If I Die Tonight Page 8

  “Not yet,” said the man.

  “I did, Daddy,” the little girl said, gravely. “I showed you.”

  The man gave her a sharp look. “Fish, Emily,” he said. “They’re asking about fish and you know we haven’t caught anything.”

  He turned to them—thick dark hair, graying at the temples, weathered skin, vacant eyes you might say were twinkling if you weren’t all that observant. Phone in his hand, glowing. Pearl figured him for divorced with visitation rights and, from the looks of things, he didn’t take advantage of those rights very often.

  Pearl said, “Can you show us your license, sir?”

  He started to go for his back pocket.

  “I don’t like fishing,” Emily said.

  The boy shushed her.

  “You might like it,” the dad said, between his teeth, “if you gave it half a chance like Holden and me.” The little girl said something so softly, Pearl couldn’t hear it. She hung her head and stared at the water. Odd girl out. Pearl saw her own early childhood in flashing frames: The car pulling up. Aunt Ruth’s house looming before her. Her father shapeless, formless. Just a voice, because that was all she could remember of him. “Stop crying. You don’t want to hurt Aunt Ruth’s feelings.” Had he really said that, or were those words something Pearl had created in her mind, along with the crying itself? She couldn’t remember what type of car it was or what it had felt like to be dropped off at a stranger’s house by a dad who could no longer bear the sight of her. But she always imagined herself crying. And she always imagined him scolding her for it.

  The man held out his driver’s license.

  “Fishing license, sir,” Pearl said.

  “Fishing license?”

  “It’s not a traffic stop.” Pearl smiled. He didn’t smile back.

  Udel said, “You need a license to fish here, sir.”

  “Seriously?”

  “You can get one at the town clerk’s offices. It’s a hop, skip, and a jump.”

  “I don’t get very much time with my kids,” the man said. “How about you two just let us stay and—”

  “I don’t want to stay.”

  “Emily.”

  “That isn’t an option, sir,” Pearl said. “We’re being nice not fining you.”

  “All right,” the man said. “As long as you’re being nice.”

  Udel rolled his eyes at Pearl. “Whatever,” he whispered, the Andy Griffith act slipping away.

  Pearl gave Mr. Phone Diddler a big, fake smile. “I could easily write up a ticket. Comes with a super-duper nice fine.”

  “We’re leaving,” the man said. “Holden, Emily. Let’s go.”

  The boy glared at his sister. “Nice going.”

  They trudged out of the Kill: Dad first, still gaping at his phone, with Holden close behind. Then Emily, dragging her feet, staring down, her father and brother not even glancing back at her, even as she tripped and fell in the shallow water. Pearl helped her up, and when the girl looked at her, she saw tears in her eyes.

  “For what it’s worth,” Pearl said, “I wouldn’t want to fish here either.”

  Emily said nothing.

  Pearl tried, “You caught something, huh?”

  She nodded slowly.

  “A mermaid?”

  Emily shook her head. “A cat.”

  “A cat?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “You want to see?”

  “Emily!” Mr. Phone called out, already nearing his parked car, noticing just now she was gone. Father of the Year.

  “I’d love to see the cat,” Pearl said.

  Emily smiled, finally. “She’s really pretty.” She dug into the pocket of her fishing vest and pulled something out. “See?” she said, opening her little fist. It was a deco figurine, a silver one.

  “She is pretty,” Pearl said.

  “You want to hold her?”

  “Sure.”

  “Emily, we need to leave now!”

  The crows screamed. They do know a jerk when they see one.

  Emily placed the cat in Pearl’s open palm. She was surprised by the weight of the figurine, but then she took a closer look at it—a shiny silver cat, sleek and leaping. She touched the face, the bared teeth. A jaguar. “Hood ornament,” Pearl whispered.

  “Huh?”

  “Where did you find this, honey?”

  “Next to that tree.” Emily pointed to it—a thick birch about twenty yards away, straining out from the water’s edge. Must have fallen off on its way in.

  Pearl lifted the girl onto the shore and walked over to the tree. She ran her hand down the thick trunk, feeling and then seeing the scrape in it. “Emily,” she said. “Can I borrow the cat for just a little while?”

  “Will you be nice to her?”

  “Promise.” She called out to Udel and told him to radio state police, all the while thinking of Amy Nathanson, of her baby’s leather seats, soaking in the Kill.

  “ARE YOU ALL right?” said Jackie’s client, a retired New York City schoolteacher by the name of Inez Ventura.

  “Oh yes, of course. I’m just a little . . . I need to get more sleep.” Jackie made herself laugh, though there was nothing funny about what she’d said. Inez laughed along, because she was a nice woman.

  For easily a minute, Jackie had stood frozen in the laundry room of the eyebrow Colonial she’d been showing Inez, her hand resting on the washer-dryer as though she were taking an oath, staring down through the open dryer lid and thinking of this morning, of Wade’s black clothes at the bottom of her own dryer, the rest of the clothes in the washer, untransferred. What with the shock of Liam Miller’s death and comforting Connor over it, Jackie had put it out of her mind—Wade’s clothes in the dryer, what that could possibly mean. But now it was all she could think about.

  Jackie closed the lid. “Washer and dryer are both state-of-the-art,” she heard herself say, the sales pitch reanimating her in a way; she made eye contact with Inez while her brain stayed stuck on Wade, her sad-eyed son with his blackened hair, the black clothes in the dryer that would have been so easy to hide had he thought of transferring the other load, blending his own wet clothes in with the others. But no. Teenagers were still children in so many ways, unable to keep anything safe, including their own secrets. The night before SATs, you went out. You got caught in the rain. You tried to hide it. “Of course, these appliances come with the house, as do the Sub-Zero fridge, the dual-fuel oversize range . . . Did you notice the details in the kitchen? The subway-tile backsplash?” The same night someone stole a car and killed one of your classmates with it.

  Vaguely aware of Inez shaking her head no, Jackie said, “Let’s go take a closer look then.” Jackie led her into the kitchen and then through the rest of the house, walking and talking as though she were moving through a dream. Where did you go, Wade? She thought it with every step, the words in her head like a mantra, a prayer, but one she kept shutting out of her mind because of the memories it dredged up from two years ago. Her son missing from home. A stolen car . . . Where did you go this time, Wade? What are you hiding?

  AFTER SAYING GOOD-BYE to Inez, Jackie called Wade’s phone. He answered before she’d solidified in her mind what she was going to say to him, and something about the catch in his voice, the way he said, “Hi, Mom . . .” made her rethink it all.

  “You heard about Liam,” Jackie said.

  “Yeah. Connor told me.”

  “I’m sorry, honey.”

  Wade took a deep breath. Then another. She remembered him crying yesterday, how pained he had looked, tears on his face for the first time in years. “Are you . . .”

  “No,” he said. “I’m not crying.”

  “It would be okay if you were.”

  “Mom?”

  “Yes, honey?”

  “I really don’t feel like talking now.”

  Jackie’s turn to breathe. “All right,” she said. “I understand.” After she ended the call, she said, “Will you ever feel like talking?” T
o the dashboard. To no one. Will you ever feel like telling me the truth?

  She called Wade’s school and pressed the button for the guidance counselor’s office. As directed, she said her name clearly into the voice mail and asked if she could make an appointment, anytime on Monday, to discuss her son Wade. She’d start with the fact he missed the SATs, she figured. If she liked what she heard, she’d take it from there, maybe make an appointment for Wade too.

  After she ended the call, Jackie felt better, but only for a few seconds. The guidance counselor would be swamped tomorrow. So many kids trying to cope with the death of their friend and here she was, treating him like her personal therapist. Same way she’d treated his predecessor two years ago. Of course, Ms. Mulroney had asked for that, with all those lengthy after-school meetings, the phone calls when Jackie got home from work, asking not about how Wade was doing, but how he was responding, as though he were her patient . . .

  Jackie sighed. She hated the sound of her own breath—tremulous and fragile. She hated her thoughts, her awful suspicions. A stolen car. Wade, missing from home.

  She needed to stop thinking.

  Jackie was heading north on Orchard, taking the road out of town. She told herself she just needed a drive, some air, time alone, but as she gazed out the window at the row of fiery-leafed maples that lined the wide street, jaw clenched, thoughts full of spikes, she knew where she was going, and it was as though the car were taking her there. As though it had a mind of its own.

  IT WAS CALLED Mother Goose’s Book Nook, and it was painted pink, with alternating yellow and green shutters, bringing to mind an Easter egg. Jackie had never seen it in person—only in the pages of Hudson Valley Magazine, where its owner, Natalie Reed, had been profiled last month.

  Natalie Reed, former Office Girl. Now “happily married to Rhinebeck-based attorney Bill Reed and the busy mother of three little girls,” as described in the magazine, which failed to mention Bill’s other family or that, one month before closing on the Book Nook as an “early Christmas present” for his beloved wife, Bill Reed had filed a restraining order against his firstborn son.

  He only wanted to talk to you.

  Jackie didn’t like to think about it. She’d found a way to close a door in her mind on the whole ugly incident, but how could she stop herself now? With Wade sneaking off at night and keeping secrets yet again, it all seemed so horribly, frighteningly relevant.

  And you don’t care, Bill. You don’t give a damn about your son and whether he hurts himself. Or someone else.

  Jackie was standing on the sidewalk in front of the store. It was closed—probably so its busy owner could spend some quality time with her family.

  She peered through the big window at the space inside—the rows of thin-spined picture books and chunkier tomes for older kids. Fantasy stories for people young enough to believe that anything is possible. The antique brass cash register and the colorfully painted chandelier and the oversize rocking chair, everything so adorable it made Jackie want to gag. What had Natalie called it in the article? Oh, right. “My very own never-never land.” Double gag.

  A memory wormed its way into her mind: the three of them in the living room when Wade was just about three years old. SpongeBob SquarePants on the TV. Wade standing on Bill’s feet, hanging on to his daddy’s fingers as Bill walked around the room, taking great big strides. Wade beaming up at Bill, the way he always did when he was little, as though the whole world revolved around his father. And laughing. Wade used to have the most wonderful laugh.

  Jackie’s pulse pounded. She wanted to break the lock, to find a brick and throw it through the window, to pull the books off the shelves, empty the cash register, leave Natalie’s never-never land in a shambles and make Bill pay for the damages.

  Make Bill pay.

  “Excuse me?” The voice came from behind her. Jackie turned and found herself looking straight into the eyes of Natalie Reed. “I had to run out for a few minutes, but I’m just about to open up,” Natalie said. “Can I help you with anything?”

  Jackie couldn’t speak. Her mouth felt dry. Natalie smiled at her. No sign of recognition in her eyes. She wore yoga pants, a hot pink T-shirt that showed off a tan, golden highlights in her red-brown hair. Expensive-looking. She smelled faintly of honey and mint—all-natural shampoo, no doubt—and she had a couple of extra pounds on her. Residual baby fat maybe, but it suited her. She looked healthy and rested. Soft. “Hello, Natalie.” She hadn’t meant to call her by name.

  “Do I know you?”

  Jackie looked at her, this smiling woman whom in all honesty she didn’t know. She’d seen her only once, at one of Bill’s office parties, ten, eleven years ago. And if they’d been formally introduced, Jackie didn’t remember. Young, that’s what Jackie had thought back then as she watched Bill keep his distance, the way he so purposefully avoided the girl’s steady gaze. She is so incredibly young.

  What had Jackie been thinking, coming here? What had she imagined she’d accomplish, even if Bill had been here, as she’d hoped he would? He sent money every month. He’d pointed that out to her over the phone during the screaming match they’d had following the restraining order. The last time they’d ever spoken. “I send money every month. If he expects more than that, it’s on you, not me.” Bill viewed it as a mistake: his marriage to Jackie, the family they’d created together. Natalie was his do-over, and nothing Jackie could say could keep him from looking at things that way. “I know your name,” she said, “from the article in Hudson Valley Magazine.”

  Natalie exhaled. “Oh, yes. I can’t believe they gave the store that much space!” She put a key in the front door and pushed it open. “So . . . What can I help you with?”

  Jackie backed away, feeling Natalie’s kindly business-owner’s gaze on her and needing to get home or somewhere else, anywhere but here. You can’t help me with anything, she wanted to say. But all the time, it was bubbling up inside her, that molten anger. The idea that this woman wouldn’t know her. The idea. “My name is Jackie Reed,” she said.

  Something shifted within those crystal eyes, like clouds starting to form. “Excuse me?” Natalie said.

  Jackie took a step closer. Looked directly into her eyes and said it, calmly as she could. “I’m the mother of your stepchildren.”

  IT DIDN’T TAKE long to find Amy Nathanson’s car. Deep as the Kill was, especially after the rain, it was still a relatively compact body of water and, judging the point of entry from the scrapes against the tree, divers were able to locate the Jaguar within an hour. A tow truck arrived and cables were attached, and soon it emerged from the depths like a monster, plant life hanging off the rear frame, state troopers and investigators alongside Udel and Pearl, looking on like a rapt audience as the back end of the car emerged to reveal the banged-up body, the smashed rear window. “Poor Baby,” said Udel.

  “Right? Amy’s going to freak out.” Pearl’s phone buzzed in her pocket. She plucked it out to silence it, expecting Paul, but seeing the Albany number instead. Her father’s number. She glanced quickly at Udel, who was moving toward a trooper, answering a question. She declined the call.

  “Officer Maze?”

  Pearl turned to find Kendall Wind standing on the other side of her. She wondered how long the detective had been there and felt her own heart pounding, as though Kendall Wind would recognize her father’s number and know everything that was on her mind. “Yes?”

  Wind wore a heavy coat that swallowed up her small frame. Up close, she looked younger, more delicate, but when she shook Pearl’s hand, her grip was strong, and there was a hardness to her eyes. “I understand you spoke to Amy Nathanson on the night she came into the station,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “What was your read?”

  “Very upset,” she said. “And very wet.”

  “Huh?”

  “We had a bad storm that night. She got caught in it.”

  “Did you find her trustworthy?”


  Pearl looked down at the soft ground. “It was hard not to believe her.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning carjacking/hit-and-runs aren’t exactly common here, but the story seemed too bizarre not to be true. And . . . you know . . . the way she was crying.”

  “Not for nothing,” Kendall Wind said. “But if I ran a boy over and drove away, I’d cry. A lot.”

  Pearl thought about the whiskey smell on Amy Nathanson’s breath and how she’d been the only one to notice it—a similar species, sniffing another out.

  “I couldn’t find Breathalyzer results in the files,” Kendall Wind said, as though she’d been reading her mind.

  “Yeah, well . . . When she showed up, there was so much confusion . . .”

  Wind smirked. “He’s a big fan.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Sergeant Black. Huge, hopelessly smitten Aimee En super-Stan.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Who gets an autograph from a potential suspect and frames it a day later?”

  “He framed the Burger King bag?”

  She rolled her eyes. “So now we know why there was no Breathalyzer,” she said. “A Burger King bag. Jesus.”

  Pearl looked at Wind, her cheeks flushing. She’s good. “Ms. Nathanson did come to the station voluntarily,” she said. “We all viewed her as a witness.”

  “All of you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did she talk about the carjacker a lot?” Wind said. “This . . . hooded teenager?” She may as well have been saying “headless horseman” or “little green man from outer space.” So patronizing. Pearl found herself feeling more and more defensive of the sergeant, of their tiny police force with its condemned station house and its holding bench. Of Amy too, as annoying as she was, if only for the fact she hadn’t been treated as a suspect. “She gave us a description,” Pearl said. “It’s in the report.”

  “Did it strike you as an accurate description?”

  “It was okay.”

  “Just okay?”

  “Ms. Nathanson was out of sorts, crying,” Pearl said. “She was upset about her car and Liam Miller and I’m sure she’ll be able to remember more details about him when you question her.”