“Quentin,” Dean said. “You’d tell me, right? I mean, if anything was going on with you again...”
Quentin took Dean’s face in his hands. He kissed him, because it was something he knew how to do, because he could close his eyes to do it and because it felt a hell of a lot better than answering that question. “What are you scared of?” Dean whispered.
Getting found out.Quentin didn’t say it, but the words raked at his skin, the backs of his eyeballs. They pushed into his lips as he kissed the man he loved more than anything, so much more than himself... Those words, always close to the surface when the topic of his mother came up, her death and what it had done to him, what he’d done...
His hands slid down the length of Dean’s smooth body, more powerful than his own and yet more yielding. He wasn’t all coiled up inside like Quentin was. He had nothing to hide.
Quentin pulled away. “I’ll investigate,” he said. “I’ll look into April Cooper’s past. If I can find a compelling enough reason to believe she survived that fire, I’ll fly out to New York and track down Renee.”
“Quentin.”
“Yeah?”
“I know what you’re scared of.”
Quentin’s stomach tightened. “What?”
“Hurting people.”
Quentin smiled, tears forming in his eyes. He closed his laptop. Clicked the light off, thinking back to months ago, weeks after his mother’s death, when he’d awakened from a nightmare and reached out for Dean, pulled him too close and held on too tight, his lips pressed to Dean’s shoulder, his face wet against Dean’s neck, bothfists jammed into his stomach, hanging on for his life.Don’t leave me, please don’t leave me, please...Dean waking, holding him. The gentlessshes andit’s okays, andI won’t of course I won’t. I’ll never leave you.
But you don’t know me. You don’t know what I’ve done.
Neither one of them had mentioned it in the morning. Neither one of them had spoken of it again. “You’re right,” Quentin said, his eyes open in the soft pitch-dark. “I don’t want to hurt anyone.”
Five
Quentin
THE HOUSE WHEREApril Cooper had lived with her doomed stepfather and baby sister had been leveled decades ago. But Santa Rosa High School, where she’d gone for what was commonly believed to have been the last year of her life, was still around, located in a dusty little town of the same name—a far-flung L.A. suburb situated between Duarte and Monrovia that was nowhere near as lovely and exotic as its name suggested.
Judging from the old pictures Quentin had found online, it hadn’t changed much over the last forty-three years, save for the stores in the strip malls that lined the wide, treeless streets. Back then, it had been all about Perry’s Pizza and Sunglass Hut and Good Earth Health Foods (Now serving frozen yogurt!). These days it was mostly nail salons, punctuated by the occasional Chick-fil-A or Starbucks, plus a surprising number of crafting shops with overly cute names. Stitches n’ Such, Buckets O’ Yarn, Trimmin’ the Tree. All those apostrophes, cropping up like dandelions everywhere you looked.
Santa Rosa High School was less than a five-minute drive away from St. Xavier, the Catholic boys’ school attended by Gabriel LeRoy. But Quentin already knew that. It was part of the lore, how Cooper and LeRoy had met cute at the McDonald’s between theirtwo schools. The thing that surprised him most about SRHS was how close it was to Duarte, where George Pollard lived and worked. He’d grown up more than fifty miles away and had gone to college at Stanford, which was 350 miles north of here. Yet when it came time to settle down, he’d somehow made it back to his first love’s last-known location. Quentin wondered how often Pollard drove by April’s old school on a weekly basis—because that really was the question, wasn’t it? Notif, buthow often?
He could imagine Pollard cruising slowly past while talking to his wife on the phone, explaining to her and to himself that he was taking the long way home from work, his sparkling brown eyes aimed at the front steps, hoping to see a ghost.
Santa Rosa High was a beige building, squat and charmless, with slits for windows like a jail. It probably hadn’t changed a bit since April Cooper was a student, which made Quentin understand, to a small degree, how she might have run off with a deranged murderer. Anything to escape.
After he pulled into the visitors’ parking lot and found a space, Quentin took out his phone and recorded that thought. If this were to become a podcast, the story might very well start here, in the hellhole that spawned April Cooper. The skin prickled at the back of his neck, the feeling a familiar one—the thrill of being onto something, that first spark of understanding that would fire his curiosity, pushing him to investigate further. Quentin was beginning to understand April Cooper. Whether he wanted to or not.
“A place like this,” he said into the voice recorder, “might even drive someone to kill.”
QUENTIN HAD BEENwrong about Santa Rosa High School being unchanged since the ’70s. While it was definitely true of the décor, not to mention the ventilation system (How can any of these kids stayawake in class?), the security at SRHS was 2019 all the way. Intercom. Metal detector. Heavy glass doors that, according to Melanie at the front desk, were bulletproof. “We haven’t had an actual school shooting,” she said, “but we’ve had some close calls. The PTA petitioned the school board, and with the help of a wealthy donor...”
“You’re safe now,” Quentin said.
“I guess,” said Melanie. “You ask me, they could have spent some of the money on new computers. Maybe a few books.”
“Central air-conditioning?”
“Exactly. But the donor was specific.”
“Interesting.”
She shrugged. “People are scared in this town. Too scared if you ask me.” Melanie clashed with her industrial surroundings. Raven-haired and pale-skinned, thanks to a shiny dye job and copious amounts of matte powder, she could have been anywhere from twenty-five to fifty years old, though Quentin figured she had to be on the lower end. She wore glittery cat-eye glasses, bright red lipstick, a vintage ’50s frock that looked like something Lucy Ricardo would have worn out shopping with Ethel. A hell of a lot of work, just to sit at the front desk of a stifling-hot high school over summer vacation, talking to absolutely no one for 90 percent of the day. An older person, he thought, probably wouldn’t have bothered. “At any rate,” Quentin said, “thanks for buzzing me in.”
“Are you kidding me?” she said. “You’re Quentin Garrison.”
