Page 91 of What Boys Learn

The most frightening moment, Veronica’s parents relayed in a clip of a TV news report, was when the unknown man told the twenty-year-old she was being moved to a new location. She thought she was being trafficked somewhere else, into the hands of someone less gentle or conscientious. For a long time after she was brought out to the car, blindfolded and with her hands tied, she could hear a vacuum running in the house or apartment they’d just exited, and once he entered the car, she could smell bleach.

Then they started driving. At least an hour. The car stopped. The man let her out onto the road shoulder, still blindfolded.

“The plan changed,” he said. He snipped the plastic ties at her wrist and told her she could count to one hundred, then take the blindfold off.

The reporter asked Veronica’s mother, “Do you believe Christopher Weber was the one who took her?”

Weber’s car was a two-seater MG, I thought to myself. The news story had already described Veronica reclining in a back seat. On top of that, Weber was dead.

But I was criticizing too soon. The reporter prompted, “Not the one who let her go, because Weber died days before her release. But could he have left her with a partner, and that’s why the plan changed, once Weber crashed his car?”

“She thinks it was all the same man.”

The reporter looked disappointed. “But she couldn’t see him.”

“But she could hear him. She could smell him.”

The reporter started to turn away, ready to wrap up her commentary, when the mother added, “That’s the only reason we’re talking about this. Because whoever did it is still out there. People should know.”

The reporter asked Veronica directly if she had anything else to share. Had the man said anything else before driving away? The mother threw a cautioning glance at her daughter, like she didn’t want her to answer. But Veronica, who hadn’t spoken once during the interview, lowered her mouth toward the microphone. “Kittens must catch their own mice.”

“Kittens?” the reporter asked.

“That’s what he said.”

33

Izzy’s family had chosen to have a small, family-only funeral shortly after her death, but Sidney’s family waited. Some people said it was because they refused to bury her until the coroner had returned every last organ and tissue sample. Or maybe it was only that Geneva had left Pleasant Park for several weeks, perhaps to dry out somewhere and regather her strength.

Either way, the delay and desire for belated resolution resulted in a funeral so large that it was nearly impossible for anyone but family members to gather close enough to hear the priest or speakers who followed. The cemetery, located just a few blocks from downtown, was bordered by quiet streets on all sides, and every one of those streets was backed up with black town cars restlessly circling until the service ended.

I had walked from home, aware of the parking challenges, and now I remained at the back, head bowed, trickles of sweat running down my spine, my long-sleeved black blouse clinging to my damp back. I hadn’t known how to dress for a sweltering funeral. Some people had brought umbrellas for shade rather than rain—a good idea that hadn’t occurred to me as I’d hurried out the apartment door, asking Benjamin for the third time if he wanted to come along. He hadn’t.

I told myself that was okay. You couldn’t force a kid to grieve publicly. You couldn’t force a kid to grieve privately, for that matter. Even now, he expressed only anger at the girls, but especially Izzy, and then only tersely, blaming her for falling for a guy like Christopher Weber. I believed, now, that he missed her. He was just mad at her for being dead. It was one way to care—being angry. It was better than feeling nothing.

Standing apart from the crowd, so far from the grave site I was nearly backed up against the wall that bordered the cemetery’s western boundary, I thought about Sidney’s interest in psychology and imagined how she might have started talking to Weber at the pool, where he’d briefly worked. The latest news reports had hypothesized about Weber’s agile deception as the key to attracting two underage girls, but I felt almost certain Sidney was drawn not to any lie but to the truth—that he had a criminal record and a troubling but intellectually interesting diagnosis. I imagined him striking up a wounded pose, lamenting his inexperience with women, due to the years he’d lost to incarceration. She might have convinced herself that she could cure him of any residual antisocial tendencies, maybe even keep him from taking the quick on-ramp to incel misogyny. The last day of her life, when she let him into her house, she must have thought she was helping him, still.

I imagined him arriving with a sob story—that Izzy no longer wanted to see him, which would have made Sidney feel guilty, since she was the one who’d warned Izzy not to become romantically entangled with a psychopath. Or maybe he fed her an even less factual, self-aggrandizing version—that he was taking Sidney’s advice and no longer seeing Izzy of his own accord. Maybe they’d pulled out their phones to compare text messages, Sidney sincerely worried about Izzy and Weber only pretending to be, searching together for clues to her silence.

If he was a master manipulator, he could have shown Sidney proof of the breakup texts he’d written—texts Izzy wouldn’t have seen, because she was already dead. If he’d watched Sidney open her own phone, he would have had the passcode for later, so that he could type the cryptic text to Geneva that others would interpret as a suicide note.

My imagination had gotten away from me, but I kept following it. I could picture the small-eyed, dark-haired Weber I’d gotten to know from news photos, asking Sidney to go downstairs to the massive Mayfield kitchen and find them something fun to drink. While she was gone, he could have hurried to Geneva’s master bathroom, to rustle through her drawers and cabinets for pills he could smash up, ready to dribble into the prosecco bottle when Sidney wasn’t looking. He’d sip his first glass and pressure Sidney to drink all of hers, then accept a second glass from the tainted bottle.

I felt a hard lump in my throat, imagining the bitter taste of that fouled wine, wondering if Sidney objected or went along, trying to spare them both the embarrassment of outright rejection.Drink with me, and then I’ll leave. Have a second glass and I won’t come closer. Take your shirt off,and I won’t touch you. Let me take a photo. Drink again. Don’t reject me. This is helping. I need this. You promised this. You have to.

His prints would be on everything—the phone, the bottle, the bathroom counter where he smashed the pills—but if the detectives weren’t smart, if they believed the suicide setup, if they’d dealt with precious few murders in this safe, upscale community, then police wouldn’t necessarily dust for prints—not right away. Weber’s cockiness had led him to make bad choices, but the police department’s ineptness had let him get away with those choices, at least for a while.

“Abby?”

I swiped my eye dry and turned in time to see Rita, from Summit.

“Oh, hi,” I said with a shaky smile, accepting her sideways embrace. “Good to see you. It’s been too long.”

“Are you on Team Jack or Team Geneva?”

When I shook my head, confused, she clarified, “Drinks here in town with the mother’s crowd or in Chicago at the dad’s bar?”

“Neither. But I did want to express my condolences, if I can catch Geneva.”