He was breathing heavily before he’d made it fifteen yards, laboring through snow already calf-deep and struggling to see where he was going. Thick flakes slipped down inside his collar. The wind knocked him around and snow stung his cheeks, but every six or seven steps he’d feel a lull in the wind and the thickness of the blizzard would diminish just enough for him to make sure he was on the right track.
Whittier Elementary sat on the bald crest of a hill, ringed by trees. Wind sheared across the top of the hill, slicing over the baseball field, but Keenan kept going, promising himself an enormous coffee as soon as he could lay hands on one … and after he had smacked Gavin Wexler and his two idiot friends in the head.
“Stupid kids,” he whispered, bending into the storm.
He paused to orient himself and felt the ache of the cold settle into his fingers. The school was to his right. In a momentary lull, he saw the black stripes of the power lines that marched across the hill behind the school, and turned left toward the far corner of the field. A chain-link fence was supposed to keep kids away from the viaduct that ran down the hill in that corner, but in the winter it was the greatest place to sled. Young Joe Keenan had been there with his own idiot friends dozens of times, but they’d never done it in a blizzard at one thirty in the morning.
A voice came to him on the wind and he looked up, peering through the snow at nothing. The cold cut deeply despite his jacket and hat and gloves, but he forged ahead, wondering if the raging wind and whipping snow had played a trick on him, if the sound he’d heard had come from some other direction. Half-a-dozen steps more, and he found his answer—a dark silhouette staggering toward him, straight ahead.
“Hey!” Officer Keenan shouted. “This way!”
Stupid. The guy was already heading this way. But maybe he needed to know he wasn’t alone.
He heard the voice again, though it sounded different this time. A soft, chuffing whisper. Yet it confused him because it came not from ahead but behind and to his left. The wind drove harder, thickening the white curtain in front of him and obscuring his view of the figure in the snow.
The storm playing tricks on me, Keenan thought.
But then the whisper came again, so close it seemed to be right at his ear, and he felt something snag on his jacket and turned with a shout, reaching for his gun—stupid because he had gloves on.
He stared into the storm, not breathing, heart booming inside his chest, waiting for a lull in the gale. When it came and the snow fell straight down for once instead of whipping sideways, he saw nothing. No one was there. And yet that whisper lingered in his mind so vividly that his heart still thundered and he took short, nervous breaths. His thoughts rushed back to earlier in his shift and whatever had made the scratches on his car.
“Hello?” a voice called.
Spinning around, he saw that the silhouetted figure had come nearer. Keenan saw a bulky green jacket with a hood, but the face was in darkness until he swung his flashlight up. The blizzard played havoc with the beam, but he could make out the man’s basic features and the frantic terror in his eyes.
“Sir, I’m a police officer. Are you hurt?”
Keenan flashed the light in his eyes again, waved it back and forth, and wondered if the guy was in shock.
“Are you Mr. Wexler?” he asked.
The guy blinked. He looked around as if he’d lost something and then fixed his gaze on Officer Keenan.
“I’m okay. It’s the boys. You’ve gotta help the boys,” Wexler said, his voice rising from numbed to frantic in the space of a handful of words.
Wexler grabbed Keenan by the wrist but the officer yanked his arm away.
“Please, sir, just show me where they are.”
The man nodded his head and then just kept nodding it as he turned back the way he’d come.
“This way,” he said. “Hurry. I thought … my cell phone didn’t work, maybe the storm, and I thought I’d have to go all the way home and then … please!”
Wexler struggled through the storm and Officer Keenan followed, more certain with every step that they were headed for the chain-link fence at the corner of the ball field that led down onto the viaduct … to the narrow slope that Keenan and his friends had grown up referring to as Meatball Hill, after the time Frankie Matos had gone flying off the side and into the trees and torn up his knee so badly it looked like a raw meatball. That was both the danger and the allure of the place. If you screwed up and went off the side, the viaduct dropped off at a rough angle for a good ten feet, all covered with trees.
They reached the fence and Wexler started to climb over.
Keenan grabbed his arm. “No, Mr. Wexler. You need to stay up here and watch for more help to come.”
Whatever waited for him at the bottom of Meatball Hill, Keenan figured if he needed to call it in, it would help to have Wexler at the top to flag EMTs or other officers as they arrived.
Taking a deep breath, the icy chill drawn inside him, he scaled the gate at the top of the viaduct, balanced precariously a moment, and then dropped down on the other side. When he landed in the snow he went down on one knee, grabbing hold of the chain link to keep from falling. This sort of thing had been a lot easier when was fourteen.
Keenan tried to peer down the narrow hill. Through the maelstrom of white he vaguely made out the electrical towers that marched across the shoulder of the hill below, where the viaduct leveled out. Meatball Hill was about eighty feet in length—not as long as his memory had imagined but just as steep as he’d recalled. The deep snow around his feet was trampled by the bootprints of several kids and the viaduct was striped with the paths of sleds.
The sleds, he thought, frowning as he remembered the other dangerous element of Meatball Hill—the gate at the bottom. The fence down there was a twin to the one at the top, chain link with a double-door gate, framed with metal piping. In order to sled down the viaduct, you had to be willing to bail out at the bottom and let your sled hit the gate, but Keenan remembered staying on too long several times, so that his momentum took him skidding along the snow into the fence.
“Shit,” he whispered to himself, his hands and face growing numb. Then he raised his voice to be heard over the storm. “Did one of them hit the fence, Mr. Wexler? Are there injuries?”
“Yes,” Wexler replied, his voice strangely clear amid the roar of the blizzard. “It’s Gavin. And not just…”
Keenan had whipped off his glove and slipped out his radio. As soon as he hit the button a burst of static filled the air. A squeal came from the radio, loud enough to blot out anything else Wexler might have said.
“Coventry Central, this is Car Four,” he said. “Come in.”
He started down the hill, listening to the radio hiss and pop, but he’d taken only five steps when he realized that Wexler had stopped in midsentence and hadn’t said more. Worried that the guy might be collapsing in shock, Keenan turned to check on him, but saw no sign of the man.
“Mr. Wexler?” the officer called as he struggled back to the gate.
He peered into the storm and shouted the man’s name again, scanning the frozen baseball field—or as much of it as the storm allowed him to see. A fresh burst of static came from his radio and Keenan jumped, startled. He lifted the radio and hailed Dispatch again, even as he stared into the driving snow. There was nowhere for Wexler to have gone. Nowhere he could have gone, at least not fast enough that Keenan wouldn’t have spotted him.
“Wexler!” he shouted.
No answer.
Until one came, but this was not the voice of a grown man. A younger voice, frantic and plaintive, cried out from the bottom of the viaduct, calling for help. Keenan swore, glanced once more at the void in the storm where Wexler had just vanished, and turned to stumble, march, and slide down the steep slope of Meatball Hill.
The radio kept crackling. He tried calling in again and heard a snippet of words among the static but nothing he could make out clearly. The storm was interfering with every
thing.
Twenty feet from the fence, snow frosting his coat and sticking to his face, Keenan barely made out a pair of figures on the ground.
“Hello?” he called.
“Here!” a voice came back. “Right here!”
Exhausted from fighting against the brutal wind, Keenan staggered toward the two boys, one of whom knelt in the snow, cradling the other in his lap. The upright boy was a skinny little guy whose eyebrows were rimed with snow. He wore a wool pea coat and a scarf pulled up to cover the bottom of his chin and he gazed at Keenan with pleading eyes.
“Help him!”
Keenan stood over them, studying the unconscious boy, whose head lolled alarmingly to one side.
“What happened?”
“He tried to help Gavin,” the skinny kid said, his voice cracking with emotion.
Keenan frowned. “Neither of you is Gavin Wexler?”
“I’m Marc Stern. This is Charlie Newell,” the kid said. “Gavin’s…” His face crumpled into grief and horror. “Gavin’s over there.” He nodded toward the gate, only another ten feet away.
Keenan stumbled over and nearly tripped on a small figure in a gray-and-blue winter coat that lay mostly covered beneath at least an inch of snow. Even as he bent to brush some of the snow away, he smelled the stink of burnt flesh and he froze.
“No!” skinny Marc Stern cried. “Don’t touch him! It might not be safe!”
Keenan backed away, glancing around to take in the scene, and then he heard a spark and a pop and he understood it all. He craned his head back to look up at the power lines that ran perpendicular to the viaduct, crossing the path just on the other side of the fence at the bottom of Meatball Hill. A long black line hung from one of the towers, and about fifteen feet to his left it draped across the top of the fence.
A sizzle and hiss reached him and he saw a little shower of sparks come off the fence where the power line had fallen on it.
He didn’t want a better look at Gavin Wexler’s burnt corpse, and he didn’t have time for one. He hurried back to the other boys and dropped to the snow beside Charlie. He felt the boy’s wrist for a pulse but it was weak if there at all, so he checked Charlie’s neck and found his heart still beating.
Keenan glanced up at Marc. “So, Gavin hit the fence. Did he grab it, use it to help himself up?”
Marc nodded vigorously. “He couldn’t even scream. We saw him standing there and we didn’t know what was happening because he was so quiet and then his gloves caught fire and we could smell, like, burning hair, and Charlie went to try to pull him off the fence and I screamed for him not to and … and…”
“It’s okay,” Keenan lied, glancing at the skinny kid. “It’s gonna be okay.”
The kid didn’t bother to argue. It had been a stupid thing to say and they both knew it. Gavin had been electrocuted to death. His flesh had been smoking. His gloves and probably other things had caught fire. Now they were out here in the blizzard at two in the morning and Charlie had a slow, flickering heartbeat. He’d been electrocuted, too, trying to save his buddy. There wasn’t a damn thing okay about it.
“Charlie,” Keenan said, leaning in. “Charlie, can you hear me?”
He hit the call button on the radio again and static squealed, echoing off the trees and the storm.
“Coventry Central, come in!” he called. “Coventry Central, please respond!”
Nothing but static.
Charlie started to twitch and jerk. Marc cried out, pulling his hands away as if afraid he was somehow responsible. The unconscious kid seized and spasmed and began to groan and all Keenan could think about was the boy’s heart. He’d felt a flutter when he’d checked Charlie’s pulse and Keenan figured he’d had a heart attack, and maybe this was another one.
“Back up!” Keenan said, shuffling over beside Charlie on his knees as Marc retreated.
Should’ve covered him with my coat, he thought, as if that would’ve prevented whatever this was.
Keenan grabbed Charlie’s flailing arm, then put weight on his collarbone, trying to hold him down to keep the kid from hurting himself. He twitched once and then lay still; the seizure had stopped. It took Keenan only a second to realize that the seizure was not the only thing that had ceased—the rise and fall of Charlie’s chest had gone still.
Cursing, Keenan checked the kid’s pulse again, but couldn’t find one. A calm not unlike the numbness the blizzard caused began to spread through him. Keenan wished for EMTs. He wished for a portable defibrillator. All he had was a terrified, skinny little frostbitten teenage boy and his own two big, fumbling hands. He made sure Charlie’s airway was clear and then started chest compressions, damning himself for every second he’d delayed, talking to Mr. Wexler and checking on Gavin’s corpse.
“Come on, come on,” Keenan said, talking as much to himself as to the quieted heart of Charlie Newell.
Wexler, he thought, remembering the man’s fumbling, shocked attempts at communication. Somehow he’d run off so fast that he’d vanished into the blizzard, but had he gone far?
“Mr. Wexler!” Officer Keenan screamed. “Can you hear me up there? Are you still here?”
No reply. He wondered if Wexler had gotten his act together enough to fetch EMTs or just call 911. Surely that was what he’d intended to do before Keenan had run into him.
“Come on, Charlie,” skinny Marc pleaded.
But despite the rests between repetitions of chest compressions, Keenan’s arms were getting tired fast. The storm worked against him, as if the wind did not want this boy’s heart to beat again.
“Wexler!” Keenan cried.
He caught Marc staring at him and they locked eyes a moment. Keenan paused in his compressions, pulled out his cell phone, and tossed it to the kid, who fumbled it with his frozen hands and let it fall to the snow.
“Call 911!” Keenan said.
“I tried. Me and Mr. Wexler both did. Our phones—”
“Try mine!”
Nodding, Marc worked off one snowy glove and tried to use Keenan’s phone to call 911.
“A couple of bars!” Marc cried.
“Make the call!” Keenan said, between compressions.
In moments, he heard Marc announcing their location and then repeating it several times, trying to communicate, tears of frustration springing to his eyes as he desperately tried to tell the dispatcher where they were and what they needed.
More than a minute passed and Keenan’s arms were growing tired. Charlie had not so much as twitched. His pulse had not fluttered. His skin had begun to grow even colder than before. A long sigh escaped Joe Keenan’s lips and he shuddered as he sat back on his haunches, gazing at the frostbitten, frozen features of Charlie Newell, who had died right in front of him. Charlie Newell, whose life he had failed to save.
“Do something,” skinny Marc said, but without much fire. It was a hollow plea. The boy knew there was nothing to be done.
Marc began to sob, hugging himself. Keenan could only watch him. The wind shifted for a moment and he smelled the aroma of Gavin Wexler’s burnt flesh still in the air.
The snow kept falling.
Keenan knew he had to leave the dead boys behind. He had to take skinny Marc with him, go back up the hill, over the fence, and make it to his car. He hoped the car radio would be working better than his handheld. Marc had gotten through to 911 but Keenan felt pretty dubious that the dispatcher had been able to hear half of what the kid had told her before the call had been cut off.
He just wanted to take a minute, in the cold and the storm, as the snow began to accumulate on his clothes and the still form of Charlie Newell. Keenan fought back tears as the icy wind assaulted him.
Charlie Newell, he thought, and knew he’d never forget the name.
The kid who’d died at his feet. The kid he hadn’t been able to save.
FOUR
Allie Schapiro lay in bed with Niko, watching him sleep. The candle on her nightstand had burned down nearly to the bottom
and begun to dim, but the flame endured. In the flicker and gutter of the candlelight, he looked so handsome that her heart swelled and she could barely breathe. The windows rattled in their frames and the storm blew so hard that the house shook with its fury. She’d never taken the wind chimes off the back deck when winter arrived and now she strained to listen for their frantic music. Earlier she had heard the chimes clearly but now they had been silenced; the wind had blown them down.
Beneath the comforter she was warm, so she knew that the goose bumps that kept prickling her flesh came not from the cold but from the memory of making love with Niko earlier in the night. Just the thought sent a delicious shiver through her that hardened her nipples and ignited a fresh yearning at her core. She reached out under the covers and ran a hand along his thigh.
Gazing at him, her heart so full, she slid her hand out from beneath the comforter and touched his face, caressing the contours and shadows of his deep, olive skin and feeling the stubble on his chin. He had long, beautiful eyelashes that she envied.
As she studied him, Niko opened his eyes. A tired smile touched his lips.
“You should be sleeping,” he said.
Allie cupped his cheek with her hand, bent in, and brushed his lips with hers.
“It was a good night, wasn’t it?” she said.
“The beginning or the end?”
She glanced away, blushing a little, surprised that he could make her feel shy after all that they had shared, and all that they had done together.
“Both,” she admitted. “But I meant earlier, with the kids.”
Under the sheets, Niko placed a hand on the curve of her hip, trailing his fingers along her skin.
“It was perfect, Allie. Dinner was wonderful. And it was great to see the kids relax around each other, and with the two of us together. It all seemed so … normal.”
“Normal is nice,” she said.
“Normal is very nice,” Niko replied.
Once the power had gone out, Jake and Isaac had insisted that they had to eat all the ice cream in the freezer to keep it from melting, even though they’d had no idea how long they would be without electricity. Another night Allie would have refused, but she had not wanted to disrupt the playful atmosphere. While she and Niko had poured glasses of Shiraz and watched the storm through the slider that led to the deck, the kids had sat at the kitchen table and polished off whatever had been left of three different pints of Ben & Jerry’s. Fortunately, even that sugar had not kept them awake terribly late. Without lights or television, they were all asleep by eleven o’clock. Allie and Niko had given it forty minutes to make sure they weren’t going to stir and then he had taken her to bed.
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