I slid in next to Donald, who was absently playing with a thin red straw floating in his drink. He stopped long enough to acknowledge me with a slight nod. Across from us, Rick sat clutching a bottle of cola with both hands, his expression darker than usual. “Heard the latest?”
“I haven’t seen the news since this morning,” I told him. “They found a body, it’s a woman, and she’s been dead for weeks. That’s all I know.”
Donald spoke without looking at me. “They’ve identified her.”
“Twenty-two years old, single mother from New Bedford,” Rick said. “Been missing almost two months.”
I looked back across the room, hoping to locate a waitress. The throng of patrons reminded me of the days in our early twenties when we’d come here, so full of life, young and strong and together, still so certain we were indestructible. All the time in the world, we’d thought then. Downing drinks, smoking cigarettes and eating whatever the hell we pleased without giving any of it another thought. Until that moment I hadn’t realized just how much I missed feeling like that, so enthusiastically alive.
“Remember when we used to come here before I got married?” I asked.
Rick stared at me like I’d spoken Mandarin, but Donald allowed the slightest quiver of a smile and nodded. “Can you believe we actually once found this place fun?”
I caught the attention of a waitress near the bar. When she got to us I ordered a beer then turned back to the table. “Those were good days,” I said. “Weren’t they?”
“Are you asking?” Donald gazed into what was left of his drink. “Or only hopeful?”
“A little of both.”
“Missing your youth, Alan?”
“Almost.”
“Don’t worry, we’re not old yet,” he said softly. “We’re just not young anymore.”
Rick leaned forward. “I hate to interrupt you two and your stroll down memory-fucking-lane over here, but we got some important shit to talk about.”
“So talk,” I said. “You’re the one who called the meeting.”
Rick’s eyes swept across me, sized me up. He opened his mouth to say something but the waitress appeared with my beer and asked if he and Donald wanted anything else. Donald ordered another vodka and tonic. “All set, sweetie, thanks,” Rick said.
The waitress hesitated just long enough to give him a flirtatious smile then vanished.
“We need to decide what to do,” Donald said.
“Do?” I looked at him, then at Rick. “What’s there to do?”
Eventually Donald said, “Could Bernard have really done this? Could he have killed that girl?”
My immediate inclination was to tell him to keep his voice down, but the din in the bar was such that I could just barely hear him myself. “We don’t know for sure that he did, but—”
“Yes we do,” Rick said. “Don’t be an idiot.”
I sighed. “Look, all I’m saying is—”
“I just can’t seem to get my mind around this,” Donald interrupted.
Rick cracked his knuckles and fired Donald a cross look. “Donny thinks we should turn the tape over to the cops.”
“I said we should consider it.”
“All that’s going to do is drag us right into the middle of this,” I said.
Donald looked at me with glazed eyes. “We’re already right in the middle of this.” He threw back the remainder of his drink just as the waitress appeared with a refill. Once she’d gone, he lit a cigarette and continued. “Look, we’re in possession of potential evidence here. We need to do the right thing, and the right thing, it seems to me, is to at least consider turning the tape over to the authorities.”
“No,” Rick snapped. “Fuck that.”
I took a gulp of beer, ran the cold bottle across my forehead. “I don’t know if it’s a good idea to give it to the police. Rick has a point, with all the news coverage this thing is getting, why draw attention to ourselves?”
“We haven’t done anything wrong,” Donald said. “What is it with you two? The entire area is in a panic. People think a killer is on the loose in Potter’s Cove, and if what Bernard said was true, it won’t end here. More bodies will be found. We’re going to have something on our hands here the likes of which this town has never seen.”
“And eventually it’ll pass.” Rick pushed his cola aside, put his hands flat on the table between us and again leaned in close. “What’s done is done, Donny. That tape’s not gonna bring anybody back to life, it’s not gonna prove a goddamn thing, and turning it over to the cops isn’t gonna do anything except get our names in the paper. I tried to make this crystal fucking clear before. I’m an ex-con. I don’t need the cops up my ass, snooping around my personal life. I want nothing to do with any of this, you hear me? Nothing. I got no doubt Bernard told the truth on that tape, that he did this shit for real. But it’s over. It’s not like he can kill again and we can do something to stop it—that’d be different—he’s dead and buried. There won’t be no more victims.”
“Fine, what if I turn it over to them? I’ll say it came to me and—”
“No chance.”
“Look, this isn’t just your decision. This involves all three of us.”
Rick shook his head. “I’m making the final call.”
“This is absurd.” Donald gave me a pleading look. “Alan, for Christ’s sake, help me out here.”
“Sorry, man,” I said. “I’m with Rick on this one.”
His eyes searched mine. “Tell me why.”
“Because in the overall scheme of things, the tape doesn’t mean shit.”
Rick and Donald exchanged glances. “What’s that mean?”
“We all know there’s more to this than meets the eye,” I said. “The only way to get to the bottom of it, the only way we’ll ever know for sure who Bernard was and what he did is to go back to the beginning.” I powered down the rest of my beer, belched under my breath and explained my plan to construct a history of Bernard’s activities.
Donald drew on his cigarette, expression thoughtful. “I understand your desire to put all of this into some semblance of order, Alan, sincerely I do. But…”
“But what?”
“Aren’t things bad enough? The deeper we delve into this the higher the odds that we’ll begin to open doors that are almost certainly better left closed.”
“We might find even worse things,” Rick added. “Things we don’t want to know.”
“Yeah.” I nodded at him through the graceful trails of smoke weaving between us. “We just might.”
“Then what’s the point?” Rick shrugged. “We can just keep our mouths shut, lay low and wait until the storm passes, you see what I mean?”
“Are you afraid of what we might find, Rick?”
His features hardened. “I’m not the one who freaked out and saw shit that wasn’t there, now was I?”
I set the empty beer bottle on the table and pushed it closer to the edge, ignoring the desire to smash it over his head. “You do what you want. I’m going to get to the truth.”
“A young woman was butchered and left in a shallow grave in a field the town uses to bury dead animals,” Donald said flatly. “Bernard almost certainly did it to her and who knows how many others, and the entire time we never even suspected he was a psychopath. That’s the truth, Alan. How much more do we need to know?”
Rick gave an enthusiastic nod. “Finally making some goddamn sense, Donny.”
A sudden cheer from a group of young men at one of the pinball machines startled us, and we turned in unison to look. “High score!” one of them yelled.