NOS4A2(33)
“The last girl he was sleeping with,” Linda said. “I don’t know who he’s with now, though, or why he’d decide to take off with her. It’s not as if I’ve ever put him in a position where he had to choose between home and the girl on the side. I don’t know why this time is different. She must be some nice little piece.”
When Vic spoke again, her voice was hushed and trembling. “You lie so bad. I hate you. I hate you, and if he’s leaving, I’m going with him.”
“But, Vicki,” said her mother in that strange, drifting tone of exhaustion. “He doesn’t want you with him. He didn’t just leave me, you know. He left us.”
Vic turned and fled, slamming the door shut behind her. She ran into the early-October afternoon. The light came at a low slant through the oaks across the street, gold and green, and how she loved that light. There was no light in the world like you saw in New England in early fall.
She was up and on her embarrassing pink bike, she was riding, crying but hardly aware of it, her breath coming in gasps, she was around the house and under the trees, she was riding downhill, the wind whining in her ears. The ten-speed was no Raleigh Tuff Burner, and she felt every rock and root under its slim tires.
Vic told herself she was going to find him, she would go to him now, he loved her and if she wanted to stay with him, her father would find a place for her, and she would never come home, never have to listen to her mother bitch at her about wearing black jeans, dressing like a boy, hanging with burnouts, she just had to ride down the hill and the bridge would be there.
But it wasn’t. The old dirt road ended at the guardrail overlooking the Merrimack River. Upriver, the water was as black and smooth as smoked glass. Below, it was in torment, shattering against boulders in a white froth. All that remained of the Shorter Way were three stained concrete pylons rising from the water, crumbling at the top to show the rebar.
She rode hard at the guardrail, willing the bridge to appear. But just before she hit the rail, she dumped her bike on purpose, skidded across the dirt in her jeans. She did not wait to see if she had hurt herself but leaped up, gripped the bike in both hands, and flung it over the side. It hit the long slope of the embankment, bounced, and crashed into the shallows, where it got stuck. One wheel protruded from the water, revolving madly.
Bats dived in the gathering dusk.
Vic limped north, following the river, with no clear destination in mind.
Finally, on an embankment by the river, under 495, she dropped into bristly grass, among litter. There was a stitch in her side. Cars whined and hummed above her, producing a vast, shivery harmonic on the massive bridge spanning the Merrimack. She could feel their passage, a steady, curiously soothing vibration in the earth beneath her.
She didn’t mean to go to sleep there, but for a while—twenty minutes or so—Vic dozed, carried into a state of dreamy semiconsciousness by the thunderous roar of motorcycles, blasting past in twos and threes, a whole gang of riders out in the last warm night of the fall, going wherever their wheels took them.
Various Locales
IT WAS RAINING HARD IN CHESAPEAKE, VIRGINIA, ON THE EVENING of May 9, 1993, when Jeff Haddon took his springer spaniel for the usual after-dinner walk. Neither of them wanted to be out, not Haddon, not his dog, Garbo. The rain was coming down so hard on Battlefield Boulevard that it was bouncing off the concrete sidewalks and the cobblestone driveways. The air smelled fragrantly of sage and holly. Jeff wore a big yellow poncho, and the wind snatched at it and rattled it furiously. Garbo spread her back legs and squatted miserably to pee, her curly fur hanging in wet tangles.
Haddon and Garbo’s walk took them past the sprawling Tudor home of Nancy Lee Martin, a wealthy widow with a nine-year-old daughter. Later he told the investigators with Chesapeake PD that he glanced up her driveway because he heard Christmas music, but that wasn’t quite the truth. He didn’t hear Christmas music then, not over the pounding roar of the rain on the road, but he always walked past her house and always looked up her driveway, because Haddon had a bit of a crush on Nancy Lee Martin. At forty-two she was ten years older than him but still looked much like the Virginia Tech cheerleader she had once been.
He peered up the lane just in time to see Nancy coming out the front door, with her daughter, Amy, racing ahead of her. A tall man in a black overcoat held an umbrella for her; the girls had on slinky dresses and silk scarves, and Jeff Haddon remembered his wife saying that Nancy Lee was going to a fund-raiser for George Allen, who had just announced he was running for governor.
Haddon, who owned a Mercedes dealership and who had an eye for cars, recognized her ride as an early Rolls-Royce, the Phantom or the Wraith, something from the thirties.
He called out and lifted a hand in greeting. Nancy Lee Martin might’ve waved back, he wasn’t sure. As her driver opened the door, music flooded out, and Haddon could’ve sworn he heard the strains of “Little Drummer Boy,” sung by a choir. That was an odd thing to hear in the spring. Maybe even Nancy Lee thought it odd—she seemed to hesitate before climbing in. But it was raining hard, and she didn’t hesitate long.
Haddon walked on, and when he returned, the car was gone. Nancy Lee Martin and her daughter, Amy, never arrived at the George Allen fund-raiser.
The driver who had been scheduled to pick her up, Malcolm Ackroyd, vanished as well. His car was found off Bainbridge Boulevard, down by the water, the driver’s-side door open. His hat was found in the weeds, saturated with blood.