"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.
It sure as hell hadn't been funny.
In his years on the Coventry Police Department, Joe Keenan had seen the ugliest facets of human behavior-rape and murder and addiction, suicide pacts, parents prostituting their kids in exchange for drugs-but every once in a while he was reminded of the basic decency of his community. As dawn gave way to morning, the sunlight making the frozen hardpack glisten like diamonds, he paused and leaned against a tree, exhausted and out of breath, and watched people moving through the woods around him. There were police officers, on duty and off, and there were also firefighters and EMTs and city workers and ordinary volunteers who had responded to a summons in the middle of the night and gone without sleep to beat the bushes in search of a little lost boy who'd become an orphan overnight.
None of them wanted to believe that Zachary Stroud had drowned in the river. For hours, as the storm wound down from snow to sleet to rain to a morning of dissipating clouds, they had searched behind and in the branches of every tree, checked every depression in the ground, and followed the riverbank looking for footprints in the wet soil there. Police cars cruised the neighborhoods just inland from the river. Now that dawn had arrived, some officers had begun canvassing door-to-door on the nearest streets.
"Falling down on the job, Detective?" a deep voice said.
Keenan glanced to his right, toward the deep, rushing whisper of the river, and saw Harley Talbot approaching. Officer Talbot must have been off duty because he was out of uniform, clad instead in a blue cable-knit collared sweater, jeans, and boots.
"I know you're screwing with me, Harley, but today's not the day," Detective Keenan said.
"I've got you, man," Harley said. "You've been out here all night and we haven't found a damn thing. Gotta be demoralizing. But don't lose hope, Detective. Nobody's giving up yet."
Detective Keenan nodded. "Why is that, do you think? I mean … if we haven't found the kid by now … "
He let the words trail off but the question was clear. The search would continue all day long. Dogs had been brought in overnight but with all the new-fallen snow they had not been able to get a scent to follow.
"Not that big a riddle," Harley said, veiled in the golden early-morning light, almost ghostly. "They don't want to believe the worst. Holding on to hope when most people would give up … that's faith, man. Everyone knows how this is gonna end, but they hold on because giving up the search means giving up hope, and nobody's ready for that."
Keenan inhaled, cold morning air filling his lungs. His eyes burned with exhaustion and his limbs felt leaden from slogging along a mile or more of wooded riverside, but he could go on. They had to keep looking.
"I'm with you, Harley," Detective Keenan said. "Though I have to tell you, it takes more than hope to keep going. It takes coffee. If I don't get a massive caffeine injection I'm not going to be any good to anybody."
Harley grinned. "Shit, Detective, that's easy. Head out to the corner of Riverside and Harrison. Got a food truck there. The owner's giving away free coffee to all the searchers. It's no Starbucks, but it'll pick you up."
Detective Keenan thanked him and headed west. The stretch of woods he had found himself in was maybe four hundred yards from river to road, not far at all, but it took him nearly fifteen minutes of moving through underbrush and around trees to reach the pavement. As he did, his cell phone rang.
The food truck was parked as promised. Lights were on inside the truck, though the sun had come out. Half-a-dozen people were standing or sitting near the big open window on the side of the truck, including two women who sat cross-legged on the snow, too tired to care if the dampness soaked through their clothes.
"Joe Keenan," he said, phone to his ear.
"It's Sam."
"Lieutenant Duquette," Keenan said. "I hope you're calling with good news."
"I'm afraid not," the lieutenant replied. "We've got more searchers coming in, but just no sign of the boy."
Keenan eyed the food truck longingly, craving the coffee so powerfully that his need for it unnerved him. But this conversation could not be avoided.
"You sound defeated," Detective Keenan said. "This isn't over, Lieutenant."
"We've scoured the river's edge and the woods," Duquette replied. "If the Stroud boy was out there, we'd have found him. He's in the river, Joe. You know it and I know it."
Keenan's heart turned to ice. He flashed back to Charlie Newell dying in his arms.
"I know nothing of the kind."
"Detective-"
"You're not abandoning the search," Keenan said quickly.
"Don't be an idiot," the lieutenant said. "The media would be so far up the mayor's ass that they'd be camped out in his colon. He'd take it out on the chief and we'd all pay the price. We've got to keep it going a couple of days, but I'm telling you we're not going to find anything. You're not a rookie, Joe. You know this. Unless the kid was snatched-"
"I'm not saying he was snatched. But if he wandered away, could be somebody picked him up-"
"In the middle of that storm?"
"There were people out in it. The Strouds were out in it."
"And they're dead."
"Not everyone who was driving in the storm finished the night upside down in the river, Lieutenant. All due respect."
Seconds ticked by. Detective Keenan felt the sun warming him, heard the wet snow slipping off branches and footsteps clomping through the snowy woods. Voices called to one another hopefully, just as Harley Talbot had said. There were so many people in Coventry who were hurting, just like the rest of the country, people who were still weathering years of a struggling economy. But the people out searching didn't care about their own troubles this morning.
"My search for this kid isn't for show," Keenan said quietly, the phone tight against his ear. "We've got people searching the banks downstream for miles. I'm not discounting the idea that Zachary Stroud ended up drowning, but I'm not going to just assume it either, not when the only evidence we have indicates that he got out of the car on dry land, or near enough to it."