They sat like that, the silence no longer cold, no longer cavernous, neither one of them touching their mugs or sweets. Garlic and tomato sauce and meat and cheese filled the steamy kitchen air. They sat until the oven beeped and the lasagna was done, and it was time to bring the trays two houses down where Holly and her outsized family were celebrating yet another Sunday on earth.
CHAPTER
56
ED CALLED HER the first week of March. Alfie was back in school, and she was home, getting ready to run a few errands (or skip them and go for a hike—the weather had warmed, grown foggy and almost balmy). She had gotten in touch with Janine about driving a school bus again, but Janine was evasive. The schedules were full. There were no openings yet.
“Laney,” Ed said, “do you have time to meet for coffee?”
She hesitated. She knew her own shot was clean. Officer Ryan, the rookie, had seen Hopper point his gun at her, had seen her fire in what was clearly self-defense. Alfie’s situation was more opaque. The fire in the cabin had been ruled arson, and since Alfie was a known firebug and Hopper would have had no reason to burn down his own residence, Alfie was the obvious culprit. More troublesome still was the needle to the neck.
But Alfie was only thirteen and wouldn’t talk. His own injuries had been grave, arguably life threatening. He’d lost blood, almost lost one toe.
She didn’t really believe either the Narrowsburg or the Sylvan police department would decide to arrest her son or pursue a criminal investigation against him, but seeing Ed Boswell was the absolute last thing she wanted. That never seemed to change.
“Today’s not a good day,” she said.
“Let’s meet anyway,” he said, in a tone she couldn’t ignore.
A half hour later they sat across a table at the Majestic Diner, coffee and a bagel before each.
“I wanted to talk with you for a couple of reasons,” Ed said, mixing sugar into his cup. “We’re not going to pursue any charges against Alfie. Whatever he might have done, he did under extreme circumstances. He was held against his will, and a convicted felon tied to at least one murder tried to kill him.”
He stirred, sipped, tore a chunk of bagel. “I wanted to tell you that.”
Relief flooded her, sweet and light, and she hid it by downing half her coffee at once, scalding her mouth. “That’s nice of you.” She put her cup down, then chewed through a quarter of her bagel before asking, “What’s the second reason?”
He sat back, his face both serious and shy. “Laney, you finding that cabin, that was good detective work. Some of the best I’ve seen.” He stuck out his lower lip. “I’m not going to ask how you got access to the information you had.”
She shook her head, but her cheeks warmed anyway.
He withdrew his wallet, flicked through it, and placed a business card on the table next to her plate.
“My family runs a private investigation business.”
She looked up at him in surprise.
“I didn’t want to spend my life working for my dad.” His lip quirked. “But give them a call. I hear you’re looking for a new job.”
CHAPTER
57
A COUPLE WEEKS after he came back, when his arm was still bandaged and sore, someone threw a half-eaten apple at his head in the cafeteria.
“Heard you killed your old boyfriend, fuckface,” someone said.
“Heard you set him on fire.”
A lump of something hard and sharp (a rock, selected from the school’s driveway) wrapped in napkins hit him in the temple.
“Let me hear you squeal!” someone else said, and others laughed.
When Alfie looked around, he saw two girls smirking and filming the entire episode while a group of boys, juniors by the looks of them, snorted into their fists.
He remembered a story Owen Hopper told him one snowy afternoon in his Mountain View apartment, Jordan half dozing on the couch and cans of Bud on the floor by their feet.
Guys like throwing their dicks around, Owen had said. If you don’t want one of those dicks to smack you in the face, you gotta throw some hot oil on it. Alfie always appreciated Hopper’s way with metaphors. Once, Owen said, I had this big dude, like seven feet, three hundred fifty pounds, he was threatening me, see? Telling me he was going to beat me up, whatever. Now, no way can I take him in a fair fight. Not in an unfair one either. So I come up to him, real calm. And I look him in the eye. And I don’t blink. Remember that. When you don’t blink, you look crazy. Think Charles Manson. So I don’t blink, and I say to him, you can kick my ass, sure. But one day, and you won’t know when, and you won’t know how, I’m going to cut your eyes out of your head. It’s a promise. And then I counted to ten, and I still didn’t blink. And you know what? The fucker walked away. Never bothered me again.
Alfie calculated his chances of getting away with doing just this to the fruit-and-rock-throwers. It was a quick calculation and involved weighing the probabilities of being reported to a counselor or the principal, being beaten to a pulp on the way home from school, and stuttering at the crucial moment in the speech, thus becoming even more of a laughingstock. In the end it was the girls with their phones who decided him. If he played this right, he’d be on video. And his reputation as someone you don’t fuck with would be cemented. He didn’t mind if everyone thought him crazy. They did so already. He just wanted them to leave him alone.
What was weird though, as he rose to his feet and hobbled to the table of his chortling, guffawing tormentors, he didn’t feel himself. Owen Hopper’s wiry, rangy ghost walked with him, and when he spoke, it was Hopper’s Brooklyn cadence that came through.
The maneuver worked better than he might have hoped. Although the boys at the table whooped with glee when he finished, there was a panicked unease in their eyes, and one of the girls put her phone down, her face reddening furiously.
The video took about two hours to reach everyone who was anyone in the school hierarchy. After that, all he had to do was stare at someone without blinking to get them out of his way, and somehow, in a matter of weeks, they let him be.
Another unexpected but welcome side effect of having his feet so damaged and his arm in a sling was being excused from gym. He could skip the boring team sports and the pointless racing around a stuffy court for the rest of the year. Instead, a young gym teacher-in-training with the unfortunate name of Mr. Flake had volunteered to work with Alfie on strengthening his upper body. Every day during eighth period, they met in the weights room, and Mr. Flake showed him how to use the machines, the dumbbells, the benches. He started with the tiny one-pound weights, pink (of course they would be pink), and at first even those felt impossible to his mangled muscles.
But he improved. By the end of March, he had full range of motion in his hurt arm, and by the end of April he could do biceps curls with ten-pound dumbbells and squats with fifteen-pound kettle balls, lifting them over his head as he straightened.
He grew and lengthened, his shoulders widening. When he walked the hallways now, he kept his spine in the neutral position—pelvis, rib cage, and skull aligned—as Mr. Flake taught him, and his chin parallel to the ground. He started hanging out with Jordan again, tentatively at first, then with greater ease after Jordan asked him if he held him responsible for being kidnapped and Alfie said no, of course not, that’s crazy.
His circle of friends expanded. He realized he’d always approached friendships from the wrong end, thinking he was the one who needed to be witty and clever, who needed to come up with ideas for things to do. In reality, all he had to do was stay quiet and look people in the eye. They would then carry the conversation along on wings or waves or gusts of words, depending on their personalities. He found comfort in their chatter and their presence.
Once in a while, when confronted with a new or unpleasant or confusing situation, he’d have the oddest thought. He’d think, what would Owen do? And then his would-be murderer’s ghost might whisper in his ear or move his hand or work his tong
ue and mouth and speak for him.
He sometimes dreamed of Owen Hopper, but the dreams had nothing of the Mountain View townhouse or dank wood cabin in them. He dreamed they walked on a beach, hot sand beneath their bare feet, the smells of ocean and sunblock caressing their faces. Owen told him stories, outlandish stories, of all the places he traveled—England and Holland, Thailand, China, Iceland, and once Siberia with his wife, because that’s where she was from. He told of how her family lived in a house with no running water, but they had a beautiful porcelain toilet propped over a hole in the floor, and how he once met a pirate through the pirate’s girlfriend who worked the drawbridge in a tiny Florida town. In these dreams Owen called him Otto and Alfie thought nothing wrong with it.
On his fourteenth birthday, his mother bought him his own saxophone. His old rented one was gone irretrievably, stolen or lost when Owen’s car had been taken as evidence. Next to the sax’s solid black case, she placed a card, postmarked New Mexico.
“Your father sent you a card,” she said.
He didn’t realize he expected the signature inside to read Owen until he saw his dad’s graceful script, and the sight of it was a gut punch, shocking and raw after all these years.
Alfie folded the card back into its envelope, and when his mother turned toward the cake, he threw it into the trash under the sink. He hadn’t cried at all since what he and his mother had started calling “the incident”—not when the doctors told him he might lose toes, not when the pain kept him from sleeping, not even when Ed Boswell questioned him and he thought he might be going to prison.
But now he pressed his hand against his eyes and sobbed. And once he started sobbing, he couldn’t stop, the tears pouring through his fingers, the ache in his throat and chest inescapable, obliterating, and in the end, purifying.
CHAPTER
58
ON THE FIRST hot day in June, Laney Bird dressed in a maid’s smock, pinned a name tag onto her lapel, grabbed her handbag, and settled behind the wheel of her car. The name tag read Magda. The handbag contained a subpoena, and the man about to get served was sequestered in a Catskills motel.
She squinted into the bright sky, letting the sun warm her cheeks. Everything was in bloom—the untrimmed dog roses by her driveway, the azaleas flanking every door, columbines at the side of the road. She rolled down her windows, set the radio to the classic-rock station.
At the intersection where she should have turned left, she turned right instead, because it was only noon, and the day glowed with such a pretty light.
And she had to see Alfie. Only just see him. From afar. She’d developed this habit recently and she couldn’t seem to break it. He had no clue she drove past the school every day, either during lunch or when he sat by the track when his gym class ran. She knew how to observe without being seen. Sometimes she used her phone in lieu of binoculars, pointing it at his slight frame and zooming in.
Was it really such unhinged behavior? She didn’t think so. Not really. Anyway, not too unhinged.
She parked under an ancient oak and turned her attention toward the picnic tables and benches nestled within the school’s glossy lawn.
Alfie perched on one of the benches in a group of four, listening to something another boy was saying. Propping his saxophone on his knee, he punctuated the boy’s story with what appeared to be humorously timed honks.
Five minutes later she put her car in gear and rolled away, toward the highway and the motel and the business exec who would most certainly open his door to a maid in about an hour.
The detective agency for which she now worked was hosting a birthday party at a pub tonight, cake and drinks for one of the long-timers. She wouldn’t stay long, but she was looking forward to it.
As she accelerated, she turned up the volume and made herself think of nothing but balmy heat, music, and the vivid green world spinning out behind her.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Emilya Naymark’s short stories appear in Secrets in the Water, After Midnight: Tales from the Graveyard Shift, River River Journal, Snowbound: Best New England Crime Stories 2017, 1+30: THE BEST OF MYSTORY, and in the upcoming Harper Collins anthology A Stranger Comes to Town. She has a degree in fine art, and her artworks have been published in numerous magazines and books, earning her a reputation as a creator of dark, psychological pieces. Being married to an N.Y.P.D. undercover detective compelled her to create the character of Laney Bird, whose occasionally wild and, even more often, terrifying experiences are inspired by real events. When not writing, Emilya works as a visual artist and reads massive quantities of thrillers and crime fiction. She lives in the Hudson Valley with her family.
This is a work of fiction. All of the names, characters, organizations, places and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real or actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2021 by Emilya Naymark
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crooked Lane Books, an imprint of The Quick Brown Fox & Company LLC.
Crooked Lane Books and its logo are trademarks of The Quick Brown Fox & Company LLC.
Library of Congress Catalog-in-Publication data available upon request.
ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-64385-637-7
ISBN (ebook): 978-1-64385-638-4
Cover design by Kara Klontz
Printed in the United States.
www.crookedlanebooks.com
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New York, NY 10001
First Edition: February 2021
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