All the time he was pissing, he was also gunning Diet Pepsi.
In and out.
When he was finished in the john, he walked shakily back to the bed.
Boy, he was really in rough shape this morning. Legs really wobbly.
He sat on the edge of the bed, drinking his can of pop.
All he heard at first, in the late morning silence, was the birds. Wrens, jays, robins. Singing their assess off in the beautiful day.
Only gradually did he come to hear the undertone of human voices.
His first reaction was that he was having an auditory hallucination. God knew, he’d had hallucinations before. You couldn’t put them away the way he did without damaging your brain a little.
But as he sat there, he slowly began to realize that these voices weren’t echoes of the previous night — as they sometimes were. These voices were real. Here and now.
But where would voices be coming from? He lived in the boonies.
He stood up and wobbled over to the back window and looked up the hill.
A large group of people. Maybe fifty or so.
And several cops.
Cops? What the hell was going on?
He felt very vulnerable standing here in his Jockey shorts, body feverish, head pounding, mouth dehydrated. Vulnerable and young — and yet, at the same time, very old, too. As if his life had all been lived. And it had not been a good one. Not a good life at all.
He looked up the hill and for the first time felt a stirring of terror in his belly and chest.
Cops could mean only one thing: trouble.
And trouble so close to his cottage...
He leaned forward, pushing his head to the relatively cool glass of the window. The coolness felt like a balm.
He wished he could remember last night...
The cops right up there on the hill...
...and him not able to remember last night.
Without quite knowing why, Richie McGuire started trembling.
3
Amy’s secretary, Midge, was the one who broke the news.
Amy was looking over some of the paperwork one of her new assistant DAs had set on her desk. The young woman was a Mexican-American and very nervous about this, her first real job since graduating from the University of Iowa Law School this spring. She had nothing to worry about. The way she’d scoped out the forthcoming trial was impressive. Amy certainly hadn’t been doing work of this quality her first year out of law school.
Midge knocked.
Amy said, “This isn’t more pictures of your granddaughter, is it?”
Ordinarily, Midge would’ve laughed at Amy’s joke. Midge’s daughter had just given birth to a beautiful little six-pound girl named Shannon. Every day, it seemed, Midge had more new photos of the infant. The office joke was that there was no place to escape to.
But Midge didn’t have photos this morning.
She just opened the door and said, “I just got some news that I think you’d better know about.”
Midge was a fiftyish lady whose hair was still naturally red and whose green eyes were usually merry. Whenever anybody in the office got depressed, they went to see Midge. She got their engines started again.
But Midge wasn’t starting any engines this morning.
Amy had rarely seen the woman look this somber.
Midge walked into Amy’s office and said, “I just got a call from the police department. The body of a teenage girl was found this morning.”
“Oh, God,” Amy said, thinking of the girl’s parents. As a substitute parent herself, she used to worry constantly about Richie. Still did, in fact.
“Who was she?” Amy said.
“The Fuller girl. Darcy.”
“My God. She was just—”
“Fifteen,” Midge said.
“Where did they find her?”
Midge touched long, slender fingers to the front of her blue jumper and white blouse outfit. There was some shift in her gaze, as if she was reluctant to answer the question.
“Up in those woods off Swanson Road.”
“Why, that’s where my brother lives.”
“Right.”
At the mention of Richie, Midge’s face tightened and she averted her eyes momentarily.
“Was this near Richie’s cottage?”
“I... I suppose so.”
“You suppose so? Midge, there’s something you’re not telling me, isn’t there?”
Midge sighed. “I didn’t want to tell you this but you’ll obviously find it out anyway.”
“Find out what?”
“The body was found right up the hill from Richie’s.”
“But that doesn’t mean anything.”
“No, of course it doesn’t.”
But Midge’s mood hadn’t changed. She still looked self-conscious and uncomfortable talking about this.
“I want to know everything,” Amy said. “What else did the police say?”
“Just that they’d sent a crime-scene team out there and Sam insisted on calling in the State Bureau of Investigation.”
“So Sam’s in charge?”
For the first time, Midge offered a tiny smile. “You know how the Chief is. He said something like, ‘I let Sam take over so he can do all that scientific crap he does and impress all the gawkers.’ ”
Amy wanted to smile. She could picture the grouchy and intolerant Chief saying exactly that. But there was no humor in her now.
On the hill above the cottage. Richie’s cottage. It didn’t have to mean anything, but of course it did mean something. Given Richie’s reputation for carousing, it meant a lot. Midge knew this. That’s why she’d been so reluctant to speak.
“Somebody from the office should be out there,” Amy said. “Yeah, probably,” Midge said.
“Maybe I’ll go.”
Midge looked at her. “I could ask Dick.”
“You mean you think I shouldn’t go? Because of—”
“Maybe it’d look better if somebody else from the office took it.”
She said it gently. The way a good friend would. Midge was a lot more than a secretary. Inside that attractive head of hers was a lot of hard common sense.
“I really want to go, Midge.”
“I know.”
“But it’s probably better if Don goes, right?”
“Right.”
“He didn’t do it. I’m sure of it.”
“I’m sure of it, too, Amy.”
“He’s not a bad guy.”
“I know.”
“He’s had some bad luck.”
“Yes, he has.”
“And I wasn’t exactly a great parent.”
“You know better than that, Amy. The way you loved him... protected him... very few kids get a parent like that. You made him your whole life.”
Amy looked at her directly. “You’ve never liked him, have you, Midge?”
“I can’t say I’m crazy about him.”
“Why?”
“All the grief he’s brought you. It’s hard to stand by and watch sometimes.”
“He really didn’t kill that girl.”
“I don’t think he did but—”
“But what?”
Midge sighed. “He was over at Riley’s Pub last night and she came in. Darcy, I mean. There was a scene.”
Midge described what the police department had told her fifteen minutes ago.
Amy listened in silence.
“But that doesn’t necessarily mean anything,” Midge said. “Lots of people get in little dustups when they’ve been drinking.”
“She left without him?”
“That’s my understanding.”
“He probably didn’t even see her the rest of the night.”
“Right.”
But Amy realized what she was doing. Trying to convince not Midge but herself of Richie’s innocence.