I sighed. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that: the fact that people I’d never met, and probably never would, still somehow knew that I was Frank Weary’s kid. He used to run into people he knew everywhere, in the city and out, once even on a family vacation to Niagara Falls. I pulled the blankets over me. “It was horrible,” I said, as the image of the tarp slipped back in front of my eyes. “I thought I’ve seen my share of ugly already, but something like that? I don’t know how you do it. I really don’t.”
“Listen,” Tom said. “Do you want to grab a drink? An actual drink, that’s not code for—you know.”
I rolled over and buried my face in the pillow. Vaguely disappointed that he wasn’t calling for the you know part, but I didn’t want to dwell on it. “Right,” I said, “since you’re basically engaged now.”
“You’re never going to make anything easy, are you.”
I smiled into the pillowcase. “No,” I said. But the thought of not drinking alone was very appealing. “I will take you up on that offer though. I keep seeing ghosts.”
He was quiet for a second. “Yeah,” he said, like he knew his share about seeing ghosts, “it happens.”
*
We met at the Olde Towne Tavern on Oak Street and I ordered shot after shot of Crown Royal while Tom nursed a single beer. He shrugged when I called him out on it. “I can’t keep up with you, so there’s no sense in trying. Plus, I have to drive home.”
I, on the other hand, had walked over. The bar was probably chosen strategically by Tom for this reason, since he lived on the other side of the city. It was a good, old-school bar, exposed brick and pressed-tin ceiling. And it was full of people. That usually wasn’t my favorite thing about a bar, but it was tonight.
“Frank and I used to drink at Bob’s Bar. Do you know it?” he said after a minute.
“The Cultural Hub of the Midwest,” I said, reciting the tagline of the place, a strange little hole in the wall near where my parents lived. I wondered if the proximity to Frank’s house was why they drank there. Walking distance if necessary. The Weary family, in constant need of handling. “Did you stick to beer with him too?”
“That depends on why we were drinking,” he said, “and what we saw that day.”
I buried my head in my arms on the bar top. “Does it ever get any easier?”
“Short answer?”
I nodded.
“No.”
“What’s the long answer?” I said, sitting up. The bartender had refilled my glass and I downed the shot, aware that I probably should slow down. It wasn’t a great sign if Tom couldn’t keep up with me, considering that he drank with my father for years and years.
He thought about that for a second. “Long answer. Fuck no.”
I laughed, not because it was funny, but because.
“After a while you get better at isolating it and shoving it into a compartment so it doesn’t mess with you, after. But it never really gets easier, seeing what people do to each other.” He took a long swallow from his glass. Then he looked at me. “Most of the time, I try to look at a scene like it’s a puzzle, a series of objects to process. But sometimes you can’t. Every cop has a case or two that just got in and won’t get out and there’s nothing you can do. That’s when you drink.”
I wondered what my father would have been like if he hadn’t been a cop. If he’d been an electrician or a mechanic or any other profession that didn’t involve seeing things you had to drink to forget. “What’s the one you can’t forget? Sorry—you don’t have to answer that,” I added quickly, suddenly afraid that he was going to say my father’s death was the case that stuck with him. That was the last thing I wanted to think about today.
“It’s okay,” he said. He leaned on the bar so that our elbows were touching. He took a minute before continuing. “Jada Pierce. She was two. Her piece of shit father took her with him to his buddy’s meth lab. She somehow got her hands on a cup of sulfuric acid—drain cleaner. It was just sitting around while they cooked up. She drank it. The acid ate through her throat, through her stomach. She might have lived if they’d gotten her medical treatment, but they didn’t. Instead they panicked and put her body in a Coleman cooler and they dumped it in the Olentangy River.”
I said nothing.
“About a dozen witnesses saw them, so it wasn’t hard to put them away. But I couldn’t stop seeing this kid, jammed into the cooler, acid burns around her mouth and a hole in her throat—for weeks, it fucked with me. I’m talking majorly here—I couldn’t sleep, I was a mess. I didn’t understand why everyone who’d been on the scene wasn’t a complete wreck over it and I resented it. I thought I could never be the kind of person who saw that kid and felt nothing. Frank said, and I’ll never forget this, he told me, No one feels nothing. Your job as a cop is not to feel nothing. It’s to neutralize what you see, so no one else has to see it, and no one else has to feel it.” Tom paused, blinking up at the tin ceiling. “I don’t know if that makes any sense to you,” he added. “But it helped me. A lot.”
I wasn’t a cop. And what I’d seen wasn’t on the same level as what Tom had seen—what he had probably seen many, many times. But it did make sense. “So it’s okay to feel like shit, because there’s a certain amount of shit that needs to be felt in this world, and some people have signed up to feel more of it than others,” I said.
“Exactly.”
I sighed and shoved my whiskey glass away. “I’m the world’s worst detective. I set out to prove this woman was still alive, and instead I found her body. I was supposed to be helping my client’s brother get out of jail, but instead I think I might have implicated him in another crime. I want to be wrong, but I don’t know. Not now.”
“No you don’t,” Tom said. “Want to be wrong, that is. You wish the world was different. That’s something else. And the world’s worst detective wouldn’t have found out anything about anything, so I’m afraid you don’t get to claim that title.”
I stared up at our reflection in the half-moon-shaped mirror behind the beer taps. I wanted to ask how his symphony date with Pam had gone but I didn’t want to know. Based on the fact that we were in this bar and not in my bed, I probably already had the answer anyway. Months of me telling Tom that it was just sex somehow left me disappointed when he finally took my word for it. I didn’t even understand myself. It was no wonder I didn’t understand my case. But Tom was a good guy to have on my side either way. “Look at us,” I said, but then I left it at that.
EIGHTEEN
The phone woke me out of a dream again, but this time the room was still dark and the house was quiet and I hadn’t been asleep long enough to be hungover. The glowing red numerals of my clock told me it was seven forty. I sat up and grabbed for the phone and my stomach dropped: Danielle Stockton. I thought about rejecting the call but I didn’t, figuring I at least owed her that much.
But she didn’t even let me say hello. “They found another body,” she said breathlessly.
I bit my lip. She sounded way too excited about that. “I know,” I said, “I tried to call you yesterday—”
“What if you were right, Roxane? About Mallory, that whoever killed her also killed Sarah’s parents, and maybe now this other girl, like a pattern?”
I turned the light on, something about the darkness keeping my thoughts from connecting. “Danielle, that’s not—”