Читать книгу Whatever it takes - Paul Cleave - Страница 17

Twelve

I feel like I’m in a Bruce Springsteen song as I drive the streets where I grew up. Fragments of different memories play out like a parade. I can see the last time I drove out of here, my splinted fingers making it painful to drive. I can see myself heading inside The Big Bar at my mom’s behest to tell my dad it was time to come home. It was a dark sticky-floored sports bar with pool tables and dart boards and TVs showing horse racing or football, and people drinking at the bar looking like they slept there too. I can see us with a Christmas tree strapped to the roof of the car, my dad braking quickly for a dog and the tree snapping its bindings and hitting the pavement, and us leaving it in the street and never getting another one again. I see myself walking the streets as a kid, walking them with Maggie, walking them as a cop. Some buildings have seemingly been put into a time capsule the day I left to be brought back out on my return. Some of the faded shop fronts haven’t faded any more, or maybe they were replaced and faded all over again. The cars are more modern, clothes are more modern, people are on cellphones that twelve years ago nobody would have thought possible.

Father Frank’s car chugs along, the engine hiccupping every now and then, and something from the front clicks loudly when I make left-hand turns. I pass by a couple of bars unsure which one has Conrad Haggerty working in it. I pass The Big Bar, its name now up in neon. I pass a shop where I bought my first and only suit. I pass the barber my dad always took me to. I drive through my history, pangs of regret for having to leave coming from everywhere I look.

I reach the police station. It’s a flat building with brownstone walls stained by small-town life, exhaust fumes and bird crap and dirt swept in from forest and quarry. The front has floor-to-ceiling windows with closed blinds on the other side, big letters painted in gold across them saying Acacia Pines Sheriff Office. Maggie was right — it is bigger than it used to be, the front closer to the road, the right-hand side extending further into the parking lot. There are seven patrol cars out front, fairly new models. Back in the day there only ever used to be four.

If driving into Acacia Pines was like coming home, then walking into the sheriff’s office is like coming to work. There are notice boards with messages and photographs and wanted signs, large filing cabinets scattered around the walls, maps of the town, of the forest, of the country, ring binders and lamps and computers covering the desks, people sitting behind them tapping on keyboards, or talking on phones. Some people I recognize, some I don’t. The air conditioning is working overtime.

Drew, or Sheriff Drew Brooks as he’s now officially known, is pouring himself a coffee from the same machine we were looking at replacing all those years ago. He’s aged better than I have. He’s lost weight and gained muscle and those two things make him look taller and younger. He looks thirty instead of forty. He’s grown a horseshoe mustache to match the one his predecessor had. He glances at me, looks back at the coffee, then glances back at me again. He straightens up and has a look about him of a man who thinks he might be dreaming.

I offer him my hand. He looks at it without any expression and doesn’t move. Coming here was a mistake. He puts his coffee down, and then he smiles, and he steps forward and puts his arms around me and smacks me on the back a couple of times and I do the same to him.

“Jesus, Noah, Jesus, it’s good to see you.” He pulls back and keeps smiling. “It’s great to see you.”

“Out of everybody in this town,” I say, “they made you the sheriff?”

“I’m the only one who could read and shoot straight.”

He goes about pouring me a coffee. He remembers how I take it. Black, and in a cup. The machine has either been serviced or blessed by the church because it doesn’t jam up halfway through the pour like it often used to.

“You learned to read while I was away?”

“Picture books, mostly.” He hands me a cup. It says World’s Sexiest Sheriff on the side. “What’s it been? Ten years?”

“Twelve.”

“Twelve.” Slowly he nods as that night comes back to him. We’ve never spoken a word to each other since then. “Yeah, twelve. Of course, of course. That was messed up, what you did to me back then, Noah,” he says, and then he shakes his head. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to say that.”

“You have every right to say it,” I say, and I can’t defend it. He has every right to be mad. I need to let him tell me, take what’s coming, and hope we can move on. “I’ve always wanted to apologize, but never quite knew how.”

“By picking up the phone,” he says. “I was willing to listen.”

It sounds so simple, the way he puts it. “You’re right. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”

He thinks on that. “You ever wonder where we’d be if things had gone different?”

“Every day,” I tell him.

“Every day.” And then the big smile from a few moments ago comes back. “Well, hell, it’s all water under the bridge now,” he says, even though it isn’t. He slaps me on the shoulder.

“Can we talk? I have about forty minutes before Old Man Haggerty straps me to the front of a tractor and drives me into the sunset.”

“Old Man Haggerty. You know, we actually call him that here at the station when he’s not around. If he heard he’d strap us to that same damn tractor.”

I follow him through to his office, which is Old Man Haggerty’s old office, which is along the back wall next to a fire exit that Haggerty often propped open so he could sit out on the step to have a cigarette. The office looks the same, and Drew hasn’t put his touch on it. The same painting of horses in a landscape that Haggerty hung up a hundred years ago is still there. Same aerial photograph of the town. Same map on a wooden board of the town framed by the forest. The way the town has expanded, the map must be for nostalgia, not as a reference. The only things in here that have been updated are the calendar on the wall and the computer on the desk. We sit down either side of the desk. I think about the questions I need to ask. When was the last time anybody saw Alyssa? Has she used her bank account? Has she made large withdrawals of money? Who are her friends?

“So how have you been?” he asks. “You married? Got children? What have you been up to?”

“I never got married again,” I tell him. “No kids. And I own a bar.”

“You own a bar?”

“Yeah, with a buddy of mine. We own it fifty-fifty. It’s a good bar. And I have a cat.”

“Cats are good,” he says. “So are bars. You sound happy, and you look good,” he says.

“And you? What’s new with you, other than the promotion?”

“Leigh’s good. She’s still selling houses. We have a couple of more kids since you were last here. Three in total now. So, Father Frank called you, huh?”

I take a sip of my drink. If the machine has been blessed to get it up and running, the effects don’t extend to making the result taste any better. “In a roundabout way.”

“Maggie?”

“Maggie.”

“And I take it you didn’t need much convincing,” he says. “Because you figured without you here, the rest of us don’t know what we’re doing. You figured you’d come here and save the day, while the rest of us keep rescuing cats out of trees and writing up tickets.’

His response hurts, but it’s not unexpected. “I don’t think that at all.”

“No? Then why did you come?”

“Because Maggie asked me to.”

He sips at his coffee. I’m in no hurry to take another sip of mine. “You know she’s married now, right?”

“She told me.”

“Has a couple of kids and everything.”

“I didn’t come here searching for my old life, Drew. I’ve moved on. I came back for Alyssa. That night I found her, I promised her I’d make sure nothing bad ever happened to her again.”

“And then you left,” he says.

“And then I left.”

“And now you’re back.” He fiddles with a pen between his fingers. He used to do this a lot when he was questioning people. It always made him look casual, and that, combined with his easy-going nature, made him the kind of guy you could open up to. Of course, out here career criminals are sheep stealers and tractor joyriders, not serial killers or assassins. Now he looks like he could flex his way out of his shirt and pick somebody up by their ears.

He carries on. “The thing is, Noah, we don’t need your help. I appreciate you coming all this way, and I know it was an effort and it’s sure great seeing you, but there’s no case here. I know what you’re thinking, that Alyssa wouldn’t run out on her dad like that at the end, but that’s exactly what she did.”

“You sure about that?”

He sighs, puts down the pen, and forms his fingers into steeples, tapping the front two against his lips. Then he points those front two at me, the rest folding down, so he’s now making the shape of a gun. “Yes, I’m sure, because I know how to do my job.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“Look, I get you made Alyssa this promise, but the thing is, it’s a wasted trip. If Maggie had come to me first before calling you, I could have saved you both a whole lot of time. Alyssa . . . well, Alyssa didn’t disappear.”

“No?”

He starts rotating his cup on the spot, ninety degrees clockwise, then ninety degrees anti-clockwise and so on. “No,” he says. “She left town four days ago for personal reasons.”

“Personal reasons? You’re going to need to give me more than that,” I say.

“No, I don’t, Noah. I don’t have to give you anything.”

“Come on, Drew, I’m not trying to be a pain here, I’m just trying to help out. I owe her that.”

“You think we need your help?”

“I’m not saying that.”

“She left town to have an abortion.”

What he’s saying doesn’t make sense, not at first, and that’s because this whole time I’ve been keeping my promise to the Alyssa whose hand barely fit in mine. Not once have I seen her as the girl she might be today.

“Is that personal enough for you?” Before I can answer, he carries on. “Something like that, well, she’s not going to be advertising the fact on her way out of here, is she?”

“Why hasn’t she come back?”

He picks up his coffee. He takes another sip. “Says she can’t face Father Frank.”

“You’ve spoken to her?”

“Several times.”

“What, you just rang her? She answered, and that solved the case?”

“Actually no,” he says. “I spoke to her friends. A couple of them said she was struggling, and that after her dad died she was going to leave. Which made sense. Which made me think maybe she wasn’t going to wait. We treated this as a missing person case even though we figured it likely she’d run away, but still, we treated it like a missing persons. It wasn’t until yesterday her best friend told me they were still in touch. She’d been sworn to secrecy, but she could see how serious things had become. Her best friend told me there was more to it, but wouldn’t say what, and had texted Alyssa to tell her she needed to talk to me. After that, Alyssa started taking my calls. Look, Noah, I’ve tried convincing her to come back, hand on heart,” he says, and puts his hand over his heart. “I’ve said everything humanly possible to get her to return. The thing is she thinks her uncle will see it in her somehow. She thinks she’d rather he die disappointed that she isn’t here than be ashamed of what she did. And to be clear here, those are her words, not mine.”

“And you let people think she’s missing?”

“Yeah, I knew you were going to say that,” he says. “Goes to show you have no faith in what we do around here.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“No? We told Father Frank yesterday she was okay, but she couldn’t deal with watching him die. He didn’t believe us. You see him already?”

“Before I came here.”

“Did he tell you we found her?”

“No. He didn’t.”

“My guess is he didn’t tell Maggie either. Like I said, if she had spoken to me first you wouldn’t have needed to come here.”

“You tell Frank about the abortion?”

“Are you kidding?”

“He deserves to know the truth.”

“Actually, Noah, he doesn’t. This is Father Frank here. He’s probably the nicest guy in Acacia, but let’s not forget he’s a Catholic priest. Alyssa thinks this would devastate him, and I’m inclined to agree.”

“I’m not so sure it would. Frank’s a liberal guy, and I think more than anything he wants to know she’s safe.”

“Could be you’re right,” he says, “but it doesn’t much matter. This isn’t about what you think, or what I think, this is Alyssa’s decision, and I have to respect that. You, you’re seeing Alyssa as a kid who makes kid decisions, and you think Father Frank still has the mental capacity of the Father Frank you knew. Look, it’s easy for you to ride in here and think you know what to do, but it’s not so easy when you’re on this side of the desk. But you know what? I think it’s more than Alyssa not wanting to face him or talk to him because she feels she’s let him down. You’ve seen him, you know this is a man who isn’t close to death, but is halfway on the other side of it. It’s all over the house too. You can feel it. Alyssa, well, she lost both her parents when she was young, and now she’s losing him too, and it’s not pretty. It’s too much for her to handle. She might not be seven anymore, but she’s still a kid. If I were nineteen and that were my dad, hell, I’d want to run away too. Tell you what, if you think I’m wrong, if you think Father Frank really deserves to know, then by all means head on over to the church and tell him the girl he considers his daughter got pregnant, and compounded that sin by having it taken care of. Could be you telling him that is what he needs so he can let go and go see his Maker.”

He’s right. Of course he’s right. I’ve come into town and weighed up an hour’s worth of facts, and who am I to think I know what’s right here? I think of my own mother wasting away the year after my dad wasted away. They were different kinds of wasting, and both were ugly, but neither looked as bad as Father Frank. If they had, I might have driven away too until it was all over.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“Sorry for thinking we’d dropped the ball?”

“Sorry for being a jerk,” I tell him. “Sorry for everything.”

He brightens up. “Never apologize for being a jerk. You start doing that, nobody else is going to get a word in.” He starts rotating his coffee cup again. “So — you going to stick around for a bit, or let Old Man Haggerty run you out of town?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Come on, man, you can’t up and leave — you just got here. Stay a while. Come stay the night with me and the family. Leigh would love to see you and I’d love for you to meet the kids. You can tell me more about what you’ve been doing the last twelve years. I can provide you around the clock protective custody against Old Man Haggerty and Leigh can provide around the clock protection against my cooking. What do you say?”

“It’s tempting,” I tell him.

He glances at something on his computer, then writes down a number on a piece of paper and slides it across to me. “It’s Alyssa’s. You’re about to ask for it. I know you’re thinking you’re not done here until you speak to her yourself. Keep in mind she might not answer, I don’t know. You could leave a message maybe. I think . . . I think considering what you did for her, she’ll talk to you. Just . . . just go easy on her.”

I fold the piece of paper into my pocket. He was right about me not being done here until I’ve spoken to her myself. “Has she had the procedure done?”

“She has.” He stares at me for a few seconds. “After you call her, you’re leaving, I guess. You’re not going to come by and see us, are you?”

“I really should get going.” I stand up. He does the same. We reach out over the desk and shake hands.

“So this is it,” he says.

“Yeah. I think it is.”

“I’m still in the same place,” he says. “I’ll be firing up the barbecue around seven, but I promised Leigh I’d be home around four to help out with the kids. Seriously, drop by. Old Man Haggerty — screw him. If he tries anything, I’ll arrest him.”

“No, you won’t,” I say.

He smiles. “No, I won’t.”

He walks me to the car. Once I drive out of town I have no need to ever drive back, not unless Alyssa goes missing in another twelve years. Neither of us say it, but I can tell he’s thinking it too. I’ve missed Drew over the years, but I didn’t realize how much until seeing him again.

“It really was good to see you, Noah. I mean that. I wish . . . I wish things had worked out different. You were like a brother to me.”

“Likewise,” I say, and we part ways and this man who was my best man, my best friend, this person I grew up with, I watch him walk back into the station knowing I’ll never see him again.