13 Joey
Joey
River is at her door.
He stands with his hands in his pockets and offers a nervous smile.
Joey knew it would be him as soon as she heard the gentle knock.
He looks hopeful, but still, she doesn’t want to talk.
She’s about to say so, but then she sees that next to him, in a perfectly happy, obedient sit, is Walter.
His tongue flips out of his mouth, and he pants enthusiastically.
“Hello, sir,” Joey says, bending down to greet the dog. His marbled Aussie fur is soft and fluffy, and he has black markings over one crystal blue eye. He offers her a playful paw, even though he’s almost sixteen and has arthritis in his old joints.
“I didn’t think you’d talk to me if I came alone, so I brought reinforcements.” River peers at her cautiously beneath waves of hair the color of oak. His beard is short and thick, while his build is tall and strong.
Joey waits a beat before inviting them inside.
She was hoping to avoid this conversation, or at least put it off as long as possible.
After the morning at Barbara’s, she had to put in time at the coffee shop, working, cleaning, apologizing to Zach, her one disgruntled employee.
All the while, she wished she knew what to do about Tom Winter.
“Wow, smells great,” he says, stepping through the door and slipping his shoes off.
She disappears into the kitchen, saying, “Chicken parm,” over her shoulder. She can practically hear him salivating, and she suddenly wishes she’d chosen something else.
Soon, Walter is curled up at her feet, and River’s bringing salad to the table.
They start to eat in silence. To break it, he tells her about the trail he helped clear this morning.
He’s worked for Parks & Wildlife since high school.
“We cleared, I don’t know, four huge downed trees.
It was kind of grueling, but it felt good to use the saw again. ”
When that line of discussion dries up, she stares studiously down at her plate. He asks her if she went for a run this morning, clearly just trying to fill the awkward gaps. She says no and doesn’t elaborate.
Then he takes a sip of water. “I heard Sophie is back in town.”
She looks up.
He spears a lettuce leaf with his fork. “Otto cornered me at the store, going on and on about her surprise visit. I take it you’ve seen her?”
Joey lets her gaze linger on his face. When he finds her eyes, she coughs and studies her plate. “Elena is back too.”
He whistles, one dipping trill. “Really? What’s going on? Is hell freezing over?”
“I don’t know.” She instantly knows her tone is too cutting.
He bites his bottom lip. “Sorry. It’s probably bringing up a lot for you.
” River is the kind of man who is the first to apologize and always means it.
It’s infuriating. There’s a pause, and she sees something familiar in his face.
His candor is about to bubble over. He’s going to ask her about the other night.
She can sense it. At her feet, Walter’s ears perk up, like he can feel it too.
Joey stands suddenly, startling the dog and River—even herself a little bit.
Without saying a word, she walks around the table.
His face is a question. Gently, she grabs his hands.
They’re warm and dry and strong. Without saying anything, she places them on either side of her hips and moves in closer to him until she can smell his smoky shampoo.
Her mind is going fuzzy. She tries to stay in control, takes his hands again.
He swallows as she moves them to the front of her body, sliding them up and, finally, placing them on her neck.
He keeps them gripped there until their eyes meet, his thumbs resting gently on her throat.
Then he stands, slowly exhaling. The fingers of one hand snake behind her head and weave into the roots of her hair while the other hand slips her hair tie loose and lets it fall to the floor.
***
Afterward, they’re in her bed. Sunset is on its way, and a sideways glare of light exposes his broad, bare shoulders.
They’ve lain here like this, after sex, so many times Joey has lost count.
She knows the contours of his chest, the way his skin feels surprisingly smooth against hers.
She knows that he’s minutes away from kissing her on the forehead and padding out barefoot to go feed the dog.
He doesn’t keep a dog bowl here, but he knows exactly where the silver baking bowls are that she never uses.
They have, somehow, at some point in time Joey can’t quite nail down, braided their little habits together.
It’s this thought that makes her roll over.
She pulls on a bra and running shorts. Hearing the rustle of the blankets behind her, she hurries out of the room.
With every step, she can hear the echo of Sophie’s voice in her mind.
“Bloodspell.” A word that seems like it should mean something, but it doesn’t. Not to Joey, anyway.
The guest room is dark, and her fingers find the light switch on the wall.
It illuminates the pictures the way a CT scan illuminates the brain.
They’re all here. Tom, Barbara, a handful of teachers, her old volleyball coach, River’s dad, Sophie’s dad.
And then of course, there are pictures of Joey, Quinn, Sophie, Elena, River, and a few peripheral friends like Marissa Berg and Tanner McGrath.
A couple of strings tie pictures together and a few more tie pictures to notes. She leans toward one image she took of the crag months after Quinn’s death. It looks like a tourist photo, perfectly capturing the view of the valley below and a snow-capped peak behind it.
The truth is that Joey’s sleuthing turned up nothing in the years following Quinn’s death.
The number of people who said they were simply at home when Quinn died meant that it was impossible to get a clear picture of anything.
To them, Joey was a source of gossip, a play detective, a lost cause.
They all thought she was chasing something that wasn’t there.
Because it was an accident. Everyone knew it.
Greg Hunstad listened impatiently while she had tried to explain.
“She wouldn’t come out here alone,” Joey swore.
“Not here.” She couldn’t mention the magic, of course, but she had made it clear that they had agreed to only go there together.
And yet, by the time Mr. Hunstad and the other officer bushwhacked their way to the crag above Quinn’s body, it felt like they’d already decided.
No one was going to take Joey seriously.
She even tried to appeal to Barbara, who knew Quinn wouldn’t go out there alone because she knew the rules better than anyone, but Barbara only said something about there being no evidence of anything other than an accident and that they needed to accept it, as hard as it was.
Joey pulls the picture of Tom Winter off the wall.
Aside from one conversation, she stayed away from Quinn’s dad when she was first investigating.
God, investigating—that sounds far more official than it ever was.
Every resident of the town was accounted for that day, at least by their own testimony.
There was a group of tourists staying at the inn who had dinner in town.
Front desk staff had them heading up to bed around nine thirty at night and not coming out of their rooms until morning.
They spent the next day on a fly-fishing excursion.
These were facts Joey learned later, after doing her own digging.
Tom Winter’s two-dimensional face looks up at her now.
A thick string of greasy hair hangs limply over one eye and a scraggly beard streaked with gray.
The man himself is permanently hunched over, and his eyes are watery.
As far back as Joey can remember, Tom always seemed to have a beer in his hand.
Despite that, he functioned relatively well until his divorce from Barbara.
Then, cracks began to form. The drinking got worse, he forgot Quinn’s birthday, and he drove drunk into town and crashed into a telephone pole.
Quinn tried to mend things with him all the way up to the end.
But after she died, he nose-dived. From what Joey gathered, he stopped going to his weekly poker nights and became a complete picture of self-neglect.
These days, he only surfaces once a week or so to go to the market or the liquor store.
She stares into his flat eyes now and wonders if it’s guilt that’s driven him deep into reclusiveness these last fifteen years.
Knuckles tap on the other side of the door. Joey jumps.
“Knock, knock.”
She lays the picture on the desk and flicks out the light before swinging the door open. The hall is dark too. River is there in silhouette, head bowed.
“You don’t have to say, ‘Knock, knock,’if you actually knock,” she says, and she means it to come out light, but she’s not sure it has because he releases a heavy sigh and leans against the doorframe. Outside, the sun must have set because the hall behind him is a deep, thick blue.
“What are you doing, Joey?”
Joey goes hot. She shrugs.
He reaches by her and flips on the light. “I thought you were done with all this.”
“All this?”
He looks disappointed or resigned. She can’t tell which. “What happened to Quinn was…”
“You don’t know what happened to Quinn,” she bites back.
“I do, though,” he says, ignoring the sharpness in her tone. “Everyone does. She fell.”
Joey looks away, feeling herself seethe but not wanting to get into it right now.
“Look, I’m worried about you,” he says. “Fifteen years is a long time to hold on to so many questions.”
“I’m not just going to let it go,” Joey says. I can’t, she thinks but doesn’t say. She takes the opportunity to turn the light out.
River runs a hand over his beard and exhales. “Anyway, the thing I said the other night…I’m not going to bring it up again, so you don’t have to worry about that. You don’t have to hide from me.”
Joey’s body begins to warn her of some small impending danger. A flutter in her chest, a hitch in her breathing.
“I know you don’t want to talk about it, and that’s fine.
I’m okay with it. I just want to—” He inhales and moves his hands up and over his hair.
Joey feels a spasm of alarm when she sees that motion, as if he’s reaching the end of his tether.
As if he’s ebbing away from her. She’s not sure she wants that. She’s not sure what she wants.
“I just want to be with you,” he says finally.
Joey has to swallow. Her throat is dry. When did she last have a drink of water?
She feels rooted to the spot, feet nailed to the floor.
In the end, she says nothing. What is there to say?
The pause is excruciating. She knows what he wants her to say.
But she can’t say it. To reply would be a kind of betrayal.
Joey is a thief. She has no right to be happy.
Quinn is dead, and Joey won’t steal the life she could have had.
Fresh waves of grief and guilt move through her, and she resists them yet again by closing the door behind her and stepping past River to turn on the hall light. It’s shocking, the sudden brightness.
River squints at her, and she says the only thing she can think of. “You should go.”
Another sag of the head, and she knows she’s let him down. She pinches her bottom lip, harder than she means to, as she watches him go down the hall. She doesn’t move but hears him shake Walter awake. The front door clicks gently, and she is alone.