'My dear baby,' he said. His voice shook. He clutched the wreath close to his chest. 'April, I will always be your father, and you will always be my daughter. I will carry you in my heart until the day of my death. I promise you that the person who did this to you will not go free. I don't have much strength left, but it will be enough for both of us. I love you, my child.'
He stepped forward to the lip of the rock and looked down. In the softest voice I had ever heard from him, he said, 'Your father wishes you peace.'
Alan took a step backward and dangled the wreath in his right hand. Then he moved his right foot backward, cocked his arm back, swung his arm forward, and hurled the wreath into the bright air like a discus. It sailed ten or twelve feet out and plummeted toward the water, turning over and over in the air.
The boys pointed and shouted when they saw the wreath falling toward the lake pool. They started swimming toward the spot where it would fall, but stopped when they saw Alan and me standing on the rock shelf. The ring of flowers smacked onto the water. Luminous ripples radiated out from it. The wreath bobbed in the water like a raft, then began drifting down the shoreline. The two boys paddled back toward the little beach at the bottom of the stairs.
'I'm still her father,' Alan said.
When we pulled up in front of John's house, only the shining gap between Alan's eyelids and his lower lids indicated that he was still awake. 'I'll wait,' he said.
John opened the door and pulled me inside. 'Where were you? Do you know what time it is?'
His parents were standing up in the living room, looking at us anxiously.
'Is Alan all right?' Marjorie asked.
'He's a little tired,' I said.
'Look, I have to run,' John said. 'We should be back in half an hour. This can't take any longer than that.'
Ralph Ransom started to say something, but John glared at me and virtually pushed me outside. He banged the door shut and started down the path, buttoning his jacket as he went.
'My God, the old guy's asleep,' he said. 'First you make us late, and then you drag him out of bed, when he hardly even knows who he is.'
'He knows who he is,' I said.
We got into the car, and John tapped Alan's shoulder as I pulled away. 'Alan? Are you okay?'
'Are you?' Alan asked.
John jerked back his hand.
I decided to take the Horatio Street bridge, and then remembered something Dick Mueller had said to me.
'John,' I said, 'you didn't tell me that April was interested in local history.'
'She did a little research here and there. Nothing special.'
'Wasn't she especially interested in the Horatio Street bridge?'
'I don't know anything about it.'
The glittering strips at the bottom of Alan's eyelids were closed. He was breathing deeply and steadily.
'What took you so long?'
'Alan wanted to go to Flory Park.'
'What did he want to do in Flory Park?'
'April used to go there.'
'What are you trying to tell me?' His voice was flat with anger.
'There's a flat rock that overlooks a lake pool, and when April was in high school, she used to sun herself there and dive into the pool.'
He relaxed. 'Oh. That could be.'
'Alan wanted to see it once more.'
'What did he do? Moon around and think about April?'
'Something like that.'
He grunted in a way that combined irritation and dismissal.
'John,' I said, 'even after we listened to Walter Dragonette talk about the Horatio Street bridge, even after we went there, you didn't think that April's interest in the bridge was worth bringing up?'
'I didn't know much about it,' he said.
'What?' Alan muttered. 'What was that about April?' He rubbed his eyes and sat up straight, peering out to see where we were going.
John groaned and turned away from us.
'We were talking about some research April was doing,' I said.
'Ah.'
'Did she ever talk to you about it?'
'April talked to me about everything.' He waited a moment. 'I don't remember the matter very well. It was about some bridge.'
'Actually, it was that bridge right ahead of us,' John said. We were on Horatio Street. A block before us stood the embankment of the Millhaven River and the low walls of the bridge.
'Wasn't there something about a
'It was a crime, all right,' John said.
I looked at the Green Woman Taproom as we went past and, in the second before the bridge walls cut it from view, saw a blue car drawn up onto the cement slab beside the tavern. Two cardboard boxes stood next to the car, and the trunk was open. Then we were rattling across the bridge. The instant after that, I thought that the car had looked like the Lexus that followed John Ransom to Shady Mount. I leaned forward and tried to see it in the rear-view mirror, but the walls of the bridge blocked my view.
'You're hung up on that place. Like Walter Dragonette.'
'Like April,' I said.
'April had too much going on in her life to spend much time on local history.' He sounded bitter about it.
Long before we got close to Armory Place, voices came blasting out of the plaza. 'Waterford must go! Vass must go! Waterford must go! Vass must go!'
'Guess the plea for unity didn't work,' John said.
'You turn right up here to get to the morgue,' Alan said.
A ramp led up to the entrance of the Millhaven County Morgue. When I pulled up in front of the ramp, Paul Fontaine got out of an unmarked sedan and waved me into a slot marked FOR OFFICIAL VEHICLES ONLY. He stood slouching with his hands in the pockets of his baggy gray suit. We were ten minutes late.
'I'm sorry, it's my fault,' I said.
'I'd rather be here than Armory Place,' Fontaine said. He took in Alan's weariness. 'Professor Brookner, you could sit it out in the waiting room.'
'No, I don't think I could,' Alan said.
'Then let's get it over with.' At the top of the ramp, Fontaine let us into an entry with two plastic chairs on either side of a tall ashtray crowded with butts. Beyond the next door, a blond young man with taped glasses sat drumming a pencil on a battered desk. Wide acne scars sandblasted the flesh under his chin.
'We're all here now, Teddy,' Fontaine said. 'I'll take them back.'
'Do the thang,' Teddy said.
Fontaine gestured toward the interior of the building. Two rows of dusty fluorescent tubes hung from the
