Snowblind(42)

The Tap was a combination restaurant and brewhouse, complete with vats of beer in the cellar. The bar and dining room were separated by a wall whose lower half was wood and whose upper half was frosted glass. As he walked to the bar he peeked through the opening between the two rooms and saw that only a few tables were occupied, which explained the bored look on the face of the tall, soccer-mom-looking woman by the hostess stand. She started to reach for a menu as he approached, but he waved her away and pointed to the bar and she went back to her desultory slouch.

Several people recognized and greeted him as he moved through the bar, all cops. The Tap had been unofficially adopted by the Coventry PD in the years since their old haunt, the Lasting Room, had closed. Keenan gave halfhearted hellos and clapped more than one officer on the shoulder as he made his way to an empty stool, but he did not linger or stop to chat. He had come here because it was familiar and comfortable and because he liked the Coventry Winter Ale they brewed, not to look into the eyes of his fellow police and see the regret and apology they felt over failing to find Zachary Stroud.

As he slid onto a stool, the aging blond bartender noticed him and came down the bar.

"Evening, Joe," she said, her voice a cigarette rasp.

"Morgan," Detective Keenan said. "Glad to find an empty seat."

"Aw, we're just a little light tonight. Hell, it's a Tuesday," Brenda said, the makeup crinkling on her face, worn by nicotine and years of tanning. "It's the restaurant that's dead."

"I'm just teasing," Keenan said. "I'm actually surprised you've got a crowd at all. It's gone very quiet out there tonight."

Brenda wiped down the counter like some bartender in an old Western.

"You know what it's like before a snowstorm. Coventry always holds its breath," she said, then met his gaze. "What can I get you? Winter Ale?"

Keenan smiled, his tension relaxing further. "How do you do that? I hardly ever come in here anymore."

"Yeah, yeah, ever since you made detective," Brenda teased, grabbing a glass and going to the tap to draw his beer. "But you've been drinking the same thing every winter for, like, ten friggin' years."

She poured a perfect glass-just a skim of foam on top-put out a coaster, and set his beer on top of it.

"If my wife ever throws me out, I'm going to propose to you," Keenan said. "Any woman with that kind of memory should be cherished."

"Yeah, right. Tell that to my asshole ex-husband."

Keenan took a swig of his beer and was about to reply when someone tapped his shoulder. He turned to see Marco Torres standing behind him, looking pissed off. After the week he'd been having, Keenan had run out of patience.

"What the hell's your problem?"

Torres shuddered as if he might cry and stepped in close.

"Personal space, asshole," Keenan said, but when he reached up to push Torres away, the younger man grabbed his wrist and twisted his arm aside.

"He's still out there, you son of a bitch," Torres whispered. "You're here having a beer and another kid is going to die on your watch."

"Fuck off!" Keenan shouted, shaking loose and shoving Torres backward, so that he crashed into the wall, his head cracking a panel of frosted glass.

Other patrons at the bar shuffled away from them, but the cops who'd been drinking there moved nearer, all of them ready to step in if things got out of hand. One of them was Ted Finch, who gave Keenan a conspiratorial grin.

"Didn't think you had it in you, Joe," Finch said.

Keenan felt all the fight go out of him. If Finch approved, he knew he had crossed a line. He stared at Torres, who stood in a kind of defensive crouch, eyes wide with what looked more like sadness than fear. A chill went through the detective, a crawling, icy thing that spread through him with a shiver. Something about the way Torres looked at him made his stomach knot with unease.

"Why me?" Keenan demanded. "Yeah, I want to find the kid. It's killing me. But why the hell do you put this just on me when there's a whole department-a whole goddamn city-that should still be out searching?"

Torres straightened, his eyes narrowing angrily. His lips were a thin white line until he took a single step nearer and spoke so quietly that even Keenan could not be completely certain what he said.

Then Torres bolted, running for the exit and slamming out the door.

A lot of chatter filled the wake of his departure, patrons reacting to the scene and cops muttering about rookies coming unraveled because of the job. Finch came up beside Keenan and offered to buy him a beer as soon as he'd drained his glass.
     
 

     

"Another night, Ted," Keenan said, drinking half of his beer in a couple of gulps and then dropping a ten on the bar. He glanced up and saw Brenda watching him. "Tell the owner he can reach me at the department about the glass. I'll cover it."

His voice sounded as if it were coming from somewhere other than his own lips.

Keenan ignored Finch's exhortations to finish his beer, to stick around and join the other cops in the bar for another round, and headed for the door. He stepped outside into the frigid February night, the wind cutting through his jacket, the air heavy with the threat of the coming storm. He shoved his hands into his pockets and glanced around for any sign of Torres, but the rookie had gone.

The last thing Torres had said had been spoken so quietly that even Keenan, who had been the closest to him, wasn't sure he had heard correctly. But he knew what those words had sounded like.

"Because I'm betting you still remember what my skin smelled like when it burned."





Miri sat in her rental car, bathed in the green glow of the dashboard lights. Hot air blasted from the vents and yet she could not get warm inside. There were only two possibilities. Either she had seen her father's ghost standing on the sidewalk across the street from The Vault in the middle of a snow flurry  …  or she had lost her mind. Such thoughts made it almost impossible for her to breathe.

She had loved her father deeply and still missed him so much that it hurt every day, so the idea of being able to see him and speak to him caused a flutter of anxious joy in her heart. But the existence of ghosts, the possibility that the dead lingered on and might be around her even at this very moment, made her shiver. What did they want, if they were there at all? Were they merely sorrowful, or jealous and spiteful of the living? The mere thought made her uneasy, and cold despite the car heater as it fought the winter chill. Miri sat behind the wheel as the car shuddered with every ominous gust of wind, and glanced anxiously out at the darkness, fearful of the silent yearning of the dead.

"Where are you, Daddy?" she whispered, her voice barely audible above the groan of the heater and the purr of the engine.

What the hell am I doing out here?

Miri glanced out the windshield at the house diagonally across from the spot where she'd parked. She remembered it well, had seen it both in dreams and in nightmares. As far as she knew, Allie Schapiro still lived there, and judging by the warm lights inside and the car parked in the short, narrow driveway, the woman was at home. Though Miri had stayed friends with Jake all through middle school and high school, she had not set foot inside that house since the night of the blizzard that had claimed her father's life, the night that Isaac Schapiro had fallen to his death.

How hard is it? Just go up to the door and ring the bell.

Jake was the only person in the world with whom she felt she could talk about what had been happening to her. The only person who would not outright dismiss her. But at some point she would need to talk to Allie as well. The blizzard had changed the course of all their lives. If not for that storm, Miri had no doubt, Allie would have been her stepmother. They'd have been a family. If her father had a message for her, Miri was sure he would want her to share it with Allie as well, but this was premature. She wouldn't know where to begin.

Miri shivered, still unable to let the warm air penetrate the chill inside her. She turned on the headlights, put the car into Drive, and pulled away from the curb, following a route she could have navigated with her eyes closed. As long as she had been away from Coventry, its streets were ingrained in her subconscious like the lines she'd memorized for her eighth-grade play. Discovering just how deeply Coventry was rooted inside her made her wistful and yet depressed her as well. In some ways it would always be home, and yet she hoped that once she put it behind her for a second time, she would never have to come back. All her ghosts were here, real and imagined. And now she found herself driving toward them, instead of away.

Her mother had an apartment in Hamel Mill Lofts, less than a ten-minute drive from Allie Schapiro's house. Her childhood home had long been sold and her mother could be a total bitch, but that ninth-floor apartment at the Lofts was the closest thing she had to a home in Coventry these days.

"This should be fun," she muttered to herself as she turned into the big lot behind the Lofts, a complex of old mill buildings that had been converted into some of the best apartments in the city.

The old smokestack, now nothing but a giant accent piece, loomed against the low, winter storm clouds. She craned her neck to glance at it, but pulled her attention away in time to notice a parking space halfway across the lot toward the center building. Miri had never visited her mother here, but she knew from talking to Angela that this was the right spot, and had the apartment number written down. Once she'd parked the car, she consulted the strip of paper she'd stashed in her tiny purse.