The River King (20 page)

“You don't have to get hysterical,” Abe told the tom as he opened a cabinet. “You won't starve.”

As a rule, Abe had never liked cats, but this one was different. It didn't fawn over a person, arching its back and begging for scraps, and was so independent it didn't even have a name.
Hey, you,
Abe called when he wanted to get the cat's attention.
Over here, buddy,
he'd say when he reached for one of those cans of overpriced cat food he used to say only an idiot would spend good money on.

Surely, this cat had a history, for one of its eyes was missing. Whether this was the result of surgery or a badge of honor from some long-ago battle was impossible to tell. This injury was not the cat's only unattractive feature; its black fur was matted and its shrill meow brought to mind the call of a crow rather than the purr of its own kind. The one remaining eye was yellow and cloudy and could be extremely unsettling when it fixed upon someone. If the truth be told, Abe wasn't unhappy that the tom had taken up residence. There was only one troublesome sign: Abe had started to talk to the thing. Worse still, he had begun to value its opinion.

When Joey arrived to pick up Abe, as he had every day for the past fourteen years, Abe was showered and dressed, but he was still wrestling with his dream.

“What looks like water, but breaks like glass?” Abe asked his friend.

“Is this a frigging riddle at seven-thirty in the morning?” Joey poured himself a cup of coffee. When he looked in the fridge there was no milk, as usual. “It's so hot out there the sidewalks are steaming. I feel like Mary Beth is going to get after me to put the screens back in the windows.”

“Take a guess.” Abe got some powdered milk from the cabinet where the cat's food was stored and handed the box to Joey. “It's driving me crazy.”

“Sorry, bud. No idea.” Though the silverware was unwashed and the sugar only bare scrapings at the bottom of the bowl, Joey added a spoonful to his coffee and poured in the clumpy powdered milk. He quickly drank the potent mixture of caffeine and sucrose, then went to the sink to place his cup atop a pile of dirty dishes. Mary Beth would faint if she saw the way Abe kept his place, but Joey envied his friend's ability to live in a dump such as this. What he didn't understand was the addition of the cat, which now leapt onto the counter. Joey swiped at the animal with his newspaper, but it only stood its ground and mewed, if mewing was what the croaking sounds it emitted could be called. “Do you feel sorry for this disgusting animal? Is that why you have it?”

“I don't have it,” Abe said of his pet, as he poured some powdered milk into a bowl, added tap water, then set the dish on the counter for the cat. “It has me.” In spite of the tablets he'd taken, Abe's head was pounding. In his dream he had known exactly what his grandfather meant. Awake, nothing made sense.

“What's with you and the riddles today?” Joey asked as they went out to the car, the back door slamming shut behind them.

Joey had driven the black sedan through the car wash attached to the mini-mart on his way over and now sunlight was striking the beads of water on the roof, causing the black metal to resemble glass. Golden light streamed down Station Avenue and a bee drifted lazily over Abe's unkempt lawn, which hadn't been mowed since July Up and down the street, people were out in their yards, marveling at the weather. Grown men had decided to play hooky from work. Women who had always been proponents of washer-dryers decided to hang their laundry out on the line.

“Will you look at this,” Abe said beneath the deep and brilliant sky. “It's summer.”

“It won't last.” Joey got into the car, and Abe had no choice but to follow. “By tonight we'll all be shivering.”

Joey started up the engine, and once they were on their way, he hung a U-turn and drove into town, making a right at the intersection of Main and Deacon Road, where the Haddan Inn stood. Nikki Humphrey's sister, Doreen Becker, who was the manager of the inn, had draped several carpets over the railing, taking advantage of the beautiful weather to beat the dust out of the rugs. She waved as they passed by, and Joey honked a greeting.

“What about Doreen?” Joey kept his eye on the rearview mirror as Doreen leaned over the railing to turn one of the carpets. “She might be the girl for you. She's got a great behind.”

“That's the part you always notice, isn't it? I guess that's because they're always walking away from you.”

“How did I get dragged into this? We were talking about you and Doreen.”

“We went steady in sixth grade,” Abe reminded him. “She broke up with me because I couldn't make a commitment. It was either her or Little League.”

“You were a pretty good pitcher,” Joey recalled.

Abe never took this route through town, preferring to cut across the west side on his way to work, thereby avoiding this part of the village entirely. The inn mostly served out-of-towners, Haddan School parents visiting for the weekend or tourists arriving to see the fall foliage. For Abe, the inn brought to mind the occasion of his brief and heedless involvement with a Haddan School girl. He'd been sixteen, smack in the middle of his bad behavior, in the year when Frank died. He was crazy back then, out at all hours, wandering through town in search of trouble, and as it turned out trouble was exactly what this girl from Haddan was after as well. She'd been the kind of student the school had been known for in those days, pretty and indulged, a girl who had no qualms about picking up a local boy and charging a deluxe room to her father's credit card.

Though he'd prefer to forget the incident entirely, and had never mentioned it to Joey, Abe remembered that the girl's name was Minna. He'd thought she'd said minnow at first, and she'd had a good laugh over that. Still, it had been quite some time since he thought about how he'd waited in the parking lot while Minna checked in. As they drove past the inn, he recalled how she had signaled to him from the window of the room she'd rented, confident that he'd follow her, anytime, anyplace.

“I didn't have time for breakfast,” Joey said as they drove on. He reached past Abe for the glove compartment, where he kept a stash of Oreo cookies. He told people they were for his kids, but his kids were never in this car and Abe knew that Mary Beth didn't allow her children sugar. People did that all the time, and what was the crime? Most folks tossed out little white lies, as if truth were a simple enough dish to cook, like eggs over easy or apple pie.

“Let's say it wasn't suicide and it wasn't an accident, that only leaves one thing.” Perhaps it was seeing the boy's open eyes that affected Abe so; you had to wonder what the synapses in the brain might have recorded, those last things the boy saw and felt and knew.

“Man, you are really into riddles this morning.” It was early and the streets were empty, so Joey picked up speed; he still got a kick out of ignoring the town limit of twenty-five miles per hour. “See if you can figure out this one from Emily. What do you call a police officer with an ear of corn on his head?”

Abe shook his head. He was serious, and Joey refused to hear his concern. Hadn't that always been the way between them?
Don't ask, don't talk, don't feel anything.

“Corn on the cop.” Joey popped another cookie into his mouth. “You get it?”

“All I'm saying is that there is always the possibility of criminal intent, even in Haddan. Things aren't always what they seem.”

A bee had managed to fly into the car through the open windows ; it hit repeatedly against the windshield.

“Yeah, and sometimes they're exactly what they seem to be. At best, the kid had an accident, but I don't think that's what happened. I went through his files from school. He was in and out of the infirmary because of his migraines. He was taking Prozac and who knows what illegal drugs. Face it, Abe, he wasn't some innocent little kid.”

“Half the people in this town are probably taking Prozac, that doesn't mean they jump in the river, or fall in, or whatever we're supposed to believe. And what about the bruise on his forehead? Did he hit himself on the head in order to drown himself?”

“That's like asking why does it rain in Hamilton and not in Haddan. Why docs someone slip in the mud and crack his skull open while another man walks by untouched?” Joey grabbed the package of Oreos and smacked the bee against the glass. “Let it go,” he told Abe as he tossed the crumpled bee out the window. “Move on.”

When they arrived at the station, Abe continued to think about his dream. He usually did let things go; he was pleased to move on with no regrets, a trait to which most of the single women in Haddan could surely attest. But every now and then he got stuck, and that had happened now. Maybe it was the weather that was getting to him; he could hardly draw a breath. The air-conditioning was officially turned off by town decree every year on the fifteenth of September, so the offices were sweltering. Abe loosened his tie and looked into the cup he'd gotten from the cooler in the hallway.
You can't see water, but
you
know it's there all the same.

He was still mulling this over when Glen Tiles pulled up a chair to appraise next week's schedule, spread out in a heap on Abe's desk. Glen didn't like the look on Abe's face. There was trouble brewing; Glen had seen it all before. If Glen had had his way, Abe would never have been hired in the first place. For one, there was his past to consider, and second, he was clearly still unstable, in the good old here and now. He'd work overtime for weeks, then not show for the hours assigned on the schedule until Glen called him to remind him that he was a town
employee, not a duke, not a prince, and not unemployed, at least not yet. You never could tell with Abe. He'd let Charlotte Evans off with a warning when she burned leaves—even though as a lifelong village resident she should have been well acquainted with the town bylaws—then he'd slap some newcomers out in one of those expensive homes off Route I7 with a huge fine for doing the very same thing. If Abe hadn't been Wright Grey's grandson Glen would already have fired him for his moody temperament alone. As it was, Glen still considered that option on a regular basis.

“I'm not so sure that boy from the Haddan School was a suicide,” Abe was telling Glen, which was the last thing the chief wanted to hear on a beautiful morning such as this. Outside, those birds who hadn't migrated, the sparrows and the mourning doves and the wrens, were singing as though it were summer. “I'm just wondering if it isn't possible that someone had a hand in what happened?”

“Don't even think like that,” Glen told him. “Don't start a problem where none exists.”

Abe himself was a man who needed proof, and so he understood Glen's hesitancy. As soon as he wrapped up his paperwork, Abe went behind the station for the beat-up cruiser his grandfather used to drive, and headed to the river road. When he got out he could hear frogs calling from the sun-warmed ledges of rock. Trout splashed in the shallows, feeding on the last of the season's mosquitoes, wildly active in the unexpected burst of heat.

Abe liked the idea of all this life renewed on the banks just at the time when it usually faded away. Wrens fluttered past him, perching on the wavering branches of the Russian olives that grew here in profusion. In the coldest part of winter, the river froze solid, and it was possible to skate to Hamilton in under thirty minutes; a really good skater could make it to Boston in less than two hours. Of course, there was always the possibility of a sudden thaw, especially during the cold blue stretches of January and the fitful gloomy weeks of February. Disaster could strike any skater, as it had for those students from Haddan so many years ago. Abe had been only eight when it happened, and Frank had been nine. The roads were slick that day, but the air was oddly mild, as it was today; fog rose up from asphalt and ivy and from the cold, brittle front lawns. People could sense the world waiting beneath the ice; a taste of spring appeared in the form of the soft, yellowing branches of willows, in the scent of damp earth, and in the clouds of stupefied insects called back to life by the sunlight and warmth.

It was a fluke that Wright chose to ride along the river that day when the ice cracked. The old man kept his tackle box and several fly rods in the trunk, always anticipating good fishing weather, and when it came, he was ready. “Let's go looking for trout,” he had told the boys, but instead what they'd found were three students from Haddan screaming for mercy and going down in the icy depths, the skates still strapped to their feet.

Abe and Frank stayed in the cruiser and didn't move a muscle, precisely as their grandfather had instructed. But after a while Abe couldn't sit still; he was the brother who could never behave, and so he climbed into the front seat to get a better look, pulling himself up to see over the steering wheel. There was the river, covered with ice. There were the boys who had fallen through, their arms waving like reeds.

He's going to be mad at you,
Frank told Abe. Frank was such a good boy, he never had to be told anything twice.
You're
not
supposed to m
ove

But in the front seat, Abe had a much better view of the proceedings. He could see that his grandfather had gotten a length of rope he kept beside the fishing rods in the trunk and was racing down the icy banks, shouting for the drowning boys to hold fast. Two Haddan students managed to drag themselves to shore, but the third was too panicked or too frozen to move, and Wright had to go in after him. Abe's grandfather took off his wool coat and threw his gun on the ground; he looked behind him before he dove in, thinking, perhaps, that this was his last view of the beautiful world. He spied Abe watching, and he nodded; in spite of Frank's warning. he didn't look mad at all. He appeared perfectly calm, as though he were about to go for a swim on a summer day when all that was waiting for him was a picnic lunch set out on the grass.