Snowblind(15)

"I get it, Detective," Harley interrupted. "She's a pill-head, too. She had a bunch of illegal scrips, maybe was selling them, and some guy knew it and cleaned her out. Probably someone she knows."

Jake and Detective Keenan both looked at him.

Harley laughed and shook his head. "You two think you're Holmes and friggin' Watson. Can we just finish this shit up and go? I go off duty in twenty minutes and I need a cocoa."

"Cocoa," Jake repeated.

Harley glowered at him. "When it snows, I like cocoa. A little whipped cream, too. You got something to say about it?"

Detective Keenan outranked him but didn't say a word. Neither did Jake.

"I thought not," Harley said. Scowling, he turned and left the room. Jake laughed and started packing away his camera.

"You're pretty smart, kid," Keenan said, sounding for a moment like he'd stepped out of some 1940s gangster movie.

"Harley doesn't think so," Jake replied with a laugh.

"Ever think about becoming a cop yourself?"

Images of that night flickered through Jake's mind again. Isaac's broken body, the falling snow, the flash of a camera  …  those had been real, tangible things. Awful things, yes, but they had been solid and true and grimly understandable. The bright flashes had taken away the shadows-all except for the sad hollows around his dead brother's eyes. That had been a reality that twelve-year-old Jake could understand. The more he had talked about the things that Isaac claimed to have seen out in the snow, only to have cops and shrinks think he'd imagined it or was making it up, the less he felt willing to admit what he had seen. A face at the window. Icy hands coming through the screen  …
     
 

     

Until eventually he had begun to realize that the cops and the shrinks had to be right. They had to be. His little brother's imagination and his own grief had gotten the better of him.

But even now, a dozen years later, the camera gave him comfort. Pictures made it real. The flash chased the shadows away and left only the tangible world. If the camera couldn't see something, it wasn't real.

"I'd make a terrible cop," Jake said at last, as he slung his camera bag over his shoulder. "Besides, I only do this so I can afford to take the pictures I care about."

Keenan fished out his phone. No crime-scene tech had shown up and he needed some fingerprinting done. Whoever had been sent out had probably been delayed by the storm, but Keenan didn't need Jake to tell him that.

"Be sure to invite me to your first gallery opening," the detective said.

Jake couldn't tell if he was being sarcastic. He didn't like to talk about what his mother called his "nice pictures." She thought his paying job was ghoulish and wished that he could make a living as a different sort of photographer. So did Jake.

"I'll do that," he said, and headed out the door.

On his way out he took another look at the victim. In the bedroom they'd been making light of the situation, but when she glanced at him and he saw her face again-the swelling, the dried blood on her lips-he felt bad about that. Addict or not, she deserved sympathy. At twenty-four, he knew far too many people who used drugs or alcohol to try to forget the things that haunted them. Coventry had more than its fair share of bad memories.

He went down the stairs and out into the storm, nodding to the cop guarding the door. Normally there would have been neighbors and other spectators gathered outside but the snow fell thickly now, a white silence that spread across the city. The forecast called for about eight inches, turning to rain at the end. It would be a hell of a mess tomorrow, but this afternoon and tonight it was beautiful.

Jake hurried to his car, anxious to get out his personal camera. He'd first truly fallen in love with the camera in high school, taking pictures of ominous thunderheads from his back porch, finding beauty in the churning clouds and the way the blue sky had been so quickly blotted out. Now his real art-photography that he had indeed shown in a few galleries, not that he'd ever tell Keenan that-was photographing storms of all kinds. Trees bending in a gale, rain on glass, shafts of light spearing through black clouds. Snowstorms provided the most beautiful and haunting images of all.

But his favorite photographs were not of the storms themselves. The ones about which he felt the most passionate, and perhaps not coincidentally the ones he had sold for quite a bit of money, were pictures of the mornings after. When the sky had cleared and the sun had returned and, despite whatever damage the storm had left behind, everything looked clean and pure and somehow renewed  …

He never saw Isaac in the snap of the lens when he took those pictures.

Those were the moments he lived for.





SIX





A knock at the door got Allie Schapiro up out of her chair. She'd been sitting beside a window in her living room, reading by the wan gray daylight that filtered through the storm and drinking a glass of red wine. One finger holding her place in the book, she went out into the little foyer and put her hand on the doorknob.

"Who's there?" she called.

TJ Farrelly identified himself and she pulled open the door. Scruffy and blond, midthirties, he stood on the stoop in the swirl of snow and greeted her with a kind smile and tired eyes. His hair was too long and he needed a shave, but that unkempt quality made him more handsome instead of less.

"Oh, thank God," she said. "And thank you so much for coming out today."

Allie stood back to let TJ enter. He stamped snow off his boots on the little rug in the foyer and his eyes found the book in her hand.

"Sorry to interrupt your reading."

"Oh, not at all," she said with a nervous laugh, closing the door. "Honestly, I kept rereading the same section over and over. I haven't been able to focus on it at all."

TJ adjusted the heavy tool belt on his waist in that unconscious, get-the-job-done way she had always loved to see in men. It gave an aura of confidence that was contagious.

"No worries, Ms. Schapiro," he said. "I'll take care of you."

Though he seemed a bit wary of her, Allie gave a little inward chuckle at the sexy-handyman clichés that popped into her mind. As a younger woman she would have blushed, but once she had passed fifty something had changed in her. Yes, she kept her hair dyed an attractive auburn and had it styled regularly, and she chose her clothes carefully, but those were things she did for herself and not for others. She no longer cared quite as much about what other people thought. Once it had bothered her that she had a reputation as being a bit of an uptight bitch. People ought to have understood, given the losses in her life, or that was the way she'd rationalized it. Now she understood that life was all about loss, that everyone suffered in his own way. She just wasn't ever going to be able to be the kind of person who pretended to be happy when she wasn't.

"Please, TJ," she said, "I'm not your daughter's teacher anymore. You can call me Allie."

The man looked surprised. "All right, Allie. Lead the way."

She picked up the heavy-duty flashlight from the little table in the foyer and clicked it on. TJ unclipped a small but powerful light of his own from his belt and followed her down the short hall to the kitchen, through the cellar door; and down the steps into the basement. Even less of that gray light filtered through small box windows close to the ceiling, the glass rectangles half covered by the newfallen snow outside, making the flashlights helpful but not entirely necessary. Not until nightfall, at least.

"The fuse box is over there," she said, shining her flashlight on it.

"Gotcha." He went over and opened the panel, moving the light over the circuit breakers.

"It really does mean the world, you coming out in the storm."

"I couldn't leave you in the dark," he said, almost casually clicking the breakers and snapping them back into place. "Not with the snow … "

He trailed off, pausing as if rooted to the spot, one hand on the metal door of the fuse box. The flashlight wavered in his hand.

Allie's chest hurt. She had forgotten to breathe.

"I'm sorry," he said, turning toward her, the beams of their flashlights throwing ovals of illumination on opposite walls.

She wet her lips. "It's okay. After all this time I'd better be able to talk about a little snow without letting it get the better of me. Besides, you lost someone in the storm, too. I'm sure you're happy to talk about your mother, to remember her."

"Most of the time," TJ allowed. "Though for some reason it's harder to talk about her when it snows. It always feels wrong, somehow."

"I know the feeling. But it's okay. If you and I can't understand each other, who could?"

He didn't quite manage to smile, but nodded and turned his light back to the electrical panel.

Allie had first met TJ at a memorial for those killed or lost in that blizzard on the one-year anniversary of the storm. At that point, he and his wife, Ella, had been married less than a month and already had a little girl at home. Many years later, at a parent-teacher conference, Ella had lightheartedly revealed that their daughter, Grace, had been conceived during that storm.
     
 

     

So at least one good thing came out of it, TJ had said.

The couple had exchanged an ugly sort of look, then. One she had seen all too often in her years as a teacher. That particular look never boded well for marriages. Allie had thought then and still believed that it would be a shame if the Farrellys' relationship hit the skids. Pint-size Grace-copper-eyed and tiny and always buzzing with positive energy-had two parents who obviously loved her very much. A separation or divorce would dim or destroy the little girl's smile, and it saddened Allie to think of it. The Farrellys were a nice family, but over the past few years she and the rest of the staff at the Trumbull School had seen a lot of nice families buckle under the stresses of the times.