Start Reading #6
I wait awhile longer and decide against walking the perimeter of the house to look for some easy way to enter.
Earlier in my career, I’d have parked a half mile away and come on foot through the woods, giving me the flexibility to get closer, peer in windows, try doorknobs, look for security systems. If I were feeling especially bold, I might even call the phone and see if I could hear it ringing inside.
But like I said, I’m not as brave (or as young) as I once was.
I’m a mother. I have a bad right knee—a consequence of a particularly reckless move by twenty-four-year-old me, one which Lenny still brings up when we’ve been drinking, involving my tackling a fleeing deadbeat dad.
Let’s just say that my daddy issues got the best of me on that outing.
I wait for hours. No one comes or goes, nothing moves.
Finally, I reverse down the drive, lights out, slowly.
The crunching of the gravel beneath my tires seems overly loud.
There’s thick cloud cover and no moon. Before I make the turn onto the road from the drive, something catches my eye.
The dim orange glow of a light in a window.
It comes on, then goes dark again. I stop, hold my breath.
Was someone watching me while I thought I was watching them?
I imagine the redhead with bright-red lipstick, smoking a cigarette near the window, watching me sit in my car.
What the fuck is going on here?
The next step would logically be to search out property records and find out who owns this place.
That should point me toward the person who took my father’s phone—if not the property owner, somebody connected to them.
It doesn’t necessarily follow that it’s the redhead, but I’d say it’s a fair guess.
Though I’d normally be a dog with a bone with this type of thing, unable to rest until I knew the answer, I feel an odd resistance, a niggling unease. That I’m not going to like whatever I find at the end of this trail of breadcrumbs. That I’ve stumbled into something dangerous.
I should have known my father wasn’t going to be content with bird-watching.
Maybe Lenny’s right. I just need to go home.
I take the winding rural roads back toward my father’s house, driving slower than usual because there’s a deer problem, my eyes shifting often to the rearview mirror. It’s nearly dawn.
All the nights on these roads with my friends driving from one of those hidden old places where we felt so free and wild come back vividly.
We were stupid, reckless, drove too fast. But we had fun.
I don’t talk to anyone from high school anymore; what I know about their adult lives I picked up from limited interactions on social media.
Marion was the wildest of us all, the one who most often procured weed from Shift; she’s a doctor now.
I think her daughter just got married. Steve was the first guy I ever fooled around with, an awkward grope session in my parents’ basement.
He just retired from finance. Sandy, now a poet of some note, was the most likely to get sloppy after ingesting too much of whatever we’d managed to get that night and wind up crying or hurling in my car or by the side of the road.
As I drive, I can almost hear them, laughing, shouting, taunting each other, singing to the Cure or the Smiths.
My parents were pretty chill, especially my dad. They rarely knew where I was; once I was driving, they almost never asked where I was going or what I was up to. I don’t remember having a curfew like Sandy. Still, I’d often find my dad waiting when I got in, imagining they were both sound asleep.
“Watch out on those roads,” he said one night. “Deer. Cops. Don’t fuck up your life, kid. It’s too easy to do that. We’re all just one moment of poor judgment away from the worst possible outcome.”
“I’m okay,” I told him. “I’m careful.”
I wasn’t careful. Not at all. I was just lucky. I did always watch out for deer on that dark road, though.
When I pull into my father’s driveway, there’s a dark SUV waiting. I feel a sudden dryness in my throat.
What’s this now?
The vehicle sits idling, exhaust billowing into the red of the taillights.
The motion-detector light over the garage has been activated, and it washes the whole area in bright white.
A 911 call might be in order here. But a quick glance at my phone shows that I have no signal.
So instead, as I come to a stop and exit the car, I tuck my hand inside my coat and rest it on the gun in its holster.
Standing behind the cover of the open door, I wait.
One beat. Two.
I could just get in the car and drive away. Another Lenny favorite: Curiosity killed the cat.
After a moment, a heavyset, slightly rumpled-looking man climbs out of the SUV. Before things get any tenser, he bows his head, lifts a palm.
“Police,” he says, flashing his shield, which even from here I can see is real, the gold dull, the leather case faded and bent from too much time in pockets.
“Okay.”
My shoulders relax as I release a breath I didn’t know I was holding.
I’ve had to pull my gun only three times in my career, and I’ve had to fire only once.
I still dream about that moment. Amelia was small, and I really did see my life flash before my eyes as I stood facing down a desperate man.
I killed someone that night, and I’d do it again if it meant spending even just one more minute with my kid.
“Detective Grady Crowe, Little Valley PD,” he says.
“You don’t look like a small-town cop.”
He doesn’t, in his leather jacket and baggy jeans, black T-shirt. He has a bearing, too, a kind of New York City, seen-it-all attitude.
“You got me,” he says with a nod.
There’s a kind of fatigue there, too, one you develop only in a big metropolis where people and situations are in constant, unpredictable, chaotic collision.
Like you can’t believe who will do what, and what accidents will happen, and how much hate, love, stupidity, passion, and heroism there is in the world.
“Moved upstate last year from the NYPD. The Ninth. East Village.”
That’s a big change—busy metro area to tiny town in the middle of nowhere. Burnout, maybe? There’s a wedding ring that looks shiny and new. Love? Parenthood?
“How can I help?” I ask, which is a Lenny-ism. It’s not quite What do you want?—which is hostile, according to Lenny. Nor is it How can I help you?—which might be too obsequious or might be perceived as sarcastic.
“Are you Rae Donovan?”
“I am.”
“Your father recently died,” he says, looking at his notes. “Admitted to the hospital last Monday, passed on Friday.”
I clear my throat. “That’s right.”
“Sorry for your loss,” he says, rubbing at his clean-shaven jaw. “The toxicology report came back. The ME says it looks like he was poisoned. Well, organ failure most likely due to poisoning.”
“That’s what they told me. Said it might have been accidental?”
“Might have been,” he says with a nod. “Mind if we step inside and talk?”
Cops are like vampires. If you let them in, it’s only a matter of time before they have their teeth in your neck.
Lenny would have said No fucking way. Come back with a warrant.
I’ll call my lawyer. Because truthfully you never know what they’re after, what narrative they’ve already started, what kind of quotas or personal vendettas they have going.
No telling how this might tie in with something else he’s working, or how he might have already decided I fit into it.
But I’ve been up all night, and I’m tired, and there’s something about him that reminds me of Lenny.
And honestly, I’m feeling a little lost and alone, a little perimenopausal brain-fogged, not to mention wading through a mire of grief I wouldn’t have expected to feel.
So in a moment of embarrassing weakness, I agree, and he follows me inside.
I offer peppermint tea because that’s all I find in the cupboard, which he accepts, and I brew.
Then we sit at the kitchen table. I keep my coat on because I’m carrying.
Don’t want to get into a whole thing about it.
Hope I don’t have a hot flash, though—between the coat, the stress, and the tea—it’s probably inevitable I will.
“My research on you says that you’re licensed in the state of New York as a private investigator.
That you have a gun license.” He looks down at his notebook, which is open on the kitchen table.
His scrawled handwriting fills the pages margin to margin, utterly illegible, I’m guessing, to anyone but him. “You own a Glock. And a shotgun.”
Okay, so we’re going to get into a thing about it. “That’s correct.”
“Are you currently armed?”
“I am.”
“Do you mind?” He nods, and I gratefully stand and shift off my coat, remove the gun from its holster, pop the magazine, release the bullet from the chamber, and then put it all on the counter by the sink.
“And the shotgun?”
“In a locked and concealed compartment in the trunk of my car.”
He nods again. I think Lenny would like him. He’s smart, calm, watchful. I return to my seat at the table.
“So did your father have any enemies?”
“I don’t know,” I answer honestly. “We were estranged.”
Not ready to tell him about the room downstairs, or the redhead. Or anything, really. I am actually just interested in what he knows.
“Files indicate that your father was a retired FBI agent?” A statement disguised as a question.
“Yes. He was a photographer for the FBI.”
Scribble, scribble, then a look up at me. “So he just retired twenty years ago and did nothing else after that?”