A Drunkard's Path (2 page)

It took a moment for me to realize that, as my mind was wandering toward quilting, my feet were headed directly to the police station. My feet were clearly braver than my head.

Well, why not? I’m a modern woman in charge of my own destiny. “If a man stands me up, he is damn well going to hear about it,” I muttered to myself, even as I wondered if I could get past the station unnoticed.

I couldn’t.

“Hi, Nell.”

I turned to see Greg, the youngest of the twelve uniformed officers in Archers Rest. He was also the most eager. Jesse once told me that Greg gave out more parking tickets than all the other officers combined. It was a source of amusement for Jesse until the day he found a parking ticket on his own car. It seems that Greg had spent twenty minutes waiting for the meter to expire, just so he could ticket the boss’s vehicle. Greg told me later that he was hoping Jesse would admire his diligence and promote him. Instead Jesse confined him to desk duty.

“Looking for Jesse?” Greg asked.

“Um, I guess,” I managed to get out.

“He’s down by the river. He sent me back to the station to pick up some walkies.” Greg held up two walkie-talkies. “But I’m going back to help with the investigation.”

“What investigation?” I asked, but Greg was in too much of a hurry to answer. I followed him for two blocks, from the station to where Main Street met the Hudson River. Then I kept following as he walked down the river’s edge for a quarter mile to the end of town. All the while I struggled to keep up with him without breaking into a full-out run or stopping to catch my breath.

“Stay here,” Greg shouted when we reached the crime scene. “I’m going to find out what’s going on.”

He had the energy and excitement of a kid showing off to his friends, and it got me a bit excited too. What was going on? I waited impatiently for Greg to come back with all the answers, but he returned a moment later, a failure.

“Everything okay?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I’m supposed to do crowd control.” He pointed toward the twenty or so people standing near the police barricade. “I thought this was my big chance to help with the investigation.”

“You are helping.”

I tried to be supportive even as I saw how defeated he looked. More than that, I understood. Standing on the sidelines wasn’t exactly my favorite activity either. I walked away to see if I could get a glimpse of any of the action.

The river, normally a black hole on a cold January night, was bathed in light. The police cars had their lights flashing and their headlights on, and three twenty-foot temporary klieg lights were flooding the riverbank. In the middle of the light, Jesse and another man were standing next to something on the ground. I moved closer to get a better look but was immediately stopped by an officer I didn’t recognize. And after five months of living in Archers Rest, I’d met all the full- and part-time officers in town.

“I’m Nell Fitzgerald,” I said. “I’m a friend of Chief Dewalt.”

“He’s a little busy right now, miss,” the policeman said, obviously not swayed by my small-town connections. “Why don’t you call him later?”

I looked down at the patch on his coat. Morristown Police. “You’re not from here,” I stated the obvious.

“No, miss. We’re here to offer our assistance to the Archers Rest Police Department.”

I nodded and moved about ten feet away, toward the area at the edge of Main Street where the crowd was gathering.

“What is it?” I turned and saw Bernie, a member of my grandmother’s quilt club or, I should say, my quilt club, since the women had officially taken me on as a junior member. Junior, that is, until I finished my first quilt.

“I have no idea. I can’t get in there to talk to Jesse.”

“Whatever it is, it sure put a crimp in your date,” she said.

I nodded. I hadn’t told Bernie I had a date with Jesse. In fact I’d sworn my grandmother to secrecy, but I wasn’t entirely surprised that word had gotten out. Archers Rest was a small town with a means of communication faster than the Internet—gossip. My guess was that when Jesse asked his mother to babysit, she told her good friend Bernie. And by now, I was sure, Bernie had told everyone else in the quilt club. I knew right then that our Friday meeting would be less about piecing and more about my love life. I’d have been annoyed, but, considering how things were going, I could use the advice.

I tried to see what Jesse and the other man were talking about, what they were looking at, and why officers kept walking over and walking away, but I couldn’t see anything. Frustrated, I was about to give up and go home when I had a better idea.

“I’m going to find Greg,” I said to Bernie.

“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t, dear.” She smiled.

I laughed. Bernie was the ex-hippie of the group and even now, in her sixties, was known for her outrageous behavior.

“That leaves me a lot of room,” I said.

I headed toward Greg, who was standing near an empty ambulance with two other Archers Rest officers.

“Hey, guys,” I said. “Jesse and I had a date tonight. He stood me up and I’d like to yell at him.”

It was a little embarrassing to admit that publicly, but I wasn’t about to stand around with the crowd when a little embarrassment might get me closer to the action. The three men laughed, exchanged looks, and seemed about to turn me down when Greg took a few steps toward me.

“I’ll get you within yelling distance,” he said. “But put in a good word for me. You know, to get me back on the streets.”

I nodded. Greg and I walked past the barricade and the officer from Morristown. Greg pointed me toward Jesse and then turned and walked back to the barricade. Whatever happened now, I was on my own. I took a few more strides, then stopped when I was about three feet away from Jesse and got my first look at what lay at his feet.

It was the body of a young woman. She was pale and wet, I assumed from being pulled out of the river. Her pink dress clung to her. Her eyes were open and blank except that she looked, at least to me, frightened.

“Oh my God,” I said.

Jesse looked up. “What are you doing here?”

“Well, I waited at the restaurant and you didn’t show up, so . . .”

Jesse walked over to me. He leaned in and said, almost too quietly for me to hear, “I’m sorry. There’s no excuse for not calling you.”

“I don’t know. That looks like a pretty good excuse.” I nodded toward the body.

He glanced momentarily back at the dead girl and then moved in front of me, blocking my view. “I’m going to be here all night, Nell. Go home and I’ll call you tomorrow. I promise.”

I looked up at his earnest, intellectual face. His dark hair was rumpled and his glasses were perched crookedly on his nose. Something about the sad, serious expression and the way he squeezed my hand made me want to kiss him. But there was no point in wasting our first kiss in front of a corpse, the police force of two towns, and a growing crowd of spectators.

“Get some sleep if you can,” I said.

He smiled a little. “I will. Get a deputy to take you home.”

I let go of his hand and started to turn, but I had to ask. “Who is she?”

He shrugged. “I have no idea. No one from town. And Chief Powell doesn’t know her either, so she must not be from around here.”

I looked at the man I’d seen Jesse conferring with. He was large, over six feet tall, and looked to be in his forties, but with a crew cut that made him seem older. “Is he from Morristown? One of their cops tried to stop me from coming down here.”

“He didn’t know who he was dealing with.” Jesse smiled. “But I do. And you’re not getting your nose in this. It’s probably just a suicide anyway, so I’ll wrap this up before I need your keen investigative skills.”

“Are you making fun of me?” I smiled.

He leaned toward me, his lips moving toward mine. Then he must have thought better of it. Instead he moved his mouth close to my ear and whispered, “Go home before I arrest you.”

“Empty threats,” I said. But I moved back from the scene. I walked up from the river’s edge onto the pavement of Main Street, past the twenty or so people who were still watching, and toward the safety of my grandmother’s house.

As I pulled my wool coat snugly around me, I found myself smiling at the thought of Jesse’s warm breath against my cheek. But before I lost myself in images of him, I remembered something that made me feel suddenly cold—the sight of that poor young woman lying on the bank of the icy Hudson River. I wondered what had made her do it. Or who.

 

 

 

 

“D
oesn’t that thing ring if someone’s calling, like a real phone?” my grandmother, Eleanor, asked.

“Yes, unless it’s broken.”

“Is it broken?”

“Not as far as I know,” I sighed.

“Well, then put it down. He’ll call when he gets to it.” She shook her head. “Besides, you want to make a nice impression on the people here, don’t you?”

Reluctantly I dropped my cell phone into my purse and looked around. It was the sort of event I’d often dreamed of—an art opening, with some of the coolest, hippest artists in New York State in attendance. But instead of feeling excited, I felt out of place: an artist wannabe standing in the corner between my grandmother and her best friend, Maggie Sweeney. A week ago I’d read in
The New York Times
that the Coulter Art Center, the school I planned to attend, was holding an open house/art show. The article teased that a famous area artist, Oliver White, would be making an announcement regarding his collection. I desperately wanted to go, but I didn’t want to go alone, so Maggie and Eleanor volunteered.

I was worried that they would feel bored, but while they made themselves at home among the crowd, I stood, like a kid on her first day of kindergarten, unsure of how to join in.

“Which one is Mr. White?” Eleanor asked me.

“I’m not sure,” I admitted.

I didn’t know anything about Oliver White, but, judging by the excitement in the room, I guessed he was a pretty big deal in the art world.

Maggie’s deep green eyes pierced through me. Even in her seventies, she had a withering authority that must have come in handy in her years as town librarian.

“Why don’t you get out there and meet some people?” she scolded me. “There’s no point in coming to a place like this if you spend your time talking to a couple of old ladies.”

With that she nudged me forward. I moved three inches and took a deep breath, then changed my mind. Too late, though. When I turned around, Maggie and Eleanor had disappeared into the crowd. I stood self-consciously for a minute, but that only made me feel worse, so I tried, unsuccessfully, to break into a conversation three men were having. Then I got a glass of wine from a passing waiter. That helped. I wasn’t normally a wallflower, but so many of these people were artists. They did what I only dreamed about doing. I couldn’t imagine any conversation in which I wouldn’t sound like an idiot.

The only thing left to do was to look at the paintings. And it was quite a collection. Hung around the room were more than thirty paintings, mostly of women, covering nearly fifty years of White’s career.

According to the exhibit brochure, in the late fifties and early sixties Oliver White painted musicians, drug addicts, and beatniks in New York’s Greenwich Village. These early works were, to quote the brochure, “full of the pain and confusion of a man at odds with himself.” Whatever that meant. There were only a few examples from that period, but each was full of emptiness and anger.

One, called
Nobody
, was of a nude woman who at first appeared to be sleeping but was, on closer inspection, passed out in vomit on a dirty bed. I wondered what kind of person would paint this woman rather than help her, but I was strangely filled with envy. There was an energy and emotion in White’s work, a franticness to it. Any artist, or aspiring artist, would kill to be as good.

I took a few more steps and saw that his work had completely changed. These paintings and charcoal drawings, from what the brochure called “his pastoral period starting in the late seventies,” were mostly of people from small towns and farms in upstate New York. There were still nudes, but these women were actually awake and seemed a million miles away from that girl on the dirty bed. Still, there was something sad or even resentful in his depiction of them.

“Cool, huh?”

I turned to see a woman of about twenty, with a shock of long and seemingly unmanageable copper red hair that fell in her face. She was wearing jeans and a bright green cardigan over an orange T-shirt and tugged at a chunky pink plastic necklace that made loud noises as she moved.

“I’m Kennette,” she said brightly.

“Nell,” I replied. “It’s so different from his earlier stuff.”

“He got sober,” she said. “He was a drunk or an addict, or both, when he was painting in the city.”