Clay, who has no real interest in these matters, begs off in favor of heading back to the cabin, streaming a hunting show on his phone. The others break away from him in the hallway, turning left into the school office. With Liam in the lead they continue straight ahead, not into his personal office but rather behind the long, high desk, like a library checkout counter, where the school secretary must have been entrenched. Here, a series of low filing cabinets spans the width of the wall directly behind it.
The space atop these cabinets, though only chest high to most of them, is unadorned apart from a solitary picture in a plain looking frame at each end, each propped up and slanted to face away from its respective corner. The nearest of these shows a much younger Liam standing in front of what is possibly the Grand Canyon, a woman of his same approximate age next to him, both flanked by two teenage looking girls. The other, of more recent vintage, depicts a grey bearded Blodgett onstage somewhere in cap and gown, shaking hands as he accepts a rolled up diploma.
“Hey, what’s this from?” Denise asks, genuinely interested.
“That’s for my doctorate,” he says, calculates, “so…eleven…no, twelve years ago.”
The others move to other end, to inspect the family photo, and then Lenny asks, grinning to soften the edges, “Okay, but what’s the story, here?”
“With what? The degree or the missus?” Blodgett deadpans.
“Both, I guess,” Lenny cackles.
Liam nods once, lips pursed before declaring, “and I guess the answer is the same in both instances as well.” He pantomimes the universal sign for someone imbibing an alcoholic beverage.
Catching his drift, Lenny also nods, a handful of times, explains, “yeah, that’s pretty much how I ended up here, too. In roundabout fashion.”
“Is that so? Drinking problem?”
“Eh, curiously enough, I really wouldn’t say so. I wasn’t drinking when I wrecked my bike, for example. But, you know, sometimes I felt like drinking on the job, so I would drink on the job. Of course,” Lenny laughs a little more heartily now, “my last boss didn’t quite see it that way.”
“Yes, these things are all cyclical, aren’t they? The free time leads to more drinking. Which often leads to more free time, as it were…”
As the other three are occupied pawing through the cabinets, extracting folders and examining their contents, Denise steps back, indicates all of the drawers and asks “hey, what happened here? Why does it look like somebody went after these with a crowbar?”
“Possibly because I did in fact go after them with a crowbar,” Liam tells her. “There’s a…small amount of similar material in a drawer in my office. I stumbled onto it one evening last week. This piqued my curiosity as to what might be found out here, but then I couldn’t locate the keys.”
“Dude, whoa,” Rafael remarks, though not to this. Rather, he has found a large, glossy, black and white photograph, with a couple dozen young boys and a handful of teachers, standing in front of what must be this very school.
“Holy shit!” Denise enthuses, and crowds in to inspect the photo alongside him, with the others to follow, hovering behind these two.
After studying the picture for a handful of seconds, Denise blurts out, “oh my God!” and starts tapping one boy’s face with her left index finger. “That’s him! Look, Emily!” She turns around to smile back at her sister, unable to believe the eerie coincidence. This kid she’s certain she’s never laid eyes on before, and absolutely not before having that disturbing dream about him. “This is that Charles Howard kid! I’m positive!”
“Huh. That’s wild,” Emily says, hoping that she is able to at least fake some enthusiasm. It’s strange, but she doesn’t even really wish to look at this photograph, and isn’t, only zoning out, eyes unfocused, with her head in that direction. Yet can’t say why this is the case, only that her heart begins beating out of control at the thought of it.
“Hey, check it out,” Lenny remarks, reaching an arm around Rafael’s shoulder to point at the photo. “Three from the left of the one you’re talking about. That’s fuckin Kidwell, ain’t it? Tell me that’s not fuckin Kidwell.”
“Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuck…,” Denise croaks. Flips the picture over, but there’s nothing written here, just as there’s no note of any sort on the front. Holding it up, for all to see as well as enabling herself to view it more closely, she says, “I knew it! He is such a lying, crooked jackass! Of course, even if you shoved this picture in his face, he would probably still claim it was so traumatic he must have suppressed the memory, and blah blah blah, et cetera…”
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