Steve laughed. He and Fran were both light sleepers. Their daughters were the opposite.
Fifteen minutes later they pulled into their driveway and woke up Aline. Still half-asleep, she stumbled into the house after them.
“Dear God,” Fran exclaimed, as she looked around her usually tidy home. Empty plastic glasses and beer cans were on the coffee table and all over the living room. She walked into the kitchen to find an empty vodka bottle in the sink next to empty pizza boxes.
Completely awake now, Aline could tell her mother and father were upset and furious. She shared their feelings. Ten years older than her sister, she had an immediate sense that something was terribly wrong. If Kerry had a party, why didn’t she have the brains to clean up afterward? Aline asked herself. Did she drink too much and pass out?
Aline listened as her mother and father hurried upstairs calling Kerry’s name. They came back immediately.
“Kerry isn’t here,” Fran said, her voice now filled with concern. “And wherever she went, she didn’t take her phone. It’s on the table. Where is she?” Fran’s face was becoming pale. “Maybe she got sick and someone took her home or—”
Steve interrupted her. “Let’s start calling her friends. Someone is bound to know where she is.”
“The lacrosse team roster with phone numbers is in the kitchen drawer,” Fran said, as she began hurrying down the hallway. Kerry’s closest friends were on the team.
Please let her be asleep at Nancy or Sinead’s house, Aline thought. She must have been in really bad shape if she forgot to bring her cell phone with her. At least I can start to straighten up. She went into the kitchen. Her mother was starting to dial as her father read her a phone number. Aline grabbed a large garbage bag from the cabinet.
She decided to see if there was any junk on the back porch or the patio and pool area, and headed there.
What she saw on the porch startled her. A half-filled garbage bag on one of the chairs. When she glanced inside, she saw that it was stuffed with soiled paper plates, a pizza box and plastic cups.
Obviously Kerry had started to clean up. But why would she have stopped?
Uncertain about whether or not to tell her parents what she had found or to just let them keep making calls, Aline went down the four steps to the patio and walked over to the pool. It had been open all summer and she was looking forward to relaxing with Kerry in it before Kerry left for college and she began her new job as a guidance counselor at Saddle River High School.
The putter her parents would use to practice was lying across a chaise lounge on the pool deck.
Aline leaned over to pick up the putter and looked down in horror. Her sister was lying at the bottom of the pool, fully dressed and absolutely motionless.
4
Jamie loved to sleep late. He worked at the supermarket from eleven until three o’clock. Marge had his breakfast ready at ten o’clock. When he was finished, she reminded him to go upstairs and brush his teeth. Jamie came back, gave her a wide smile and waited for her to say, “Very nice,” before he bolted out the door to go to “my job,” as he proudly referred to it. It was a twenty-minute walk to Acme. As she watched him head down the block, Marge was aware that something was nagging at the back of her mind.
When she went upstairs to make his bed, she remembered what it was. Jamie was wearing his old scuffed sneakers, not the new ones she had bought for him last week. What on earth made him do that? she asked herself as she began to tidy up his room. And where are the new sneakers?
She walked over to his bathroom. He had showered, and the towels and washcloth were in the hamper just where she had taught him to put them. But there was no sign of the new sneakers or the pants he had worn yesterday.
He wouldn’t throw them away, she told herself, as she went back to Jamie’s room and looked around. It was with both relief and dismay that she picked up his tangled belongings where he had left them on the floor of his closet.
The socks and sneakers were soaking wet. So was the lower half of his pants.
Marge was still holding them when she heard a piercing scream from the backyard. She ran to the window to see Aline leaping into the pool and her parents rushing out from the house.
She watched as Steve Dowling jumped into the pool next to Aline and came up carrying Kerry with Aline steps behind him. Horrified, Marge watched as he laid Kerry down and started pounding on her chest, shouting, “Call an ambulance!” In a matter of minutes, police cars and an ambulance were racing up the driveway.
Then Marge saw a policeman pull Steve away from Kerry as the crew from the ambulance knelt beside her.
Marge turned away from the window when she saw the officer get back on his feet and start shaking his head.
It took a long minute before she realized she was still holding Jamie’s pants, socks and sneakers. She knew without being told how they had gotten wet. Why would he have started to go down the steps to the pool and then come back out? And what are these stains?
She had to throw the pants, socks and sneakers in the washer and dryer immediately.
Marge didn’t know why every bone in her body was screaming at her to do that, but without understanding why, she understood that she was protecting Jamie.
• • •
The wail of the police and ambulance sirens had drawn the neighbors out of their homes. The word spread quickly. “Kerry Dowling drowned in her pool.” Many of the
