Fragile

31

There were no news vans when Jones pulled into the driveway. It was the first time in days that there hadn’t been at least one reporter hoping for a statement, an ugly candid, maybe flinging insults to get a rise. It didn’t bother him as much as he would have predicted. He’d ignored them mostly, offering not even a glance in their general direction. As he put Maggie’s SUV in park and killed the engine, he thought that they’d missed out on a good day to be there, with the contents of his office in three boxes in the backseat. He hadn’t been fired from his job; he’d offered his resignation, which had been reluctantly accepted by the Hollows PD chief, Marion Butler, a woman he’d come up with from the academy.

“I don’t think this incident requires your resignation, Jones,” she’d said. She’d looked down at the blotter on her desk when she said it. She had eyes that could freeze you dead, and when she’d turned them back on him, he saw her sadness.

“We both know it does,” he’d said.

She’d run a thin hand through silver-gray curls. She’d been gray since the day he met her.

“The incident was an accident,” she’d said. She had sat down behind her desk and picked up the letter he’d handed her. “And you were just a kid. You know it’s likely that charges won’t be filed.”

He knew all this, and he was grateful that she still believed in him. But it didn’t matter.

“I was in a position of trust. And I kept a horrible secret from this town.”

She’d given a careful nod and pointed to the chair in front of her desk. He’d sat. Outside her glass-walled office, the floor had been quiet, as if everyone had frozen in their cubicles to listen to their conversation.

“You were vested in your pension last year.” Her tone had taken on the practical edge he so admired in her. Marion Butler was a straight line, no artifice, no veil.

“That’s a good thing. And, you know, maybe it’s time for a fresh start.”

“Are you sure about this? I’ll fight for your job, if it comes to that. So many years of faithful service to this town counts for a lot, you know.”

But, no. He was sure. In fact, he was sure that he should have quit years ago. He’d wanted to many times; the reasons he hadn’t were myriad. Now the future lay before him, an unwritten page.

He grabbed one of the boxes from the backseat and walked inside. He found Charlene sitting at the kitchen table, drinking a cup of coffee and reading People in her pajamas, like she lived there. Which, annoyingly, she did-for the time being.

“Hi, Mr. Cooper,” she said. She looked up from her magazine, seemed to register the expression on his face. “How did it go?”

“How do you think it went, Charlene?” he said.

“Um… bad?”

He poured a cup of coffee from the pot and came to sit across from her.

“How are your college applications coming?”

“Just taking a little break.”

With Melody awaiting charges in the death of her husband, Charlene had needed a place to stay. When Ricky and Maggie had approached him with the request to board her until Melody was released or, in the worst case, until Charlene went to school in September, he’d surprised himself by agreeing.

They were connected, all of them, weren’t they? The night that Sarah had died, and during everything that had followed, the separate passages of their lives had conjoined in ways none of them could have predicted, or even imagined. It had set even their unborn children on a collision course with each other. He felt like he owed it to all of them to take Charlene in, to right some of the things that had been wrong for so long.

Charlene had decent grades, respectable SAT scores, and a desire to get away from The Hollows for good. She’d finally figured out that an education was the way to do that. There was money left by Charlene’s father and the sale of Melody’s childhood home, which Melody had invested wisely in a trust for her daughter. The conditions of the trust were that the money was available to her only for school and after she had completed her degree, not to traipse around New York City trying to get a record deal. Jones felt a bit guilty for being glad that she had already decided to look at schools in New York City-Fordham, Hunter, and, in a long shot, NYU. Ricky would be going to Georgetown alone.

Ricky and Charlene both claimed that there was nothing more to their relationship now than friendship. But Jones saw the way his son still looked at Charlene. She was a pit of need into which Jones hoped fiercely that his son wouldn’t fall.

“How’s your mom doing?”

A little bit of the wild sadness he’d been seeing in Charlene’s face since the night he lifted her off the boat was fading. But mostly when he looked at her, he just saw this lost, small thing. And in a way he felt responsible for that.

“She’s okay. It was self-defense, you know. I saw him go for her, and she swung to defend herself.” She looked down at the magazine. “She didn’t mean to kill him. Her lawyer thinks the prosecution will be amenable to a deal, because, you know, of the things he did to me. Mitigating circumstances or whatever.”

Jones didn’t know what to say to this girl. So many awful things had happened to her, so many people had hurt and used her. He wanted to put a comforting hand on her, but he hesitated to touch her. She seemed skittish and delicate.

“I better get back to the computer,” said Charlene. “I’m going to school on Monday, and I want to have everything done by then.”

“Sounds like a plan, kid.”

“Hey, Mr. Cooper? Thanks for asking.” She didn’t wait around for him to answer.

He nodded to himself, looked out into the backyard. The pool had been covered for the winter that had closed in on them, and the maple trees had shed their leaves. He really had to get out there and clean up. Of course, now there was plenty of time.

No sooner had he settled into a silent zone of peace, preparing to contemplate his future, than he heard the shuffle-shuffle-thump that heralded the approach of his mother-in-law, another unwanted semi-permanent guest.

“Stripped of his badge and his gun, the retired cop has to contemplate what lies ahead,” she said, putting a pot on the stove.

“Hello, Elizabeth.”

They’d fought out the worst of it. But her recriminations and his were on the table, ready to leap up at any given moment. The truth of it was that they were both guilty of keeping quiet when they should have been raising alarms. The only reason you’re both so angry at each other is because you’re guilty of the same failure to act. Forgive yourselves and maybe you’ll be able to forgive each other. Elizabeth didn’t like to be “shrinked” any more than he did, so when Maggie was around, they both put on happy faces. But Maggie was in session.

“So when do you think you’ll be leaving?”

“Not soon enough, Detective. Oh, that’s right. It’s just Jones now. Mr. Cooper.”

She came to sit across from him, shuffle-shuffle-thump. She looked frail and tired; she didn’t have the same vigor since her last accident. Her weakened state did take a little of the fun out of fighting with her.

“What’s it going to take to bury the hatchet, Elizabeth?”

She leaned back in her chair and looked at him. “I just can’t get over that those things were in my attic. That you hid them there.”

Jones, on Maggie’s insistence, was seeing a therapist a few towns away. He drove there weekly with a brew of dread and resentment in his belly, returning exhausted in a way he’d never experienced before. He’d grab a big cup of coffee at a drive-through Starbucks, blast some classic rock like Led Zeppelin or Van Morrison to try to shake off that bone-deep fatigue. But it lived in him for at least a day after each session, lashing him to the couch. His therapist was a man about his age, a soft-spoken guy with a thick head of ink black hair, always in crisply pressed chinos and a colorful shirt. Dr. Black. They talked a lot about the items Jones had kept, why he’d kept them, what they meant, why he’d chosen Elizabeth’s attic to hide them in recent years.

“I know,” he said. “I’m sorry. It was a violation of our trust. It felt like a safe place to hide that part of myself.”

She looked down at her hands, twisted the gold wedding band on the finger of her left hand.

“A few days after I went to see Tommy Delano in prison, I went to see the chief,” she said. “He was such a weasel, that man. Not a kind or compassionate thought ever entered his tiny, little mind.”

She hadn’t told him this before. He took a sip of his coffee, waited for her to go on. But she didn’t.

“What did he tell you?” he asked, finally. He looked out at the backyard, a view he’d gazed upon for almost twenty years. But everything out there-the covered pool, the patio furniture, the ivy-covered pergola-looked different, brighter somehow, more solid.

“He told me something I’ve never told anyone. It was part of the reason that psychic had such an impact on me.”

“I’m listening.” And he was; he felt the palms of his hands start to tingle.

“They found other pictures in his room-yearbook pictures, some snapshots-of other girls at the school. One of those girls was Maggie.”

Jones let the information sink in, taking in a deep breath and letting it out slowly, trying not to imagine Tommy Delano with a picture of a young and innocent Maggie in his grease-stained hands.

“I was wrong about Tommy Delano,” Elizabeth said. “And the chief? He didn’t lie. What he said Tommy Delano had done, he’d done. He probably would have done worse to another girl somewhere down the line. Maybe…” She let the thought go unfinished.

“‘I was wrong,’” he said, as if testing the words on the air. He had the urge to make light, to not focus on the horror of what she was saying. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you utter that statement.”

She gave him a wan smile. “I’ve never had to.”

“Hmm,” he said. He offered a deferential nod.

“After I saw the chief, I was angry and unsatisfied-and frightened. Still not convinced I had the whole story from Crosby-which, of course, I didn’t. So I went to see that woman, that psychic, Eloise Montgomery. I went there to blast her, to force her to tell me that she was a fraud.”

They hadn’t talked like this before, not really. The words they’d exchanged over the last couple of weeks had been loud and angry, designed to deflect blame and hurt each other. But sitting with her now, Jones found that Maggie was right, as usual. He wasn’t mad at Elizabeth. She’d acted out of fear, just as he had.

“But there in her kitchen, she made me a cup of tea and told me what she saw. And I believed her. Something about her voice, her eyes, filled me with horror and awe. I’ll never forget what she said. She told me, ‘If you don’t stop asking questions, if you don’t let this rest, you’ll lose your daughter.’ I can’t describe the way her words made me feel. They cut me to the bone.”

He reached for her hand, and she didn’t pull away. Her skin was soft and papery in his grasp. “I asked her what she meant, and she said she didn’t know. But, of course, I just kept seeing Sarah lying there, stiff and unnatural, those horrible gashes filled with putty. Thinking of Maggie’s pictures in his room. And the thought of losing my daughter like that was enough to bind and gag me for good.”

A single tear trailed down her face, and she withdrew her hand from his to remove a tissue from her pocket and angrily dab her cheek dry.

“But now I think that maybe it was about you,” Elizabeth went on. That maybe she meant you wouldn’t be here to bring her back to The Hollows. It would have changed your life if the truth had been revealed about that night. Maybe for the better. Maybe you would have left this place. But I don’t know.”

“We don’t know,” he said. “And it doesn’t matter. All that matters is how things are right now.”

“My husband used to say, ‘The past is history. The future is a mystery. The present is a gift.’”

“He was a wise man.”

“I miss him every day.”

“I know you do.”

She reached out to touch his face. “You always were a good boy, Jones Cooper.”

He didn’t know if his mother-in-law was being sarcastic or not, but he supposed it didn’t much matter.

Maggie slipped back through the door that led to her office and closed it quietly. She’d been headed to the kitchen to see if Jones was back from picking up his things, and overheard him talking to her mother. She decided to give them some space to finish their conversation.

She’d stayed out of sight and eavesdropped like a kid. She was feeling bad about it when she looked up to the top landing to see Ricky and Charlene listening, too. They all exchanged guilty glances, but none of them moved. Maggie and Ricky locked eyes as Elizabeth told Jones what she’d been keeping to herself for decades.

Now she sank into the leather chair behind her desk and looked at the flock of unopened e-mail messages on her screen-Angie Crosby checking on Marshall’s progress; Henry Ivy wanting to get coffee; a referral from a friend who practiced in the next town. But she found she couldn’t really focus. Her mother’s conversation with Jones had triggered a flash flood of memory. And suddenly, she was remembering the thing that had been nagging at her since the night Charlene disappeared. The thing she couldn’t quite remember.

A few days before Sarah disappeared, Maggie had stayed late after school to work on the yearbook. A senior girl on the project, Crystal James, someone her mother approved of, was supposed to give her a ride home. But as Maggie waited by the entrance to the building, the dusk deepened and Crystal was nowhere to be seen. Maggie walked around the back of the school to the parking lot, wondering if Crystal was waiting for her there. She came around the building to hear raised voices. Some boys had gathered around the bus yard where Tommy Delano was working.

She’d seen it too many times. It angered her, and she walked over to the group. Even now she couldn’t remember who it was-maybe Dennis and Larry, possibly Greg.

“Stop it, you guys. Just cut it out.” Her voice sounded weak and insubstantial, not at all strong and commanding like her mother’s voice.

The boys turned, ready to fling insults in her direction by the looks on their faces. But when they saw it was her, they all went quiet. There were some benefits to being the principal’s daughter.

“We’re just playing around, Maggie.”

“It’s not funny,” she said. She felt embarrassed suddenly, with so many eyes on her. “Go home.”

She remembered the look on Tommy Delano’s face, a kind of sheepish gratitude, and something else. After the boys had walked off, she stood awkwardly, looking into the distance for Crystal’s car, a yellow Volkswagen Bug.

“Thanks,” he said. “Thanks a lot. You’re a really nice girl. A lot like your mom.”

She bristled a little at that but knew he meant it as a compliment. “They shouldn’t hassle you,” she said. “It’s not cool.”

“I’m used to it.”

She turned to look at him, and something about the expression on his face made her back away. There was something needy and strange about his energy, and she felt uncomfortable being alone with him, even though a chain-link fence stood between them.

“What are you doing here so late?” he asked, moving closer to the fence.

“I’m waiting for Crystal.”

“I saw her leave a while ago,” he said, lacing his fingers into the fence. “Maybe she forgot she was supposed to give you a ride?”

Maggie felt her heart start to thump, for no reason she could name.

“I could give you a lift home, Maggie. I’m just finishing up here.” His tone was sweet and mild, but every nerve ending in her body started to tingle.

“I’ll just call my mom.”

He gave a nonchalant shrug that didn’t come off. “Your mom used to drive me home all the time when I went to school.”

“She did?”

Maggie relaxed a little then. If her mom liked Tommy Delano, he was probably okay. She couldn’t remember ever hearing her talk about him.

“Hey, Maggie.”

She looked over to see Travis Crosby in his beat-up old Dodge that was always breaking down.

“I just passed Crystal on Old Farmers Road.” He had his arm out the window. “Her car is dead. She was worried sick that you were standing here in the dark. She wanted me to drive you home.”

She didn’t even think about it for a second, started jogging toward his car.

“Thanks anyway, Tommy,” she called behind her.

She wasn’t allowed to ride in cars with boys, and her mother did not approve of Travis Crosby. She’d get in trouble if Elizabeth found out.

“Don’t worry,” Travis said as she got in the car. “I won’t tell your mom.”

“Thanks,” she said, surprised at her breathless relief to be away from Tommy.

“You shouldn’t be talking to that guy. He’s a weirdo, you know. He killed his mother.”

“That’s just a rumor,” she said, looking back. Tommy was still leaning on the fence looking after her.

“No,” said Travis. “It’s true. My dad told me. He pushed her down the stairs and sat on the top step to watch her die.”

Maggie felt a shudder move through her. Travis reached over and cranked the heat. “It’s still cold,” he said. “It doesn’t feel like spring.”

“No,” she said. “It doesn’t.”

Then, “Thanks for the ride, Travis.”

“No problem. Crystal is hot; maybe she’ll like me now.” He gave her a goofy smile, and she laughed. She remembered the smell of his cologne; Polo was what all the jocks wore then. She remembered the song on the radio, “Angel in Blue” by the J. Geils Band. There was a can of Pepsi wedged in between the seats; she could hear the liquid swishing around as the car moved.

“You’re a dog, Travis.”

“Bow, wow, wow,” he said.

They chatted all the way home, and she forgot that moment with Tommy Delano. Even in the days and weeks that followed, she didn’t think about that conversation with him again. It was buried deep, not available for examination until now. What would have happened to her if she had taken that ride home? Or if he hadn’t been in prison a few weeks later and died there? Tommy Delano had written to Eloise that he couldn’t have kept his appetites at bay much longer. How long would he have served for mutilating and violating the dead body of a girl if the whole truth of that night had been revealed? Would he have been out roaming The Hollows again while she still lived there?

As Travis pulled into her drive, the bottom of the car ground against the steep incline where the paved surface met the road. There was the unpleasant sound of metal on concrete, and then the car sputtered and died. Maggie and Travis exchanged a look.

“Shit,” he said.

They both looked toward the house to see Elizabeth standing in the doorway and then stepping onto the porch. Travis tried to start the car, but there was only a sad coughing noise. Elizabeth approached, arms folded around her middle, a scowl on her face.

“You’re dead,” said Travis. “Sorry.”

Maggie got out of the car, and Travis rolled down the window, both of them talking over each other to explain.

“Into the house, Maggie.”

“But, Mom-”

“Now, please.”

“Crystal’s car broke down,” she said. Maggie remembered that rush of angry frustration. It was something she still often felt with her mother, at Elizabeth’s unwillingness to listen, at her occasional arrogance.

“You don’t know how to use a phone?” Elizabeth asked. A question that didn’t require an answer. “Now, go. I’ll deal with you in a minute.”

There was no way to explain the energy of that moment with Tommy Delano, how she would have gotten into anyone’s car just to be away from him. She tried to explain to her later, but Elizabeth wasn’t listening, as usual, thought Maggie was just making excuses for breaking the rules. Her punishment was no television for a week.

“I expect more from you, Maggie.”

Now, as she sat in her office, all those feelings crashed over her, one wave after another, as though days, not decades, had passed. The implications were enormous, but at the same time almost too nebulous to contemplate. Maggie had always suffered through worry. Even as a kid, she’d fret about exams and projects, this or that drama at school. She’d turn problems-hers and others’-over and over in her mind. As an adult she was prone to a random dark dread, the occasional but powerful feeling of foreboding. It would wake her up at night sometimes, keep her wandering the house in the wee hours. She remembered her father’s advice as clearly as Elizabeth did, how he’d sit beside her on the bed and put his hand on her forehead, gently admonishing against worry.

But she knew that it was impossible to live a life that way. It was all woven together in one great tapestry-the past, the present, the future-colors and textures mingling and entwined. It was nearly impossible to extract the present moment from what came before it, from what might lie ahead. She knew this from her patients. She knew it in her own heart.

What if Travis’s car hadn’t broken down that night after hitting the steep incline in her drive? Maybe then he wouldn’t have needed a ride from Jones; they wouldn’t have been together that night, and Jones, by his own account, would have driven by Sarah without a second glance. Sarah might have returned home unharmed. And Tommy Delano would have still been wandering free in The Hollows, struggling and probably eventually failing to keep those terrible appetites at bay. She struggled to make meaning of it all. But like all what-ifs, it had no real answer, nothing solid to hold on to. Just imaginings, fantasies that slipped through her fingers like sand.

“Mags?” Her husband’s voice broke her from her thoughts. She saw, with surprise, that he was standing in the doorway. She didn’t remember ever seeing him enter her office. It was strange to have him there, and oddly thrilling.

“You okay?” he asked, stepping over the threshold. “You look pale.”

“Yes,” she said. She stood and went to him, let him take her in his strong embrace.

“How was it?” she asked. “Your last shift?”

“You know what? It was good. I feel… pretty good, considering.” Then, “What were you thinking about just now?”

“Jones, I overheard your conversation with my mother.”

He pulled back to look at her. “I’m sorry. It’s disturbing, I know.”

“I just remembered something. Something from so long ago.”

She moved over to the couch, and he came to sit beside her. On the coffee table, she saw the catalog she’d ordered from an art school in the city. She was thinking of taking an oil painting class once a week, maybe on Saturdays, after Ricky went off to Georgetown. She was hoping that she could convince Jones to join her, that maybe they could start spending more time in the city, doing the things she loved and had put on hold for so long. Life was short. So very short. Who knew how much time any of them had?

Then she turned back to her husband and told him about the thing that she hadn’t been able to remember. As she talked, Ricky drifted in and, without asking, flopped into the chair across from them. Then Elizabeth was standing in the doorway. Jones must have left the door to her office open, something she never did. And, for some reason, her son and mother followed him into her space. It was okay to have them here; it was even good.

As she told them all about her buried memory, she felt an awe at how all their separate lives were twisted and tangled, growing over and around one another, altering, aiding, and blocking one another’s paths. Not just her family but people who seemed so distant, like Travis, Marshall and Melody, Sarah and Eloise Montgomery, Tommy Delano. And how the connections between them were as terribly fragile as they were indelible.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

A lifetime ago, a girl I knew went missing. I lived in a small, quiet town in New Jersey with my family. I was fifteen years old. This missing girl was someone I knew… we played in the same school orchestra, said hello in the hallways. I wouldn’t have said we were friends. But her disappearance and the eventual discovery of her body, the chaos that followed, the fear and sadness that lingered in the wake of her murder, have stayed with me in ways that have only recently become clear to me.

That said, this novel-one I have been trying in various ways to write for twenty years-is not about that event or about that girl. It is not my intention to exploit her memory, or to cause any more pain. In fact, I won’t even mention her name here. Nothing in this book bears more than a passing resemblance to the events that occurred in the mid-eighties. I have done little or no research to improve my fuzzy recall of chronology or details. This story and the characters that populate it are wholly products of my imagination; even the town itself is fictional, not based on any place I have ever been.

As always, any inaccuracies and liberties taken for the sake of the narrative are my own.