She fixed her eyes on mine and bit her lip. Finally, she said, “I’m not sure Braden’s fall was, like, an accident.”
“What?”
She pounded her fists on her thighs. “See, I knew no one would believe me!”
“Wait a minute.” I held up a calming hand. “I didn’t say I didn’t believe you. Why don’t you think it was an accident? Did you see something?”
She didn’t answer; instead, she shoved a hand into her pocket and came out with a crumpled piece of paper. As she smoothed it out, I could see it was an article torn from a newspaper.
“Did you see this?” she asked. “It was in today’s Brunswick News.”
I shook my head and she passed it to me. “Depressed Teen Injured during Ghost Hunt,” the headline read. I glanced at Rachel, but she had her head bowed, her hair a dark curtain obscuring her expression. Scanning the brief article, I read that “Braden McCullers, eighteen, suffered head and other injuries in a fall at the Rothmere mansion near St. Elizabeth Saturday night. He was taking part in a school-sponsored field trip to scientifically dispute the presence of a nineteenth-century ghost in the antebellum home, according to Merle Kornhiser, principal at St. Elizabeth High School. Police sources are calling the fall an accident but say the teen had a history of depression. He remains in intensive care.”
I folded the page carefully along its creases, playing for time. Newspaper articles and TV reports about teen depression flashed into my head. I thought I knew what was troubling Rachel. “Are you afraid Braden tried to commit suicide?” I finally asked.
“No! But that’s what people will say. And it’s not true. He told me about his depression when we were dating. Not many people know. He was taking antidepressants and was involved with a study to, like, test a new drug.”
A bus slowed but I waved it on. Belching diesel smoke, it picked up speed. The fumes drifted around us and I coughed. “If you don’t think it was a suicide attempt, then what—”
“He was worried about something this past week.” She plucked at the metal strands of the bench seat with a fingernail. “But not in a sad kind of way. He wasn’t worried about himself. He said he knew something and was wondering if he should intervene.”
“Knew what? Intervene how?”
“I don’t know!” She flung her head up and her eyes, worried and defiant, met mine.
I hoped Rachel was making a mountain out of a mole hill, but she clearly needed someone to take her fears seriously, so I did the best I could. “What, exactly, did he say?”
“He gave me a ride home on Thursday. We stopped at the marina and walked all the way out the boardwalk in the marsh, out to where those benches are where the bird watchers like to sit?”
I nodded. I knew the spot she meant. It was a peaceful place surrounded by cattails and swamp grasses, home to dozens of bird species. A wooden bench, with the names of many visitors etched into its boards, looked out over an expanse of marsh to where the St. Andrew Sound glinted in the distance. I liked to sit there myself at this time of year, when the tourists were mostly gone, and inhale the slightly sulfurous scent of the marsh and listen to the cries of the water birds.
“Anyway, he recited a bit of that Donne poem, you know, the one about ‘No man is an island’? He was always doing that when we were together—saying bits of poems. He even wrote a few. And then he talked about, like, our responsibilities to each other and said he had a hard decision to make. He said that sometimes knowledge is a curse and that he felt he needed to intervene.”
“ ‘Intervene’? That’s the word he used?”
Rachel nodded. “Yeah, like, he said it two or three times.”
“But he didn’t say what he was referring to?”
“No. I asked him. He said he had a responsibility to be discreet until he’d made up his mind about what to do.”
“And you have no clue what he was talking about? He didn’t bring it up again on Friday or Saturday?”
“I didn’t see him Friday,” Rachel said, “and he was all jumpy last night. When I asked if he’d made a decision, just concerned-like, you know, not trying to be nosy, he told me to drop it.”
I heard the hurt in her voice and reached over to squeeze her hand. “And now that’s he been hurt, you think this plays in somehow?” Like maybe he was dealing with something he couldn’t handle and he tried to kill himself? I didn’t say it aloud, but the thought crossed my mind.
“I don’t know,” Rachel said, frustrated. “I just don’t want people saying he tried to kill himself, and I don’t see how it could’ve been an accident. He wouldn’t have gone up the stairs just for nothing. And he wouldn’t have fallen for no reason!”