Misery Bay by Steve Hamilton Read Free Book Online Page B

off come September.
    As I was hearing the tale, I already knew what was coming next. By the time they saw each other again, Rebecca had spent the whole summer with Wayne, and Charlie had apparently sort of met somebody else, too. That part was a little fuzzy. Bottom line, there was a big fight and an official breakup and then an okay-let’s-be-good-friends a few weeks later. By the time winter break rolled around, everybody was reasonably happy. Or so it seemed.
    “I don’t think Charlie’s father knew anything about the breakup,” I said.
    “I just feel so bad,” she said. “I can’t help thinking I had something to do with what happened.”
    “No, come on,” Wayne said. “That’s not true at all. You know better.”
    Wayne sat there rubbing her back for a while as she fought off the tears. That’s when a few more of Charlie’s friends and classmates showed up. It became a jumble of names and young faces at that point, with lots more stories of how great a guy Charlie was and how nobody ever would have thought he’d be the kind of man to hang himself. There were apparently enough people over twenty-one now, so the beers started getting passed around and everything got a little louder. There was even a little bit of dark humor centered around the fact that Charlie was a forestry major and he decided to hang himself from a tree. That’s about when I decided it was time to leave.
    Wayne had introduced me to Charlie’s two other apartment-mates—Bradley, whose name I already had on my list, and another kid named RJ. They invited me to come back to the apartment to see where Charlie had lived, so a few minutes later we were all outside. The wind had picked up, so we were all trying to shield our faces from the driving snow as we walked up the hill, away from the water. It was Bradley and RJ and me, with Wayne and Rebecca tagging along behind us.
    It was a squat little apartment building on the very top of the hill, assaulted by the wind and the snow. I wasn’t even sure how it was still standing. They opened up the door and we all went inside and slammed the door behind us, flakes of snow still flying around us in the living room as we took off our coats.
    It was everything I expected from a college apartment, with odds and ends and cast-off furniture. Posters for rock bands I’d never heard of on three walls, but on the fourth, in place of the crappy little television and the CD player with the cheap speakers, was a forty-eight-inch hi-def LCD television surrounded by a sleek black sound system. I guess that’s the minimum these days, even for four half-starving college kids.
    Or rather, make that three. They showed me to the room Charlie shared with Wayne—his half of the room was pretty much empty now.
    “The police asked us to box up all his stuff,” Bradley said. He was a big kid, maybe fifty or sixty pounds overweight. A late bloomer with bad skin. I didn’t imagine he had much of a social life. Not up here where the men outnumber the women by a good seven to one.
    “It was just clothes and books and a few CDs,” RJ said. He was tall and thin and had dark hair and heavy eyebrows. There was something intense about him, and I’m sure most of the college girls would call him attractive. Unlike Bradley, I was sure he had no trouble finding someone to be with on a lonely Saturday night. “They said they were going to mail it all back to his father.”
    That makes sense, I thought, and it also means he’s already seen it all and gone through it. If there was anything to learn from it, he’d already had that chance.
    “It’s so weird not having him here,” Bradley said. “I mean, it’s not like we’d even want somebody else in here. Not that you’d find somebody in the middle of the school year. Heck, I don’t even know what I’m talking about.”
    I sat down on the bare mattress. Then I stood up and on a whim I lifted up the mattress to see if there was anything hidden underneath. There was