Even as I ask the next question, I pray that I’m wrong.
“Are you telling me you were intimate with the girl?”
Drew doesn’t blink. “I was in love with her.”
My heart is pounding the way it does on the all-too-rare occasions when I run for exercise. I’m sitting in front of the St. Stephen’s Preparatory School with one of the most distinguished alumni who ever attended it, and he’s telling me he was screwing a high school student. A student who is now dead. This man is my lifelong friend, yet the first words that pass my lips are not those of a friend but of a lawyer. “Tell me she was eighteen, Drew.”
“Her birthday was in two weeks.”
I suck in my breath and close my eyes. “It might as well have been two years. That’s statutory rape in Mississippi. Especially with the age difference between you. It’s what, twenty years?”
“Almost twenty-three.”
I shake my head in disbelief.
He takes my arm and pulls it toward him, forcing me to look into his eyes. “I’m not crazy, Penn. I know you think I’ve lost my mind, but I loved that girl like no one I’ve known in my life.”
I look away, focusing on the playground of the middle school, where water has pooled on the merry-go-round. What to say? This isn’t a case of some horny assistant coach who got too chummy with a cheerleader in the locker room. This is an educated and successful man in the grip of a full-blown delusion.
“Drew, I prosecuted a lot of child molesters in Houston. I remember one who had regularly molested an eleven-year-old girl. Can you guess what his defense was?”
“What?”
“They were in love.”
He snorts with disdain. “You know this isn’t like that.”
“Do I? Jesus Christ, man.”
“Penn … until you’re in a situation like this, you simply can’t understand it. I was the first to condemn that coach who got involved with that senior over at the public school. I couldn’t fathom it then. But now … I see it from the inside.”
“Drew, you’ve thrown your life away. Do you realize that? You could go to jail for twenty years. I can’t even …” My voice fails, because it suddenly strikes me that I may not have heard the worst of what will be revealed in this car tonight. “You didn’t kill her, did you?”
The blood drains from his face. “Are you out of your mind?”
“What did you expect me to ask?”
“Not that. And there’s something pretty damned cold in your tone.”
“If you don’t like my tone, wait till you hear the district attorney. You and Kate Townsend? Holy shit.”
“I didn’t kill her, Penn.”
I take another deep breath and let it out slowly. “No, of course not. Do you think she committed suicide?”
“Impossible.”
“Why?”
“Because we were planning to leave together. Kate was excited about it. Not depressed at all.”
“You were planning to run away together?”
“Not run away. But to be together, yes.”
“She was a kid, Drew.”
“In some ways. Not many. Kate had a different kind of upbringing. She went through a lot, and she learned a lot from it. She was very mature for her age, both psychologically and emotionally. And that’s saying something these days. These kids aren’t like we were, Penn. You have no idea. By fifteen they’ve gone through things you and I didn’t experience until our twenties. Some of them are jaded by eighteen.”
“That doesn’t mean they understand what they’re doing. But I’ll be sure and run that argument past the jury.”
Drew’s eyes flicker. “Are you saying you’ll represent me?”
“I was joking. Who else knows about this relationship?”
“No one.”
“Don’t be stupid. Someone always knows.”
He sets his jaw and shakes his head with confidence. “You didn’t know Kate. Nobody knows about us.”
The naïveté of human beings is truly breathtaking. “Whatever you say.”
Drew puts his big hands on the wheel and squeezes it like a man doing isometric exercises. In the small space of the car, his size is intimidating. I’m six-foot-one, two hundred pounds; Drew has two inches and twenty pounds of muscle on me, and he hasn’t let himself slip much from the days he played tight end for Vanderbilt. It’s not hard to imagine Kate Townsend being attracted to him.
“It comes down to this,” Drew says in a steady voice. “The police are going to start probing Kate’s life. And if they probe deeply enough, they might find something that connects me to her.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. A diary? Pictures?”
“You took pictures?” Why am I asking? Of course they did. Everyone does now. “Did you videotape yourselves too?”
“Kate did. But she destroyed the tape.”
I’m not sure I believe this, but right now that’s not the point. “What about Ellen?” I ask, meaning his wife.
His eyes don’t waver. “Our marriage has been dead for ten years.”
“You could have fooled me.”
“I did. You and the rest of the town. Ellen and I mount a major theatrical production every day, all for the sake of Tim.”
Tim is Drew’s nine-year-old son, already something of a golden boy himself in the elementary school. Annie has a serious crush on him, though she would never admit it. “What about Tim, then? Were you going to leave him behind?”
“Of course not. But I had to make the break from Ellen first. I’ll die if I stay in that marriage.”
They always sound like this before the divorce. Any rationalization to get out of the marriage.
“I don’t want to say anything negative about Ellen,” Drew says softly. “But the situation has been difficult for a long time. Ellen’s addicted to hydrocodone. She has been for six years.”
Ellen Elliott is a lawyer who turned to real estate in her midthirties, a dynamo who focuses on the upscale antebellum
