Page 124 of What Boys Learn

And then our voices stopped. It couldn’t have been more than ten minutes into the session. I forwarded a little. Forwarded again. The only sound was a dry hiss of moving tape and Curtis’s occasional throat clearing. He’d kept recording. Another fast-forward. Nothing. I flipped the thirty-minute tape over and pressed Play again. Nothing and nothing and nothing, until finally, my startled voice, as I woke at the end of the hour:Do we need to start over?

No, Curtis had told me.Our time is up.

I stared at the tiny white reels, coming to a sudden stop. The tape was done.

But where were all those parts where I talked about the half-naked girl I’d seen jump out of the car? Where was the accident in horrific detail? Where were my shameful, remorseless confessions?

I briefly considered whether Curtis had simply recorded over them, exchanging my problematic confession for white noise. But the throat clearing proved it wasn’t so. He’d kept recording.

There was only one possibility left. I hadn’t said most of the things in that transcript.

I pulled out the tape, staring at it, the magnitude paralyzing for a moment. Who woulddothat?

It’s what I’d asked of myself after reading the transcript, but now the question doubled back on itself. Who would defraud a patient into thinking she’d seen and heard things that never happened?

A few details were there—things I’d told Curtis at the start of the session, other moments he could have gleaned from Ewan. But most of it was invention. He didn’t bother to implant a false memory during the session itself. He didn’t even bother with conventional hypnosis. He just drugged me into submission and then wrote utter falsehoods into the transcript, knowing I’d believe them.

I crawled out of the window, came around the office, and continued toward the front of the darkened main house. I tried the front door—locked. And several windows—but most of them were picture windows, and the only one that looked possible to slide open was high above my head. Every room inside looked empty, as best I could tell in the dim light. I had nearly circled the house when my eye fell on a large tarp-covered object in the back yard. Riding lawn mower? Immense pile of firewood?

When I got close enough, I saw it was a vehicle supported by several tire jacks, the wheels completely removed. That was a lot of trouble to go through in order to store a car in summertime, especially if Curtis would be coming back to retrieve it soon.

The tarp was fastened down on all sides by a web of bungee cords. I unhooked two from the rear of the SUV, spotting the removal of the back plates, and worked my way around the front, panning with my phone light until I stopped. The front of the car was buckled. Grill dented, front edge of the hood curled back like a lip, sneering.

My mind searched for the last time I’d seen the SUV. I could picture it shooting past—the car a white blur, disappearing around the house, the one and only time Curtis was late for one of Benjamin’s appointments. I could see him moments later, face shiny, pushing back his dark hair.

That’s when I’d driven from his place to a café, the same place I’d gotten the call from Willa about Christopher Weber, who had died sometime before dawn, hit by a driver who was never found. The accident hadn’t surprised Curtis at all. He was smug. Weber was reckless.Maybe he pissed someone off.

What had the police said? Something about the tires and the car color being common. Curtis’s SUV was white. Tires, missing.

I stared at the crumpled bumper, making space in my mind for this new thing. Bigger than the microcassette tape, which mattered only to me. Bigger than any of the wild speculations I had half indulged, still trying to keep open the possibility that Curtis could be surrounded by death without any of it being his fault.

And if it was his fault?

You didn’t crash into the car of a former patient on a backcountry road several hours away by accident. You had to hunt that person, first. You had to be arrogant enough to believe that you’d get away with it, no matter the evidence left behind. Tire tracks. Paint chips. And if you could get away with such a thing you were probably both lucky and smart, smarter than the man you wanted to kill, even if he was a killer and a psychopath.

I startled at the buzzy call of some night bird, coming from behind me, in the woods that surrounded Grove Academy. Just through those trees, the school was so close.

Harper, I thought, picturing her as I’d seen her in the school portrait—awkward, spotty, and so very young.

Stupid and impulsive.

I remembered the expression on Curtis’s face when he said those words. Impulsivity was what he hated most in his failed clients. The thing he would hate the most in himself if one time—a time of strong desires only recently unbottled—he gave in and did something rash.

Harper McKibben.

Too close to home. Broad daylight. No witnesses, but still, what a risk.

Harper McKibben was picked up in Lake Forest. She was disposed of in a ravine two miles from Lake Forest.

Too close too close too close.

I pulled onto my residential street and parked at the curb. My car doors were locked. I was parked under a bright streetlight. Even though I was physically and mentally exhausted, the whole night had made me so jittery that I didn’t even want to step out of my car. I gripped my phone, like it had the answers I still needed.

Curtis Campbell. Out of grad school for about twenty years. A therapist and researcher at a time when the most heinous crimes against women in our area seemed to be on the wane.

The timeline kept troubling me, as did the paradox of Curtis’s professional identity. If he was someone trying to cure psychopaths, he would have been heartened to know something was working, there were fewer murders by strangers, fewer serial killers especially. But if he harbored his own dark appetite, how would that make him happy?

I had to keep reminding myself: None of Robert’s maps and graphs really proved there were fewer serial killers from the 2010s on. There were fewer serial killers identified by the police. Fewer serial killers who were caught. And even the ones who were caught had changed their behavior. They drove farther to dump their bodies. They’d become more careful. It meant something. I could tell that it did, just as Harper’s name had meant something the first time I heard it. It was the sound of the past opening up—a sinkhole—strange proof of unseen forces. Violence under the surface of everyday life.