Locust Lane(28)

The police arrived four days later. He was passed out on the sofa—he was drinking steadily by this point, starting the long pursuit of his own oblivion. After they gave him the terrible news, he looked down at his feet and saw that he was only wearing one sock. He was clearly over the limit, so the cops gave him a lift. At the hospital, people asked if this was his daughter. He was tempted to say no, not even close.

Over the next few days, as he endured the funeral and everything that went with it, a terrible understanding settled over him. He’d failed her. Pure and simple. This was on him. He was her father and fathers saved their kids. Fathers didn’t breathe a secret sigh of relief when their daughters disappeared into the wilderness, taking their agony with them. Fathers answered the phone. And fathers didn’t slumber on the sofa while their child was finally silencing her depthless and unfathomable pain as other people’s kids sat eating Happy Meals a few feet away. He’d failed her and no one, however well informed or experienced or sagacious, would ever be able to tell him otherwise.



* * *



He’d had enough of his stolen food after three mouthfuls. This was how it always went, the initial burst of appetite crushed by his body’s inability to handle more than a few morsels. It had been months since he’d finished a meal. He stowed his trash in the nearest bin and drove to the office, chewing three breath mints on the way. The receptionist greeted him with a baffled smile. He didn’t know her name—Griff liked to use temps to avoid paying benefits. Kara, the assistant he shared with two other brokers, had long ago migrated to a position near her more productive bosses.

Ann Nichols sat in his office. She acknowledged his entrance with a grim, censorious nod.

“Well, I thought you’d abandoned me,” she said, even though he was a few minutes early.

She was his oldest client, both in terms of the calendar and the duration of their relationship. She came by once a month to make sure that her nest egg was safe and warm. Really, she just liked to chat. Her position was only three hundred grand—chump change for Emerson Wealth Management Partners—but she fretted over it like it was the Getty Trust. She came across like a widow, though she occasionally made brief, obscure references to “Otis,” and it was only on about her tenth visit that Patrick figured out this was her husband, not her dog. He presumed she knew all about his decline, but she was sticking with him. He hoped it wasn’t pity, but ultimately he understood that it didn’t much matter.

She was scheduled in for a half hour, as always, even though their actual business usually took somewhere south of ten minutes. It was nothing more than a bells-and-whistles tour of her statement. His presentation was usually followed by a much longer chat about anything from the weather to that time she lunched with Ethel Kennedy, who was not the saint everybody made her out to be.

“I’d never abandon you,” Patrick answered, though his attention was focused on the ominous Post-it stuck to his keyboard. It was from Griff, the firm’s managing partner. We need to talk.

“Did you hear about the murder?” she asked.

“Murder?”

“At the Bondurants’.”

The name was vaguely familiar.

“They live here in town,” she prompted. “On Locust?”

Locust. The word crashed into his mind like a Panzer division rumbling down a narrow city street.

“Their son got leukemia when he was at Waldo,” she prompted. “He’s who the fun run’s named after. He was on the cross-country team.”

The Run for Rick. Of course. He knew this family. EWMP had gone after their portfolio a couple of years ago, but Bondurant wouldn’t shift from the rickety old Boston firm his ancestors had probably used since before the Revolutionary War.

“Somebody killed them?”

“Nobody’s saying who died.”

“Wow. Was it a home invasion?”

She shrugged peevishly, frustrated by her lack of gossip-worthy data. Things were picking up now inside Patrick’s skull. The dog’s yelp; the figure in the trees. His leg started to throb.

“But have they arrested somebody or…?”

She knew nothing more. Patrick rushed her through the presentation, then invented an excuse to hustle her unhappily out the door. Once alone, he looked up what he could about the murder on his desktop. There’d been a lockdown ordered for the town’s schools, but it had been lifted. They’d released a photo of the victim, a young woman from Watertown, some sort of relation to the Bondurants. My God, he thought as he looked at her sweet face. His mouth suddenly felt parched. He badly needed a drink.

He found the Bondurants’ address in the company database and Google Earthed it. It was one house down from where he’d been bitten, just beyond that dense thicket. He touched the treetops on the computer screen with his index finger. There, he thought. He’d been standing right there.

Somebody needed to be told about this. His instinctive impulse was to call Lily, but his ex-wife was currently in Asheville, chasing happiness and rarely picking up. There was Griff, but a breathless report of what happened while he was wandering the streets at three a.m. might not be a good look for Patrick, especially after that Post-it and the reckoning it promised.

The police. Despite their bad history, it had to be them. They needed to know what he knew. He dialed the nonemergency line and was told to come in immediately. He was tempted to take a detour to the trunk of his car, where that Suntory continued to age. Not a good idea. In fact, he decided to leave the car where it was. He needed to figure out what he was going to say before he arrived. As he strode along Centre, he tried to focus on that figure in the woods. Tall, broad-shouldered. Silent, faceless, but very real. He wished his mind could run it through one of those software programs to sharpen the pixels until a clear image appeared.