The River King (15 page)

“What happened last night?” Joey asked, knowing that Abe had taken out a new woman, someone he'd met at the scene of a traffic accident on Route 17. By now, Abe had been through most of the single women in Haddan and Hamilton alike, and they all knew he'd never commit. He had to look farther afield for women still willing to give him a chance.

“It didn't work out. We wanted different things. She wanted to talk.”

“Maybe no one's told you, Abe, but talking to a woman doesn't mean you're asking her to set a wedding date. How can I live vicariously through you at this rate? I'm not getting any excitement out of your love life. Too much complaining, not enough sex. You might as well be married.”

“What can I say? I'll try to have more meaningless one-night stands so I can report back to you.”

They could hear sirens now, so Joey headed up toward the road in order to flag down their backup from Hamilton.

“You do that,” Joey called cheerfully as he climbed the hillock.

Abe stayed beside the boy, even though he knew it was risky. His grandfather had warned him that anyone who remained with a dead body for too long ran the risk of taking on its burden. In fact, Abe did feel weighted down, as though the air was too heavy, and in spite of his old leather jacket, he continued to shiver with cold. On this first day of November, he realized just how much he wanted to be alive. He wanted to listen to the river and hear birdsongs and feel the pain in his bad knee, which always acted up in damp weather. He wanted to get drunk and kiss some woman he truly desired. This boy he stood guard over would never do any of these things. His chances had been washed away, into the deepest pools of the river, those places where the biggest trout hid, huge fish, or so people said, with brilliant fins that reflected the sunlight upward, blinding fishermen and allowing for a clean getaway each and every time.

Later in the morning, after the Haddan School had verified that one of their students was indeed missing, the drowned boy was wrapped in black plastic, then packed in ice to prepare him for the trip to Hamilton, since there weren't facilities to do a proper autopsy in Haddan. Abe left work early; he went out behind the station to watch as the ambulance was made ready. Wright's old police cruiser was parked beside the loading dock, kept mostly for sentimental reasons, although every so often Abe took it out for a spin. His grandfather liked to ride along the bumpy river road, and when Abe was growing up Wright often took his grandson along, although it wasn't always trout Abe's grandfather was searching for. He would leave Abe in the car and come back with bunches of blue flag, the native iris that grew along the banks. Those flowers had looked so small when held in Wright's huge hands, as if they were little purple stars plucked from the sky. It was almost possible for a child to believe that if these flowers were tossed aloft, as high as a man could throw, they might never come down again.

Some other big man pulling up wildflowers might have appeared to be a fool, but Wright Grey seemed like anything but. Riding back to the farm, Abe was always instructed to hold the flowers carefully and not to crush them. Every once in a while, on a hot spring day, a bee would accompany the irises into the car and they'd have to open all the windows. On several occasions the bee would stay along with them all the way home, buzzing like mad and flinging itself at the bouquet; that's how sweet those wild irises were. Wright never brought the flowers into the kitchen where Abe's grandmother, Florence, was fixing supper. Instead, he walked out behind the house, to the fields where the tall grass grew and that woman he'd known long ago had found peace. Maybe that's when Abe's suspicious nature got ahold of him. Even back then, there seemed to be a truth he couldn't quite get to, and now he wondered why he hadn't fought harder to find it out and ask the simplest and most difficult question of all: Why?

For the longest time, he had wished there was a way for him to speak to the dead. Not knowing was the thing that could haunt a man; it could follow him around for decades, year after year, until the accidental and the intentional had twisted into a single hanging rope of doubt. All Abe wanted was ten minutes with any boy who might have chosen to end his own life.
Did you mean to do it?
That's all he wanted to ask.
Did you cry out loud, your voice echoing upward through the treetops and clouds? Was it the blue sky you saw at the end or only a black curtain, falling down fast? Did your eyes stay open wide because you weren't yet done with your life and you knew how much more there was to see, years of it, decades of it, a thousand nights and days you would no longer have?

As the drowned boy was taken to Hamilton, he would surely turn blue along the way, just as silver trout did after they'd been hooked and stowed in a tackle bag, along with empty beer bottles and unused bait. In all probability, there were no facts to go after and nothing to prove, but the boy's wounds nagged at him. Abe got into his grandfather's car, deciding to follow the ambulance, at least for a while. He did this even though he was absolutely certain his life would be a whole lot less complicated if he'd only turn back.

“Are we getting an escort?” the ambulance driver called through his open window when they stopped at the town line. Abe recognized the driver from back in high school, Chris Wyteck, who had played baseball and wrecked his arm senior year. It wasn't yet happy hour, but the dirt lot of the Millstone was already half full. If the truth be told, Abe's car was often parked among the Chevy vans and pickup trucks, a fact Joey Tosh tried to keep from Glen Tiles, as if it were possible to keep any secret in this town for long. But on this November afternoon, Abe didn't have the slightest urge to take his regular seat at the bar. Truth was funny that way; once a man decided to go after it, he had to keep right on going no matter where the facts might lead.

“You bet,” Abe called to Chris. “I'm with you all the way.”

As he drove, Abe recalled that his grandfather always told him that any man who took the time to listen would be amazed at all he could discover without even trying. A truly observant individual could lie down beside the river and hear where the fish were swimming; why, the trout would practically give directions to any man who was willing to study them. And because his grandfather was the best fisherman in town, and had always given out good advice, Abe started listening then and there. He thought about that dark mark on the boy's forehead, a bruise the color of wild iris, and he decided that for once in his life he'd pay attention. He'd take note of what this drowned boy had to say.

* * *

NEWS TRAVELED QUICKLY AT HADDAN, AND BY noon most people knew there had been a death. After the initial course of hearsay and gossip, people overloaded on rumors and simply shut down. All across campus there was silence in unexpected places. In the kitchen, pots and pans didn't bang; in the common rooms, there were no conversations. Teachers canceled classes; soccer practice was called off for the first time in years. There were those who wanted nothing more than to go about their business, but most people could not so easily ignore this death. Many had encountered Gus at the school, and most had not been kind. Those who had been cruel knew who they were, and there were legions of them. Those who would not sit at his table in the cafeteria, those who would not lend him notes for the classes he missed, who talked behind his back, who laughed in his face, who despised him or ignored him or never bothered to learn his name. Girls who had thought themselves too superior to speak to him now took to their beds with headaches. Boys who had thrown volleyballs at him during phys ed class paced their rooms gloomily. Students who'd delighted in taking potshots at an easy target now feared that their past iniquities had already been charted in some heavenly book with a brand of black ink that could never be erased.

Gus's peers were not the only ones to feel the sting of remorse; several faculty members were so sickened when they heard of Pierce's death they couldn't bring themselves to eat lunch, although chocolate bread pudding, always a big favorite, was served for dessert. These teachers, who'd dispensed D's, and decried the sloppy script and coffee stains that accompanied the papers Gus had written, now found that beneath the slipshod penmanship there had been a bright and original mind. Lynn Vining, who'd been looking forward to failing Gus in retribution for the series of black paintings he'd executed, removed the canvases from a utility closet and was startled to see luminous threads of color she hadn't noticed before.

An all-school meeting had been called and in the late afternoon the entire community gathered in the auditorium to hear Bob Thomas refer to Gus's death as an unfortunate mishap, but word had already spread and everyone said it was suicide. Bereavement specialists were stationed at tables outside the library and Dorothy Jackson, the school nurse, dispensed tranquilizers along with ice packs and extra-strength Tylenol. There was particular concern for the residents of Chalk House, who had been closest to the deceased, and Charlotte Evans's ex-son-in-law, the psychologist, Phil Endicott, was brought in for an extra counseling session before supper. The meeting was held in the common room at Chalk House, and clearly such an action was needed. The freshmen who had shared the attic with Gus looked especially shaken, and Nathaniel Gibb, who was more softhearted than most, left halfway through the session when Phil Endicott had reviewed only two of the five stages of grief. At the end of the meeting, Duck Johnson advised his charges to go out and make every day count, but no one was listening to him. Because of the thin walls and ancient plumbing, they could all hear Nathaniel vomiting in a nearby bathroom; they could hear the toilet flush, again and again.

On the other side of the green, girls at St. Anne's who had never spoken to Gus now sobbed into their pillows and wished they could have altered the chain of events. Any boy who died in a mysterious fashion could easily become the stuff of dreams: a girl was free to wonder what might have happened if only she had been walking along the river on that last night in October. She might have called to him and saved him, or perhaps she herself might have drowned, pulled down in the midst of her selfless act.

Carlin Leander was disgusted by this sudden outpouring of false sympathy. She herself was boiling, a stew of fury and regret. She refused to attend the dean's assembly; instead, she locked herself in the bathroom, where she tore out her pale hair and raked at her skin with ragged, bitten-down nails. Let others think what they wanted, she knew quite well who was to blame for Gus's death. Her wretched actions on Halloween night had destroyed both Gus and their friendship and gone on to form something cold and mean in the place where Carlin's heart ought to be. To let out all that was vile within, she took a razor from a shelf in the medicine chest. A single strike and drops of blood began to form; another, and a crimson stream coursed down her arm. All in all, Carlin cut herself six times. Her own flesh was a ledger upon which she measured all she'd done wrong. The first cut was for avarice, the second for greed, the next was for the petty delight she had taken in other girls' jealousies, then one for vanity, and for cowardice, and the last and deepest cut was for the betrayal of a friend.

On the night Gus died, Carlin had dreamed of broken eggs, always a portent of disaster. Rising from her bed in the early morning, she had gone to her window and the very first thing she saw was a dozen ruined eggs on the path below. It was only a silly prank, some local boys had egged St. Anne's, as they did every Halloween. But looking down on that path, Carlin had known that there were some things she could never put back together again, no matter how she might try. And yet once the announcement had been made she could not believe that Gus was really gone. She ran to Chalk House, half expecting to crash into him in the hall even though the place was deserted when Carlin arrived, with many of the boys wanting to avoid the confines of the house. No one stopped Carlin when she went up to the attic, or noticed when she entered Gus's room. She curled up on his neatly made bed. By then the fury and the heat had been drained away, leaving Carlin's tears icy and blue. Her cries were so pitiful they chased the sparrows from the willow trees; rabbits in the bramble bushes shuddered and dug down deeper in the cold, hard earth.

It was nearly the dinner hour when the two officers arrived. Neither man had ever been comfortable on campus and both flinched when their car doors slammed. Abe had already driven to Hamilton and back, Joey had filed their report. Now they were here to meet with Matt Farris from forensics and give the deceased's lodgings a quick once-over. Abel Grey noticed, as he had before, that tragedy tended to create an echo. Coming upon an accident on an icy road, for instance, he'd heard sounds he'd never been aware of before: leaves falling, the crunch of pebbles beneath his tires, the hiss of blood as it melted through snow. At Haddan, it was possible to hear the air moving in waves. There was the call of birds, the rustle of the branches of the beech trees, and just beyond that, someone was crying, a thin ribbon of anguish rising above rooftops and trees.

“Did you hear that?” Abe asked.

Joey nodded toward a boy racing by on a mountain bike that most likely cost a month of a workingman's salary. “The sound of money? Yeah, I hear it.”

Abe laughed, but he had an uneasy feeling in his gut, the sort of apprehension he experienced late at night when he found himself looking out his window, waiting for his cat to return. He hadn't wanted the cat in the first place, it had simply arrived one night and made itself at home, and now Abe worried when it wasn't there on the porch when he got home from work. On several occasions he'd stayed up past midnight, until the damned cat had seen fit to appear at the door.