Summer by Eden Maguire

meant it. He picked up his keys and scraped back his chair.
    ‘No, stay. Drink your coffee.’ I looked more closely and dropped the stalker theory. Brandon seemed tired, minus the usual macho posturing. ‘How are you doing?’
    ‘Good,’ he said, walking over to the counter to save thewaitress a trip. He stayed there to sip his coffee.
    ‘What happened to you?’ I asked. ‘How come you’re not pressing my buttons?’
    ‘I’m not in the mood.’
    ‘You were the last time we met, outside the Madisons’ place.’ This new subdued Brandon allowed me past the tough-guy image to view the Brandon that reminded me more of Phoenix – quiet and somehow vulnerable. ‘Really – did something bad happen?’
    He came back to the table, turned his chair around and sat astride. ‘The cops brought Zak home,’ he told me. ‘Last night. They caught the kid setting fire to a janitor’s store at his school.’
    ‘That’s bad. I’m sorry.’
    ‘Mom went crazy. After she yelled at Zak she turned on me and said it was all down to me. Zak needed someone he could look up to and now Phoenix is gone, I’m the lousy role model he has to follow.’
    ‘She said that? So when did you last set fire to a janitor’s store?’ I asked. Phoenix had told me about Brandon’s past and it didn’t include arson. True, there was a jail sentence for fighting over a girl and beating the other guy to a pulp, and other angry adolescent stuff before that. But nothing since, as far as I knew.
    ‘You know what Mom means,’ he muttered. ‘I need toset Zak an example the way Phoenix did.’
    ‘So the pressure’s on. What exactly does she want you to do?’
    ‘Rewind ten years, wipe the exam failures, the gangs, the fights, the conviction for assault, you name it.’ The bitter tone told me he was way down in a deep hole, not even trying to climb out.
    ‘Seriously – what can you do?’
    ‘Ditch the Harley, get work, be home nights.’ Drinking the dregs of his coffee, Brandon slammed the cup down. ‘You know what she wants, Darina? She wants me to do what Phoenix did, she wants me to act like him, look like him – she wants me to be him!’

4
    S leep was a million miles away. I lay in my bed that night, my mind going a hundred miles per hour, flipping from one topic to another.
    First, the copycat killing in Florida. I tried to stand back from my first thought of Hey, it’s the same guy! Slow right down. Run that through again. I took a deep breath and told myself that Florida was half a continent away. Crazy gunmen usually stayed local. They had their killing spree then ran home and holed up, went back to living their lives with no one even suspecting the guy who lived above the convenience store or the loner who drove the animal-feed truck – until they went out and shot more innocent people.
    But then I remembered the same quick getaway technique, the identical calculating mind behind the two crazy acts. Whoever shot Summer and the Venice victimsmust have planned the whole thing in advance. And the white baseball cap stuck in my mind, even amongst the whirl of warring ideas.
    I turned and pulled the blankets over my head, trying to stop the muscles in my legs from twitching and to get some sleep.
    And what about Hunter? How could I look at him in the same way now that I’d read exactly what happened to him and Marie? There was a rape and then there was a daughter. How had Marie handled the disgrace of that back then? Had she given Mentone’s baby up for adoption? Had she lived the rest of her life hanging her head in shame?
    And Hunter had a first name. He was an actual rancher with a Christian name, who died trying to save his wife from a rapist. Imagine the worst thing that could happen to a guy and it had happened to him out at Foxton more than a century ago.
    I turned again, pummelled my pillow back into shape. Maybe I should turn on the light and read a magazine because I sure wasn’t going to sleep. I reached out for the