The River King Read online

  “You bet,” Abe called to Chris. “I’m with you all the way.”

  As he drove, Abe recalled that his grandfather always told him that any man who took the time to listen would be amazed at all he could discover without even trying. A truly observant individual could lie down beside the river and hear where the fish were swimming; why, the trout would practically give directions to any man who was willing to study them. And because his grandfather was the best fisherman in town, and had always given out good advice, Abe started listening then and there. He thought about that dark mark on the boy’s forehead, a bruise the color of wild iris, and he decided that for once in his life he’d pay attention. He’d take note of what this drowned boy had to say.

  * * *

  NEWS TRAVELED QUICKLY AT HADDAN, AND BY noon most people knew there had been a death. After the initial course of hearsay and gossip, people overloaded on rumors and simply shut down. All across campus there was silence in unexpected places. In the kitchen, pots and pans didn’t bang; in the common rooms, there were no conversations. Teachers canceled classes; soccer practice was called off for the first time in years. There were those who wanted nothing more than to go about their business, but most people could not so easily ignore this death. Many had encountered Gus at the school, and most had not been kind. Those who had been cruel knew who they were, and there were legions of them. Those who would not sit at his table in the cafeteria, those who would not lend him notes for the classes he missed, who talked behind his back, who laughed in his face, who despised him or ignored him or never bothered to learn his name. Girls who had thought themselves too superior to speak to him now took to their beds with headaches. Boys who had thrown volleyballs at him during phys ed class paced their rooms gloomily. Students who’d delighted in taking potshots at an easy target now feared that their past iniquities had already been charted in some heavenly book with a brand of black ink that could never be erased.

  Gus’s peers were not the only ones to feel the sting of remorse; several faculty members were so sickened when they heard of Pierce’s death they couldn’t bring themselves to eat lunch, although chocolate bread pudding, always a big favorite, was served for dessert. These teachers, who’d dispensed D’s, and decried the sloppy script and coffee stains that accompanied the papers Gus had written, now found that beneath the slipshod penmanship there had been a bright and original mind. Lynn Vining, who’d been looking forward to failing Gus in retribution for the series of black paintings he’d executed, removed the canvases from a utility closet and was startled to see luminous threads of color she hadn’t noticed before.

  An all-school meeting had been called and in the late afternoon the entire community gathered in the auditorium to hear Bob Thomas refer to Gus’s death as an unfortunate mishap, but word had already spread and everyone said it was suicide. Bereavement specialists were stationed at tables outside the library and Dorothy Jackson, the school nurse, dispensed tranquilizers along with ice packs and extra-strength Tylenol. There was particular concern for the residents of Chalk House, who had been closest to the deceased, and Charlotte Evans’s ex-son-in-law, the psychologist, Phil Endicott, was brought in for an extra counseling session before supper. The meeting was held in the common room at Chalk House, and clearly such an action was needed. The freshmen who had shared the attic with Gus looked especially shaken, and Nathaniel Gibb, who was more softhearted than most, left halfway through the session when Phil Endicott had reviewed only two of the five stages of grief. At the end of the meeting, Duck Johnson advised his charges to go out and make every day count, but no one was listening to him. Because of the thin walls and ancient plumbing, they could all hear Nathaniel vomiting in a nearby bathroom; they could hear the toilet flush, again and again.

  On the other side of the green, girls at St. Anne’s who had never spoken to Gus now sobbed into their pillows and wished they could have altered the chain of events. Any boy who died in a mysterious fashion could easily become the stuff of dreams: a girl was free to wonder what might have happened if only she had been walking along the river on that last night in October. She might have called to him and saved him, or perhaps she herself might have drowned, pulled down in the midst of her selfless act.

  Carlin Leander was disgusted by this sudden outpouring of false sympathy. She herself was boiling, a stew of fury and regret. She refused to attend the dean’s assembly; instead, she locked herself in the bathroom, where she tore out her pale hair and raked at her skin with ragged, bitten-down nails. Let others think what they wanted, she knew quite well who was to blame for Gus’s death. Her wretched actions on Halloween night had destroyed both Gus and their friendship and gone on to form something cold and mean in the place where Carlin’s heart ought to be. To let out all that was vile within, she took a razor from a shelf in the medicine chest. A single strike and drops of blood began to form; another, and a crimson stream coursed down her arm. All in all, Carlin cut herself six times. Her own flesh was a ledger upon which she measured all she’d done wrong. The first cut was for avarice, the second for greed, the next was for the petty delight she had taken in other girls’ jealousies, then one for vanity, and for cowardice, and the last and deepest cut was for the betrayal of a friend.

  On the night Gus died, Carlin had dreamed of broken eggs, always a portent of disaster. Rising from her bed in the early morning, she had gone to her window and the very first thing she saw was a dozen ruined eggs on the path below. It was only a silly prank, some local boys had egged St. Anne’s, as they did every Halloween. But looking down on that path, Carlin had known that there were some things she could never put back together again, no matter how she might try. And yet once the announcement had been made she could not believe that Gus was really gone. She ran to Chalk House, half expecting to crash into him in the hall even though the place was deserted when Carlin arrived, with many of the boys wanting to avoid the confines of the house. No one stopped Carlin when she went up to the attic, or noticed when she entered Gus’s room. She curled up on his neatly made bed. By then the fury and the heat had been drained away, leaving Carlin’s tears icy and blue. Her cries were so pitiful they chased the sparrows from the willow trees; rabbits in the bramble bushes shuddered and dug down deeper in the cold, hard earth.

  It was nearly the dinner hour when the two officers arrived. Neither man had ever been comfortable on campus and both flinched when their car doors slammed. Abe had already driven to Hamilton and back, Joey had filed their report. Now they were here to meet with Matt Farris from forensics and give the deceased’s lodgings a quick once-over. Abel Grey noticed, as he had before, that tragedy tended to create an echo. Coming upon an accident on an icy road, for instance, he’d heard sounds he’d never been aware of before: leaves falling, the crunch of pebbles beneath his tires, the hiss of blood as it melted through snow. At Haddan, it was possible to hear the air moving in waves. There was the call of birds, the rustle of the branches of the beech trees, and just beyond that, someone was crying, a thin ribbon of anguish rising above rooftops and trees.

  “Did you hear that?” Abe asked.

  Joey nodded toward a boy racing by on a mountain bike that most likely cost a month of a workingman’s salary. “The sound of money? Yeah, I hear it.”

  Abe laughed, but he had an uneasy feeling in his gut, the sort of apprehension he experienced late at night when he found himself looking out his window, waiting for his cat to return. He hadn’t wanted the cat in the first place, it had simply arrived one night and made itself at home, and now Abe worried when it wasn’t there on the porch when he got home from work. On several occasions he’d stayed up past midnight, until the damned cat had seen fit to appear at the door.

  “Hey,” Abe called to some kid walking by. Immediately, the boy froze. Boys of this age could always identify a cop, even the good kids with nothing to hide. “Which one is Chalk House?”

  The kid directed them to a building so close to the river the branches of weeping willows tra
iled across the roof. When they reached the house, Abe stomped some of the mud off his boots, but Joey didn’t bother. There were several more of those expensive bikes tossed down carelessly. Haddan wasn’t the sort of town where bikes needed to be locked, nor front doors latched for that matter, except back when Abe and Joey were on the loose and people from the village went down to the hardware store in droves, asking for Yale locks and dead bolts.

  Once the men had stepped inside the dim hallway of Chalk House, Abe’s first thought was exactly the one he’d had all those years ago when they were breaking into houses: Nobody’s stopping us. That’s what had always surprised him. Nobody’s in charge.

  Matt Farris was waiting in the student lounge smoking a cigarette and using a paper cup as an ashtray.

  “What took you?” he asked, something of a joke since he and his partner, Kenny Cook, were usually the ones to be late. He stubbed out his cigarette and threw the whole mess into the garbage.

  “You’re just on time because Kenny’s not with you,” Joey joked.

  “Trying to start a fire?” Abe asked of the smoldering wastebasket.

  “Burn the place down? Not a bad idea.” Matt was a local boy, with the local prejudice against the school, and it amused him to see bits of trash simmer before he doused it all with a cup of water.

  “No photographs?” Abe asked now. Matt’s partner, Kenny, was the man with the camera, but he had a second job, over at the Fotomat in Middletown, and wasn’t readily available for emergencies.

  “The word from Glen was don’t bother,” Matt said. “Don’t take up too much time with any of this.”

  Abe managed a look at some of the rooms on their way past the second floor; all were predictably sloppy, ripe with the stink of unwashed clothes. The men went on, stooping as they made their way up the last flight of stairs, trying their best not to hit their heads on the low ceiling. There was even more need to crouch when they reached the rabbit warren of an attic, with paper-thin walls and eaves so pitched a man of Abel’s height had to slouch at all times. Even Joey, who was barely five-eight, quickly began to feel claustrophobic. In all those years of imagining how the other half lived, they had never imagined this.

  “What a frigging dump,” Joey said. “Who would have thunk it.”

  They’d always believed Haddan students lived in luxury, with feather beds and fireplaces. Now it seemed what they’d envied had turned out to be nothing more than a cramped attic, with floorboards that shifted with every step and pipes that jutted out from the ceiling.

  As they neared Gus’s room, Abe heard the crying again. This time, Joey and Matt heard it, too.

  “Just what we need. Some spoiled brat in hysterics.” Joey had less than twenty minutes to get home, eat dinner, placate Mary Beth for all the household tasks he’d forgotten or would forget soon, and get to his job at the mall. “We could leave,” he suggested. “Come back tomorrow.”

  “Yeah, right.” Abe took some Rolaids out of his pocket and tossed a few into his mouth. “Let’s get this over with.”

  The nagging feeling Abe had been having was turning sour. He never could stand to hear anyone cry, although by now he should be used to it. He’d witnessed grown men sobbing as they pleaded for another chance after he’d pulled them over for a DUI. He’d had women lean on his shoulder and weep over minor traffic accidents or lost dogs. In spite of his experience, Abe was never prepared for displays of emotion, and it only made matters worse when he opened Gus’s door to discover that the person in question was only a girl, one not much older than Joey’s daughter Emily.

  For her part, Carlin Leander hadn’t heard anyone approach, and when she saw Abe, she was immediately ready to run. Who could blame her? Abe was a big man, and he seemed especially huge in the tiny attic room. But in fact, Abe wasn’t paying much attention to Carlin. He was far more concerned with a bit of visual information that surprised him far more than a crying girl: the room was spotless.

  Carlin had risen to her feet; she judged Abe to be a police officer even before he’d introduced himself as such, and for one stupefying instant, she thought she was about to be arrested, perhaps even charged with murder. Instead, Abe went to the closet, where he found the shirts neatly placed on hangers, the shoes all in a row. “Was this the way Gus usually kept his room?”

  “No. His clothes were usually spread all over the floor.”

  Joey was out in the hall along with Matt Farris. When he peered into the room, he didn’t like what he saw. Another rich Haddan student, that was his estimation, a pampered girl likely to burst into tears every time she couldn’t get what she wanted.

  “Maybe we should bring her down to the station. Question her there.” Joey had a way of saying the wrong thing at the right time, and this was no exception. Before Abe could assure Carlin they’d do nothing of the sort, she darted from the room. Down the hallway she went; down the stairs two at a time.

  “Brilliant move.” Abe turned to Joey. “She might have known something and you had to go and scare her off.”

  Joey came to look in the closet; he reached along the top shelf. “Bingo.” He withdrew a plastic bag of marijuana, which he tossed to Abe. “If it’s there, I’ll find it,” he said proudly.

  Abe slipped the marijuana into his pocket; he might or might not turn it in. Either way, he couldn’t quite figure how in a room so neat and tidy, a bag of weed could be carelessly left behind. While Matt Farris dusted for fingerprints, Abe went to the window to see the drowned boy’s view; they were so high up it was possible to spy birds’ nests in the willows, blackbirds soaring above the church steeple in town. From this vantage point, the woods on the far side of the river seemed endless, acres of hawthorn and holly, wild apple and pine. No dust on the window ledge, Abe noticed, and the panes of glass weren’t smudged either.

  “Two scenarios.” Joey had approached to stand beside Abe. “Either the kid killed himself, or he got good and stoned and accidentally drowned.”

  “But you’re not voting for the accident theory,” Abe said.

  “From what I’ve heard, the guy was a loser.” Having realized what this implied, Joey quickly backtracked, in honor of Frank’s memory. “Not that only losers kill themselves. That’s not what I meant.”

  “I wish they’d sent Kenny along.” Abe was not about to discuss Frank. Not here. Not now. “I’d still like some pictures of this room, and I know how to get them.”

  He had caught sight of the woman with the camera on the path below, and he nodded for Joey to take a look.

  “Not bad,” Joey said. “Great ass.”

  “It was the camera I wanted you to see, you moron.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure it was the camera that attracted you.”

  As she walked across the quad, Betsy Chase was wondering if she’d been among the last to see Gus Pierce alive. She could not get past the moment when he’d scaled the cemetery fence, devastated by his argument with Carlin. Was there anything Betsy herself might have done to save him? What if she had called out as he disappeared into the woods, or if she’d gone forward into the cemetery? Might she have changed what was about to happen? Could a single word have redirected that pitiful boy’s fate, much the way a single star can guide a traveler through a storm?

  Betsy’s camera banged against her ribs in its usual, comforting way, but she felt spacy and light-headed, perhaps the effect of crossing from the dim, shaded path into the last of the day’s sunlight. In the shadows a recent death cast, even the thinnest rays could be dizzying. Betsy leaned up against one of the weeping beeches to regain her balance. Unfortunately, the swans were nesting nearby. They were such territorial creatures that anybody with sense would have known to walk on, but Betsy brought her camera up to her eye and began to focus. She much preferred to look at the world through glass, but before she could continue, someone called out to her. Betsy placed one hand over her eyes. There was a man on the front porch of Chalk House and his gaze had settled onto her.

  “Is that a camera
?” he called.

  Well, that much was obvious, but no more obvious than the fact that his eyes were a pale, transparent blue and that he had the sort of stare that could hold a person in place, unable or unwilling to move. Betsy felt akin to those rabbits she came upon when she went walking at dusk; although it was clear they should run, they stayed where they were, frozen, even when it was clear they were in the direct path of trouble.

  Abe had begun walking toward her, and so it would be ridiculous to bolt. When he took out his ID, Betsy glanced at the picture. Such snapshots were usually laughable, a portrait from the gulag or the prison farm, but this man was good-looking even in his ID photo. Best not look for too long if Betsy knew what was good for her. He was the handsomest man she had seen in Haddan, and a handsome man could never be trusted to appreciate anything as much as the reflection he saw in his own mirror. Still, Betsy couldn’t help but notice a few basic facts as she scanned his ID: his date of birth, along with his name, and the color of his eyes, which she already knew to be astoundingly blue.

  Abe explained what he needed and led her toward Chalk House. As Betsy walked beside him, she kept a watch on the swans, expecting them to charge, hissing and snapping at coats and at shoes, but that didn’t happen. One merely peered out from the nest, while the other followed along on the path, which encouraged Betsy to quicken her pace.