Night had fallen by now, lit by candles that seemed to be everywhere at O’Hara Field.
The first speaker, a girl, said they were going to begin by playing some of Jack’s favorite songs, picked out by Ainsley Walsh. Jesse saw Suit standing in the first row of the crowd, his wife, Elena, on one side of him, his sister on the other, Suit’s arms around both of them.
Coach Hal Fortin spoke when the music stopped, talking about how Jack Carlisle was the most talented kid he’d ever coached, a team leader. A great kid. And a sure thing, Fortin said, to make The Show. Jesse knew it was a cliché. But it had always been Jesse’s, too. He talked about The Show all the time still.
But wanted to tell Coach Hal Fortin there were never any sure things when it came to making it all the way to the big leagues.
There were more songs, none of which Jesse recognized. More speakers. Some of the kids broke down. Boys and girls. Some of them fought through, the air in the night thick with sadness. A couple volunteer firemen played “Amazing Grace” on bagpipes. Ainsley Walsh read “To an Athlete Dying Young.” Jesse had heard the poem plenty of times before, once when one of his Albuquerque teammates had died of lymphoma before he turned thirty.
The only line he remembered was the one about silence being no worse than cheers.
He walked away from the field then, toward the parking lot. He would talk to Molly in the morning about what she might have learned from Ainsley Walsh, if she even talked to the kid tonight, and what her fight with Jack Carlisle had been about.
He would talk to Laura Carlisle, knowing he needed a face-to-face with her, at her house, just the two of them. Suit would think he’d asked her all the right questions. Jesse knew better. Suit was too close. How the hell could he not be? But if it was suicide, Jesse needed to know, even knowing that it wasn’t his job to know why the boy might have killed himself.
But he had to rule it out, in case it wasn’t suicide and wasn’t an accident and somebody had done this to Jack Carlisle.
Jesse thought about checking his phone and seeing if he could find a late AA meeting somewhere in the area, knowing that meetings always made him understand that whatever he had going on in his life, that first drink wasn’t going to do him any good, or fix things.
He decided, just like that, to drive over to Charlie Farrell’s house instead. Telling himself it would be better than a meeting, even better for the soul. Not even thinking about seeking out Nellie Shofner for comfort tonight.
Jesse felt himself smiling about that as he drove across town, feeling better just thinking about sitting with the old man, even knowing he’d just chosen an elderly man for companionship tonight over a woman in her thirties.
He’d make sure to ask Dix, his therapist, to explain that to him first chance he got. Jesse liked to give people the impression he knew everything.
Dix actually did.
Eleven
There were lights on in the house. A good thing. Sometimes Charlie turned in early. The Jetta was parked in the driveway. Jesse knew the old man did a lot of takeout, now that he’d proudly and successfully mastered Uber Eats.
So often when the two of them would get together, here or at the Gull or when Charlie would occasionally stop by the station when out on his morning walk, and Jesse would start some kind of bitch-a-thon about the general bullshit of being chief, Charlie would say, “Remember something: Nobody died today.”
But today somebody had.
Jesse’d had experience before in dealing with a senseless death like this, plenty of times. Charlie Farrell had had more.
Before he got out of the Explorer he saw a text from Molly.
getting with Ainsley in the a.m.
wish me luck
Jesse didn’t respond. Molly Crane didn’t need luck, especially when the task at hand was dealing with a high school girl. She’d raised four daughters. No one knew more about talking to high school girls, or drawing them out, even getting them to reveal their secrets whether they wanted to or not, than Molly did.
She could teach a course in it.
Maybe I should take that course, Jesse thought.
Maybe it would make me smarter about women when they were all grown up.
He walked up the front steps and rang the doorbell.
Waited.
No sound from inside, not even the television in the living room, the big-boy flat screen that Charlie had bought for himself, one that was always on when Jesse would pay him a visit. If there was an old Law & Order on, any kind of Law & Order — And when wasn’t there one on? Jesse thought — Charlie would be watching it.
“That Mariska Hargitay,” he liked to tell Jesse, “she’d still be ringing my bell on the rare occasions when it still gets rung.”
Jesse hit the doorbell again.
Still nothing.
The door was unlocked, as usual.
“Hey, Chief,” Jesse called out, stepping inside. “It’s me. The other chief.”
He closed the door behind him and listened.
Something wrong.
Something about the air Jesse didn’t like.
Not the kind of silence you got from a poem.
Jesse unholstered his Glock. On instinct. Or force of habit. Or both. Being overly cautious had never gotten anybody killed, he told Suit all the time. And Molly. And even Sunny Randall.
If Charlie came walking down the stairs now, or in from the kitchen, or from the backyard, the two of them could have themselves a good laugh about Jesse pulling a gun on him.
“Chief,” Jesse said, louder this time, in case he was upstairs in the bathroom or in the yard. “You here?”
Gun at his side, he stepped into the living room.
He found him on the floor, the side of his head caved in, a spread of blood underneath him.
Charlie’s own old Glock near his right hand.
Jesse knelt next to him, all the breath out of him at once, like a tire had been punctured, put a finger to Charlie Farrell’s neck, knowing there was no point. Knowing he was gone.
Jesse stood and pulled his phone out of the back pocket of his jeans and dialed 911.
Swallowing hard and telling himself he wasn’t going to cry in front of Charlie Farrell.
Even now.
He quickly told the operator who he was, and where he was.
“Does the victim have a name?” she said.
“Chief Charles Edward Farrell,” Jesse said.
Ended the call and holstered his weapon and put his phone back in his pocket and sat down on the floor next to the body of Charlie Farrell.
“Cop,” he said, his voice sounding even louder now. “Died old.”
Twelve
Jesse sat with Healy at Daisy Dyke’s at eight the next morning.
Healy had been a captain with the Massachusetts State Police, homicide department, since before Jesse had arrived in Paradise from Los Angeles, back to when Charlie was still chief. He had retired as a Massachusetts legend in law enforcement a few years ago.
But he had heard about Charlie Farrell. Here they were.
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Jesse said to him, “but I hope I look as good at your age as you do.”
“You don’t know my age,” Healy said. “And ask yourself a question, by the way: What are my options?”
Neither one of them had ordered breakfast, just coffee for both of them. Daisy, whose hair this spring seemed to include most of the colors of the rainbow, said to Jesse, “The whole town heard what happened, you need to eat,” when she brought the coffee to the table herself.
“I’m good,” he said.
“Don’t get smart with me,” Daisy said, and left, at least for the time being.