Jack_ Secret Vengeance - F. Paul Wilson [75]
“Here is what I know. A search has been on for him and a helicopter spotted his car in the Pines.”
I knew it, Jack thought. I knew it, I knew it, I knew it!
“When the deputies arrived, they found him…” She covered her mouth and sobbed once into her hand. “They found him hanging from a tree. It appears … the police think he committed suicide.”
The new outburst of dismay from the class dwarfed the previous one. Jack felt the room spin. Bile and acid surged into his throat.
Suicide!
No-no-no! It can’t be!
He’d pushed him, tried to embarrass him, give him a taste of his own medicine, but he’d never intended to push him this far!
Carson Toliver was a bad guy, a violent phony. He’d earned a comeuppance, but he was only seventeen years old. He didn’t deserve this.
It was Jack’s fault he’d killed himself.
He’d pushed him too damn hard!
3
Except for some sobbing now and again, the school bus ride home was silent. Even Weezy looked dejected.
It had been tough just getting to the bus, what with passing Toliver’s unlocked locker, and worse, seeing knots of weeping girls and stunned-looking guys.
“You’ve barely said a word,” Weezy said after they’d been dropped off. “What do you think? How do you feel?”
She, Jack, and Eddie were making their daily after-school trek up Quakerton, with Eddie lost as usual in his headphones. Jack wondered if he was listening to something sad. Some of the dark, gloomy music Weezy liked would have been appropriate.
“How do I feel?” He searched for an answer. How could he tell her about the massive guilt weighing him down, hunching his shoulders, bowing his back? “I don’t know. You?”
She shook her head. “Strange. I started out with a crush on him, then I was scared of him for what he tried that night, then I hated him—really hated him for the lies he told, and then I wasn’t afraid anymore and was going to report him—”
“Did you?”
“No. I was going to do it today, but now … doesn’t seem much point. You know, during all that Easy Weezy stuff I hated him so much I wanted him dead. I wished him dead. But now that he’s really dead—killed himself, of all things—I feel really, really bad for him.”
“Yeah. I know what you mean. Somehow, some way, considering what he did to you and did to himself, he must have had some loose wires in his head.”
Jack had begun telling himself that during the long afternoon. He hoped it might lessen the guilt. And it did, but not much.
“I know all about that,” Weezy muttered.
Jack realized immediately what she meant, but hid any sign that he knew what she was talking about. He pretended he hadn’t heard. But he wondered if Carson Toliver had been going to a psychiatrist. Maybe even the same one as Weezy.
“You saw how he was acting Sunday night. No way you can call that normal.”
Weezy nodded. “Yeah. That was bizarre. I think the wheels were coming off then. Someone was making a fool of him, he blew the game, he was drinking, he was alone in the woods screaming at no one … all the signs were there.”
“Of what?”
“Of a breakdown. Maybe we should have said something.”
“How could we know? We’re not shrinks.”
They were passing USED. He was supposed to put in a couple of hours today. Usually he didn’t mind spending the afternoon alone in a store full of musty old stuff, but today that was the last thing he felt like doing.
“Wait here a sec,” he said as he trotted up to the store’s front door.
He stuck his head inside and saw Mr. Rosen at the counter, reading the paper and listening to his classical music station.
“Mister Rosen, is it okay if I don’t come in today?”
He looked up over his reading glasses. “Of course it’s okay. I heard about your friend at school. What a terrible tragedy.” He shook his head sadly. “So young and yet nothing to live for? Such an awful thing to lose a child. His parents must be inconsolable.”
Jack hadn’t thought about Toliver’s folks. His dad had a weekly TV show on the local channel. Thinking about them now made him feel even worse. He tried to imagine his own mother’s reaction if someone ever came to the