Chapter 16
quinn
She picks up the glass and swirls it beneath her nose. The movement creates a noticeable banana-bread-with-brown-sugar vibe.
She puts it back onto the bar without tasting it, and beckons the barkeep, a young woman with a stud in her nose and evergreen tattooed on her left cheekbone. ‘I’ll take a Shacksbury,’ Quinn says.
The barkeep fetches the non-alcoholic tonic water without comment. Quinn takes a dispiriting sip. The AA chip burns a hole in her pocket.
Three years, four months, seventeen days.
She swivels on the bar stool and surveys the room.
The place is almost empty: it’s ten-thirty on a weeknight, and most Vermonters in this farming community are sensibly tucked up in bed in anticipation of their four a.m. starts tomorrow.
The few barflies here are depressed and lonely, staring miserably into their drinks.
If you weren’t suicidal when you came in here, you would be when you left.
A man walks into a bar. That’s his first mistake, Quinn thinks: the poor bastard should have walked into a pub.
You couldn’t beat the camaraderie of a good, old-fashioned British pub.
Quinn would kill to be in her old London local now.
Brits went to their pubs to let their hair down and relax in the company of friends: alcohol was a lubricant, a means to an end.
Whereas in an American bar, the only purpose was to get hammered, first and foremost; any social interaction was an accidental by-product.
She doesn’t blame Phil for ducking out and watching porn in his room at the Stowebury Inn instead.
She swings back around and stares at the bourbon again. She knows exactly how it’d feel in her mouth: slightly viscous, like creamy banana. She can taste the well-balanced mix of fruity, spicy notes warming her throat as it goes down; the earthy, roasted oak of its finish.
Quinn’s a dry drunk; she may have quit drinking, but she’s never dealt with the issues that caused her alcoholism in the first place.
She white-knuckles it in front of a glass of bourbon like this whenever she comes close to relapsing, because the only way she can be sure of staying sober is to face down her fear.
‘How long?’
She glances left along the bar. An old man, mid-seventies, dressed in a worn plaid shirt and high-waisted jeans, is sitting two stools away from her. He nods towards her glass. ‘How long?’ he asks again.
She notices the tumbler sitting untasted in front of him. Whisky seems to be his poison of choice. Red Label Johnnie Walker, at a guess.
‘Three years this past May,’ she says. ‘You?’
‘Fifteen months, three weeks, two days,’ he says. ‘This time.’
Quinn’s news sense prickles. Fifteen months.
‘This time?’ she says.
‘I made it thirty-four years before.’
Quinn whistles. ‘That’s quite a streak.’
‘Never thought I’d fall off the wagon,’ he says. ‘Woulda staked my life I’d gotten this thing beat.’
‘One day at a time,’ Quinn says.
‘Ain’t that the truth.’
He glances up at the large TV behind the bar playing ESPN with the sound off. It looks like a game of college football, though Quinn can’t be sure. She’s got to the age where even the cops seem young.
The man extends his hand across the stools between them. ‘Bret Connelly,’ he says.
‘Quinn Wilde.’
‘You ain’t from around here.’
She shakes her head. ‘New York. London, originally.’
‘Figured that from the accent. What brings you to Stowebury?’
‘Long story,’ Quinn says.
The man picks up the bottle next to his glass of untouched whisky. A non-alcoholic beer of the kind that belongs in the refrigerator of a middle-aged woman who’s given up Pilates and doesn’t want anyone to know.
He indicates her own glass again. ‘Wouldn’t have picked a London gal like you for a Kentucky fan.’
‘My ex-girlfriend was from Tennessee.’
‘My wife’s folks were from Nashville. She was the one got me straight. Woulda drunk myself to death an’ it weren’t for her.’
‘You still married?’
‘Forty-two years. She passed a couple years back.’
‘Sorry to hear it.’
‘Don’t be.’ His face seems to fold in on itself, the seamed lines deepening with grief. ‘We lost our son just over a year ago. Would have broken Emmy’s heart. Glad she didn’t live to see it.’
‘Enough to drive anyone to drink,’ Quinn says.
The man’s too old to have had a son in the doomed graduating class on the Lady. The twenty-one kids who died were all teenagers.
But Quinn doesn’t believe in coincidence.
‘Mind if I ask what happened to your son, Bret?’ she says.
‘Ain’t no one knows,’ the old man says. ‘He just disappeared on his way home one night, like he vanished into thin air.’
The hairs on the back of Quinn’s neck stand up.
‘Disappeared?’ she says.
‘It was Emmy’s birthday the night he went missing,’ the man says.
‘First since she passed. Ain’t no way he’d have missed that.
Said he’d come by soon as he’d finished up work.
We were going to lay flowers at her grave.
He was a part-time PhD student at UVM,’ he adds proudly.
‘Studying lake health and the toxic effects of farm run-off, or some such. Never quite did get it straight.’
And there it is.
The connection Quinn has been waiting for.
‘Your son was researching lake pollution?’ she says, her pulse quickening.
‘He’d had a lot of interest from the EPA – the Environmental Protection Agency,’ Bret Connelly says. ‘He was hoping to get a job there, once he’d finished his dissertation. He’d certainly rattled a few cages in town, I can tell you that.’
‘Did you report his disappearance to the police?’
‘Police didn’t take it serious,’ Bret Connelly says.
‘Luke was thirty-four years old. They found his car by the side of the road, but no signs of violence, no reason to think he’d come to harm, so they said there weren’t no reason to open no investigation.
I told them, he’d never have walked out on his wife and babies, not Luke.
But they didn’t even open a file on him till he’d been gone three days.
Luke was a good man, a family man. He wouldn’t have left us without a word. ’
‘What do you think happened to him, Bret?’
The old man stares at the glass of whisky in front of him.
‘He’s dead,’ he says baldly. ‘He’d have come back to us if he could.
All this time, no one’s used his bank accounts, his social security number, nothing.
Police say he prob’ly went off to start a new life with a new name, maybe a new woman, but he wouldn’t do that. Not Luke.’
‘When was this?’ Quinn asks, knowing the answer.
‘The week before the Lady sank,’ Bret says. ‘They might have investigated a bit more otherwise, but with all those high-schoolers on that boat dead, they didn’t have time for my boy. It was the perfect accident for anyone as needed him gone. No one wanted to know about him after that.’
Quinn doesn’t need to challenge herself with bourbon anymore. This story is all the fix she needs.
Her famous spidey news sense is going into overdrive.
‘I want to know about your boy,’ she says.