A Long Way Down

by Randall Silvis

  “She had as many as she wanted.”

  “Okay,” DeMarco said. “Do you remember when she first left the house that evening?”

  “I wasn’t here. I already told you guys that.”

  “That’s right, you did. Sorry; I forgot. Remind me where you were that night.”

  “Just driving around. I like to get away by myself sometimes. Just to get out of the house for a while.”

  “Your father mentioned that. I do the same thing sometimes. Just go out to the country and drive around and listen to my music. Do you do that too? Put the windows down and turn up the music?”

  Griffin nodded. “I loaded my sister’s playlist onto my phone.”

  “This was after, you mean? After she was gone?”

  Another nod.

  “That’s cool,” DeMarco said. “What did she like to listen to?”

  “Seal. Taylor Swift. Adele. Coldplay… Lots of oldies too. And a bunch of independent artists. Hollow Coves, Laurel, George Taylor, Zoey Lily, Radical Face, Juke Ross. Plus two whole Beatles albums.”

  “Let me guess,” DeMarco said. “Sgt. Pepper?”

  Griffin smiled. Nodded.

  “And…The White Album?”

  Griffin shook his head no. “Rubber Soul. She was crazy for ‘Norwegian Wood.’”

  “It’s a great song,” DeMarco said.

  He let half a minute pass in silence. Then he noticed Jayme peeking around the corner of the upstairs hall. “Just one more question, Griffin. I’m sure you must have told the detectives this too, but refresh my memory, if you would. When you went out driving that night…”

  Jayme tiptoed down the hall, testing all the doors. All locked.

  “Where exactly did you go?” DeMarco asked.

  “I was just driving around,” Griffin said.

  “I understand. But we usually go to a certain point, right? And then turn around and come back. Especially out in the country, where you’re not weaving in and out of streets. So where did you drive to before you turned around?”

  “I don’t know. I wasn’t really paying a lot of attention to places.”

  “But which direction did you go?”

  The boy thought for a moment. “South, I guess.”

  “Okay, good. And did you head out of town on 62 or, what, maybe 11?”

  “62.”

  “Yeah, that’s a nice quiet ride. Especially if you stay south. Which means switching to 9 down around Salem, right?”

  “Right,” Griffin said.

  “And about how long do you think you drove before you turned around and headed north again?”

  Jayme came to the top of the stairs, looked down at DeMarco. He gave her a little nod.

  She tapped her knuckles against the handrail before continuing down the stairs. The sound caused Griffin to swivel around in his seat.

  “Just an estimate,” DeMarco said. “About how long, do you think?”

  Jayme smiled at Griffin.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “A couple of hours probably. Maybe a little more.”

  “And then you came back home?”

  Griffin turned to face him again. “Yeah.”

  “Excellent. That’s it, then. Oh, wait a minute. Did I ask what time you left the house that evening? To start your drive?”

  The boy cocked his head. Blew out a breath. “Man, I don’t know. Just before dark, I guess.”

  “Okay,” DeMarco said, and wrote in his notebook. “Somewhere between 8:30 and 9:00. Close enough.”

  He flipped up the cover on the notebook, stood, and said, “We really appreciate your cooperation, Griffin. And again, our apologies for disturbing you here at home.”

  The boy stood and turned away, crossed to Jayme at the bottom of the stairs. “So?” he said.

  “It’s a very nice room,” she told him. “And such a beautiful house. Thank you for your time.” With that, she crossed into the foyer and out the front door, with DeMarco close behind.

  Thirty-Eight

  On their way back to the Greek restaurant, Jayme filled him in on her search of Samantha Lewis’s room. While she talked she used a USB cord to attach her phone to the laptop. “The girl was neat to the nth degree,” she said. “Every little thing was perfectly organized. Books, CDs, even her panties in the drawers. Folded on top of each other according to color. Black in one stack, pink, white, yellow. It was kind of awe-inspiring.”

  “That might have been the housekeeper’s doing.”

  “Maybe,” Jayme said. “But I mean everything. Dolls, stuffed animals, you name it.”

  “In other words, nothing illuminating?”

  “Hold on a minute. Let me pull up this photo I took.”

  DeMarco leaned forward, tried for a quick glance at the screen.

  “Give it a second,” Jayme said. “And maybe you’d like to pull over instead of wrapping us around a telephone pole?”

  Immediately she regretted her words, which had made DeMarco flinch. No telephone pole had been involved in the accident that killed his son, but still… “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Nope,” he told her, and eased the car onto the shoulder. “You’re right. Absolutely right.” He pulled the gearshift into Park and punched on the four-way flashers. She turned the screen in his direction.

  He saw a low bookshelf with four shelves, the top shelf empty, the other three holding books and wire-bound notebooks stacked on top of each other. “What am I looking at here?” he said.

  “The entire bookshelf is devoted to the textbooks from all of her classes. Arranged chronologically. First and second semesters on the bottom, up to the fifth and sixth, the last ones she completed, on the top shelf. She kept a separate notebook for each course. Each stack represents one semester. From top down they go text, notebook, text, notebook, text, notebook.”

  “Okay,” he said. “She kept all of her textbooks. Never sold any back. And this means something to you?”

  “Click to the next picture.”

  He did. A close-up of the second-semester stack. He stared for a few moments. Leaned closer. A large truck sped past his car, its horn shrieking. He sat up quickly, glanced through the windshield. “That’s not fifty-five miles per hour,” he said.

  “Like you drive the speed limit? The picture, Ryan.”

  He looked again. “I don’t know. Whatever it is you want me to see, I’m not seeing it.”

  “That’s because you’re looking at what’s there. You need to look at what isn’t there.”

  Twenty seconds later he said, “A notebook is missing.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Which one?”

  “Take a guess.”

  He knew of only one of her courses. “Gillespie’s.”

  She smiled. “Can I get a carumba?”

  “Muchas carumbas,” he said.

  “So two questions. Who took it and why?”

  DeMarco sat back in his seat again. Checked in the rearview mirror, the side mirror, punched the flashers off, put on his turn signal and pulled out onto the highway. “Her father said that nothing in her room has been touched. He insisted on that.”

  “So he doesn’t know.”

  “Which leaves either Griffin or the housekeeper. With the gardener a remote possibility.”

  “Very remote.”

  “However,” DeMarco said. “Also according to the father, Griffin sometimes lies on her bed and listens to her music. Maybe he also reads her notebooks.”

  “Should we go back and ask?”

  He thought for a moment, then shook his head no. “Let’s think this through first. Let’s find out if Griffin took the same class. Or plans to take it. That would give him a viable excuse for having the notebook.”

  “You didn’t mention Gillespie to him?”

  “
I did not. Or anything about the memorial tomorrow night. If I asked about Gillespie, and Griffin was one of his students, he might warn his professor. I want to see if Gillespie shows up tomorrow night. And how they both react if they see us there. Also how they react if they don’t.”

  “Nice,” Jayme said. She closed the lid on her laptop. “So what’s your read on the boy in general?”

  “Spoiled rich kid, for one thing. But does he have something to hide? Maybe he’s just full of grief and anger. Grief is like gravity; it grounds us in reality, but too much of it can crush a person flat.”

  She raised her eyebrows at that. Did he know whom he was really talking about?

  He said, “Maybe he was just genuinely ticked off to have us invading his space. His and his sister’s.”

  She said, “How was he when I was in her room?”

  “Antsy. Kept sneaking glances up at the balcony.”

  “Every other door upstairs was locked.”

  “I did promise the commissioner we would limit ourselves to that one room.”

  Jayme pursed her lips. Leaned her head against the headrest. “Amber Bertell,” she said. “I can turn her. I get the feeling she can give me something on her roommate Kaitlin. She’s not fond of pretty girls.”

  “Then she must have hated you,” DeMarco said.

  “Nice try. But you’re still buying me souvlaki.”

  Thirty-Nine

  That afternoon they spent a couple of hours adding to their information on the dining room wall. DeMarco checked in with Sheriff Brinker and brought him up-to-date. At the end of their telephone conversation, Brinker said, “Vee wants me to invite you and Jayme over to dinner some night. Like soon. I think she misses your ugly face.”

  “Probably wants to find out if she still has a shot with me,” said DeMarco.

  “You’re risking a shot talking like that. Maybe a full clip.”

  “We should hit the firing range some time,” DeMarco suggested. “All four of us. Loser buys dinner at Aqua Pazzo.”

  “I have an astigmatism and you know it. Let’s deal with one dinner at a time. How’s Saturday night for you guys?”

  “What can we bring?”

  “Just tell Jayme to bring somebody other than you. Better yet, she should come alone. Four’s a crowd, you know.”

  A part of DeMarco enjoyed this reconnection with his former teammate. As a young man he had never allowed himself to feel close to anyone. It still did not feel wholly natural, but he no longer felt a compulsion to run from any possibility of friendship and its responsibilities. Every relationship came with its burdens. Recognizing this, he experienced a wash of guilt for not tending more carefully to his most important relationship.

  “What do you say we call it a day?” he told Jayme after relaying the sheriff’s dinner invitation. “I’m sorry I’ve been like a donkey turning a millstone.”

  “If you have, so have I. So what do we do with the rest of the day?”

  “The yard needs mowed. You know how to drive a lawn tractor?”

  “You know how to wash and dry and fold laundry?”

  “Flip you for it,” he said.

  “Flip yourself. I’ll put a load of laundry in, then go in town and grab a movie for tonight. My choice. Just because you’ve been such a donkey.”

  Forty

  It was a few minutes after six that evening when somebody knocked on the front door. DeMarco was in the shower, Jayme downstairs in the kitchen, where she was building her version of Mexican spring rolls: flour tortillas stuffed with shredded cabbage, chopped Vidalia onion, sweet red peppers, and sharp cheddar cheese. She placed the fourth one in the casserole dish, then covered all four with salsa verde and crumbled queso, and failed to hear the first knocks because she was also dancing barefoot in a periwinkle summer dress and singing along with the Cars’ “Just What I Needed” playing on the stereo in the living room. Then came the second set of knocks, slightly louder, five quick raps.

  Quickly she slid the casserole into the warm oven, went into the living room and turned down the music, then to the front door. She opened the door to an attractive woman in her late forties, wearing beige slacks and a yellow long-sleeved blouse, her dirty-blond hair cut short and neatly styled. Jayme’s first thought was that she should have known the woman but didn’t—and then suddenly recognized her from the photos in a box in the closet.

  Laraine’s smile was as pale as her skin. “You must be Jayme.”

  Jayme’s smile was equally wan, though her heart, she guessed, was beating faster. “Laraine. It’s nice to meet you.”

  “I don’t mean to interrupt your evening, but is Ryan here? There’s something I wanted to tell him.”

  “He’s upstairs in the shower.”

  Laraine nodded. “May I come in for a moment?”

  “Of course,” Jayme said. “Of course.” And she stepped aside, held the door as Laraine entered, then left the door standing open.

  Laraine came forward two steps, then stood there looking around. “It hasn’t changed much, has it?” she said, still with a small smile on her pale lips.

  “We, uh…we don’t spend a lot of time here.”

  Laraine looked toward the stairway. “Do you think he’ll be long?”

  “He just stepped into the shower a few minutes ago, and then he likes to shave—”

  “And brush his teeth,” Laraine said, “and pick out his clothes, and iron out the wrinkles. Maybe I should just tell you?”

  “Sure,” Jayme said. “Would you care to sit down?”

  “Thank you, no,” Laraine said. “On second thought maybe you could ask him to call me. I think he has my number.”

  “I’m sure he must.”

  “Tell him that I have a message for him from a friend of mine. From our boy.”

  “Oh,” Jayme said, startled, unsure of what else to say. A message from their boy? “Okay.”

  And then another shock. Laraine reached out to take Jayme’s hand. “You’re very pretty,” she said. “I hope you make each other happy. I don’t intend to interfere with anything.”

  The only thing Jayme could think to say was, “Thank you.”

  Laraine smiled and squeezed her hand once, then released it, turned away and walked outside.

  Jayme stood leaning against the edge of the door, watching as Laraine crossed to the curb and climbed into a white sedan and drove away. Then, still holding the door, Jayme turned toward the stairway. The water could still be heard in the shower. The music from the stereo was soft but somehow jarring.

  Finally she released the door and crossed to the sofa and sat down. She could not remember if she had taken a breath since first opening the door, but knew it would be a good idea to take a few breaths now.

  Forty-One

  When he stepped out of the bathroom naked and saw her sitting there on the edge of the bed, he turned quickly, grabbed the wet towel and wrapped it around his waist, then immediately headed for the dresser. But her crooked smile and dazed look stopped him in his tracks.

  “What’s wrong?” he said.

  “We had a visitor a few minutes ago.”

  “Who was it?”

  She paused before speaking. Raised her eyebrows. Crinkled her nose. “Laraine.”

  He wasn’t sure he had heard her correctly. Replayed it in his head. Then said, “Oh lord.”

  “No,” Jayme said. “She was perfectly nice. Sweet even.”

  “Really?”

  “She must think I’m an idiot.”

  “And why’s that?”

  “Because I acted like one.”

  “How so?”

  “Like…like an idiot,” she said.

  He crossed to the bed and sat beside her. Took her hand. “Just tell me what happened.”

  “Nothing happened. She wants you to call her. S
he has a message from a friend of hers. From your boy.”

  “What?” he said.

  “That’s what she said.”

  “What friend?”

  “I didn’t ask.”

  “About Ryan Jr.?”

  “She said from. From a friend. From your boy.”

  “Oh lord,” he said again. He stood and crossed to the dresser, picked up his cell phone, scrolled through his contacts list, pressed the call icon and stood there listening to the phone ring. Then said, “Laraine. Hi. Jayme said you came by.”

  “Yes,” he said. “She is. Thank you.” And he returned to sit beside Jayme again, listening.

  And listened for thirty seconds more. Then said, “Well, who is this woman?”

  And then said, after an audible sigh, “All right. I should have some time free tomorrow, late afternoon. How about five-ish? We have an appointment in Canfield at seven.”

  He listened awhile longer, then said, “Just so you’re doing okay. I mean, if that’s what it takes. If you really believe it’s helping you.”

  He listened, nodded, and finally told her, before hanging up, “Okay. Text me the address. Take care of yourself.”

  He turned to Jayme. She sat smiling crookedly at the bathroom door. He said, “I need to go talk to a psychic tomorrow. Please tell me you’ll come along.”

  “Ah,” she said. “The message from your son. A warning to stay away from me, I bet.”

  “I guess we’ll find out, won’t we?”

  “I doubt that I’m invited to this meeting.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “If I’m going down that rabbit hole, you’re going with me.”

  Forty-Two

  The next morning, during breakfast, DeMarco said, “Is there anything you want us to tackle this morning? We have a busy afternoon and evening ahead.”

  “You want to take the morning off? Rest our brains a bit?”

  “I was thinking of visiting the cemetery.”

  “You don’t want to wait till Sunday? That’s your usual day, isn’t it?”

  “What’s usual anymore? I feel the urge to go today.”