“It's okay, Jake,” I said. “Maybe this is a bad time ⦠.”
“No,” he said. “Sharon would like to see you, I know.” He tried to smile. “Me, too, of course. But she's ⦔ He shook his head. “She's not dealing with this at all. She's trying to convince herself that Brian's alive, and I'm worried that if they don't find himâhis bodyâpretty soon, she'll ⦔ He waved his hand. “I don't know what she'll do, Brady. The doctor came by yesterday after you left, gave her some medication. But she refuses to take it. Says she wants to be awake and alert when Brian comes home. I keep trying to tell her he's not going to come home. It's like a knife in my gut. Saying it, seeing the anger and pain in her eyes. She hates me when I say that to her. But what'm I supposed to do?”
“I don't know, Jake. I wish I did.”
“Well,” he said, “her mother's coming to stay with us. That'll help. Come on in.”
Sharon was wearing what appeared to be the same jeans and sweatshirt she'd worn the day before. She huddled in an armchair next to the fireplace with her feet pulled up under her. Her face was blotched and swollen. In that big chair, she looked like a child.
She gave me a wan smile. “Hello, Brady.”
I went over and kissed her cheek. “How're you doing?”
“The waiting is hard. I miss my boy.”
“I know,” I said.
“Want some coffee?” said Jake. “A drink?”
“Bring me a glass of wine,” said Sharon.
“Coffee's fine,” I said.
Jake went out to the kitchen.
“The Rolandos were here this morning,” said Sharon. “Tom and Emily. I felt so bad. They were very kind. It had to've been awfully hard for them, coming to see us. We all cried together.”
“And Chief Sprague was here,” I said. “I just met him ouside.”
“Ed's such a good man.” Sharon rubbed her eyes. “He's trying to make me understand that Brian's dead. Part of me knows that. But part of me thinks, no, he'll be back. Jake thinks I'm crazy, but I'm not. It's weird, but you know, when Tom and Emily were here, I was jealous of them. At least they know. How much easier it has to be, knowing, not wondering and hoping.” She touched my arm. “I'm just about all cried out, Brady. I'm just waiting for this to be over with. Now my mother's coming, and she's gonna drive me nuts, I know. It was Jake's idea. I think he just wants to foist me off on somebody else.”
“That's not it at all,” said Jake, who had come back into the room. “When I called her, she insisted on coming.” He handed Sharon a glass of white wine, and he gave me a mug of coffee. He patted Sharon's arm. “She wants to be with you.”
Jake had poured himself a beer, and the three of us sat in the gloom-filled living room sipping our drinks and not saying much. I felt uncomfortable and out of place. There was no way I could share their grief or make them feel better.
I'd talked to my two boys today, and that was the difference between us.
I stayed for about an hour, and when I got up to leave, both Jake and Sharon thanked me for coming. But it sounded mechanical, and as I left, I realized there was nothing I could do to help them.
It occurred to me that if I wanted to analyze it, I might discover that my real reason for visiting them was to make myself feel better. I decided that I wouldn't return unless they asked me to, or until something changed.
I
picked up River Road a mile or so past the Reddington village green and headed north. At first the narrow country road played tag with the winding river, touching it here, bending away from it there, following it upstream. The river was fifty or sixty yards wide in most parts, and it was sheeted over with snow-covered ice from bank to bank. If you didn't know it was a river, you could mistake it for a winter field.
As I neared the dam, I saw that a channel had been opened in the middle of the river where the state police scuba rescue team had extended their search for Brian's body. Big slabs of broken ice lined both sides of the open water. They'd apparently given up about a mile down from the dam.
Brian and Jenny had crashed through the snowbank and the guardrail and smashed into the water directly across the river from the old Reddington powder mill. It was one of those typical nineteenth-century New England brick factory buildingsâfive stories high, a hundred yards long, built right on the water's edge. Someone had optimistically begun to renovate it for office suites in the economic boom of the eighties. But the boom busted before they finished, and now the old factory's
flat back wall loomed up over the river, and its dark empty windows gazed forlornly across the water to the place where Jenny and Brian had died.
For about a hundred yards downstream from the dam the riverbank was riprapped with big jagged hunks of blasted granite. Here, River Road was just two lanes wide, bounded by a steep hillside on the left and the river on the right. It curved slightly, then followed tight to the riverbank, with a narrow frozen sand shoulder barely wide enough for a car to pull off. You'd have to be driving awfully fast not to negotiate that soft curve.
It wasn't hard to spot the place where Jenny Rolando's car had gone in. A car's width of guardrail and old plowed snow was torn away.
A black Chevrolet pickup truck was pulled against the guardrail just past the site of the accident. I pulled in behind it and walked back.
The swollen river poured over the top of the dam into a heavy tumult of water funneling between the rocky riprapped banks. Here it was twenty-five or thirty yards across. The dam itself was about ten feet high, and at its base where the water crashed down onto itself, a faint mist rose into the wintry air.
The water was dark and swift and cold-looking, and the powerful currents and eddies swirled and scraped across the riverbed. It was easy to see how they could suck a person down and smash and tumble him against the rocky bottom until he lost all sense of direction. The river widened below where the riprap ended. There the now-frozen water flattened out into the placid, shallow, meandering river that typified the Reddington all the way down to Rhode Island, where it merged with a couple of other rivers before it emptied into the sea.
Chief Sprague had said it: If Jenny and Brian had gone off the road anywhere else along the river, they'd probably have survived.
Two figures were sitting on the big squarish hunks of granite
along the top of the riverbank where the guardrail was broken away. Their backs were to me, and as I approached them I saw that they were tossing white flowers into the water. They were young women. Teenagers. Friends of Jenny and Brian, I guessed, come here to remember and to mourn.
I didn't want to interrupt them. I stood there quietly for a minute and thought about Brian. When my thoughts flipped to Billy and Joey, my own sons, I let out a long breath and turned back for my car.
“Hey, mister.”
I stopped and looked back.
One of the girls had stood up, and she was shielding her eyes with her hand and squinting into the afternoon sun at me. She wore a red parka and baggy blue jeans and Bean boots.
I lifted my hand. “Hi.”
She approached me. She had a bunch of daisies in one hand. “Who're you?” she said. “You're not from Reddington.”
“The Golds are friends of mine,” I said.
She was a chunky girl with hair so black that I figured it was dyed. She stood in front of me and frowned. “You're not one of those gawkers?”
“I'm not gawking,” I said.
“There have been a lot of gawkers. You should've been here when they were diving for Brian. There was a mob, all of them hoping to see a body. Some of them had cameras, for God's sake. Sick.”
I nodded.
“So why're you here?” she said.
I shrugged. “Same reason you are, I guess.”
“We're remembering Jenny,” she said. “She was our friend. Flowers on the water.”
“Brian wasn't your friend?”
She frowned, and her eyes darted away from mine for an instant. Then she nodded quickly. “Of course he was. Brian, too. Flowers for both of our friends.” She held her bunch of daisies to me. “You want to toss in a flower?”
I plucked two daisies from her hand. “Thank you,” I said. “I'd like to do that.”
I followed her to the edge of the river, closed my eyes for a moment to focus my thoughts on Brian, then tossed one of the daisies into the water. Then I tried to think about Jenny Rolando. I remembered her photo on the wall in the police station, and the image of that young girl strapped behind the wheel of an upside-down car with water pouring in was vivid in my mind. I tossed the other daisy onto the swirling currents.
The girl touched my arm. “I'm Sandy,” she said.
“I'm Brady Coyne. I knew Brian when he was a baby.” I arched my eyebrows at Sandy and jerked my head in the other girl's direction. She had continued to sit there on the rock with her back to me. She wore a grayish quilted ankle-length coat and a black knit watch cap. Her head was bowed and she was hugging herself.
“That's Mikki,” said Sandy. “She's pretty broken up.”
“I guess everybody is,” I said. “Brian's parents are devastated. The fact that they can't find his body ⦔
Sandy's eyes flickered, and she turned quickly and tossed a daisy onto the water. She glanced at me, then went and crouched beside Mikki. She whispered to her for a moment, then helped Mikki stand up and led her over to where I was standing. “This is Mikki,” said Sandy. To Mikki she said, “This is Mr. Coyne. He's a friend of Brian.”
Mikki was a tiny Asian girl. She looked like a papoose huddled in her ankle-length coat. She had smooth olive skin and dark eyes and long ebony hair. She held out her hand to me. “Hello,” she said softly.
I took her hand. “Hello, Mikki.” I looked from one girl to the other. “What do you think happened here?”
Mikki stared at me for a moment. Then her eyes brimmed. She shook her head, turned, and went back to sit on the rocks.
“I'm sorry,” I said to Sandy. “I've upset her.”
“She's already upset,” said Sandy. “You're not exactly helping.”
“How about you?” I said. “What do you think happened?”
She shrugged. “What do you mean? What kind of question is that? Their car went into the water, andâand they died. What are you, anyway? Some kind of cop?”
“No,” I said. “I'm actually a lawyer. The Golds have been my clients and friends for years.”
“So you gonna sue somebody? That why you're snooping around?”
“No. I'm not here as a lawyer, and I'm not snooping. I'm here as a friend. I'm sad about what happened just the way you are.”
“I doubt that,” said Sandy.
“Hey,” I said. “Lawyers have feelings, too, you know.”
She smiled for the first time. “Yeah, right.” She squinted at me. “So why
are
you here?”
“I was visiting Brian's parents. They're out of their minds with grief, and they will be forever until their boy's body is found.”
Sandy shook her head. “That's pretty awful.”
“Do you have any idea where Brian and Jenny were going the other night?” I said.
She flapped her hands. “Just out, I guess. They were together all the time.”
“Did you know that they'd packed some clothes?”
“I heard that, yes.”
“Then whatâ?”
“How should I know?” she said quickly. “Look, mister. You've got no right to come here and bother us andâand interrogate us.” Tears welled up in her eyes. “Why don't you just leave us alone?”
I nodded. “I'm sorry.” I took out my wallet and fished out two of my business cards. “Here,” I said. “Give one to Mikki. If you hear anything or think of anything, I'd appreciate it if you'd give me a call.”
“Like what? What could we tell you?”
“I don't know,” I said. “Take them anyway. Maybe you'll think of something.”
She shrugged, took the cards, glanced at them, then stuffed them into her pocket.
I held out my hand to her. “I'm sorry I bothered you,” I said.
She started to reach for my hand, and then her eyes darted past me.
I turned. A black-and-white police Explorer had pulled in behind my car, and Chief Sprague and Officer McCaffrey had gotten out. Sprague looked in my direction with his hand shielding his eyes. Then he turned and said something to McCaffrey, who shrugged and got back into the cruiser.
Sprague waved and came toward us. When he got to where we were standing, he said, “Well, Mr. Coyne. I see you've met my friends.”
“Yes,” I said. “We tossed daisies into the river.”
He smiled quickly at me, then turned to Sandy. “You okay, kiddo?”
She shook her head, then went to him and hugged him. He patted her shoulder. Then Mikki came over, and they had a three-way hug, with their arms across each other's shoulders and their heads close together.
I turned and started for my car.
“Mr. Coyne,” called Sprague. “Hang on.”
I stopped. Sprague spoke earnestly to the two girls for a minute. Then Sandy held out her bunch of daisies to him. Sprague plucked out two of them, tossed them into the water one at a time, then stood there with his head bowed.
After a minute, he turned, gave each of the girls another hug, and came to where I was standing. He was shaking his head. “It's going to take a long time for this town to heal,” he said.
“It'll be forever for Jake and Sharon,” I said, “unless they find Brian's body.”
“Man, you got that right.” He waved at the river. “They dove all through this deep water here, and they broke the ice and searched for almost a mile down below before they quit. I'm going to do everything I can to get them to come back. Mr. Nash, our DA, he's pulling some strings. Brian's body is stuck somewhere under the ice down there, and the idea of not finding him until the river breaks up in the spring is just intolerable.”
“So the state police have given up the search?” I said.
“Mr. Nash and I are working on it,” he said. “But you know the staties. They've got their priorities, and little Reddington isn't one of them.”
We started back to our vehicles. “What did the kids have to say?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Nothing. They're sad. They seem like good kids.”
“They are,” said Sprague. “Jenny and Brian were, too. I believe in kids, Mr. Coyne. I believe that all kids start out as good kids. A big part of my job is keeping them that way.”
“That's admirable,” I said.
“Admirable?” He shook his head. “It's just common sense.” He cocked his head at me. “Oh. You were being sarcastic, huh?”
“Not at all,” I said. We stopped at Sprague's cruiser. Inside, Officer McCaffrey was talking on the radio. “Yesterday,” I said to Sprague, “you told me the kids had packed some clothes, as if they were planning to shack up for a few days.”
“I didn't say they were planning to shack up.”
“Right. Anyway, I was wondering what their parents said about that.”
“About their shacking up?”
“About their bringing clothes with them.”
“I didn't tell them about that.”
“Why not?”
He shrugged. “Why? To give them something else to think about?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Good point. It wouldn't bring those kids back to life.”
“No,” he said. “It wouldn't.” He reached for my hand and gripped it. “Good to see you again.”
“You, too,” I said. “And ifâ”
“Right. If anything happens, I'll let you know. I've got your card.”
My encounter with Sandy kept nagging at me as I drove the back roads home to Boston through the gathering twilight. I had the feeling she knew something. For one thing, she knew that Brian and Jenny had taken clothes with them. According to Chief Sprague, only the police knew that. They hadn't even told the parents.