“No, I guess it doesn't.”
Jake was silent. “I used to have a rule,” he said after a minute, “back after my divorce, when the world was full of willing women. My rule was: Never sleep with a woman who can't remember exactly where she was and what she was doing when she heard Kennedy got shot.”
I did some quick math. I figured Sharon had been in diapers in 1963. “It's been a little rough, huh?”
He shrugged. “She's blaming this on me.”
“Ah, come on, Jake.”
“No, I mean it. She thinks this is my fault, what happened to Brian.”
“What'd she say?”
“Say? She doesn't have to say anything. It's her look, her body language, the way she turns away from me every time I look in her direction. I know what she's thinking. She thinks I've been too soft on him, that Brian knows she and I don't agree on how to discipline him, that he plays us off against each other, that he thinks he can get away with anything because I'll defend him. As if he did something wrong, being in that car last night, for Christ's sake, and that if I'd been a sterner parent it wouldn't have happened. And she thinks I'm that way because I need to compensate for the fact that I've ⦠I've tended to ignore him.” Jake glanced at me, then gazed up at the sooty sky. “Which, God help me, I guess I have. I was forty-four years old when Brian was born. Sharon wasâwhat?âtwenty-three? She doted on him when he was a baby. Made me feel like I was the grandfather. Let me hold him now and then, but
she always watched and criticized how I did it. It was Sharon who got up with him at night, nursed him, changed his diapers, dressed and undressed him, gave him his bath. Actually, that was okay by me. I never was big on babies. Figured when he was older he'd become a person and we'd be pals, and in the meantime his mother could do the dirty work.” He shrugged. “Next thing I know, he's a teenager, and we hardly ever played catch or shot hoops or went fishing together. Hell, you did as much of that stuff with my son as I did.”
“Jake, you can'tâ”
He shook his head. “I know the truth, Brady. Oh, I think we liked each other, Brian and I. I went to his soccer games. He was a terrific athlete. I liked watching him play. But he was always his mother's son, no doubt about it. And since Ed came by last night, said there's been an accident, told us Brian was in the river somewhere, all I've been thinking about is that I never did get to know my boy, never did take him fishing, and now, God help me, it's too late.”
I put my hand on his shoulder. “It sounds like it's you, not Sharon. It's you, blaming yourself.”
“Projecting, huh?” He shrugged. “Yeah, maybe I am.”
“I'm sorry, man. It's got to hurt like hell.”
“Oh,” he said softly, “you can't imagine.”
There didn't seem to be anything else to say. We stood there on the porch for a while, smoking and watching the sky break up. Finally, Jake rapped his pipe against the rail, put it to his mouth, blew through it a couple of times, then jammed it into his jacket pocket. “We better go back in,” he said. “Sharon'll have the coffee ready.”
W
hen we got inside, we found Sharon on the sofa, slouched down on her spine. She'd slipped off her sneakers. She was wearing white cotton socks, and her feet were propped up on the coffee table beside a carafe and three coffee mugs. Her eyes were closed, and she had her hands folded over her stomach. Her chest rose and fell slowly. Her face looked soft and peaceful and young. In her tight Levi's and loose-fitting gray sweatshirt, she could've been Brian's teenage sister, not his mother.
Jake leaned to me and whispered, “Look at her. Isn't she fantastic?”
I nodded. “Remembering when Kennedy was shot isn't everything.”
He went to her, bent down, and touched her shoulder. “Why don't you go upstairs and lie down for a while,” he said.
Her eyes blinked open, then darted from Jake to me. “Sorry,” she mumbled. “I just closed my eyes for a minute. Rude.”
I smiled. “Don't be silly. Go have a nap.”
She rubbed her temples with her fingertips. “I don't want to
sleep. I'm afraid I'll dream. I'm afraid when I wake up ⦔ Her eyes brimmed, and she cried.
Jake put his arm around her and helped her up. She didn't resist. He led her over to the staircase. “Be right back,” he said to me.
I sat on the sofa and poured myself a mug of coffee, and a few minutes later Jake came back down. He took the chair across from me. “She's a wreck,” he said.
“How about you?”
He nodded. “Sure. Me, too. We've been up all night.”
“So, why don't you go lie down?”
“I couldn't sleep,” he said. “It's a fucking nightmare, Brady. It's like I'm watching this happen to somebody else, you know?” He poured himself some coffee. “I really appreciate your coming out. Sharon does, too.”
“I wish there was something I could do.”
“You can find Brian for us.” He shook his head and laughed ironically. “Sorry.” He blew out a breath. “Just being here for us, that's a help. It really is. I needed someone to talk to. Sharon thinks you're God. It's like, if Brady's around, everything's got to be okay.”
“I can't make this okay, Jake.”
“I know. I wish you could.”
We sipped our coffee in silence. Jake slouched forward in the chairâhis head bowed down and his forearms on his knees cradling his mug in both handsâtaking an occasional, absentminded sip. After a while, he looked up at me. “It's Friday night, for God's sake. I bet you've got a date.”
I smiled. “I think I do.”
“Evie?”
I nodded.
“There's no sense hanging around,” he said.
“I don't mind.”
“We'll be all right,” he said. “If anything happens, I'll let you know. You go ahead. Sorry to drag you out here for nothing.”
“Not for nothing,” I said. I drained my coffee mug, put it
onto the table, and stood up. “Say good-bye to Sharon for me. I expect to be close to home all weekend. You've got my number. Please keep me posted.”
He nodded. “Sure.”
Outside, the rain had stopped. The clouds were skidding across the sky, and here and there patches of blue showed through. The temperature had dropped about ten degrees, and it was feeling like winter again. I hoped Phil had enjoyed a shadowless day down there in Punxsutawney and had tracked down a sexy young groundhog. Maybe he was already shacked up with her, deep under the ground where, if the sun peeked out before evening came, he wouldn't see it.
The freshening breeze sliced through my topcoat. I figured the wet roads would freeze once the sun went down. It would be a good night for automobile accidents.
The police aren't always forthcoming with the families of victims, I knew, so I decided to drop in at the Reddington police station before I headed home. I took the two-lane north-to-south road from Jake's house. I passed apple orchards, horse farms, stubbly cornfields, and conservation land.
Reddington had been settled by farmers sometime in the 1700s. They raised corn and squashes and apples in the fertile valley of the Reddington River. Then in the early days of the American industrial revolution, the village transformed itself into a mill town. They built a dam across the river and used its power to run their machines. Gunpowder had been the main product.
Today, Reddington is a Mass Pike commuter town, remarkably devoid of commerce. There's a hospital, three or four churches, one elementary school, a 7â12 high school. A couple of bookstores and restaurants and convenience stores are clustered around the community college in the northwest corner of town, and there's one strip mall for the supermarket, the bank, the dry cleaner, the take-out pizza joint, the video rental, the pharmacy, and the camera store. I passed a garage and a gas station and a couple of farm stands, now closed for the season,
on my way from the Golds' house to the village green, where the police station shared space with the town offices in the big barnlike old New England town hall.
I parked out back and went in.
A uniformed officer sat behind a glassed-in booth like a ticket-seller at a movie theater. She was thirtyish, I guessed, with clear, fair skin, an angular face, and straight blond-streaked brown hair in a no-nonsense short cut that showed her ears. A plaque on the left breast pocket of her uniform shirt read V. WHYTE. When I cleared my throat, she looked up at me and smiled. She had enormous gray-green eyes and a fetching little gap between her front teeth.
“Can I help you, sir?” she said. Her voice came at me through a round perforated metal plate set into the bottom of the glass.
I bent down to speak into it. “I'm here to see Chief Sprague.”
“Is he expecting you?”
“No. It's about the accident last night.”
She narrowed her eyes. “You from the media or something?”
“No. I'm the Golds' lawyer.” I fumbled a business card out of my wallet and held it against the glass.
She squinted at it, then said, “Hang on a minute.”
She picked up a telephone, spoke softly into it, then looked up at me and said, “Okay. The chief's with somebody, but he said for you to wait.”
The door to the left of her booth buzzed, and I opened it and went into an empty waiting room. It was small and sparsely furnishedâten or a dozen plastic chairs, a couple of end tables strewn with magazines and newspapers, a pay phone on the wall beside the door, and a coffee urn on a scarred wooden table in the corner.
A cluster of framed black-and-white photographs hung on the inside wall. I wandered over to look at them. The police bowling team, half a dozen head-and-shoulder shots of police officers, and several team photos showing the same middle-aged
man surrounded by boys and girls in shorts and soccer jerseys. Jake had said that Chief Sprague coached Brian's soccer team.
I peered at the photos and found Brian in each of them. Brian Gold had always been small for his age. He knelt in the front row in each photo, the way they always arranged itâtall kids in back, short ones kneeling in front. It didn't look as if Brian had aged or grown from one photo to the next. He looked eight years old in the oldest photo, and in the most recent one, he still looked about eight.
Hell, they all looked young. They all
were
young. It took me back to when my boys, Billy and Joey, were that age, back to a time when I lived in suburban bliss with my ex-wife, Gloria, and watched my kids play Saturday-morning co-ed soccer.
Not that blissful, actually.
Brian Gold looked younger even than the other kids on Chief Sprague's soccer team. Brian was a cute boyâthe word
handsome
didn't work, but
pretty
wasn't right, either. He had his mother's black hair and big, dark eyes and delicate, almost-but-not-quite feminine features, but he was long-legged, and you could see how he might grow into Jake's gangly body.
Now he was somewhere in the Reddington River, under the ice. Brian Gold would not grow into any body whatsoever.
“Somebody helping you?”
I turned. A police officer was standing behind me. He was in his mid-thirties, I guessed, a big redheaded guy with a friendly Huck Finn face.
“I'm all set,” I said. “Just waiting to talk to your chief.”
“Anything I can do?” said the officer. “The chief's pretty busy. It might be a while.”
“That accident, huh?” I said.
He nodded. His nameplate read L. MCCAFFREY. He pointed at one of the soccer pictures. “That's Jenny Rolando, there, and that's Brian Gold.”
Jenny had flashing dark eyes and blond hair pulled back in a ponytail. She had a terrific smile. She was standing directly
behind Brian in the most recent photo. She was one of the tall ones. When I squinted at the picture, I could see that her hand rested on Brian's shoulder.
“I knew Brian,” I told McCaffrey. “I'm the family lawyer.”
“Lawyer, huh?”
I shrugged. “Friend. Today, I'm their friend.”
“Boy,” he said. “Something like this, they can use all the friends they've got.” He shook his head. “I was first on the scene.”
“Last night? The accident?”
He nodded. “Helpless damn feeling, knowing those two kids were down thereâ”
At that moment, V. Whyte, the female cop from the ticket-seller's booth, came in. She was taller and lankier than she'd looked sitting behind the bulletproof glass. “Beware of the coffee,” she said to me. She ignored McCaffrey. “I'll check on the chief for you.”
“Thank you,” I said.
She went through a door in the back of the waiting room.
I turned to McCaffrey. “That accident,” I said. “You didn't seeâ?”
He held up his hand. “I'm not supposed to talk about it. You'll have to talk to my boss.”
I shrugged. “I understand.”
“Well,” said McCaffrey. “If you're all set, I got work to do.” He held up the thick manila folder he'd been carrying. “Paperwork, you know?”
I smiled. “I know it well.”
He went out through the same door the female officer had used. I poured myself a cup of coffee and sat in one of the plastic chairs. It was spectacularly uncomfortable, so I stood up and sipped my coffee, which was spectacular, too, if you liked crankcase grease.
I put the coffee cup back on the table and wandered over to the window. Darkness had begun to seep in over the Reddington village green. Yellow lights glowed from the windows of
the colonial houses across the way. Soon Groundhog Day would be over.
I tried sitting again. The chairback stopped right where my shoulderblades began. It was molded in a way that forced me to hunch my shoulders.
V. Whyte came back. She had changed out of her uniform into a pair of Levi's, a red sweater, and a hip-length black leather jacket. “The chief knows you're here,” she said. “He'll be with you. It might be a while.”
I thanked her again, which earned me an over-the-shoulder smile as she walked out.
I stood up, went to the pay phone, fished some quarters from my pocket, and called Evie Banyon's office at Emerson Hospital in Concord, where Evie was the assistant to the administrator.
When she answered, I said, “Happy Imbolog.”
“Brady!” she said, and I don't think the delight I heard in her voice was wishful thinking on my part. “I was just thinking about you.”
“Anything you can say out loud?”
“Goodness, no. What's Imbolog?”
“Groundhog Day, honey,” I said. “A joyous pagan holiday. The orgy begins at sundown.”
“It does?”
“It does this year. It requires a barrel of mead, a sacrificial goat, and at least one virgin.”
“Nuts,” she said. “I'm fresh out of virgins.”
“I just wanted you to know that I don't know how long I'll be here.”
“Where are you?”
“I'm out here in Reddington.”
“Reddington,” she repeated. “Shining the light of truth and justice into every corner of the land, are we?”
“That's me,” I said. “Have briefcase, will litigate.”
“Something's wrong,” she said. “I can hear it in your voice.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I'm extremely bummed, actually. I'm not
sure I'll be very good company tonight. Maybe we shouldâ” At that moment two men emerged from the corridor. “Gotta go, honey,” I said to Evie. “I'll call you when I get home, okay?”
“You're the boss,” she said.