Down River (8 page)

He gestured at Robin. “Now, Detective Alexander has told me about your relationship to the victim. None of us likes to see cases like this, but it’s important to move as quickly as possible when something like this does occur. I know that it’s late and that you’re probably upset, but I’m hoping that you can help me out.”

“I’ll do what I can.”

“That’s good. That’s just fine. Now, I understand that you saw the victim today?”

“Her name is Grace.”

He smiled again, and this one had an edge on it. “Of course,” he said. “What did you and Grace talk about? How was her state of mind?”

“I don’t know how to answer that,” I said. “I don’t know her anymore. It’s been a long time. She never responded to my letters.”

Robin spoke. “You wrote to her?”

I could feel the sudden hurt in her voice.

You wrote to her, but not to me.

I turned to Robin. “I wrote to her because she was too young to understand my reasons for leaving. I needed her to understand why I was no longer there for her.”

“Just tell me about today,” Grantham said. “Tell me the rest of it.”

I pictured Grace: the heat of her skin beneath my palm, the fierce resentment, the undertones of something more. I knew what this cop was looking for. He had his story from Grace and wanted corroboration; to hell with objectivity. Part of me wanted to give it to him. Why? Because screw it.

“I rubbed lotion on her back. She kissed me. She said that she hates me.” I looked Grantham in the eye. “She ran away.”

“Did you chase her?” Grantham asked.

“It wasn’t that kind of running away.”

“It doesn’t sound like the kind of reunion most would expect, either.”

My voice came low and hard. “Thinking that I raped Grace Shepherd is like saying I raped my own daughter.”

Grantham did not blink. “Yet, daughters are raped with great consistency by their fathers, Mr. Chase.”

I knew that he was right. “It’s not like it sounds,” I said. “She was angry at me.”

“Why?” Grantham asked.

“Because I left her. She was making a point.”

“What else?”

“She said that she had lots of boyfriends. She wanted me to know that. She wanted me to hurt, too, I think.”

“Are you saying that she’s promiscuous?” Grantham asked.

“I’m not saying anything like that. How would I know something like that?”

“She told you.”

“She also kissed me. She was hurt. She was lashing out. I was her family and I left her when she was fifteen years old.”

“She’s not your daughter, Mr. Chase.”

“That’s irrelevant.”

Grantham looked at Robin, then back at me. He clasped his hands in front of his waist. “Very well. Go on.”

“She was wearing a white bikini and sunglasses. Nothing else. She was wet, just out of the river. When she ran away, she ran south along the bank. There’s a trail that’s been there forever. It leads to Dolf’s house, about a mile down.”

“Did you assault Ms. Shepherd?”

“I did not.”

Grantham pursed his lips. “Okay, Mr. Chase. That’ll do for now. We’ll speak again later.”

“Am I a suspect?” I asked.

“I rarely speculate on such things this early in an investigation. However, Detective Alexander has stated, quite emphatically, that she does not believe you capable.” He paused, looked at Alexander, and I saw flakes of dried skin on his glasses. “Of course, I have to consider the fact that you and Detective Alexander apparently have some kind of relationship. That complicates matters. We’ll have a better idea about all of this once we can speak to the victim”—he caught himself—“to Grace.”

“When will that be?” I asked.

“Just waiting for the doctor to clear it.” Grantham’s cell phone chirped and he looked at the caller ID. “I need to get this.” He answered the phone and walked away. Robin moved next to me, yet I found it hard to look at her. It was like she had two faces: the one I saw above me in the half-light of her bedroom and the one I’d seen most recently, the cop.

“I shouldn’t have tested you,” she said.

“No.”

“I apologize.”

She stood in front of me, and her face was the softest I’d seen since my return. “It’s complicated, Adam. For five years, all I’ve had is the job. I take it seriously. I’m good at it but it’s not all good. Not all the time.”

“What do you mean?”

“You get isolated. You see shadows.” She shrugged, dug deeper for the explanation. “Even the good guys will lie to a cop. Eventually, you get used to it. Then you start to expect it.” She was struggling. “I know it’s not right. I don’t like it either, but it’s who I am. It’s what I became when you left.”

“You never doubted me, Robin, not even during the worst of it.”

She reached for my hand. I let her take it.

“She was so innocent,” I said. I spoke of Grace.

“She’ll get over this, Adam. People get over worse.”

But I was already shaking my head. “I’m not talking about what happened today. I’m talking about when I left. When she was a child. It was like a light came off of her. That’s what Dolf used to say.”

“How so?”

“He said that most people walk in light and dark. That’s the way the world usually works. But some people carry the light with them. Grace was like that.”

“She’s not the child you remember, Adam. She hasn’t been for a long time.”

There was something in Robin’s voice. “What do you mean?” I asked.

“About six months ago, a state trooper caught her doing one-twenty down the interstate at two in the morning on a stolen motorcycle. She wasn’t even wearing a helmet.”

“Was she drunk?” I asked.

“No.”

“Was she prosecuted?”

“Not for stealing the bike.”

“Why not?”

“It was Danny Faith’s bike. I guess he didn’t know that she’s the one who took it. He reported it stolen but wouldn’t press charges. They locked her up, but the D.A. dropped the case. Dolf hired a lawyer to handle the speeding charge. She lost her license.”

I could picture the bike, a big Kawasaki that Danny had had forever. Grace would be very small on it, but I could see her, too: the speed, the torrent of noise, and her hair straight out behind her. Like she’d looked the first time she’d ridden my father’s horse.

Fearless.

“You don’t know her,” I said.

“A hundred and twenty miles an hour, Adam. Two in the morning. No helmet. It took the patrolman five miles to catch up with her.”

I thought of Grace now, damaged in one of those antiseptic rooms behind me. I rubbed at my eyes. “What am I supposed to feel, Robin? You’ve seen this before.”

“Anger. Emptiness. I don’t know.”

“How can you not know?”

She shrugged. “It’s never been someone I love.”

“And Grace?”

Her eyes were impregnable. “I’ve not known Grace for some time, Adam.”

I was silent, thinking of Grace’s words on the dock.

Who else cared about me?

“Are you okay?” Robin asked.

I was not, not even close. “If I could find the guy that did this, I’d kill him.” I showed her my eyes. “I would kill that motherfucker dead.”

Robin looked around; no one was close. “Don’t say that, Adam. Not here. Not ever.”

   Grantham finished his phone call and met us at the hospital door. We walked in together. Dolf and my father were speaking to the attending physician. Grantham interrupted them.

“Can we see her yet?”

The doctor was a young, earnest-looking man with black-framed glasses and a thin nose. He seemed small and prematurely bent; he held a clipboard against his chest as if it could armor him from the injuries that surrounded him. His voice was surprisingly firm.

“Physically, she’s sound enough. But I don’t know that she’ll be responsive. She has not really said anything since she came in, except for once in the first hour. She asked for somebody named Adam.”

People turned as one: my father, Dolf, Robin, and Detective Grantham. Eventually, the doctor looked at me as well. “Are you Adam?” he asked. I nodded, and my father’s mouth opened in the silence. The doctor looked uncertain. “Maybe if you spoke to her.…”

“We need to speak to her first,” Grantham said.

“Very well,” the doctor said. “I will need to be in the room as well.”

“No problem.”

The doctor led us down a narrow hall with empty gurneys along the wall. We rounded a corner and he stopped next to a pale wooden door with a small window in it. I caught a glimpse of Grace under a thin blanket.

“The rest of you wait out here,” he said, then held the door for the detectives.

Cool air moved against my face and then they were inside. Dolf and my father watched through the window while I paced small circles and thought of the last thing Grace had said to me. Five minutes later the door opened. The doctor looked at me.

“She’s asking for you,” he said.

I started for the door, but Grantham stopped me with a hand against my chest. “She wouldn’t speak to us. We’ve agreed to let you in because the doc here thinks it will help her snap out of it.” I met his gaze and held it. “Don’t do anything to make me regret this.”

I leaned against his hand until he was forced to move it. I stepped past him, into the room, still feeling his fingers there, and how he’d pushed hard at the last second. The door swung on silent hinges; the two old men crowded against the glass. Then she was before me, and I felt my resentment wither and die. None of that mattered.

Hospital light sucked the color out of her. Her chest rose and fell, with long pauses where I felt that none should be. Strands of blond hung across her cheek, and there was dried blood in the shell of her ear. I looked at Robin, whose face was closed.

I walked around the bed. Stitches pierced her lips. She had massive bruising, her eyes so swollen that they were barely open, just a glimmer of blue that looked too pale. Tape secured a tube to the back of her hand, which felt brittle when I took it. I tried to find some hint of her in those eyes, and when I said her name the slice of blue expanded minutely, and I knew that she was there. She stared at me for a long time.

“Adam?” she asked, and I heard all of the things I knew she felt, the subtle nuance of pain and loss.

“I’m here.”

She rolled her head away, not wanting me to see the tears that slipped, thick and silent, down her face. I straightened so that she could see me when she opened her eyes. It took her a while. Grantham shifted his feet. No one else moved.

She did not look at me again until the tears had ceased, but when our eyes met, I knew they would come again. The battle was there, in her face, and I watched helplessly as she lost it. She held up her arms and I leaned into them as the dam burst again; and she grasped me as she began to sob. Her body was hot and shaking; I put my arms around her as best as I could. I told her not to worry. I told her that everything would be okay. Then she leaned her mouth against my ear one more time and whispered something so quietly I could barely hear her.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

I pulled away so she could see my face. I nodded because I had no words; then she pulled me back down and held me as the tremors racked her.

I looked up, and found my father’s face in the window. He rubbed a hand across his eyes and turned away, but not before I saw the palsy in his fingers. Dolf watched him go, and then shook his head, as if in great sadness.

I returned my attention to Grace, and tried with my arms to swallow her up. Eventually, she drifted back to whatever shelter her mind had made for itself. She never said another word, just rolled onto her side, and closed her eyes.

The cops got nothing.

Back in the hall, Grantham crowded me again. “I think that we need to step outside,” he said.

“Why?”

“You know why.” His hand settled around my arm. I jerked it away and he grabbed for it again.

“Just a minute now,” Dolf said.

Grantham got control of himself. “I told you not to piss me off,” he said.

“Come on, Adam,” Robin said. “Let’s go outside.”

“No.” It was all settling upon me: Grace’s lost innocence, the suspicions that dogged me, and the darkness that hung above my return to this place. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“I want to know what she said.” Grantham stopped short of actually touching me. “She said something to you. I want it.”

“Is that true?” Robin asked. “Did she speak to you?”

“Don’t ask me, Robin. It’s not important.”

“If she said anything, we need to know what it is.”

I took in the faces around me. What Grace had said was for me, and I felt no need to share it. But Robin put her hand on my arm. “I have vouched for you, Adam. Do you understand what that means?”

I pushed lightly past her and looked in on Grace. She had curled into a ball, her back to the world outside. I still felt the hot slide of her tears as she’d pressed against me. I spoke to Grantham, but put my eyes on my father. I told them exactly what she said.

“She said that she was sorry.”

My father slumped.

“Sorry for what?” Grantham asked.

I’d told them the truth, exactly what she’d said; but interpreting that apology was not my problem. So, I offered an explanation that I knew he would accept, even though it was a lie.

“When we were at the river, she said that she hated me. I imagine that she was apologizing for that.”

He looked thoughtful. “That’s it?” he asked. “That’s all she said?”

“That’s it.”

Robin and Grantham looked at each other and there was a moment of unspoken communication between them. Then Robin spoke. “There are a few other things we’d like to discuss with you. Outside, if you don’t mind.”

“Sure,” I said, and turned for the exit. I took only two steps before I heard my father say my name. His hands were palms up, his face drawn down by the realization that Grace would be unlikely to embrace the man who’d so abused her. There was no forgiveness in my face as I met his eyes. He took half a step and said my name again, a question, a plea, and for a moment I thought about it; he was in pain, full of sudden regret and of the years that had marched so implacably between us.