A Tap on the Window

Sixty-eight

More people turned out for the funeral than I might have expected. At least a hundred. Donna was more loved by her colleagues, and the entire Griffon Police Service, than she ever would have imagined.

I knew Augie would show up — it was his sister, after all — but I was still surprised when I saw him walk into the church with Beryl. I wasn’t surprised by his attendance, but by how quickly the events of the past few days had worn on him. His wife was a sapling next to Augie’s oaklike stature, but she seemed to be propping him up as they made their way to a pew.

It was blame and guilt eating us all up, like a cancer. Mayor Bert Sanders was feeling it, too. He had to be asking himself why he hadn’t kept a closer eye on Claire, why he’d been so easily duped when she’d said she was going to see her mother in Canada.

Annette Ravelson showed up, too, along with her husband, Kent. She made a point of not sitting anywhere near Mayor Bert Sanders.

I was relieved when Sanders offered to say a few words about Donna. I knew I wouldn’t be able to hold it together, and when I’d asked Augie if he wanted to say anything, he could only shake his head.

“Darkness has visited our town,” he said. “It has touched us all, but it has touched some more than others, and we mourn for them.” He was speaking, of course, about Hanna as well.

But not Ricky.

Instead of offering up one of those “insert name here” kind of eulogies, Sanders had asked around about Donna, particularly among her coworkers, and pulled together a brief, touching portrait of a woman who had already lost so much.

Besides the minister, there was one other speaker: a woman Donna’d kept in touch with over the years, and who’d gone all through public and high school with her. She uttered some nice platitudes. At least, I’m told they were nice. I’d stopped listening by that point. I was imagining being someplace else. Someplace with Donna and Scott. How I ached, sitting in that church, to believe in the tenets that had led to its construction. I had little expectation that I would find myself reunited with them one day.

The Skillings came. Sean, of course, had been released from jail, within twenty-four hours of Donna’s death. His parents were threatening a massive lawsuit that included the town of Griffon and Augie personally. I was betting the Rodomskis would get in on that.

They’d do what they had to do.

Then the service was over, and people were filing out of church, offering their condolences.

I was surprised to see Fritz Brott, owner of the butcher shop. He took my hand in his and squeezed.

“Read about this in the paper,” he said. “So sorry about your loss.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I’ve been meaning to call you. I made a promise to someone a few days ago.”

“Tony,” Fritz said.

“That’s right. Tony Fisk. I found myself in a situation... and he helped me out. I promised him I’d speak to you, ask you to maybe reconsider, give him another chance. I didn’t promise him I’d be successful, but that I’d at least make the pitch.”

Fritz nodded knowingly. “He came to see me.”

“He did?”

“Came in, maybe the day after you saw him. Said you were going to come talk to me, that you were going to make me give him his job back.”

“No,” I said. “That wasn’t the deal.”

“I figured, and told him so. And then he took out a gun and started waving it around and called me a bunch of names and for a second there I thought he was going to shoot me.”

I felt my heart sinking. “No.”

“After he left, I called the police. He’s been arrested. Tony’s in jail right now.”

You don’t think you can feel any sadder. But you can.

Fritz moved on, and a few more people stopped and shook hands, but I couldn’t tell you who they were or what they said. I believed Tony Fisk had some good in him, but not enough to keep him from being a hothead.

Then Sean stopped, along with his parents. They all shook hands with me, said the things people are supposed to say at a time like that, and moved on. But then Sean held back.

“Could I talk to you for a minute?” he asked.

“Sure.”

“I mean, private like?”

I put my hand on his shoulder and steered him back into the church, which was now empty.

“What’s up?” I asked him.

“Well, first, I just want say thanks again,” he said. “For getting me out of jail.”

“It wasn’t really me,” I said.

“Yeah, well, I guess, but it was you, finding Claire and everything, that made it happen.”

I waited to hear what it was he really wanted to tell me. He was looking at his shoes, his hands stuffed into the pockets of his suit pants. The jacket was tight around his shoulders. The suit probably fit him six months ago, but he was at that age where he was having his final growth spurts.

“There’s something I gotta say,” he said.

“Something you don’t want to tell me in front of your parents.”

“Yeah, I guess. But maybe you’re going to tell them anyway, and if you do, I guess I have to live with that. But you’ve been good to me, and I think I owe you the truth.”

“What is it, Sean?”

He licked his lips, then lifted up his head to look me in the eye. “It was me. I did it.”

I leaned my head in closer to him and put a hand on each shoulder, as much to steady myself as anything. What the hell was he talking about? There was no doubt Haines had killed Hanna, that he’d planted Hanna’s clothes in Sean’s truck. Phyllis Pearce had confirmed those details since her arrest.

So what was Sean talking about?

“Sean, what are you saying? You killed Hanna?”

He shook his head violently and his eyes went wide. “God, no, I didn’t do that. No way. I loved Hanna. I just wish I’d gotten there in time, picked her up before...” He shook his head sadly and looked down again.

“Then what are you—”

And then it hit me.

“Scott,” I said, dropping my hands from his shoulders.

He lifted his head slowly and nodded. Tears were welling up in his eyes. “A couple of days before he, you know, I had some X. Sometimes, when Hanna and I would go around delivering beer and collecting money for it, you’d get the odd asshole who didn’t have the cash. This one guy, he wanted to pay Hanna with a couple of tabs, and she let him, and got back in the car with the X, and I told her she was an idiot, that Roman wasn’t going to take anything except cash and we were going to have to make up the difference, and I thought of Scott, because I knew it was his thing, and I got hold of him and he said, yeah, he’d take them off my hands.”

Sean looked at me, waiting for a reaction, but I was too numbed by the day to offer one.

So he continued, “I don’t even know if he was on the stuff I sold him when he jumped. I wasn’t the only guy he got it from. But I know it’s possible it was me.” A tear ran down each of his cheeks. “I’m so sorry. If you want to hit me or something, like, I’m okay with that. I’ll tell my parents why you had to do it. I’ve got it coming. But I’m sorry, Mr. Weaver. God, I’m so sorry.”

“I’m not going to hit you,” I said.

“I just— I just, I don’t know why I did it.” He sobbed quietly. “I could have just made up the difference with my own money, you know? And thrown the shit out. I should have flushed it or something. But I was thinking... I don’t know what I was thinking.”

His shoulders began to shake. I raised my arms tentatively, then put them around him and pulled the boy to me. I held him close, tightened my arms around him as he wept into my chest.

I felt Donna watching me as I did. Felt it was what she would want me to do.

“Everyone’s done some pretty dumb things lately,” I said.

I felt him slip his arms around my back. “I hate myself,” Scott said. “I hate myself so much.”

We all hated ourselves these days.

Holding Sean, this boy about the same age and size as Scott, I could almost imagine he was my own. I remembered the feeling of taking him into my arms, of the father-son hugs we once shared.

If I forgave Sean, would I be forgiving Scott, too, for what he’d put us through? And wasn’t there less to forgive Scott for, anyway, than what I’d once believed?

“It’s okay,” I whispered again. “It’s okay.”

Because I no longer believed Scott jumped. I knew, in my heart, he was pushed.

Thrown.

And there was one person I was now ready to talk to, in hopes that she might be able to shed some light on what happened that night.

Her name was Rhonda McIntyre.

I’d first heard it when I got a ride home with Annette Ravelson the night I’d found her in Bert Sanders’ bedroom. Annette said she’d been one of the mayor’s other flings, and she’d also been seeing a Griffon cop who didn’t know she had a thing going on with Bert. I remembered Annette saying Rhonda had broken it off with the cop, that she’d found him kind of “freaky.”

That cop had turned out to be Ricky Haines. Her name had come up as the Griffon police did a full investigation into his background. They’d found her e-mail address on his home computer, and in his phone.

When she broke things off with Haines, which was around the time she’d also stopped seeing the mayor, she quit her job at Ravelson and moved back in with her family in Erie.

I wanted to talk to her.

So I drove to Erie. I did the trip in just under an hour and a half. I’d gone back to Cayuga Lake one day, turned in my rented Subaru, and gotten my Honda back from the cottage where Dennis and Claire had been hiding out.

Rhonda McIntyre was living with her parents in a beautiful lakeside house on Saybrook Place, just west of the industrial city’s downtown. I didn’t call first. I had no idea whether she would want to talk to me, and I didn’t want to give her a chance to disappear.

I knew it was a long shot, but I was hoping Haines might have told her something, if not actually confided in her, some of the details surrounding Scott’s plunge off the roof of Ravelson Furniture.

Maybe, I thought, if she had some idea of what he’d done, it was the reason she’d broken things off with him and gone back to the safety of her family.

I found the house behind a tall, well-manicured hedge that shielded the McIntyres from the prying eyes of passersby. I drove up the long, paved drive and parked within steps of the front door.

A handsome woman in her fifties answered. “Mrs. McIntyre?” I said. When she nodded, I told her who I was, and that I was here to speak with Rhonda.

“About all this sordid mess,” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

“I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” she said.

“It might be easier talking to me than the police,” I said. An implied threat that sometimes worked.

This time, it did the trick.

She led me through the house to a sunroom at the back that looked out over Lake Erie. The sky was overcast, and there was a north wind raising whitecaps. I could feel cold drafts of air sneaking their way around the windows.

“I’ll get Rhonda,” she said.

Moments later, a small, wispy woman of twenty-five entered the room anxiously, her mother right behind her.

“Yes?”

“Hi, Rhonda,” I said. “I need to ask you a few questions.”

“I’m sorry. I forgot your name,” the mother said.

“Weaver,” I said. “Cal Weaver.”

Rhonda blinked. Her anxiety level appeared to have taken a jump. I thought it would be easier for her to talk to me without her mother present.

“Mrs. McIntyre, would you mind if your daughter and I spoke privately?”

“Well, I think I need to be here if—”

“It’s okay, Mom,” Rhonda said. “I’ll be okay.”

The woman withdrew reluctantly. Rhonda and I sat in white wicker chairs with puffy yellow-flowered cushions.

“You should have called ahead,” she said.

“Rhonda, we know an awful lot now about Ricky, and his mother, and what they’d been up to for more than a decade. But there are still a few gaps in what we know — in what I would like to know — and I know that for a while there you were going out with Ricky.”

She became defensive. “We went out a few times, but I could never... I was never really all that serious. There were things not right with him.”

I waited.

“First of all, this relationship with his mom, it was kind of sick, you know? He was always trying to please her, always rushing over to the house. Of course, I sort of get now why he was always there, because he was helping his mom look after his stepdad, in the basement there. I mean, that kind of explained a lot.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’d never take me to his mother’s house. I mean, he wanted me to meet his mother once, but we did it at a coffee shop. We never went out to her place. One time, I was going by there and saw Ricky’s pickup in the driveway, so I turned in and knocked on the door, just figuring I’d say hello, and he came out on the porch and went crazy on me.”

“They couldn’t take a chance of anyone going inside,” I said.

“No kidding. But there was more. He was like two people. He could pretend to be all nice when it suited him, but underneath, he didn’t really feel anything. Except maybe anger. Sometimes you could tell it was just simmering under the surface. I don’t think he ever understood what it meant to be someone else.”

“What do you mean?”

“Like, to be in someone else’s shoes. He had no, you know, empathy. Everything was about how it felt to him. He didn’t care if he hurt you — like, your feelings, mostly — because he didn’t feel the hurt himself. Except where his crazy mother was concerned. She could hurt him. Like I said, he was always worried about pleasing her.”

Rhonda looked out over Lake Erie.

“I really don’t see how I can help you,” she said. “That’s really all I have to say.”

“The thing is,” I said, “I’m not really here about any of that. I’m here about a more personal matter.”

Her head moved ever so slightly in my direction. “What sort of personal matter?”

“My son. I had a son named Scott. A couple of months ago, he died. Maybe you heard about that.”

Rhonda nodded. “Of course. I was still working at Ravelson Furniture then. Everybody felt just awful about it. He was a nice boy.”

Her voice started to get shaky. I leaned in closer to her.

“I drove down here today, hoping you might know something about what happened on the roof that night. For the longest time, I’ve believed Scott went off that roof because he was high on drugs. That’s not what I believe anymore.”

Her face looked as though it might shatter.

“Why would I know anything?” she asked.

“Because of the man you were seeing at the time,” I said.

Rhonda put her hands over her face. “Oh God, oh God,” she said. “I knew you’d come. I knew you’d figure it out eventually.”

I reached out and gently pulled her hands away from her face. “Tell me about it, Rhonda.”

“It was never supposed to happen,” she said. “Never.”

“Did he do it because Scott had threatened him?”

She nodded, and I let go of her arms so that she could wipe her eyes. “Your son, Scott, said he was going to tell. He was all, ‘Hey, wait till everyone finds this out!’ You know?”

Rhonda was describing the incident at Patchett’s. Could she have been there? It seemed unlikely Ricky would tell her the story about his patdown of Claire.

“You saw that happen?” I said.

She nodded, reached for a tissue on a nearby table, dabbed her eyes and wiped her nose.

“You were at Patchett’s?”

That startled her. “What?”

Now I was startled.

“What’s Patchett’s have to do with this?” she asked.

My mind was struggling. “Wait,” I said. I had a theory. “Not Patchett’s. You were on the roof.”

Her head went up and down. She grabbed another tissue.

“You were there when Scott got pushed off the roof?”

She dropped her head. In sorrow, or shame, I wasn’t sure.

I pressed on. “You saw Ricky do it?”

Her head shot up and her mouth opened. She looked as startled as if I’d slapped her.

“Ricky?” she said. “You thought it was Ricky?”