Snowblind (16 page)

The backseat of the car was empty. He’d barely noticed before but the rear passenger window was broken, just like the front one.

“Did you do that?” he asked the two waders, pointing to the window.

“No,” the talkative one replied. “The back of the car was mostly above water when we got here.”

It made sense, of course. The windows were likely to shatter when a car rolled. The fact that the rear windshield and the front passenger window hadn’t broken in the crash was more of an anomaly than the rear passenger window breaking.

He shifted his flashlight around, examining the backseat. The beam halted on the door latch and he frowned. Keenan used his flashlight to brush away loose shards of safety glass and pushed himself through the broken window, taking a closer look.

“Blood,” he said, flashing the light around for a moment longer before pulling out of the car.

“The kid, you think?” Ross asked.

Detective Keenan shot him a hard look, then turned to Callie. “Get me information. Now. I want a description of the Stroud child within five minutes. Name, gender, height, weight, identifying marks. I want a photograph in fifteen minutes or less. And at some point between the two, I want as many people on this site as you can muster. We’re going up and down the river, full-on search party.”

“You don’t want to wait till morning?” Ross asked, glancing dubiously at the riverbank. “If the body snagged on the shore, it’s not going anywhere till dawn. If it’s still floating we’re not going to find it tonight anyway.”

Keenan felt his fists clench. He swallowed hard and begged himself not to punch the guy. Bile rose in the back of his throat and he thought of Charlie Newell and Gavin Wexler—other kids he had not been able to save.

“And what if this kid’s alive?” he asked, staring at Ross. Stepping back, he spread his arms, addressing the rest of the gathered men and women. “The back of the car was not submerged. Rear window was broken. There’s blood on the handle. Someone who was in the backseat and who sustained injuries in the crash tried to get out with that handle before climbing out the window.”

He shone his light up and down the riverbank.

“Whoever owns those smaller skis might be in the river, yeah,” he went on. “But the way it looks, we have to assume that the kid wandered away from the crash, probably looking for help.
We
are going to be that help.”

People were scrambling. The guy from the ME’s office did his job, supervising the recovery of the bodies of Christopher and Melissa Stroud from their vehicle. Everyone else was refocused on the task of finding the missing child. Maps came out and zones were marked off, but several officers had already spread out to search the immediate vicinity of the crash. Phone calls would be made. If the kid had been picked up by another car or shown up at a hospital, they would know soon enough.

Keenan stood staring at the river, hoping. He wondered why Jake Schapiro hadn’t shown up with his camera. It might be helpful later to have photos of the site and the inside of the car before the small army of searchers arrived to trample the area.

“Zachary,” a voice said behind him.

He turned to see Callie Weiss holding a police radio as if it might ward him away.

“Zachary Stroud,” she said. “Ten years old. Goes to Whittier Elementary. A picture’s on the way. We should be able to get it to everyone shortly.”

Detective Keenan could not speak. Could barely breathe. He only nodded and then returned his attention to the river. Cars were approaching. He heard their engines and knew that the search was about to begin. Nobody else would be out in the middle of the night in this weather. The chief wouldn’t be among them yet, but he wouldn’t be that far behind. Chief Romano would take charge. Keenan would be relieved; he wanted to be out there searching in the dark and freezing rain.

Zachary Stroud,
he thought, setting the name firmly in his mind.

Another boy lost in the storm.

“No,” he muttered to himself. “Not again.”

He wouldn’t let it happen again.

NINE

Ella came awake on Sunday morning with sunlight streaming through the windows in her bedroom. They had left the curtains open last night and now she had to turn her face away from the brightness, burrowing into her pillow’s cool shadows. The memory of the night before returned to her slowly. Furrowing her brow, she wiped sleep from her eyes and flopped onto her back.

After Grace’s bad dreams, she and TJ had first insisted that their daughter try to go back to sleep on her own. She was eleven years old, after all, not a baby anymore. But when for the third time an anxious Grace had appeared at their bedside, Ella had gone back to her daughter’s room and they had climbed into bed together. This had been their pattern for years when Grace was troubled or ill. Most of the time it seemed preferable to letting her get into the habit of sleeping with her parents, but there had been nights when Ella cursed TJ for his firm resistance to letting Grace drift off between them. She understood his reluctance to set a precedent, but at three o’clock in the morning, when she’d had only small snatches of broken sleep, Ella didn’t give a crap about precedent.

During the night she had tried to depart Grace’s bed several times, only to have the girl stir and call for her to come back. Finally, after hours without any decent sleep, she had slipped from beneath Grace’s covers and shuffled back to her room. TJ had sprawled across their bed, claiming most of it for himself, and she’d had to shake and poke him to get him to move over. This morning, her eyes burned and her head felt heavy, as if she’d had too much to drink the night before. Of TJ there was no sign save a tangle of sheets and bedspread that had been twisted up and hung off the bed on his side.

Groaning, Ella sat up and swung her legs out of bed. She dragged on a pair of yoga pants and rose, going to the window and squinting against the bright sunshine. The storm had been fierce yesterday, but now the sky was nearly cloudless. The yard and driveway were covered with a thick layer of snow capped by a gleaming crust of ice. The plows had been through, evidenced by the white ridges on either side of the road, but given how much frozen mess remained, it had been many hours since the last one went by.

What a shame,
she thought. Grace would want to play in the snow today, would insist that Ella, and possibly TJ, accompany her outside. But Ella thought her daughter was going to get bored very quickly when she realized this snow was no good for sledding or snowballs or for building snowmen.

Still tired, she managed to trudge into the corridor and downstairs to the kitchen. A glance into the living room did not turn up Grace as she had expected. The TV wasn’t on. Nor was Grace in the kitchen; instead, she found her husband at the counter with a mixing bowl and a mess.

“Morning,” she said. “What’re you up to?”

TJ gave her an open smile, no hesitation or reservation. She felt tentative herself. Making love with him last night had given her hope for the first time in a long while that their relationship could be healed, but one night could not erase the injuries they had inflicted upon each other in the past few years. Looking at him now, though, she wondered if she wasn’t making it more difficult than it had to be.

“Banana pancakes!” he said happily, digging into a corner cabinet. “And, if you’ll give me a minute, coffee.”

He pulled out a couple of pods for the big Keurig on the countertop.

Maybe it actually is this easy,
she thought. Her mother had always said that all men ever really needed to be happy was food, sex, and peace at home. Ella had thought about that many times over the years of her marriage, but watching TJ now, she felt that she was having a minor epiphany. Could it be that those three things were all
she
needed to be happy as well?

“Grace is still sleeping?” Ella asked.

“She was when I came down,” he replied. “It’s a good thing, too. Maybe she’s had some nicer dreams to wash away the scary ones.”

“You’re awfully cheery this morning,” she said as TJ popped the first pod into the coffeemaker and slipped a mug into place.

He glanced up at her, a flash of regret in his eyes. “Sorry. I know you’re probably exhausted from being up with Gracie, but … I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Nightmares aside, it was a good night, wasn’t it?”

“It was,” she agreed, “though maybe … incomplete. We might need a redo.”

He smiled the same rakish grin that had first stirred her twelve years before.

“That can be arranged.”

TJ set the pan on the stove and turned on the gas flame. While the pan heated up, he chopped up a banana and then whisked the batter for a few seconds. Ella just watched him, looking for signs of strain behind his demeanor. The tension between them had abated but not vanished and she knew he still felt it. But at least he was trying.

A
for effort, babe.
A
for effort.

And if TJ was willing to make the effort, could she do any less?

“What do you think that was all about?” she asked, fetching orange juice from the fridge. “The ghost thing, I mean.”

“Bad dreams,” he said.

“Sure,” Ella replied, getting a small glass from the cabinet to the left of the stove. “But she’s never had one like this. I just hope…”

TJ poured dollops of pancake batter onto the hot pan, doling it carefully with a wooden spoon. When he’d made the third one, he glanced up at her.

“What do you hope?”

Ella finished pouring her juice, then shrugged. “I don’t know. Sometimes nightmares come from stress in your life. I just hope things haven’t been so tense around here that we’ve been planting those seeds in her mind and they’re coming out like this.”

This sobered him. “I’d never want that.”

Ella put the juice bottle away and then turned to him. “Me either.”

TJ touched her face and she felt a delicious ripple pass through her, a memory of the night before. Ella slid her arms around him and tilted her head back to accept his kiss. Their lips met and she inhaled his breath, giving him her own, mingling themselves in that way that had always seemed so intimate to her.

When he pulled back, she winced in disgust. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I need to brush my teeth.”

He laughed. “Yeah, you do. But that’s love, honey. Morning breath can’t kill it.”

She whacked his arm and then as if to test the theory she kissed him again, though more chastely.

“You’re burning the pancakes,” a voice said.

Startled, they both jumped a little and turned toward the kitchen entrance. Grace stood there in her pink New England Patriots T-shirt and a pair of loose cotton pajama pants that were covered in penguins. The clothes were hers, but something about her seemed different. She stood almost at attention, head tilted back with an air of dignified disapproval that might have been comical if that disapproval hadn’t seemed aimed at her parents.

“Grace?” Ella said.

“Hey, Gracie, I’m glad you’re awake,” TJ said cheerily. “Want banana pancakes?”

“Not those, TJ,” the little girl said. “You’re burning them.”

The first time she’d said it, neither of her parents had really registered the words. Now TJ swore and hurried to the stove, using his fingers to flip the pancakes over; he’d been too busy kissing Ella to get the spatula from the drawer. Ella saw that Grace was right: the pancakes had burned a dark brown on one side. This batch would end up in the sink disposal. The good news was that he hadn’t gotten to the stage of adding banana slices.

Suddenly Ella heard an echo of her daughter’s words and realized what had sounded so wrong to her.

“Since when do you call your parents by their first names?”

Grace ignored her, instead watching her father scrape the burnt pancakes off the pan. TJ cleaned it off as best he could and then set it back down on the burner.

“No, no,” Grace said, huffing as she approached the stove. “You’re just going to get that burnt flavor in the next batch. You’ve got to clean it first.”

The little girl took the pan from her father and ran water into it over the sink. The hot pan hissed and steamed when the water struck it.

“Careful!” TJ said. “You should really let me do that, Gracie. I know you want to help, but—”

As he reached for the pan, she turned her back to block him, finishing the job and making short work of it. Ella and TJ just watched as she turned and gave her father a look that seemed to say
there, that’s how it’s done,
and then set the pan back on the burner.

“There,” Grace said, reaching up to tug at some unruly locks of her hair, tucking them tightly behind her ears. “Don’t put the banana in too early and you’ll be fine.”

What the fuck was that?
Ella thought.

“Grace,” she said sternly.

The little girl turned to study her gravely, as if Ella were some new and unwelcome discovery. Grace had always been a little sassy with her, and Ella knew that lots of girls reached the point where they tried to act more maturely and to distance themselves from their parents and the children they had once been, but this went way beyond anything she’d ever expected … and it had arrived in her daughter’s behavioral repertoire at least two years before Ella had thought it might.

“Yes, Mother?” Grace said at last.

Mother?

“Don’t call your father by his first name.”

Grace smiled. “Of course,” she said, turning to her father. “Sorry about that, Dad.”

As her parents watched, Grace Farrelly turned and left the room. “I’m going to watch some TV,” she said. “Please let me know when the pancakes are ready. I’ll have three or four, I think. I’m starving.”

Ella realized that her mouth had been hanging open for several seconds before she turned to stare at her husband.

“Where did
that
come from?” she muttered.

“Not a clue,” TJ said.

Her husband remained staring at the kitchen entrance, as if thinking that Grace might return and take a laughing bow to let them in on the joke. But Ella felt pretty certain it hadn’t been a joke at all.