16
TOM SUTTER STOOD just outside the shelter, alone and listening to the sounds of his own smoking, the faint cracklings of tobacco and paper when he inhaled, the sighs of his breath when he exhaled. He smoked the cigarette down and dropped it to the concrete and crushed it under his boot toe before he remembered the receptacle with its long plastic neck. He thought of Gordon Burke—the pain, the anger in those eyes all these years later. Of course still there, of course—where would it go? And he thought of Danny Young, nineteen back then, Gordon’s daughter’s age. Audrey’s age now. What had become of him? Would you even recognize him if you passed him on the street?
Of course you would.
Sutter looked up at stars, the billion stars—far more than that, sending light from distances you could never imagine. Coldness and silence and total indifference as to himself or anyone else alive now or ever alive. He looked into these so-called heavens and said: “Well, what have you got to say about it?” And stood listening.
“That’s about what I thought,” he said. Then he walked to the parking lot and got into his car and began the long drive home. He’d not slept in his own bed for two nights and they wanted to keep her for one more night at least; she was out of danger but they didn’t like her temperature, and they would know more tomorrow.
On the highway, the sedan up to speed, he lit another cigarette and left it to burn between his knuckles. After a while he said, “Why don’t you just say it?” But she stayed quiet. Sometimes he would smell her lipstick. Her skin. The whole complex scent of her. Would see her hands in the corner of his eye. The flash of the diamond he’d put on her finger, years ago.
You don’t need to hear it from me, she said finally. You already know it.
He drove. The cigarette burning down.
“Shoot,” he said. “That never kept you from saying it before.”
TWO HOURS LATER he stood near the trestle bridge, in the rutted and trampled snow there, looking down the beam of his MagLite at the river. The rupture had frozen over but was still visible by its outline of jagged ice. From where he stood it had the mouthy look of a great fish, a prehistoric monster, frozen at the moment of striking. He saw the iced-over hole and he saw the story it told but he could not see his daughter there, struggling to get out, pawing at the busted ice, pulled under into that coldness, that darkness, by the car as it rolled. Could not see that.
Of the car’s tiretracks going down there was nothing left; they’d been plowed under by the car’s body coming up. Nothing left of the tiretracks up top either, where the car had first come to rest; too many vehicles had come and gone and you couldn’t expect first responders to concern themselves overly about evidence—and he wouldn’t have it any other way in this case—but God damn.
He doused his light and stood at the top of the bank with his arms at his sides. The breath smoking from his nostrils. Winter smell of woodfire in the air. Listening, but not a sound. Then, from downriver, traveling some distance along the ice, the baying of a hound dog. Baying. Pausing. Baying again, but answered by nothing Sutter himself could hear in all that hushed valley. He crossed the road and got back in his sedan and shut the door and sat in a darker, closer silence.
Don’t even say it, she said after a moment, and he didn’t. But then he did: “Just one more stop,” he said, and turned the key in the ignition.
THERE WAS A pay phone at the corner of the station but when he went to pick up the receiver there was no receiver, no cable, and he moved on, passing the window—the woman sitting there, at work on her puzzles, much as he’d pictured her—and stepped inside.
“Oh,” she said, looking up from her work. “I didn’t see you pull up.”
Sutter turned and looked out the pane of glass and said, “No, I guess I parked out of view, didn’t I?”
“That’s all right. I guess you can park anywhere you like, Officer.”
She sat on her stool behind the counter, soft-faced and blond. The pin tag on her chest said pamela. He took in the cluttered countertop, the disposable lighters and ChapStick and other plastic junk for sale.
“Is it about the accident again?” the woman said. “Those two girls? Just so awful.”
Sutter shook his head—somber, dumbfounded. “It doesn’t get much more awful, does it?”
“No, sir. It just chills me to the bone to think about it.”
“It had to be mighty cold in that water.”
“Well, yeah, that—but I mean seeing those two girls just a few minutes before, right here? Right where you are standing now? I still can’t hardly believe it.”
“I guess you remember that night pretty clearly, ma’am.”
“I guess I’ll never forget it.”
He stood a moment, giving the comment room. Then he said, “I know they’ve already asked you questions up and down, ma’am, but I just want to ask one or two more, if you don’t mind.” He watched to see if she would look more carefully at his sheriff’s jacket, but she did not. Good warm jacket for a cold night, if anyone cared. Beneath it he wore a plain khaki shirt, no tie, and he wore jeans and a plain leather belt and his old leather workboots. His sheriff’s hat and belt and holster, his badge, were all back home in his bedroom closet. The county-issue .45 was back with the department, turned in one year ago on his last day, as per regulation.
The woman said, “I’ll answer whatever you want to ask me, Officer. If it’ll help, I’ll answer.”
“Thank you, ma’am—Pamela, is it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You can call me Tom, Pamela.”
She placed her hands in her lap and waited. He glanced about the cramped little store. In a dark recess at the back an exit sign glowed above a metal firedoor. Adjacent to that door was a narrow wooden door leading, he guessed, to some kind of storage room or back office.
“You tend to be here by yourself, Pamela?”
“Yes, sir. Six to midnight on weeknights.”
He’d already looked for security cameras and seen none. “It doesn’t seem like the safest of shifts for a woman alone, if you don’t mind me saying.”
She laughed. “You’d have to be crazy to come here looking for money, or any other kind of nonsense. For one thing, Ron—that’s my boss—he takes all the day cash away at five p.m., and most folks use cards for the gas anymore. Heck, I asked for this shift. It’s nice and quiet, mostly.”
“And the other thing?”
“Sir?”
“You said for one thing,” he said. “Sounded like there was another thing.”
“Oh.” She glanced toward the back, the shadowed recess, and he saw the color come to her face like a sunburn. She flung a hand and said, “I was just gonna say that Ron, my boss, comes in kind of regular. At nights. He stops by to check on things.” She fussed with the ChapStick dispenser.
“But he wasn’t here that night?” Sutter said. “He didn’t stop by?”
“No, sir. Not that night.”
Sutter nodded. “You get a lot of regulars, then?” he said, and she looked up at him big-eyed and hot-faced and he added, “Customers, folks filling up.”
She gave a breathy laugh. “Oh, sure. Plenty. I mean, we’re the only station out this way you know, so.”
“How about a boy—a young man named Bud?”
She shook her head. “It’s like I told the sheriff before, I don’t know anyone named Bud around here. I mean he might’ve been in here, but I didn’t know him by name.”
“Did you know him by sight—him or the other boy?”