The Prophet

6

WHEN BETH CAME DOWNSTAIRS to greet Kent, it was past two in the morning but she didn’t show any surprise. During the season, hours like this were no cause for alarm for a coach’s wife, and in the years before they’d had children, hours like this had been Beth’s norm. She’d been an ER nurse and intended to return to it once Lisa and Andrew were old enough. The night shift had never ebbed away from her; Kent sometimes found her making coffee at four in the morning simply because she knew better than to fight for a return to sleep.

Tonight, though, she’d been asleep. He could tell that from her foggy smile and the way her long blond hair was fuzzed out from the pillow. “Still perfect,” she said. “Nice work, babe.”

He’d opened the refrigerator to get a bottle of water and in the shaft of white light she saw something that made her say, “Hon?” in a concerned voice.

He took the water out and let the door swing shut and they were standing in darkness when he told her that Rachel Bond was dead.

“Someone killed that poor girl? Murdered her?” she said, her reflex response to bad news, stating the facts and considering them, the practiced reaction of someone who had been required to show poise in the face of crisis. Tonight it chafed. Scream, he wanted to say, cry, shout, break down, because no quality was so annoying in someone else as the very one you didn’t like in yourself. He’d spent the whole night trying to offer calm and strength and to repress emotion. He was tired of that.

Beth crossed the kitchen and took him in her arms then and the irritable edge that sorrow and fatigue had given him melted into her warmth. He held her while he told her about the police station, all that had been said, Stan Salter and Colin Mears and the news about Adam.

“Adam sent her to him?” Beth leaned back, searching his eyes. “Adam?”

He nodded. “You remember the night that Colin asked me about him? Saw him in the team photo from the championship year and asked where he’d gone? Well, I told him he was still here, and I said… I said he was a private detective. He remembered that, apparently. And when Rachel decided to try and find her father…”

“She went to Adam.”

“Yes.”

They were silent. Kent finished his water. Neither of them turned on the lights.

“She was such a beautiful girl,” Beth whispered. “In every way. Too mature. You know I used to tell you that. Like she’d never been a girl, always had to be an adult.”

“I know.”

Beth wiped tears from her eyes with her fingertips. “She was going to do so much, Kent. She was one of those… you could just tell that she was going to do so much.”

Her voice trailed off and he reached out and stroked her hair as she took a shaking breath, folded her arms tightly around herself, and said, “By tomorrow morning, people will have heard what happened. Maybe before practice.”

“We won’t practice. I’ll say a few words, send them home.” He leaned against the counter and removed his baseball cap and ran a hand through his hair. “They’ll try to connect it to football. Make her a symbol, start dedicating games to her. I wish they wouldn’t.”

“They’re just boys.”

“It’s not going to be only the boys. It’ll be the parents, the fans, the guys on the radio. It’ll be the cheerleaders and the teachers and the janitors and even the police. All of a sudden a bunch of kids playing a game are going to represent something they should not.”

“Maybe that won’t happen.”

“Trust me,” he said. “It will.”

The police had finished with him before three, but Adam didn’t make it home until the sun was up. He went to his office—a convenient trip from the police station—and then he drove north to the lake. There, on the tumbled slabs of rocks that formed the breakwater, in the shadow of an empty mill that had once produced steel and now stood as a tired symbol of an age that had been gone for generations but that people still mourned as if it had just ended, he sat in the cold and drank from the bottle of whiskey he’d removed from his office. It was very good whiskey. Auchentoshan Three Wood, a fine Scotch. He kept only good stuff around his home and office. You didn’t drink the good stuff as fast, couldn’t afford to.

He drank it fast now.

Didn’t get much of it down.

As the moon went pale and then faded beneath the dawn’s lead light, Adam Austin vomited fine Scotch into Lake Erie and then he let himself weep, slipping down until one arm and one foot were in the frigid water, the wind heedless and unforgiving. This would make him sick, being both unprepared for the cold and unwilling to step out of it. It would infect him in time.

Why again? he thought. Why wasn’t bearing it once enough? How can it not be? He crawled back up the rocks and stared out at this lake that touched three other states and one other country in places he couldn’t see, this lake that was always cold, when you needed it to be and when you didn’t. Watched the horizon take shape and then, when it was bright enough or as close to bright as this day seemed inclined to get, he returned to his car and drove home. It was the only home he’d ever known, the home his parents had brought him to from the hospital, their firstborn son, firstborn child, eldest of three. He’d remodeled when he could afford to, replaced what he cared to. Other than the basics of the structure, there wasn’t much left to the house that recalled what it had once been. He’d changed almost everything.

Except for one room.

He walked to it now, stood in the dim upstairs hallway, and reached for the knob. Laid his hand on the chill metal and read the handwritten sign: MARIE LYNN AUSTIN LIVES HERE—KNOCKS REQUIRED, TRESPASSING FORBIDDEN! THANKS, BOYS! He shook his head. Not yet. He couldn’t enter like this, nothing more to show her than a drunk man with wet shoes and bile on his shirtsleeve and blood on his hands. More blood.

Instead, he went down the hall and peeled off his clothes and turned on the shower, looking into the mirror as the old water heater took its time limbering up and preparing for action. His eyes were dry now. They’d stay that way. He knew that.

“I’m coming for you,” he whispered, and then he thought that was a strange thing to tell your own reflection, and turned away.