Dark Road Home

by Anna Carlisle

“Records, this is Tom Parker speaking.”

  His voice was both familiar and subtly changed. Deeper, perhaps; or maybe it was just the strangeness of hearing his terse, professional greeting. Tom had always been the joker of the group, the type to ham it up; it had been a thorn in his father’s side that Tom never took anything seriously.

  “Tom, this is Gin. Virginia Sullivan. I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”

  “Gin! Oh hey, I’m so glad you called. I didn’t get to spend much time with you on Saturday.”

  He’d come to the memorial with Christine and her kids, but then disappeared in the throng of mourners. Gin had caught only brief glimpses of him, always with a wineglass in his hand.

  “Thank you so much for coming,” she responded carefully. “It meant so much to me and my family.”

  “Of course. It was . . . hard.”

  His voice wobbled on the last syllable, catching Gin by surprise. He’d seemed unfazed, even cheerful at the service; was it possible he’d been covering up his own grief? Gin had long ago concluded that Tom and Lily’s romance would have soon come to a natural end, especially since Lily had begun spending more time with Jake. Neither of them had the maturity for a lasting relationship.

  “It was hard for me, too.” She waited a beat, trying to find the words to put him at ease. “I was wondering . . . Christine invited me to Olive’s party, and I’m looking forward to it. But we won’t have any time to ourselves there either—”

  “I’m not even going to be able to attend,” Tom said. “I’ve got a work thing.”

  “Well, then, all the more reason . . . I guess I just hoped we could get together to talk. Just you and me. Now that Lily’s been found, I have more questions than ever. I’m just trying to make sense of it all, you know?”

  “Do I ever,” Tom said. “I’ve barely slept since they found her. I have nightmares—I’ve been remembering all these little things from back then.”

  He sounded genuinely tormented, which made Gin feel a little guilty for her subterfuge. “Could you meet for a drink after work today?”

  Tom laughed, a humorless, empty sound. “Hell, I could meet you for a drink right now. In the summer on Fridays, this place empties out early. It’s just me and the crickets around here.”

  Gin doubted he was telling the truth. Spencer had put in long hours, including many weekends, for as long as Gin had known him. According to her parents, the medical center was busier than ever. She wondered how Spencer would feel about his son skipping out early, but she wasn’t about to let the opportunity slip by.

  “I could stand to get out of the house myself,” she said. “Is there somewhere we can go that’s quiet?” She trusted that he would read between her words and understand that she meant somewhere where they wouldn’t be seen—and gossiped about.

  “Tell you what, how about the club?” Tom suggested. “It’s pretty dead in the afternoon. We’ll clear out by the time the dinner crowd comes in.”

  “Sure,” Gin said, though she was less than thrilled with the choice. The Bella Vista Country Club, which wasn’t in Trumbull itself but rather fifteen minutes to the west of town, was a beautiful old rambling stone structure built nearly a century ago for wealthy residents of Pittsburgh who owned country estates. Her parents belonged, as did Spencer Parker and a few other well-heeled families who hadn’t fled town when the steel industry hit hard times, but most of its members came from more affluent addresses than Trumbull. Even some Pittsburgh residents made the drive for the lush greens and the atmosphere of old money—something Gin had gotten more than enough of back when her mother’s aspirations were more social than political.

  At least she could count on Jake not being there; the son of a local cop wouldn’t make the cut, even if he wasn’t despised by an entire town. Besides, she couldn’t imagine Jake enjoying the manicured course or the staid, fussy clubhouse—with his hands rough from physical labor, his year-round burnished tan, and most of all, his disdain for the trappings of wealth.

  “I can be there in half an hour. Just need to answer a couple e-mails. That work for you?”

  “Absolutely,” Gin said, already gathering her purse and keys. She’d be at the club in fifteen minutes, but waiting in the bar until the appointed time sounded better than waiting in her parents’ echoing old house full of too many ghosts.

  17

  It was closer to forty-five minutes before Tom came through the swinging doors of the club’s lounge, blinking from the sun. He was wearing a button-down blue shirt with the cuffs rolled back over his wrists; his tie was loosened. Even with these modifications, he managed to give off the same air of good-natured, indolent privilege that had allowed him to coast through adolescence with barely a scratch.

  “So glad we decided to do this,” he said, brushing Gin’s cheek with a perfunctory kiss. She thought she detected a note of liquor on his minty breath, but maybe it was just the slightly musty bar smell.

  The elderly bartender tottered his way down to them. He had a thin scrim of silvery hair and wore a bow tie and a short-sleeved white shirt. Gin, who’d been dragged to Christmas open houses and summer dances here as a child, thought it might be the same man who’d been tending bar twenty years ago.

  “What can I get you folks today?” he rasped in a smoker’s wrecked voice.

  “Tell you what, I think I’ll have a martini,” Tom said. “Ketel One, olives, very dry.”

  “Just a club soda,” Gin said—and then changed her mind. “No, on second thought, make that a glass of wine. Maybe a pinot blanc?”

  “I got a nice chardonnay,” the bartender said. “From California, I think, I gotta check.”

  “The chardonnay’s fine,” Gin amended, hoping it hadn’t been sitting open for too long; this was still a mixed-drink crowd. Like Trumbull, it was stuck in the decrepit aftermath of its heyday, when its wealthy members had bellied up to the bar with their wives clad in fur and diamonds. Today, the only other patrons were a pair of elderly women sipping pink drinks by the window and a man with a shock of gray hair ringing his scalp who looked like he was taking a nap at the other end of the bar.

  “So,” Tom said. “How are you and your folks holding up?”

  “Oh, about like you’d expect,” Gin said. “You know my mom—as long as she’s busy, she’s fine. And Dad tends to disappear a lot when he’s not at work. I found him weeding his carrot patch in the middle of the afternoon the other day.”

  Their drinks arrived, and Tom gave his an experimental sip, smacking his lips. Gin took a sip of her own drink and found it about what she expected: stale and cheap. Still, it went down easy.

  “Sounds like my dad—drowning his feelings in work. I hope you don’t mind that he didn’t come. He doesn’t do very well with memorials.”

  Gin was surprised by the tenderness in Tom’s voice; ordinarily he butted heads with his father. But the twins’ mother had died in childbirth, and according to her parents, Spencer had never recovered from that loss. No wonder a memorial would be difficult for him.

  “Listen, Tom, I’ve been thinking a lot about that day, when Lily disappeared.” Gin spoke carefully.

  “Me too. I mean, the water tower! We were there just about every day that summer. You ever think—I mean, it could have been any of us who got killed. It could have been you, anyway, or Christine.”

  As he spoke, he played with a loose button on his shirt, twisting it idly. Tom had never been a deep thinker, and this observation was typically insensitive. But Gin nodded along.

  “I’ve gone over it again and again, trying to think who might have gone there that day,” Gin said. “I mean, we hardly ever saw anyone up there. People tended to stay down near the creek or on the paved trails, remember? No one came up by the tower unless they knew about the old fly ash trails, and they were hidden pretty well by the trees.”

  Fly ash, the powdery gray residue left over from burning coal at the power plant, had once been hauled up the hills overlooking the river and dum
ped. By the time Gin was in her teens, the network of trails once used to dispose of the ash was overgrown, used only by kids and the occasional dirt-bike rider.

  “Yeah, that’s what made it such a good spot,” Tom agreed forlornly. “Remember how we used to skinny-dip there? And how Jake fell asleep that one time and we left him and he got so sunburned?”

  “He’d worked a double shift,” Gin remembered. The joke had been Tom’s idea; she’d felt guilty about it, especially when Jake woke up after sundown and had to thumb a ride back to town.

  “Yeah. That was Jake. Always working.” It wasn’t bitterness, exactly, that edged his words. It almost sounded like envy. “I go back sometimes, you know. Once or twice a year. I like to hike up there when it snows, and there’s no one around, and you can’t even hear the road noise.”

  “I was wondering . . . about that night. Remember, you said you were driving with your dad?”

  “Yeah,” Tom said, his tone instantly turning defensive. “He’d just got that BMW M3, remember? He was teaching me to drive a stick.”

  Gin vaguely remembered the car; Spencer’s one ostentatious indulgence was a new luxury automobile every few years. “It’s just that I don’t remember you ever doing that before. We used to talk about it, remember? How you always said your dad wouldn’t let you drive his car after your fender bender? So it’s kind of surprising to think you would have done it on a night when Lily wasn’t babysitting. When you two could have gotten together.”

  “She was busy,” Tom said. He caught the bartender’s eye and signaled for another drink; Gin had barely drunk a quarter of her wine. “Or at least . . . she said she was doing something.”

  “That’s the funny thing,” Gin mused. “I’ve gone over and over it in my head and I just draw a blank. I can’t remember her saying where she was going. She was just . . . gone, when I got back from Columbus. I mean, later we figured out that she’d taken those things. The backpack and the clothes.”

  Watching Tom over her glass of wine as he attacked his fresh drink with zeal, Gin mused that he was anything but strong. He was like one of the buds on her mother’s camellia bushes that never bloomed, that remained compacted in its tight ball while all around it the other flowers opened lushly.

  Failure to launch, she’d heard some of her colleagues call the phenomenon, bemoaning children who returned home after college or siblings who languished while waiting for inheritances. But Tom, at least, had the resources to limp through life. The job his father found for him kept him in a bare-bones version of the life of privilege that he’d always favored; the rock-bottom cost of living in Trumbull certainly helped. The genes he’d inherited from the mother who’d died giving birth to him had endowed him with stunning blue eyes and good bone structure. From his father he got his athletic ease, the youthful grin—and the faintly arrogant attitude that harkened back to Spencer’s own family wealth.

  Tom had been a beautiful child, and he was a striking adult, even with the extra weight he was carrying, and if he hadn’t been gifted with his sister’s quick intelligence, perhaps it had been a good thing. A more introspective man might have judged himself wanting, might have become bitter in the face of failure. But Tom had always been happy to coast on his looks and charisma, even if that meant that he was second fiddle to other, more successful men, that he lived off the largesse of others’ toil.

  Except . . . what if she’d read him wrong? Then and now? What if the broken capillaries around his nose, the slight paunch around his waist, the trembling hands that he tried to conceal—were indicative of something much darker? Not just a few too many drinks each evening, but a descent into physical and moral lassitude?

  “Did you know she was going to meet Jake?” she asked suddenly, the question taking even her by surprise. So much for easing into things.

  Tom looked wounded. “Gin, I told everyone then—no. Lily said she had things to do and I let it go at that.”

  Gin was already shaking her head. “I just don’t remember things that way.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? You weren’t there that day. You were off at freshman orientation. I mean, no offense, but I doubt you thought about home at all, you were so eager to get out of Trumbull.”

  Gin ignored the sting of his unintentional barb. “What I mean is that I can’t see you just letting it go. You and Lily—you were inseparable that summer.”

  “Yeah,” Tom said, and then he seemed to wilt a little. He stared into his drink morosely, and then picked it up and downed it. “What do you say, Virginia Jean, want to tie one on? For old times’ sake?”

  Gin was taken aback. Tom seemed oddly vulnerable, staring at her from under sleepy lids, his mouth—always one of his best features, almost feminine in its shape, but tempered by his chiseled jaw—curved into a hopeful, sad smile.

  “You remember my middle name,” she said softly.

  “Course I do. Come on, you’re practically my sister. I mean, remember how your mom used to put us all in the tub together?”

  “The bubbles,” she said, smiling. “We made beards with them.”

  Tom laughed with delight. It was, Gin realized with a pang, the happiest she’d seen him since she’d come home, and her heart constricted a little. She had to remind herself that she was here because Tom made a compelling suspect.

  “You also told Maribeth Connolly you’d seen me naked,” she went on. “You ruined my fourth-grade year.”

  Tom laughed harder. Did he really not see how cruel he’d been, pointing at her prepubescent body, in her bright-colored tank tops, crowing about having seen her titties? How his bravado had given the other boys license to torment her? Lily was exempt; Lily would stare anybody down, mock them in return.

  And even then, there was something between the two of them. Tom and Lily, thick as thieves, Madeleine used to say. When she was only a toddler, he was her self-appointed guardian, the only one who made any attempt to include her while the older girls played. By the time Lily reached grade school, they spent their recess time chasing each other around the jungle gym, despite the difference in their ages.

  His laughter died away as he signaled the bartender again. “One for her, too,” he said, pointing at Gin’s still half-full glass. She didn’t even bother to try to stop him.

  “Listen,” she said. Maybe she could use his inebriation in her favor. “I need to ask you something else. It—it’s important to me. Did you know she was pregnant?”

  “What? Oh my God, of course not!” Tom said. His shock seemed real. “Jesus, Gin—what do you think I am?”

  “Look, we were young,” Gin said, rushing through the words she’d rehearsed on the drive over. “It would be a lot for anyone to handle. No one could expect you to have known what to do—”

  “I didn’t know,” he said woodenly, his jaw set in a rigid line. “Gin. Come on.”

  “Had she . . . had she been acting differently with you? I mean, looking back at it, were there signs?”

  “How am I supposed to know?” He took a quick, savage pull at his glass. “I mean sure, she got all crazy at that time of the month. You remember. But she was always moody, always unpredictable.”

  “But before that day. Was there anything that seemed unusual, even for her?”

  Tom stared at his glass, worrying his lower lip with his teeth. Finally he shook his head. “Nothing.”

  Gin took a deep breath. “I don’t know how to ask this, Tom . . . but are you sure the baby would have been yours?”

  His mouth compressed into a thin, angry line. “I can’t believe you’re asking me that! I loved her, Gin. I mean—for real. Like, more than I’ve ever loved anyone in my life.”

  He finished his third drink while staring miserably at her. He set it down and wiped his mouth on his sleeve.

  But Gin couldn’t help noticing that he didn’t answer the question.

  ***

  Half an hour later, she was wondering if she ought to ask him for his keys when the swinging doors of
the club opened and a man in a sport coat strode purposefully through. It took Gin a second to recognize Spencer: his hair had gone completely white. It was still cut close, and his face was tanned and mostly unlined; he’d obviously kept up his ambitious fitness routine through all these years. And yet, there was something weary and aged about him.

  “Virginia,” he said, ignoring his son. He clasped her hands in his and squeezed, his face stricken with genuine grief. “I’m sorry I haven’t come by sooner. And that I missed the service. Lily . . . has never been far from my thoughts.”

  “Thank you, Spencer.”

  “How is your mother holding up?”

  “She’s doing well. Work, I think, is helping.”

  “Good. Good. I’m so glad you were able to take some time off from work to be with your folks. Will you be in town for long?”

  Behind him, Gin could see that Tom was stewing. He’d pushed his glass covertly away from him, onto the lip of the bar, and he’d tugged at his shirt to straighten it. But resentment came off him in waves, as his father continued to ignore him.

  “I’m not sure yet. A couple of weeks, anyway,” she hedged.

  “I’ll have to have you and your folks over for dinner,” Spencer said. “Fire up the barbecue.”

  “That sounds great, Dad,” Tom said in a sing-song voice. “I’ll bake a pie.”

  “That’s enough, Tom,” Spencer said without looking at him.

  “One pie would probably be enough, yeah,” Tom said. Gin could smell the sweet scent of gin on his breath even three feet away. “Unless Christine and the kids come. What do you think, Dad, should we invite your perfect child? Your beautiful grandchildren?”

  “Tom, save it,” Spencer said, turning on him. “Gin’s lost her sister. Try for one minute to show a little respect. Not everything is about you.”

  The expression on Tom’s face was as if he’d been slapped. Pain flashed in his eyes—deep, searing hurt. And Gin had a glimpse of a side of him that he kept buried underneath his glib exterior.

  But was his hurt due to his father’s treatment of him? Or was the loss of Lily as fresh for him now as it was for Gin? Or . . . was there something entirely different going on?