“Jesus,” he said aloud, and wished for something, anything, to distract him. There was nothing to clean, nothing to organize except the attic, but he wasn’t going back up there, no way. Malcolm closed his fist against a vision of Bratton’s face collapsing when Malcolm made contact. Patrick’s, too, for inviting him in. Everyone knew, he supposed. Like he didn’t have chances? Like he didn’t have very appealing options every weekend night of his life?
He wondered if his mother had gotten anyone to plow her driveway. Last snowfall Mr. Sheridan rode his quad with the plow attachment around the block to clear her driveway after doing his own. Malcolm had just gotten over there, hadn’t started shoveling yet when they heard the quad coming. Seventysomething years old and Mr. Sheridan’s taking corners on two wheels, the plow’s blade scraping the road. His mother suggested it was a little wrong to bypass houses where the people inside also needed help, but Mr. Sheridan said screw that, he wasn’t in charge of the whole neighborhood, and from the way his mother blushed Malcolm knew that she loved the idea of him speeding by Margie Strand’s four-car driveway to get to her. Malcolm was sure she had plenty to eat, at least, but maybe she was scared over there by herself. His sister had called twice in the last few weeks, saying she wanted to talk to him “about Mom,” but he hadn’t gotten a chance to get back to her, and now his phone was dead. Anyway, he knew what she wanted to say: little mistakes—names, places. He’d noticed, but he wasn’t quite sure how much to worry. She seemed confused, sometimes, about basic things—had she eaten at the diner that morning or was that several days ago? But then a moment later she was razor-sharp again. His mother-in-law had called, too, the only time he heard from her since Jess took off, and left a long message about a raccoon in his mother’s basement but then said there was no raccoon, the basement was fine. He deleted it and figured he’d check it out himself next time he went by, but then he’d gotten tied up at the bar every night, and last time he saw his mother had been in his own kitchen on Friday, late afternoon, when she showed up with dinner. She sat and talked with him while he ate. She seemed totally fine to him except for one tiny thing, a funny thing, really, when he thought about it. When Malcolm teased her for making a meat loaf so big, how would he ever get through it, she said it wouldn’t go to waste, it was her son’s favorite.
“Your son?” Malcolm laughed. “Hello? Do you have another?”
Jess used to say that he wasn’t himself until he had people around, until he had other moods and personalities to react to, and he resented when she said that, as if he were incapable of self-reflection, but now he sort of knew what she meant. It wasn’t that he disliked being alone, it was more like he felt muted, not completely awake. He held a bag of ground coffee, considered whether he could rig up a percolator on the stove if he found matches to light the pilot. And then, after standing there another minute, he heard the crunch of snow under tires, as if from his dreams.
A police SUV was rolling slowly up the street, the snow so high it looked like it was floating. Malcolm imagined all his neighbors rushing to their windows, praying that a cop car meant something that would distract them for ten minutes, break up the morning. It kept coming, rolling past the other houses, and stopped at Malcolm’s driveway.
Malcolm tried to see who was driving, but the young officer who eventually got out of the car was one Malcolm didn’t recognize. He began making his way across the snow to Malcolm’s door.
“Malcolm Gephardt?” the officer said when Malcolm answered his knock.
“That’s me.”
Jess was dead. No one could call. His mobile wasn’t listed. They didn’t know how else to reach him.
“You own the Half Moon on Seneca?”
“Yeah?” Malcolm said.
“You were there on Friday night?”
“Yes. What’s going on?” So it was the bar, then, not Jess. The bar had flooded. The bar had filled with carbon monoxide and exploded, taking out half the town.
He gestured for the officer to come inside.
The cop stomped the mat several times. “Cold out, huh?”
Malcolm led him down the hall to the kitchen. He stayed on one side of the island, the officer on the other. He wiped down the counter like he was at the bar, about to serve a drink.
“So? What’s up?”
“Do you know a Charles Waggoner? I understand he was at your bar on Friday night.”
Charles Waggoner. Malcolm felt his body relax. Jess was fine. The bar was fine. It was just some guy named Charles Waggoner who was not fine.
“I know a Tripp Waggoner. Any relation? We had a pretty good crowd Friday night. Why? What happened?”
“Tripp. That’s his nickname. He hasn’t been home since Friday. His wife talked to him around six o’clock, and he was headed to the Half Moon. He told her a friend was dropping him off.”
“Sorry, today is Sunday, right?”
“Sunday, yeah,” the officer said as he reached into his pocket and drew out his phone. “It’s the power being out, the days are blending together. Anyway, this is him. A photo from last summer.”
Malcolm nodded. “He almost got himself into a brawl. He never made it home?”
“No.”
“Sorry to hear that.” He should be careful now, he knew. A pair of cops in uniform had come into the bar one afternoon years ago, asking questions about a guy who’d driven his car into a house. He blew right through a stop sign and into the den of a family of five, all of whom were sleeping. There was an eleven-year-old boy whose headboard was not eighteen inches from the front of the car. The guy had been drinking at the Half Moon for hours that day.
Did Hugh panic? No. He asked after the officers’ families. He changed the subject every which way. He told André to throw two steaks on the grill. When they left, Hugh shrugged and said, “No one died and insurance will pay for the house to get fixed.”
“Can you shed any light?” the officer asked now. “What time he left? Did he mention where he might be going?”
He’d gotten dropped off, Malcolm heard as if on a delay. So there was no fear of Tripp having plowed his car into someone. He tried to remember—there was a bar in the Bronx recently that made the news because a patron had left on foot—on foot—and assaulted someone, maybe an hour later. The bar had still gotten sued. Maybe whenever he left, whichever way he’d gone, some of the young guys in the group from earlier in the night spotted him. Maybe they caught up with him, continued the argument they’d been having at the bar. He tried to remember the guy who punched Tripp, how young he was. Tripp had taken the punch like all drunk people, like he barely noticed, as numb as he was. But he would have felt it Saturday morning.
“Sorry, I don’t know. He never made trouble before, but on Friday he got into it with a group of young guys, so we had him cool out for a bit. I guess that was about nine thirty or so. But then he ended up leaving before we called a cab for him.”
“?‘Cool out’ meaning what?”
“Meaning we took him aside, set him up in the kitchen. I figured he should sober up a little. He was at the bar alone, otherwise I would have told whoever he was with to get him out of there. And we kinda know him, he comes in a lot. But anyway, he just left.”
There were times, after cutting someone off, when somehow that person seemed even more wasted after an hour of doing nothing than they had while drinking. As if whatever last gulps of alcohol took precisely that long to enter the bloodstream and reach his brain. Maybe that’s what had happened to Tripp.
“When you say ‘got into it,’ what do you mean?”
“Ah, you know. Taking digs at each other about dumb things. People around him were getting sick of it.”
“He didn’t mention any plans?”
“Most people were planning on being snowed in, I think,” Malcolm said. “It was a weird night.”
“I mean in general. Life plans. Or any trouble he might have been in.”
“No. Not that I remember.”
“Okay,” the officer said.
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”