“Couldn’t you see us living in a place like that?” Michelle said, pointing at a little farmhouse.
“I don’t know,” he said, not wanting to dampen her good cheer. He
did
know: He’d probably go nuts after a few months in a quiet place like this. If he took a job with a police force out here, he’d probably spend his time investigating teenagers’ break-ins of summer homes. A good murder would probably only come along every five years.
A scruffy little brown-and-white dog trotted out of a yard and started following them. Jack bent down and scratched its ears. “Go home, pooch,” he said, his breath puffing white in the still country air, but the dog set off with him when he moved on.
By the time he and Michelle reached the next town, they were both hungry; even the little dog looked like it could use a snack. The village seemed rather run-down and not at all touristy. There were no cute little cafes or even convenience stores. It soon became apparent that there was not a single commercial dining establishment in the whole place. Every once in a while a car whizzed through, headed somewhere else. Finally, Jack saw a gaunt old woman step out onto her front porch.
“Excuse me,” he called up. “Is there someplace to get a bite to eat around here?”
“Well,” she drawled, “there’s some nice places about three miles up the road that way.” She pointed toward their starting point.
Jack turned to Michelle. “Sorry, honey.”
Michelle just grinned.
That was one of the things he loved about her: She was such a good sport. She had proved that in the most dramatic way imaginable, just after they had gotten together this past summer, when he had taken a late-night call, left her bed, set off to meet an informant for a case he was working on—and taken a bullet in the chest. She could easily have bailed out, and he wouldn’t have blamed her—they barely knew each other—but she had rushed to the hospital, visited him every day, helped him with his physical therapy when he finally came home. In the middle of all that, September 11 happened, and they spent several days huddled together in front of the TV. It seemed as if they had lived a lifetime in that terrible month. Jack shrugged. “I guess we’d better head back, then.” A few yards away, the little dog sat on its haunches looking up at him with what seemed like a Brooklyn expression.
Whaddayagonnado?
TWO MILES INTO THE
return trip, even the dog was drooping. Jack wondered if he’d have to start carrying the thing.
“You okay?” Michelle asked.
Jack was tired—he was still recovering from his bullet wound—but he nodded and kept walking.
Finally, they reached the dog’s yard and it perked up and trotted off.
Adios, amigos.
By the time they made it back to town, chilled and faint with hunger, even Michelle’s good spirits were wearing thin. They found a luncheonette on the main street and settled into a booth.
“I’m gonna order one of everything,” Michelle said.
Jack scratched the side of his mouth. “Let’s save some room for dinner.” After the mix-up with the rooms and the long, hungry walk, his hoped-for perfect day had already gone a bit off the rails. It wasn’t so much that Michelle would expect a fairy-tale proposal—it was more that he was determined to do things better than when he had gotten engaged to his first wife. He had been in his early twenties and Louise had gotten pregnant and there hadn’t even been a proposal, really, just a sort of somber discussion and an agreement that marriage seemed like the right thing to do.
“I’M HUNGRY AGAIN,” MICHELLE
said three hours later as they prepared to head down to the inn’s fancy dining room. “It must be the country air. Or maybe the good loving.” She smiled and gave her dress a tug in front of the mirror.
The moment of truth had arrived. Jack chewed an antacid as he started putting on a necktie.
“C’mon,” Michelle said. “We’re out in the country—you don’t need to dress up.”
“You sure?” Jack was an expert at many things—crime scene investigation, ballistics, even forensic entomology—but fashion was not one of them. This made him an anomaly among NYPD detectives, who loved to put on the style.
“Of course,” Michelle said. “This is our chance to relax a little.”
Down in the dining room the ceilings were low, with dark wood beams from when the place had been a tavern during the Revolutionary War. The flickering oil lamps didn’t give off much light, but enough to show that every man in the place was wearing a tie.
Jack frowned, but Michelle squeezed his arm. “You look great.”
He gave his name to a portly older woman at the entrance to the dining room and made sure he made eye contact—
I’m the guy who’s gonna propose tonight.
She smiled and led them to a nice corner table. Jack held Michelle’s chair out for her and then he sat down.
A short girl in a frilly apron approached. Her teeth were covered with braces and she looked like she might still be in high school. “Can I take your beverage order?” she said cheerily, stretching her mouth around the words.
“I feel like something fun,” Michelle said. “Can I get a Cosmopolitan?” This was a drink she had learned about on nights out with the women from her office in Manhattan. The company rented out plates and tablecloths for parties.
“And you, sir?”
“I’m okay for now.” He didn’t want alcohol to interfere with his upcoming speech.
The leather-bound menu weighed about two pounds. The appetizers cost more than the entrées in most places he was used to. He tried not to raise his eyebrows. It wasn’t that he was cheap, but he had grown up poor in Red Hook, Brooklyn, to parents who thought take-out chow mein was a great extravagance. He rested a hand on top of Michelle’s. “Order whatever you want.”
“The Caesar salad looks good.”
Jack gave her a worried look. “You can’t have a salad for dinner.” What kind of story would that make when they were old and sitting around on a porch somewhere?
Michelle looked beautiful, her skin glowing in the candlelight.
I don’t have a single doubt about this woman,
Jack marveled.
He glanced at a middle-aged couple two tables away. They were the only black people he had seen since he had gotten off the train. They were more formally dressed than anyone else in the room. The guy sat as straight as if there were a board in the back of his jacket. He looked about as comfortable here as Jack was, but he had probably never allowed himself to consider skipping the tie.
Jack made it through the dinner. He managed to order something, and even to eat something, and to make small talk about how the sweater-vested bartender looked like he might have fought in the Revolutionary War himself. He kept reaching down to his pants pocket and then remembering that he had surrendered the ring to the innkeeper, who was going to pass it on to the chef, who was going to hide it in Michelle’s dessert.
A busboy cleared their entree plates. “Hoo,” said Michelle, who had finally settled on linguini with shrimp. “I’m stuffed.”
Jack tried not to frown. “Have a little dessert. How about the chocolate mousse? You love chocolate.”
Michelle sighed. “I’m fine. Thank you, honey. This was such a beautiful dinner.”
“Get the mousse,” Jack said. “I’ll help you eat it.” He wished he had just held on to the damned ring.
Michelle took a sip of her wine. “All right—but only if you’ll help.”
After the waitress took their order, Jack sat back and wiped some sweat off his upper lip. He was known as the Homicide Task Force’s most dogged veteran, a guy who didn’t mind tackling the most difficult, evidence-starved cases. Proposing made such challenges seem like a walk in the park.
Even though he and Michelle had known each other for only a short time, they had gone through so much together, and he was sure she wouldn’t say no. Almost sure. His armpits were sweating profusely and he was glad his jacket was still on.
The waitress swept out of the kitchen bearing a silver tray. With a flourish she set down the mousse and two little glasses of port. “Compliments of the chef.”
Jack tried to smile as he nodded his thanks, but he wondered if the port was overkill. Michelle gave no sign of suspicion, just picked up her spoon and scooped up a tiny dab of whipped cream. After a minute, another. At this rate, it might take an hour to reach the ring. Jack wanted to help, but what would happen if
he
accidentally scooped it up?
“You okay?” Michelle asked.
“Huh?” he said. “Of course. It’s just a little hot in here.”
Thankfully, once Michelle hit the chocolate she began to take more of an interest in the dessert. She finished a big spoonful and closed her eyes in rapture. “Oh my God. This is amazing.”
Jack glanced over at the bar. The waitress was beaming at him and the bartender gave him a thumbs-up. The room was packed now and he wondered how the other diners would react when he got down on one knee.
Michelle licked some mousse off her finger and gave him a sultry look. “Don’t you want some?”
“It’s okay. I’m good.”
She smiled again. “You certainly are.” She dipped the spoon in, dipped the spoon…
His chest got tighter with every dip. Absurdly, he wondered which knee to get down on. He tried not to stare at Michelle’s par-fait glass. Another spoonful. Another. And then…she scraped the spoon along the bottom of the empty glass.
He stared openly now, in shock. He had spent two months’ pay on the ring, like you were supposed to. He’d run the gauntlet of the jewelry stores up on Forty-seventh Street, the Diamond District,
the horror
—salesmen practically diving over their counters, as if he had worn a sign on his head:
SCHMUCK LOOKING FOR ENGAGEMENT RING…
And he had finally found just the right one.
Vanished.
S
PECKS OF GLASS GLITTERED
in the asphalt as Jack drove deep into the heart of Red Hook. Past vacant lots, low factories, modest row houses; past dead weeds rising out of sidewalk cracks. He drove through the quiet, run-down streets but also through the remembered world of his childhood, when these streets had swarmed with sailors and shipbuilders and longshoremen, back before the boom years of the Brooklyn docks had irrevocably gone bust. In those days the place had been packed with bars, movie theaters, groceries, and clothing stores; now you had to leave the neighborhood to shop or to see a show. There was talk of a revival but the place still felt like a ghost town.
He pulled over for a moment, took out his cell phone, and dialed the inn, his second call of the morning.
“Did you find it yet?”
“I’m sorry, sir,” the innkeeper said. “I promise you we’re doing the best we can.” She didn’t sound particularly sorry, but at least she had given up on her argument that the inn was not responsible. (She had stuck to that claim until he had finally done what he hated to do: pull out his badge when off duty.)
“It’s not replaceable,” he said. Not strictly true, but he couldn’t face another shopping trip.
“Sir, I told you,” she said. “We’re doing the best we can, and if there’s any problem, I’m sure our insurance will take care of it.”
Jack just snorted and signed off. No insurance was going to compensate him for watching his romantic weekend go up in smoke, or for the Oscar-worthy performance he had had to pull off for the rest the night, pretending to Michelle that everything was okay.
He stopped in to a bodega for a cup of coffee. He was tempted to pick up a pack of smokes, but his long hospital stay had gotten him off the nicotine; it would be stupid to start up again. He took a sip of the thick Puerto Rican Java and got back in the car.
He surveyed the sidewalks idly as he drove past: a couple of kids goofing around at a bus stop, swinging their backpacks at each other; a big battleship of a woman nattering away on a little cell phone. As he neared Coffey Street, his stomach clenched. Just two blocks down, in a dank warehouse basement, his world had almost ended. He flashed on a moment from that crazy summer night: police scanners crackling, paramedics shouting as they stretchered him up and out. He’d lain on his back watching streetlights slide by overhead like bright full moons and he had believed that he was about to die…
The anxiety ebbed as he drove on. “I’ll understand if you’d rather not take the case,” his boss had said to him this morning. “I can give it to Santiago or Reinhorn, but I figure you know the neighborhood best.” Normally Brooklyn South Homicide used an impartial rotation, with each of the detectives catching new cases in turn, but Detective Sergeant Stephen Tanney was making an exception. Was it a test, Jack wondered, an opportunity for his boss to find out if his recovery was complete?
He drove another block, then turned toward the harbor, down a cobbled street bordered by anonymous little factories and machine shops. Down at the end, he parked behind a couple of patrol cars, a detective’s Grand Marquis, and the Crime Scene wagon. Being back in Red Hook gave him the willies, no doubt about it, but he was eager to put recent events behind him and to immerse himself in a case.
As he stepped out into the cold, damp air, his nose filled with the smell of some industrial solvent, a metallic scent, like spray paint, probably coming from one of the factories lining the street. He strode down the old cobblestones, then veered into a little waterfront park. A lawn led down to a small bay, which opened out onto the gray expanse of New York Harbor. Once upon a time this had been the site of the wooden Coffey Pier, where he and his childhood pals had dived laughing out into the water (wearing underpants because none of their parents could afford swim trunks), but that pier had long since rotted away. Recently it had been rebuilt in metal and concrete.
The base of the pier and a stretch of rocky coastline were cordoned off with yellow Crime Scene tape. Beyond that flimsy barrier the inevitable crowd of local spectators had already mushroomed up, wearing the baggy jeans and hooded sweatshirts of the city’s poor. They cracked nervous jokes and stamped their feet to stay warm. “Yo,
CSI
!” they shouted, though they were actually looking at a couple of jumpsuited technicians from the Medical Examiner’s office. (Thanks to the hit TV show, public interest had moved away from homicide detectives and settled on the Crime Scene teams, which was fine with Jack—he wasn’t looking for glory.)