What a shame, she thought. Grace would want to play in the snow today, would insist that Ella, and possibly TJ, accompany her outside. But Ella thought her daughter was going to get bored very quickly when she realized this snow was no good for sledding or snowballs or for building snowmen.
Still tired, she managed to trudge into the corridor and downstairs to the kitchen. A glance into the living room did not turn up Grace as she had expected. The TV wasn’t on. Nor was Grace in the kitchen; instead, she found her husband at the counter with a mixing bowl and a mess.
“Morning,” she said. “What’re you up to?”
TJ gave her an open smile, no hesitation or reservation. She felt tentative herself. Making love with him last night had given her hope for the first time in a long while that their relationship could be healed, but one night could not erase the injuries they had inflicted upon each other in the past few years. Looking at him now, though, she wondered if she wasn’t making it more difficult than it had to be.
“Banana pancakes!” he said happily, digging into a corner cabinet. “And, if you’ll give me a minute, coffee.”
He pulled out a couple of pods for the big Keurig on the countertop.
Maybe it actually is this easy, she thought. Her mother had always said that all men ever really needed to be happy was food, sex, and peace at home. Ella had thought about that many times over the years of her marriage, but watching TJ now, she felt that she was having a minor epiphany. Could it be that those three things were all she needed to be happy as well?
“Grace is still sleeping?” Ella asked.
“She was when I came down,” he replied. “It’s a good thing, too. Maybe she’s had some nicer dreams to wash away the scary ones.”
“You’re awfully cheery this morning,” she said as TJ popped the first pod into the coffeemaker and slipped a mug into place.
He glanced up at her, a flash of regret in his eyes. “Sorry. I know you’re probably exhausted from being up with Gracie, but … I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Nightmares aside, it was a good night, wasn’t it?”
“It was,” she agreed, “though maybe … incomplete. We might need a redo.”
He smiled the same rakish grin that had first stirred her twelve years before.
“That can be arranged.”
TJ set the pan on the stove and turned on the gas flame. While the pan heated up, he chopped up a banana and then whisked the batter for a few seconds. Ella just watched him, looking for signs of strain behind his demeanor. The tension between them had abated but not vanished and she knew he still felt it. But at least he was trying.
A for effort, babe. A for effort.
And if TJ was willing to make the effort, could she do any less?
“What do you think that was all about?” she asked, fetching orange juice from the fridge. “The ghost thing, I mean.”
“Bad dreams,” he said.
“Sure,” Ella replied, getting a small glass from the cabinet to the left of the stove. “But she’s never had one like this. I just hope…”
TJ poured dollops of pancake batter onto the hot pan, doling it carefully with a wooden spoon. When he’d made the third one, he glanced up at her.
“What do you hope?”
Ella finished pouring her juice, then shrugged. “I don’t know. Sometimes nightmares come from stress in your life. I just hope things haven’t been so tense around here that we’ve been planting those seeds in her mind and they’re coming out like this.”
This sobered him. “I’d never want that.”
Ella put the juice bottle away and then turned to him. “Me either.”
TJ touched her face and she felt a delicious ripple pass through her, a memory of the night before. Ella slid her arms around him and tilted her head back to accept his kiss. Their lips met and she inhaled his breath, giving him her own, mingling themselves in that way that had always seemed so intimate to her.
When he pulled back, she winced in disgust. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I need to brush my teeth.”
He laughed. “Yeah, you do. But that’s love, honey. Morning breath can’t kill it.”
She whacked his arm and then as if to test the theory she kissed him again, though more chastely.
“You’re burning the pancakes,” a voice said.
Startled, they both jumped a little and turned toward the kitchen entrance. Grace stood there in her pink New England Patriots T-shirt and a pair of loose cotton pajama pants that were covered in penguins. The clothes were hers, but something about her seemed different. She stood almost at attention, head tilted back with an air of dignified disapproval that might have been comical if that disapproval hadn’t seemed aimed at her parents.
“Grace?” Ella said.
“Hey, Gracie, I’m glad you’re awake,” TJ said cheerily. “Want banana pancakes?”
“Not those, TJ,” the little girl said. “You’re burning them.”
The first time she’d said it, neither of her parents had really registered the words. Now TJ swore and hurried to the stove, using his fingers to flip the pancakes over; he’d been too busy kissing Ella to get the spatula from the drawer. Ella saw that Grace was right: the pancakes had burned a dark brown on one side. This batch would end up in the sink disposal. The good news was that he hadn’t gotten to the stage of adding banana slices.
Suddenly Ella heard an echo of her daughter’s words and realized what had sounded so wrong to her.
“Since when do you call your parents by their first names?”
Grace ignored her, instead watching her father scrape the burnt pancakes off the pan. TJ cleaned it off as best he could and then set it back down on the burner.
“No, no,” Grace said, huffing as she approached the stove. “You’re just going to get that burnt flavor in the next batch. You’ve got to clean it first.”
The little girl took the pan from her father and ran water into it over the sink. The hot pan hissed and steamed when the water struck it.
“Careful!” TJ said. “You should really let me do that, Gracie. I know you want to help, but—”
As he reached for the pan, she turned her back to block him, finishing the job and making short work of it. Ella and TJ just watched as she turned and gave her father a look that seemed to say there, that’s how it’s done, and then set the pan back on the burner.
“There,” Grace said, reaching up to tug at some unruly locks of her hair, tucking them tightly behind her ears. “Don’t put the banana in too early and you’ll be fine.”
What the fuck was that? Ella thought.
“Grace,” she said sternly.
The little girl turned to study her gravely, as if Ella were some new and unwelcome discovery. Grace had always been a little sassy with her, and Ella knew that lots of girls reached the point where they tried to act more maturely and to distance themselves from their parents and the children they had once been, but this went way beyond anything she’d ever expected … and it had arrived in her daughter’s behavioral repertoire at least two years before Ella had thought it might.
“Yes, Mother?” Grace said at last.
Mother?
“Don’t call your father by his first name.”
Grace smiled. “Of course,” she said, turning to her father. “Sorry about that, Dad.”
As her parents watched, Grace Farrelly turned and left the room. “I’m going to watch some TV,” she said. “Please let me know when the pancakes are ready. I’ll have three or four, I think. I’m starving.”
Ella realized that her mouth had been hanging open for several seconds before she turned to stare at her husband.
“Where did that come from?” she muttered.
“Not a clue,” TJ said.
Her husband remained staring at the kitchen entrance, as if thinking that Grace might return and take a laughing bow to let them in on the joke. But Ella felt pretty certain it hadn’t been a joke at all.
It sure as hell hadn’t been funny.
In his years on the Coventry Police Department, Joe Keenan had seen the ugliest facets of human behavior—rape and murder and addiction, suicide pacts, parents prostituting their kids in exchange for drugs—but every once in a while he was reminded of the basic decency of his community. As dawn gave way to morning, the sunlight making the frozen hardpack glisten like diamonds, he paused and leaned against a tree, exhausted and out of breath, and watched people moving through the woods around him. There were police officers, on duty and off, and there were also firefighters and EMTs and city workers and ordinary volunteers who had responded to a summons in the middle of the night and gone without sleep to beat the bushes in search of a little lost boy who’d become an orphan overnight.
None of them wanted to believe that Zachary Stroud had drowned in the river. For hours, as the storm wound down from snow to sleet to rain to a morning of dissipating clouds, they had searched behind and in the branches of every tree, checked every depression in the ground, and followed the riverbank looking for footprints in the wet soil there. Police cars cruised the neighborhoods just inland from the river. Now that dawn had arrived, some officers had begun canvassing door-to-door on the nearest streets.
“Falling down on the job, Detective?” a deep voice said.
Keenan glanced to his right, toward the deep, rushing whisper of the river, and saw Harley Talbot approaching. Officer Talbot must have been off duty because he was out of uniform, clad instead in a blue cable-knit collared sweater, jeans, and boots.
“I know you’re screwing with me, Harley, but today’s not the day,” Detective Keenan said.
“I’ve got you, man,” Harley said. “You’ve been out here all night and we haven’t found a damn thing. Gotta be demoralizing. But don’t lose hope, Detective. Nobody’s giving up yet.”
Detective Keenan nodded. “Why is that, do you think? I mean … if we haven’t found the kid by now…”
He let the words trail off but the question was clear. The search would continue all day long. Dogs had been brought in overnight but with all the new-fallen snow they had not been able to get a scent to follow.
“Not that big a riddle,” Harley said, veiled in the golden early-morning light, almost ghostly. “They don’t want to believe the worst. Holding on to hope when most people would give up … that’s faith, man. Everyone knows how this is gonna end, but they hold on because giving up the search means giving up hope, and nobody’s ready for that.”
Keenan inhaled, cold morning air filling his lungs. His eyes burned with exhaustion and his limbs felt leaden from slogging along a mile or more of wooded riverside, but he could go on. They had to keep looking.
“I’m with you, Harley,” Detective Keenan said. “Though I have to tell you, it takes more than hope to keep going. It takes coffee. If I don’t get a massive caffeine injection I’m not going to be any good to anybody.”
Harley grinned. “Shit, Detective, that’s easy. Head out to the corner of Riverside and Harrison. Got a food truck there. The owner’s giving away free coffee to all the searchers. It’s no Starbucks, but it’ll pick you up.”
Detective Keenan thanked him and headed west. The stretch of woods he had found himself in was maybe four hundred yards from river to road, not far at all, but it took him nearly fifteen minutes of moving through underbrush and around trees to reach the pavement. As he did, his cell phone rang.
The food truck was parked as promised. Lights were on inside the truck, though the sun had come out. Half-a-dozen people were standing or sitting near the big open window on the side of the truck, including two women who sat cross-legged on the snow, too tired to care if the dampness soaked through their clothes.
“Joe Keenan,” he said, phone to his ear.
“It’s Sam.”
“Lieutenant Duquette,” Keenan said. “I hope you’re calling with good news.”
“I’m afraid not,” the lieutenant replied. “We’ve got more searchers coming in, but just no sign of the boy.”
Keenan eyed the food truck longingly, craving the coffee so powerfully that his need for it unnerved him. But this conversation could not be avoided.
“You sound defeated,” Detective Keenan said. “This isn’t over, Lieutenant.”
“We’ve scoured the river’s edge and the woods,” Duquette replied. “If the Stroud boy was out there, we’d have found him. He’s in the river, Joe. You know it and I know it.”
Keenan’s heart turned to ice. He flashed back to Charlie Newell dying in his arms.
“I know nothing of the kind.”
“Detective—”
“You’re not abandoning the search,” Keenan said quickly.
“Don’t be an idiot,” the lieutenant said. “The media would be so far up the mayor’s ass that they’d be camped out in his colon. He’d take it out on the chief and we’d all pay the price. We’ve got to keep it going a couple of days, but I’m telling you we’re not going to find anything. You’re not a rookie, Joe. You know this. Unless the kid was snatched—”
“I’m not saying he was snatched. But if he wandered away, could be somebody picked him up—”
“In the middle of that storm?”
“There were people out in it. The Strouds were out in it.”
“And they’re dead.”
“Not everyone who was driving in the storm finished the night upside down in the river, Lieutenant. All due respect.”
Seconds ticked by. Detective Keenan felt the sun warming him, heard the wet snow slipping off branches and footsteps clomping through the snowy woods. Voices called to one another hopefully, just as Harley Talbot had said. There were so many people in Coventry who were hurting, just like the rest of the country, people who were still weathering years of a struggling economy. But the people out searching didn’t care about their own troubles this morning.
“My search for this kid isn’t for show,” Keenan said quietly, the phone tight against his ear. “We’ve got people searching the banks downstream for miles. I’m not discounting the idea that Zachary Stroud ended up drowning, but I’m not going to just assume it either, not when the only evidence we have indicates that he got out of the car on dry land, or near enough to it.”
He heard the lieutenant sigh on the other end of the line. “We’re both tired, Joe. I’m not asking you to stop searching. But we’ve known each other a long time and I know you take things like this pretty hard. I’m just trying to prepare you, that’s all.”
Keenan froze. Lieutenant Duquette trying to protect the feelings of one of his detectives? Wonders never cease, he thought. But then he realized that the sympathy might not be so benevolent.
“Yeah, I do take it hard if a child dies on our watch,” Keenan said. “I don’t think you can be human and not be affected by something like that. But if you’re questioning my ability to do the job—”
“What are you talking about?”
“I just want to assure you that I’m fine. I’m up to it. All I need is caffeine. We’re going to find this kid, Sam.”
“I hope like hell that we do, Detective. But you can’t spend the next two days out there looking for him. You have other work to do.”
“I’m not chasing down ghost stories,” Keenan snapped, heart racing. “You want to spend time on nutjobs who saw UFOs or fairies, you can send uniforms to take their statements. I’ve got a few open robberies that you and I both know we’re never going to solve with the evidence I’ve got, and that assault case from yesterday, which turned out to be the woman’s ex ransacking her place for drugs. That guy’s already in custody, as of yesterday afternoon. Given that, do you really want to pull me off the search for a kid who escaped the car his parents died in?”
“I’m not pulling you off the search,” Lieutenant Duquette said. “But you need to be practical. I can keep you out of the detectives’ rotation today and maybe tomorrow. But if something else comes up that I need you for, you’re going to have to do your job.”
“That’s exact
ly what I’m doing.”
The lieutenant sighed loudly again.
“Word’s going on to the media about the Strouds. There’ll be pictures of Zachary on TV and online all day. If someone picked him up, even if the kid can’t remember his own name, they’ll know it by dinnertime for sure. But I’ll tell you what’s worrying me.”
“What’s that?”
“If someone picked the kid up, why haven’t they called us already? If he’s injured, why haven’t they shown up at the hospital?”
Detective Keenan had no answer for that. The same questions had been gnawing at his gut all night and had only grown worse as morning arrived.
“If Zachary Stroud’s alive,” the lieutenant went on, “chances are he’s still out there somewhere. I hope you find him, Joe. And I sure as hell hope you find him hiding in some bushes somewhere instead of at the bottom of the river.”
“So do I.”
“Call me the minute you find anything,” Lieutenant Duquette said. “I’m keeping the chief informed.”
The call ended before Keenan could reply. Not that he had anything more to say. Sam Duquette was a good man and a good cop, though he could be one hell of a ballbuster at times. Like everyone, his nerves were frayed. Bad enough this family had to suffer such a crushing tragedy, but if the boy was alive and they couldn’t find him, the Coventry police would look completely inept. Detective Keenan wasn’t much worried about the city’s reputation, but his higher-ups had to be.
Slipping his cell phone into his pocket, he crossed the street and headed for the food truck. His craving for coffee—for anything other than finding Zachary Stroud alive—had vanished, but if he didn’t get some caffeine into his body, his addiction would punish him with a splitting headache, and he couldn’t afford that. He needed to be awake and alert, not just to search for the boy but to figure out what to do if the search became a mystery. He didn’t believe the boy had gone into the river, but if he wasn’t in the woods and hadn’t wandered into one of the surrounding neighborhoods, then where had he gone? People didn’t just vanish.
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