He passed John Scott Highway, and now the traffic began to slow as he approached Wintersville. Ben had moved his family to this small town from Pittsburgh thirteen years ago. He’d met Susan during medical school at Loyola University in Chicago. They’d graduated together, and had both managed to secure residency positions at University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. He’d trained in pathology, while Susan had pursued a program in family practice. At the end of their first year, they married—a small ceremony attended by immediate family and a few friends. They’d spent the following week hiking and kayaking through a good portion of upstate New York—Susan’s idea, actually—before returning to the exhausting, gut-wrenching grind of medical residency. The week had suited their needs perfectly, providing unhurried time to spend exclusively with one another, far removed from the constant demands and commotion of residency. It had felt good to exercise their bodies, which had already started to become soft with neglect. The fresh air and vibrant green foliage had rejuvenated their senses, and they’d talked with excitement about their plans for the future. Nights had been mostly cloudless, as he recalled, and they’d made love under the stars nearly every evening before retiring to the thin, nylon shelter of their tent. Ben had finished the week with more than a few mosquito bites on compromising areas of his body. Susan had come away from the week pregnant, although they would not realize it for another six weeks. Thomas was born nine months later.
That had been a difficult time for them, so early in their marriage. Medical residency was not the ideal time to try to raise a newborn, of course, and the hospital didn’t lighten the already exhausting work hours simply because there was a crying three-month-old infant at home to attend to. Neither of them had family in the area, and Susan simply couldn’t bring herself to turn Thomas over to day care after her very brief maternity allowance had ended. Ultimately, she’d decided to take a year off to spend with the baby, which, in retrospect, had turned out to be the right choice for all of them.
Canton Road slipped by on his right, and Ben realized just a little too late that he probably should’ve turned there to detour around some of this congestion. Sunset Boulevard, which had now become Main Street, was the primary connector between the towns of Steubenville and Wintersville, small midwestern flecks on the map, lying just west of the Ohio River. Fifty miles to the east was Pittsburgh, and approximately 150 miles to the west was Columbus. Aside from a parade of small towns with equal or lesser populations, there wasn’t much else in between. Certainly not enough to warrant traffic like this—one of the reasons they’d decided to leave such cities as Chicago and Pittsburgh behind them in the first place.
Must be an accident, Ben thought. A bad one from the looks of this backup. Inconvenient and frustrating, of course—and for one guilty moment he resented its presence in yet another way. An accident causing this much of a standstill could mean fatalities. And that often involved a coroner’s investigation, which meant he might be making a trip to the Jefferson County Coroner’s Office this evening or, by the latest, tomorrow morning to perform an autopsy. Great. Absolutely perfect, he thought to himself, and immediately felt another pang of guilt. Life as a small-town pathologist meant one-stop shopping when it came to coroner investigations. There was him, and then there was the Allegheny County Coroner’s Office and Forensic Lab in Pittsburgh, fifty miles to the east. But he had known that, he reminded himself, when he’d signed on to the job here.
The Beatles had yielded to the Band, who were sailing off into the first stanza of “The Weight”—an ominous sign, Ben thought. He switched off the radio. Traffic had slowed to a crawl and he could now see the entrance to Indian Creek High School just ahead on the right. This seemed to be the source of at least some of the congestion. He could identify two police cruisers, an ambulance, and a news truck in the school’s parking lot. On the right-hand shoulder, two cars had pulled off the road to exchange insurance information, apparently the result of a low-speed rear-end collision caused by a little rubbernecking. The drivers were involved in a heated discussion, and a sheriff’s deputy approached to intervene before things escalated further.
Up ahead, the traffic dissipated, and Ben accelerated slowly toward home. There was still enough time to make Thomas’s wrestling meet, although things would be a little tighter than he’d initially anticipated. He flipped back on the radio and smiled to himself. The Band was finishing the final chorus, and just like that, “The Weight” was over.
2
The first thing Ben noticed as he approached the house was that Susan had beaten him home, her gray Saab already parked in their driveway. He pulled in behind her, got out, and retrieved his briefcase from the trunk. Having heard him drive up, his wife had stepped out of the house and was walking down the front steps to greet him. Even after all these years she was still beautiful, Ben thought, with dark black shoulder-length hair and chestnut eyes he had difficulty looking away from. Her tall body had remained slim and agile, despite the two children she had carried. And although Ben himself was of similar athletic build, the years, he felt, had taken a harder toll on him, the responsibilities pulling steadily at the corners of his eyes, his brown hair now speckled generously with strands of gray. He smiled up at her, but the smile faded as she drew nearer.
“Tell me you’ve spoken with Thomas this afternoon,” she entreated, her hands clutching at the sides of her dress.
“Why? What’s wrong?” he asked, his mind automatically flipping through a list of the most catastrophic possibilities. Something was very wrong indeed, he realized as he studied her features. Susan was afraid—but she was much more than that: She was on the brink of hysteria.
“There’s been a death at the school,” she blurted out. “One of the high school kids, they think.”
Ben looked at her, dumbfounded. “What?”
“Someone was killed this afternoon,” she advised him. “Initial news reports said it was one of the high school kids, but they don’t know for sure.” Susan’s voice shook. “Where in the hell is Thomas?! He should’ve been home an hour ago!”
“He has a baseball game at Edison,” Ben reminded her. Edison High was located in the neighboring town of Richmond. A bus was scheduled to transport the team after school. But there were other, more pressing details to be considered. He was still trying to work his mind around what Susan had just told him. “What do you mean someone was killed? There was an accident?”
“An accident? Don’t you listen to the radio?”
“On the ride home,” he answered. “But they didn’t say anything about—”
“Honey, it wasn’t a car accident.” Susan’s voice continued to waver as she spoke, as if it were riding precariously along on one of those small-time roller coasters erected at carnivals. “One of the high school kids was murdered on the way home from school—in the woods along Talbott Drive. Ben, he was stabbed to death and just left there to die. They don’t even know who he is yet.”
For a moment, Ben was too stunned to say anything. What his wife had just told him was so implausible that he felt the urge to argue with her, to tell her that she was being ridiculous. Wintersville was a quiet midwestern town of about five thousand inhabitants. The town’s occupants were mostly middle-income conservative families who presumably preferred the sort of small-town life that could be enjoyed here. Golfing, fishing, and hunting were popular pastimes, and in early December folks came out for the annual Christmas parade. Tax evasion, shoplifting, and the occasional drag race along Kragel Road were the most hardcore criminal activities this town had seen over the past decade. After four years in Pittsburgh, it was one of the things that had initially attracted him. He had decided a long time ago that he did not wish to fall asleep to the sound of sirens. As for the murder of a high school child on his way home from school, it was simply not the type of thing that happened here. Ever.