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I look away, biting back my smile. “Fair enough.”
I’ve done a lot I could’ve gotten arrested for, if not for my dad and my uncles.
I peer up at him. “You knew my father.”
“I knew of him,” he says. “Saw him race a few times when the Loop was young.”
He comes around the front of his desk and sits on the edge.
“What did you think of him?” I ask.
“Initial impression, I thought he was a little shit.” He smiles, combing his brown hair back over the top of his head. “I thought, here was this kid who comes and goes as he likes and answers to no one. No one’s on his back, making demands. Why the chip on his shoulder? Why’s he always pissed off?”
“Pretty much.”
Mr. Bastien locks eyes with me, his smile softening. “And now, I think, here was thiskid, answering to no one,” he pauses for a moment before continuing. “No one on his back, caring where the hell he was or what he was doing.”
I fall silent. I know my dad’s history, but I guess I know my grandma as she is now, and it’s hard to picture anything different. He was on his own a lot, wasn’t he?
“Your parents were around?” I ask Bastien.
“No.” He shakes his head. “I still couldn’t come and go as I liked, though. Siblings.”
“Did you know the people who lived in the house where I’m staying?”
He holds my gaze. “What have you heard?”
“Nothing.” I shrug. “Just that the only Pirate girl to trade to Weston twenty-two years ago stayed there. She never made it back home. Drowned in the car you can still see on the bottom of the river when the water level is low. But we don’t have a record of any student deaths that year. Or the year before or the year after.”
He folds his arms across his chest. “But I’ll bet she doesn’t show up to any of the class reunions, does she?”
Does she? I didn’t think of that. I’ll have to ask Hawke.
Bastien seems to believe the story, though.
“I don’t know anyone who was in school with her,” I admit, “and happenings back then are hard to track online.”
He exhales a laugh. “Winslet MacCreary,” he tells me. “I was a few years ahead of her in school. Our version is that she was dead before she was put in the car that went over the bridge.”
That would be a blessing. What a terrible way to die otherwise.
“Her body was washed away,” he explains. “Her parents probably held out hope for a while, which is why there wasno memorial before the end of the school year or mention in the yearbook or school paper.”
“What does your version say happened to her here?”
He draws in a breath, bowing his head for a moment.
“Twin brothers.” He meets my eyes again. “One in love with her to the point of madness, and when she refused him, he stood on the bridge, with rocks in his pockets, and swallowed the key to the handcuffs around his wrists.”
Wow.
“Just before he jumped,” Bastien adds.
A shiver courses down my spine.That’sa terrible way to die.
“He waited for a stormy night,” he goes on. “When the water would be high, the current strong, and the visibility zero. It took eight days for his body to wash up about ten miles downriver.”
“So, it was found?”
