by Chris Beakey
Did you go in my room, Sara? What did you find in there?
He tried to think of how he would respond if she had seen what was on his laptop.
You’ll have to make her believe it’s not you.
Could never be you.
The road curved. He tapped the brake, but the truck skidded instead of stopping and the right rear wheel slipped over the edge of the pavement. He slowed to a crawl and continued moving forward but the back of the truck veered further off the roadway, into the shallow ditch.
“Fuck!” he yelled, and hit the gas, expecting the four-wheel drive to pull him out. At first the treads of the back tires seemed to find the ground, but then there was another bump, and a whirring sound as the truck merely vibrated without moving forward.
He looked up the road. Aidan was heading back toward the direction of the house.
He lowered the window, and called out:
“AIDAN O’SHEA GET BACK HERE!”
Aidan reacted by walking faster. Seconds later he was no longer in sight.
He opened the door and started to call out again as the sound of a car coming from the opposite direction filtered through the trees.
He called out again: “GODDAMN IT COME BACK!”
And heard the whir of braked wheels against the ice.
He ran toward the sound but slipped after just a few steps, his legs flying upward as he fell, the back of his skull smacking the pavement as he came down.
For the rest of his life Stephen would see the images in freeze-frame, a slide show of horror to be relived again and again.
His vision was still blurred from the booze; his hands like fists around the top of the wheel as he drove up the mountain, using careful pressure on the gas to get to the top of each rise and carefully pumping the brake just before each steep descent. His concentration was fixed on the icy pavement in front of him when he saw the faint glow of headlights at an odd angle beyond a bend in the road ahead.
The sight held his attention for an instant too long, dulling his reflexes and making him realize too late that he was cresting an incline. The skin on his arms tingled as the front wheels rose from the pavement and his breath caught as he came down hard and fast—too fast to handle the next sharp curve in the road. He tapped the brake but the car went into a sideways slide as he stared in shock at the figure suddenly in front of him.
A boy.
In the road.
Adrenaline shot through his heart as he smashed the brake pedal to the floor and jerked the wheel to the left. As the car went into a spin he remembered something about turning into the skid and turned it back, losing control completely as the wheels locked and skated across the ice. The boy disappeared from the headlights and he felt a flicker of hope that he was out of the way.
But then he heard the awful thump as the car came to a stop.
The headlights were pointing straight into the woods; the Explorer resting across both lanes of the road.
He opened the door, swung his legs outward, felt the restraints of his shoulder belt pulling him back. He groped for the latch, snapped free, and stepped out to a blast of cold wind, the snowflakes tinged with ice and hitting his face with a rapid-fire sting. He took a step and almost lost his footing on the slick pavement; put his hand on top of the open door and turned around.
The road was shrouded in darkness beyond the reach of the headlights but he searched—wide-eyed, yearning—for the boy. Standing up. Alive and whole. He tried to call out but his voice was trapped in his throat. He kept his hand on top of the car for balance as he walked around it, toward the rear where the field of vision was even shorter, the falling snow tinged red from his taillights.
And then he saw him. On the ground. Flung sideways; his back against a tree.
He rushed forward and dropped to his knees; the sight sucking the air from his lungs.
The boy’s eyes were half-open and glazed. Fat drops of blood clung to his nostrils and a line of it dripped in a single trail from the corner of his mouth. Stephen took his wrist and searched for a pulse. His skin was unnaturally cold. He reached up, put his hand over the boy’s heart, and pressed against the red thermal undershirt. The boy was as still and lifeless as a mannequin.
“Oh God,” he whispered, and reached for his wrist again. The movement shifted the boy’s weight against the tree and his head dropped limply forward.
Stephen gasped as the horror hit him full-force.
His neck is broken.
He’s dead.
He staggered backwards, leaned against the car and moved around to the open door; sat back down behind the wheel as a wave of dizziness swept through him.
You killed him.
He lowered his head, covered his eyes with his palms. Snippets of the night came back to him. The drive home from work in the snow. Kenneth crying in his arms. Sara’s voice on the phone, telling him she was in trouble.
Call 911. Tell them what happened. An accident.
But then his mind was suddenly, terribly clear.
You’re drunk.
Driving.
Drunk.
The night was strangely silent, as if the air all around him had been shocked and stilled. He looked down at the phone, his heart pounding as he stared at the glowing screen.
Kieran opened his eyes to the sight of snow falling like a million stars from the night sky. He was sprawled out with his back against the frozen ground. He heard a rhythmic swishswash sound and turned his head toward it; saw his pick-up truck back-ended into the ditch, the front wheels angled on the pavement; the wipers still moving back and forth across the windshield.
He arched his back, slowly sat up—
And remembered. Aidan in the woods. Aidan on the roadway. The whirring of brakes on the ice.
Still out there out in the snow the cold.
Nurlene was back, a disembodied voice that came from all directions at once.
Racing car in the road racing too fast on Rolling Road.
He sat up; winced at the sharp pain at the back of his skull. It felt as if his brain had been knocked loose as he rose to his knees and grabbed the driver’s side door and himself up to a standing position.
Snow cold reckless car.
“Stop.” He shook his head and breathed in and out, pushing the voice away, and gazed dazedly in the direction he would have driven if he hadn’t gotten stuck. He remembered seeing Aidan behind him. Remembered stopping the truck, backing up. Watching as Aidan trudged down the road, back in the direction of the house.
His whole body ached as he started walking, his legs heavy and still uncoordinated after the fall, realizing after a few yards that he’d left the flashlight in the truck.
Just keep going, he thought.
Find him—
He began moving more quickly as his balance leveled. And then he heard, in the distance, the faint rumble of an engine starting. He began walking faster, his feet and legs still unsteady on the icy surface as he rounded the bend.
The car was no more than a hundred yards ahead—a silver SUV. It sat at an angle across the road, as if it had spun out of control.
Even from the distance he recognized the man behind the wheel, from photos he had seen online.
Sara’s father.
Stephen Porter.
He instinctively ducked, moved quickly off to the side of the road; then watched as the SUV backed up, straightened out, and drove away.
Caruso poured the rest of the expensive scotch down the drain as he informed dispatch that he was heading out to check on the girl and the vehicle stranded at 4334 Rolling Road. Kieran O’Shea’s address was embedded in his memory, and the thought of Sara Porter being there with him filled him with dread.
He shivered as he stood next to the back door and put his ski vest, coat, and gloves back on. His service weapon was where he
left it, in the primitive pine bureau that had stood in the cabin for more than a hundred years. He slipped it back into the shoulder holster underneath his coat, and stepped back outside.
He had to brush another half inch of snow off the truck’s windshield before he could pull out of the driveway and onto the road that would take him to Kieran O’Shea’s house. It had been years since he had been in a church but he muttered a prayer as he got behind the wheel; a plea that Sara would be found safe upon his arrival, and that he would not be complicit in any harm that might have come to her.
Sara was looking through the front windows of Kieran’s house when her father pulled up in front. Then she was outside and trudging as fast as possible through the snow, desperate to keep him from coming to the door.
She gave him a short wave and rushed around to the passenger side of the car and got in before he could turn off the ignition.
“Oh my God, it’s freezing!” She shivered. “I can’t wait to get home.”
She pulled down her shoulder belt and buckled it before looking at him. And knew then that something was wrong.
“Sara…”
His face was ashen. His eyes were glassy and his mouth was moving as if he was trying to speak but couldn’t form the words.
She asked him if he was all right. He shook his head. She saw the rise and fall of his chest as he sucked in deep breaths.
And then suddenly he found his voice. “What are you doing out here?”
She pulled her collar up higher around her neck, and held it tightly with her hand as she told him the story she had worked out during the wait. An argument with Madison that made her change her mind about staying overnight. A call on her cell phone from the autistic boy she had been tutoring at school. A spur-of-the-moment decision to drive up to the boy’s house and help him with a homework assignment.
He stared at her as she spoke, but his eyes were unfocused and she wasn’t sure he was even listening. His breath smelled funny, as if he’d been drinking.
He looked at Kieran’s house. “This is where you called me from.”
“Yeah, but the storm messed up the phone lines. That’s why you couldn’t hear me.”
He looked at her again. “I tried to call you on your cell. You didn’t answer.”
Something else to be in trouble for. She touched her collar again, self-consciously, and felt a nervous twitch in her cheek. “I might have lost it. It wasn’t in my purse when I looked for it. But actually it’s possible that Aidan has it.”
“Aidan.”
“Aidan—the boy I tutor. The autistic one. You’re never going to believe this but he’s actually outside somewhere, running around in the snow. Probably doesn’t even have a coat.”
Her father’s mouth dropped open. His eyes were bulging and bloodshot. He looked like he was in shock.
“Dad, what’s wrong?”
He was quivering now, and she heard him groan as a gust of wind rocked the car.
Kieran ran toward the spot where he’d seen Stephen Porter’s SUV. His feet and hands were numb and he had to move carefully to keep from falling back down as he called out to Aidan again.
And then he saw him; at the side of the road. Still and lifeless.
He felt the night collapsing around him as he moved forward and sank to his knees and gently placed his hands on Aidan’s face. Aidan’s skin was cold, his eyes half- open. Kieran knelt closer, used one hand to feel for a heartbeat underneath the red thermal shirt and the other to gently open his brother’s mouth, which he covered with his own, blowing in, willing life to return to Aidan’s broken body as Detective John Caruso’s white Blazer rounded the bend.
Stephen continued down Rolling Road, driving farther and farther away from the scene of the accident, until he came to another intersection, this one marked with a sign—frederick—and an arrow indicating that a right turn would take him back down the mountain.
He felt Sara watching him as he came to a stop; saw the nightmare scene playing out in his mind, the handcuffs closing in on his wrists, bars and a cell, a courtroom and a judge—
“Daddy?”
He blinked, saw the boy in the road, his arms coming up in front of his face.
Your friend Aidan is dead. I killed him. And then I left him there—but only because my phone didn’t work.
But now the phone did work. He had gotten a clear signal the moment he pulled up in front of the house Sara had called him from. But even then he had waited, thinking of how it would play out in the morning, knowing from his former life as a reporter how the media would swarm around the story.
“A local man has been arrested in connection with the death of a teenager. Authorities say Stephen Porter was driving while intoxicated when he lost control of his car and struck the boy—”
“We have to go back,” he said.
Sara frowned, and visibly shivered despite the high heat in the car. “Back where?”
He stopped himself from answering, conscious of saying too much as he backed up and executed a three-point turn on the narrow road, then drove another two minutes before coming to the top of another rise, and saw the accident scene in the distance. He abruptly stopped, leaned forward and squinted as he gazed through the rapidly falling snow. There was another SUV stopped in the middle of the road, its hazard lights flashing.
Sara leaned forward in an effort to get a better look. “What’s going on down there?”
“I don’t know,” he said too quickly, realizing that whoever had arrived at the accident scene must have already called 911. And then he remembered the sound of the man’s voice he had heard just an instant before he hit the boy; the vague glow of light he had seen in the woods.
“Dad, can we please just go home now?”
From a distance, just barely audible underneath the moaning wind, he imagined that he heard the sound of a siren, somewhere down below them on the mountain, approaching slowly, with no need to rush.
Kieran was sitting with his back against a tree, looking toward Aidan’s body in the snow. Caruso had pulled him away from his brother as soon as he had driven up. He had then checked Aidan’s pulse, then put his palm against Aidan’s chest, then shaken his head, a confirmation that Aidan was gone.
And now Caruso was standing a few feet away, talking on his phone. The snow was falling heavier and faster—in thick, white flakes that swirled around them in the frigid wind. Kieran’s face was numbed by the cold but the back of his head was wet, bloodied by the fall on the ice. He imagined that a vessel had ruptured underneath his skull; imagined the blood clotting, halting the flow of life to his own brain. He gazed at Aidan’s profile—the pallid skin, the soft blond hair tousled by the wind—and began to weep, his mind fixated on the image of Stephen Porter getting back into his car, and driving away.
Cold and dead.
Ran him over.
He shivered, conscious of another presence close by, and watched as it took shape just beyond the illumination of Caruso’s headlights.
It was Nurlene, standing just behind Aidan’s body, looking just as she had hours before, the blood rolling down from the top of her head.
With me now—
“Kieran, look at me.”
Suddenly Caruso was in front of him, squatting down, face to face.
“Tell me what you’re doing out here.”
Caruso’s voice was gentle, but his eyes were hard.
“Tell me what you saw tonight.”
Stephen made it all the way home without saying another word. His whole body was rigid with tension as he navigated through the storm, and the need to concentrate kept both he and Sara from having to talk any more about what had happened.
As expected, it took two attempts with the remote to get the garage door open. When it rose high enough he pulled halfway in and stopped.
“Go ahead and get out,”
he said.
Sara frowned. “Aren’t you going to pull all the way in?”
“Please Sara.” His voice was tight. He had to be sure she went straight into the house without noticing the damage to the car. “Just go inside, okay?”
She gave him a sullen look and stepped out.
He waited until the door to the family room was completely shut before driving all the way in to the garage. The remote that controlled the door was clipped to the visor. He pressed it before getting out, and when the door grudgingly squealed closed he walked around to look at the damage.
The dent was located on the rear passenger side. It was about six inches wide and extended from the edge of the rear bumper. The location of the damage showed that he had almost succeeded in avoiding the boy—that with a few more inches…
But he had hit him, probably somewhere near the waist, Stephen thought, given the way he had been flung backward against the tree.
He stooped down, looked for blood near the dent, and saw none. The taillight cover alongside the dent had been fractured. Most of the glass stayed in the frame but a triangular piece had fallen out.
It’s probably still up there, right where you hit him, he thought.
Proof it was your car.
He knew there would be other signs of the accident—skid marks on the icy roadway, tracks that would be matched to the Explorer’s tires, his footprints.
But then he thought about the snow. It had been falling heavily when he had hit the boy, and it was still coming down fast and thick. He wondered: How much snow does it take to cover tire tracks? How long would it take investigators to get up on that mountain? Was it possible that the storm would conceal all of the evidence?
God, what are you doing? A feeling of shame swept through him. Through the eyes of a cop or any everyday citizen he was nothing more than a criminal. A drunk driver who killed a teenage boy and drove away.