Snowblind
Page 22
She drove north, discovering each mile as if she had never traveled these roads before. There were new buildings visible from the highway and a new overpass on Route 93, but as she wended her way toward her childhood home she found herself igniting old memories that had lain dormant for years. Miri did not feel any desire to come back to live in New England, but still she realized that she had missed it, that she had a bittersweet love for the place that she had denied for a very long time. The feeling had a surreal quality that she had never before experienced.
She reached the exit for downtown Coventry just before six o’clock. In a parking lot that had once held a Toyota dealership, three snowplows and a sander idled in the darkness, drivers sitting in shadows in the cabs, smoking cigarettes and talking through their open windows. Miri imagined them as early settlers, circling the wagons to prepare for an attack. The real snow wouldn’t start for five or six hours, but the forecast had apparently forced the city to get its act together for once. They were ready.
Hipster music played on the car radio—she’d tuned it to her old favorite, The River, which was headquartered right here in Coventry. Gusts of wind buffeted the little Ford as she drove along Washington Street, looking at the warm lights burning in the windows of The Tap and Keon’s and the other restaurants and storefronts that were part of the fabric of her memories of home.
Home, she thought. Where are you going, Miri?
The answer was not home. She knew she had to see her mother at some point, and she found that she wanted to see Jake. Needed to, urged on by a fondness in her heart. It had been so long since she had allowed herself to miss him, and now that she had let those feelings in, the strength of them surprised her.
Yet she found herself driving not to her mother’s apartment or to Jake’s house but pulling into a curbside parking space across the street from The Vault. Killing the engine—the sudden silence making her aware of the music she had barely been listening to on the radio—she sat for several seconds and just looked at the windows. Her mother had taken her to dinner at The Vault at least twice a month during high school, usually dragging Jake or another of her friends along. With strangers now living in her childhood home and the corridors of Coventry High no longer her territory, this felt like the closest she could find to a real homecoming.
Miri locked up the car, crossed the street, and pulled open the door of The Vault. From the bone-deep chill of winter, she stepped into the warmth of the restaurant’s foyer and inhaled the delicious aromas that wafted from the kitchen. A blaze roared in the large fireplace and she felt the heat reach her core instantly. A twinge of regret touched her heart, not that she wanted to live here again but that the past was past, never to be lived again. She’d been so happy to put Coventry behind her forever, but now that she’d returned she realized that there had been much to love about this place.
“Can I help you?” a pretty brunette hostess asked. She was young, with skin like caramel, and Miri wondered if she went to Coventry High or had recently graduated. For a moment she was tempted to ask about the teachers she remembered fondly, but resisted the urge.
“Table for one,” Miri said. Once she would have been embarrassed to eat in a restaurant by herself. As an adult, she had come to enjoy her own company.
Ensconced in a small, intimate booth by the front windows, she took off her knit cap and shook out her curly hair. She glanced around in search of Ella, the always friendly and energetic owner, or her husband, TJ, whose rich, sexy singing voice was half the reason The Vault had maintained such a cherished place in Miri’s memory. Neither of them seemed to be around but she found it didn’t disappoint her very much. She was not sure how long she would be back in Coventry, but certainly long enough to pay The Vault another visit.
A frown creased her forehead as she wondered again how long she would be here.
Never mind how long, she thought. The big question is: why? What the hell am I doing here?
The phone call from her father seemed so unreal to her now. So much like a dream. Miri knew it had not been either dream or imagination. Her presence here—her plane flight and rental car and the lack of any tangible plan as to what she would do upon her arrival—was evidence enough of that. But what was she supposed to do now that she was here?
For the moment she had no answer, other than to see her mother and Jake.
There were other people she knew in Coventry, other old friends, and there were a small handful that she would not mind seeing during her visit. Tonya Michelli. Adam Chang. But such wistful thoughts—unusual for her—vanished in the shadow of the haunting call that had brought her home.
The waiter came, a short Latino guy with incredible eyes and obvious muscles, a year or two older than she was, at a guess.
“Can I get you something to drink while you’re looking at the menu?” he asked.
“I haven’t been here in forever, but do you still do that little pot-pie dish?”
He smiled. “We do. It’s my favorite.”
Miri liked his smile very much. “Then I don’t need to open the menu,” she said. “I’ll have that, with a glass of water now and a coffee after.”
“A woman who knows what she wants,” the waiter observed.
“For better or worse,” Miri agreed.
The waiter gave her a curious look before he took her menu and went off to the kitchen. Though it was still relatively early in the dinner hour, there were a good number of people in the restaurant already, many of them at the bar, and she overheard talk of the impending storm along with other chatter and the clinking of glasses. Customers had apparently come in for a hot meal before the storm crashed in. She overheard several people at a nearby table talking about the chaos at the supermarket earlier in the day as people stocked up on groceries and batteries for flashlights and even candles.
A ripple of nausea went through her. Somehow Miri had managed to keep her feelings about the impending blizzard at a distance, but now with these hushed conversations all around her and the strange, breathless tension she felt among the diners in The Vault, dark memories returned, along with a terrible fear that she had tamped down inside her for a dozen years.
For the first time she worried about where she would spend the night. She had intended to get a room at the old Sheraton on the north end of town, not far from the New Hampshire border. But now the idea of being alone troubled her.
A sudden urgency filled her and she wanted the waiter to hurry. Perhaps it had been a bad idea for her to stop for a sit-down meal. She wondered if Jake would let her sleep the night on his sofa.
Of course he will, you moron, she thought. He might hate you for leaving, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t still love you.
Some friendships were forever, and she and Jake Schapiro were connected by more than just love or friendship. They had shared the most terrifying and most painful night of their lives together. That linked them like nothing else could.
Miri glanced out the window at a passing car, its headlights and the streetlamps illuminating the flurries that danced in the air all along Washington Street.
A man stood on the opposite sidewalk, almost lost in the yellow glow of a streetlamp above him, snow flurries swirling around him. Miri couldn’t breathe. Her heart seized in her chest. The snowflakes moved around him … and through him, as if he weren’t there at all.
Icy fingers spider-walked along her spine.
“Daddy?” she whispered.
The figure stepped off the curb and began to cross the street toward the front of the restaurant and her heart leaped with fear and hope in equal measure. The snowflakes swirled through him, and though he was substantial and three-dimensional and as real as the cold glass against which she now placed her fingertips, she could see through him, his body translucent and turning to shadow as he stepped out of the dome of light cast by the streetlamp above.
The ghost gazed at her, a sad smile touching his darkened features as he reached the middle of the street.
Miri looked up and saw that the flurry had ended. The sky still hung heavy with snow, but for the moment it had ceased to fall. Wind eddied a few flakes along the pavement, but the real storm had yet to begin.
Of her father’s ghost, there was no sign.
Doug watched Angela glide across the ice on rented skates and couldn’t help smiling. She wore a white knit hat pulled down far enough to cover her ears and a thick blue cotton scarf that hid her smile, but somehow he found her more beautiful than ever. He still remembered the irritable, dissatisfied, volatile woman she’d been when they had first dated, but over the past couple of days those memories had been quickly fading. As she did an ice pirouette, her hazel eyes lit up with joy, and he knew that he would do whatever he had to do in order to see that joy again and again. Tomorrow’s burglaries would go a long way toward making that happen. He wasn’t stupid enough to give her any of the jewelry they planned to steal, but something bought with the proceeds … that would make her eyes sparkle.
The ice skating at the rink in Veterans Memorial Park—the stretch of green between City Hall and the town library—had been a Coventry winter tradition for more than fifty years. Doug knew how to skate well enough, but growing up he had never understood the point of doing it without a hockey stick in his hands and a goal to shoot pucks at. Then he’d met Cherie, and that had changed. The outdoor rink, little more than a wooden frame full of frozen water, had been her favorite place in the world. Her mother had brought her there as a little girl and she had always said that it brought her back to those days, that the Christmas lights strung in the bare branches of the trees all over the park and her hair flying as she skated made her feel ten years old again.
Angela turned to him, skating backward and beckoning him to follow, which he did in the long, powerful strides that his body still remembered from high school hockey. He had his own nostalgia for the rink, for the cold air and the couples skating hand in hand, some of them old enough to have skated there the first year it opened. But his nostalgia was bittersweet.
Making the turn at the far end of the rink, Angela swept into another pirouette, this one less graceful. She spun around once and then hit a rough patch of ice and went down on her behind, sliding several feet before she burst out laughing, her scarf sliding down to reveal the rest of her face.
Doug skated to a hard stop, spraying ice at her.
“Hey!” Angela cried, pouting. “That’s not very nice.”
“I said I could skate,” Doug said, reaching out to give her a hand up. “I never said I was graceful.”
She took his hand and he hauled her up onto her skates, then pulled her against him for a kiss. Angela smiled against his lips, then responded more fully, grabbing the back of his head to deepen the kiss. His body reacted instantly and he pressed himself against her, nearly unbalancing them both, so that they had to retreat to arm’s length to keep from falling.
Grinning, Doug skated a few feet away from her. A pair of high-schoolers went by, shaky on their skates, arms out as if bracing for a tumble.
“You never told me you could skate so well,” he said.
Angela glided after him. “You mean fall on my ass? Yeah, that was lovely.”
“You know what I mean. Were you into figure skating as a kid? I didn’t know you and Cherie had that in common.”
They’d been close friends. Doug figured they must have bonded over a shared love of skating, but he didn’t remember either Cherie or Angela ever bringing it up.
“I’ve always loved to skate,” Angela said, turning around to skate backward and yet still catching up to him and smiling as she passed him by.
“Did you two ever go together?”
“All the time,” Angela said quickly, but she glanced abruptly away and he had the strangest sense that she was lying to him.
“That’s weird.”
She cocked an eyebrow. “What is?”
“I took her skating all the time during the winters we were together. How come you never came along?”
With a sad smile, she reached out and took his hand as they continued to skate face-to-face.
“I did, baby. Trust me. I was with you every time.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” he asked.
But he had barely made it halfway through the question before she pulled away and turned from him, skating off into the crowd and wiping her eyes. Just before she’d spun away, Doug thought she had begun to cry.
What are you hiding? he thought.
Through a gap in the crowd circling the rink, he saw her skating alone in the center of the ice. She had taken off her hat and her hair flew behind her as she glided along, enjoying the sensation, as if only here on the ice could she find peace.
Doug waited for a gap in the line of skaters passing him by and then went to her. When Angela turned to him, her tears were gone but her eyes held a haunted sorrow that he had never seen in them before.
“What is it?” he asked.
She took his hand. “Just skate with me, baby. I want to remember this, no matter what happens.”
Doug touched her face, tucked her hair behind her ear. Was she worried about what might happen to him tomorrow night? About the burglaries?
“What’s going to happen?” he asked.
“Silly man,” Angela said, tugging him along beside her, the air full of chatter and laughter and distant music. “It’s going to snow.”
Detective Keenan walked into The Tap, relishing the heat blasting from the vent above the restaurant’s foyer. He shivered a little, but from the warmth instead of the cold, and some of the stress eased from him. A glance at the clock above the bar—an antique Elvis Presley whose hips swung from side to side to tick the seconds away—showed that eight P.M. had come and gone, which meant that he was officially off duty.
The Tap was a combination restaurant and brewhouse, complete with vats of beer in the cellar. The bar and dining room were separated by a wall whose lower half was wood and whose upper half was frosted glass. As he walked to the bar he peeked through the opening between the two rooms and saw that only a few tables were occupied, which explained the bored look on the face of the tall, soccer-mom-looking woman by the hostess stand. She started to reach for a menu as he approached, but he waved her away and pointed to the bar and she went back to her desultory slouch.
Several people recognized and greeted him as he moved through the bar, all cops. The Tap had been unofficially adopted by the Coventry PD in the years since their old haunt, the Lasting Room, had closed. Keenan gave halfhearted hellos and clapped more than one officer on the shoulder as he made his way to an empty stool, but he did not linger or stop to chat. He had come here because it was familiar and comfortable and because he liked the Coventry Winter Ale they brewed, not to look into the eyes of his fellow police and see the regret and apology they felt over failing to find Zachary Stroud.
As he slid onto a stool, the aging blond bartender noticed him and came down the bar.
“Evening, Joe,” she said, her voice a cigarette rasp.
“Morgan,” Detective Keenan said. “Glad to find an empty seat.”
“Aw, we’re just a little light tonight. Hell, it’s a Tuesday,” Brenda said, the makeup crinkling on her face, worn by nicotine and years of tanning. “It’s the restaurant that’s dead.”
“I’m just teasing,” Keenan said. “I’m actually surprised you’ve got a crowd at all. It’s gone very quiet out there tonight.”
Brenda wiped down the counter like some bartender in an old Western.
“You know what it’s like before a snowstorm. Coventry always holds its breath,” she said, then met his gaze. “What can I get you? Winter Ale?”
“Yeah, yeah, ever since you made detective,” Brenda teased, grabbing a glass and going to the tap to draw his beer. “But you’ve been drinking the same thing every winter for, like, ten friggin’ years.”
She poured a perfect glass—just a skim of foam on top—put out a coaster, and set his beer on top of it.
“If my wife ever throws me out, I’m going to propose to you,” Keenan said. “Any woman with that kind of memory should be cherished.”
“Yeah, right. Tell that to my asshole ex-husband.”
Keenan took a swig of his beer and was about to reply when someone tapped his shoulder. He turned to see Marco Torres standing behind him, looking pissed off. After the week he’d been having, Keenan had run out of patience.
“What the hell’s your problem?”
Torres shuddered as if he might cry and stepped in close.
“Personal space, asshole,” Keenan said, but when he reached up to push Torres away, the younger man grabbed his wrist and twisted his arm aside.
“He’s still out there, you son of a bitch,” Torres whispered. “You’re here having a beer and another kid is going to die on your watch.”
“Fuck off!” Keenan shouted, shaking loose and shoving Torres backward, so that he crashed into the wall, his head cracking a panel of frosted glass.