River Road (24 page)

“I'd sure like a tour of the underworld.”

And Troy had smiled a slow, seductive smile and said, “Anytime, Leia, I'll be your Virgil.”

I remembered at the time being proud that Troy remembered that Virgil had been Dante's guide to the Underworld and thinking that Leia would be a good influence on Troy.

But what kind of influence had he been on her?

And what had Leia seen on her odyssey to Poughkeepsie? Something that Troy didn't want anyone to know about? Something worth killing Leia to keep secret?

I read Troy's story over twice, looking for some clue, while the wind wailed outside like a pack of Furies bent on vengeance. A cold draft snaked in through the curtains. I went to draw them closed and found a horrible, grimacing face staring back at me from the glass. Even when
I saw that it was only a pattern etched in ice my heart still pounded. It looked like the ice hag had pressed her face against the window and left her icy impression on the glass. I thought of what Hannah had told Joe about seeing the ghost wandering the woods behind my house. The reason it had frightened me so much was that it made an awful sort of sense. The ice hag was a bereaved mother who had taken her life in her grief. Why should I survive the death of my child? What was I still doing here, the wild wind demanded of me as I climbed the stairs, which groaned under my feet as if the very house resented my presence. Why was I inside, safe and warm, while Emmy and Leia were dead and Troy was out there in the cold?
Gone to ground
, his father had said, like a hunted animal.

It was that last thought that haunted me through the night. No matter what Troy might have done I still hated the thought of him outside on a night like this. Whenever I drifted off to sleep I dreamed of him wandering through a driving blizzard like Kristoff and Anna in
Frozen
and I would startle awake, shivering in my drafty house.

In the morning I called Joe to ask if he had found Troy or heard anything. He hadn't. I told him about Troy's story and the locations in Poughkeepsie he mentioned. “Maybe he's hiding down there.”

“I'll check it out,” he said, “but don't you get any ideas of looking for him. That's a pretty dicey neighborhood around Noah's—and there's a snowstorm coming tonight.”

“I wouldn't begin to know where to look,” I said. “I'll leave that to you.”

When I got off the phone I realized I hadn't asked about Ross. Was that because I didn't want to bring up my ex-lover with Joe? Ridiculous, I told myself. As if it would matter to Joe McAffrey. I considered calling him back to ask if he'd heard anything about Ross but then realized that was even more ridiculous. I could call the hospital myself—although they might not tell me anything over the phone—

Or I could go there. Vassar Brothers was only a half-hour drive away. I had my car back. I didn't have anything else to do and I didn't relish
the idea of lingering around the house listening to the wind shrieking and imagining the ice hag lurking around my windows.

The ice hag had done a number on my car. There was an inch of ice coating the windows and the lock was frozen. I had to pour hot water over the keyhole and the seams of the door to get into the car and then run the engine with the defrost on high and scrape the windows for twenty minutes. I considered giving up and going back inside, hunkering down by the woodstove.
With a glass of Glenlivet
, the ice hag whispered in my ear.

I'm laying off
, I countered.

Then why haven't you poured the rest of it down the drain?
she jeered back.

I kept scraping to drown out the voice. When I was finally about to drive the car I took the turn at the bottom of Orchard too fast and skidded onto River Road. Luckily the road was empty.

There wasn't much more traffic on Route 9. People were staying off the roads on this frigid Sunday between Christmas and New Year's. Or maybe it was the gathering storm clouds over the Catskills that were keeping people off the roads. With little or no traffic I got to Vassar Brothers in less than half an hour. I parked in the visitors' lot and hurried into the building. The lobby had the sad look of public places after Christmas, the artificial Christmas tree beginning to droop, the smiles of volunteers, with their holly pins and reindeer sweaters, strained. Who wanted to be in a hospital at Christmastime?

“Mr. Ballantine has been moved out of intensive care but he can only have one visitor at a time and there's someone with him now,” a woman with short silver hair in a red sweater set and plaid pants told me.

“It's probably a colleague of ours from work,” I said. “Couldn't I go up and wait outside the room?”

“I suppose . . . since it's so quiet.” She gave me directions to his room that I immediately forgot when I got off the elevator. Why were hospitals so confusing? I wondered, walking down a hall with a green stripe
on the floor—presumably to guide the way—and generic photographs of cheerful landscapes and happy children. I'd gone to visit my father almost every day when he'd been in the hospital and I'd still gotten lost in the hallways. They all looked alike. And they all smelled like death.

What finally led me to Ross's room was a familiar voice—“and you're not to worry about the house. I went by this morning and set the taps to drip and opened the cabinets under the sinks so the pipes won't freeze. And I called Charlie Maynard to come by and clear the ice dams in your gutters. They say the temperature will remain in the single digits through New Year's—the river is almost entirely frozen.”

I followed this companionable chatter to a private room, where I found Dottie sitting beside Ross's bed, her hands working busily knitting a colorful afghan square. Ross's eyes were closed and his mouth was covered by plastic tubing. I couldn't tell if he was conscious or not.

“Dottie?” I said softly as I came into the room.

“Nan! Look, Ross, Nan is here. I told you she'd come.”

Ross's eyes flickered open. They were an alarming shade of red. I moved quickly to his side and took his hand. “You're awake,” I said. “You gave me quite a scare.” I felt like I was reading from a script, a stupid smile pasted to my face. He responded with a soft moan.

“Does he have to have that thing over his mouth?” I asked Dottie.

“Until they're sure his lungs are working all right.”

I turned back to Ross. “Do you remember what happened?” I asked.

He nodded, then grimaced at the pain the motion must have caused. “You're tiring him,” Dottie said, tugging at my sleeve. “The doctor said he shouldn't be stressed.”

I pulled Dottie a few feet from the bed and whispered in her ear. “I need to know if he tried to kill himself.”

“Why?” she cried. “Why can't you leave it?” I'd never heard Dottie sound so upset.

I took her hand. “If he didn't do it to himself then someone tried to kill him.”

“Kill Ross? Why would anyone . . .” Dottie's eyes grew wide. “You mean if he knew who killed Leia?”

“Yes.”

“But who?”

I considered telling her what Joe suspected. She saw the doubt in my face. “I see. You still don't trust me because it was my fault it got out about Ross and Abbie—but I
had
to tell Abbie that Ross was a suspect—”

“Of course you did, Dottie. It's not that. It's just that it's a police investigation and I'm not sure what I'm supposed to tell.” Then I recalled Troy giving Dottie the finger and realized that if I didn't tell her and something happened to her I would never forgive myself. “Sergeant McAffrey thinks it might have been Troy Van Donk.”

Doubt flickered across Dottie's face, her loyalty to Troy's father warring against Troy's insult to her. Loyalty won out. “I don't believe it of Troy,” she said firmly.

“Well, then I'd better ask Ross what he remembers because Sergeant McAffrey is out looking for Troy right now.”

We went back to Ross's bed. His eyes were closed. I was afraid he'd drifted off while Dottie and I conferred, but his eyes struggled open when I took his hand.

“Ross, I need to know what happened to you. Can you answer some questions?”

Instead of nodding he lifted his other hand, pinched his thumb to his forefinger, and waved it in the air. It took me a second to realize he was miming the motion of writing. I dug in my bag for a piece of paper, but Dottie had already pulled out a small memo pad with a quilt design on the cover. She braced the pad up under Ross's hand and gave him a pen. Ross's face tensed with concentration as he moved the pen across the page. I felt a pang recalling the ease with which he'd signed his name at bookstore signings, but then, as he wrote, I saw his face relax. This was what Ross loved—writing, telling a story.

He might have been penning his memoirs from the exhaustion on his face when he at last dropped the pen and pushed the pad away. I took the pad from Dottie with a shaking hand. Would he confess that guilt over his affair with Leia had driven him to try suicide? Would he name Troy as his attacker? I looked down at the page. For a moment I thought I was so nervous that I'd lost the ability to read. But then I heard Dottie gasp.

“It doesn't make any sense at all,” she whispered, her eyes filling with tears. “It's all gibberish!”

I
t took me ten minutes of walking around in a blur to find my car in the parking lot. That Ross, a brilliant and eloquent literary man, had been reduced to writing in gibberish struck me cold with horror. It had been one of my worst nightmares—before I learned what nightmares really were—that something would happen to my hands and I would be unable to use a pen or type. But this—writing gibberish—was worse. And it wasn't just the writing. When I asked him point-blank if it had been Troy who had led him to the garage he stared at me with vacant eyes. Would he ever regain his faculties? What would become of him if he didn't? I couldn't imagine Ross without the ability to write.

By the time I found the car I was weeping loudly and openly. I could barely see to navigate my way out of the lot and onto the streets of Poughkeepsie where the falling snow limited my vision even further. I headed north toward Route 9 but after a few blocks realized I must have missed the entrance. I was in a neighborhood of modest two-story houses that had once been beautiful Victorians but now featured discolored aluminum siding and sagging porches. I could make out Route 9 below me to the left and beyond that the frozen river. I kept going, assuming that I'd eventually come to an entrance. I passed an apartment complex named for Harriet Tubman and then a
desolate-looking park. I crossed an arterial thoroughfare that had been built in the '70s and, according to an urban planning lecture I'd once attended, gutted downtown Poughkeepsie, hastening the decline of the city from the days when it was a thriving ferry and train destination. Despite its neighborhoods of once beautiful Victorian houses, a major train station, and nearby colleges (Vassar was west of the city, and Marist College and the Culinary Institute of America just north of it), the city had one of the highest crime and welfare rates in the state. It was no place to get lost in—but that's what I was. Every time I tried to head toward the river I was turned back by a one-way street. I passed an abandoned establishment called Spanky's and a church building with crackled paint that reminded me of the rectory in
The Exorcist
. I saw the train station and headed there, figuring I could ask someone how to get back to 9, but then an outlandish figure loomed up ahead out of the snow—a bare-breasted woman with hair blown back and skirts flapping in the wind. I skidded to a stop and stared at her. It was a ship's figurehead, carved out of wood and painted in bright colors. She was mounted to the brick façade of a river-facing building as if to a ship's prow, breasting the snow as she once might have parted the waves. She was a strange sight in these derelict streets, but the reason I stopped was that there was something familiar about her, something I should remember . . .

The Sea Witch.
She was the ship's figurehead Troy had described in his story, above the bar he called Circe's Den. This bar was called Noah's Ark, but it had to be the same place. How many antique ships' figureheads could there be in downtown Poughkeepsie? I stared at her through the swirling snow as if she were a landmark pointing the way home.

But what home? The empty, haunted house I'd been rattling around in since Emmy died? What did I have there but a few frail memories of Emmy? I wouldn't have a job much longer—my one real supporter lay in a stupor, unable to string letters into words. My reputation was ruined at Acheron—and even if it weren't, what business did I have there? I'd prided myself on being a good teacher—on being the kind
of teacher who cared about her students—and look what had come of that. I'd run Leia off when she came to me for help. I'd ignored the obvious signs that Troy was involved in a dangerous drug world—why, he'd practically drawn me a map of his downward spiral into hell and I'd treated it like a goddamned literary metaphor! I didn't deserve to be a teacher anymore.

I wiped my eyes with my coat sleeve, then swiped at the windshield, which had fogged over during my sobbing. Yes, the Sea Witch was pointing home—I could make out a sign for 9 North just beyond the bar. I put the car in drive and began to pull into the road . . .

When a familiar-looking figure came out of the bar. Skinny legs, pointy shoes, vintage tweed coat, porkpie hat—it was the Aging Hipster I'd seen on the Loop bus and walking in the woods with Troy. He paused in the doorway, pulled his collar up around his scrawny neck, and lit a cigarette. I guess even Noah's Ark obeyed the state no-smoking law. I stared at him, wondering how many drugs he'd sold my students. He was looking up and down the street, his eyes lingering on my headlights for a minute but then returning to the sidewalk. As if he were looking for someone. A drug connection? I had half a mind to get out of the car and tell him what I thought of him—