“She gave it to you?” Rain reached for the nearly empty can.
“Yeah.” Duane didn’t bother taking it back but retrieved another from the refrigerator. Their mother the detective would know exactly how many were gone, but at the moment that was the least of Rain’s concerns.
“Why? Why would she give it to you?”
He shrugged. “What does it matter now?”
“But why?” she persisted.
“Oh, Rainy.” He closed his eyes and held the cold can against his forehead. “It wasn’t anything. Just forget it. Let it go.”
“Bullshit, Duane. Lucy loved that thing. Why would she give it to you?”
“It was kind of a secret, okay?”
“A secret? You and Lucy had a secret?” A sting of betrayal, the heat of jealousy caught her ribs. Everybody has secrets.
He started pacing from the table to the far counter, his face scrunched with concentration. “So do you really think those two cops will be back?”
A secret with Lucy? She fought to keep tears from welling. “Of course they’ll be back.”
“I don’t know. Maybe they won’t. I told them I didn’t have the Yoda. That’s all they wanted to know.”
“Are you completely stupid, asshole? They could tell you were lying. You’re such a shitty liar a blind man living on Neptune could tell.”
“What? Are you mad at me now?”
“Dogs get mad, stupid. People get angry,” she said in a singsong voice.
“So are you angry with me?”
“I wouldn’t waste my energy. You know what? I hope they do come back. I hope they come back and drag you down to the station in front of the entire town and then lock you up.”
“Lock me up? Jesus, Rainy. Why would they lock me up?”
“You tell me. You tell me why they would lock you up, Mr. Big Shot Secret Keeper.”
He stared at her with eyes grown glassy from the two beers. “Jesus, Rainy, what are you thinking?”
“I’m not thinking anything. Should I be?”
“I didn’t do anything to Lucy, if that’s what you’re thinking,” he said. “I would never do anything to hurt Lucy.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
A noise from outside the window woke me.
I was in an unfamiliar bed, and it was a moment before I remembered. Maine. Sophie. I turned and saw her still figure on the far side of the bed. I started to reach across the distance, but before I touched her I stayed my hand, my fingers that still held her scent. Let her sleep, I thought. Carefully, I slid out of the bed and descended the stairs. A nearly full moon lit the main room. I threw open a window, inhaled the damp air. I found the yellow plastic-cased flashlight on the table by the door and stepped onto the porch and went down to the dock, guided by the beam of its light and the moon. Sturgeon moon. The name came to me from memory’s recesses. Once I had known the name of each month’s full moon. Names, I corrected myself, for I knew each moon had many names, but I could only remember a single one of those for August. The stillness of night was broken by voices, drunken, I realized after a moment, and arguing, the same ones we had heard the previous afternoon. Suddenly a memory from childhood surfaced, the summer my parents had rented a lakeside cabin in New Hampshire for a week, unusual in itself because they seldom went away. Long before the word staycation had been coined, my father had been a proponent. “Why leave home when we have everything we want or need right here?” And yet, this one summer—I had been what? Twelve?—we had taken a cabin. The first night there we had eaten out, another rarity in my family. At the next table sat a family, mother, father, and daughter. The daughter was about my age, but it was the mother who fascinated me. She was tanned and dressed in a sundress with straps as thin as string, and she had struck me as exotic as a movie star. The man initiated a conversation with my father. They were from Ohio, a fact that had surprised me. Such an ordinary setting for the woman. This was their first time east, the man confided. Usually they took a place on Lake Michigan. Not long after we had ordered, the waitress arrived at our table with a bottle of wine. Compliments of that gentleman, she told my father. For a moment, I thought my father would refuse—my parents were not wine drinkers—but then my mother placed her hand on his sleeve and the moment passed. Much later, I woke to the sound of voices cutting through the night just as the ones did there in Maine. The father, clearly drunk, the woman too. And someone crying. The girl, I’d known. And as quickly as that, the scene in the restaurant seemed false. The memory of the dinner tainted. I’d vowed that when I grew up and had a daughter, I would never fight in front of her. Standing on the dock, I allowed myself that brief consolation. Lucy had never heard her mother and me argue.
After a while I returned to the house and replaced the flashlight where I’d found it. When I switched on the lamp on the table Sophie used as a writing desk, I saw the stack of manuscript pages. I reached for them.
The introduction was personal. I hadn’t expected that and wasn’t prepared for it. Sophie wrote of Lucy’s murder, even writing of the day we had both stood and identified her bloodied book bag and ruined cell phone, the morning we had gone to pick out the coffin that would hold her ruined body. I forced myself to continue, reliving the horror, the shock, fighting a sense of violation. The book would be, she wrote, both our personal story and those of other parents of lost children, and an exploration of how our society had become one in which thousands of children disappeared each year or were murdered without an answering and sustained outrage. The first chapter related the story of a couple from Tennessee whose nine-year-old son had been kidnapped and his body found a week later, still dressed in his Little League uniform. The killer was never found. A tonsure-like circle at the top of my skull tingled, grew warm. I swallowed, continued to read the stories. The parents from San Diego. Their daughter had been eighteen when she disappeared, three years older than Lucy, and they continued to hold on to the hope that someday she would find her way home. The circle on my skull grew hotter, tighter. A phrase came unbidden to mind. I blew my top. The single mother from Key West whose son was fourteen when he was shot by another boy. Fourteen. Almost Lucy’s age. The couple from Utah. Their child was two. Two. Rage spread through my chest like a stain. The buzzing in my head grew to a throb. Unable to endure any more, I dropped the pages and let my head fall into my hands.
“Will?” Sophie’s hand was on my shoulder. “Are you all right?”