The Miles Between Us (29 page)

PART III: THE HEALING

Rob

It was the rain that woke him. A cold, fine, needle-sharp rain that fell on his face like
microscopic shards of glass. Puzzled, he opened his eyes to darkness. He slowly lifted a hand and recognized as raindrops the tiny, sharp-toothed objects drilling into his skin.

He blinked. The darkness remained. No light. No sound. His head ached, and his thinking moved at a glacial pace. Where the hell was he, and how had he ended up here? Moving at the speed of sloth, he patted the
hard surface he lay on, and was even more puzzled to recognize it as damp grass. Had he gotten drunk and passed out in the yard? It had been more than a decade since he’d been that drunk. Casey would have his hide.

Pain throbbed behind his eyes. He reached up a hand to rub his temple, and it came back sticky. Squinting into the darkness, he could just make out the white blur of his hand, his fingers tipped with something so dark it blended into the night that surrounded him.

Blood. He was bleeding from his head.

He struggled to pull information from his brain, but it was like jogging through molasses. He was somewhere
in rural Maine, lying on wet grass, in the rain, bleeding. That much he knew. But he had no idea where he was, no memory of how he’d gotten here, no idea how long he’d been here.

Think!
he ordered himself.
Think, fool!
The answer was locked somewhere inside him. If he thought hard enough, he should be able to find it. He closed his eyes, tried to focus. Images swam behind his eyelids, but it was impossible to tell which were real and which were fantasy. Concentrating hard, he tried to nab one of them as it drifted by.

Bad to the bone.

Where the hell had that come from? He squeezed his eyes more tightly shut, but all he saw was a blank, impenetrable wall.

Ridiculous. This was ridiculous. He couldn’t very well lie here all night in the rain, with
George Thorogood lyrics running through his head. He had to get up on his feet so he could figure out where he was and what kind of mess he’d gotten himself into.

He drifted, unable to hold onto the thought long enough to will his body to follow the signals his brain was sending.
Gotta get up
, he told himself.
You can do it.
Eventually, he managed to brace both hands against the grass. Taking a deep breath, he gathered all his resources, and pushed upward.

Pain lasered through him, white-hot pain that sucked the breath from him, screamed inside his skull, and wrenched a sob from deep in his throat. He dropped back to the ground, gasping, disbelieving. Through a haze of indescribable pain, he muttered,
“Fuck.”

Somewhere inside that haze, Casey’s face floated in the air above him. His love, his life, his woman, with her soft voice, her cool hands. She would make everything better. Casey always made everything better. He just had to figure out how to get home to her. Then everything would be all right.

He exhaled a hard breath, tried to stop the chattering of his teeth. He’d had no idea that September nights in the foothills of Western Maine could be this cold. Especially in the rain. He wiggled his fingers, pleased to note that they still worked. He should be wearing a jacket. Why the hell wasn’t he wearing a jacket?

For the first time, it sank into his befuddled brain that he was in trouble.

Casey

It took an hour before her anger dissipated, leaving behind emptiness and regret. She didn’t want to fight with Rob. How was it that two so-called adults could be so hard-headed and obstinate? Why couldn’t they sit down like rational human beings and talk out their differences? Why did their disagreements always seem to escalate into shouting matches?

It took another hour before she started to think about what he’d said
. Could there be any truth to it? Was it possible that he was right? At some point, her train had clearly derailed. Had she really been so self-absorbed that she’d failed to consider how that derailment was affecting her family? If so, then she’d gone farther around the bend than she realized. And if that was true, she owed her husband a huge apology.

It wasn’t until the third hour that she started to worry.

Because he’d been gone for far too long. Rob was generally the world’s most laid-back and easygoing guy. But when his feathers were ruffled, that temper of his became a fire-breathing dragon. After the screaming was over, he always went off by himself to restore his equilibrium. He’d done it for as long as she could remember. But it wasn’t like him to stay gone this long. Not without calling. Not since the night two years ago when he’d driven off in a blizzard, leaving her to stew for hours before she finally tracked him down at his sister’s house, where he was drowning his sorrows in a bottle of Jim Beam.

He’d never done that to her again.

If that hoodlum hadn’t stolen his cell phone, she could have called him. Chances were good that, even as furious as he was, he would have answered. Because underneath the fury, he loved her. He wouldn’t want her to worry.

But without the phone, there was no way to reach him.
When the clock reached the three-hour mark, she decided it was time to call Rose. If he’d gone over there, and if he and Jesse were commiserating over a bottle of Beam, calling home could have slipped his mind. So, as much as she hated it, at half-past midnight, Casey dialed her sister-in-law’s house.

A groggy Ro
se answered. “Hey,” she rasped when she recognized Casey’s voice. “What’s up?”

“I woke you, didn’t I?”

“Meh. Don’t worry about it. Sleep is overrated.”

“I’m
so sorry. I’m looking for Rob. I thought he might be at your house.”

There was a moment’s hesitation
. “Rob? No, hon. We haven’t seen him.” Rose paused. “How long has he been gone?”

“Three hours, give or take.”

“Where’d he go at nine-thirty at night?”

Casey rubbed absently at her temple
. “We had a fight. A whopper. He did what he always does. Stomped around like an angry little boy, yelled at me, then drove away to cool off.”

“You
do realize that the infamous MacKenzie temper can involve a lengthy cooling-off period?”

“
Of course, but…three hours?”

“Maybe you should buy him a punching bag
to hang in the basement. It would save on gas.
Ouch
.”

“What?”

“Jesse just elbowed me. He doesn’t think I should be making jokes when my brother is missing.”

“He’s not missing. He’s just misplaced.
There’s a difference.” Casey gnawed on her lower lip. “I was so sure he’d gone to your house. Now, I’m really starting to worry. Where else would he go in this rinky-dink little town?”

“He’s probably driving around, still trying
to work off that head of steam. The brat. Did you try Colleen? He’s not hanging out with Harley, is he? Lately, they’ve been joined at the hip.”

“At this hour? I highly doubt it
. Harley’s up at four every morning to milk cows. He’s probably been asleep since eight-thirty.”

“
Look, he probably drove further than he expected, and now he’s on his way home. He hasn’t called because we live in western Maine, where there isn’t exactly an abundance of pay phones.”

“
I wish I had your faith, but you know me. I’m a worrier.”

“
So am I, underneath the snark. He is my baby brother, after all. Call me when he gets home. I don’t care what time it is.”

Casey
dropped the phone into its cradle on the kitchen counter and turned. Paige was standing in the doorway to the dining room, wearing a Wonder Woman sleep shirt that fell halfway down her lanky thighs, her long blond curls falling loosely around slender arms.

“Dad’s not home yet?” she said.

“He’s not.” A chill blew across the back of her neck, raising gooseflesh on her arms, and Casey rubbed them for warmth.

“He left three hours ago
.”

She should have known her stepdaughter would keep track of the time
. They’d made enough noise, yelling at each other, to wake the dead. Paige could probably tell her the precise minute that Rob had walked out the door. The poor kid had lost her mother at the age of fifteen. The idea that she could conceivably lose her father, too, had to be terrifying.

“Maybe we should go look for him.”

It was a crazy idea, and a stupid one. He could be anywhere. Casey latched onto it anyway. Making a split-second decision, she said, “I’ll go look. You stay here with Emma.”

“But—”

She already had her car keys in hand, was already fishing her fall jacket out of the coat closet. “He might call,” she said, tugging on the jacket and pulling her hair free from the collar. “Somebody needs to be here to answer the phone.”

Casey didn’t say aloud what they were both thinking: that the
aforementioned call could come from the police. It was a possibility she wasn’t ready to face. He was out there somewhere, and she would find him.

“Where will you look?”

“There aren’t many obvious places in this town. I’ll swing by Harley’s, and Bill’s. He’s pretty tight with both of them. Take a drive through downtown. Maybe he pulled into a parking lot somewhere and fell asleep.”

“Right.
” That was all she said, but Paige’s tone left no question about her opinion.

“I’ll be back in an hour, give or take
. If the phone rings—”

“
I know. Answer it.”

A soft rain was falling, and c
louds scudded across the face of the waxing moon as she unlocked the Volvo wagon they’d bought after Emma was born. At the time, she’d been driving the Mitsubishi Eclipse she purchased after Danny died. She’d never grown attached to the Mitsubishi; the car was merely transportation. It had been Rob who, after a lengthy study of
Consumer Reports
, had decided a Volvo was the safest car they could buy for the purpose of chauffeuring their newborn daughter to her pediatrician appointments and to story hour at the library. Casey had found it by turns both amusing and charming, the transformation of her laid-back rock musician husband into a somber, responsible family man. But she hadn’t argued when he’d suggested trading the Mitsubishi for something a little more substantial. She’d bought that car to replace the destroyed BMW that Danny had died in. Every time she looked at the Mitsubishi, it reminded her of the devastated young widow she’d been, and the negative vibes were unnerving. Besides, she wanted to move on with her life, not wallow in the past.

It had been a relief to dump it.

The damp night air cooled her, and she shivered as she slipped onto the cold leather seat. Barely September, and already the nights were cool and unforgiving, the restless rustling of early-turning maple leaves a portent of what was to come.

She spent a couple of minutes warming the car, then took Ridge Road to
where it curved and intersected with Meadowbrook Road. Ever vigilant, scanning the roadsides for any sign of something amiss, she hung a left onto Meadowbrook, her Volvo smoothly riding the bumps of the unpaved gravel road. She passed Meadowbrook Farm, where she’d grown up. The barnyard lay in silence, her sister’s car and Harley’s pickup truck parked side by side like an old married couple. A half-mile beyond the farm, at the foot of McKellar’s Hill, she turned right onto River Road, and left the gravel behind.

Set
back from the road behind an unmowed meadow of nodding wildflowers, Rose and Jesse’s house was a hulking form in the pale moonlight, a lone second-story window dimly lit. The only vehicles in the drive were those that belonged there: Jesse’s truck, Rose’s new car, Luke’s rusty old beater. Rose and Jesse had started married life three years ago with a houseful of teenagers. Now, Luke was the only one still living at home. His choice of work over college hadn’t pleased his mother and stepfather, but Rose had told her that after last winter’s fiasco with Mikey, they’d decided to give Luke some space to make his own decisions.

Beyond Jesse’s property, the road took a sharp turn, clinging snugly to the dark, winding river
bank, and she monitored every foot of guardrail, looking for a break, for a length of crumpled metal, letting out a sigh of relief when she found neither. Another left took her to Hardscrabble Road and past her brother Bill’s tidy yellow ranch house. It lay in peaceful slumber. No sign of Rob.

That pretty much took care of the obvious places
.

She
followed Meadowbrook Road to the state highway and turned toward town. The state had rebuilt the highway a decade ago, bypassing downtown Jackson Falls and turning it into a ghost town. Most people who drove this northeasterly route were headed toward the Canadian border, or to one of the big ski areas. Few of them even knew that just off the highway lay the center of the little river town that was nothing more to them than a name on a map.

She took the turnoff through town
. It was exactly a mile from one end of the bypass to the other, and the old highway through town was dotted with small businesses. The IGA sat dark, its parking lot empty, its roadside sign advertising a sale on ground chuck and local produce. At the Big Apple convenience store, a customer was pumping gas into a dark green Subaru. She quickly scanned the parking lot, but Rob’s Ford Explorer wasn’t there. Lola’s Steak House was dark and deserted, the Jackson Diner well lit, but every booth was empty, and she wondered how they managed to stay in business.

At the bowling alley, a
police cruiser with just its parking lights on sat facing the road, waiting for some poor sucker to come along driving faster than the posted speed limit. She thought about pulling in, asking the officer if he’d seen her husband, but it was too soon to go there, too soon to make Rob’s disappearance official.

Downtown
Jackson Falls consisted of a single block of late-nineteenth-century brick buildings that housed a shoe store, a five-and-ten, a real estate office, the local veterinarian, and a handful of other small specialty stores that came and went, depending on the current business climate. The town’s lone traffic light, at the intersection of Main and Bridge, flashed yellow. Just beyond the light sat the library, with its tidy green lawn and towering elms, and the grammar school she’d attended through sixth grade. A side street led to a small residential neighborhood that lay between downtown and the new bypass, just a half-dozen cross streets lined with Victorian houses, and a dusty trailer park that had seen better days.

She proceeded through the light and took a left after the school, winding her way through side streets until she reached the trailer park. Rob had a friend who lived here
. Mike Turcotte played drums, and sometimes they jammed together. Maybe Rob had stopped by for a beer or three. Her husband wasn’t a big drinker, but he was a sociable sort, and among the men she knew, sociability generally included lifting a few brews.

But he wasn’t at
Mike Turcotte’s little trailer. Mike’s Harley sat in the yard, his helmet draped over the sissy bar, and all the trailer windows were dark.

It had been a long shot anyway
. Casey turned the car around, left the trailer park, and headed back toward downtown. Just south of the bridge, the river plunged forty feet through a cavernous canyon of boiling white water that smoothed out three hundred feet downriver. There’d once been a textile mill here. Most of the adult population of Jackson Falls had worked there. It had burned in a spectacular conflagration the year she turned eleven, plunging the town into an economic recession from which it had never really recovered.

She turned off Main Street, drove into the parking lot behind the stores, and parked along the riverbank
. A half-dozen vehicles were scattered throughout the lot, most likely tenants who lived in apartments above the stores. None of the vehicles was Rob’s. Casey got out of the car and stood at the riverbank, hands in the pockets of her jacket, watching the river flow past.

And thought,
Damn it, MacKenzie! Where the hell are you?