The Fall of Never(50)

“I’m sure they were just worried about you. Maybe it would have been too hard on them to come.”

“Well, it was hard on me not seeing them. Sometimes,” she said, her voice dropping down a notch as if they were about to share some intimate secret, “I think my parents didn’t even know I was alive. Like they’d forgotten all about me.” And she could see them in her mind’s eye, standing in that bright yellow office at the institution—both of them with their heads bowed, their eyes unable to focus on her. Her father had almost said something just before she was taken away down the hall, but in the end words had proven too difficult for him. And then they were gone.

She could feel herself on the verge of tears. Coward, she thought.

“I’m sorry,” Gabriel said. “I’m sorry it was that bad for you.”

“I wonder if they were the reason I broke down when I was fifteen,” she said. It was a matter-of-fact statement, resonating with the quality of a well-worked notion, although this was truly the first time such a thought had ever occurred to her.

“Why?” Gabriel said. “What could they have done?”

“Maybe nothing,” she said, “and maybe that was all it took. Maybe their absence as parents caused that breakdown.”

There was a long silence that followed. Then Gabriel said, “You’re thinking of your sister?”

“I am.”

“What are you thinking?”

“Just that it’s odd how she’s in a bad place right now too. Right in the middle of her childhood.”

“Right at the age of fifteen,” Gabriel added. “Just like you.”

“Fifteen,” she muttered. The corresponding ages hadn’t occurred to her before.

“But it’s something different with Becky,” Gabriel said. “I mean, the poor thing was attacked and nearly…” He trailed off, sparing Kelly’s feelings. “Maybe there’s something more there and you’re just using the similar events of both your lives to cover up what’s really the problem.”

“So what’s really the problem?”

“Maybe,” he said, “you feel bad for leaving your family behind. Maybe you feel bad for leaving Becky behind.”

The concept was nothing new—in fact, she’d thought it herself several times—but Gabriel’s words struck her like a hammer whacking a gong nonetheless. She’d just needed to hear someone else say it.

“I think maybe you’re right,” she said. “So how do I fix that? How do I make up for lost time and fix those mistakes?”

For some reason, she anticipated some grand solution to come from Gabriel Farmer—something that would make everything all better and heal old wounds, erase the ugly scars.

“I don’t know,” was all he wound up saying.




Just as Kelly and Gabriel entered Gabriel’s tiny apartment, Detective Felix Raintree parked his sedan outside the police station. He wasn’t thinking about old wild-eyed Graham Rand; rather, he was silently observing the weather. It had gotten cold feverishly quick this year, and winter wasn’t even fully upon them. Lawns were already stiff with frost. Windows had been shut and locked weeks ago, heaters already pumping.

Going to be brutal this year, he thought to himself as he mounted the front steps of the station.

Inside, Annie Haas, the station’s dispatcher, sat at her desk with her face buried in a desk drawer, as if searching for something. Behind her on the desk was a small Philco radio from which Billie Holiday gently worked through “Solitude.” Annie, who normally communicated an air of pleasant contentment to those around her, looked frazzled and even a bit irritated. As Raintree approached her desk, she looked up sharply and nearly sighed with relief at the sight of the detective.

“Felix,” she said.

“What’s the matter? You look distraught.”

“Mr. Rand. He’s just been getting me so uptight and nervous, walking around the way he was.”

“Where is he?”

“I told him to wait in your office.”

“Sheriff?”

“He went home,” Annie said. Raintree had a distaste for Sheriff Alan Bannercon, a young fellow from Shitpoke, Kentucky who, the detective surmised, would probably have himself a difficult time if he ever had to distinguish his handgun from his nose-picking finger.

“And Sturgess?”

“Out on a call. Mr. Rand was quite adamant about speaking with you, Felix.”

“Rather,” Raintree mused. He slid off his overcoat and, standing on one foot, leaned over Annie’s desk to peer through the wire-mesh glass wall and into his own office. The shades were half-drawn. He could make out a flannel hunting jacket pacing back and forth from behind them.

Felix Raintree really had no problem with old Graham Rand—he was a lonely, keep-to-himself widower with an excruciatingly dull life and a severe imagination that compensated for such dullness. To date, and since the death of his wife three years ago, Graham Rand had professed to several members of the Caliban County Police Department that he’d seen the ghost of his dead wife roughly sixty-three times since her demise. Sometimes she was standing out in the yard, half-hidden behind a huddle of blue spruce; other times, he claimed to have opened the bathroom door only to find the poor dead woman using the toilet, or sponging herself in the bath. Or sometimes just standing there in the middle of the night at the foot of his bed. Usually Graham Rand made these claims while in his cups and seated on a bar stool at Rita’s; other times, he called the station and insisted someone be sent over immediately. Being the patient and good-natured soul that he was, Raintree usually found himself volunteering to drive out to the old Rand place. Soon, Graham Rand began asking for him by name.