Wreckage: An Addictive Psychological Thriller Packed with Twists, page 3
I’m a 1099er, not a salaried staffer. The pay is tragic, but the freedom agrees with me. I show up at the office once or twice a week for meetings. Most days, I patch in from home.
I call Rajam, my boss, and tell her sorry, sorry, I’ve been dealing with a medical emergency, but I’ll make up the work later. She says fine and she hopes I’m blah-dee-blah.
I consider calling the police, but what would I tell them? My visitors left no traces, and I can’t identify them except to say that one of them had a reddish beard and small, even teeth. But of course, the larger issue is that until I know what happened to that “suicide note”—and until I read its full contents—I don’t feel too jazzed about bringing in the cops.
I check my emails. There are several from the programming and design teams at work. They can wait. I also find one from my sister Angela, saying she’s worried about me. The hospital must have called her. Her name was listed as next of kin.
Angie lives in Wentworth too. She helped me with Mom duties whenever she, Ange, was sober. Unfortunately, that wasn’t all too frequently, and she and I haven’t talked a lot since Mom went to her big Parish Bingo Night in the sky. Complicating matters is the fact that Mom bequeathed the house to me, not Angie, which is a touchy spot between us. I briefly consider asking Ange if I can stay at her apartment for a couple of days, but I don’t want to put her in danger, and I really don’t want to deal with her drinking.
I need to find that deleted suicide note before I leave. Supposedly it’s hard to fully delete a file from a computer; it can almost always be recovered. But I have no idea how. For a guy who works in a technical field, I am astoundingly low-tech.
A muffled thump issues from somewhere behind me. I freeze. Squirrel or assassin? My urgency to vacate the premises shoots into the red zone.
I run upstairs to my bedroom, dig out a backpack, and throw in a few haphazard changes of clothes, some toiletries, a couple of books, and a phone charger. Grabbing my all-weather jacket, I dash out to the car, leaving the computer behind.
4
Ipace the floor of my sad single standard at the Oak Crest Motel (nary an oak to be glimpsed), trying to ignore the thick smell of bleach—I hope it’s bleach—in the air. I chose this place because of its off-the-beaten-path location and rear parking lot. I don’t want my car to be seen from the road.
I haven’t come up with a plan beyond “house bad, motel good.” The anxiety in my chest feels like a physical mass. I long to talk to someone I trust but tragically have no one to call. Angie, whom I love dearly, is probably hammered to the nines by this hour and, alas, is also physically incapable of listening. I don’t want to argue about the house either.
There was a time I would have called my friend Miles in a situation like this. He’s a pretty good listener, or at least pretends to be. But we had a “cooling off,” shall we say, when I left the island, and he and I have some ground to cover first.
Besides, if that note said what I thought it said, my relationship with Miles has just taken on a troublesome new twist. I still have a few other friends on Musqasset, but we don’t really have “chat on the phone” relationships. Besides, I’d rather they thought I was painting in a loft in Bruges.
That damnable suicide note is eating at my mind. There should be some trace of it that can be reconstructed. I regret having left my iMac behind. I wish I could tool with it right now. With darkness approaching, though, I don’t feel safe going home to get it.
If only I had some way to tap into my computer remotely. I’ve never bothered to hook it up to the Cloud. I rack my brain to come up with a solution, but low blood sugar has turned my skull into an ever-tightening vise. I’ve got to put something in the ol’ Twinkie-hole.
.....
I’m sitting at the bar at J.B.’s Pub, a rural roadhouse with poor self-esteem and a truly frightening jukebox lineup, scarfing down a Cowboy Burger and watching a cornball old movie starring George Segal and a fresh-out-of-acting-school Denzel Washington. It’s called Carbon Copy. Each time the title comes up, my gut tickles, but I can’t figure why.
Then, mid-burger-bite, it hits me. There’s an online service called CarbonCopy—it provides remote backup of personal computer files. I have it on my iMac, courtesy of Rajam; its icon sits there in the upper corner of my screen.
My skin prickles with excitement. CarbonCopy makes daily backups of your files and archives them. That means even if my home invaders eliminated all traces of the suicide note from my computer when they returned to my house, there’s a chance a copy exists on my backup. And I can access my backup from any computer.
My burger loses its scant appeal. I need to get into my CarbonCopy account. That means getting my hands on a computer. My phone won’t do. Technically, it’s an Internet portal, but it’s a Barney Rubble iPhone with a tiny screen, all scratched up. I need to use a real computer. Where can I find one at seven forty-five on a Wednesday evening?
Do Internet cafés still exist? I google “cyber café” and find there is, indeed, a brew-house in nearby Haverhill that rents computer time. It’s open till eleven and only a few miles away.
I slap a twenty on the bar and head out the door to saddle up my trusty Hyundai. Yee-ha.
.....
Brew Moon is a wannabe-hipster joint that suffers from a pronounced dearth of hipsters. Other than the requisitely goateed and eyebrow-impaled barista, who crafts my iced Vietnamese Cà Phê Dá with studied indifference—ten bucks says his name is Bennett or Django—the rest of the tiny night crowd is woefully unhip and borderline desperate-looking. All but one of the computer stations are available. I pay for my Cà Phê Dá, which comes with a free hour of computer time, and settle into a Mac station in the darkest corner of the room.
I google CarbonCopy and go directly to its website. I’m able to access my account and view the mirror image of my home hard drive. After a bit of clicking around, I learn that CarbonCopy lets you restore any folder to an earlier version by date.
I do the restoration process for August 23, the date of my home invasion. Can’t believe my eyes—at the top of the AutoRecovery folder is a Word file created on that date. I double-click on the auto-generated filename and hold my breath.
Holy crap. There it is: a document with the heading, “Finnian Carroll’s Absolutely Final (This Time I Mean It) and Incontestable Suicide Note and Last Confession.” With my brain now free of toxic chemicals, I can read the text easily. I wish I couldn’t.
Friends, Romans, Countrymen,
I, Finnian Carroll, have opted to “put in for early reincarnation,” i.e., terminate this failed attempt at an earthly existence. I do this because I can no longer come up with a defensible reason to crawl out of bed each morning. Thus have I swallowed a large quantity of the very pills intended to keep me alive, along with enough vodka to kill a Russian game programmer (or at least get him mildly buzzed). I apologize to whoever discovers the “results” of my actions—hope it wasn’t too grisly a scene (unless it was you, Clyde Gilchrist, then I hope it was straight out of Battle Royale).
They say confession is good for the soul. I hope that’s true, because my soul is going to need all the help it can get.
The tone then takes a less smarmy turn.
Eighteen years ago, on May 12, 1999, the night of my college graduation, I made a lethal mistake, which I failed to atone for.
I stand up and walk away from the computer, blowing air from my cheeks. I’m starting to hyperventilate. I need to calm down. Taking a slow breath from my diaphragm, I sit back down and continue reading.
That night, I went to a graduation party at a professor’s farmhouse in Bridgefield, Mass. There was a lot of drinking. Late in the evening, a close friend and I went outside to share a goodbye toast in private.
Somehow, we’d gotten our hands on an expensive bottle of Glenmalloch single malt scotch. We passed it back and forth, sitting by a stream behind the house, talking and reminiscing. I had never drunk scotch before and had little experience with hard liquor in general. I did not realize how drunk I was getting (not an excuse, just an explanation).
I left the patry—my eyes note the misspelling—alone. Foolishly and regrettably, I got behind the wheel of my car, taking the scotch bottle with me.
As I was driving home—on the “back roads”—I dozed off at the wheel and almost struck the stone wall bordering the Dempsey Bridge. I jammed on the brakes, making a loud squeal, and went into a panic. What if the noise attracted attention? I’d had way too much to drink and was carrying an open container of alcohol. I had to get rid of the bottle.
What I did next was an honest mistake, but the costliest one of my life. I threw the half-full bottle over the bridge. I won’t describe the consequences of my action here, but for those interested in knowing...
Here the note provides a link, presumably to a news article (the name bostonglobe is embedded in the URL).
Where I erred, morally speaking, was not so much in making the initial mistake but in failing to own it once I realized what I’d done.
I have regretted my actions every day since, and it’s not an overstatement to say they have ruined my life. I deeply apologize to all those whose lives I have affected.
Until next life,
Finnian Carroll
I feel like there’s a blowgun dart in my neck. This note is a flat-out impossibility. Shock waves bombard me, and I can’t make sense of my world. I wobble to my feet. If I don’t get some air, I’m going to pass out, right on the floor of Brew Moon.
5
Ihang an “In Use” tag on the monitor and tell Barista General Django I’ll be back. Punching the door open, I stumble out into the chill night air.
My legs are on autopilot. I jam my hands into my pockets and pound my bootheels up Washington Street, past the sleepy pubs and closed thrift shops. Without conscious intent, I’m heading toward the bridge over the Merrimack River.
Questions tumble in my head like clothes in a dryer. Logic can’t get traction in my brain. There are so many disturbing elements to the note, I have trouble putting them in order of enormity. First and foremost, it contains facts no one could possibly know about. No one on the entire planet but me. No one. Then there are other details only Miles and I would know. But also, there are crucial facts that are flat-out wrong or omitted. Why? How? Either someone is lying or doesn’t know the whole story.
Who could possibly have learned these private and unknowable truths? And why are they making a move now, after eighteen silent years? And, oh yes—don’t want to overlook this trifling detail—why do they want me dead because of it?
Of course, the biggest question of all—and the one I must answer before this evening is over—is, What actually, factually happened after the bottle was thrown that night? My entire adult life has been an exercise in stuffing that jack into its box. But tonight, when I get back to that computer at Brew Moon, the jack will be sprung, baring its grinning teeth. I will learn the facts. At long last. I am both terrified and relieved.
I arrive at the Comeau Bridge and gaze down at the rushing black Merrimack far below. I reflect that if a certain glass bottle had landed in these waters all those years ago, as intended, the worst crime committed would have been littering.
The flowing water has a hypnotic effect. I allow myself to be carried back to a night I spend as little time thinking about as possible.
.....
May 12, 1999. Miles and I did indeed go to a party, at a farmhouse in the rural section of Bridgefield, where a sociology professor we knew co-ran a small organic farm.
The Godwin College graduation had taken place that afternoon, and I was now a certified Bachelor of Arts. Stand back, world. Godwin, a small private college in blue-blooded Bridgefield, Massachusetts, catered largely to upmarket students who didn’t make the Ivy League cut but wanted to go to a school that looked the part. About two-thirds of its students were residents who lived in the dorms or college apartments. A third were local commuters. Townies. Like me. I lived in Wentworth, the neighboring blue-collar city, with my parents, and never could have afforded Godwin if not for a full scholarship.
I drove Miles and his live-in girlfriend Beth to the party that night. They were planning to return the next day to Miles’s home state of Connecticut, there to take up their rightful places in the world of privilege-by-birthright that I knew only from behind a glass wall. This was to be our final night together as college friends.
Jeannie, my unofficial girlfriend, came to the party too but tellingly did not come with me. We were already starting to do the emotional mitosis necessitated by our career choices: she had taken a job in Quebec and I was heading to grad school at RISD—Rhode Island School of Design. Jeannie and I were planning to have our grand goodbye the following weekend.
The beer was flowing freely, but I was trying to be temperate. I knew I’d be driving later and the local constabulary would be out in force on this celebratory night.
May 12th was a gorgeous spring evening, strident with frog song, that seemed to stretch on forever. There was a pass-the-guitar session around a fire pit, and I yowled out a couple of Cohen tunes. There were sloppy toasts and long goodbye hugs and tearful reminiscences.
Toward the waning part of the evening, I managed to get Miles alone for a private goodbye. Miles Sutcliffe was my best friend. We came from different worlds, but we had bonded at a level I’m not sure I understand even today. I was working-class all the way, deeply self-conscious and insecure. Miles was cool and self-assured, from old Connecticut money (though the bulk of the family money had taken its show on the road a generation or two earlier, leaving mostly old Connecticut attitude).
Our friendship grew from the fact that we both loved to talk endlessly about topics no one else was remotely interested in—Castaneda, game theory, obscure Monty Python sketches. We tended to drive other people away with the fervor and exclusivity of our conversations.
Miles was a handsome SOB, with a smile that made estrogen boil. For the first three years of college, he had an endless, overlapping stream of gorgeous, brainy, and cool girlfriends. In fact, I can’t remember a single girl—except Jeannie—who ever spurned his advances. It wasn’t till senior year that he became exclusive with Beth, who, oddly enough, was the “plainest” looking girl he’d ever dated, as well as one of the least imaginative. Well, maybe not so odd when you realized how much her dad was worth.
The dudes loved Miles too. Yep, all the preppy boys and girls genuflected at the altar of Miles Sutcliffe. And because I was his friend, and a reasonably funny guy, I got to nibble at some of his social crumbs. But when push came to shove, most of his friends regarded me as little more than smart-assed white trash. Fun to have around in a group setting—a capuchin monkey in a bellhop cap—but not invite-on-the-ski-trip material.
Here’s the thing about that miserable bottle of scotch: I bought it for Miles as a gift, and I didn’t drive with it in my hands, as the note claimed. ...And I was not the one who tossed it off a bridge.
About eleven o’clock that evening, I went looking for Miles and found him embroiled in a flirt session with a pair of comely female underclassmen.
“Sutcliffe,” I said, holding up two heavy-bottomed whiskey glasses I’d appropriated from the house. “Come with me, I want to give you something.”
“A kiss? You can do that here,” he said. “Everybody knows.” The gals laughed. It was an open joke that certain members of the male student body opined that Miles and I were gay because of our constant and enthusiastic companionship.
I wiggled the whiskey glasses like fishing lures and started down the path to the stream behind the farmhouse. Miles followed. When we got to the banks of the brook, I surprised him with the bottle I’d hidden in the riot of early spring growth. It was the Glenmalloch, his dad’s favorite single-malt. This was the sixteen-year stuff, and it came in a special, limited edition, decanter bottle, rectangular-shaped and made of heavy glass. It had set me back eighty-something bucks. I was proud of it.
“I want to have a private toast with you,” I said, “and I want to do it with a man’s drink, not something from a red Solo cup.”
I handed Miles the bottle. He responded with an overly hard hug that told me he was already pretty toasted. He uncorked the bottle expertly and poured us each a finger. We clinked our glasses and drank. To my uncultured tongue, the stuff tasted like Listerine. But Miles, as in so many other things, was light years ahead of me, taste-wise. He rolled the nectar around on his tongue, savoring the texture and flavor.
“That’s whisky as God intended it,” he proclaimed. “Blended scotch ought to be used for soaking machine parts.” A ridiculously pompous statement for a 21-year-old but the kind of thing Miles could get away with.
I was soon to learn that Miles, who was always judicious in his consumption of beer and wine, was powerless under the spell of single malt. Over the next hour or so, as we swapped memories and promises by lantern light, he swigged from the bottle like it was a hiker’s canteen. His speech got sloppier as his tongue got looser.
Miles was typically a guarded guy beneath his cool exterior. He liked to have fun but not too much of it. He talked like an anarchist but was careful never to do anything that might besmirch the family name.
Not tonight, though. Tonight, he was throwing off the moorings. Sharing his family scandals with me, offering scathing analyses of all our friends. “What’s the over-under on when Timmons gives up the hetero act and starts begging for bratwurst in his bun?” Whoa. My window of opportunity for getting Miles home conscious was slipping shut.
“Wait here, brother. I’m gonna go find Beth.”
I took a walk around the property, looking for Beth amongst the lingering partygoers, but she was nowhere to be found. I didn’t want to leave without her. Someone finally told me, “She left with Fitzy and Deb, like an hour ago.” Beth often became impatient with Miles and me as a duo, so it didn’t surprise me she’d found her own way home.
