Drowning with Others Read online

  ALSO BY LINDA KEIR

  The Swing of Things

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2019 by Linda Keir

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542041454 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 1542041457 (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781503902992 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 1503902994 (paperback)

  Cover design by Shasti O’Leary Soudant

  First edition

  For Brandon and Marya, again

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Prologue

  No one can keep a secret these days, thinks the boy as he leads them all down to the lake, its flat surface the color of nickel in the cloudy Illinois evening. He had intended to take just a few eager freshmen, but someone told someone else, and then one of them told his girlfriend, and soon they had become a party of twelve guys and five girls, all of them on their way to break the rules at his instigation.

  It’s his father’s fault. His father, who attended Glenlake Academy and instilled in him a reverence for the school’s traditions. Many of those traditions—the locked journal in which students chronicle their four years, meals with the faculty, the senior page—are alive and well, but others have lost their place, forgotten or even banned by the faculty charged with upholding Glenlake’s sense of history. But his father remembered them.

  For over a hundred years, on the first full moon of fall term, seniors led freshmen down to Lake Loomis to jump—fully clothed—off the lifeguard tower. Swimming tests and legal worries put an end to the ritual, but the boy grew up with his father’s stories. His knowledge of Glenlake’s arcane ways has given him status during the previous three years, and now he plans to cement his reputation by restoring this dangerous, forgotten rite.

  Too bad they can’t see the moon.

  And too bad half the kids are wearing swimsuits under their clothes and carrying towels, a far cry from the chaotic dunkings his father described. But the air is charged with whispered rumors that two of the girls plan to jump naked.

  They can’t do it from the lifeguard tower, of course. They’ll be heard, or seen, and nobody wants to start the semester with demerits, him least of all—they’re rebels, but they aren’t stupid. So, reaching the lake, they take the perimeter road, grouped in twos and threes, propelled by nervous anticipation, until half a mile later, progress slows to the accompaniment of Are we there yet?

  But he isn’t the crew coxswain for nothing: He marshals them, exhorts them, gets them stoked for the next half mile and a two-hundred-yard bushwhack down a dirt road overgrown with brush and saplings. To the top of the cliffs.

  The crumbling rock wall is taller than the lifeguard tower, looming twenty-five feet over the shoreline. As they peer over the edge, a cool breeze ruffling hair and clothes, it feels even higher. Across the water, the lights of Glenlake’s old, stately buildings twinkle in the humidity.

  “That water looks so . . . black,” says a girl, shivering.

  “How do we get out?” asks a stocky boy with false bravado.

  “It’s deep here, but just swim to your right and there’s a beach,” explains the boy. “A trail leads back to the top.”

  “How do you know?”

  “My dad told me,” he says, not wanting to reveal that he has come here every year in secret, planning for this moment. Wanting to sound like he hasn’t calculated the angles. Wanting to sound like he hasn’t already made a practice jump.

  Which, in fact, he hasn’t.

  “You first,” someone says.

  In his mind, seniors don’t jump—they make others do it. But he suddenly realizes the only way to pull this off, to engrave his legend, is to go first. But hell if he’s going to do it in his clothes and walk back in soggy jeans.

  He takes off his shoes and socks, then his shirt, and then, with only a moment’s hesitation, his pants, hoping the outline of his junk isn’t visible in his boxer briefs.

  “Wait a minute!” says a girl. “Let’s get this on camera!”

  He’s seen her on campus before, always the one taking pictures, sometimes with her phone and sometimes with a small but fancy antique-looking digital camera. She works on the school paper or the yearbook, maybe both.

  Before he can say anything, lighted screens are bobbing like fireflies, and the girl and one of her friends are heading down the trail to shoot his jump from below.

  He’s torn, imagining the likes, shares, and comments on dozens of social media feeds, but yells, “This is secret! Do you want to get me expelled?”

  Slowly, grudgingly, the fireflies wink out.

  He wishes he hadn’t waited this long, thinking about the drop. Goose bumps prickle his skin.

  “Jump already!” yells a kid who doesn’t want to miss out on the return of tradition.

  From his daylight scouting missions, the boy knows he needs to jump out to avoid the rocks in the water at the base
of the cliff. He can’t see them now. But he would rather die than turn back.

  He takes three fast steps toward the cliff, feeling soil give under his right foot as he pushes off and yells, “Glenlake!”

  He hits the water straight on, plunges deep, and sees a fading halo of gray light above him.

  As he kicks for the surface, his foot hits something hard and sharp. It hurts like a thrown rock.

  He pulls himself out onto the beach to scattered cheers, echoes of “Glenlake!” from above, and the girl with the camera shoving a blurry video under his nose.

  “I couldn’t resist,” she says. “You can delete it if you want.”

  Her fragrant hair brushes his wet shoulder, and he shivers. After watching the video, which is too grainy for anyone to identify him anyway, he probes the cut on his foot matter-of-factly, a four-sport athlete used to injuries. It’s deep but not dangerous. He’ll ask someone to bring down his socks and shoes so it doesn’t get dirty.

  “Oh my god, you’re bleeding,” she says.

  “There’s something down there,” he tells her. “Something metal.”

  “It’s probably an old shopping cart or some junk. I bet the townies sneak out here to dump their trash.”

  “It sure didn’t feel like a shopping cart. I wish I could get a closer look.”

  “Want to take a picture?” she asks coyly.

  She pulls a waterproof bag out of her pocket, a knotted bikini bottom peeking over the waistband of her jeans. She puts her phone in the bag and seals it tight, tracing her finger across the plastic to turn the flashlight and camera on.

  “I brought the bag in case I went in,” she explains. “But I don’t think I’m going to.”

  Voices carry and word travels fast to the top of the cliff that the senior has cut his foot on something in the black water. No one else wants to go in either.

  Compelled as much by curiosity as by the freckled chest and peeking bikini of the girl with the camera, the boy wades back in, triangulates his landing place, and kicks into the water, the glowing camera light rippling ahead of him like some bioluminescent fish.

  Reaching the spot, he porpoises and dives down, the light on the phone only making the rest of the water look darker. He needs to go deeper, so he exhales, emptying his lungs as he kicks down, down, down, seeing nothing, until abruptly the flashlight picks up a glint of glass or chrome. He sees it through the screen first: a car, broad and dark and resting right side up.

  Water pressure plugs his ears as he exhales the last of his air and makes a final kick, anchoring himself on the door handle, inadvertently opening the door as he pulls himself toward the car.

  It’s an old muscle car, like he’s seen on cable car-auction shows or in town, driven by some aging gearhead slowly trolling for compliments.

  He’s light-headed with lack of oxygen and the thrill of discovery and knows he needs to push for the surface, but he wants the prize: a peek inside. A picture of the car at the bottom of the lake.

  He angles the phone’s screen. It shows the silt-covered car, the cracked-but-intact windows, and, through the open door, a steering wheel.

  And heaped around a still-buckled seat belt: Bones. A rib cage. A cracked skull.

  Chapter One

  Once again, everything had changed and nothing had.

  Or, more accurately, Ian thought, nothing had changed except the students and the fact that he and Andi were twenty-plus years older—and Glenlake Academy was breaking ground on a new writing center, a small but sleek building where students could read and write and meet with faculty in an environment casual enough to rival a Silicon Valley start-up.

  Well, maybe not Silicon Valley but Silicon Prairie, which was what business boosters had taken to calling Chicago, forty minutes to the south.

  Leaving their bags at the Old Road Inn, whose rooms and halls were small and crooked enough to be called historic, Andi and Ian left the car and walked the half mile to campus, enjoying the crisp, dry air of a perfect autumn Friday afternoon. Orange and yellow leaves fell on the sidewalk and broke under their shoes, dry, musty, and astringently fragrant.

  Ian reached out for Andi’s hand. As her fingers closed around his, a memory arrived unprompted, of walking the opposite direction with her on this very sidewalk, his school tie loosened, both of them smoking cigarettes and feeling very adult as they headed into town for a cup of coffee at Glenlake’s only diner. Where they would see real people.

  Though they both now looked every inch the moneyed prep school parents they were, recalling himself as a wannabe grown-up made Ian feel he was still a student playing a role—only actually wearing the clothes of an adult.

  Andi looked up at him, even more beautiful than she had been then, with her dark, wild curls, and he flashed ahead to later tonight when, tipsy, they would stumble through the door of their room at the inn and—he hoped—into bed. Hotel rooms always made his wife horny. They didn’t travel together often enough.

  “So we’re skipping the welcome talk, right?” she said.

  At the last three annual parents’ weekends, they had dutifully filed into the auditorium while the school’s president, various department heads, and a major donor had droned on for over an hour. Andi was right—there was no need to go. They were veterans.

  “Should we surprise Cassidy instead?”

  Andi punched him lightly with his own fist, their fingers still interlaced. “Total dad move. Yes, she’d just love to be caught off guard while she’s with her friends. No, we’ll see her when we see her.”

  As they walked up the long, winding drive, Ian felt a familiar flutter in his chest: happiness at being back here. They passed the turnoffs for the faculty cottages and, a few hundred yards later, the freshly painted, gothic-lettered Glenlake Academy sign. Then they were crossing the oval in front of the Copeland Academic Center, built with a gift from his great-great-grandfather Augustus Copeland, a robber baron of the first order.

  “Should we dust the bust?” asked Andi, their standard joke, referring to the aged bronze sculpture of old Augustus that stood atop a six-foot marble plinth just inside the entrance.

  Ian shook his head. He couldn’t blame his ancestor’s ghost for his youthful dislike of the old redbrick building—but the legacy had weighed heavily all the same.

  Cutting between the arts building (whose halls he’d seldom darkened) and the science building (where he’d been more comfortable), they passed the student union, crossed the field-hockey turf, and wandered among the places where the actual life of the school took place. They passed the freshman residence halls where they’d first stayed, then circled the grand old manors where they’d had rooms as upperclassmen, before crossing the grass to the mossy old peristyle where they’d smoked pot and, on the back of one of the columns, neatly chiseled their initials.

  As time ran short, they meandered back toward McCormick Mansion, the former seat of this grand estate, now a warren of administrative offices. But first they stopped in at Holmes Library, whose interior walls were covered with framed, handwritten journal pages. They climbed the stairs to the third floor, stopping now and then to read one that caught their eyes, before locating their own class of 1997 senior pages, hung in opposite corners of the same study room.

  Andi read Ian’s aloud in a monotone before making the joke she always made: “Are you sure you didn’t pay someone to write this for you?”

  Despite Glenlake’s focus on literature and creative writing, Ian had never felt particularly comfortable expressing himself on paper. Or aloud, for that matter. It still embarrassed him that his strained and dutiful passage—about hard work, growth, and the value of service—would be framed for as long as the school stood. He wished he’d had the guts to choose something honest, like the entry Andi had been bold enough to submit. While most students, like him, had produced anodyne statements calculated not to offend, she had mused about the private nature of journaling and how carefully curated everyone’s senior page actually was, befo
re concluding with a poem:

  These Best Years

  Bridging the gap between childhood and adulthood

  Prepared, precisely prepped, on the path to our predestination

  Are we about to wake up?

  Or have we just fallen asleep?

  Every time Ian read her senior page, he thought about one of his entries from freshman year—the day he met her, September 20, 1993.

  A new girl started today. Her name’s Andi Bloom. She just showed up in algebra after missing the first two weeks. It was funny, she acted like she’d been there all along and kind of rolled her eyes when Nadelman introduced her to the class. I would hate being late and new, but she just shrugged it off.

  Everyone is saying her dad is some Hollywood big shot. So, of course, everybody thinks if they can be friends with her, they’ll end up meeting movie stars or getting to hang around on a movie set. I haven’t talked to her yet, but I will.

  She looks and acts really different than the usual girls around here. In a good way, I think. She somehow makes the dress code seem cool, which is hard to do, and acts like Glenlake is no big deal. It probably isn’t to her, since she’s from California and everything. I don’t think she’s stuck-up, though.

  I can’t stop thinking about her.

  And the locks on these stupid journals better be good.

  While other parents joined their students for a gathering with boxed wine, one kind of beer, and soft drinks for the kids, the several dozen alumni gathered in a walnut-paneled reception area just outside the school president’s office, where a black-vested bartender waited behind a full array of bottles. Glenlake’s administrators liked to get the alumni together every chance they could. Alumni were key to the endowment and future enrollment—especially alumni whose names were set in stone above the entrances of campus buildings.

  Ian and Andi had just gotten drinks—a passable sauvignon blanc for her, a glass of cabernet he’d regret—when their names were called from across the room.

  “Ian and Andi,” the voice said in wonder, a simple declarative that almost put a period after each name, as opposed to the way their names had been said throughout their years at Glenlake: IanandAndi.