River Road

by Carol Goodman

  I was so busy watching him in my rearview mirror that I missed the turn into my driveway. I yanked the wheel sharply and the car spun 180 degrees and began sliding toward the stone wall on the opposite side of the road. I watched the wall coming, the wheel useless under my hands. Useless like me, I thought, as powerless as I’d been to stop what happened to Leia. Steer into the skid, they always said. Hadn’t that been what I’d been doing this whole time, moving straight toward disaster? Fuck that.

  I wrenched the wheel at the last moment. I missed the wall by inches and landed in a ditch, right wheel lower than the left, a gruesome reminder of how I’d landed the night Leia died. For a second I had the feeling that I’d gone back in time, given a chance to stop what happened. I turned off the engine and sat listening to the snow filling up the woods.

  The place I’d come to rest was the turnaround that the farm trucks used to use, protected by a canopy of pine trees, the favorite make-out spot for local high school kids and where college kids parked their cars to hike into the woods—

  To go to the boathouse. You couldn’t drive to the boathouse. You could hike to it from the college along the railroad track but that was a long way. The shorter way was to park in the turnaround on Orchard Drive and hike in. If Leia wanted Troy to take her to the boathouse they could have taken Ross’s car and parked here.

  But why? Why did she want to go to the boathouse? What was there?

  Their stash, of course—that’s what Troy and Scully had been looking for the day I saw them walking into the woods. But it wasn’t there. Why not? And why had Leia wanted it? As proof that Troy had been dealing to Shawna?

  Come back! I heard the anger in that voice now—and something else. Desperation. The desperation of someone who has lost everything, who already knows it’s too late.

  My boots sank into half a foot of snow. I stared into the woods. I could see the wall where Leia’s shrine was from here but all the offerings were covered with snow. Hannah had denied leaving the bottle there. Could it have been Troy who left it? But why? To incriminate Hannah? I pictured Troy following Leia back from the boathouse—only, Leia hadn’t gone to where they left the car. Come back! Troy had yelled. Angry that she was leaving him, angry at something she had done. He gave up following her and went for the car. Leia would continue walking south on River Road, toward her apartment in town. If he drove fast down Orchard he could head her off—

  I heard the screech of brakes, a scream—Troy might have just been trying to stop her from going to the police, he might not have meant to hit her—but once he did he’d seen my car in the ditch, one wheel hovering in the air like an unanswered question. It wouldn’t have taken much to drag Leia under my car, leaving me to run over her when I pulled out.

  I rubbed at my face, wet from falling snow and tears. Had he known it was my car? The slim hope that he hadn’t was extinguished by the memory of him working on my car last spring and of him once saying he had total automobile recall. He never forgot a car. Stupidly, that’s what hurt the most. That he’d deliberately tried to frame me for Leia’s death. And left the bottle of Four Roses on the shrine to incriminate Hannah and killed Oolong.

  I crossed the road and walked up my driveway, slipping in the soft, deep snow. I’d need to get the drive plowed again—but I sure as hell wouldn’t be asking Troy’s father.

  When I got inside I kicked snow off my boots and peeled off wet clothes, leaving them in soggy heaps on the floor. I pulled on the sweatpants and sweatshirt I’d left on top of the dryer. I thought about the Glenlivet but instead turned on the electric kettle. Or tried to turn it on. The switch light didn’t go on. I checked that it was plugged in, shivering in the cold and dark. Too cold. Too dark. I checked the thermostat and saw that it had dropped below fifty. I turned the dial, waiting for the reassuring roar of the furnace but heard only the dry rasp of the snow. Then I tried switching on a lamp. Nothing. The power was out. It had happened half a dozen times the first year we were here. Evan had said we should get a generator but we hadn’t been able to afford it and I hadn’t bothered since. The power usually came on before too long.

  I started a fire in the woodstove and then took out my cell phone to call Joe.

  It was dead.

  I couldn’t remember the last time I’d thought to charge it. There was a charger in the car but the car was down the driveway and across the road in the turnaround. I pulled the curtain back to look outside. It was nearly dark, the world outside a grainy blur of shadows and spinning flakes. There was no guarantee I’d ever find my way back from the car. I could barely see the barn—

  A flicker of light flashed through a gap in the boards and then was extinguished in a gust of snow. It was so brief I might have imagined it. I watched for it again, staring so hard into the snow that I began to see shapes moving in it—sea witches breasting surging waves, ice hags screaming in openmouthed horror. My head ached. The flash of light might have been a migraine symptom. What else could it be?

  The ghost of Charlotte Blackwell, the snow whispered, come to take you at last to join Emmy.

  Emmy. In my dream she had led me to the boathouse with her flashing sneakers. If her ghost came for me now I’d gladly go. I felt tired of pretending that it was enough for me just to care about my students, that I didn’t need anything more in my life. Look what had come of that. My two favorite students had gone on a heroin spree and then one had killed the other and tried to frame me for her death.

  I saw the flash of light again. A red flash like the lights on Emmy’s sneakers. A beacon calling me through the storm. Or to my death. Why should I answer it? It could be Troy luring me to the barn just as he’d lured Ross out to his barn to kill him. I should lock the doors and stay huddled by the woodstove with the bottle of Glenlivet until the morning—which is exactly what I’d do alone in this cold house. I’d drink the whole bottle. Even after I’d promised myself that I wouldn’t. And that would mean that all of them—Anat, Cressida, my mother, Joe McAffrey—had been right; I was a washed-up drunk like Hannah Mulder. Or I could go out and face whatever was out there. Right now it seemed like the less frightening choice.

  I pulled on coat and boots. As I stepped outside I thought of early settlers leaving their snowbound cabins drawn by solitude-induced phantoms and losing their way between house and barn. As soon as I stepped off the porch I was swept into a blind current like being pulled out to sea by a riptide. Too late I thought of tying a rope to the porch as a guideline. But then part of me didn’t think I was coming back anyway.

  I walked as straight as I could, buffeted by gusts of wind, toward the only slightly darker and more solid shape in the gray, which was the barn. As I got closer I saw the light again—an orange glow through a chink in the old wood. Only when I rested my hands on the door did I think to be afraid, but then it was too late. I was more afraid to turn my back on whatever was inside.

  I pushed open the door, the metal tracks screeching in protest, giving whatever was inside ample warning.

  She was waiting for me, her long cloak trailing on the ground, her face beneath her deep hood a void waiting to swallow me like a black hole.

  Then she pushed back her hood and the ice hag was gone. Troy Van Donk stared defiantly out at me instead. He clutched Evan’s old baseball bat in his hand, braced to swing. Only the tremor in his hands gave away how scared he was.

  “Put that thing down,” I said in my firmest teacher’s voice, “and come back to the house before we both freeze to death.”

  * * *

  I sat Troy down by the fire and went out onto the porch to get more wood. And to give myself a moment to think. If Troy had killed Leia and dragged her under my car to frame me, he was dangerous. He might have been waiting out in my barn to kill me, wait out the storm in my house, then steal my money and car to escape. Everything I had learned in the last twenty-four hours had taught me to doubt my own judgment, but still, when I looked at Troy I saw a scared kid, not a hardened criminal. As I went back i
nside I realized that a scared kid might be just as dangerous.

  He was waiting at the door for me when I came in. He took the wood from me and dumped it in the bin by the stove. When he grabbed the iron fire poker I held my breath, but he only used it to stir up the fire. I looked at my phone lying on the table and noticed that it had been moved.

  “It’s dead,” he said, keeping his eye on the fire, “so I’m guessing you didn’t get a chance to call your cop boyfriend.”

  “He’s not my boyfriend,” I said, sounding all of twelve.

  “Then why were you with him at my dad’s garage?”

  “He was bringing me back from the hospital. I nearly got asphyxiated dragging Ross Ballantine out of his garage.”

  I watched Troy’s face, lit up by the glow of the fire, for any reaction, but he only sneered. “Don’t tell me the asshole tried to off himself.”

  “Someone tried to kill him.” This time he did flinch.

  “Really? A jealous husband?”

  “I imagine it was Leia’s killer, afraid that Ross saw him take his car that night.”

  Troy turned to look at me. He was still holding the poker. “And you think that was me. Why would I kill Leia?”

  It might have been more prudent to pretend I thought he was innocent but I was tired of being careful. “Because she knew you gave Shawna the heroin that killed her and she was going to turn you in.”

  A muscle on the side of his mouth twitched. “How do you know about the heroin?” I noticed he hadn’t denied anything.

  “I talked to Aleesha. She told me about your Poughkeepsie odyssey.”

  “That was all Leia’s idea. She wanted a taste of real life—and apparently that meant trying smack.”

  “So you obliged her.”

  He shrugged, his face a bronze mask of reflected firelight.

  “Leia’s—Leia was a pretty girl. Why wouldn’t I want to spend some time with her? As for the heroin—I thought she’d sprinkle a little snow on her joint and then she’d be able to write about the experience. And for a while that was enough. She smoked some of the stuff a couple of times hanging out with Shawna behind Noah’s and then down at the Blackwell factory. I didn’t know she was getting hooked—or that Shawna would OD—” His voice broke on the last syllable and the mask slipped. Without it he looked young and afraid.

  “Were you with Shawna when she OD’d?”

  “We all were. Scully, Leia, me, and Shawna, down at the Blackwell. Leia said she wanted to shoot up and Shawna said she’d show her how to do it . . .” His mouth twisted. “I thought Leia would be squeamish but she made Shawna talk through each step so she could remember and write about it later. I think she would have taken notes if she wasn’t afraid of Scully making fun of her. Finally, Shawna got impatient and says, ‘Let me just show you.’ So she takes the needle, ties off her arm, taps her vein”—Troy tapped the inside of his own elbow with two fingers—“and shoots up. I turned away. I don’t care what anyone thinks, I can’t watch that, but Leia watched the whole thing. Then I see Leia’s face go all white. I thought she was faint from watching the needle but then she screams Shawna’s name and grabs for her. Shawna’s jittering all over the floor, foam coming out of her mouth, Leia’s crying, Scully’s cursing at her to get out of the way. Then he was doing CPR, pounding on Shawna’s chest so hard I heard a rib break, and he kept saying, ‘Shit, what they cut this shit with, what they cut this shit with?’ ”

  “He thought it was something in the heroin?”

  “Yeah, strychnine or quinine or some other shit. He was mad. Later I realized it wasn’t about Shawna dying—he was mad he’d been sold bad product.” Troy took a breath and then went on. “When Scully sat back and stopped Leia says, ‘There’s something they can give you if you OD—nalo-something.’ She said she learned about it in some substance abuse workshop she’d taken. She said cops and EMTs carried it. She takes out her phone like she’s going to call nine-one-one and Scully knocks it outta her hand. Calls her a stupid bitch and stomps on the phone, shouts: ‘WE AIN’T CALLING NO POLICE.’ ”

  Troy’s rendition of Scully’s voice sent chills down my spine. I realized, too, that Troy, despite how painful this scene was to him, had gotten into the telling. He was doing all the voices. “ ‘But they could save her,’ Leia cries. I thought Scully was gonna slap her but he only shakes his head and says, ‘She gone, baby, gone like the wind. Nalo don’t cure no strychnine poisoning.’ Leia’s eyes got big then. I think that’s when she realized it coulda been her. She got hysterical. ‘We can’t just leave her here,’ she starts screaming. So Scully goes, ‘We ain’t gonna.’ He picks Shawna up like she was a bag of mulch—he’s a lot stronger than he looks—and carries her outside and dumps her in the river. Leia really freaked out then. Scully says to me, ‘You make her shut up or I will.’ I thought he was gonna kill us. I grabbed Leia and hustled her out of there, one hand over her mouth. Frog-marched her to the train station to catch the Loop. She cried all the way back to campus. Kept saying it shoulda been her and we had to do something. But what?” He looked at me, as if I had the answer. “What could we have done for Shawna? What good would it do her, at the bottom of the river, to get ourselves involved?”

  I shook my head. “You can’t live keeping something like that to yourself. It will eat you alive.”

  “Yeah, that’s what Leia said. But then I reminded her about her fancy internship and her scholarship at Wash U. and she seemed to see sense. She said she only wanted to make sure nothing like that happened again—so she asked me if I had any more of the stuff Shawna had taken.”

  “And did you?”

  “Yeah, a couple of bags, hid in the boathouse. She said we had to get rid of it, so no one else would die like Shawna had.”

  “And did you agree with her?”

  “Of course. I didn’t want to have anyone else’s death on my conscience, only . . .”

  “Only what?”

  “I told her that Scully either wanted the stuff back or the money for it.”

  “Do you think Scully would have sold it even after what happened to Shawna?”

  “I think a man like Scully doesn’t like to see a profit loss. He told me he planned to cut the stuff again with baby powder—said it would be safe enough to give a baby.” He saw the face I made and grimaced. “Yeah, I had the same reaction. But what was I going to do? That was ten grand worth of product. Where was I going to get that kind of money? I told Leia that and she said she’d get the money, that if I dumped the product she’d give me the money to give to Scully.”

  “Where would Leia get ten thousand dollars?”

  He shook his head. “I asked her the same thing. She said she had someone who would give it to her. That must be some friend, I said, and she said, no, not exactly a friend but someone who would pay to keep her quiet.”

  “She was going to blackmail someone?”

  “Yeah. I figured it was someone she was sleeping with. When I saw that stuff about Professor Ballantine on ‘Overheard’ I figured it was him. That Leia tried to blackmail him. But it must have gone wrong. Only she didn’t tell me that. When she met me at the barn she said it had all gone fine. She was even laughing—”

  “I saw that. But she’d been crying a minute ago in the kitchen.”

  “Like I told you, she played a part. She wanted me to think she had the money so I’d take her to the stash so we could get rid of it. I told her I had to have the money first and she said she’d give it to me when she saw the stash. She was acting all coy, like we were in Pulp Fiction or something. Like it was a game. She’d even lifted Ballantine’s keys so we could ‘ride in style.’ ”

  “So you did take Ross’s car.”

  “Leia took the keys and Leia drove. We left it in the turnaround on Orchard Drive and hiked to the boathouse. I’d hid the stuff under the floorboards. I showed it to her and asked to see the money, but she started chucking it in the river. I knew right away that she’d lied about the money. I t
ried to stop her but she was like a crazy woman. She pushed me away and I fell in the water. She threw the rest of the stuff into the river and then ran. I got out of the water and went after her. I’m not even sure why. The stash was gone, she didn’t have the money—”

  “You must have been furious with her.”

  “Yeah, but I was more pissed at myself for believing her.” He smiled wryly. “I guess I had a thing for her. I—” He stopped and looked toward the door. “Did you hear something?”

  I’d been so immersed in Troy’s story that I hadn’t heard anything but his voice. I listened now but all I heard was the whisper of the snow, like a chorus of Furies calling for the next chapter of Troy’s sad tale—the part that would tell how he chased Leia down in the car and ran her over and left her for dead under my car wheels. He’d been angry with Leia, hurt and betrayed, he’d followed her back through the woods and chased her on the road. He hadn’t meant to hit her—

  A sharp crack broke the silence. It came from the front porch and sounded like someone stepping on the loose floorboard. Troy’s eyes opened wide. “Someone’s here,” he hissed. “Are you expecting McAffrey?”

  “No,” I said, wishing I were. “But he might have come to see if I’m okay. I didn’t hear a car, though—”

  Another crack came from the porch. Troy put his hand to my mouth and pushed me down as the door exploded inward in a shower of sawdust and splinters and snow. I looked up and saw that where my door had been stood Scully holding a shotgun.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  “Well, well, my man Troy!” Scully sang in a high-pitched voice. “I’m impressed. I figured Princess Leia was having it on with her professors but I didn’t know you were too.”