River Road (22 page)

Earlier that day I had come into the kitchen and found Evan holding a plastic mug with a picture of Scuffy the Tugboat on it. He was quietly weeping, trying not to let me hear. I knew then that he was going to leave. After I had taken him to the train station I drove to the bridge and stood at the guardrail watching the dark water flowing toward the sea thinking
It will be quick, like flying into a wall of ice and then nothing
. I'd leaned into the wind, yearning for that nothing, but then I heard Emmy's voice shouting
Bon Boy-Osh, Scuffy!
and I couldn't do it. It felt like betraying her somehow.

“How do you know it was just that one night?” I asked. “How do you know I didn't go stand on the Kingston Bridge every night while you were in jail?”

She shrugged. “Because if you were gonna do it you'd've done it that night,” she said with the authority of someone who had stared into that dark water herself. “But when I saw you sit down in the snow I thought
you'd come up with another way. Freezing to death would be slower but you wouldn't feel so much like you were to blame. It would just sorta
happen
, like it was taken outta your hands.”

“You sound like you've given the subject a lot of thought.” She shrugged again, a habitual cringing gesture that summed up her preferred mode of suicide—something that was taken out of your hands. “So you watched me in the woods. What would you have done if I hadn't gotten up?”

“Dragged you back to your car, I guess. But then I saw the girl and thought maybe I could get her to help.”

“What girl?”

“One of them college girls. Skinny. Short hair. Long neck. Red leather jacket.”

“Leia.”

“Yeah, that's what her boyfriend called her. They were walking in the woods together, friendly like at first.”

“Did you recognize the boy?”

Her eyes slid away from me toward the door. I followed them, but the curtain blocked my view.

“It was dark. He was wearing a hood. They were going fast. I followed for a bit. They went over the hill and down to the boathouse. I don't like it down there . . .” She hugged her knees in and shivered, as if the cold of the night had penetrated into the hospital room. “I went back to check on you. You was still sleeping. I thought I'd have to do something but then that girl came back. She ran right past me, the boy following her, calling her to come back.”

A man's voice calling
Come back!
I could almost hear it. “And did she?”

“No, she was scared . . . of
her
.”

“Her?”

Again Hannah's eyes slid toward the door. This time I leaned back and saw Joe McAffrey standing in the doorway.

“He don't believe me,” Hannah said.

“What don't I believe?” Joe asked, coming into the room.

“What I seen in the woods. I told you once before and you didn't believe me.”

“What does she mean?” I asked McAffrey.

“I told Hannah to stop hanging around your house,” he said to me. “She gave me a rather remarkable story about something she'd seen in the woods. Are you starting with that again, Hannah? Let's stick to the boy you said was chasing Leia Dawson in the woods.”

“Not chasing. Following like.”

“Okay,
following
. Did you recognize him?”

“He was wearing a hood—”

“That isn't what I asked you. Did you recognize him?”

Hannah cringed and looked nervously from me to McAffrey. “Might of been the Van Donk boy. They must of had a fight down in the boathouse. She was running when they came back, him following her, yelling come back!”

“And then what?”

“I-I don't know . . . I saw
her
. I got scared then and ran. I heard the car, the tires squealing, the girl screaming . . . and I ran. I didn't want to see . . .”

“So you ran away from the scene,” McAffrey said, his voice tight with anger. “You didn't think about helping whoever was hurt?”

“I was scared!” Hannah cried, her voice high and childish, like Emmy's when she woke up from a nightmare. “I was afraid of
her
.”

“Who?” I demanded, exasperated. “Who else did you see in the woods?”

“The same one I seen lurking around your house. Her that drowned herself in the river. She's covered with ice from head to toe, icicles hanging from her hair and clothes. That's who I saw watching Leia—just like I seen her watching you: the ice hag.”

“D
o you think she made up the ghost because she didn't want to tell us about Troy?” I asked.

We'd gone back to my room after a nurse came in to tell us that Ms. Mulder needed her rest. It was clear Hannah wasn't going to tell us anything more anyway. At least anything coherent.

“Maybe, but it's not the first time she's told me about the ghost. She told me she'd seen it in the woods behind your house. She thought it was an omen that you were going to try to hurt yourself.”

“Great. That's an image I need on cold, lonely nights—the ghost of a suicide clattering her frozen shroud outside my window.”

“Don't tell me you believe in all that nonsense.”

“Of course not! What kind of an idiot do you take me for?”

“I know you're no idiot, but your book had ghosts in it. It almost made
me
believe in ghosts.”

“You
read
my book?” I tried to keep the pleasure out of my voice. I wasn't even sure why it pleased me. Usually when people told me they'd read my book I immediately assumed they were wondering why I hadn't written another one.

He looked embarrassed. “Yeah, well, I'd never met an author before. When I heard you'd written a book I thought it would be a children's
book or one of those romantic things with a bare-chested guy on the cover, like the ones my sister reads, not a
ghost
story.”

“It was supposed to be a postmodern homage to the gothic tradition.” I nearly laughed at his blank stare. “Yeah, it sounds pretentious to me too now. The fact is, it kind of scared me too and after Emmy . . . well, it no longer seemed like fun to write about the dead, ironically or not.”

He shifted in the too narrow hospital chair, looking uncomfortable. “Some women who'd lost a child would go the other way. You know, contacting psychics, going to séances.”

I shuddered. “So charlatans could tell me that Emmy's up in heaven and just wants me to be happy? No, thank you. Just because I wrote a ghost story doesn't mean I believe in ghosts. Still, I'm not immune to suggestion. I don't like to think of Hannah seeing the ice hag peering in my windows.”

“So you've heard of her?”

“Sure. It's a popular legend at the college. I get a couple of papers on her every semester. I'm sure my students sit around the boathouse, smoking pot, scaring themselves silly by telling the story of the grief-stricken mother who walked out onto the frozen river and fell through the ice.”

“And whenever a mist comes up off the river they say it's the ice hag come to drag little children under the ice.”

“So you know it too,” I said, shivering at the image and drawing the hospital blanket over my legs.

“When I was in sixth grade a boy named Arlen Mott went out onto the frozen river on a dare and fell through the ice. I had nightmares about the ice hag until I was in high school.”

“What stopped them?”

“Thinking about girls,” he said with a slow smile that took the chill off my skin. I could feel the heat in my face and I felt suddenly conscious that I wasn't wearing anything under the thin hospital gown.

“Hannah must have grown up on the same story,” I said. “A couple of pints of Four Roses and she starts seeing the ice hag in the mist. Speaking of Four Roses, Hannah said she didn't leave that bottle on the wall.”

“I didn't think it was Hannah, but I do think it was someone who might want to direct our attention to her if Hannah claimed she saw him in the woods.”

“Troy?”

McAffrey nodded. “It could have been Troy you saw in the garage with Ross—”

“How
is
Ross?” I asked, feeling a sudden pang of guilt that I hadn't asked after him when he'd almost died today.

“Still unconscious but stable. They moved him to Vassar Brothers in Poughkeepsie to put him in a hyperbaric chamber. The lab results indicate that he had a lot of alcohol in his blood. Do you think he would have tried to kill himself?”

“It's what I was afraid of when I went to his house—that all this scandal about having an affair with Leia would devastate him. He lived off the admiration of his students—but would he kill himself? I don't know. Do you think someone did this to him?”

“I went back to look at the barn. Unfortunately the snow outside the door was completely trampled by paramedics, but I was able to make out only three sets of tracks from the kitchen door to the barn. A women's size nine L.L.Bean snow boot, which I believe belongs to you”—he glanced at my boots, which were sitting on the floor by the closet—“a size twelve men's oxford shoe, which matches what Mr. Ballantine was wearing today, and a size ten construction boot, one of those steel-tipped things a lot of the college kids like to wear, whattaya call them—”

“Doc Martens?” I suggested. I was trying to recall what Troy had been wearing in the woods yesterday. Something sturdier than his friend's pointy-toed oxfords.

“Yeah. Those tracks were right beside Ballantine's. The thing is, Ballantine's tracks were all over the place, like he was drunk. The Doc Martens were steadier but following Ballantine's.”

“As if someone was walking beside him trying to keep him from falling?”

“Exactly. You'd make a good detective, Ms. Lewis.”

“Thanks. I may be looking for a new job soon . . . but I can't think why anyone would want Ross dead.”

“Perhaps he figured out who took his car keys that night.”

“And he confronted whoever did it—but how would that person get him in the car?”

“If Ballantine was already drinking he could have slipped sleeping pills in his glass, lured him to the car somehow, waited for him to pass out, and then closed him in there. Then he waited to make sure no one came along to save Ballantine. When he saw you go into the barn he was afraid that if Ballantine lived he'd be caught for Leia's death
and
the attempted murder of Ballantine.”

“So he closed the door and left me there to die.” I tried to picture that dark figure silhouetted in the doorway, searching my memory for some identifying feature, but I could only see an amorphous cutout shape. “You keep saying ‘he' but the figure I saw could have been a man or a woman. It was slim, hooded—”

“Troy was wearing a hood when Hannah saw him in the woods.”

“But what about the ice hag?”

He paused as if humoring me. “I think that was a hallucination on her part. But I think Hannah did see Troy Van Donk in the woods. You saw him too—talking to Leia outside the barn the night of the party and later in the woods walking to the boathouse. Unfortunately, it wouldn't be out of the question for it to be Troy. I picked him up for possession of marijuana last year. He got off with community service. I'd hoped he was straightening himself out . . .” He frowned and ran his hands through his hair. He looked tired—and sad. I saw the same look of disappointment that I had when a student I'd been working with failed to show up for a final—or didn't hand in a paper, like Troy had failed to hand in his final story.

“He was doing well in my class this semester,” I said. “Handing in work, writing some great stuff—and then a week or two ago he started missing classes and then he didn't hand in his final paper.”

“So something went wrong. Maybe he got involved in something over his head. A couple of weeks ago we picked up an Acheron student with heroin.”

“
Heroin?
At Acheron? I know the kids smoke pot, but heroin?”

He pursed his lips, suppressing a smile. “You don't think college students do heroin?”

I blushed, remembering Aleesha's paper on her cousin Shawna. “One of my students, Aleesha, did write about her cousin Shawna doing heroin. In fact, Shawna just died of an overdose.”

“Shawna Williams. That was a tragedy. I met her in a drug prevention program we ran last summer. But it's not just black kids from Poughkeepsie doing heroin; it's an epidemic. I've got high school kids here in Acheron shooting up. I went on a call last month—a sixteen-year-old boy, star quarterback on the football team, OD'd. We gave him naloxone and revived him but he suffered brain damage. Mom finally came to tell me that he started on painkillers last year after he broke his femur playing football. When he couldn't afford the OxyContin he switched to heroin. It's cheaper.” He sighed, truly looking defeated now. “The same thing is happening all over the country. People get addicted to Oxy then switch to heroin when they can't afford it anymore. And we're right in the middle of the traffic pattern here in Acheron. It moves up from the city, through the projects in Poughkeepsie, then up to Albany and on into Canada. Route Nine is a major drug traffic route. I caught a dealer just last month pulling him over for an expired inspection ticket. The smart ones take the Loop bus.”

That caught my attention. “The Loop bus? The one the Acheron kids take?”

“Sure. Dealers from Poughkeepsie come up here, sell to high school and college students, and ride the bus back to Poughkeepsie. No worries about getting pulled over for a broken taillight.”

“The older guy I saw walking with Troy in the woods—the skinny scarecrow one—I saw him riding into town on the Loop bus and then back again.”