“Not until I get an answer,” Mrs. Smith said, striding over to where Allie stood with Mr. Gustafson, who had taken up position behind her as if she could shield him from Mrs. Smith’s wrath.
“Look, I’m sorry,” Mr. Gustafson said, but he wouldn’t meet Mrs. Smith’s gaze. He kept shifting his weight from foot to foot, glancing around with an air of awkward frustration. “But I’m not drunk.”
“If you haven’t been drinking, then what the hell were you thinking?” Mrs. Smith demanded. “You hit that pickup truck back there. I saw you coming in my rearview mirror. You were all over the road and then you hit your damn accelerator instead of the brake, like one of those ninety-year-old ladies who crashes through a convenience-store wall. We all had our children in the car! If you’re not drunk, you must be high—”
“I’m not high!” Mr. Gustafson roared.
“Then what happened?” Mrs. Smith roared right back. “And don’t tell me your pedal stuck, because I will slap you right in the—”
“I don’t know how to drive a car!” Gustafson shouted.
That silenced them all for a moment.
“I mean…” he fumbled, “I mean I don’t remember how. Something happened to me. I … I had to get my son to school and he wanted me to drive him. His mother went in to work early this morning and I was his only ride, but I don’t know … I can’t remember how to drive!”
They all stared. Allie knew there was something he wasn’t saying but she could also tell that much of this was the truth because it hurt him so much to reveal it.
A police car turned the corner seconds ahead of an ambulance that came from the other direction. Principal D’Amato had been striding toward the gathered parents but now he redirected himself to meet the police car. Allie glanced around and saw that all the students had gone inside and only the cars involved in the accident remained at the curb. The school bell clamored inside, the sound rolling across the lawn.
Mrs. Smith abandoned them abruptly and marched toward the policeman, probably to insist that Mr. Gustafson be tested for drugs and alcohol. And that was the right thing to do, Allie knew. It might have been accident, but Gustafson could have killed someone. She didn’t like Helen Smith at all—nobody did, really, not even Mr. Smith—but Allie wondered if the bitch might be the only one who really understood what she could have lost this morning.
Penitent and yet somehow also a little petulant, Mr. Gustafson wiped his eyes and waited for the policeman and the principal. Allie stood close to him, though all the others had turned their attention elsewhere.
“Did you hit your head recently?” she found herself asking.
Gustafson looked at her. “What?”
“Did you hit your head or fall down or something? I mean, people don’t usually just forget how to drive.”
He turned away, unwilling to meet her gaze. As she studied him, something occurred to her that made her knit her brow.
“How did you know my name?” she asked.
His expression changed, turning from irritated to anxious. He cast a quick glance her way, as if he was guilty of something, but he didn’t answer. A chill ran up her spine.
Then the policeman was there with a pad and pen out, ready to take a statement, and Mr. D’Amato swept Allie away for a private chat so that she could fill him in. As she spoke to the principal she kept glancing back at Mr. Gustafson, but he seemed determined not to look her way.
Leaving her to wonder.
Miri lay in bed, looking at the clock on her nightstand, telling herself she ought to get up. The darkness outside her window had begun to lighten with a hint of morning. Soon the sun would rise—as much sun as Seattle was likely to get in February. Sleep had eluded her, save for several brief respites when she had drifted off for fifteen or twenty minutes only to wake again, her late father’s voice fresh in her mind, as if he had been speaking to her in her dreams.
The trouble was that he had spoken to her, but not in a dream.
She studied the clock as it ticked over toward six A.M., but her true fascination lay not with the time but with the cell phone on the nightstand, just beyond the clock. She’d plugged it into the wall before going to bed to make sure it would be charged today, but she had also turned off the power. The phone lay dormant and harmless and yet she had found herself convinced that it would ring in the middle of the night. The prospect had alternately terrified and thrilled her.
Daddy, she thought, as if she could summon him.
Miri had been half convinced that she would have a different perspective in the morning. People said that sort of thing all the time and she had found it to be true, but not today. The passing of night and slow arrival of morning did not chase away the previous day’s events, did not make her suddenly realize that it had all been a dream or that there was some legitimate explanation.
The voice on the phone had belonged to her father. Her father was dead. She had therefore spoken to a ghost.
She sat up and rubbed her eyes. Her hand strayed unconsciously toward the cell phone before changing trajectory. Picking up the TV remote, she clicked it on and climbed out of bed, peeling off her fading Decemberists concert T-shirt and heading for the shower. She splashed some cold water on her face at the bathroom sink and then found her mind drifting as she stared at her reflection in the mirror, studying the small rose tattooed on her hip. Her father had sometimes called her his beautiful flower.
Shaking off her fugue, she turned on the shower and let the water run until steam began to cloud the room. Only when she had stepped into the hot spray did the stiffness in her shoulders and neck begin to ease. As the water cascaded over her and she washed the previous day’s grime from her body, she at last allowed her thoughts to drift.
Miri thought of home.
On an April morning during her senior year in high school, her mother had told her that she could no longer afford their house and that she had stopped paying the mortgage months before. The house was being foreclosed upon, and Angela would be moving into an apartment. Miri could stay with her until she went to college and during vacations, but Angela had made it clear that her one-bedroom apartment was not intended to be Miri’s home. The fight that had erupted over this decision had been short, bitter, and one-sided. Although Angela had always had an ugly temper, she let Miri do all the yelling. The lack of emotion had been the thing that cut Miri the deepest. Her mother had made a decision and she was resolute; Miri’s feelings didn’t factor into that at all.
Angela might not have abdicated her responsibilities as a parent, but she had cast Miri adrift. As a little girl, Miri remembered her mother’s constant refrain about giving a child roots and wings. Roots and wings. Now her mother wanted to set the nest on fire.
Miri had never forgiven her for that.
The idea that her childhood home would be gone had distressed her, yet in some odd way it had freed her as well. She had spent that fall at UMass Amherst, and when her mother had asked what she wanted for Christmas, Miri had told her “a backpack and hiking boots.” The day after Christmas she had abandoned everything she owned except what she could fit into the backpack, laced up her new boots, and hit the road, silently vowing never to sleep on the sofa in her mother’s little apartment again.
Miri had hitchhiked all the way across the country, sleeping in parks and campgrounds. Despite the horror stories she had heard throughout her life, no one had attacked her, robbed her, or raped her. Out on the road she had found only free spirits and lost souls. Along the way, she had spent her time making bracelets and earrings with beads that she had brought along. She had been making jewelry as a hobby for years, and when she reached California she set up a blanket on the beach and began to sell the things she had made on her travels.
For three years she had wandered the roads of America, visiting forty-seven of the contiguous states but not returning to Massachusetts. Never going home. After those three years she had found herself in Seattle, where at last she decided that her odyssey had
ended and a new journey ought to begin. She got a job and an apartment and went to college and tried to put Coventry, Massachusetts behind her for good, all except for Jake, her best friend from high school, with whom she had shared the worst night of both their lives.
Thoughts of Jake brought her mind back around to the phone call the day before, and suddenly even the hot water could not drive away the chill that raced through her. Rinsing out her hair, Miri shut off the tap and dried off, wrapping her towel around her hair and stepping out into the steam-filled bathroom. The mirror had frosted over with condensation, so she could not see her reflection, as if she weren’t really there at all. As if she existed in the same world where that other phone call had originated.
After she’d dressed and dried her hair, she sat for a time on the edge of her bed in the company of muffled television voices and stared at her cell phone. Gray morning had arrived and muted daylight streamed through the window.
Miri picked up her phone, disconnected it from the charger, and powered it on. She hesitated for only a second before going to Recent Calls, where she saw JAKE at the top of the list. Her throat constricted and she felt her pulse quicken; she had thought that in the light of day, without a second call or some other evidence, she would be able to tell herself that it hadn’t happened—that she had not spoken to her dead father on this very phone.
“Shit,” she whispered.
Leaving the cell phone on the nightstand, she went to her closet and dragged out a travel bag. There were preparations she would have to make, work to reschedule, people to whom she would have to apologize, so today was out of the question.
Tomorrow, though. Tomorrow she would go back to the only place she had ever really thought of as home.
Harley Talbot pulled his cruiser into Jake Schapiro’s driveway shortly after three P.M. on Monday. The shadows of the towering pines and old oak and birch trees on the property had already grown long. It had been a beautiful day, the ground covered with pure white snow and the sky blue and bright, but the winter days were always ephemeral. Harley had no quarrel with the night—he had gone through several nocturnal periods—but on those abbreviated winter afternoons when the color began to seep from the land so early, he always felt cheated.
Who are you kidding? he thought as he put the cruiser in Park and killed the engine. It’s not the shortness of the day getting under your skin.
Night falling meant the chief would halt the search for Zachary Stroud until morning—more than twelve hours, during which anything might happen to the boy, if he was still alive, out there somewhere. Harley had been with the search team all day, and now he had to pull a regular shift as well. Someone had to be out patrolling Coventry, especially at night.
As he climbed out of the car, relieved to be able to stretch his long legs, he glanced at the house and arched an eyebrow. In the fading light and the long shadows, Jake’s house looked abandoned. The shades had been drawn on every window.
“What the hell?” Harley muttered, dropping his hand to his sidearm and undoing the holster snap.
A quick survey of the property revealed nothing out of place. Jake’s car sat in the driveway, nose up close to the door of the garage, which was too cluttered to serves its intended purpose. There were no tire tracks in the snow that still framed the vehicle’s spot on the driveway—Jake hadn’t driven anywhere since the storm had ended. Harley glanced into the car and then went up the front walk. With the placement of the house and the trees, the walkway didn’t get much sun during the day and still bore a crust of ice that cracked underfoot.
Up close, Harley saw a ridge of light around the shades on the living room windows to his left. The sidelights around the front door had gauzy curtains over them but he tried to get a glimpse inside, to no avail.
He rang the doorbell, then rapped loudly on the door, the sound echoing off the snow and trees. Seconds ticked past. Normally he would have assumed that Jake had gone for a walk with his camera to take some pictures but the oddity of the drawn shades disturbed him, along with the fact that he had texted Jake half-a-dozen times today and left him two voice mails without getting any reply. He had dropped by to say hello, hoping to see if Jake was up for a late-night movie and Atomic Wings, a tiny worry in the back of his mind thanks to Jake’s radio silence.
Now his worry had grown.
“Jake!” he called, knocking harder. “You home? Open the door, man.”
You’re overreacting, Harley.
Maybe he was, but he had only seen all the shades drawn on a house like this once before—drawn all the way down, so that nobody could get a look inside—and that had been at the LaValle murder house. The previous summer, a twenty-year-old college kid named Martin LaValle had come home from a night of partying with friends, taken his father’s shotgun, and murdered his little sister in her bed. When his parents had come running, woken by the gunshot, he had blown them all over the faded floral wallpaper in the hall.
Harley didn’t like those drawn shades.
“Jake, answer the door, goddammit!” he snapped, slapping his palm against the wood, shaking the door in its frame.
Fuck it.
He tried the knob but found the door locked. After staring at it for a moment, as if his scrutiny alone might open it, he rang the bell one last time and then pressed his ear to the wood, listening to it echo inside and hoping to hear movement. It seemed to Harley that he did hear something, a kind of rustle or whisper.
He flinched away from the thunk of the dead bolt being drawn back.
“Jake?”
The door opened ten or twelve inches and Jake Schapiro’s face appeared in the gap, unshaven and smiling uneasily. He looked unkempt, hair mussed, wearing a T-shirt and old, baggy jeans. The way he stood reminded Harley of the times he’d come back to his dorm room in college only to have his roommate shoo him away because he had a girl in his bed.
“Hey,” Jake said. “Sorry I haven’t gotten back. I’m in the middle of a project. You know how I get.”
Harley stared at him. “What kind of project?”
“Finishing the back bedroom upstairs. Gonna make it a library, I think.”
“Cool,” Harley replied.
He tilted his head to get a look inside the house but Jake shifted his body and narrowed the gap a little and there could be no question that he did not want Harley to see within.
“Look, I—”
“I have some time tomorrow,” Harley interrupted. “I could give you a hand.”
“No, no, that’s okay. It’s been weighing on me, y’know? All the stuff I planned to do to fix the place up that I’ve just never gotten around to. I’m determined now, and I’d kind of like to accomplish that myself. No offense.”
Harley nodded, taking a step back. “None taken.”
As Jake’s friend, he wanted to force the issue, to give the door a shove. As a police officer, there were rules about entering a private residence uninvited and without a warrant.
Warrant? What are you thinking, that he’s got somebody tied up in there?
Harley exhaled, smiling at himself. Yes, Jake had gone all twitchy for some reason. Maybe he did have a girl inside and just wanted Harley to get the hell away from there so he could close the deal. Or maybe the story about the home improvements was the truth; Jake had an artist’s ability to immerse himself in something and forget that the rest of the world existed. Harley had seen that part of him before.
“Tell me the truth,” he said. “You got a girl in there?”
Jake rolled his eyes, his grin clearly forced. “I wish. Look, I’ll call you tomorrow, okay? We need a night out.”
“Atomic Wings,” Harley said.
Jake brightened. “Exactly!”
“Tomorrow, then.”
Harley began to turn to go. As he did, he saw Jake edge back from the door. In the moment before it closed, Harley spotted something in his right hand—a fan of what appeared to be playing cards, although the yellow edges of the cards niggled at
his memory, as if he ought to have recognized the design. Had they had illustrations on them? Harley thought they had.
Whomever Jake had been playing cards with, he clearly didn’t want Harley to know about it. Strip poker? Always a possibility. Maybe the girl had been half naked already, sitting in the living room and waiting for him to depart. Harley figured it had to be someone he knew or Jake would’ve admitted he had someone inside.
You dog, Harley thought, smiling as it all began to make sense to him.
He climbed into his cruiser and started it up, trying to figure out whom Jake might be hooking up with. Someone from the ME’s office, maybe, or a crime-scene tech. Though given the effort Jake had made to keep him out, Harley wondered if maybe it was actually one of the women on the Coventry PD. There were several Harley wouldn’t have minded seeing out of their uniforms.
Tomorrow he would pin Jake down.
Curiosity killing him, Harley backed out of the driveway and headed toward Carpenter Road, turning on his headlights as the twilight deepened around him.
FOURTEEN
The surface of Kenoza Lake had iced over by the turn of the year and wouldn’t melt for another month at least. The weekend’s snowstorm had left inches of fresh snow on top of the ice, and as the sun slid down behind the tops of the trees, the snowmobile tracks left behind that day looked like deep scars, carved in shadow.
“Where the hell are we going?” Baxter asked, glancing back at the small public lot in the lakeside park.
There were four cars there, one of them an old Chevy Monte Carlo that Doug had been restoring and one an Audi that he figured Franco had borrowed without permission from an unsuspecting customer at Harpwell’s Garage. Doug had arrived first and waited in his car, chewing gum to fight the urge to smoke—a habit he’d given up two years before. He had been early on purpose and instantly regretted it, but he sat and watched the sun drift lower in the sky, people returning to their cars, couples and dog owners who’d been walking in the woods around the lake.
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