I lay there staring at the ceiling for several minutes when I decided enough time had gone by that it was okay to check in on Grace. I got out of bed, threw on a bathrobe, and went down the hall to her room.
The door was ajar an inch and I pushed it open. Her light was off, but there was enough illumination coming through the window to see that she was in bed.
“I’m awake,” she said.
“I figured,” I said, perching myself on the edge of her bed.
“I don’t think I can go to work tomorrow.”
“I’ll phone you in sick in the morning.”
“Okay.”
She brought an arm out from under the covers and held my arm.
“What about Mom?” Grace asked.
“I was just thinking about her.”
“If it all comes out, and I have to, you know, go to jail or something, we’ll have to tell her.”
“I think we might have to bring her up to speed sooner than that,” I said, smiled, and rubbed her arm.
“You think that’s what’ll happen? That I’ll go to jail?”
“No,” I said. “We won’t let that happen. Let me ask you something.”
Grace waited.
“What’s your gut tell you?” I asked.
“About what?”
“About Stuart. Did you shoot him or not?”
She took a second to think about the question. “I didn’t.”
“What makes you say that?”
“I’ve been lying here thinking about it and thinking about it and thinking about it, you know?”
“Sure.”
“It’s the order of things.”
I gave her arm a slight squeeze. “Go on.”
“I did hear a shot. And all this time I’ve been wondering if I’m the one who did it. And when it happened, I screamed. But the shot came first. If I’d gotten scared and screamed, I might have done something dumb like pull the trigger when I was all freaked out about something. But I didn’t freak out until I’d heard a shot.”
“You remember anything else?”
Her head bounced back and forth on the pillow. “I don’t think so.”
“You going to be okay here or do you want to come into my room?”
“I’ll give it a few minutes. If I can’t sleep, I’ll come in.”
“Okay,” I said. I was going to tell her my thoughts on getting a lawyer, then decided against it. I leaned in and kissed her forehead. “We’ll get through this.” I hesitated. “We need a couple of new rules.”
“Yeah, I know. I’m grounded forever. I figured that.”
“I’m not talking about that exactly. I mean, you need to be, you know, careful. Paying attention. About answering the door, who you talk to online, like if somebody new wants to meet you or—”
“What are you talking about?”
I didn’t want to upset her. God knows she was going to have a hard enough time sleeping as things were now.
I searched for words that didn’t sound too alarmist. “He — whoever bumped into you — might think you saw him.”
“But I didn’t.”
“But what I’m saying is, he might not know that.”
Her eyes sharpened as she grasped my meaning. “Shit.”
“Yeah.”
“If Stuart’s dead, and if this guy in the house did it—”
“Yeah,” I said again.
“But how would he even know who I am?” Grace asked.
“He might not. But he might figure it out.”
She sat up in bed and put her arms around me. “I’m scared, Daddy.”
I held her tight. “Me, too. But you’re safe here, right now, with me. I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”
Grace buried her face against my chest, her words coming out muffled. “I didn’t see him. I didn’t see anything. I didn’t.”
“I know. We’re going to get through this.”
I held her like that for a good five minutes before she let go and put her head back down on the pillow.
“You come get me if you need me,” I said, easing off the bed.
“I will. I’m okay.”
I slipped out of her room, leaving the door slightly ajar so I could hear her if she called.
As I expected, I didn’t sleep. At least not until around five in the morning, when I finally dozed off. But I was awake again before seven, and couldn’t see the point in staying in bed. I got up, showered, dressed, and on my way down to the kitchen peeked into Grace’s room to see whether she was asleep.
She was not in her bed.
Her bathroom was directly across the hall, but the door was open. She wasn’t in there.
“Grace?” I called out.
“Down here,” she said.
She was sitting at the kitchen table. Just sitting there. Not eating breakfast, not doing anything. Just sitting there in the oversized T-shirt she liked to sleep in. She was bleary eyed, and it looked as though she’d done her hair in a wind tunnel. Not that I looked any better.
“You gave me a start,” I said. “How long you been sitting there?”
She glanced up at the clock on the wall. “Since around five.”
She must have come down after I’d finally fallen asleep. Otherwise I would have heard her moving about.
“I’ve got something to say,” Grace said.
I looked at her. “Okay.”
“I don’t care what Vince says. I don’t care what he said to you. And I don’t care what happens to me.” She paused, took a breath. “I have to know.”
And with that she got up, sidled past me, and went back upstairs to her room.
Thirty
Eldon Koch was asleep when he heard banging on the door.
He and his boy, Stuart, lived in an apartment above an appliance repair shop on Naugatuck Avenue. The entrance was up a flight of stairs that ran up the side of the building.
He opened his eyes, looked at the digital clock, saw that it was nearly seven a.m. He figured it was Stuart, that somehow he’d lost his keys and needed him to open the door. It wasn’t unusual for Stuart to be gone all night, or even for a day or two. If he’d lost his keys, that meant Eldon’s second car, the old Buick, was out there somewhere. So Eldon would have to find his spare set and the two of them would have to head back out there, pick it up, and bring it back.
Unless Stuart was drunk. There was every reason to think he’d come home pissed, or stoned.
Eldon believed he’d done the best he could with the kid, but Jesus Christ on a hubcap, you could spend your whole life trying to teach a fish to operate a backhoe but at some point you had to face the fact that some goals were unachievable. Maybe, when Stuart got older, he’d develop some common sense. Eldon could only hope. Raising a kid on your own was no picnic. Maybe his wife was the smart one, running off when Stuart was only five. She ended up getting killed six years after that in a motorcycle accident, riding on the back of a Harley somewhere north of San Francisco, but at least she had those six years of no responsibility. He kind of envied her for that, even if she did end up leaving an imprint of herself on a bridge abutment.
“Hold on!” he shouted. “You lose your damn keys again?”
He threw back the covers, stood up in his boxers, took a second to get over the dizziness he felt when he got up quickly, then slid his feet into a pair of threadbare red-and-black-plaid slippers. He shuffled out of the bedroom and crossed the combined living room/kitchen. There was a man silhouetted in the window of the door, the morning sun rising behind him.
Didn’t look like Stuart, but Eldon wasn’t sure. The man continued banging.
“I said hold on!”
He got to the door, turned back the dead bolt, and swung it open.
“Oh,” he said, squinting, blinded by the sunlight. “Hey, Vince.”