The Guest Room(76)
A yellow cab honked as it passed him on the right, the driver giving him the finger for being distracted and driving too slowly, but when Richard glanced down at the speedometer he saw that he was motoring along at fifty-five. Not awful. Not geriatric. Still, he tried to focus more on the crowded, tortuous highway. But it was difficult. He kept seeing the faces of people he loathed: Spencer. Hugh Kirn. A couple of Russians who called themselves Pavel and Kirill, though none of the detectives he had met believed for one second that those were their real names.
But the person whose face infuriated him the most was Spencer.
And so he made a decision. He was not going to pay the bastard a penny. Paying a bribe only suggested that he had something to hide—and, the fact was, he didn’t. He was already a public spectacle. He was going to tell Kristin that there was a video and it might be painful for her to see it—that is, if she chose to watch it. But she already knew the tawdry outlines; the video was mere lineament. He would devote his life to making amends for that one moment, if he had to.
The same went for his daughter. Someday he would tell her about the video, too. He didn’t know how, but he would.
And as for those bastards at Franklin McCoy, well, they could go f*ck themselves. They were self-righteous and smug, and they were far from the only game in town. They weren’t even the only game on Water Street. He knew how good he was at what he did. And if he did leave, he had a feeling that Dina Renzi would make sure that his exit package was substantial.
The traffic slowed, and abruptly he came up behind the cabbie who had given him the finger a few minutes ago. Briefly he considered slamming his car into the back of the bastard’s taxi. He knew he wouldn’t really do such a thing; his life was enough of a mess as it was. And while he would readily admit that he had issues, road rage wasn’t among them. But the idea of rear-ending the cabbie had indeed crossed his mind. How dare that moron give him the finger? How dare he? Was he on his way to the Brooklyn morgue? Nope. Was he on a forced leave of absence from a job he really liked and desperately missed? Nope. Did he have a couch in his living room that looked like a prop from The Walking Dead? Nope.
He braked and inched forward along with the rest of the traffic. He turned on the radio, steering clear of News Radio 88 and 1010 Wins. The last thing he wanted was a reminder of what a disaster the rest of the world was. He found a station with sports talk, and tried to lose himself in the debate about how to rebuild the Giants’ offensive line. But he failed. Try as he might to think of anything else, his mind would always roam back to the mess he had made of his life and, saddest of all, to the corpse at the hospital where he was headed. And so he finally allowed himself a small prayer. He succumbed. He prayed that the girl with the coal-colored hair was alive.
…
“It was called Mountain Day when I was at Smith,” Kristin was explaining to Melissa and Melissa’s friend Claudia as the three of them stood with the very last of the commuters on the platform of the Bronxville train station. Kristin was doing something now that she wished she had done four days ago, back on Monday morning: she was taking a personal day. She was taking a personal day with her daughter and one of her daughter’s friends. Something about Richard having to drive to Brooklyn to ID a body had pushed her over the edge and given her the idea. She and her daughter simply weren’t going to go to school today. That’s all there was to it. And they were going to bring Claudia with them when they played hooky. As Kristin had anticipated, Jesse was all in: she didn’t mind her daughter joining them for a day off in the slightest.
“One weekday in the autumn, we’d all wake up and hear bells,” Kristin went on. “The bells in College Hall and the quadrangle and the chapel would all ring like it was, I don’t know, 1918 and the end of a war, and that meant that all classes were canceled. We—the students and faculty—had the day off and we could do whatever we wanted. The college has been doing it for forever. And this, girls, is our own personal Mountain Day.”
“Why did they ring bells at the end of a war?” Claudia asked her.
“To let people know it was all over,” she answered.
“Why not just tell them on TV?”
“There was no TV in 1918.”
“But there were newspapers,” Claudia argued. “I think a newspaper would be a better way to tell people a war is over than ringing a bell. I mean, when the students at Smith College heard the bells, did they think it was the end of the war or they just had no school?”
“Claudia, don’t take everything literally,” Melissa said to her friend, rolling her eyes.
“What does that mean?”
“It means,” Melissa began, but then the thought stalled. She didn’t know quite what it meant. What she meant. She just knew that Claudia took everything…literally. It drove Melissa crazy sometimes. It drove everyone crazy sometimes.
“You’re right, Claudia—about the bells and the newspapers,” Kristin told her. “People knew the war was over because of the newspapers. And the newspapers had informed them that the bells would ring when there was an armistice. When there was peace. I just meant that we heard a lot of bells on Mountain Day at Smith.”
The three of them stared for a long moment in silence at the train tracks. It was chilly this morning, and the temperature wasn’t supposed to climb above forty-five degrees that day. When Kristin exhaled, she saw her breath. But it was sunny and the sky was cerulean. Her plan was to take the girls to the Museum of Natural History and then the Museum of Modern Art. She was going to see if her own mother would like to join the three of them for lunch, though she guessed this was a long shot: her mother’s social calendar filled up far in advance. Given how much the two girls enjoyed clothes shopping, she assumed they might also wander into some of the stores on Fifth Avenue or Rockefeller Center. They might visit Capezio for new leotards and dance tights.