River Road (14 page)

I reached for my phone but it wasn't on the night table. It must be downstairs in my bag. I'd stopped paying for a landline years ago. I opened the night table drawer quietly and celebrated silently when I found a heavy Maglite inside. Evan had put one in every room because we lost power so often. The batteries were long dead but the metal casing was reassuringly heavy in my hands. I crept out onto the landing and saw that someone had turned a light on in the living room—not standard operating procedure for a thief or vigilante, I thought. There was no point creeping down the rickety old stairs, so I walked down
firmly, holding the Maglite over my head, shouting, “Who's there?” When I reached the bottom I saw the silhouette of a man sitting in my desk chair and looking at my computer screen, which I'd left on at a student Tumblr site that had taken up the discussion closed on “Overheard at Acheron.”

“These students should be expelled for spreading this tripe on the Web—it's libel.”

“Ross?” I asked, lowering my arm. “What are you doing here? How did you get in?”

He held up a key in his right hand. “You gave me a key—remember?”

“Over six years ago!” I said, moving closer. The sudden relief I'd felt when I recognized him was dissipating. Even from across the room I could smell liquor. It was coming from an open bottle of Glenlivet. His usually impeccably coiffed hair stood up in unruly tufts. His beautiful cashmere coat bunched up around his stooped shoulders like a damp pelt.

“You never asked for it back,” he said with a sly smile that sent a chill from my bare feet up to the nape of my neck.

“Are you returning it now?” I asked, trying to keep my voice level. “You could have come by in the . . . oh, I don't know . . . daytime?”

“And give the scandalmongers more fuel for their bonfire?” He picked up the empty bottle of Four Roses I'd left on the kitchen counter and shook it at me. “Do we really pay you so little this is the best you can afford even on Christmas Eve?”

I sank down onto the arm of the couch, feeling drained after the rush of adrenaline. “I found that on Leia's shrine,” I said. “I think Hannah left it. I see you've brought your own. Do you really think driving drunk is such a good idea after what happened to Leia—and Hannah? If you were pulled over—”

“It doesn't matter now,” he said. “By tomorrow this site will be plastered with my picture, not yours. That's why I came by—to give you the good news. The police have a new suspect.” He threw open his arms and bowed his head. “Yours truly.”

“For Leia's death?” I asked, appalled but also, to my shame, with a queasy twinge of relief. “But you were at home, cleaning up after the party.”

“Yes, I
was
at home—not actually cleaning, though, Dottie saw to that—but apparently my car had ideas of its own. Your friend Sergeant McAffrey has informed me that a little bit of Leia's red leather jacket found its way into the radiator grille of the Peugeot.”

My mind flashed on an image of Leia standing outside the barn in her red leather jacket, looking brave and jaunty in the cold, and then, horribly, I saw that jacket shredded and bloody, scraps twisted in metal. “There must be some mistake,” I said. “You couldn't have run Leia over.”

“Because you did?” He suddenly sounded dead sober. A warning shot of adrenaline pulsed through my blood. I remembered how that night over Hannah's inert body he'd tried to coax me into admitting that I'd run over Leia. Was that why he'd been coming here that night—and why he was here tonight? With a bottle of expensive scotch to ply me with? So I would take the blame for something he did?

“No, because I believe that you were home. Dottie will say you were there—”

“She left before the time Leia was run over.”

“Was there anyone else with you after Dottie left?” I asked. “I know that the students love to listen to you—”

“You make it sound like I'm the Pied Piper, some lecherous old fart preying on vulnerable young girls.”

“I didn't mean that at all,” I protested.

“No? Isn't it what you said to me when you broke off with me? That I'd taken advantage of you as much as if you were a student?”

What I'd said, I now painfully recalled, was that a department head who slept with a newly hired teacher was as bad as a professor sleeping with a student. “I didn't know what I was saying. Of course it's not the same thing . . . I was hurt. . . .” I suddenly remembered
why
I'd been
hurt. Cressida had taken me out to lunch and explained to me that Ross Ballantine was infamous for seducing graduate students at his last job at Cornell. Why did I think someone of his stature had ended up at a state school? If people learned of the affair—as she had by seeing us coming out of a B&B in Hudson—I wouldn't be taken seriously either and I'd never get tenure. “Ross,” I said now, “you weren't . . . you and Leia . . .”

He threw the Four Roses bottle against the wall. The sound of it shattering made me jump. I felt for the Maglite, which I'd let slip into the couch cushions. “There! There it is!” Ross shouted. “That's what everyone will be saying. You take an interest in a student, mentor her—because she's
remarkable
, because she reminds you of yourself when you started writing, when you had that fire in your belly—and everyone wants to make it into something
ugly
. Hell, Cressida Fucking Janowicz spent far more time with Leia than I did. She had Leia to her house for cozy dinners by her fireside. Why not suspect
her
of having an affair with Leia? Does anyone even know what Cressida's orientation is?”

“I'm not sure she has one,” I said. I hadn't meant to be funny—Cressida had once admitted to me that she simply didn't have that much interest in sex—but Ross was suddenly laughing and so was I, as much from tension as anything else. And then I noticed that Ross's laughter had turned to sobs.

“Hey,” I said, taking a tentative step forward and squeezing Ross's arm. “I don't think you were sleeping with Leia. I know you wouldn't do that. And even if you were, you wouldn't run her down and leave her for dead. Someone else must have taken your car—you leave the keys in an ashtray by your kitchen door, for Pete's sake.”

He nodded and wiped his face with his cashmere scarf. “That's right. Anyone at the party could have taken it. But how will I
prove
that? You see how quickly the vultures circle.” He pointed at the computer and I saw that the new forum discussing appropriate punishments for me
had 263 comments. Even if the police were looking at a new suspect no one would know—
unless someone leaked it
. Ross must have guessed what I was thinking.

“You could have your friend McAffrey whisper a word in Kelsey Manning's ear. I hear she's gotten an internship at
Gawker
out of this—a girl who could barely string two sentences together without dangling a modifier! She hardly passed my British Lit class.”

“He's not my friend,” I said. “You are. I'd never do that to you.”
But he's asking you to
, a little voice said in my head. I shook it away and leaned over the desk, scrolling through the comments.
Nancy Lewis is a washed-up has-been who killed Leia Dawson because she was jealous of her
was one of the kinder ones. “Besides, I think it might be too late for me.”

Ross's hand stole over mine. “Don't say that, Nan. It's not too late for you—and maybe it's not too late for us either.”

He pulled me down into his lap, one arm circling my waist, the other cupping my face. He felt so warm after the chill of the floor that I wanted to lay my head against his chest and go to sleep, but then he drew my head down to his and found my mouth and I woke up. The taste of the expensive scotch he'd been drinking made me feel instantly drunk. I remembered that this is what it felt like to be with him—drunk, whether we were drinking or not, although usually we were. He deftly repositioned my legs so that I slid into the curve of his lap like a clasp sliding shut. I remembered how well our bodies had fit together in all those corny Catskill hotels—the Dew Drop Inn, the Ko-Z Kabins—and how he'd moved me into positions I hadn't imagined. I remembered that I liked being moved because it meant I didn't have to think and thinking was the last thing I wanted to do after Emmy. And with Ross, after a couple of drinks, I didn't have to think. What I was having trouble remembering was why I had called things off. Because of my job? Well, hell, that wasn't a problem anymore.

I slid one leg up and over and straddled him. His hands were under my T-shirt, stroking my breasts, and mine were pulling at his belt.
The chair creaked beneath us, juddering an inch over the wood floor, the way it had that day I'd looked up from my desk when I heard the screech of tires on River Road—

Come back!

My hands froze on his belt buckle. I could hear the voice calling—as I had in my dream when I'd fallen asleep in the woods—only it didn't sound like my voice—

“What's wrong? Do you want to go upstairs?”

I looked into his eyes—why did they always seem so sad? I remembered the way he would plunge us down those dark roads, the way we lost ourselves at those divey Catskill hotels. I'd thought he was helping me to lose myself but I soon realized he was trying to get lost too. All that posing in front of his classes and sitting around the fireside charming his students with stories of his early successes, the famous writers he'd gone to Iowa with, the need to feel himself reflected in his students' successes.
Sometimes I think that if I'd had the balls to tough it out on my own without the safety net of an academic job I could have been a great writer
, he once told me at one of those hotels.
Now all I can hope for is that one of my protégés will be one.

“No,” I said, easing back. “I don't think this is a good idea . . . we're both not thinking.”

“I remember when you liked not thinking,” he said, stroking my face and drawing his thumb down my throat until it rested in the curve of my collarbone. As if he were taking my pulse. It made me feel exposed, even more than his hands on my breasts had. I saw Leia turning in the kitchen, her long white neck elegant and fragile. . . .

“I don't think I can afford that kind of oblivion anymore.” I swung my leg over his and stood up. The floor felt cold against my bare feet. The draft from the window on the small of my back where his hand had warmed it was like ice. “If I hadn't passed out in the woods that night—”

“Passed out?”

Too late I realized this wasn't part of the story I'd told him. Perhaps because it made me sound like a drunk.

“Fell asleep. When I went looking for the deer I started thinking about Emmy. I sat down on a log and . . . it was so peaceful. Lovely, dark, and deep.” I smiled, knowing how much he liked Frost.

But he didn't return my smile. “Do you know how long you were out?”

“No, why?”

“Wouldn't you have heard the car that hit Leia? If someone
did
steal my car and hit her, that is.”

A screech of tires. A voice screaming, “Come back!”

“I think I did hear it, but it mingled with my dream and I kept sleeping. When I got to the road there wasn't any car and I didn't see Leia in the ditch so enough time had passed for the snow to cover her.”

“Are you sure?” he asked, looking skeptical. “If you saw the car you'd know who was driving it. Maybe you saw it driving away and you didn't think anything of it.”

“There were no cars on the road. And the snow had covered Leia.”

“Maybe you'll remember something,” he said, straightening the seam of his trousers and crossing his legs. “It would be helpful if you did—for you as well as me. My guess is that a student stole the car. Didn't you tell Dottie that you saw some students hanging out by the barn?”

Of course Dottie had passed that on. “Yes, but—”

“Wasn't one of them Troy Van Donk? Damn, I bet Troy knows how to hot-wire a car. He wouldn't even need to steal the keys. And he was fighting with Leia—”

“Actually they were laughing when I saw them.”

“
I
saw them arguing earlier. In fact, I think that's what Leia was about to tell me in the kitchen before you interrupted us. She was telling me about some ‘bar crawl' in Poughkeepsie she'd gone on with Troy—an odyssey, she called it, nothing romantic. Then you burst in. But we can imagine the rest. Troy had misunderstood her and thought the
‘bar crawl' was something more. He started getting possessive, following her. Maybe he decided to follow her home in my car and when she wouldn't get in he drove her off the road in a fit of drug-induced rage.”

I stared at him. Sitting back in my desk chair, legs crossed, he looked as he did when he sat by his fireside regaling students with stories. That's what he was doing now. I already couldn't recall where the odyssey part Leia had told him ended and the part about Troy stalking her began. The story he was spinning about Troy had the compelling ring of truth, which, as I always told my students, had nothing to do with whether or not it really happened. All Ross needed were a few corroborating stories. Dottie and Cressida could contribute the scene of Troy bursting out of Cressida's office and giving Dottie the finger. If I just added my suddenly recovered memory of Troy driving Ross's car, the story would gain heft and credence. I wouldn't be a suspect anymore—I'd be a witness. I remembered the bitterness in Troy's voice when he'd spoken about Leia yesterday.

“I saw Troy on the bus yesterday and he did sound very bitter about Leia. He said she played a role with him—that she lied to him.”

“You see!” Ross leaned forward eagerly. “Troy is the logical suspect. He even has a record. I
do
blame myself for not seeing it and for not paying more attention to what Leia was trying to tell me but then you came into the kitchen and you were so upset about the tenure decision.”