The waitress, a bored UMD student in a Rascal Flatts T-shirt, told her that one of the men at the bar wanted to buy Tish a drink. Tish waved her off without giving the man a look. It wasn’t the first time tonight. Men assumed that a single woman in the bar was on the prowl, when all she really wanted was to get drunk. She knew she drank and smoked too much. It was a way to get through the days and nights.
Tish wondered if she had made a mistake by coming back. Stirring up her life wouldn’t accomplish anything, and she was already lying about her past. Stride knew it-she could see it in his eyes when he looked at her. A part of her wanted to pack up and go before things got worse, but she owed it to Laura to be here. She owed it to Cindy, too. She had foolishly made a promise to her, and she couldn’t put off any longer her need to honor it.
She paid her bill. It was one in the morning. She left the bar through the crowd of smokers outside the door and strolled past dark storefronts toward her rental car. Rather than get in, she continued past it, down the sharp slope of Second Avenue toward the corner. She stood by a parking meter on the curb and stared diagonally across the street, where a crumpled piece of newspaper blew up against a brick building like a tumble-weed. The ground floor of the building housed a wireless phone store behind its big windows. Neon glowed brightly in the display.
Back then, when she was a child, the same space had been a bank office. The bank where her mother worked as a teller.
Tish had been in school when it happened. The policeman who came to get her had a black mole on his cheek and breath that smelled like burned coffee. He took her to the station and put her in a white room, and then a woman in a flowery dress came in and told her. That was it. She slept with strangers that night.
“I’m home, Mom,” Tish murmured to the air.
She turned around, leaving the old bank building behind, and stalked briskly to her car. The fresh air had burned off some of the alcohol clouding her brain. She drove north out of downtown through streets largely empty of traffic. The lights stayed green. She turned right at Twenty-first Avenue, crossed over the freeway, and curled around a sharp curve to the cliffside road that led to the condominium she was borrowing. She parked under the trees at the end of the street and got out. She lit a cigarette and stood there, smoking, letting it burn down. The lake twinkled below her. The birches were silhouettes with a thousand arms, moving and alive. Behind her, the freeway overpass rumbled on its stilts like a concrete giant. She felt strange. As if eyes were watching her. That was how Laura must have felt. Tish shivered, but she finished her smoke before crushing out the butt in the street and continuing to her front door.
She stopped. Froze.
One of the miniature square panels of stained glass in the door was shattered, letting out a square of white light. The broken pane was near the dead bolt.
Tish backed up, listening. Everything was quiet. She looked behind her, feeling a stab of panic. The sensation of being watched had fled. She was alone now, but she felt violated. With her cell phone, Tish called the police. They told her a car would be there soon. Knowing that help was close by gave her the courage to return to the door, which was unlocked, and nudge it open. She took a cautious step into the foyer, listening for anything that would betray a stranger. She breathed the air, trying to smell an echo of whoever had been here, but all she detected was a lingering paint smell from the work that had been done on the place before she arrived.
Nothing was disturbed that she could see. Nothing taken. But she had only been in town for a few days, enough time to get up her courage to see Stride, enough time to visit the north beach in the park. A pilgrimage to feel Laura’s spirit again.
All she had in the condo was her suitcase and some food.
Tish waited for a long time by the front door, and when she was convinced she was alone, she went to the bedroom. Her papers were strewn over the bed, not the way she had left them. Her clothes were in and out of the drawers. The closet was open, and so was her suitcase. Tish caught her breath and immediately went to the case and unzipped the netting over the main compartment and found the hidden pocket inside. She reached in as far as she could and exhaled with relief.
The letter from Cindy was still there. Untouched. So was the clipping about the robbery.
She returned to the living room to sit down and wait for the police. It was obvious that no matter how little time she had been here, someone already knew she was back.
Someone already wanted her gone.
Stride lay in bed on his back and stared at the ceiling. The bedroom window was open, and he could hear the surf on Lake Superior where it assaulted the shore on the other side of the sand dune. The narrow strip of beach was only steps from their back door. Tish was right that hardly anyone lived on the Point year-round in the old days. Cottages like this one were mostly summer getaways then. Today, it was prime real estate. The old houses were being torn down and replaced by castles and condos. Anything on waterfront anywhere was gold. He liked it better when he and Cindy had first moved out here, when people wondered why anyone would want to live in the eye of the Superior storms. Stride wasn’t always sure himself, except that the lake was so vast that he sometimes felt as if he were staring at eternity.
Serena sat cross-legged on the bed, watching him. The lights were off. Sometimes, when he closed his eyes, he expected that he would open them again and see Cindy sitting there, in the same pose, a crooked smile on her face. As if all the time that had passed had been in his imagination. He wasn’t really closing in on fifty years old. He wasn’t really bruised by death and loss. He was a teenager. A new cop. A young husband. Everything that was going to be lay ahead, not behind.
“You know what I remember about that night?” he told her. “Other than me and Cindy, I mean. I remember the bat.”
Serena didn’t say anything. He could see it like a video clip on a loop that played over and over in his head. Close up. That bat going around and around.
“It was Peter’s bat. One of those aluminum ones. Bright silver. He never let anyone else use it. I remember him taking practice swings at home plate and hearing the whoosh of the bat. I can still see that bat in his hands. All I can think about is that, not long after, someone used that same bat to beat an innocent girl to death. A girl who would have been my sister-in-law. Someone hit her and just kept swinging and swinging.”
“If it was Peter’s bat, how did it get into someone else’s hands?” Serena asked. She spoke so softly that she was almost whispering.
“You’re assuming it did.”
“Well, you said someone else’s fingerprints were on it.”
“Yes, that’s true,” he admitted. “Someone else had it. Someone who killed Laura. That was the only explanation that made sense to me all these years.”