Reservation Road (13 page)

My foot came off the gas. The car slowed as if it had been shot. She passed ahead of me and kept going, and it was over.

Grace

The front door opened—then silence. He must have seen the car out front, must know she was here with the police, but he did not call out to her.

Standing in the living room, Sergeant Burke cleared his throat.

“Ethan!” she called. Her own voice sounded damped to her, cloudy, like a cataract eye. “In here. We have a visitor.”

Footsteps—he appeared under the wide archway with a flushed face, as if he’d just stepped in from the cold. But it was high summer.
Drinking
. A peculiar sense of dread, climbing her like a vine. She didn’t get up.

“Afternoon, Mr. Learner,” Sergeant Burke said, with a sober nod. He sounded positively relieved to have another man in the room.

Ethan nodded back. “Hello, Sergeant.” Then his eyes fell on her and his face darkened. She watched him absorb her robe, her hair, her face. Even across the room she could feel his anger, the black thunder in him—because she was disheveled, because she’d failed to keep up appearances when appearances were important. (
Are they
?
Are they really
?
I don’t fucking care
.) He was far too private a man to yell at her in front of a stranger; he’d merely disown her with a stare. He turned away from her.

She made herself speak. “Ethan, Sergeant Burke came by.”

“Did you find him?” He was looking at the trooper.

“No,” the sergeant said.

“Do you have anything?”

“Not much so far. But it’s early yet.”

Ethan looked about to say something but changed his mind. She could hear the sharpness of his breathing—an exhale like a horse, a boxer throwing a punch. He came and sat down on the other chair, leaving her by herself on the sofa. He did not so much as glance at her. Sergeant Burke lowered himself onto his chair, careful of his gun belt, his eyes scouting them both in carefully controlled movements:
A detective, a professional.

“We’ve got the lab work done. That’s really what I came by to tell you folks about.” Sergeant Burke hooked a finger under the gun belt at his waist and hoisted it an inch. This seemed to relieve him of some pressure. He cleared his throat again. “Mr. and Mrs. Learner, the car that hit your son was dark blue, more like a midnight blue. It’s a Ford, we’re ninety-nine percent sure it’s a Taurus, which as you may know is a model the company started back in 1986. Our lab guys tell us it’s one of the earlyish years, but just which year is where things start to get a little fuzzy. Ford used the same paint mix and the same glass and plastic on the Taurus right through ’92. So, we could be talking an ’88 here, or we could be talking a ’92. That leaves a lot of cars in between.”

“You’re making excuses,” Ethan said. His voice was quiet and frightening.

“I’m telling you the facts, Mr. Learner.”

“You want facts? A man murdered my son.”

“
Our
son,” she said. She instantly regretted it. It was a cliché and sickened her. She turned from them both and stared out the window.

“We are tracking down records of every dark blue Taurus sold in the state before 1993,” Sergeant Burke said.

“Then what?”

“We try to put together a profile of the suspect. We put the profile into our computers and try to link it up with the sold cars we’ve traced. There are names there, in some cases addresses. We try to rule out cars that have left the state. There are many ways, Mr. Learner. We are pursuing them all.”

“What if it wasn’t bought in the state? What if it’s been scrapped? What if the son of a bitch doesn’t even live in the state?”

“Those are good questions. Real questions. And we will tackle them one at a time.”

Ethan got up and walked to the window, stood looking out. “He’s going to get away with it,” he said. “Isn’t he?”

“It’s way too early to be talking like that,” Sergeant Burke said.

Ethan turned around. The look on his face was chilling.

He was in his study, sitting in the leather chair she’d given him for his birthday, reading. She wasn’t surprised to find him there. He had always depended on books. When his father died, she remembered, he’d cloistered himself in this room for days— reading, reading, reading. When depression struck him, as it did, he would turn silent and removed, incapable of focusing on anyone but the characters in his books. Then it would pass. He’d return from his reading as from a private hideaway, without pictures to show or stories to tell. Then he’d want to talk about other things. About them, his family. What was everyone up to? Emma’s best friend, Josh’s pet turtle, her own watercolors, which she did in her spare time for the hell of it, because she could, because she’d once been pretty decent at it. He could be curious in a human, not just academic, way; he could be kind and loving. She was trying to remind herself. Because this man sitting in the chair reading Henry James for the hundredth time while she stood in the doorway waiting to be acknowledged might have been a different man.

Which novel?
The Ambassadors
. Ah.
My husband
. He looked up but didn’t close the book. She was just a temporary interruption, a speed bump on his road home.

“Yes?” he said, as if she were one of his students knocking on his door during office hours.

“You’ve been drinking,” she said.

“And you just look like you have.”

“Fuck you.”

She wanted him to lash back, she wanted a fight. But he just sighed and looked up at the ceiling. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean that.”

“Of course you did.”

He was silent.

“Ethan.”

He looked at her. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes and put on his glasses again. He closed his book and set it on the floor.

She watched mutely. This was his private room of ritual and she couldn’t interfere. That had always been their unspoken bargain.

I have my own room
, she thought,
and I will go to it soon.

“I went to a bar,” he said. “After I dropped Emma off.”

“Which bar?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know bars. Some dive.”

“Is that the plan now, Ethan? Start going to dives in the middle of the day?”

“No plan,” he said.

“Just see what happens, play it by ear—is that it?”

“That’s it.”

“What courage! What a hero.”

“I knew you’d think so.”

She turned away from him. She didn’t know what to do. This hole they were falling into felt like a grievous sin to her, a sacrilege to Josh. Yet it was happening, and she did not know how to stop it.

When she turned back, he was reading again. She felt overcome with the desire to hurt him in return and she stood very still in the room, afraid of herself. She tried to find it in her heart to look beyond it all. To find the man she loved. To see the room as a catalogue of his better nature, its objects touchstones of the past. But it was hard, now. She blamed him.

There, on his desk surrounding the computer, were piles of books from the college library. There were stacks of xeroxed academic articles, too, for a paper he was supposed to be writing this summer on Edith Wharton, and the speckled composition books he used for notes. He wrote with a fountain pen that had belonged to his father. He used sepia-colored ink. It had always seemed to her as if the words came out of him already aged, from another era. His handwriting was knotty and small. She remembered the first love letter he’d ever written her, when they were still students, how hard it had been to decipher. “You’d have to be an archeologist to read this,” she’d told him—a response that had pleased him no end. “Yes!” he’d replied. “Exactly.”

“Say it,” he said now.

She looked at him. His eyes were fierce with self-hatred.

“Come on. I’m guilty. Say it.”

An immense pity flooded her. She shook her head.

“Say it!” he shouted.

But she would not. It would be the end of them as a family— she believed that—and it was not, finally, in her nature to destroy. So she turned and left him there. And his voice, raging and pleading against the walls of the house, pursued her down the hallway.

“Goddamn you, Grace! Why won’t you say it? Why won’t you?”

Dwight

We met for lunch at Tommy’s Diner; usual place, usual table, a corner booth at the back, near the pay phone in case someone called. Every time the phone rang Jack Cutter believed it would be for him. He had that kind of sense of himself. He was forty-two years old, rotund, florid, heart-attack-perfect. A big smalltown lawyer. He’d read
To Kill a Mockingbird
maybe half a dozen times, and once told me that Atticus Finch (who seemed to look a lot like Gregory Peck) appeared regularly in his dreams and spoke to him in glowing terms.

In certain respects, it was a regular Tuesday afternoon. Dr. Zinser, my dentist, sat at the table by the register, reading a Dean Koontz paperback and eating a piece of key lime pie. I’d bought my snow tires last winter from the guy at the table next to him. And sitting at the first booth along the wall was a man in a seersucker suit who looked like the fellow in Sheffield who’d sold Ruth and me that wrought-iron chandelier years back. There were a couple of farmers, too, and part of a road crew taking up two booths, their yellow hardhats resting here and there like domed pool lights. And finally, slick and daunting in shades of blue, a pair of state troopers sat in a booth smack in the middle of the place, two seats for themselves and two for their hats. The police barracks were just a few football fields up the road, on the other side of the train tracks that, having limned the edge of Bow Mills, ran by here too, cutting into southwestern Massachusetts.

We’d ordered our food and now time was dragging strangely. I tried not to look at the cops sitting there. Jack and I were old friends and didn’t normally have trouble making conversation (he usually made most of it). We’d met at law school, when he was in his last year and I was in my first. I’d called the number on a sale notice for used law books on the kiosk in the student union. They were Jack’s books. I was greatly hard up for cash then, but so was he and he’d stiffed me on the price, talked me into the buy with all the verbal mastery of a good preacher. He had a confidence in the sheer wattage of his personality that up till then I’d experienced only in my biceps. It was enticing, not quite real, like hearing a foreign language I wanted to learn but knew I never would; there was something addictive in the idea of it. Two years later Jack was best man at my wedding.

That day he drank too much even for a big man and knocked over a glass of red wine. It stained the white tablecloth like a birthmark. Undeterred, he toasted Ruth and me over the wreckage. It was an elegant, memorable speech, maybe a little unhinged. Lawyers were trained to fix things, he said, but the greatest lesson of all was never to try to fix what couldn’t be broken. He said that the love Ruth and I had was the authentic article, the crystal vase, the china cup, the thing whole and perfect and needing only a custodial, loving hand. But not fixing. He said that we lawyers, schmucks like him and me, we must curb our pathological need to negotiate and tamper. We must learn to let well enough alone or risk transforming the sublime into the merely expedient. We had—he was very sorry to say it, but he felt it was his duty—a perverse and even perhaps criminal tendency to ruin what precious little was good in life.

The jukebox switched over and Patsy Cline came on, singing “Crazy.”

“You think Cheryl sleeps around?” Jack said. “More to the point, you think she’d bestow her favors on old Jack here? Because, I’ll tell you, buddy, I’ve got a hankering.”

“What?” I said.

Jack frowned at the inattention, a subtle and practiced double-dip at the corners of his wide mouth that I remembered him using with some success on the judge who’d presided over my case. “What’s with you today? You look ready to blow. Have a beer.”

“I’m fine, Jack. Usual stuff. Nothing serious.”

“Have a beer anyway. For the hell of it.”

“Okay. For the hell of it.”

Our food arrived—cheeseburgers and fries—brought by Cheryl the waitress with her stiff black hair and dark-polish nails.

“Who’s got the rare?”

“Bloody’s for me,” Jack said.

Cheryl banged the plates down on the table in a good-natured way.

“Cheryl, sweetheart, a Bud for Dwight here and another for me.”

“I don’t get paid enough to be your sweetheart, Jack,” Cheryl said.

Jack grinned. “We can negotiate.” He watched her walk away, her hips breaking the stiff planes of the nubbed pink uniform and shooshing. The diner was long and narrow, with windows all down one side, sunlight pouring in over the booths and shining in the customers’ eyes. Jack watched Cheryl walk the length of the room. She picked up an empty coffee cup and a gravied plate and a basket of dinner rolls from a table and dumped them behind the counter. He studied her rear end. “My kingdom for a waitress,” he murmured. Then he raised the cheeseburger to his mouth and a quarter of it disappeared. He put a few fries in after it, a wedge of pickle, and added a hearty, pirate’s swig of beer. “Amen.”

I looked at the troopers sitting there eating. The one facing the sun had put his aviators on.

The food was gone. We were drinking coffee. The pay phone had rung once but it was a wrong number. Jack poked at his teeth and gums with a toothpick. He’d put down three beers to my one.

“How’s old Sam doing?” he asked.

“Doing okay,” I said.

“The school year go okay?”

“It was okay. Dyslexia’s all over the place now. People seem to know how to deal with it.”

“He’s a good boy.”

“Yes, he is.”

“You two getting along all right? Everything smooth?”

I’d called Sam five times since Sunday but he wouldn’t come to the phone even once. Ruth had said it: “He doesn’t want to speak to you, Dwight. Did you do something to him? He won’t tell me what, but it must’ve been something. Goddamn you, Dwight, he looks miserable. I think maybe he should see a psychiatrist.”

“Smooth?” I shook my head. “I wouldn’t say so.”

“Yeah?” Jack said. “Sorry to hear it.”

“There’ve been some ups and downs lately.”

Jack nodded. “Vicissitudes.” He looked pleased with the word. “That’s called being a father, Dwight. You should spend a couple of days over at our place. My kid? My guess is Toby’s started smoking a little weed after school. You know, normal teenage stuff, nothing serious. But Barb’s acting like the kid’s gotten into devil worship. She’s going around blasting me for not being enough of a role model. I mean, for Christ’s sake. Every morning at breakfast, blah blah blah, calling me a lousy father and worse. Finally a couple days ago I told her either bring on the divorce papers or shut the hell up. I said of course I’d represent myself in court. That settled it. She wouldn’t be caught dead actually
paying
for a lawyer.” Jack laughed.

The antiques dealer in the seersucker suit stood up to pay. He reached into his pocket and pulled out some change, sorted through it on his palm, plucked out the pennies, and dropped the remaining coins on the table. A quarter rolled on its edge in a wobbling circle before falling flat beside the others. He walked to the register, passing the troopers drinking their coffee. At the table where Dr. Zinser had been eating pie, now there was a fuel company employee, a black man in gray coveralls.

“I don’t always trust myself, Jack.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about Sam.”

Jack sighed. “Oh Jesus, here we go.” He tossed the toothpick he’d been chewing onto the floor. “It was an accident, Dwight. So said the court and so says I. I’ll bet you a grand he doesn’t even think about it any more. It’s like it never happened. He’s a kid and he’s let it go. You should do as much. You’re the one keeps dragging it around everywhere like some fucking stone. Drop it already. Give yourself a break.”

“I can’t.”

“In that case do something memorable. Throw yourself into a fucking gorge. Sue somebody and hire me as counsel. Fill my wallet with dough. Just don’t talk about it any more.” He smiled, reached out and slapped me on the shoulder. “Hey. Come on. In America it’s called a joke. Cheryl!”

Cheryl was going table to table with the coffeepot. She came over.

“Refill?”

Jack tried to put his arm around her waist, but she stepped away smartly. The coffee sloshed in the pot and almost spilled out.

“What we want here are two more beers.”

“Not for me,” I said.

“Absolutely for him,” Jack said. “Especially and most importantly for him.”

He was a little drunk, and I hadn’t realized it till then. “Not for me,” I repeated.

“Loosen you up,” Jack said. “Throw your cares to the dogs.”

“Your reputation too,” Cheryl said. “Don’t you guys work?”

“We don’t work, sweetheart. We’re lawyers.”

She went away to get the beers. Once again we watched her go. Smalltown life. She walked behind the counter and set down the coffeepot and bent over the bar fridge where the longneck Buds were cooled by the case. She pulled two bottles from the rack, and then at the far end of the diner the door opened and I turned to see who it was.

It was a state trooper. Just inside the diner he paused. Even with his shades on, I could tell he was looking for somebody in particular. He scanned first the tables and then the booths, stopping on the two troopers finishing up their meal. He nodded and they nodded back, curt, military nods, and for a moment I let myself believe he was there just to see them. Then he looked past them. His chin inched up until there could have been nothing in his sight except Jack Cutter and me. He came toward us. I faced Jack and put my hands flat on the table—the way I’d put my hands on the steering wheel, at ten o’clock and two o’clock, if a cop stopped me for speeding. A gesture designed for innocence. I heard footsteps coming and closed my eyes.

“Two Buds.”

I opened my eyes. Cheryl was putting two bottles on the table. The trooper was right behind her. He’d taken his shades off and his eyes were gray. His hair was gray too, at the temples. He was tall and fit. Cheryl turned around and walked off, and the trooper stepped up to our table.

Jack took a swig of beer. “Afternoon, Ken.”

The trooper nodded. “Jack. How goes things?”

“All right. Nothing in particular to complain about.”

“Glad to hear it.” He turned to me. “Mr. Arno? Dwight Arno?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Sergeant Burke of the Connecticut State Police, Canaan Barracks.”

“What can I do for you, Sergeant?”

“I’m going to have to ask you to come with me.”

“What the hell for?” Jack said.

Burke ignored him and kept looking at me.

“Is there a problem, Sergeant?” I said.

“Do you know Stu Carmody?”

“I’m his lawyer.”

“Know what he looks like?”

“Of course.”

“Then you’d better come with me right now.”

“Not till you say what the hell is going on here, Ken,” Jack said.

Burke’s eyes narrowed. “I’d shut your mouth now, Jack, if I was you. Okay?”

“Where is Stu?” I asked.

“All over his barn.”