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By Root 370 0

A handyman type, jack-of-all-trades. He did jobs for Peter on a few of the properties that Shore managed. Thing was . . . David had this old girlfriend. A woman he’d known when he was young, anyway. Did some waitressing, bar work. Smoked a lot of weed, drank too much—you know the type, the keys are full of them. I’d seen her around over the years, propping up this bar, serving behind that one, slumped over a table with a pitcher of beer—and I was real surprised when it turned out she and David had a connection. I was having a drink with him one time in Bradenton when she came in. The look she gave him was kind of . . . weird. But he went right up and said hi, and she was on the edge of the group after that.”

“Because you all wanted to fuck her,” Marie said.

“I did not want to fuck her,” Tony said mildly.

“This going to take much longer?” I asked. “See, my wife’s in the hospital. And I’m not enjoying being around you people.”

“Hunter and Katy met, somehow. David didn’t like it. He started to stir us up over it, did a little digging. Eventually it turns out Hunter’s not everything he appears. Ran with a bad crowd when he was back in Wyoming, was maybe involved in a few burglaries, including one where an old woman died. It was natural causes, apparently, but it happened under duress. He was never tried for it, and had straightened out his life since, but . . . he just seemed like a good target for modification. Or so David said. To get him out of town.”

Tony hesitated. “But then one afternoon David told us something that was a lot more worrying. He said Katy was trying to blackmail him. Not just him, either—the whole club. She’d been around us for a couple of years by then, and this was back in the eighties. We were younger, played harder. Drank a lot, did a lot of cocaine, had parties where . . . stuff happened. We weren’t as discreet as we should have been. Then one afternoon Katy buttonholed Marie.”

“She was drunk,” Marie said. “She came right up to me on the street. She said she had tape recordings of the group talking about the game, had been carrying a Walkman around for the last couple months. That she also had photos of our . . . recreational pursuits. She thought she’d been real smart. She became abusive. It was very embarrassing. She evidently believed that we were going to bankroll her and her white trash boyfriend so they could go off and start a new life.”

“I said we should pay her off,” Tony said. “Phil and Hazel said the same. But . . . David had another idea.”

I turned from the window. Tony and Marie were standing at an angle to each other, as if to not hold some past event between them. Jane was watching now.

“We didn’t say yes,” Marie said.

“But we didn’t say no.”

“And Katy died,” I said, “and it got pinned on John Hunter, and he went to jail.”

“David handled all that,” Tony said quickly, as if relieved not to have to recount the event itself. “We had nothing to do with it. And this was the only time anybody died. Until then it had just been messing with people. Spreading rumors. Planting stuff, to see what happened. It was entertaining, that’s—”

“ ‘Entertaining’?” I said, feeling my fists bunching at my sides. I looked at Jane. She didn’t meet my eyes, looking down at the floor instead.

“I know how it seems,” Tony said. “And we all knew it was wrong, we all got that—but by then it was too late. Hazel talked about going to the cops, but we knew that couldn’t happen. We couldn’t go down for something we hadn’t done. So we talked her out of it.”

“But you stopped playing the games?”

“For a while. But David . . . David just kept pushing. He loved the ones where we got inside someone’s head. He got off on messing with people’s lives.” Tony shut his eyes momentarily. “David was fucked up, bottom line. It became more and more clear. That’s why Katy had been wary of him, and thinking back, I knew that’s what the look she gave him in the bar that first time had meant. She knew him when they were teenagers, maybe knew things about him that we didn’t. I didn’t understand a lot of this until it was too