“No.”
He nodded. “You don’t have kids, you’ve never been divorced. You haven’t watched some other guy step into your daughter’s life. Some other guy who is a damn
His voice had been rising steadily, closing in on a shout, and he caught it at that point, paused. The bar had filled in as the night grew later, and there were other people in the dining room. I had my back to them, but I could feel the stares. We sat there in silence, though, and once the rest of the room realized Ken’s rant had concluded, they lost interest and went back to their own conversations and drinks.
“I know it’s petty to care,” he said. “I know that, but you try not caring about something like that. You give that a shot.”
He reached for his empty glass, wrapped his hand around it, and held it.
“Ken,” I said. “This case . . . nothing good comes out of working it. You do understand that, don’t you?”
He shook his head. “No. No, I do not understand that. What I understand is that the man and his wife went missing, Lincoln, vanished and did not appear again until his remains were found. So now he’s dead, and she’s still missing, and his parents still have no idea what the hell happened. They have no idea what went wrong in their son’s life, how his bones ended up in the woods an hour’s drive from the million-dollar home he left without a word.”
He looked me in the eye. “I want to tell them what happened. I don’t give a damn if it’s the Sanabria family or the Manson family, or who that guy was married to, I want to be able to go back to those people and tell them, this is what happened to your son.”
He lifted the glass, remembered it was empty, and lowered it again. “I’m not good enough to do that on my own.”
I shook my head, but he was already shaking his own right back at me.
“Lincoln, I’ve tried to do it on my own. I didn’t succeed.”
“There’s no reason to think I’d do any better.”
“I disagree.”
There was a long pause, and then he said, “How about this? How about I bring my case file by your office tomorrow. I run through it with you and talk about approach. Talk about where I’m going from here. You could offer some input, right? Is there a reason in the world why you couldn’t at least do that?”
I was sure there was, but it didn’t come to mind fast enough to save me.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll do that much.”
He toasted me with the empty glass.
9
__________
That night strips of coal-colored clouds skidded over a bright three-quarter moon, pushed by a spirited wind off the lake. I sat on the roof of my building and marveled at their speed, stared long enough that the lights and sounds of the street below faded and I was held by the rhythm of the clouds, by the vanishing and then resurfacing moon. If I looked long enough, it seemed I wasn’t on the roof anymore, could instead be miles out at sea, nothing in sight but that moon and those clouds.
Yeah, I’d had a bit to drink.
I’d called Amy on the drive home, but she hadn’t answered, and I’d soon realized that was for the best—I shouldn’t have been driving, let alone driving and using a phone. I put the windows down and took Lorain all the way back, a simple and slow drive, stoplight to stoplight until I got home.
I missed her, though. That was different. That was something new. Any night I spent without her, I missed her. Sounds like a bad feeling, but it’s not. Having somebody in your life to miss . . . always good. I missed Amy when she was gone, and I’d missed Joe for many months, and all of that meant I wasn’t truly alone. There were people who belonged near me, and I felt their absence when it occurred. It was almost a healthy sort of existence. Didn’t seem to suit me at all.
It was a warm night, overcast but without rain, and I didn’t even turn the lights on in my apartment, just poured a glass of water in the dark kitchen and took it up on the roof. I settled into one of the lounge chairs and watched a sky that seemed determined to entertain.
For a while, bits of the conversation with Ken Merriman played through my head, the most frequent recurrence being the moment he’d confessed it was Dominic Sanabria who’d called him. He’d thrown that out casually enough.
I dreamed that I woke. Sounds crazy, maybe, but it happens to me now and then, always when I fall asleep somewhere other than my bed, and often when the mind is encouraged toward odd behavior by alcohol or fatigue. This time I dreamed that when I came out of sleep I was facing the trapdoor that led to the stairs, still in the lounge chair. A figure stood beside the trapdoor, and my dream-mind registered that with surprise but not alarm. I didn’t move from the chair, didn’t speak, just watched the figure standing there in the dark, and eventually my vision adjusted and I saw that it was Parker Harrison.
He looked at me for a long time, and I knew that I should rise, say something, order him out of my home, but instead I watched silently. The longer I looked at him the more my surprise edged toward fear, a steady crawl, and I held my breath when he reached into the shadowed folds of his clothing with his right hand. The clouds blew past the moon and a shaft of white light fell onto him, and I saw that though his face was normal the flesh on his arm was gone, only thin bones protruding from his sleeve. When his hand came free again, it, too, was nothing but bones, a skeleton hand, and there was a silver coin between his fingers.
He looked across the roof at me, and then he flicked his thumb and spun the coin skyward. The moonlight gave it a bright, hard glint. He caught the coin and flipped it again, and again, and it seemed dangerous now, each flash as wicked as the edge of a sharp blade. My fear built with each toss and burst into pure terror when he caught the coin with an abrupt and theatrical slap of his hand, snatching it out of the air and folding it into his palm and hiding it from the light. When he clasped his hand shut, the bones shattered into a cloud of white powder that turned black as it drifted down to his feet. The coin landed on the roof and spun as the black dust settled around it, and suddenly I was awake and upright, my hands tight on the arms of the chair.
I held that position for a few seconds while the wind fanned over the roof. It was much colder now than when I’d fallen asleep, and below me the avenue was silent. I swung my feet off the chair and stood up, forgetting about the glass resting against my side. It rolled off me and fell away from the chair and shattered on the stone, and I nearly jumped off the roof at the sound.
The sparkle of the broken glass near my feet made me think of the coin from my dream, and like a child who can’t trust that the dream world was a false one I turned and looked back at the trapdoor as if expecting to see Harrison there. The door was nothing but a dark square in the surface of the roof, and it was also behind me and not in front of me as it had been in the dream. I took a deep breath and walked toward the door, stepping over the broken glass. That could be dealt with in the morning. Down on the avenue a car finally passed by, rap music thumping out of its speakers, and I was grateful for the noise. I walked to the trapdoor and climbed carefully down the steps and then folded them back into the roof, the door snapping closed with a bang. It was dark inside the building, and my head pounded with a pressurized ache, as if someone had pumped it full of air, searching for leaks in the skull.
“No more bourbon,” I said aloud. “No more bourbon.”
I groped along the wall for the light switch, flicked it up, and flooded the hallway and stairs with light. Halfway to the apartment door, I paused and turned back, squinting against the brightness, and looked down the steps at the front door. Closed, and with the dead bolt turned. Of course it was. Of course.
