A Tap on the Window (18 page)

THIRTY-TWO

I
threw back the covers and stood up so quickly I made myself light-headed. I turned the bedside table lamp on. Donna’s side of the bed did not look slept in. It didn’t make sense that if she hadn’t been able to get to sleep, she’d have made the bed when she got up. You don’t do that when it’s eleven or twelve at night. You get up, wander around, have a glass of water, figuring that in a few minutes you’re going to get back under the covers and try again to get to sleep.

So Donna had not yet gone to bed.

I made my way down the hall, going to Scott’s room first. It never surprised me to find her under the covers there these days. But when I opened the door, allowing light to spill in from the hall, I could see the bed was empty.

Turning on lights as I went, I descended the stairs. If she had been sitting in the living room, quietly, it was possible I could have walked in and gone right past her without noticing. But she wasn’t there.

She wasn’t in the basement or the laundry room.

“Donna!” I shouted.

I unlocked the sliding glass doors that led out onto the deck and hit the floods, which were powerful enough to illuminate the entire backyard. It was way too frosty for her to be sitting outside, gazing heavenward, wondering how our boy was doing up there. Like I say, if you believed in that sort of thing.

I went back in, relocked the sliding doors, and opened the one at the end of the kitchen that connected with the garage.

Donna’s car was gone.

“Son of a bitch,” I said.

I went to the phone on the kitchen counter and hit the button that automatically connected me to her cell phone.

It rang once.

“Come on,” I said.

It rang a second time.

“Pick up.”

It rang a third time. Then, “Hey.”

“Where are you?” I asked.

“Driving around.”

“I came home, couldn’t find you. I was starting to get frantic.”

“I should have left a note,” she said. “I couldn’t sleep.”

“What’s wrong?” The stupid question to end all stupid questions, I knew. What I was trying to ask was, what made tonight worse than all the other nights of the last few months?

“I have a lot on my mind,” Donna said.

We were both silent for a few seconds. I could hear the hum of the car in the background. Finally, I said, “What’d you have for dinner?”

“I didn’t have dinner,” she said.

“Me neither,” I said. Another pause. “I’m kind of starving.”

“I guess I am, too.”

“The Denny’s would be open,” I said. “We could get a midnight breakfast. I feel like some eggs and sausage.”

“I’m not far from there,” Donna said. Long pause. “I’ll meet you.”

“I need you to swing by and pick me up. I haven’t got a car.”

“You haven’t got a car?”

“I’ll tell you about it over eggs.”

* * *

Before
I could fill her in about the car, I had to explain the bruise on the side of my face. She noticed it as soon as I got into the passenger seat.

“Does it hurt?” she asked.

“Not as much as my pride.”

There were two other couples and one man sitting by himself at Denny’s. Donna and I took a table by the window and ordered decafs to start from the waitress, who was there before our butts had hit the seats. We clung to the hope that once we got home, we’d actually be able to get to sleep, so regular coffee seemed an unwise choice.

“The police seized the car,” I said.

Donna spooned some sugar into her mug. “Tell me.”

I told her. Starting with my visit to the Rodomskis’, followed by my visit to the Skillings’, taking Sean with me to where I’d dropped Hanna off, then finding her body under the bridge.

“And Annette Ravelson is sleeping with the mayor,” I said, “but that seems kind of anticlimactic to everything else.”

“How awful,” she said. “Finding that girl’s body.” I thought I saw her shiver. It wasn’t possible to think about any body without imagining Scott’s in the parking lot at Ravelson Furniture.

“Yeah,” I said. “The Skilling kid took it bad.”

“You don’t think he did it,” Donna said.

“I don’t,” I said. “But I’ve been wrong before.”

The waitress returned and we ordered eggs and all the greasy, wonderful things that generally come with them. An awkward silence ensued for several minutes until the food came.

“I can’t believe my brother would have the car seized,” Donna said.

I sipped my coffee, imagined the jolt it would give me if it weren’t decaf. “Yeah, I was surprised, too.”

“You two are like a dog and a cat in the same sack, but I think, at some level, he respects you,” she said. “Maybe he seized the car to make a point, that he’s not showing favoritism, even though he knows he won’t find anything.”

“Unless he does,” I said.

Her forkful of egg stopped halfway to her mouth. “Cal, Augie’s not going to frame you. That’s absolutely ridiculous. You think he’s going to plant evidence against you?”

I said nothing.

“For God’s sake, why would he do that? What possible reason could he have?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“I know you don’t like him—half the time I don’t even like him—but he’s not capable of that.”

“He’s feeding the mayor a line of bullshit, saying his people never overstep their bounds.”

She gave me a look that suggested I should know better. “You think there’s a police force anywhere that doesn’t? Like, say, the Promise Falls police? I believe you used to work there.”

“Donna.”

“Augie looks out for his people. The way your chief looked out for you.”

“I lost my job,” I said.

“You could have lost more,” she said.

My time in Promise Falls was not something I liked to talk about. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe Augie’s making a point. Maybe he just wants to inconvenience me. I’ll have to rent something in the morning.”

“Use my car,” Donna said. “Drop me off. If you can’t pick me up, I’ll find my way home.”

“Sounds like a plan,” I said.

A couple of minutes of silence followed. I had a feeling we were done talking about my evening, at least for now. We were moving to something else.

Finally, Donna said, “I was afraid he’d stop loving me.”

I looked at her and waited.

“I was afraid, that if I—if we—got really tough with him, grounded him, cut off his money, forced him into counseling, just went to war with him about what he was doing, I was afraid he wouldn’t love me anymore.”

“I know,” I said.

“I even thought about turning him in,” Donna said. “Calling Augie. Have him arrested, put the cuffs on him, throw him in jail, the whole thing. Like that
Scared Straight
movie. Remember that? But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I didn’t think I’d be able to forgive myself. I thought about what might happen to him when he was in jail, even if it was only for a little while, about the other people he might meet in there, what they might do to him. But now that I didn’t do it, I can’t forgive myself for that, either.”

I put my fork down. I wanted to say something, but it was hard for me.

“What?” Donna said.

“I’m angry all the time,” I said. “I do my best to hide it. But it’s always there. It’s like I’ve got snakes slithering around under my skin. Millions of bugs, crawling inside me.”

“Are you angry with me?” Donna asked.

I didn’t answer right away. I was debating how honest to be, because I was angry with her. But it was nothing compared to the anger I felt toward myself. It was nothing compared to the anger I felt toward whoever sold Scott that final dose.

And it was nothing compared to the anger I felt toward Scott himself.

“I don’t know if there’s anyone I’m not mad at,” I said, and watched her face fall ever so slightly. “But you’re far from the top of the list.” I paused. “That’s where I am.” I made two fists, trying to work out my tension, and then relaxed my hands.

“You want to punish yourself, that’s one thing,” she said. “I get that. I want to do it to myself. But you have to stop punishing me.”

“I’m not,” I said. “I haven’t said a thing.”

“Exactly. You have to talk to me. I’ve never needed you more in my life than I do now, but you’re shutting me out. Withdrawing into yourself. When we lost him, what we had, part of that died, too. Are you willing to let it die completely?” Her eyes were red and moist.

I closed my own briefly.

“No,” I said.

I struggled to find words. “I’m afraid . . . I feel like it’s wrong to be happy. That if we’re ever good, if we’re ever happy again, it’s some kind of betrayal.”

A tear ran down Donna’s cheek. “Oh, babe, we’re never going to be happy. But we could be happier. Happier than we are now.”

As hungry as I’d been, I didn’t have enough appetite to finish what was on my plate. I pushed some eggs around with my fork, then set it down.

“I never should have let her out of the car,” I said.

“What else could you have done?”

“Something. At the very least, stayed with her until she got hold of someone else to give her a ride. She was calling the Skilling kid when she got interrupted.”

“You said she ran away. How would that have looked, you chasing a teenage girl down some empty street late at night?”

Donna wasn’t wrong. But I didn’t feel any better.

“It’s not my only regret,” I said. “I’ve done some things.”

Donna eyed me warily. “Go on.”

“Things I’m not proud of.”

Her face fell and her lip trembled before she spoke. “Are you seeing someone?”

“What?” The comment caught me off guard.

“Things like that happen. After a crisis. People end up doing any number of things they wouldn’t normally do.”

“No,” I said. “Not that.” I looked her straight in the eye. “Never that.”

I got the check.

* * *

I
think we both knew it was going to happen.

We went into the house, neither of us saying a word, perhaps worried that if we said anything, it wouldn’t. We got ready for bed, the way we used to. Sharing the bathroom, taking turns to brush our teeth at the sink. Crawling under the covers at the same time, turning out the lights on the bedside tables.

“’Night,” I said.

“’Night,” Donna said.

Neither of us pretending the other wasn’t there.

I hesitated a moment, then laid a hand on her side. She turned so that her face was resting on the edge of my pillow. I pulled her body into mine, and it happened. It was slow, and undoubtedly sad in the way lovemaking can be at times, but there was something else. There was hope.

Things seemed better. Maybe we’d turned a corner.

THIRTY-THREE

The
phone on our bedside table rang at six forty-five a.m.

I was already awake, staring at the ceiling, thinking about gas stations, but Donna was sound asleep next to me. She woke with a start.

“What?” she said. “What is it?”

“Hang on,” I said, rolling over and grabbing the receiver. I glanced at the display, but the ID name was blocked. “Hello?”

“I’ve called all around and no one knows where she is.”

“Who is— Is this Bert?” I said.

“Yeah,” the mayor said. “I called everyone I could think of, at least those I had numbers for, and sent e-mails to people whose addresses I had. No one’s seen Claire, no one has any idea where she might have gone. I was on the phone with Caroline for an hour after you left, and she tried to help me make a list of names. And the police showed up and had a lot of questions, too, because, you know, they had your version of events and knew Claire and Hanna had been together last night.”

“Was it Augie?”

“No, no. It was a man and woman. I can’t even remember their names.” It would have been Ramsey and Quinn. “I’m not tracking a hundred percent. I’m rattled and haven’t had any sleep. I’ve been calling people all night, waking them up, pissing them off, but I don’t care.”

“Are there some you’re still waiting to hear back from?” I asked.

“A few. So far, nothing. Roman, Annette’s son, called me around one in the morning. She asked him to.”

I couldn’t help but ask. “He didn’t wonder why his mom was getting in so late? With his dad out of town?”

“I don’t know what she told him. But he was out late, too, doing whatever he does.”

Making booze deliveries to underage drinkers, I bet. Two of his employees, Sean and Hanna, weren’t available.

“What’d he say?”

“He said, and I quote, he didn’t fuckin’ know, and he didn’t fuckin’ care. Said I should put in a call to Dennis Mullavey. But I don’t know where to find him.”

The young man I’d seen in pictures on Claire’s iPad.

“Tell me about him,” I said as Donna threw off her covers, sat on the edge of the bed and rubbed her eyes.

“Like I said, a summer romance. They were crazy about each other. A nice kid, you know? I liked him okay.”

“Where’d they meet?”

“Where does anyone meet in this town? Probably Patchett’s.”

“But Dennis isn’t from Griffon?”

“No. He got a job here for the summer. Working for a lawn service. Cutting grass, that kind of thing.”

“What’s the name of the company?”

“I don’t think I ever knew. Whenever he came by here, he’d be driving one of their trucks. It was orange.”

I could recall seeing those trucks around town, but I couldn’t think of the name painted on the side. Griffon probably had three or four landscaping companies.

“I can find that out,” I said. “So what happened between Claire and Dennis?”

“I guess it was more than just a summer job for Dennis, because he stayed on with this company into September. Most of these firms, they look after you right into the fall, raking leaves and all that. Wherever he was from, he didn’t have to go back to school. He was done with high school, I know that much.”

Donna was still sitting on the edge of the bed, listening. Sanders was talking loud enough that she was probably able to hear most of what he was saying.

“Go on,” I said.

“So one day, out of the blue, he just quits his job, breaks up with Claire, and goes back home. Broke off with her with a text or an e-mail or something. Said it wasn’t working out for him, he was sorry, but he wasn’t interested in having some long, drawn-out discussion about it. She was heartbroken. Cried for a couple of days. I told her, ‘Look, you’re young, you’ll have a hundred more boyfriends before you find the right one.’”

“Huh,” I said.

“In case you’re wondering, I didn’t try to break them up,” Sanders said defensively.

“I didn’t suggest you did.”

“You’d be surprised, this day and age, how many people took me aside, said I should talk Claire into breaking it off with him because he’s black. Said I should scare him off. Unbelievable.”

Sounded like the kind of thing Augie might say, but I knew Augie wasn’t exactly giving advice to the mayor, except maybe to take a long walk on a short pier.

“Even Caroline,” he said. “You know, my ex. I swear she’s not a racist, but she was uncomfortable with it.”

“Did she tell Claire how she felt?”

“No, she was putting it all on me, since Claire spends most of her time in Griffon. I told her I wasn’t going to do any such thing.”

“You sure she couldn’t have said something to Dennis? Did he and Claire ever go visit her mother in Toronto?”

“They might have, once, but no, I don’t think so.”

I wondered why Claire lived mostly with her father. So I asked.

“When Caroline got remarried and moved to Toronto, Claire put up a huge fuss. She wasn’t going to move there, she wasn’t going to leave her school and her friends. And honestly, I think Caroline was happy to lose that battle. She wanted to start off this new marriage without the complications of a teenage daughter at home.”

“You were okay with that?”

“Absolutely,” he said. “Look, Cal—may I call you Cal?”

“Of course.”

“Cal, I owe you an apology. I misjudged you, misjudged your motives. I know now that your concern for Claire is genuine, and I understand how, given the way you were dragged into this, you felt an obligation to become involved. And I appreciate your discretion where Annette is concerned.” I was waiting for a “but.”

“But up to now, you’ve kind of been working for yourself. I’d like to make that right, and hire you, pay you for your time.”

It wasn’t the “but” I was expecting. I thought he was going to politely tell me to cease and desist, that he’d handle things from here on.

“I want you to find Claire. I mean, look, maybe she’ll call me in the next hour. Maybe she’ll be in touch before the day is out. But what if she isn’t? Then I’ll have lost a day trying to find out what’s happened to her.”

“I guess you don’t want to go to the police and report her missing,” I said.

Sanders almost chuckled. “No, I don’t think so. But I have to ask, is it going to be difficult for you to help me with this, given the animosity between you and your brother-in-law?”

“Probably,” I said. “But that’s okay. Look, I have a couple of things I was going to follow up on this morning, anyway. There are a couple of gas stations close to Iggy’s. Someone who’d been waiting around to pick Claire up might have filled up before or after. And I’ll make some calls to local landscapers, see if I can get a lead on this Dennis Mullavey character.”

For a moment I thought I’d been cut off. Sanders wasn’t saying anything.

“Bert?” I said.

“I’m sorry.” His voice was shaky. He’d broken down. He’d been crying. “Tell me you don’t think she’s ended up like Hanna.”

“I’m gonna do my best to find her.”

“I just want to know she’s okay. I have to know she’s okay.”