Swallowing Stones (3 page)

But when the footsteps came, they were lighter, quicker, and Jenna knew that her mother was overhead in the kitchen. The basement door clicked open.

“Jenna, are you down there?” Her mother’s voice was like the crash of cymbals coming at the end of a lullaby. It was always like that these days. Jenna’s body grew rigid, a simple reflex action. She sat silent and motionless.

“I need you up here.” There was a brief pause. “Now.” Couldn’t her mother leave her alone for even a minute? Just a
few minutes alone to try to understand this terrible thing that was happening to them?

Jenna took a swallow of her tea and tried to remember if she was even talking to her mother this week. They had had so many fights over the past few years, spent so many weeks barely speaking to each other, that she found it hard to keep track.

She stared down at the mug in her hand. The tea had become lukewarm. She shouldn’t be behaving like this. She had lost her father. Her mother had lost her husband. They should be trying to comfort each other, not bite each other’s heads off.

Reluctantly she slid off the stool and padded up the stairs to the kitchen, where she found her mother, a bottle of Fantastik in one hand and a wad of paper towels in the other, frantically wiping down the stove. Her mother nodded toward the vacuum cleaner in the dining room.

Jenna blinked but did not move. Surely her mother didn’t expect her to vacuum the carpet.

Meredith Ward tossed the clump of soggy paper towels into the trash compactor and pulled another handful from the roll next to the sink.

“Mom …” Jenna found she could not finish her thought, because she didn’t know what it was she wanted to say.

Her mother was staring down at the bottle of Fantastik in her hand as if she were trying to remember where it had come from. She set the container on the counter, wiped her hands on her yellow shorts, and tucked the loose strands of her hair—hair much like Jenna’s, only shorter—back into the wide barrette at the nape of her neck. Then she poured herself a cup of coffee.

“People will be coming to the house,” she said. “We have
to get organized.” She looked over the rim of her coffee mug at her daughter’s face, closed her eyes, and breathed deeply. “I’m sorry, Jen. I wish I knew a way to make this easier for you. For both of us. But I don’t.” She set the mug back on the counter without taking a swallow. “We have to get through this somehow. People will be coming to the house, and it’s a mess. I’m counting on you.”

Jenna stared over at the vacuum cleaner. Suddenly it was just like any other morning. Especially those Saturday mornings when she wanted to go to the mall with her friends and her mother insisted she stay home and help her with the housework. Those Saturday mornings almost always ended in a screaming match.

“Nobody’s going to care if the house is a mess.” Jenna sucked in the sides of her mouth, a habit she had acquired as a small child when she was upset. Then, as if she needed to test the words, she whispered, “Good Lord, Mom, Daddy’s dead.” She waited to see if saying this out loud would somehow make it more real. It didn’t. “Nobody’s going to notice lint on the carpet.”

Their eyes locked. Her mother seemed to be holding her breath. Then, without a word, she grabbed a bottle of Soft Scrub from under the sink and left the room. That was when Jenna understood that her mother did not believe what was happening to them any more than she did.

Jenna sat down cross-legged on the floor next to the vacuum cleaner, her hand resting on the cool plastic as if she were stroking a family pet. Well, fine. Her mother could Soft Scrub the bathroom tiles until her fingers bled, but Jenna would not be a part of it.

In the end, though, Jenna vacuumed not only every rug in the house but all the upholstered furniture and all the bedspreads
and drapes. The work kept her busy, and she didn’t have to think, which, much as she hated to admit it, might have been just what her mother had in mind. By the time Chief Zelenski arrived to take their statements, the house was spotless.

t
he police were the only people her mother allowed in the house that morning, except for Mr. Krebs, the widower from next door, who, although almost eighty, kept the reporters at bay like a loyal palace guard, screened telephone calls, and took messages.

An autopsy had been done only hours after what everyone kept calling “the accident,” but Chief Zelenski would not reveal the findings, explaining that giving out any information would interfere with the investigation. Jenna stubbornly refused to accept that this was just some accident. This was a murder. Her father was dead. And somebody was going to have to pay for it.

She slid her hands under her thighs to warm her fingers. The room was ice-cold. Her mother always kept the central air-conditioning running. Jenna hated having the house all closed up in the summer.

She looked over at Dave Zelenski, who sat in the chair next to her. He was a middle-aged man with a robust, ruddy face and wire-rimmed glasses that seemed to be constantly sliding down his nose, no matter how many times he pushed them back in place. Under different circumstances, she would have found this funny.

“I know this is difficult for you, Mrs. Ward,” he told Jenna’s mother, looking slightly embarrassed. “But I need you to tell me everything that happened yesterday.”

Jenna glanced across the room to where her mother sat on the couch, looking calm and composed. Meredith Ward had changed from her shorts into a sleeveless sundress. The sheer fabric with tiny pastel flowers fell in soft folds about her ankles. Jenna’s hand went instinctively to the side of her head. She suddenly remembered that she still had not combed her hair. Her mother was watching her. She attempted to give her daughter a reassuring nod, but Jenna pretended not to notice.

She scarcely listened as Chief Zelenski began asking her mother questions. When he finally turned to Jenna, she slowly and methodically related what she could remember from that day. Images flooded her mind, images of her father lying at her feet; of the staple gun, still on the roof where he had dropped it, glinting in the sharp noonday sun; of her mother running from the house, drawn by her daughter’s unbearable screams, running toward her, balancing a plate with a tuna fish sandwich, unaware that she had it in her hand. But these were the only images that came to mind. The rest of the morning was a blank.

“Can you remember anything else?” Chief Zelenski asked. He raised his eyebrows, and as he did, his glasses once again slid down his nose. This time he took them off and slipped them into his shirt pocket. “I know it’s hard, but—”

“How would you know?” Jenna said. She wasn’t trying to be rude. She simply hated it when people assumed they knew what she was feeling. Especially now, when it bothered her that she wasn’t feeling much of anything at all.

Chief Zelenski stared at Jenna as if he thought she was intentionally trying to impede his investigation. But he said nothing. Instead he began to drone on about how the local ballistics team didn’t have the knowledge or the equipment to figure the trajectory of the bullet. So they were going to turn it
over to the experts, engineers from Picatinny Arsenal, who could figure the coordinates on their computer. They could, according to Chief Zelenski, determine the arc of the bullet from the point of impact all the way back to where the gun had been fired. But, he explained, looking apologetic, the men from Picatinny were in the middle of another project and wouldn’t be available for a while.

“A while?” Meredith Ward asked. “What does that mean? Two days? Two years?” Her mother’s voice, usually even and controlled, wavered slightly. Jenna studied her mother closely, watching for other signs that there might be a crack in her professional veneer.

Meredith Ward was an account executive for a large New York advertising agency. She was not a person to be kept waiting. Jenna knew this from experience. She had seen her mother hang up the phone dozens of times just because someone had dared to put her on hold. To hear her mother’s voice quake, even slightly, was disturbing.

Dave Zelenski shifted uneasily in his chair and ran his palm across his thinning hair. “Hard to say. These guys can be unpredictable.”

Jenna rose abruptly. She stared down at the police chief. “So was the lunatic who shot my father.”

“It’s okay.” Meredith Ward crossed the room and put an arm around her daughters shoulder.

Jenna pulled away from her. “What’s okay?” She narrowed her eyes at her mother. “What are you talking about? Nothing’s ‘okay.’ Nothing will ever be ‘
okay
’ again.” Each time she emphasized the word
okay
she sounded as if she were trying to take a bite out of it.

Her mother shook her head. “I was talking about the investigation,” she said, ignoring Jenna’s outburst. “I meant sometimes
these things take time, even if we’d like them to go a lot faster.” Her mother’s composure only infuriated Jenna all the more.

“Well, I can tell you this, anyway,” Chief Zelenski said, looking relieved that he could offer them something. “One of their guys will be out here tomorrow to start collecting information from the site.
They’ll
probably want to go over the police report then, too.”

Meredith Ward began to massage the space between her eyebrows with her thumb and forefinger. She looked over at Jenna. She seemed to be waiting for something.

Jenna thought that if she stayed in the room another minute, she would suffocate. All she wanted to do was get out of there. Without another word, she headed for the front foyer. She would take a walk, and when she came back, everything would magically be just as it had been before the accident. Her father would be there, and Chief Zelenski and this whole horrible nightmare would have disappeared.

But when she opened the front door, she found herself right in the line of fire, assaulted on all sides by a barrage of reporters and photographers. Too shocked by the intrusion to react, she merely pulled back into the foyer, like a turtle seeking the safety of its shell. Then she sat down on the stairs, folded her head into her lap, and waited for the tears that would not come.

m
ichael waited until he heard his mom and dad leave for work before he kicked back the covers and headed downstairs. He knew his brother, Josh, usually slept late. Thankfully, Michael found himself alone. No one was there to ask about the dark circles beneath his eyes or why he couldn’t seem to form a coherent sentence.

Someone, probably his father, had left an open carton of milk and an empty cereal bowl on the table. Michael absentmindedly put the milk back in the refrigerator and the bowl in the sink. Cleaning up after his family, or after himself for that matter, was not something he normally did. But then, nothing about him felt normal.

He toasted a bagel, buttered it, and slid it onto the table, not bothering with a plate. As he was about to sit down he noticed the morning newspaper, which had been left on the chair. A face stared up at him from the front page, a young face with enormous sad eyes. The girl’s hair, shoulder length and straight, was parted in the middle, with one side pushed behind her ear; the other side hung loosely against her cheek. The headline read “Briarwood Man’s Death Still a Mystery.” It took only a glance at the article for Michael to realize he had been
looking at the face of the dead man’s daughter. Her name was Jenna Ward. And although the family had not given any statements to the press and had asked to be left alone to grieve in peace, apparently a persistent photographer with a telephoto lens had somehow managed to snap this picture.

Michael tossed the paper on the table and sat down, bracing his head with his hands. He did not want to read the article. He did not want to know anything about these people. But he could not seem to keep his eyes from gobbling up every word, even though his mind screamed in protest.

It was all there, every detail that had so far been disclosed, just as the reporter on the radio had related it the day before. Michael’s head dropped forward, and it was only minutes later that he realized his forehead had been pressing against the forehead in the picture. The ink left a dark smudge on his skin, like ashes on Ash Wednesday.

He wanted to say something to her, something to take the pain from those sad eyes. How it had been an accident. That he wasn’t a murderer. That he could never kill anyone. How even after his grandfather had given him the antique Winchester (which had been his when he was a boy), he knew he’d never use it to hurt anything. He wanted to tell her how he planned to use it just for target practice at the range. But all that seemed so meaningless. He’d killed her father, for god’s sake. Did he think for a second she’d give a damn how bad he felt?

Suddenly he became aware of the sound of cabinet doors being opened and closed. Michael drew his eyes away from the picture in the newspaper and came face-to-face with Josh. He hadn’t even heard him come in.

His brother stood there in baggy shorts and a dirty T-shirt. He wore his baseball cap backward, covering most of his unruly
hair. Still, an obstinate clump had managed to escape through the open space above the band. At thirteen, Josh tended to swing back and forth between outrageous comic antics and moody sullenness. No one in the family knew what to expect from him anymore.

Josh stared at his older brother for a minute, then reached for the carton of orange juice in the refrigerator. Neither boy spoke.

Then he sat down across from Michael and began drinking the orange juice right from the container.

“Other people live in this house,” Michael reminded him.

Josh slammed the carton onto the table and gave him a satisfied grin. Orange juice dribbled down his chin.

He knew Josh was just trying to get a rise out of him. Michael shoved the newspaper to one side and stood up.

Josh leaned across the table on his elbows. “Hey,” he said, poking his finger into the face of Jenna Ward, “that’s that guy’s kid. You know, that guy who got shot on his roof two days ago.” His eyes widened. “Cool!”

Michael stared down at his uneaten bagel. The excited, almost gleeful expression on Josh’s face horrified him. “What would you know about it?” he said, straining to keep his voice flat and even.