If I Die Tonight Read online

  It was generally a pretty laid-back affair, the conference room meeting. But today, there was a pall over the room, a seriousness Pearl could sense as she and Udel approached the door. Inside, it felt almost as if they’d walked into another police station, one with a larger force and regular beats and cops too busy to give each other sarcastic nicknames.

  All nine officers were in the room, which was unusual. Sergeant Black stood at the far end, next to a petite woman in a tailored pants suit and a balding, middle-aged man with the type of thick mustache favored by 1970s porn stars and current-day hipsters trying too hard to be ironic.

  “I’m sure you’ve all heard, but the hit-and-run case involving Havenkill High School student Liam Miller has now become a homicide investigation,” Sergeant Black said, his eyes fixed on some point over their heads, as though he were reading from a teleprompter. “We will be assisting state police in the investigation. To that end, I’d like to introduce Kendall Wind and Alex Wacksman of the Bureau of Criminal Investigation. Detectives Wind and Wacksman will be working in our area, in and out of the station for the next few weeks at least, if the case isn’t solved earlier.”

  Pearl felt as though she’d walked through some portal and into a different station far from Havenkill, the sergeant body-snatched and replaced by someone who never, in a million years, would have asked a weeping carjacking victim to sign his Burger King bag the way he had with Aimee En the night before last. Even his voice sounded different. Unnaturally deep, like a documentary voice-over. Pearl turned to Udel, hoping to catch his eye. But he stared straight ahead, posture stick straight in a way she’d never seen before—callow, lazy-assed Bobby Udel body-snatched too. As the sergeant continued on with his speech, Pearl’s gaze moved up to Udel’s face, bright eyes blinking. Tears.

  Pearl looked away. As Sergeant Black brought them all up-to-date on the specifics of the case—the APB issued for Amy Nathanson’s Jaguar, the composite sketch drawn of the alleged assailant, requests on local and statewide news outlets for information leading to a possible arrest—she focused on the female detective, Kendall Wind, who was probably just a few years older than herself, curls tamed into a bun, eyebrows plucked to a perfect arch, full lips pursed and painted a sober burgundy. Doing everything she could to will on an extra ten years, to separate herself that much more from the boy whose death she was investigating.

  The boy who died.

  The sergeant was giving out the day’s assignments. Pearl listened for her name, thinking about Liam again, Liam in the heat of summer, his eyes shining in the garden lights, the same color as the water in the pool. “I’ll never do it again,” he had said. But Pearl and Tally had called his parents anyway. They’d called the two remaining kids’ parents in the hopes of . . . what? Scaring them off pool-hopping forever? The picture-taker’s dad had rolled his eyes. “They’re just being kids,” he’d said. But Liam’s parents had been different. “How could you?” his mother had said to him. “Did we raise a criminal?”

  It hadn’t been Pearl’s idea to call them. In fact, when Tally had first insisted on it, she’d pulled him aside. “Hey, who’s Danno now?” she had said. A joke. But Tally hadn’t found it funny. “Just because you’re a rich, white kid from a rich, white town, it doesn’t give you extra rights,” he’d said. And that had sold her. Pool-hopping in Havenkill translated to breaking and entering in Poughkeepsie. Forget about calling parents. These boys would have been taken in to the station and booked. Pearl had said that to Liam and his friend, whose name had been Ryan, she remembered now. Ryan Grant, a square-jawed kid with the rosiest cheeks—she hadn’t been able to tell if that had been from health or humiliation. She’d said it again in front of their parents. Breaking and entering. Taken in and booked. She’d used those exact words.

  Did that night change Liam Miller? Did it turn him into the type of person who was so desperate to do good, he rushed at speeding stolen cars?

  “Maze and Udel,” the sergeant said, interrupting her thoughts. “You’ll be patrolling the Kill.”

  WHEN THE MEETING ended, Pearl hurried ahead and caught up with Ed Tally. “Hey, Ed,” she said.

  “Hey.”

  “You remember Liam Miller, right? From the summer?”

  He stopped. She wanted him to say something, or at least look at her in a way that showed he remembered everything he’d said on that pool-hopping night and felt some of the guilt she was feeling. “I remember,” he said. But his eyes stayed flat as a locked door, and Pearl wondered if that calm was something that came with age or from innocence. She envied him both. “Makes me glad I have daughters, the way boys are,” Tally said. “Always getting up to things.”

  “REPRIEVE,” BOBBY UDEL said, once they were in the parking lot, heading for their patrol car.

  “Huh?” said Pearl.

  “You said a word never brought anybody back to life. But, like . . . if you’re on death row . . .”

  “Ah. I stand corrected.”

  “You want to drive?”

  “Sure.”

  They got in the car—the same cruiser she’d driven Amy home in. Pearl started it up, feeling tired, exhausted actually, the beer headache lingering, Amy’s scent still heavy in the air, hair spray and wet vinyl and pancake makeup, her voice in Pearl’s mind all over again. I don’t know what I’m going to do if that boy dies.

  Udel said, “When you were in Poughkeepsie, did you see this a lot? You know . . .”

  “Teen homicides?”

  He nodded.

  “Not a lot,” she said. “But there were a few . . . Gang stuff.” She studied his pinched, pained face. “It’s never easy.”

  “I’ve only known this town,” he said. “My whole life. I went to Havenkill High. HCC. The Police Academy up in Albany, but I commuted there from my parents’ house. Hell, I went to New York City once, when I was a kid. My mom and dad took me to The Phantom of the Opera. Serendipity. FAO freakin’ Schwarz. All I wanted to do was come home.”

  “You like it here.”

  “I get it here,” he said. “It’s like reading the same book over and over. You know what’s going to happen. You know how it ends . . .” His voice cracked.

  Pearl looked at him, his eyes clouded, glistening. “Did you know Liam?” she said.

  He nodded. “My cousin Ryan is in his class,” he said as she pulled out of the space. “They’re best friends . . . Were best friends.”

  “Ryan Grant?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “How did you know?”

  This town. This small, small town. “Just . . . School assembly, I think,” she said.

  He nodded. A tear spilled down his cheek. Pearl went for the Kleenex box and held it out for him. He grabbed a handful without thanking her and raked it across his eyes. “Don’t tell the sergeant I cried.”

  “Why not?”

  “I need to work this case. I’m scared he won’t let me if he finds out I have feelings about it.”

  Pearl stopped the car. Looked at him. “We all have feelings about it.”

  Udel shook his head. He pulled something out of the pocket of his uniform and handed it to her: a faded picture of three boys, smiling, arms around each other—two in Little League uniforms, the older one at the center, a tall, gawky teenager, making devil horns behind their heads. “Liam’s parents gave this to me yesterday. Before he . . . when he was still on life support. They told me we’re like family. Ryan and me both.”

  Pearl studied the photo. The husky, dark-haired boy to the right, those rosy cheeks of his. The boy to the left, white-blond hair sticking out from beneath the blue baseball cap, so much smaller then, but still unmistakable . . . I’ll never do it again, officer. Small hands clutching the teenage boy’s waist, hugging him. “That’s you in the middle.”

  Udel’s hands in his lap, clenched into fists. Reddened eyes glaring at the window, acne dotting his cheeks. Same boy as the teenager in the picture, only with the wind knocked out of him. Anger burning in his eyes as though someone
had taken his favorite book, the one he’d read over and over, and ripped a page out of it. “My feelings,” he said, quietly. “They’re different.”

  “WADE.”

  It was past 1:00 PM and Wade was still sleeping. Connor stood over him in his darkened bedroom, listening to his heavy snores. It smelled of sweat and stale smoke in here. He wasn’t sure what to do. He said his brother’s name a little louder, but Wade didn’t budge.

  “Mom’s gone,” Connor tried. “She’s showing a house.”

  Still nothing. Maybe Wade was drugged. Connor wondered if he’d taken something.

  He flicked on the light switch and stumbled back. Man, Wade’s room was a mess. Dirty clothes everywhere, a broken skateboard from probably five years ago, stacks of old comic books, and stupid crap that Wade had found on the street and decided for whatever reason to take home with him (Why the FOR SALE sign? Why the orange safety cones?). Connor wasn’t winning any neatness prizes either, but at least he cared enough to shove most of his crap into his closet. “Wake up.”

  Wade rolled over onto his back and threw an arm over his eyes. “What are you doing in here?”

  “He died, Wade.”

  “Huh?”

  “Liam Miller.”

  “Wait, what?”

  “Liam died this morning. Everybody’s talking about it.”

  Wade sat up. Connor’s gaze moved from his face to the stack of his drawings peeking out from under the bed. Connor could make out a woman’s bare leg, the curve of a breast. It made his breath catch.

  “Oh,” Wade said. “Wow. That’s . . .”

  “I know.”

  “That’s awful.”

  Connor wanted to look at him, to figure out if he really meant what he was saying. Mom said she could always tell if Connor was lying from the sound of his voice, but with Wade it was his eyes. “Those big brown peepers never lie,” Mom had once said, which was probably why Wade was always staring at the ground or at his phone. Mom’s mistake, showing her hand like that. But it didn’t matter anyway, because much as he wanted to look at Wade, Connor couldn’t take his eyes off the drawing.

  “What are you looking at?”

  “Nothing.” Finally Connor tore his gaze from the leg. Is that a bruise or just a shadow? “I just can’t believe Liam’s gone,” he said. “It isn’t fair.”

  Wade’s eyes were downcast, shielded by heavy lids, lashes thick as a girl’s. His dyed black hair stuck out at weird angles, and his thin, ropy arms were almost the same color as the white T-shirt he wore, and Connor thought, not for the first time, how weird his brother had become and in such a short time. As if he’d erased his old self and replaced it with one of his freaky drawings. “Nothing’s fair.” Wade said it to his hands. He picked at a nail.

  Connor’s gaze returned to the girl’s leg, her breast. He thought about Liam again, how his life had ended in a second, but as much as he tried to focus on that, all he wanted to do was to slip the paper out from under Wade’s bed, to see the rest of her.

  “Connor?”

  “Yeah?”

  “The bag.”

  “I got rid of it,” he said. “At the Lukoil. Like you told me.”

  “Look at me.”

  Connor took a breath, turned to Wade. Put the girl in the drawing out of his mind and took in his brother’s face: the eyes like black holes, the purple circles underneath.

  “Did you tell Mom?”

  “No.”

  “She saw you there, though, right? She picked you up at the Lukoil. She said she found you by the Dumpster . . .”

  “I didn’t tell her anything,” Connor said. “I swear to God.”

  A moment passed, a silence thick enough to see. “Thanks, buddy,” Wade said finally.

  Connor started to leave, but the question came out before he could stop it. “Wade,” he said. “Where were you that night?”

  “Huh?”

  “When you came into my room. When you put the bag in my closet. You were all wet. Where did you come from?”

  Wade looked at him. “Nowhere.”

  “But . . .”

  “Just outside. That’s all. Having a cigarette.”

  “At four in the morning?”

  “I couldn’t sleep. I got caught in the rain.”

  “It just seemed like you’d . . . been somewhere.”

  “Connor?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Do me a favor, okay? Pretend two nights ago never happened.”

  Connor blinked. “How am I supposed to do that?”

  “Never think about it again. Never ask about it again.” Wade put a hand on Connor’s shoulder. “It was just a dream,” he said. “Okay?”

  Connor nodded.

  “You never saw me. I was never there.”

  “Okay.”

  Wade’s eyes were like deep, black water. “That’s really awful about Liam,” he said. “But . . .”

  Connor stared at him, wondering how he could possibly finish that sentence. “But what?” he said, finally.

  “Nothing. Nobody deserves to die.”

  Connor started for the door, a feeling inside him like he was in a strange room, talking to someone he’d never met.

  BACK IN HIS own room, Connor made sure Arnie had enough food and water and then he lay down on his bed, closed his eyes, straining for something nice to think about.

  He came up with his fifth birthday. Party at Pizza Haven, that ice-cream cake from Carvel shaped like a spaceship—a stripe of vanilla, a stripe of chocolate, crunchy cookie pieces, whipped cream, and blue and white buttercream icing that he could still taste if he thought about it hard enough. All Connor’s friends from kindergarten and Noah sitting next to him and Mom looking so happy. He could remember blowing out the candles and his friends cheering, but most of all Connor could remember Wade and the present he had given him: a drawing of Buzz Lightyear he’d made himself. Mom had gotten it framed, and it still hung in Connor’s room over his desk. He opened his eyes and looked at it—the careful, straight lines, his brother such a good artist, even at just nine years old, thinking so hard about whatever it was he chose to draw.

  And now . . . that girl.

  He tried to push her out of his mind, to think of other things—the fight with Noah, Liam Miller dying, Connor and Wade’s long-gone dad, whose face he could barely remember even though he supposedly lived just a few towns away. Everyone and everything that had left his life. But when he closed his eyes, she was all he could see—the drawing under his brother’s bed, the outstretched leg, the freckles and straining calves, the clipped toenails. The round breast, row of ribs beneath it.

  Connor could tell. He knew. The drawing of that girl wasn’t like Wade’s other drawings, where the bodies were so airbrush-perfect and out of proportion that anybody could see they’d been copied from comic books or porn sites. This one was different. She would stay in Connor’s thoughts. She, not it, just as if he’d walked into Wade’s room and seen a real naked girl there, hiding under his bed. Because that’s what the girl in the drawing was, with her faded tan and her ankle bracelet, puckered skin at the thighs, muscles braced, ready to jump off the paper. Real.

  Seven

  Its real name was Haven Kill; the Kill was just what everyone called the murky body of water at Havenkill’s less populated western end, in order to avoid confusion with the town itself, kill being Dutch for riverbed. Lots of Hudson River towns were built around kills and were named for them, though this particular kill, Pearl thought, looked awfully stagnant for a riverbed, more like an enormous pond.

  She hadn’t patrolled the Kill much. Being a newcomer, not to mention female and young, Pearl was, in the sergeant’s somewhat old-fashioned mind, better suited to the more populous areas: the shopping district on Orchard, the tree-lined streets surrounding the middle and high schools with their brightly painted Victorian houses and well-kept gardens, just a stone’s throw from the park.

  The Kill wasn’t like the rest of Havenkill. It was more
like something out of an old summer-camp slasher movie. Back in the 1970s, the land around the Kill had been designated “forever wild” by the town council in order to stave off what they saw as rampant commercialization in the area, and while indeed there weren’t any strip malls here (or in the rest of Havenkill for that matter) there weren’t any houses either. Just a few abandoned hunting cabins Ed Gein would have felt at home in. Creepy plant life too: mangy cattails, poison sumac. And crows, dozens of them, screaming from the trees.

  “They gossip, you know that?” Udel said as they got out of the car, his voice barely audible over the shrieks. “If somebody’s mean to one of them, they tell each other, and then they all gang up. Listen to them. Trash-talking us.”

  Pearl looked at him. “Were you ever mean to a crow?”

  He shrugged. “Probably.”

  The ground was mucky, tugging at Pearl’s boots, and the water was high. The Kill was pretty deep to begin with, but the storm had transformed it. There was a nasty smell to it too—wet moss and sulfur and dying, rotting things. The current churned and the sky was a threatening gray. Kind of a crappy day to go fishing, but there they were, the reason why Pearl and Udel had stopped the car: a leaf peeper, standing thigh-high in the Kill with what had to be his kids, a boy of about twelve and a little girl, maybe five years old, all in fishing vests and wellies and faded, floppy-brimmed hats, looking as though they’d stepped out of an L.L.Bean catalog, only—as Pearl could see as she got closer—Dad was too busy diddling his phone to pay attention to either one of them, and the girl looked miserable.

  “How you folks doing?” Udel said it too loudly, a big unnecessary smile on his face and a slight . . . was that a southern accent? Pearl wasn’t sure whether he always went all Andy Griffith on civilians when questioning them or if he was simply overcompensating for his grief over Liam. “Catch any big ones?”