When she looked up again the taillights were still there. The car had stopped. A white fog chugging from its tailpipe. Then: reverse lights. The car backing, returning! Brake lights. A door swinging open and a woman shuffling toward her in winter boots—Oh my God, are you all right? Not a woman but a girl, sixteen maybe, and a boy coming up behind her at his own pace, wary, not yet convinced that this thing before him wasn’t what he’d first thought: a dead girl or her ghost, risen from the water.
The other girl turning now to the boy and saying, Should we call 911?
No, Audrey answered, coughing. I’m all right.
Into the car with her then, into the back seat, but not before the boy spread the blanket out to keep her from soaking the fabric. Audrey pulling the blanket up around her shoulders, thick woolen emergency blanket that still held their warmth, their smells in its dusty fibers—deodorant and perfume, and deeper scents she didn’t want to know about.
What happened to you? The girl hanging over the front seat. Her bright face, her big eyes. The car jostling and slurring down the road through the trees. Eric, turn up the heat!
Fell in, Audrey said.
Fell in? What were you…? Where’s your—Did someone push you in?
No. I’m all right.
You are not all right. You’re coming home with us. What’s your name?
The hell she is, said the boy, and the girl turned to glare at him. Hannah, he said. Your dad…?
What about him?
I suppose we’ll just tell him we just happened to be at the spillway?
The spillway! thought Audrey. The famous spillway. She hadn’t recognized it. She’d never come here herself except the one time, with Jenny White, their hearts beating with what they might see, then seeing nothing: water; a spillway… then the sun going down, nothing to eat or drink, no phones, a new kind of scared as they began the long bike ride home, and the sheriff himself pulling up alongside them, Audrey, Jenny—thank God. I’ve got the whole department out looking for you, are you all right—are you girls all right?
Home, said Audrey, and the girl in the front seat said, What?
We could drop her at the hospital, said the boy. His eyes were in the rearview and it wasn’t just fear Audrey saw; it was anger. She had interrupted. She had stopped him from getting something he’d wanted very badly and which he’d very nearly had and now might never have, not with this girl, not with Hannah, with her pretty face, with her nice full lips.
Home, said Audrey. Please… just take me home.
And next she knew she was lighting the fire. She was naked and shaking under the blankets and she was home.
Now, sitting on the sofa, the blankets thrown off her, she looked at the purple cast in the dim morning light and felt again the unseen blow—the surprise of a swing thrown so wildly finding its target so cleanly, so crackingly—then turned on the lamp and looked more closely, but there was no blood that she could see. Of course not. All that time in the river, under the ice.
The hardwood floor was cold on the soles of her feet and the air was cold on her skin but still she sat there, the curtains wide-open for all to see, and let them see, let them knock themselves out seeing, until at last she tugged one blanket free from the others and shawled it around herself.
Her father’s things lay on the coffee table once again: the Zippo lighter, the aviators, the watch, the old .38 revolver. She did not remember going to the closet for the gun and yet there it sat, the green ammo box beside it.
She listened for a moment, then picked up the watch and held it to her ear. Nothing. She looked at the face. A bubble of water lay under the crystal, rolling as she tilted the watchface. Like the little toy her granddad gave her where you tried to get all the BBs to sit in their holes. The bubble in her father’s watch enlarged the hour markers below like a lens and it rolled through all three hands where they’d stopped, fifteen minutes and forty-two seconds past ten o’clock.
Was he still there? All night on the river. Frozen. Dead.
She picked up the remote and aimed it at the TV and waited to see if the service was still working; the bill had not been paid in over a month and yet somehow the service kept going—and it was going still. But the early news programs were all about the weather, the cold last day of February, the endless winter—no one had found an Iowa sheriff frozen on the river, dead from exposure, or a blow to the head, or a combination of the two. No dead Iowa sheriff, period.
She sat thinking about that. She thought about Sheriff Halsey, and she thought about Tuck Trevor, the lawyer. Self-defense, Audrey, obviously.
But where was the proof? Who but her could say he didn’t go out there to save her?
Indeed, Miss Sutter… a man goes out onto ice he knows is too thin—a man sworn to serve and protect, no less, a sheriff—goes out there risking his own life… Why would he do such a thing except to save you?
She looked at the cast again, exhibit A, and she thought about the hospital, Dr. Breece. It was too soon; six weeks, he’d said. But the cast was wet, the padding under the plaster was soaked and it would have to come off—wouldn’t it? There were tools in her father’s garage: handsaws and hacksaws and power saws she’d watched him use and that she herself had used, with him nearby, always nearby. But then she saw the slip, and the wound that would send her to the hospital anyway, driving her bleeding self to the emergency room and—
Her heart dropped into coldness once again.
It was the car. The Ford. She’d left it in the park. They would find it there with the sheriff’s cruiser. With the sheriff’s body.
She looked at the coffee table again—lighter, sunglasses, gun, watch, but no keys.
Then how did you get in the house?
Her mind flew back to the river: She’d parked the car, gotten out to stand by the pines… and Moran had come. He’d shown her the cuffs and she’d gotten ready to claw him with the keys, which she held in her good fist, in the jacket pocket.
Hot now, her heart beating, she stood and went to her father’s jacket and picked it up by its damp collar and shook it, and there was the sound she’d hoped for: a dull jingling in the left-hand pocket.
Ready to roll, Deputy?
59
“HOW YOU DOING, Big Man?”
“All right Jeff how you doing?”
“My head is throbbin like a young robin’s ass, you want to know the truth.”
“What?”
“Never mind. You want to help me with the brake job on that Charger?”
“OK Jeff just let me punch in first.”
In a dream he watched the car go up on the lift and somehow all the lugs came off and the tires were dropped bouncing to the concrete and he stacked them off to the side with the chalk marks on them so they could rotate them later… then he was at the computer adjusting inventory for the brake pads and then he was taking the pads out to Jeff who was already turning the first rotor and it was only 8:05 and he didn’t know how he would get through the day, forgetting for a few minutes but always remembering and falling again, falling and remembering his dream, his brother so blue and cold and his mouth full of the dirty water that tasted of mud and fish.
At 8:15 he swept out the break room, emptied the trash, cleaned the sink, and then on his way back to the garage he saw something through the bay door windows that stopped him. Mr. Wabash was out there, standing in the lot talking to Sheriff Halsey. And his heart jumped, it just flew, because he was wrong! He thought he knew—all morning he thought he knew but he was wrong! Danny was OK and the sheriff had come to tell him so and Danny was home already, or he was in the SUV and you couldn’t see him because of the sunlight on the glass… But then in the one or two heartbeats it took to have these thoughts he saw that it wasn’t the sheriff’s white Chevy Tahoe the two men stood before, it was a silver Ford Escape, and then he saw that it was not Sheriff Halsey at all but it was that deputy—the one from ten years ago, from Danny’s letter. Who pulled Danny over that night. Deputy Moran. And he was not down in Iowa but he was up here, in Minnesota.