Wylee’s eyes turned hard, his face into polished stone. “You don’t drag my friends into this.”
Loyalty, Eve thought, and continued to use it. “Then stop lying to me or I won’t have a choice. I need you to tell me the truth. The faster and more detailed that truth, the less chance there is I’ll have to discuss any of this outside this room or bring your friends, your family, into it.”
“I don’t want my family to know.”
“Wylee—”
“No, Bri, enough. It’s enough.” He braced his elbows on his thighs a moment, scrubbed hard at his face. “I don’t want them to know what you found on her lists, in her fucking files.”
“Then lay it out for me, and I’ll do everything I can to protect your privacy. As long as it’s the truth.”
“I’m not sorry she’s dead. That’s the truth.” He shoved up, paced the narrow area between benches. “She came up to me a couple years ago, at a sports banquet. She gave me her card, and on the back was a name, and her private number. The name, the number, and an order to contact her.”
“What name?”
He shut his eyes. “Big Rod. I had to get up and make a speech. I felt sick, but I had to get up and make a speech. All those kids … I was a kid. I was just a kid.”
And she knew, by the look in his eyes, the tone of his voice. The child in her knew the child in him.
“Give me his full name.”
“Rod C. Keith. My hero.” He all but spat the word. “My mentor. Guardian angel of the neighborhood kids—that’s what people called him back then. If you needed someone to play catch, shoot hoops, go long, you could count on Big Rod. You could hang out at the youth center for hours. He’d listen to your dreams, push you to get good grades, and sharpen your batting stance.”
“How old were you when it started?”
His eyes, haunted now, met hers. “Twelve. Maybe it started before, just subtle things. I trusted him. I loved him. My family trusted him. They loved him.”
He paused, breathed in and out, slow.
“Sure you can go watch the game on screen with Big Rod. No problem having some catch with Big Rod. I’d feel special when it was just the two of us in his place.”
Wylee closed his eyes. When he opened them again, he stared blindly at the wall of lockers.
“I felt grown-up when he said I could have some of his beer—and we wouldn’t tell anybody. He gave me half a beer before the first time. I was dizzy and I didn’t understand, and it was Big Rod. He said it was a rite of passage. And after, when I was sick, he said I was his number one. His number one, and if I said anything, I’d be nothing. If I said anything, nobody would believe me. If I said anything, something bad might happen to one of my sisters. And…”
He sat again, let his hands dangle between his knees. “I don’t want to talk about what he did, and what I let him do for almost a year until he found another number one.”
“You didn’t tell your parents.”
“No. I was ashamed and afraid. I’ve never told them. I don’t want to tell them now.” He lifted his head to look at Eve and his hands balled to fists.
“It’s over. He’s dead. I didn’t kill him, but somebody did. They found him beaten to death in an alley a couple blocks from the youth center. He got a hero’s funeral, the son of a bitch. I was in therapy by then. I put my family through hell first. Stealing beer, buying street illegals. Sneaking out of the house at night whenever I could, but I couldn’t get away from feeling his hands on me, so I broke into Mr. Aaron’s house.”
When his voice cracked, Eve gave him a moment. “Your neighbor,” she prompted.
“Yeah. He had whiskey. I got his whiskey and the pills I bought, and I took them all with all the whiskey I could drink. Just end it, that’s what I wanted to do. Just make it stop.”
He closed his eyes, breathed out.
“Thirteen years old, and I just wanted to make it all stop. But I wasn’t very smart about it, and took too much at once, sicked it all up again.”
Pausing, he pressed his fingers to his eyes, dropped them. “My parents heard me, realized what I’d tried to do. They got me to the clinic. I can still see my mother’s face, still hear her praying. They made me go to therapy. I didn’t want to at first, and I fought it, but they made me.”
“They had your back, Wyl,” O’Keefe soothed. “They always had your back.”
“Yeah, they did, and it pissed me off back then. But … Dr. Preston. I guess he saved my life, and making me go to him saved my life. He never told them about Big Rod because when I finally got close to breaking down enough to tell him, I made him promise. He said he couldn’t and wouldn’t break my confidence.”
Wylee cleared his throat. “I started to get better. After I said it all, after Dr. Preston listened, after we talked, week after week, I started to get better.