“Patti, Patti, come on. I need you to focus. So she was a little depressed and tense with all the junior-year stuff. Anything else? Was she keeping new company? Any new boyfriends? Girlfriends?”
But it was no good. Patti still wasn’t ready. The strength she was using to hold it together was blocking her ability to think deeply or to feel anything. And then, when the front door opened and the ME’s men came in, one holding a folded body bag under his arm, Patti exploded out of her chair and charged at them, clawing. “No! No! You leave her be. That’s her room. This is her house. You don’t touch her. You don’t touch her!”
By then Suit had caught up to her and was holding her back, clamping his arms around her. She put up a hell of a struggle, and Jesse could see that Suit needed to exert some strength to hold Patti back. Even as Suit held her, Patti screamed and kicked at the air.
“You leave my daughter be. You leave her be! You’re not going to put her in a plastic bag, not my girl, not my beautiful little girl.”
But that was exactly what those men were going to do. They were going to place the body of Heather Mackey, cheerleader, popular high school junior, in a liquid-proof bag and pull a zipper up over her cooling, lifeless face. Then they were going to carry her down the stairs and out the front door, place her remains in the back of a van, and drive her to the morgue.
Jesse nodded for Suit to take Patti Mackey into the living room.
“You keep her there no matter what,” he said.
Jesse watched the sad procession. The ME first, his men behind him, and Peter Perkins in the rear.
“Chief,” the ME said as he passed, head down. “I will have the results for you as soon as I can, but the tox screen is going to take a while.”
“Do what you can, Doc.”
Peter Perkins stopped and stood in front of Jesse.
“What is it, Peter?”
“I heard an author interviewed on TV last week. He said we declared the war on drugs fifty years ago. We’ve spent a trillion dollars fighting it, but that drugs were cheaper, more available, and more potent now than ever before. Said that if that was victory, he’d hate to see defeat.”
Jesse didn’t say anything to that. What was there to say?
Four
Jesse’s son, Cole, was sitting on the sofa, watching TV and drinking a beer. Cole and Jesse weren’t yet at the hugging, I-love-you-Dad-I-love-you-Son stage. It was unclear if they would ever get there. Still, there were moments when Jesse found himself staring at his son in awe. They didn’t look much alike, though Cole was tall, athletic, and sturdily built. Cole’s looks, as they say in the South, favored his mother. They shared more in terms of personality. Tonight it wasn’t awe in Jesse’s eyes, but fear. Fear, not for himself. It was the kind of fear he only ever experienced over people he cared for.
“Hey,” Cole said, not turning away from the screen.
“Hey, yourself.”
“It’s kind of late for you to be coming back from a meeting. Did you go down to Boston?”
“No meeting tonight. Work.”
Cole finally looked away from the screen and at the face of the father he had known for only the last several months. Regardless of the short time, Cole had learned to read Jesse’s grudging expressions. He recognized some of them from the mirror.
“Something bad, huh?”
“Seventeen-year-old girl ODed.”
Cole shook his head, sipped his beer. “Heroin?”
“Yeah. What made you say that?”
“Say what?”
“Heroin.”
Cole shrugged. “I don’t know. Was she a junkie?”
Jesse shook his head. “The ME doesn’t think so. Why?”
“Back home — I mean, before I left L.A. — there was a lot of that. Inexperienced users ODing. The cartels are cutting their shit with—”
“Fentanyl,” Jesse said, finishing his son’s sentence.
“Why do you do that, ask me a question you know the answer to?” Cole asked, angry.
Angry was Cole’s default setting. He’d shown up in Paradise while Jesse was still in rehab, and everyone who’d crossed paths with him, before or since, couldn’t miss the massive chip on his shoulder. Although Cole had accepted the truth of what had happened between his mother, Celine, and Jesse all those years ago in L.A., he hadn’t been able to shed the resentment and sense of abandonment he’d harbored against his father. Given his struggles with alcohol, Jesse understood how that worked. As Dix said, “Recognition is the easy part. Just because you know the truth of things, it’s impossible to snap your fingers and make patterns of behavior disappear. Logic and reason are woeful in the face of deeply ingrained feelings.”
“Sorry,” Jesse said. “I was thinking aloud.”
“No problem.” Cole went back to the TV.
Jesse stared at the beer in his son’s hand. Most nights, it didn’t bother Jesse. He had been sober for months now, and drinking had never been a social activity for him anyway. Oh, he drank socially. Drunks didn’t need much prompting. For Jesse, though, it was his drinking alone that did him in in the end. He had been around a lot of drinkers and lots of drinks since returning from rehab. It was hard at first, but easier all the time. And when sobriety got challenging, he’d just call Bill, his sponsor, and Bill would talk him down. Tonight, though, that beer looked pretty damn appealing.
Cole noticed Jesse staring at the beer.
“Sorry.”
Before Jesse could stop him, Cole clicked off the TV, went into the kitchen, and poured the beer down the sink. They might not have worked everything out and they still tiptoed around each other, but Cole didn’t want Jesse to go back down the rabbit hole. He wasn’t sure what he wanted from Jesse. He wasn’t sure when he came to town and he wasn’t sure now. At least he had a better idea of what he didn’t want. He hadn’t come all the way across the country to watch alcohol destroy his father the same way cancer had destroyed his mother. Although Cole still lugged that chip around on his shoulder, he was smart enough to know that parent issues were more easily resolved with a living parent than with a dead one.
Cole poured the rest of the six-pack down the sink as well.
Jesse said, “Thanks.”
“Whatever. I’m going to bed. Daisy’s got me in early tomorrow doing some prep work in the kitchen.”
“You going to work there for the rest of your life?”
Cole laughed, but it wasn’t a happy laugh. “You got me the job there. You embarrassed?”
“Never.”
Cole tried not to smile at that, but failed. “No, I’m not going to work there the rest of my life. Who knows, maybe I’ll become a cop.”
Jesse knew Cole was trying to get a rise out of him. “Uh-huh” was all Jesse said to that. “Good night.”
The beer might have been down the drain, but the smell of it hung in the air. Jesse filled the kitchen sink up with soap and water, then let it drain out. When that was done, he dialed Bill’s number and talked about why it was better to be sober. As they talked, Jesse kept picturing Heather Mackey’s lifeless body in her bed surrounded by her little-girl stuffed animals.
Five
Jesse’s first stop the next morning was at the high school, and his first stop at the school was the office of Principal Virginia Wester. His initial instinct had been to go back to Heather’s family to see if Selectman Mackey had anything to add to whatever little his wife had said the night before. But since the case wasn’t murder, at least not in the way he understood it, or an apparent suicide, Jesse figured to circle back to them in a day or two. Right now they would be caught in the throes of grief and in the midst of doing something no parent ever wants to do, let alone think of. People sometimes plan for their own deaths — buy plots, draw up wills, sign DNRs, choose readings, etc. — but he had never known anyone who planned for the death of a child. No, he would leave the Mackeys alone for the moment.