Three posters hung on the wall: a close-up of Peyton Manning; a team photo of the Bison bearing the words STATE SEMIFINALISTS, DALLAS, TX; the back of a white jersey that read #1 CHRIST. The only other note of personality in the room Joel found resting facedown in the drawer of a small oak desk.

It was another photo, this one of a much younger Dylan—in a jersey and pads—smiling with his arm over the shoulder of Luke Evers, the muscled running back Joel had seen arguing with Dylan at the game on Friday night. “They haven’t been the same since Dylan started going out with Bethany Tanner,” Wesley Mores had said.

Joel returned the picture to the drawer, tapped his phone. A response from work, texts from tedious men in Manhattan, but nothing from Dylan. Joel had lost count of how many times he’d called his brother’s number but he called it again now. It was routed immediately to voice mail.

He dug through the other drawers of Dylan’s desk but found little of interest—iPhone charger, pencils, chewing gum. One drawer contained a dusty hunting knife, his brother’s initials written in Sharpie on the sheath. Joel slid the blade free. Long, serrated, perfectly clean, it clearly hadn’t seen use in ages. He returned the knife to the drawer.

He rose from the desk’s chair and crossed the room to check inside Dylan’s bedside table. At first he saw nothing but loose change, an exhausted tube of Lubriderm.

His eye settled on something odd: a gleaming gold Movado wristwatch. Joel held the watch to the light and wondered how Dylan (who, as far as Joel knew, had never worked a day in his life) had bought it. Paulette and Darren weren’t the type to give showy gifts, and even if they were, they could never have afforded a brand this expensive on their modest paychecks.

Very strange.

And then Joel spotted something far more troubling in the nightstand’s drawer. From far in the back he fished out an unlabeled amber vial with a dozen yellow tablets inside.

Joel googled the imprints on the sides of the pills and let out a sigh. They were Oxycodone, a powerful painkiller, and a high dose at that. POTENTIAL FOR RECREATION/ABUSE: SIGNIFICANT, read the pills’ literature.

Joel wondered what the odds were Dylan had been prescribed the pills to help with the aches and pains that must be inevitable in a game as strenuous as football. Not unlikely, but if that had been the case, then why didn’t the bottle bear an official label from a pharmacy?

Something Clark had said last night flitted through Joel’s head: “We’ve got all the usual meth crazies around here.” Oxycodone was a sedative, whereas methamphetamine, he knew, was a stimulant (a stimulant, Joel reminded himself, only a molecule removed from the Adderall currently pulsing in his own brain.)

Different drug classes, different effects, but the sight of the pricey watch waiting so near to these pills put an unpleasant thought in Joel’s mind. A thought that Dylan might be connected to something far more dangerous than the school’s athletic department.