actually checked, so Conrad took it out of the pouch and opened it up and had a look and he didn’t say anything, but I could tell he was scrolling through something, and he was nodding, and then he closed the laptop. And all he said was, ‘I’ll look after this.’”

“He knew then he could get away with ripping it off.”

“I knew that’s what he was thinking. And I told him so. I said, ‘If you get that published under your name, I’ll let the world know what you’ve done.’ And he said to me, he grinned, he flashed me that fucking grin of his, and said, ‘And shall I tell the world how I got all the existing copies of this book? Shall I tell the world how it is that the actual, so-called writer of this book is unavailable to claim authorship? Shall I tell the world how you pushed him off Promise Falls, how you did it for me?’”

“He couldn’t have expected people to believe that.”

“That’s what I told him. I said, ‘Go ahead and try that story, but I think people are going to believe me when I lay everything out for them. And then he said, ‘What will they think when they find out you left the scene? Left Brett Stockwell to die without calling the police?’”

I must have made a face. “That wasn’t going to look good for you.”

“I know. But even that I thought I could explain. That I was in shock, which I was. I’d nearly died myself. I’d take my chances, at any rate. I knew that what Conrad had on me was potentially damaging. I could accuse him of stealing that kid’s book, but he could turn around and say he’d never meant to do that, that I’d acted on my own on his behalf—”

“Like Illeana did,” I said.

“Yeah, a bit like that. His story would be that I’d pushed Brett Stockwell off that bridge as a gift to him, so he could steal the book and get away with it.”

“It’s far-fetched, but someone might have believed it.”

“I was so confused,” Ellen said. “I was scared. And I was ashamed. I was afraid that if people believed Conrad’s story, what would that do to me? To us? And our son? We’d all be dragged into it.” She shook her head resignedly. “Coming for ward, exposing Conrad, it would have meant you finding out that we’d had an affair. It was over by the time you found that note, but by that time it was too late to come forward, to tell the truth about what Conrad had done. My silence had the effect of confirming his version of events.”

Ellen reached out and touched my arm. “I love you,” she said. “I love you now and I loved you then. I stayed quiet, hoping you’d never find out about any of it.”

I got up, walked around the kitchen, braced myself against the kitchen counter, looking down into the sink. “So all these things I’ve been trying to do these last few days, to show what Conrad had done, you sabotaged them,” I said, “because it would find its way back to both of us. You didn’t want me talking to him, you wanted to do that yourself. You got the disc back from Derek’s lawyer and gave it to him.”

“More or less.”

“And Albert Langley, he must have known what Conrad had done years ago, to have tipped him to the computer Derek and Adam were messing around with.”

“Yeah, Conrad confessed his sins to Albert. Not out of guilt, but to cover his ass, in case of any unexpected developments. When the book was about to come out, he started getting paranoid, went to Albert to talk it over, wanted to know if someone should accuse him of plagiarism, what were his options? Could he sue? He swore Albert to secrecy, which he didn’t exactly have to do, with Albert being his lawyer and all. Albert told him to ride it out.”

“And Albert must have known that the only other person who knew was you,” I said.

“I suppose,” Ellen said. “All these years, Conrad and I, we’ve had this sick hold on each other. When his book came out and the reviews were fabulous, and it made him rich, I had to smile through the whole thing. I wanted to quit, leave Thackeray, get away from him, but he said he wanted me to stay here, that I was doing a good job, that we could put this behind us. I think he was afraid that if I ever left, got out from under this thumb, I’d find the courage to expose him. He said I’d never get a job anywhere else, that he knew people. Maybe he couldn’t write his own book, but I believed he could make up some lies to tell anyone else I might want to work for.”

Ellen took a breath, then, “Anyway, Conrad never told Illeana what he’d done, about Brett and the book, so when she got wind of something this week, that you were supposedly trying to destroy her husband’s reputation, it didn’t much matter to her at that point whether it was true or not. She just didn’t want it coming out and ruining her perfect life with the college president. And so she got her brother and another goon to get that disc back. When Conrad found out, he went mad, couldn’t believe what she’d done, and he called me, spelled it all out for me, said if I identified her brother in the lineup, not only would things unravel, but that Illeana’s people were very dangerous. He told me they’d kill Derek if they had to.”

“Jesus, what a mess.” I sat back down at the table, took her hands in mine. “If I’d been you, I’d have done the same thing. I wouldn’t have fingered Illeana’s brother. Better to cut our losses now.”

“You remember what I said the other day?” Ellen asked. “When Derek was arrested, when he was in jail, and I said we were being punished? It was for the terrible things I’ve done, for letting that boy die.”

I squeezed her hands. “No,” I said. “No.”

What I couldn’t bring myself to say was, if we were being punished for that kind of thing, then I was going to have to shoulder some of the blame as well.