The Sleepwalker(84)

In the morning, Gavin found me sitting on the couch, still clad in only his T-shirt. I must have looked waiflike and pathetic to him, and I could see in his eyes that he thought my despair was about the man he had become, once more, in his sleep. But then he noticed the towel in my lap and his shoulder bag on the couch beside me. And he understood. He reached for the attaché and tossed it onto the carpet beside the coffee table. Then he sat down next to me, where it had been.

“I was planning to burn it,” he said. “I was planning to burn the bag and the towel.”

“Where?”

“My aunt and uncle’s hunting camp. They have a little cottage up in the Northeast Kingdom.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Life just intervened. Either someone was there or I had too much work here. And it was going to be…hard. Emotionally.”

Hard. The word echoed for me.

“The thing is, my parents gave me the bag when I graduated from college,” he went on. “You know what a fuckup I’d been, I told you. The fact I’d made it? Graduated? It meant a lot to them. And the towel? That was going to be difficult to burn, too, but for different reasons. Cops don’t burn evidence. At least good cops. Burning it was, I don’t know, crossing a line. So maybe I kept finding excuses not to go to the camp and just do it.”

“You found the towel in my mom’s car?”

He nodded. “It was in the backseat. I cleaned the grill and the bumper. I cleaned the top of the windshield where it met the roof.”

“My father knows, too, doesn’t he?”

He spoke with an air of resignation. “A father doesn’t say those things aloud to a cop. And a cop—in this case, at least—doesn’t say them to a dad. I can’t tell him what I know. Excuse me, what I believe. But I encouraged him rather strongly to bring your sister to the sleep clinic.”

“He didn’t seem all that worried when I told him that Paige was afraid she’d gone sleepwalking.”

“He probably didn’t want to alarm you. He probably didn’t want to alarm her. But he was. He is. Even if you hadn’t told him about her sleepwalking, he would have found an excuse to get her to the sleep center. He told me you girls had appointments before you did.”

“But why me?”

“Think misdirection. You’re a magician.”

“So I’m going to be wired at the clinic for nothing?”

“Not for nothing. But not because you’re a sleepwalker.”

“But what if she got in the car again in her sleep?”

“Your father has been giving her your mother’s clonazepam.”

“He’s drugging her?”

“He’s medicating her, Lianna. There’s a difference.”

“And she doesn’t know?”

“No. A half tab ground up in her milk. Or orange juice. Whatever.”

I thought of the night when Paige complained that the milk had gone bad. I was sure I would recall other moments, too, as time went on. I pointed at the leather bag on the floor. “My mom’s DNA is in there, isn’t it? From the towel.”

“Yes.”

Outside, it was growing light and I heard the annoying, monotonous bleep of a garbage truck in reverse. The sky was streaked with the deep, beautiful violet of a bruise.

“My dad told me the dings on the car were from a streetlight. He said he had done a bad job of parking at the college.” My voice was small, incredulous.

“Was he convincing?”

I shook my head. “Not in the slightest.”

“Is that when you knew?”

I sighed. “He hadn’t been driving that night: I knew that. After all, he was in Iowa. And I wasn’t driving. At least I didn’t think I was.”

“So Paige.”

“I remembered how much she used to like to drive in and out of the barn, and back and forth in the driveway. Would she take the car out at night? It hadn’t crossed my mind until I saw the dings. But I told myself I was crazy.” The conversation felt surreal to me. Even now, the recollection of what we were saying—acknowledging life’s spectacular, numbing horrors in such quiet, measured tones—can leave me unsteady.

“If it hadn’t been an SUV, I doubt your mother would have been thrown so far. It took that high a center of gravity,” he said. “Her body hit the grill. Then her head, I believe, hit the corner where the windshield met the roof.”

“Was Paige speeding?”

“Well, she was driving fast. Fast enough to…to send your mother over the riverbank. I’m sorry.”

“No,” I murmured, “I asked.” She was an athlete. A ski racer. She was intense. She did almost nothing slowly. “Does anyone suspect it might have been a hit-and-run? Did you have to investigate that?”

“We went to a few auto-body shops in the area to see if anyone had brought in a car or truck claiming they’d smacked into an animal, but obviously that avenue went nowhere. It was make-work.”

Finally I put the towel down. I laid it gently atop the shoulder bag on the floor, imagining it was a quilt draped upon a coffin. “When you told me that my mom came to see you a few days before she died, you said she was afraid she was going to sleepwalk with my dad away,” I said. “You were lying about that, too, weren’t you? She came to see you because she was worried about my sister.”