Excerpts from "Swain's Folly"
Tom Swain
It had struck him in 1967 that 99th percentile on the SAT put him in the top one percent of students in the nation, not just on Folly Island, but he didn’t bring it up. There was that "bullheaded and defiant and disrespectful" label they’d all hung around his neck — a deserved one, he had to admit — so he’d shut up and smiled politely at Dolores Haggard, the guidance counselor who hated anyone smarter than her, but especially kids who were smarter than her.
It made for a lot of hate.
Police Chief Dolph Kustos
"Can I help you?" a voice asked. Kustos turned to find an inside door open and a good-looking woman looking at him. Tall, curvy, pleasant face, long brown hair, hazel eyes, confident and poised, not bothered at all by a lumbering stranger outside her door. "What can I do for you?"
Just about anything, Kustos thought, except there’s no way you’ll want anything to do with me when you find out I’m a single head of household, and a cop, and a widower, and with a teenage hellion stepdaughter. It had proven to be a losing combination in the past.
Trudy Tyrell
Trudy Tyrell stormed out of the high school music room, silver earrings flashing in a sea of black. Short black hair, black sweater, black skirt, a slim body tense with anger. Why couldn’t Mr. Fontaine just let her use the damned music room? It was her study hall and there were no music classes and she needed to work on the piano parts for her scholarship competition and she had no piano at home and time was running out and of course it was all going to end in tragedy, that much was clear. That was always clear. Most things end in tragedy. The frustration boiled inside her like ebb tide around a rock, swirling and pulling and threatening to tug her under. She could almost hear it making little sucking noises. She went to her hall locker.
"Won’t give in," she thought. "Won’t." But the only other piano she knew of was a place she just didn’t want to go, and her heart sank again when she considered what price she might have to pay to use it. It pissed her off all over again and she threw books in her locker and slammed it shut. She noted that all the other students were giving her a wide berth and not looking at her. Their avoidance was so pointed it amounted to attention. It pissed her off some more.
--
Trudy Tyrell watched Madison and Finn move off down the hall as well, wondering how it was that the new Millennium had come and gone and no all-powerful righteous force of the universe with both fashion sense and a finely tuned outrage had struck down all people wearing white crew sweaters.
Finn Drake
Finn Drake was enjoying the astonishment on everyone’s face. The Scholastic Aptitude Test results from the January tests were back. He’d pulled 680 on the verbal, 720 on the math. Not bad for a fellow who’d gotten through high school with a C average based on his charm and his father’s reputation as a power broker in the community.
"So, Finn, does this mean Mensa is in your future?" This from Tyler Preston, whose father was the local bank vice president. Finn looked at her, wondering what she meant. Mensa. Sounded vaguely biological to him. He did what he always did when he didn’t understand something, he smiled and said something as if he’d actually understood.
Trudy Tyrell
"A couple of weeks ago I heard Mr. Swain in school singing a song. Now I just heard Clay Chandler singing it on the radio."
"So? So he sings Clay Chandler songs? Lots of people do."
"Yeah, but this one was just released today."
Trudy Tyrell and Tom Swain
She looked at him.
"It’s the difference between Del Shannon and Roy Orbison," he said. "Of course you have to have the chord progressions in the right order. And it would be a lot better if you had a piano or acoustic guitar instead of this thing — you can change the way the chord sounds by which note comes out loudest and longest. They all come out the same on an electronic keyboard. On a piano you can make the note you want to emphasize louder. And if you want the discord to be, like, the foundation, you make that the lowest, strongest note, but if you want it to be subdued you ...."
He caught himself and went silent. They stared at each other. He waited.
"How does a janitor know about this kind of thing?" she asked.
He looked around. Right. Pay attention, fool.
Mary Conner and Tom Swain
He hesitated.
"Anyone who heard you knows you were good," he said.
"Well, nobody hears me now, Tom, because the guy who was gonna get me heard left town."
There it was, finally.
"Do we need to talk about this right now?" he asked.
"We don’t need to talk about it ever," she said grimly. "That would be your style, right?"
"I don’t get it," Larry said. "I don’t know everything that’s going on here, but you’re talking to him really angry and ugly — and you’re still sitting there leaning against him."
She turned to look at him.
"We grew up together, Larry," she said. "I know things about him and he knows things about me — stuff maybe we don’t want to know, but we do, because we lived in each other’s pockets for the first eighteen years of our lives. We didn’t ask for that, it just goes with growing up, but we’re tied together so strong — doesn’t matter how mad we get at each other, we’re kinda stuck with each other."
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Mary Conner and Tom Swain
"Oh," Mary said.
"Oh?" Larry asked.
"Yeah, ‘Oh,’" Mary said. "Now I know why he’s here. He’s trying to find out what happened to Jack."
"Why doesn’t he just ask?"
"Not his style," Mary said. "He never goes right for it. He stands off to the side and watches and thinks. He’d rather figure out what something is by looking at its shadow than by looking right at it. He’s always been that way."
"If you don’t mind talking about me like I’m not here, I sure don’t object," Tom said.
"Sorry," Larry said.
"Are you here or not?" Mary asked. "It’s hard to tell."
"So is everybody sure it was an accident?" Tom asked.
"We were until you asked about it," Mary shot back. "You’re a pain in the ass, but I never said you were stupid. If you wonder, I wonder."
