by Julia Keller
He lifted his shoulders, let them drop. “I’m just—just restless tonight. Kind of jumpy. Sorry I snapped at you. I do drink too much beer.” He smacked his belly. “Proof’s easy to spot.”
She tilted her head, peering at him. “I don’t think you’ve put on any weight. Anyway, that’s not the point. It’s not how the alcohol makes you look—it’s how it makes you feel.”
“And how’s that?”
“You tell me. You’re the one who drinks it. Not me.”
He grimaced. “Lousy. That’s how. But it turns things a little murky, you know? So they’re not so clear to me. Sometimes—” He broke off his intended sentence. “Never mind.”
“Speak your piece.”
“Okay. Okay, then. I will.” He put his hands on the tops of the wheels, moving the chair a little bit forward, a little bit back. Forward, then back. It had become a nervous habit. “Thing is, Molly—I like it when you and Malik come over. I like it a lot.”
“Good thing.” She smiled at him. “We’re here all the time, seems like. Even Tyler’s been making cracks about it. You might decide to start charging us rent.”
He didn’t smile back. “Don’t.”
“What?”
“Don’t joke about it, Molly. Okay? Feels like you’re making fun of me.”
Her face clouded over. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Joking about it. About you and Malik living here. When you know how much I’ve dreamed of—”
“Jake. No.” She was warning him. It was a gentle warning, but a warning just the same. She didn’t want to talk about this. “I really do need to pack up Malik and go. Bad weather’s on the way. Supposed to rain all day tomorrow. Maybe even snow. Got to get the house ready. Cover the porch furniture, make sure there’s weather stripping on the back door and the—”
“What are we doing here, Molly?”
No answer.
“Molly?”
Still no answer.
“What do you want?” he asked. “What?”
He would always wonder why it happened the way it happened that night. He would never know just what changed her mind in that moment, what combination of love or lust or simple curiosity—what, exactly, was he capable of?—had moved her, causing her to shed her cool reserve and her distancing poise. She rose from the couch and she walked over to him, and before he could take his next breath, she was sitting on his lap, her arms around his shoulders, and she was softly kissing his forehead, his eyebrows, his eyelids, his cheeks, and then his mouth. He felt the knot inside himself begin to go slack and it frightened him, but This is what you want he told himself, and he did and oh he did oh yes he did.
They went into his bedroom and she helped him take off his clothes: shirt, shoes, socks, jeans. It wasn’t awkward and he didn’t feel self-conscious, being helped out of his clothes that way. Then he watched as she undressed, too, each moment its own separate and particular marvel. He touched her and he kissed her in the places where he had long yearned to touch her and to kiss her, and when it was all over he found that he had discovered a new truth—namely, that it would never be over, that lovemaking like this lived outside of time and time’s rules.
He would have this feeling within himself forever, no matter what happened between them henceforth.
Chapter Thirty-six
Ellie turned the chair around to face the window. The morning was bright but cold. Winter would be here soon.
As if it ever left, she thought. That was how the past few years felt to her: like an unbroken spell of winter. Winter had sunk its teeth into the world and wouldn’t let go. When you thought it was gone, it was really just around the corner. Lurking.
The girl had come by this morning. When Ellie heard the knock and opened the front door and saw her, she thought, Oh, my, you look so much like Sandy now.
Ellie had known Sara Banville for the girl’s entire life. How had she missed it? How had she not seen that happening, the ordinary little miracle of a child beginning to look like her mother?
“You look like Sandy,” Ellie said. She meant it as a kindness, a compliment, but Sara’s face changed. She didn’t seem to be pleased by the observation. More annoyed, if anything. But she shook it off. Ellie had always sensed that Sara liked her. Or maybe the girl just felt sorry for her. Because of what had happened to Tyler. What he’d become.
“We’re moving,” Sara said. Blurting it out. “Right away. We’re going to go live with my grandma and grandpa in Pennsylvania. We have to get away, my dad says. Too much has happened here. With Alex. With my mom’s confession. With everything. So we have to leave. I don’t even have time to tell all my friends.” She winced. The words kept tumbling out of her. “We’ll have to come back at some point. Or at least my mom will. She’s still in trouble. For making up a story. Lying to the police. But my dad says it’s going to be okay. And for now—we have to go.”
Ellie nodded. “Yes.”
Sara was a young woman now. Not a kid. There was a hardness to her, the glaze of maturity. But Ellie could still see, beneath that shiny, brittle shell, the ghost of the girl she’d been, all long legs and uneven bangs. Running. Trying to keep up with Alex and Tyler. So many summers gone by.
“Good-bye, Sara,” Ellie said. “You take care of yourself. And Alex—is he…”
“He’s back in rehab. Another one.” Sara shrugged. She turned to go, but she’d made a decision. She had one more thing to say and so she turned back. “I know my mom blamed Tyler. She thought Tyler got Alex into drugs. But you know what? It wasn’t like that. I know for sure. That’s not how it happened. Alex started first. My brother was just a lot better at hiding it. For a while. Not anymore.”
Ellie nodded again. Did it matter, really? No. It did not. Nothing mattered anymore.
And then Sara was gone, flinging herself forward, long hair streaming out behind her. She could have been any young girl anywhere, Ellie thought, flying into her future, running on a nice street lined with lovely homes, or crossing a dirt road in a place like Briney Hollow.
Chapter Thirty-seven
A house was really two different houses. It was one house in the daytime. And another one in the middle of the night.
Bell had learned that essential truth early in her life. The succession of foster homes—some warm and comfortable, others grim and squalid—taught her well. The superficial differences didn’t matter. Because in each house, she’d experience the same moment of discovery; she’d be awake at 2 A.M., 3 A.M., after everyone else had gone to sleep, and she’d wander into the kitchen and look around at all the familiar objects—coffeepot, wall clock, saucepan—and wonder what they were. She’d wonder, too, if she was even still on planet Earth.
She looked around.
She was sitting in her own kitchen. In the big stone house on Shelton Avenue. Her watch told her it was 2:47 A.M. She couldn’t sleep.
She was haunted by two questions:
Who killed Brett Topping?
Where was the murder weapon?
At least half of the homicides in any given area—big city, small town—were never solved. Bell knew that. Back when she was a prosecutor, she’d never been able to rest easy with that statistic.
She couldn’t rest easy with it now, either, even though she wasn’t a prosecutor anymore.
She made a pot of coffee. Then she dumped the contents of her briefcase onto the kitchen table, so that she could sort through the items, one at a time, all over again: the interview notes Rhonda had emailed to her. The forensics report. The crime-scene photos. And the family pictures, the ones that captured the Toppings and their friends in happier days.
What am I missing?
She spread out an array of photos: the Toppings and the Banvilles at Disney World. The Toppings and the Banvilles on a whitewater rafting trip. In the front raft, flung aloft by a curling surge of furious current, were Brett and Ellie and Sandy and Rex, clad in colorful life preservers, the four adults looking apprehensive and sli
ghtly sick to their stomachs; in the raft behind it, lifted even higher, with paddles jutting out at crazy angles, sunlight glinting off their helmets, faces split wide open in joyful smiles, were Tyler and Alex and Sara.
Tyler and Alex and Sara.
Bell sifted through the photos again. She found the one she’d examined the other night at Jake’s kitchen table: the two boys on their bikes, with Sara below them, apart from them, looking up enviously, wanting desperately to join them in their adventure.
Three kids from the same neighborhood. A brother and a sister, and the brother’s best friend.
Wherever the boys go, she wants to go there, too.
Whatever the boys do, she wants to do it, too.
Bell picked up her cell. Tyler might be awake. Recovering addicts were almost always plagued by insomnia. If he wasn’t awake, he wouldn’t get her text until morning, but if he was …
She texted: U up?
He answered instantly: Y
A second later, her cell rang.
“What’s going on?” Tyler said. “Good to know somebody else is up.”
“You’ll get back to a regular sleep pattern once you’re over the hump,” she said. “Got a question for you. When’s the last time you saw Sara Banville?”
“Just the other day. I went to check on my mom. She came by the house.”
“What for? I mean—what did she say while she was there?”
“Not much. She wanted to see if we were okay.”
“Anything strange in her behavior?”
“Strange? Like how?”
“Whatever you can think of. No matter how trivial it seems.”
He thought about her question.
“It was just a regular … hold on. She did do one thing that was kind of weird. When she came into the living room, she leaned a little bit to one side. Like she wanted to see around me.”
“What was in the room?”
“Nothing unusual. Well, one thing. A deputy had just returned our computers. From when they’d searched for the file my dad kept. They were all stacked up on the coffee table—two monitors, two laptops, an iPad, a couple of CPUs.”
“And you think that’s what she was looking at.”
“It wouldn’t have occurred to me until you asked, but—yeah. Yeah. That’s what she was focused on. Why?”
Bell had an instant to decide if she trusted this young man. He was, after all, a drug addict, a kid who’d stolen from his parents, lied to everyone, relapsed again and again.
But Jake believed in him. Jake was rooting for him. And Jake was no pushover.
“You were the Three Musketeers,” Bell said. “And two of the Musketeers got involved with drugs. Sara followed you everywhere. Wouldn’t she have followed you into drugs, too?”
He took a moment to digest the question. “But wouldn’t I have known about it?” he asked dubiously.
“You didn’t know about Alex, did you?”
Silence.
“No,” he finally said. “We’d lost touch by then. He was in Morgantown, I was here.” He was thinking. “But how did Sara hide her addiction?”
“You hid yours, didn’t you? At first?”
Another chunk of silence.
“Yeah,” he said. “I did. And I thought I was so damned smart. So cool.” He cleared his throat. Bell could imagine him pushing back his regrets, one by one. They were big and they were heavy. “So what do we do now?”
“Sara is involved in this in some way. We need to question her to find out how. We’ll go over there tomorrow.”
“Better make it first thing.”
“What do you mean?”
“They’re leaving. The whole family. Sara came by the house yesterday and told my mom. Mom called me last night and we talked about it. Moving van’s already in the driveway.”
“Okay. First thing, then.”
Bell ended her call with Tyler. She punched in another number. This time, she was certain that she was waking up the recipient; she was also certain that the recipient wouldn’t mind.
“What do you need, Bell?” Rhonda said. Her bleary, sleep-soaked, “Yeah?” had quickly given way to total focus and alertness.
“Cell records for Sara Banville. Last two weeks is fine. We’ll need a warrant to give the nudge to her cell provider. Can we do that right away?”
“I know just the judge. I’ll have it for you shortly.”
Bell checked her email an hour later. The scanned document was waiting in her in-box. She didn’t bother printing it out; she just used a handy tool that predated all of the electronic folderol—her index finger—and went down the list of Sara’s incoming calls.
And there it was: a call from the Bulger County Hospital on the day Deke Foley had regained consciousness. Sara was too smart to use her cell in the regular course of business, Bell had surmised. But Foley’s hospitalization was a special circumstance. He needed to reach her. To thank her for services rendered.
* * *
Bell decided that she had to wait until at least sunrise. But the waiting was excruciating.
At 5 A.M. she said, “Screw it,” and got ready to go. She grabbed her purse and car keys. Two minutes later she was driving through a dark town, headed to Jake’s house to pick up Tyler.
Jake was awake, too. She found him sitting at the kitchen table next to Tyler. Both looked a bit scruffy. Both had cups of coffee in front of them. There was a nearly empty carton of store-bought doughnuts in the middle of the table, the kind with the white powder that always ends up on laps and shirtfronts.
“What? No beer?” Bell said. That was her hello. “You call that breakfast?”
Jake gave her a nod. Good one, his nod intimated. “And a cheery good morning to you, too, Bell,” he said. “Hey, Tyler here was just filling me in about what’s going on. I really want to come with you guys and see what’s up with Sara Banville. But I’m stuck here. I told Molly she could leave Malik here this morning. She’s got a doctor’s appointment.”
“We’ll be fine,” Bell said. “What time is she dropping him off?”
Jake looked sheepish. He glanced at Tyler, whose own gaze drifted over to the sink. Neither man wanted to meet Bell’s eyes.
“What is it?” she said.
“Um … Molly doesn’t have to drop him off,” Jake said. “They’re already here.”
Bell still wasn’t following. Her mind was on the case.
“Why would Molly and Malik be—” The light dawned. So that explained the big truck parked across the street. “Oh,” Bell said. “Oh, okay.” Once, three years ago, she thought she’d sensed something between the deputy and the EMT, caught a hint of their mutual attraction. But so much had changed since then. Could it be?
Hope so, Bell thought. And I hope it works out for Jake. Nobody deserves a little happiness more than he does. She took a closer look at his face, which had lost its drawn bleakness and, despite the early hour and the bad case of bed head, was almost radiant. Maybe a lot of happiness.
“Yeah,” Jake said. “Malik bunked in with Tyler last night. Well, Tyler’s floor.”
Bell was impatient. “Great. Hey, Tyler—how about putting that coffee in a travel mug? Let’s hit the road.”
* * *
We’re too late.
That was Bell’s first frustrated reaction as they rounded the corner onto the street that featured, as its far end, the rambling house where the Banvilles lived. A large green Mayflower moving van was just chugging out of their driveway.
She entertained fantasies of following the van out to the interstate, then pulling up alongside it and yelling at Tyler to take the wheel as she launched herself out of the window and grabbed the truck’s side mirror with one hand, while with the other she reached in and lunged across the seat, pummeling the driver until he pulled over.
Maybe I’ve watched a few too many Fast and Furious movies. They were her guilty pleasure.
But then she consoled herself: The moving van held only the Banvilles’ possess
ions. The family would be traveling separately. Visible now in the driveway, now that the van wasn’t blocking her view of it, was the elegant square of a bright red Range Rover. Puffy little clouds of exhaust fumes drifted from the undercarriage. Someone had come out earlier to warm it up for the long drive ahead.
Bell wondered, fleetingly, about the wisdom of having brought Tyler with her. But she wanted him here. If anyone could reach Sara, and maybe head off a dangerous confrontation, it would be Tyler.
Because he was Sara’s old friend. Her buddy. Her companion on a million adventures on a million summer days. The restless young girl who had begged Tyler to let her come along with him and Alex and sometimes—her heart surely leaped up at the words—he’d say, Yeah, okay.
A million bike rides and a long starry dazzle of endless summer nights—before it all came apart. Before the path narrowed and darkened. Before the three friends, one by one, stumbled and fell.
The big front door of the house swung open. Rex and Sandy Banville hurried out, coats buttoned and scarves tied, suitcases in hand. Trailing them was Sara. She wore a yellow parka and, on her head, a jaunty plaid beret with a fuzzy little ball on top.
Sara, as the last in line, turned to lock the front door. Bell’s eye was drawn to her large backpack.
“What are you going to do?” Tyler said. “We don’t have any legal authority to—”
“Legal authority’s overrated.” Bell parked her car with a reckless disregard of its distance to the curb.
Rex Banville had almost reached the Range Rover. As Bell and Tyler approached him, ignoring the sidewalk and crunching across the wide, frost-locked lawn, he looked startled. Confused. And a little alarmed.
“What’s going on?” he said. “Tyler—what are you doing here?”
“Mr. Banville,” Bell said, “we need to talk with you. And you too, Sandy. And Sara.”
Rex Banville was a square-faced, heavyset, ginger-haired man. Bell knew from her conversations with Nick that he was director of sales for a chemical company just outside of Charleston. She had accepted Nick’s assessment that Rex Banville was largely oblivious. He didn’t know what had become of his children. He didn’t want to know.
