Late Last Night (River Bend) (8 page)

Chapter Eight

Harrison had promised Doug that he would work a night shift on prom night, just in case.

In case of what, neither Doug nor Steffie spelled out. Drink, drugs, fast cars, girls. Harrison thought they were worrying needlessly. Andy and his buddies were pretty good kids, and not stupid. They’d been grinning with pleasure about their very cool arrival at Marietta High in the vintage cars, and he hoped they’d had a great night.

He
hadn’t.

He’d smiled at Kate and tried to talk to her, ready to recapture everything they’d felt on Wednesday night, wanting to promise more of it as soon as they could see each other again, but she’d been so cool and distant. Her tall, lush body in the little black dress made him want her like crazy, even more than he’d wanted her on Wednesday night. Those curves. Those legs. That skin. But she wasn’t giving off any of the right signals.

In fact, the signals couldn’t have been more wrong.

He understood she was busy. Well, she’d telegraphed that loud and clear, but the busy thing was the excuse, not the reason. There was something else going on, and he had no idea what it could be, and he wouldn’t know until they could connect and talk properly.

If she even wanted to.

Maybe she had simply decided that their date… including all those glorious moments when he’d had her in his arms and brought her to a shivering peak of pleasure… was a horrible mistake.

Damn! He wished he was at home in his own bed so that this night would end, instead of hanging out in a not-very-interesting law enforcement building while Marietta slept.

Still, he understood his brother and sister-in-law’s request about the night shift. He’d seen enough parents devastated by the crash of a vehicle filled with teenagers, enough shock in the faces of other parents who’d never believed their son capable of date rape or their daughter foolish enough to think that party drugs were fun. If it made Doug and Steffie feel better to know that he was on watch, then it wasn’t much to ask.

When the call came at ten minutes to one in the morning, though, it was a little different from what he’d expected, although drugs and alcohol were probably involved. Girl fallen in the river and disappeared out at River Bend Park, where some of the kids had gone after prom, and the County Sheriff’s Office was the branch of law enforcement responsible for coordinating a search. Meanwhile the parents had to be told. He made a couple of necessary phone calls then headed out, hating what he was about to do.

Marietta itself seemed quiet tonight, but then as he turned onto Fifth Street, heading for Church Avenue, he heard the familiar whoop of an alarm in the distance and his jaw gritted tight.

What, again? Dammit!

Within the town, it wasn’t his jurisdiction, but the County Sheriff’s Office and the Marietta Police Department were co-located in the same building and had pretty good lines of communication going with each other. That was why Greg
Holding had invited him along to check out the break-in at the high school on Monday, so that police department and sheriff’s office both had the same picture of what had been happening. Harrison knew that patrol officers had already responded to alarms three times earlier in the night, two at the Main Street bank building and one at the Gun Mart.

Same story as before. No damage. Nothing taken.

The Gun Mart owner, a bad-tempered man in his fifties called Bill Rainey, had vowed he was done with these idiots, though. He was going to sit in the store the rest of the night, and for as many nights as it took, catch them at it and get them punished by the law. Take it into his own hands, if he had to. He’d been advised that this last plan was not a good idea.

Was the whooping coming from the Gun Mart? Harrison couldn’t tell, and didn’t have time to find out. He pulled up outside the Church Avenue address he’d been given and prepared himself for waking Annette and Gary Shepherd with what might well turn out to be the worst news they would ever hear.

When Kate arrived back at River Bend Park ahead of the highway patrol vehicle, Neve was still missing and the mood on the sand had shifted to chaos and hysteria. There were girls crying in each other’s arms. Jay sat huddled by the fire, wrapped in a blanket and lost inside himself. Lorelai Grey sat beside him but he’d shut her out, and her hand on his arm looked forlorn and unwanted.

Meanwhile, Kate recognized the Sheenan twins’ pickup truck grinding and blundering dangerously along the river’s edge downstream, far too close to where the spring snow-melt had undercut the bank. They were still looking for Neve.

“Tell those boys to stop,” she told the highway patrol officer, showing them the pickup. “Or this’ll end up a triple tragedy.”

She’d already accepted that Neve was lost… gone… drowned… dead.

You hoped for miracles.

Of course you did.

But she’d seen Neve go into the water with her own eyes, seen her flailing arms and the moment when the pink of her dress disappeared into blackness, and there’d been no sight and no sound since.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Neve had been drunk and probably drugged as well – one of those party drugs, supplied by Judd Newell, that meant you didn’t feel the cold, even when the cold was doing you damage.

That water was freezing. Even if Neve had, by some miracle, managed to haul herself out of the water farther down the bank, the cold would kill her with insidious speed. And she hadn’t hauled herself out. There’d been no sound, no sighting. She was gone.

Kate went over to the fire. “Jay, we need to get you home,” she told him, gentle and practical. “All of you. There’s nothing more for you to do.”

But they wouldn’t move, and she had no authority. At least the Sheenan boys were lurching their way back upstream now, so she could let go of her fear that their pickup would collapse the bank and send them into the river, too.

More vehicles arrived, the start of an official search. Suddenly, here was Harrison. He saw her and said, “Kate!” in shock and surprise, and before she
knew it her hands were engulfed in his and he was rubbing them. Only now did she realize how cold they were.

She wanted to bury her head against his shoulder, but she couldn’t, and it was only their hands that touched, his intensely reassuring in their warmth and strength and size, hers half-numb and unable to move.

“What are you doing here?” he asked. His voice rumbled deep, and then caught a little.

“I saw the cars turning off. I was worried. Judd Newell, I’m sure he’s dealing drugs. But then he left, with his brother. I don’t know where they went. These are just kids. I know they’re eighteen, but I’m their teacher. I felt a responsibility, even though it seemed like spying. And then…” She shuddered, couldn’t repeat in words what had happened to Neve, and knew Harrison would have taken her in his arms if he hadn’t been in uniform, if this hadn’t been such a devastating scene. She could feel it in the air between them, a kind of pull, and a nakedness. She wanted the contact so much, but it would have been wrong.

“It’s okay,” he said. “Breathe, Kate.”

She breathed.

Him. His calm.

She breathed her memories of the other night beside his car, the way he’d been so tender and generous and skilled. She was so happy and relieved and—and
nourished,
somehow—to see him that she couldn’t even remember, at first, why there was a question hanging over their heads and then suddenly did.

He’d taken his house off the market. Did that matter?

He cut in on her thoughts. “You’re freezing. You’re not dressed for this.” He looked at her dress, at the thin shoulder straps and the curved neckline that showed the barest hint of a swell where her breasts began. Just the other night he’d touched her there…

She felt a fresh stab of vulnerability. He knew so much about her. Knew what made her body respond. Knew that she would let it happen, let it sweep her away, without any thought to consequences. “I stopped here on the way home from the prom. It was such a mild night, I didn’t even bring an evening jacket.”

“Tell me, you were here when it happened?” he said. “You saw her fall in the water? Actually saw it?”

“Yes. Yes, I did.” She understood what he wanted from her, now. “It wasn’t anyone’s fault. She and Jay Brown were arguing. She was wild, wanting him to dance in the water with her. She’d been drinking and who knows what else. She didn’t feel the cold at all. Party drugs can do that, can’t they?”

“Yes, some of them. Was she impaired by what she’d had?”

“Yes, significantly, I’m sure. She was splashing herself as if she was hot and wanted to cool herself down. Jay was telling her to take care, or be sensible, or something. I couldn’t hear the words, but it was obvious from their body language. She pulled on him and he pushed her, trying to get her to let him go, and she fell.”

“He pushed her?”

“Yes, but it was self
defense more than anything. He wasn’t trying to make her fall, I’m sure of it.”

“I’ll have to talk to him. Don’t repeat what you’ve told me, okay?”

“No… no, of course not.” Over his shoulder, she saw Gary Shepherd approaching and her stomach lurched.

Two months ago, Gary and Annette had sat in front of her at school, telling her they were worried about Jay Brown and their daughter, and now Neve was…
gone… and Jay was sitting there, slumped and hopeless, fighting to get warm after he’d spent twenty minutes lunging around in the water in search of her, desperate to find her, trying so hard.

Beautiful, dangerous Neve.

A daughter. A girlfriend. A woman.

No, a
kid
.

“What the hell is happening?” Mr. Shepherd demanded. “Why isn’t anyone searching?”

Harrison let Kate go, his warm palms sliding over her hands as if he really didn’t want to move. But he had to, of course. He took Gary Shepherd away, and Kate heard the low rumble of his calm, steady voice, and the higher, harsher notes of the stricken father trying to make the impossible into the possible through the sheer force of his will. “She can’t. It can’t. It has to—w”

It was horrible.

After a while, Harrison had a free moment and she said to him urgently, “Please tell me what to do. What’s happening? How can I help?”

“Get some of these kids home,” he answered, full of quiet authority. “You have a car?”

“Yes, my pickup, over there in the lot.”

“We’re getting them all home. We have more people on the way to search. I’m going to sit Jay in my vehicle now and take a formal statement from him. Find some of the kids who weren’t watching what happened and take them, can you? We don’t need to keep them here for this if they didn’t see anything.”

She nodded, and tried to think who those kids might be, while Harrison had already moved on to the next person who needed him.

Ren Fletcher and Ruth Wilson, she decided. They’d been lying on a blanket on the coarse sand near the fire, making out as if the world was about to end. Ruth’s prom date, Sam, wasn’t even here, and Kate still had no idea what had happened to sweet, studious Tully Morgan tonight.

Lorelai Grey, too, had been pretty thoroughly wrapped up in her date, Trey Sheenan, but Trey and Troy were both looking like they would refuse to leave unless ordered to do so, point-blank. They knew this river and this park pretty well. “There’s a place on the far bank about a hundred yards down, where it’s under-cut and there’s a heap of tree roots. If she made it there, she could be unconscious, or something,” Trey was saying.

“Yeah, look there. We’ll show you the place,” Troy came in, while his prom date Heather was one of the girls still crying and shivering over between the river and the fire. The fire was going out, now. The flames had stopped leaping bright in the air and there was a bed of coals instead, going grey with ash around the edges. No one had the presence of mind to keep it going, or maybe they hadn’t collected enough wood.

“Ren, Ruth, Lorelai, Heather,” Kate said to them, “Sheriff Pearce says I need to get you home.” She made it an order, not a request, and they were too bewildered and shaken up to argue. It had to be after one-thirty in the morning by now.