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“You’re not,” Annie assured him. “We’ve all done it. Why make life hard if we don’t have to?”
“Yeah, well, I looked at the two of them and thought, what the hell is that conversation gonna be anyway? ‘Hey, Robbie, great to see you. Sorry I ruined your entire life’? I mean, Dozer became an alcoholic after that. He couldn’t cope with what he’d done.”
“Poor kid,” Annie said. “It was an accident.”
Eli said nothing. He looked down to the bayou again with a thousand-yard stare into the past. Annie could feel the tension in him, the need to say something pushing against the need to say nothing.
“I get the feeling you’re holding something back here, Eli,” she said.
He shifted on his chair and rubbed a hand across his lower face, as if he might just push any errant words back into his mouth.
“Just say it,” Annie said. “I’m not gonna judge you.”
He took a sip of his tea to buy time as he turned his options over in his mind.
“It’s ten years ago,” Annie said. “How much longer do you want to hang on to it?”
He took a breath as if to speak, then checked himself again, made a little face of frustration, and shook his head. Finally, he just said it.
“I don’t know that it was an accident.”
He blew out a breath that might have been relief.
“I know, it happened in front of fifty people,” he said. “And no one ever said anything like that, but now I’m saying it. I was right there.”
Annie sat still, waiting, feeling a little sick in her stomach. Around them, the few other diners who had chosen to sit on the patio went on with their lunches and their polite conversations, accented by the sounds of silverware clinking and the waitress topping off glasses of iced tea.
“There was absolutely no reason for what happened to have happened that day,” Eli said soberly. “None. It was a routine practice. Robbie was in the red jersey. No one should have been anywhere near him. But there was Dozer, stumbling backward into him. And when he hit him, he twisted around and looked right at him as they went down. I’ll never forget that for as long as I live. And the soundof Robbie screaming.” He blinked back tears at the memory. “I was the tight end on the play. I was lined up maybe ten feet to Robbie’s left. It still makes me sick to remember.”
“Oh, Eli,” Annie murmured. “I’m so sorry you had to go through that.”
She’d known him all his life. He was a sweet boy. Fun, funny, smart, popular. She would have thought at the time that life was a breeze for young Eli McVay, if she had thought much about him at all. She’d been a patrol deputy at the time, fighting to gain respect in a department that thought women belonged elsewhere, not wearing a badge. To think at that same time Eli had been going through an experience so heavy, so sad, made her heart hurt for him.
“Robbie wassogood,” he said softly, emotion thickening his voice. “He was like watching a unicorn, the things he could do! The gods reached down and turned his arm into a thunderbolt, and he had wings on his feet. Everything was instinctual for him. It was like he could bend time, stretch it like a rubber band. Effortless. Easy.
“And there was Marc, sitting on the bench. And he was good. He was very, very good. But he was never gonna be Robbie. The college scouts would come around, and all they wanted to see was Robbie Fontenot. He was a legit five-star recruit. And of course, Robbie didn’t need a scholarship—his family was loaded—but he was going anywhere he wanted on a magic carpet, a full ride.
“Marc needed that opportunity. He needed a scholarship. He wasn’t going to any Division I school sitting on the bench. And his family were junk dealers. They couldn’t afford to send him to Tulane or anyplace like it. But then Robbie went down, and all those doors opened right up for Marc.
“God help me for thinking it,” he said. “But I always have, and I always will. I saw what I saw, and I know what I know.”
“You think Dozer would do that for Marc?”
“I think Dozerdiddo it for him. And Dozer was no freethinker. He didn’t come up with that on his own.”
“Did he not like Robbie?”
“He liked Robbie fine, but he was loyal to Marc. He might have thought he owed him.”
“Did you ever say anything to Marc about it?”
He shook his head. “No, but nothing was ever the same between us after that day. Maybe he sensed that was what I was thinking. I don’t know.”
“Did Robbie ever say he thought it was anything other than an accident?”
“Not to me. I can’t imagine he didn’t wonder, though. He was always the one had to get to the bottom of a story.”
“Did you ever say anything to anybody about your suspicion?”
