Mark Dolan signaled to two officers, who were already in position on either side of the gym doors. With his chief trapped inside, Dolan had assumed authority, and he was letting his testosterone take command.
Claire ran through the snow to the cruisers. Dolan and the Two Hills police chief stared at her in surprise as she dropped to a crouch beside them.
“You’re supposed to stay back!” said Dolan.
“Don’t tell me you’re going to send armed men in there!”
“The boy has a gun.”
“You’re going to get people killed, Dolan!”
“They’ll get killed if we don’t do something,” said the Two Hills chief. He signaled to three cops crouched behind the next car.
Claire watched in alarm as the officers scrambled toward the building and took position by the doors.
“Don’t do this,” she said to Dolan. “You don’t know the situation in there—”
“And you do?”
“There’s been no gunfire. Give Lincoln a chance to negotiate.”
“Lincoln’s not in charge, Dr. Elliot. Now get out of my face or I’ll have you arrested!”
She stared straight ahead at the gym doors. The snow was falling faster now, obscuring her view of the building, and through that gauzy curtain of white, the cops looked like ghostly figures floating toward the entrance.
One of them reached for the door.
Lincoln and the boy were at a stalemate. They faced each other across the shadowy gym, the distant beam from the emergency lamp slashing the darkness between them. The boy was still holding the gun, but so far all he’d done was wave it around in the air, eliciting terrified shrieks from the students huddled near the wall. He had not yet aimed at anyone, not even at Lincoln, who had his hand on his weapon, and was prepared to draw it. Two girls were standing just behind the boy, making any shot risky. Lincoln was relying on his instincts now, and they told him this boy could still be talked down, that even as the boy raged on, there was some part of him struggling for control, needing only a calm voice to guide him.
Slowly, Lincoln lowered his hand from his holster. He was facing the boy with his arms at his sides now, a position of neutrality. Trust. “I don’t want to hurt you, son. And I don’t think you want to hurt anyone. You’re above that. You’re better than that.”
The boy wavered. He started to kneel, to place the gun on the floor, then he changed his mind and straightened again. He turned to look at the classmates who cowered in the shadows. “I’m not like you. I’m not like any of you.”
“Then prove it, son,” said Lincoln. “Put the weapon down.”
The boy turned to look at him. At that moment, the flames of his anger seemed to flicker, grow dim. He was drifting between rage and reason, and in Lincoln’s gaze he desperately sought anchor.
Lincoln moved toward him and held out his hand. “I’ll take it now,” he said quietly.
The boy nodded. Gazing steadily into Lincoln’s eyes, he reached out to surrender the weapon.
The door crashed open, followed by the rapid-fire staccato of running footsteps. Lincoln saw a confusing blur of movement as men burst into the room from every direction. Shrieking students ran for cover. And caught in the knifelike beam of the emergency lamp stood a dazed Barry Knowlton, his arm still extended, the weapon gripped in his hand. In that split-second, Lincoln saw with sickening clarity what was about to happen. He saw the boy, still clutching the gun, as he turned toward the cops. He saw the men, pumped on adrenaline, weapons raised.
Lincoln screamed, “Hold your fire!”
His voice was lost in the deafening blast.
The thunder of gunfire momentarily paralyzed the crowd in the street. Then everyone reacted at once, the bystanders hysterical and screaming, the cops rushing toward the building.
A teacher ran out of the gym and shouted: “We need an ambulance!”
Claire had to fight a stream of terrified kids pushing out the door as she struggled into the building. At first all she saw was a confusing jumble of silhouettes, men padded with body armor, paper streamers drifting, ghostlike, in the shadows above. The darkness smelled of sweat and fear.
And blood. She almost stepped in a pool of it as she forced her way into the gathering of cops. At their center was Lincoln, crouched on the floor, cradling a limp boy in his arms.
“Who gave the order?” he demanded, his voice hoarse with fury.
“Officer Dolan thought—”
“Mark?” Lincoln looked at Dolan.
“It was a joint decision,” said Dolan. “Chief Orbison and I—we knew the boy was armed—”
“He was about to surrender!”
“We didn’t know!”
“Get out of here,” said Lincoln. “Go on, get out of here!”
Dolan turned and shoved Claire aside as he walked out the door.
She knelt down beside Lincoln. “The ambulance is right outside.”
“It’s too late,” he said.
“Let me see if I can help him!”
“There’s nothing you can do.” He looked at her, his eyes glistening with tears.
She reached down for the boy’s wrist and felt no pulse. Then Lincoln opened his arms and she saw the boy’s head. What was left of it.
21
That night he needed her. After Barry Knowlton’s body had been removed, after the ordeal of meeting the shattered parents, Lincoln had found himself trapped in the bright glare of reporters’ flashbulbs. Twice he’d broken down and cried in front of the TV cameras. He was not ashamed of his tears, nor was he stinting in his angry condemnation of how the crisis had been resolved. He knew he was laying the groundwork for a wrongful death suit against his own employer, the Town of Tranquility. He didn’t care. All he knew was that a boy had been shot down like a deer in November, and someone should have to pay.
Driving through a galaxy of falling snow, he realized he could not bear the thought of going home, of spending this night, like so many other nights, alone.
He drove instead to Claire’s house.
Stumbling from his car through the calf-deep snow, he felt like some wretched pilgrim struggling toward sanctuary. He climbed to her porch and knocked again and again on the door, and when there was no response, he was suddenly gripped by despair at the thought she was not home, that this house was empty. That he faced the rest of the night without her.
Then above, a light came on, its warm halo filtering down through the falling snow. A moment later the door opened and she stood before him.
He stepped inside. Neither one of them said a word. She simply opened her arms to him, accepted him. He was dusted with snow, and it melted against her heat, trickling in cold rivulets to soak the flannel of her gown. She just kept holding him, even as melted snow puddled on the floor around her bare feet.
“I waited for you,” she said.
“I couldn’t stand the thought of going home.”
“Then stay here. Stay with me.”
Upstairs they shed their clothes and slid between sheets still warm from her sleeping body. He had not come to make love, had come seeking only comfort. She gave him both, granting him the welcome exhaustion that eased him into sleep.
He awakened to a view through the window of a sky so sharply blue it hurt his eyes. Claire lay curled up asleep beside him, her hair an unruly tangle of curls on the pillow. He could see strands of gray mingled among the brown, and that first silvering of age in her hair was so unexpectedly touching that he found himself blinking back tears. Half a lifetime of not knowing you, he thought. Half a lifetime wasted, until now.
He kissed her softly on the head, but she didn’t awaken.
He got dressed while gazing out the window, at a world transformed by the night’s storm. A fluffy mantle of snow had buried his car, turning it into an indistinct mound of white. The snow-covered branches of trees drooped under their heavy cloaks, and where once there’d been the front lawn, now there seemed to be a bright field of diamonds, g
littering in the sunlight.
A pickup truck came up the road and turned onto Claire’s property. It had a winter plow mounted in front, and Lincoln assumed at first that this was someone Claire had hired to clear her driveway. Then the driver stepped out, and Lincoln saw the Tranquility police department uniform. It was Floyd Spear.
Floyd waded over to the mound that was Lincoln’s vehicle and brushed away the snow from the license plate. Then he looked up, questioningly, at the house. Now the whole town will know where I spent the night.
Lincoln went downstairs and opened the front door just as Floyd raised his gloved hand to knock. “Morning,” said Lincoln.
“Uh … morning.”
“You looking for me?”
“Yeah, I—I drove over to your house, but you weren’t home.”
“My pager’s been on.”
“I know. But I—well, I didn’t want to break the news over the phone.”
“What news?”
Floyd looked down at his own boots, crusted with snow. “It’s bad news, Lincoln. I’m real sorry. It’s about Doreen.”
Lincoln said nothing. And strangely enough, he felt nothing, as if the cold air he was breathing in had somehow numbed his heart, and his brain as well. Floyd’s voice seemed to be speaking to him from across a great distance, the words fading in and out of hearing.
“… found her body over on Slocum Road. Don’t know how she got all the way out there. We think it must’ve happened early last night, ’round the same time as that trouble over at the school. But it’s up to the ME to determine.”
Lincoln could barely force words from his throat. “How … how did it happen?”
Floyd hesitated, his gaze rising, then dropping again to his boots. “It looks like a hit-and-run to me. The state police are heading out to the scene.”
By Floyd’s prolonged silence, Lincoln understood there was still more that hadn’t been said. When Floyd looked up at last, his next words came out with painful reluctance. “Last night, around nine, the dispatcher got a call about a drunken driver, weaving all over Slocum Road. Same vicinity where we found Doreen. That call came in while we were all over at the high school, so no one managed to follow up on it—”
“Did the witness get a license number?”
Floyd nodded. And added miserably: “The vehicle was registered to Dr. Elliot.”
Lincoln felt the blood drain from his face. Claire’s car?
“According to the registration, it’s a brown Chevy pickup.”
“But she wasn’t driving the pickup! I saw her last night at the school. She was driving that old Subaru sedan.”
“All I’m saying, Lincoln, is that the witness gave Dr. Elliot’s license number. So maybe—maybe I should take a look at the pickup?”
Lincoln stepped outside in his shirtsleeves, but scarcely felt the cold as he waded across to the barn. He reached elbow deep into the snow, found the handle, and raised the door.
Inside, both of Claire’s vehicles were parked side by side, the pickup on the right. The first thing Lincoln noticed was the snowmelt puddled beneath both vehicles. Both of them had been driven sometime in the last day or two, recently enough so that the puddles had not yet evaporated.
His numbness was quickly giving way to a nauseating sense of dread. He circled around to the front of the pickup truck. At his first glimpse of the blood smeared across the fender, the world seemed to drop away from under his feet, to collapse beneath him.
Without a word, he turned and walked out of the barn.
Halting in calf-deep snow, he looked up at the house where Claire and her son now slept. He could think of no way to avoid the ordeal to come, no way to spare her from the pain he himself would now have to inflict. He had no choice in the matter. Surely she would understand. Perhaps some day she would even forgive him.
But today—today she would hate him.
“You know you’re gonna have to step away from this,” said Floyd, softly. “Hell, you’re gonna have to stay miles away. Doreen was your wife. And you just spent the night with …” His voice faded. “It’s a state police case, Lincoln. They’ll be wanting to talk to you. To both of you.”
Lincoln took a deep breath and welcomed the punishing sharpness of cold air in his lungs. Welcomed the physical pain. “Then you get them on the radio,” he said. And he started, reluctantly, toward the house. “I have to talk to Noah.”
She didn’t understand how this could have happened. She had awakened to a parallel universe where people she knew, people she loved, were behaving in ways she did not recognize. There was Noah slouched in the kitchen chair, his whole body so electric with rage the air around him seemed to hum. There was Lincoln, grim and distant as he asked another question, and another. Neither one of them looked at her; clearly they both preferred she be out of the room, but they hadn’t asked her to leave. She would not leave in any event; she saw the direction Lincoln’s questions were taking, and she understood the dangerous nature of this drama now being played out in her kitchen.
“I need you to be honest with me, son,” said Lincoln. “I’m not trying to play tricks on you. I’m not trying to trap you. I just have to know where you drove the truck last night, and what happened.”
“Who says I drove it anywhere?”
“The pickup has obviously been out of the barn. There’s snowmelt under it.”
“My mom—”
“Your mom was driving the Subaru last night, Noah. She confirms it.”
Noah’s gaze shot to Claire, and she saw the accusation in his eyes. You’re on his side.
“Who gives a shit if I did take it out for a drive?” said Noah. “I brought it back in one piece, didn’t I?”
“Yes, you did.”
“So I drove without a license. Send me to the electric chair.”
“Where did you drive the truck, Noah?”
“Around.”
“Where?”
“Just around, okay?”
“Why are you asking him these questions?” said Claire. “What are trying to get him to say?”
Lincoln didn’t answer; his attention remained fixed on her son. That’s how far he’s pulled away from me, she thought. That’s how little I know this man. Welcome to the morning after, the hard light of regret.
“This isn’t about a simple joyride, is it?” said Claire.
At last Lincoln looked at her. “There was a hit-and-run accident last night. Your pickup truck may have been involved.”
“How do you know that?”
“A witness saw your truck driving erratically and called it in. It was on the same road where the body was found.”
She sat back in her chair, as though someone had shoved her. A body. Someone has been killed.
“Where did you take the pickup last night, Noah?” Lincoln asked.
Suddenly Noah looked terrified. “The lake,” he said, almost too softly to be heard.
“Where else?”
“Just the lake. Toddy Point Road. I parked for a while, on the boat ramp. Then it started to snow too hard, and we didn’t want to get stuck there, so I—I drove home. I was already here when mom got back.”
“We? You said we didn’t want to get stuck.”
Noah looked confused. “I meant me.”
“Who was in the truck with you?”
“Nobody.”
“The truth, Noah. Who was with you when you hit Doreen?”
“Who?”
“Doreen Kelly.”
Lincoln’s wife? Claire stood up so abruptly her chair toppled backwards. “Stop it. Stop the questions!”
“They found her body this morning, Noah,” Lincoln continued, as though Claire hadn’t spoken at all, and his quiet monotone barely disguised his pain. “She was lying at the side of Slocum Road. Not far from where the witness saw you driving last night. You could have stopped to help her. You could have called someone, anyone. She didn’t deserve to die that way, Noah. Not all alone, in the cold.” Claire heard more
than pain in his voice; she heard guilt. His marriage may have been over, but Lincoln had never lost his sense of responsibility toward Doreen. With her death, he had taken on the new burden of self-blame.
“Noah wouldn’t leave her there,” said Claire. “I know he wouldn’t.”
“You may think you know him.”
“Lincoln, I understand you’re hurting. I understand you’re in shock. But now you’re lashing out, trying to assign blame to the nearest target.”
Lincoln looked at Noah. “You’ve been in trouble before, haven’t you? You’ve stolen cars.”
Noah’s hands clenched into fists. “You know?”
“Yes, I do. Officer Spear called your juvenile intake officer down in Baltimore.”
“So why are you bothering with the questions? You’ve already decided I’m guilty!”
“I want to hear your side.”
“I told you my side!”
“You say you drove around the lake. You also drove out to Slocum Road, didn’t you? Did you realize you’d hit her? Did you ever think to get out and just take a goddamn look?”
“Stop it,” said Claire.
“I have to know!”
“I won’t have a cop interrogating my son without legal counsel!”
“I’m not asking this as a cop.”
“You are a cop! And there’ll be no more questions!” She stood behind her son, her hands on Noah’s shoulders as she gazed straight at Lincoln. “He has nothing more to say to you.”
“He’ll have to come up with answers eventually, Claire. The state police will be asking him all these questions and more.”
“Noah won’t be talking to them either. Not without an attorney.”
“Claire,” he said, anguish spilling into his voice. “She was my wife. I need to know.”
“Are you placing my son under arrest?”
“It’s not my decision—”
Claire’s hands tightened on Noah’s shoulders. “If you’re not arresting him, and you have no search warrant, then I want you to leave my house. I want you and Officer Spear off my property.”