Echo Bridge

Chapter 12

Troubled. A few days later, the word was still rolling around in my head like a marble. I was sighting a bottle of organic Caribbean hot sauce down the barrel of a 20-gauge shotgun, my finger on the trigger. Ted's brother Tom was home from college-it was the weekend before Thanksgiving, and he had the week off-and though it was an invitation I usually declined, I'd taken them up on a little target practice in the field behind their house. The Parker brothers didn't shoot empty cans, instead raiding their mother's pantry for unopened containers of approximate gore: Bonne Maman strawberry preserves, San Marzano tomatoes, red wine vinegar in ornate bottles. Secretly, I had always found this morbid, but that day I saw the appeal. The barrel was cold in my left hand, and the wood butt dug into my shoulder. I braced my boots firmly in the dirt. Tom was watching me, waiting for me to fumble. I squeezed the trigger and grit my teeth, and the hot sauce went down, chipotle gore across the faded leaves of November. I felt pretty tough for a second. You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me? (Taxi Driver, four Oscar nominations, 1977.)

"Nice," said Tom. "Courtney, I must admit, I didn't know you had it in you."

"Good job," muttered Ted. He hadn't been watching my shot, but he put his arm around me anyway. He'd been distracted all day, all week, even after Hugh had come back to school. You'd have thought Hugh had been out with an exotic but not contagious disease by the fuss everyone had made. Ted and his boys, Melissa and Hilary, and even Marian, Selena, and Lindsay all flanked him in the halls like bodyguards. Rory Swanson, the junior Ted had thrown up against the wall, didn't show up at school on Thursday or Friday, and though I knew the kid was probably just afraid of getting his ass kicked and trying to lay low until Monday, the murmured gossip around school was that Hugh had found out about Rory's bookmaking and put him deservedly in the hospital. At Belknap Country Day, Hugh Marsden was a bigger deal than ever.

I leaned the gun against the large flat boulder that anchored the field, and Tom sat down on it, pulling a Miller Lite from the mini cooler at his feet. "So, little brother. Are you going to tell me what it was Marsden took at Revelry? Because I heard Mom and Dad talking last night. I believe the phrases 'negative influence' and 'dragging Teddy down' were used."

Ted dropped his arm from my shoulders, and his jaw tightened. He picked up the gun and began to reload it. "Influence, huh?" He occupied himself with the shells for a moment.

Ted was pissed, but I thought I saw him almost smile to himself. He raised the gun and a bottle of grenadine shattered on the far end of the field. "Nobody's dragging me down. My boy's in trouble, and I'm going to have his back." He dropped the shotgun to his side and finally met Tom's placid gaze. "If anyone should get that, it's you, Tom. He didn't take anything. Hugh has always been a boozehound ever since we first swiped shots of Jameson from Dad's bar. But he's never been into drugs." Ted shrugged.

Suddenly, the anger he'd been wearing like armor fell away, and he looked worried, scared even, for the first time in a week. "They did tests at the hospital, but everything was inconclusive. There were a lot of different things it could have been, and none of them made sense. There was some vaguely plausible allergy med reaction story that Hugh's parents told Farnsworth, but Hugh doesn't have allergies." Ted raised the gun and aimed at the last bottle left, a raspberry vinaigrette from a local farm stand. But then he dropped the gun to his side. "Hugh thinks someone might have slipped him something."

"What are you talking about?" I demanded, more harshly than I meant. I dug my nails into my palms. No way could Hugh know. No way.

"Oh, come on. That's a little paranoid." Tom swigged his beer. I was so grateful I could have kissed him, even though I'd always thought he was a jerk. He and Ted looked a lot alike, with the same wavy hair and golden coloring, but where Ted was solid and broad, Tom was long-limbed and lithe. His sport at Country Day had been basketball, but now he ran track at Dartmouth. He resettled his lanky self against the rock.