Snowblind (29 page)

As he slid onto a stool, the aging blond bartender noticed him and came down the bar.

“Evening, Joe,” she said, her voice a cigarette rasp.

“Morgan,” Detective Keenan said. “Glad to find an empty seat.”

“Aw, we’re just a little light tonight. Hell, it’s a Tuesday,” Brenda said, the makeup crinkling on her face, worn by nicotine and years of tanning. “It’s the restaurant that’s dead.”

“I’m just teasing,” Keenan said. “I’m actually surprised you’ve got a crowd at all. It’s gone very quiet out there tonight.”

Brenda wiped down the counter like some bartender in an old Western.

“You know what it’s like before a snowstorm. Coventry always holds its breath,” she said, then met his gaze. “What can I get you? Winter Ale?”

Keenan smiled, his tension relaxing further. “How do you do that? I hardly ever come in here anymore.”

“Yeah, yeah, ever since you made detective,” Brenda teased, grabbing a glass and going to the tap to draw his beer. “But you’ve been drinking the same thing every winter for, like, ten friggin’ years.”

She poured a perfect glass—just a skim of foam on top—put out a coaster, and set his beer on top of it.

“If my wife ever throws me out, I’m going to propose to you,” Keenan said. “Any woman with that kind of memory should be cherished.”

“Yeah, right. Tell that to my asshole ex-husband.”

Keenan took a swig of his beer and was about to reply when someone tapped his shoulder. He turned to see Marco Torres standing behind him, looking pissed off. After the week he’d been having, Keenan had run out of patience.

“What the hell’s your problem?”

Torres shuddered as if he might cry and stepped in close.

“Personal space, asshole,” Keenan said, but when he reached up to push Torres away, the younger man grabbed his wrist and twisted his arm aside.

“He’s still out there, you son of a bitch,” Torres whispered. “You’re here having a beer and another kid is going to die on your watch.”

“Fuck off!” Keenan shouted, shaking loose and shoving Torres backward, so that he crashed into the wall, his head cracking a panel of frosted glass.

Other patrons at the bar shuffled away from them, but the cops who’d been drinking there moved nearer, all of them ready to step in if things got out of hand. One of them was Ted Finch, who gave Keenan a conspiratorial grin.

“Didn’t think you had it in you, Joe,” Finch said.

Keenan felt all the fight go out of him. If Finch approved, he knew he had crossed a line. He stared at Torres, who stood in a kind of defensive crouch, eyes wide with what looked more like sadness than fear. A chill went through the detective, a crawling, icy thing that spread through him with a shiver. Something about the way Torres looked at him made his stomach knot with unease.

“Why me?” Keenan demanded. “Yeah, I want to find the kid. It’s killing me. But why the hell do you put this just on me when there’s a whole department—a whole goddamn city—that should still be out searching?”

Torres straightened, his eyes narrowing angrily. His lips were a thin white line until he took a single step nearer and spoke so quietly that even Keenan could not be completely certain what he said.

Then Torres bolted, running for the exit and slamming out the door.

A lot of chatter filled the wake of his departure, patrons reacting to the scene and cops muttering about rookies coming unraveled because of the job. Finch came up beside Keenan and offered to buy him a beer as soon as he’d drained his glass.

“Another night, Ted,” Keenan said, drinking half of his beer in a couple of gulps and then dropping a ten on the bar. He glanced up and saw Brenda watching him. “Tell the owner he can reach me at the department about the glass. I’ll cover it.”

His voice sounded as if it were coming from somewhere other than his own lips.

Keenan ignored Finch’s exhortations to finish his beer, to stick around and join the other cops in the bar for another round, and headed for the door. He stepped outside into the frigid February night, the wind cutting through his jacket, the air heavy with the threat of the coming storm. He shoved his hands into his pockets and glanced around for any sign of Torres, but the rookie had gone.

The last thing Torres had said had been spoken so quietly that even Keenan, who had been the closest to him, wasn’t sure he had heard correctly. But he knew what those words had sounded like.

“Because I’m betting you still remember what my skin smelled like when it burned.”

Miri sat in her rental car, bathed in the green glow of the dashboard lights. Hot air blasted from the vents and yet she could not get warm inside. There were only two possibilities. Either she had seen her father’s ghost standing on the sidewalk across the street from The Vault in the middle of a snow flurry … or she had lost her mind. Such thoughts made it almost impossible for her to breathe.

She had loved her father deeply and still missed him so much that it hurt every day, so the idea of being able to see him and speak to him caused a flutter of anxious joy in her heart. But the existence of ghosts, the possibility that the dead lingered on and might be around her even at this very moment, made her shiver. What did they want, if they were there at all? Were they merely sorrowful, or jealous and spiteful of the living? The mere thought made her uneasy, and cold despite the car heater as it fought the winter chill. Miri sat behind the wheel as the car shuddered with every ominous gust of wind, and glanced anxiously out at the darkness, fearful of the silent yearning of the dead.

“Where are you, Daddy?” she whispered, her voice barely audible above the groan of the heater and the purr of the engine.

What the hell am I doing out here?

Miri glanced out the windshield at the house diagonally across from the spot where she’d parked. She remembered it well, had seen it both in dreams and in nightmares. As far as she knew, Allie Schapiro still lived there, and judging by the warm lights inside and the car parked in the short, narrow driveway, the woman was at home. Though Miri had stayed friends with Jake all through middle school and high school, she had not set foot inside that house since the night of the blizzard that had claimed her father’s life, the night that Isaac Schapiro had fallen to his death.

How hard is it? Just go up to the door and ring the bell.

Jake was the only person in the world with whom she felt she could talk about what had been happening to her. The only person who would not outright dismiss her. But at some point she would need to talk to Allie as well. The blizzard had changed the course of all their lives. If not for that storm, Miri had no doubt, Allie would have been her stepmother. They’d have been a family. If her father had a message for her, Miri was sure he would want her to share it with Allie as well, but this was premature. She wouldn’t know where to begin.

Miri shivered, still unable to let the warm air penetrate the chill inside her. She turned on the headlights, put the car into Drive, and pulled away from the curb, following a route she could have navigated with her eyes closed. As long as she had been away from Coventry, its streets were ingrained in her subconscious like the lines she’d memorized for her eighth-grade play. Discovering just how deeply Coventry was rooted inside her made her wistful and yet depressed her as well. In some ways it would always be home, and yet she hoped that once she put it behind her for a second time, she would never have to come back. All her ghosts were here, real and imagined. And now she found herself driving toward them, instead of away.

Her mother had an apartment in Hamel Mill Lofts, less than a ten-minute drive from Allie Schapiro’s house. Her childhood home had long been sold and her mother could be a total bitch, but that ninth-floor apartment at the Lofts was the closest thing she had to a home in Coventry these days.

“This should be fun,” she muttered to herself as she turned into the big lot behind the Lofts, a complex of old mill buildings that had been converted into some of the best apartments in the city.

The old smokestack, now nothing but a giant accent piece, loomed against the low, winter storm clouds. She craned her neck to glance at it, but pulled her attention away in time to notice a parking space halfway across the lot toward the center building. Miri had never visited her mother here, but she knew from talking to Angela that this was the right spot, and had the apartment number written down. Once she’d parked the car, she consulted the strip of paper she’d stashed in her tiny purse.

921.

Shouldering her duffel, she locked up the rental and crossed the lot to the door. A big, scruffy guy with glasses came out as she approached, leading a tiny dog wearing a red snowflake-pattern sweater. He held the door for her and Miri smiled and thanked him, thinking that this was better, that seeing her mother face-to-face when she opened the apartment door would somehow be less awkward than talking to her over the intercom from the building’s foyer.

She could not have imagined how wrong she’d be.

The elevator whirred up to the ninth floor and she found herself wishing for the distraction of Muzak. Alone on the elevator, it was too quiet, with too much room for ghosts.

The long, turning corridor surprised her, with its freshly scrubbed brick and exposed wooden beams left over from the original mill building. At the door to apartment 921, Miri paused and took a breath, wondering if she really wanted to do this. She could always go to the shitty little Best Western on the north side of the city. She exhaled, realizing the truth. No way would she tell her mother about seeing her father’s ghost, not just yet. But if this was real, and not just some breathless, fevered wish come to frightening life, she would need to tell them all in time. Jake and Allie Schapiro, and her own mother. Although Angie and Niko were divorced, they had loved each other once. His death had scarred Angela deeply, especially coming on the same night as her best friend, Cherie Manning, had died.

The worst night,
Miri thought.
Ever.

Shifting her duffel to the other shoulder, she rapped on the door, then waited through twenty seconds of silence before she knocked again, louder this time. She had just started to wonder if her mother might not be home when she heard low voices behind the door.

“Who is it?”

So strange hearing her mother’s voice in person after years away.

“It’s me,” she said. “It’s Miri.”

More talking inside, and Miri began to get a terrible, sinking feeling. Her stomach dropped and she swore softly, wincing with awkwardness as she heard the lock thrown back, and then her mother was opening the door.

Miri wasn’t prepared for Angela’s pleasant smile or the way her mother stared at her as if in discovery, looking her up and down as if it had been forever since they’d last seen each other. But she supposed that, in a way, it had.

“God, it’s really you, isn’t it?” Angela said, tucking her hair behind her ear.

Miri took in the unruly hair, the pink flush of her mother’s cheeks, the hastily tied bathrobe, and any hope that her suspicion might not be warranted went up in smoke.

“Hi, Mom.”

Several awkward seconds passed before Angela seemed to notice the duffel, and then realization lighted her face. She gave a kind of sad smile and stepped back to let her daughter in, opening the door wider, which gave Miri a glimpse of Doug Manning farther inside the apartment, hastily buttoning his shirt. Though it had been years, Miri recognized him immediately. Doug had been the husband of her mother’s best friend, and he’d always been kind to young Miri, teasing her about boys and ruffling her hair. At the city’s memorial for those killed in the blizzard, with Doug grieving for Cherie and Miri for her father, he had stood beside her while Charlie Newell’s sister sang “Amazing Grace” and put a protective arm around her, both of them quietly weeping.

“Hey, kid,” Doug said now, the way he always had, as if no time at all had passed.

As if it made all the sense in the world for her mother to be screwing the husband of her dead best friend. And probably it did—Miri was no expert—but in that moment it made her want to throw up.

“Come in, sweetie,” her mother said, oh so tenderly—so carefully. “It’s so great to see you.”

Angela’s smile seemed almost sincere, but the
sweetie
sickened her. In her whole life, her mother had never called her sweetie. Girl, sometimes, or babygirl, as if it were all one word. Mirjeta, her full name, if she was angry. Bitch, more than once. But never sweetie.

An image of Doug and her mother having sex swam into her mind and it was too much for her to take.

“This was a mistake,” she said, shaking her head and taking a step away from the door. “I’m sorry. I should have called. I should have…”

The thought left unfinished, she turned to walk away. Her mother stepped out into the corridor and called after her, voice cracking with a plaintive sadness, a vulnerability that Miri never would have associated with Angela Ristani, and it very nearly stopped her in her tracks. But
sweetie
rang in her ears and the image of the pink, mid-sex flush in her mother’s face made her rush down the hall to the elevator.

Only when it had arrived and she’d stepped in did she allow herself to look back down the hallway to confirm that her mother had not given chase. The combination of relief and disappointment confounded her.

The doors slid shut and the elevator hummed as it began its descent.

Shitty little Best Western it is.

Sometime after one
A.M.
, Allie Schapiro woke from a dream in which Isaac rushed into her room and slid into bed with her, afraid of the rattling of the windows caused by the storm and the whistle of the icy wind. It was the sweetest of dreams, lying there under the covers, whispering assurances to her little boy in the dark, and when some noise or other roused her from sleep, she still felt him in her arms, felt the softness of his hair against her cheek. The dream dissipated like smoke and she tried so hard to hold it inside her heart and her memory, but like all dreams, it had never been meant to keep.