Snowblind(37)

He turned away, unwilling to meet her gaze. As she studied him, something occurred to her that made her knit her brow.

"How did you know my name?" she asked.
     
 

     

His expression changed, turning from irritated to anxious. He cast a quick glance her way, as if he was guilty of something, but he didn't answer. A chill ran up her spine.

Then the policeman was there with a pad and pen out, ready to take a statement, and Mr. D'Amato swept Allie away for a private chat so that she could fill him in. As she spoke to the principal she kept glancing back at Mr. Gustafson, but he seemed determined not to look her way.

Leaving her to wonder.





Miri lay in bed, looking at the clock on her nightstand, telling herself she ought to get up. The darkness outside her window had begun to lighten with a hint of morning. Soon the sun would rise-as much sun as Seattle was likely to get in February. Sleep had eluded her, save for several brief respites when she had drifted off for fifteen or twenty minutes only to wake again, her late father's voice fresh in her mind, as if he had been speaking to her in her dreams.

The trouble was that he had spoken to her, but not in a dream.

She studied the clock as it ticked over toward six A.M., but her true fascination lay not with the time but with the cell phone on the nightstand, just beyond the clock. She'd plugged it into the wall before going to bed to make sure it would be charged today, but she had also turned off the power. The phone lay dormant and harmless and yet she had found herself convinced that it would ring in the middle of the night. The prospect had alternately terrified and thrilled her.

Daddy, she thought, as if she could summon him.

Miri had been half convinced that she would have a different perspective in the morning. People said that sort of thing all the time and she had found it to be true, but not today. The passing of night and slow arrival of morning did not chase away the previous day's events, did not make her suddenly realize that it had all been a dream or that there was some legitimate explanation.

The voice on the phone had belonged to her father. Her father was dead. She had therefore spoken to a ghost.

She sat up and rubbed her eyes. Her hand strayed unconsciously toward the cell phone before changing trajectory. Picking up the TV remote, she clicked it on and climbed out of bed, peeling off her fading Decemberists concert T-shirt and heading for the shower. She splashed some cold water on her face at the bathroom sink and then found her mind drifting as she stared at her reflection in the mirror, studying the small rose tattooed on her hip. Her father had sometimes called her his beautiful flower.

Shaking off her fugue, she turned on the shower and let the water run until steam began to cloud the room. Only when she had stepped into the hot spray did the stiffness in her shoulders and neck begin to ease. As the water cascaded over her and she washed the previous day's grime from her body, she at last allowed her thoughts to drift.

Miri thought of home.

On an April morning during her senior year in high school, her mother had told her that she could no longer afford their house and that she had stopped paying the mortgage months before. The house was being foreclosed upon, and Angela would be moving into an apartment. Miri could stay with her until she went to college and during vacations, but Angela had made it clear that her one-bedroom apartment was not intended to be Miri's home. The fight that had erupted over this decision had been short, bitter, and one-sided. Although Angela had always had an ugly temper, she let Miri do all the yelling. The lack of emotion had been the thing that cut Miri the deepest. Her mother had made a decision and she was resolute; Miri's feelings didn't factor into that at all.

Angela might not have abdicated her responsibilities as a parent, but she had cast Miri adrift. As a little girl, Miri remembered her mother's constant refrain about giving a child roots and wings. Roots and wings. Now her mother wanted to set the nest on fire.

Miri had never forgiven her for that.

The idea that her childhood home would be gone had distressed her, yet in some odd way it had freed her as well. She had spent that fall at UMass Amherst, and when her mother had asked what she wanted for Christmas, Miri had told her "a backpack and hiking boots." The day after Christmas she had abandoned everything she owned except what she could fit into the backpack, laced up her new boots, and hit the road, silently vowing never to sleep on the sofa in her mother's little apartment again.

Miri had hitchhiked all the way across the country, sleeping in parks and campgrounds. Despite the horror stories she had heard throughout her life, no one had attacked her, robbed her, or raped her. Out on the road she had found only free spirits and lost souls. Along the way, she had spent her time making bracelets and earrings with beads that she had brought along. She had been making jewelry as a hobby for years, and when she reached California she set up a blanket on the beach and began to sell the things she had made on her travels.

For three years she had wandered the roads of America, visiting forty-seven of the contiguous states but not returning to Massachusetts. Never going home. After those three years she had found herself in Seattle, where at last she decided that her odyssey had ended and a new journey ought to begin. She got a job and an apartment and went to college and tried to put Coventry, Massachusetts behind her for good, all except for Jake, her best friend from high school, with whom she had shared the worst night of both their lives.

Thoughts of Jake brought her mind back around to the phone call the day before, and suddenly even the hot water could not drive away the chill that raced through her. Rinsing out her hair, Miri shut off the tap and dried off, wrapping her towel around her hair and stepping out into the steam-filled bathroom. The mirror had frosted over with condensation, so she could not see her reflection, as if she weren't really there at all. As if she existed in the same world where that other phone call had originated.

After she'd dressed and dried her hair, she sat for a time on the edge of her bed in the company of muffled television voices and stared at her cell phone. Gray morning had arrived and muted daylight streamed through the window.

Miri picked up her phone, disconnected it from the charger, and powered it on. She hesitated for only a second before going to Recent Calls, where she saw JAKE at the top of the list. Her throat constricted and she felt her pulse quicken; she had thought that in the light of day, without a second call or some other evidence, she would be able to tell herself that it hadn't happened-that she had not spoken to her dead father on this very phone.

"Shit," she whispered.

Leaving the cell phone on the nightstand, she went to her closet and dragged out a travel bag. There were preparations she would have to make, work to reschedule, people to whom she would have to apologize, so today was out of the question.

Tomorrow, though. Tomorrow she would go back to the only place she had ever really thought of as home.





Harley Talbot pulled his cruiser into Jake Schapiro's driveway shortly after three P.M. on Monday. The shadows of the towering pines and old oak and birch trees on the property had already grown long. It had been a beautiful day, the ground covered with pure white snow and the sky blue and bright, but the winter days were always ephemeral. Harley had no quarrel with the night-he had gone through several nocturnal periods-but on those abbreviated winter afternoons when the color began to seep from the land so early, he always felt cheated.

Who are you kidding? he thought as he put the cruiser in Park and killed the engine. It's not the shortness of the day getting under your skin.
     
 

     

Night falling meant the chief would halt the search for Zachary Stroud until morning-more than twelve hours, during which anything might happen to the boy, if he was still alive, out there somewhere. Harley had been with the search team all day, and now he had to pull a regular shift as well. Someone had to be out patrolling Coventry, especially at night.

As he climbed out of the car, relieved to be able to stretch his long legs, he glanced at the house and arched an eyebrow. In the fading light and the long shadows, Jake's house looked abandoned. The shades had been drawn on every window.

"What the hell?" Harley muttered, dropping his hand to his sidearm and undoing the holster snap.

A quick survey of the property revealed nothing out of place. Jake's car sat in the driveway, nose up close to the door of the garage, which was too cluttered to serves its intended purpose. There were no tire tracks in the snow that still framed the vehicle's spot on the driveway-Jake hadn't driven anywhere since the storm had ended. Harley glanced into the car and then went up the front walk. With the placement of the house and the trees, the walkway didn't get much sun during the day and still bore a crust of ice that cracked underfoot.

Up close, Harley saw a ridge of light around the shades on the living room windows to his left. The sidelights around the front door had gauzy curtains over them but he tried to get a glimpse inside, to no avail.

He rang the doorbell, then rapped loudly on the door, the sound echoing off the snow and trees. Seconds ticked past. Normally he would have assumed that Jake had gone for a walk with his camera to take some pictures but the oddity of the drawn shades disturbed him, along with the fact that he had texted Jake half-a-dozen times today and left him two voice mails without getting any reply. He had dropped by to say hello, hoping to see if Jake was up for a late-night movie and Atomic Wings, a tiny worry in the back of his mind thanks to Jake's radio silence.