River Road

by Carol Goodman

  A man’s voice calling Come back! I could almost hear it. “And did she?”

  “No, she was scared . . . of her.”

  “Her?”

  Again Hannah’s eyes slid toward the door. This time I leaned back and saw Joe McAffrey standing in the doorway.

  “He don’t believe me,” Hannah said.

  “What don’t I believe?” Joe asked, coming into the room.

  “What I seen in the woods. I told you once before and you didn’t believe me.”

  “What does she mean?” I asked McAffrey.

  “I told Hannah to stop hanging around your house,” he said to me. “She gave me a rather remarkable story about something she’d seen in the woods. Are you starting with that again, Hannah? Let’s stick to the boy you said was chasing Leia Dawson in the woods.”

  “Not chasing. Following like.”

  “Okay, following. Did you recognize him?”

  “He was wearing a hood—”

  “That isn’t what I asked you. Did you recognize him?”

  Hannah cringed and looked nervously from me to McAffrey. “Might of been the Van Donk boy. They must of had a fight down in the boathouse. She was running when they came back, him following her, yelling come back!”

  “And then what?”

  “I-I don’t know . . . I saw her. I got scared then and ran. I heard the car, the tires squealing, the girl screaming . . . and I ran. I didn’t want to see . . .”

  “So you ran away from the scene,” McAffrey said, his voice tight with anger. “You didn’t think about helping whoever was hurt?”

  “I was scared!” Hannah cried, her voice high and childish, like Emmy’s when she woke up from a nightmare. “I was afraid of her.”

  “Who?” I demanded, exasperated. “Who else did you see in the woods?”

  “The same one I seen lurking around your house. Her that drowned herself in the river. She’s covered with ice from head to toe, icicles hanging from her hair and clothes. That’s who I saw watching Leia—just like I seen her watching you: the ice hag.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “Do you think she made up the ghost because she didn’t want to tell us about Troy?” I asked.

  We’d gone back to my room after a nurse came in to tell us that Ms. Mulder needed her rest. It was clear Hannah wasn’t going to tell us anything more anyway. At least anything coherent.

  “Maybe, but it’s not the first time she’s told me about the ghost. She told me she’d seen it in the woods behind your house. She thought it was an omen that you were going to try to hurt yourself.”

  “Great. That’s an image I need on cold, lonely nights—the ghost of a suicide clattering her frozen shroud outside my window.”

  “Don’t tell me you believe in all that nonsense.”

  “Of course not! What kind of an idiot do you take me for?”

  “I know you’re no idiot, but your book had ghosts in it. It almost made me believe in ghosts.”

  “You read my book?” I tried to keep the pleasure out of my voice. I wasn’t even sure why it pleased me. Usually when people told me they’d read my book I immediately assumed they were wondering why I hadn’t written another one.

  He looked embarrassed. “Yeah, well, I’d never met an author before. When I heard you’d written a book I thought it would be a children’s book or one of those romantic things with a bare-chested guy on the cover, like the ones my sister reads, not a ghost story.”

  “It was supposed to be a postmodern homage to the gothic tradition.” I nearly laughed at his blank stare. “Yeah, it sounds pretentious to me too now. The fact is, it kind of scared me too and after Emmy . . . well, it no longer seemed like fun to write about the dead, ironically or not.”

  He shifted in the too narrow hospital chair, looking uncomfortable. “Some women who’d lost a child would go the other way. You know, contacting psychics, going to séances.”

  I shuddered. “So charlatans could tell me that Emmy’s up in heaven and just wants me to be happy? No, thank you. Just because I wrote a ghost story doesn’t mean I believe in ghosts. Still, I’m not immune to suggestion. I don’t like to think of Hannah seeing the ice hag peering in my windows.”

  “So you’ve heard of her?”

  “Sure. It’s a popular legend at the college. I get a couple of papers on her every semester. I’m sure my students sit around the boathouse, smoking pot, scaring themselves silly by telling the story of the grief-stricken mother who walked out onto the frozen river and fell through the ice.”

  “And whenever a mist comes up off the river they say it’s the ice hag come to drag little children under the ice.”

  “So you know it too,” I said, shivering at the image and drawing the hospital blanket over my legs.

  “When I was in sixth grade a boy named Arlen Mott went out onto the frozen river on a dare and fell through the ice. I had nightmares about the ice hag until I was in high school.”

  “What stopped them?”

  “Thinking about girls,” he said with a slow smile that took the chill off my skin. I could feel the heat in my face and I felt suddenly conscious that I wasn’t wearing anything under the thin hospital gown.

  “Hannah must have grown up on the same story,” I said. “A couple of pints of Four Roses and she starts seeing the ice hag in the mist. Speaking of Four Roses, Hannah said she didn’t leave that bottle on the wall.”

  “I didn’t think it was Hannah, but I do think it was someone who might want to direct our attention to her if Hannah claimed she saw him in the woods.”

  “Troy?”

  McAffrey nodded. “It could have been Troy you saw in the garage with Ross—”

  “How is Ross?” I asked, feeling a sudden pang of guilt that I hadn’t asked after him when he’d almost died today.

  “Still unconscious but stable. They moved him to Vassar Brothers in Poughkeepsie to put him in a hyperbaric chamber. The lab results indicate that he had a lot of alcohol in his blood. Do you think he would have tried to kill himself?”

  “It’s what I was afraid of when I went to his house—that all this scandal about having an affair with Leia would devastate him. He lived off the admiration of his students—but would he kill himself? I don’t know. Do you think someone did this to him?”

  “I went back to look at the barn. Unfortunately the snow outside the door was completely trampled by paramedics, but I was able to make out only three sets of tracks from the kitchen door to the barn. A women’s size nine L.L.Bean snow boot, which I believe belongs to you”—he glanced at my boots, which were sitting on the floor by the closet—“a size twelve men’s oxford shoe, which matches what Mr. Ballantine was wearing today, and a size ten construction boot, one of those steel-tipped things a lot of the college kids like to wear, whattaya call them—”

  “Doc Martens?” I suggested. I was trying to recall what Troy had been wearing in the woods yesterday. Something sturdier than his friend’s pointy-toed oxfords.

  “Yeah. Those tracks were right beside Ballantine’s. The thing is, Ballantine’s tracks were all over the place, like he was drunk. The Doc Martens were steadier but following Ballantine’s.”

  “As if someone was walking beside him trying to keep him from falling?”

  “Exactly. You’d make a good detective, Ms. Lewis.”

  “Thanks. I may be looking for a new job soon . . . but I can’t think why anyone would want Ross dead.”

  “Perhaps he figured out who took his car keys that night.”

  “And he confronted whoever did it—but how would that person get him in the car?”

  “If Ballantine was already drinking he could have slipped sleeping pills in his glass, lured him to the car somehow, waited for him to pass out, and then closed him in there. Then he waited to make sure no one came along to save Ballantine. When he saw you go into the barn he was afraid that if Ballantine lived he’d be caught for Leia’s death and the attempted murder of Ballantine.”

  �
�So he closed the door and left me there to die.” I tried to picture that dark figure silhouetted in the doorway, searching my memory for some identifying feature, but I could only see an amorphous cutout shape. “You keep saying ‘he’ but the figure I saw could have been a man or a woman. It was slim, hooded—”

  “Troy was wearing a hood when Hannah saw him in the woods.”

  “But what about the ice hag?”

  He paused as if humoring me. “I think that was a hallucination on her part. But I think Hannah did see Troy Van Donk in the woods. You saw him too—talking to Leia outside the barn the night of the party and later in the woods walking to the boathouse. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t be out of the question for it to be Troy. I picked him up for possession of marijuana last year. He got off with community service. I’d hoped he was straightening himself out . . .” He frowned and ran his hands through his hair. He looked tired—and sad. I saw the same look of disappointment that I had when a student I’d been working with failed to show up for a final—or didn’t hand in a paper, like Troy had failed to hand in his final story.

  “He was doing well in my class this semester,” I said. “Handing in work, writing some great stuff—and then a week or two ago he started missing classes and then he didn’t hand in his final paper.”

  “So something went wrong. Maybe he got involved in something over his head. A couple of weeks ago we picked up an Acheron student with heroin.”

  “Heroin? At Acheron? I know the kids smoke pot, but heroin?”

  He pursed his lips, suppressing a smile. “You don’t think college students do heroin?”

  I blushed, remembering Aleesha’s paper on her cousin Shawna. “One of my students, Aleesha, did write about her cousin Shawna doing heroin. In fact, Shawna just died of an overdose.”

  “Shawna Williams. That was a tragedy. I met her in a drug prevention program we ran last summer. But it’s not just black kids from Poughkeepsie doing heroin; it’s an epidemic. I’ve got high school kids here in Acheron shooting up. I went on a call last month—a sixteen-year-old boy, star quarterback on the football team, OD’d. We gave him naloxone and revived him but he suffered brain damage. Mom finally came to tell me that he started on painkillers last year after he broke his femur playing football. When he couldn’t afford the OxyContin he switched to heroin. It’s cheaper.” He sighed, truly looking defeated now. “The same thing is happening all over the country. People get addicted to Oxy then switch to heroin when they can’t afford it anymore. And we’re right in the middle of the traffic pattern here in Acheron. It moves up from the city, through the projects in Poughkeepsie, then up to Albany and on into Canada. Route Nine is a major drug traffic route. I caught a dealer just last month pulling him over for an expired inspection ticket. The smart ones take the Loop bus.”

  That caught my attention. “The Loop bus? The one the Acheron kids take?”

  “Sure. Dealers from Poughkeepsie come up here, sell to high school and college students, and ride the bus back to Poughkeepsie. No worries about getting pulled over for a broken taillight.”

  “The older guy I saw walking with Troy in the woods—the skinny scarecrow one—I saw him riding into town on the Loop bus and then back again.”

  “That could be Troy’s connection,” McAffrey said, pulling out his notebook and writing something in it.

  “But what does this all have to do with Leia?” I asked.

  “Maybe Leia found out what Troy was doing and threatened to turn him in.”

  “Hmm. Leia could be righteous, and Troy certainly was angry with her when we spoke on the bus, but I don’t see Leia being that concerned about drug use, unless . . .” I remembered Leia’s paper. “Unless she knew Shawna Williams had started using again. That might have made Leia look at drug use differently. Then, yeah, she might have threatened to turn Troy in for dealing.”

  “And he went after her in the car.”

  “It could have been an accident,” I said, hating to think of Troy running over Leia in cold blood.

  “Might have been, but leaving you and Ross Ballantine to die in that barn was no accident.”

  “Are you going to bring him in?”

  “Detective Haight’s out looking for him now.” McAffrey looked at his watch. “I’d better get going back to the station, but I could give you a lift home first. Your doctor said you were good to go.”

  I remembered the last time he’d driven me home. “Are you going to take me for another glimpse into my dreary future living in a trailer park?”

  He gave me a long, assessing look that brought the blood back to my cheeks. “You look like you’ve seen enough today,” he said finally. “No detours this time. I promise.”

  * * *

  I met McAffrey downstairs after I’d been discharged and gotten dressed. He was on his phone. He looked unhappy.

  “Haight hasn’t been able to find Troy,” he said. “He didn’t show up this morning for his shift at his father’s garage. I’m afraid he’s done a runner, which doesn’t look good for him.”

  “He was often late for class,” I offered.

  “You don’t want to think it’s him, do you?”

  “No,” I admitted. I could picture Troy accidentally hitting Leia and fleeing the scene in a panic, but when I tried to imagine him leading Ross out to his car and deliberately leaving him to die—or closing the barn door on me—my mind balked. Maybe I just didn’t want to imagine any student of mine hating me so much that they would kill me. But that could just have been my vanity.

  I rode again in the front passenger’s seat. We drove south on Route 9 and turned west on 199, past a farm stand closed for the season and a low-lying orchard, under a dark, overcast sky. The road climbed from there up a steep hill. As we passed Van’s Auto I glanced out the window and saw a boy in a familiar purple and gold sweatshirt bent over a truck’s engine.

  “Hey, I think that’s Troy.”

  McAffrey followed my gaze and then swung the car into Van’s, blocking the entrance. “Stay here,” he barked, jumping out of the car.

  I hadn’t really thought he would stop. I felt a qualm that I’d set a policeman onto Troy, but then it was better if McAffrey didn’t think that Troy had run away. I still was having trouble imagining Troy as a killer. He was bent over the engine of a red pickup truck, using a wrench to loosen something, his face red in the cold air. When he looked up and saw McAffrey approaching he tensed, looked behind him, then hauled back his arm and threw the wrench at McAffrey.

  I screamed as McAffrey ducked and Troy ran past him and past the police car. I could see his face as he streaked by. His eye caught mine and the panic turned to something else. I opened the door and got out, calling Troy’s name, but he was already past me, in the road—running directly in front of an eighteen-wheeler barreling down the hill. There was no way the truck would be able to stop in time. McAffrey saw it too. He’d reached the edge of the road, his feet skidding on ice and rutted snow. I saw his muscles bunching, getting ready to sprint into the middle of the road to make a lunge for Troy.

  “Joe! Don’t!” His arms pinwheeled as if caught in a current. Troy gave one glance over his shoulder and then leapt for the other side of the road. The truck thundered past us, horn blaring, brakes squealing, kicking up so much dirty snow and ice I wasn’t sure if Troy had been hit or not. But then when the truck passed I caught a glimpse of a purple sweatshirt vanishing into the woods on the other side of the road. McAffrey sprinted across the road and disappeared into the woods.

  I stood by the side of the road staring into the woods as if they were a dark lake that had swallowed both men, and I was waiting for them to come to the surface. Another man came to stand next to me. With his bulging stomach, balding head, and grease-stained hands, Troy Van Donk Sr. had none of his son’s good looks, but he did have the same expression of fear on his face that I’d seen on Troy’s as he’d run by.

  “What’s the boy gotten himself into now?” he asked, the angry tone belying t
he fear on his face.

  I couldn’t bear to tell him. “Sergeant McAffrey just wanted to ask him some questions . . . maybe he just got spooked.”

  Troy Sr. shook his head, took out a bandana, and wiped the sweat that despite the cold beaded his forehead. “There’s been something these last few weeks eating at him. He’s mixed up in something. Goddamnit!” He spit into the dirt. “I knew no good would come of going to that college and mixing with spoiled rich kids, making him want things he couldn’t have.”

  I wanted to object, to tell him that his son was a talented writer, that he had promise, but then I pictured Troy and Leia outside Ross’s barn, Leia in her red jacket, Troy in his purple sweatshirt, framed against the fiery backdrop of the sunset—all that youthful promise about to go up in flames—and thought that Troy Sr. had been right. No good had come of Troy’s going to Acheron.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  McAffrey came back half an hour later, his uniform soaked and covered in pine needles and burrs. “That kid of yours sure can run, Van,” he said to Troy Sr.

  “What’s he done, Joey?”

  “I just need to talk to him. Tell him that if you see him. Tell him it’ll go better for him if he comes in himself.”

  “I will if I see him, but knowing my boy he’s gone to ground. Back when he was little he’d go hide in those woods when he was angry or scared. Stayed in there a week once when some girlie broke his heart.”

  “Temperature’s going down below zero tonight,” McAffrey said, looking up at the darkening sky. “He’ll be looking for a warmer place to bed down. You call me if you see him, Van, and I’ll make sure he gets a fair hearing.”

  Troy Sr. squinted at McAffrey as if trying to bring him into focus. Then he looked up at the sky too. “Yep, it’s gonna be a cold one,” he said as if all they’d been talking about was the weather. Then he nodded at me and walked away, his broad back stooped and round-shouldered. I remembered Dottie telling me she’d gone to high school with him. I tried to picture him as a young man. Then I thought of how Troy must see his father. He’d written in one of his stories about a young man who “saw himself turning into his old man with every grease stain, every backache, every bad choice.” I had written in the margin, “Beautiful! But you can write yourself a better future.” That’s what going to Acheron was supposed to offer him—a different future from his father’s—but what if Leia had threatened to turn him in for dealing? That bright future would have gone up in smoke. Would he have killed her to keep that future and keep from turning into his old man?