She rolled over—a complicated maneuver that caused the hammock to swing perilously—and in a few minutes she was rocked back to sleep.
She wasn’t sure how much time had passed, but she felt her mother at her side. She squirmed and tried to pull a blanket over her head. She could hear the recycling truck out front so knew it was about seven A.M. The plastic bin of glass bottles and jars shattered against the thick metal bed of the truck. It was an awful, violent sound, like someone smashing the windshield of a car. Susan never got used to it. “Knock,” she said to her mother. “Remember?”
Her mother pressed her hand gently into her upper arm. The hammock rocked. It was something about the touch that made her know something was wrong. It was too firm, too precise. She pulled herself up on her elbows, threading her fingers into the hammock weave for leverage. Bliss’s face was pinched. Someone had died.
Susan’s heart banged in her chest. Who? Susan thought of the city beat reporter she’d gone on a few dates with two months ago. “Derek?” she asked.
Bliss smoothed a piece of Susan’s hair. “It’s Parker, sweetie,” she said. “And Senator Castle. They were in a car. It swerved off the Fremont Bridge this morning.”
Susan clambered out of the hammock and huddled naked on the tatami mat below. “What?”
Bliss sat on her bare heels facing Susan, her face full of sadness. “They’re both dead, sweetie.”
“What?” Susan said again, the word barely more than a whisper.
“Ian called from the paper,” Bliss said softly. “They’re dead.”
Parker. Susan started to fold in on herself. In a flash she was fourteen and in the hospital room with her father, helpless, alone, furious. She pushed the helplessness and loneliness aside and let the fury take her.
“He fucking died?” she said. “The senator fucking died before my story could run? Two months I’ve spent on it.” She could feel her face flush, a prickly sensation rising in her chest. Not Parker, she thought. Please, not Parker. “Two months.”
Bliss just sat on her heels on the tatami mat, waiting.
Susan snorted in a flood of snot. “Parker’s dead?” she asked, her voice tiny.
Her mother nodded.
It didn’t make sense. What was Parker doing in a car with Castle? It was a mistake. She looked up at Bliss.
It wasn’t a mistake.
Her face wrinkled. “Crap.” She squeezed her eyes shut for a minute, trying to absorb the hot tears that threatened to spill, and then stood and began sorting through the cardboard box of clothes that sat in the corner.
“What are you doing?” Bliss asked.
Susan found a long black cotton dress and wiggled into it. “I’m going down there.”
“To the paper?” Bliss asked.
“To the bridge. I’m going to find out what happened.” She dug her phone out of her purse and began to punch in a number.
Bliss stood up, her cotton caftan fluttering in the breeze of the fan. “Who are you calling?”
Susan wiped a tear off her cheek with the back of her wrist and lifted the phone to her ear. “Archie Sheridan,” she said.
She touched her hair, bringing a lock of turquoise to her nose. The smell of popcorn was gone.
CHAPTER
5
Archie stood on the Fremont Bridge. It was the newest of Portland’s ten bridges, a two-layer, four-lane, seventies concrete highway that arced high above the Willamette, connecting the east and west sides of the city. Most Portlanders would admit to a favorite bridge: the Hawthorne, the Steel Bridge, the St. Johns. Few would have cited the Fremont. It was inelegant, functional; the pale blue paint peeling from the gray concrete, like skin sloughing off a sunburn. But Archie had always liked it. If you were driving west, it was the best view of the city, a wide-open vista north, south, and ahead of you, the glittering downtown skyline, the lush west hills, Forest Park, the river snaking lazily north, all of it dusted in a pink glow. Portland could be so beautiful sometimes Archie thought his heart might stop just looking at it.
“Ugly, isn’t it?” a voice said behind him.
Archie turned a quarter step to see Raul Sanchez. He was a compact man with a neat gray beard and strong arms and a face that looked like it had been whittled out of driftwood. He was wearing a dark blue baseball cap that read FBI in big white letters, and a windbreaker that read FBI in small white letters on the chest and in big white letters on the back.
“Excuse me,” said Archie. “Are you with the FBI?”