River Road (3 page)

When I came back the cop was standing at the kitchen counter looking at the bourbon bottle. I wanted to explain that I hadn't had any when I got home last night but then that would sound like I
usually
had a drink when I got home, so I said nothing. He straightened up when I came into the room. His head almost touched the low farmhouse ceiling. I cleared off the nicest chair for him and sat down on the couch,
pulling the afghan over my lap. “Why do you think it's Leia?” I asked. “Because of her ID? You know they all use fake IDs to drink at the Black Swan.”

“I'm familiar with the underage drinking problem at the Swan,” he said. He was still standing. Looking up at him was making me feel sick again. “But I'm afraid there's no doubt about the identity of the girl. Your department head identified her this morning.”

“Ross?” My voice sounded shrill and foreign. “My God, he must be devastated. Leia was his favorite student—mine too. Was he absolutely sure?”

“Dr. Ballantine made a positive ID and verified that Ms. Dawson was at his residence last night for the faculty Christmas party. You were there too.”

I looked up at him, not sure if it was a question or a statement. “Would you please sit down? I promise the chair is cleaner than it looks.”

He blushed, which made him look younger—maybe he
had
been in one of my classes. There was a criminal justice program at the college that local cops took sometimes, but it clearly wasn't the right time to ask him. “Yes, I was at the party. I saw Leia in the kitchen talking to Ross.”

Leia, swiveling her swanlike neck as I burst in, spilling red wine onto Ross's wrist, her big blue eyes wide and startled. Those blue eyes that stood out even more since she'd cut her waist-length black hair short at Thanksgiving. She'd lost weight too, and there were dark rings under her eyes, which I'd assumed came from late-night studying. I covered my mouth at the image of those eyes frozen in a death stare. Could it really be true? Was Leia really dead? I found a tissue in my cardigan pocket and wiped my eyes. “But Dottie said she was driving her home.”

“Ms. Cooper apparently was unable to locate her and assumed she'd gotten a lift from someone else. She suggested you as a possibility since you left shortly after Ms. Cooper saw Leia leaving the kitchen. Do you remember what time that was?”

“When I saw Leia in the kitchen?” I was shaking my head, but then I recalled the view out Ross's kitchen window. You couldn't see the
river from his house but there was a beautiful view of the Catskills on the other side. A couple of students had been sitting on the stone wall next to the old barn Ross used as a garage, black silhouettes against the setting sun, except one who stood out because her red leather jacket caught the sun and glowed like a burning ember.

“The sun was going down over the mountains,” I said, “so what time is sunset these days? Four thirty? I left soon after and it was dusk when I was driving home. You know how it's hard to see at dusk. A deer ran right in front of my car on the bend before Orchard Drive—”

“You didn't see Ms. Dawson walking on River Road when you left Dr. Ballantine's residence?”

“No. If I had I would have offered her a lift. She's one of my favorite students—” I gasped, all of Leia's bright future rising up in front of me—the prizes, the MFA, the novels she would never write now—how was it possible that all of that could be extinguished overnight? “I'm sorry,” I said when I could talk again. “This is a lot to take in. You say she was hit on River Road? But she wasn't found until this morning? Who . . . ?”

“A plow driver. He saw her boots sticking up out of the snow—”

I pictured bright yellow rain boots, but no, Leia had worn red cowboy boots. And a red leather jacket. A tough-girl look she'd affected since she had started teaching at the prison.

“She was lying in three inches of snow and covered with a foot more so we think she was hit after it started snowing—around five p.m.”

“It wasn't snowing when I left the party,” I said, “or when I hit the deer. It started snowing later, when I was in the woods.”

“In the woods?”

“Yes, I went to look for the deer.”

He smiled for the first time since I'd opened my door to him. Two curved lines, like parentheses, framed his wide mouth when he smiled, making his whole face look softer. “Why?” he asked.

“Sorry . . . ?”

“Why'd you go look for the deer?”

“In case it was hurt.”

“And what would you have done if you'd found it?”

“Um . . . I'm not sure . . . I just had to see. . . .”

“And did you find it?”

“No,” I admitted. “So I suppose it was okay.”

“Uh-huh,” he said, flipping open a notepad. “So you say it started snowing when you were in the woods and then you went back to your car when you didn't find the deer?”

First I sat down in the snow and had myself a little cry and a nap.
“I hiked around a bit.”

“In those?” He bent his eyes down to the floor where I'd kicked off the velvet ballet slippers I'd worn to the party last night. I picked them up. They were still damp. Ruined.

“I guess it wasn't very practical of me but I felt bad.”

“About the deer?”

“Yeah, I didn't even see her—”

“You didn't
see
the deer?” He looked up from his notebook, eyes narrowing, jaw hardening. “Then how do you know it
was
a deer?”

He held my gaze. His eyes, which I'd taken for black at first, were actually a deep brown with flecks of gold in them. Looking into them was like staring into those eddies of snow through my windshield last night. Dizzying and cold. I drew the afghan up over my chest.

“I meant, I didn't see it until it was right in front of my car and then it was too late to stop. It's dark on the river road. The town ought to put up lights on it. I always tell my students not to walk on it at night. Poor Leia—”

“And you came right home after looking for the deer?”

“Yes. I couldn't get up my driveway so I parked in the turnaround. I went to sleep early.”
I didn't even have a drink
. “I'd had a long day—teaching, holding office hours, then the party. . . .”

“And how much did you have to drink at the party?”

He slipped the question in so stealthily that I was already saying
“Not much, a glass or two” before I could stop myself. “Why? Why are you asking me that?”

He looked up, his face carefully blank. “We've had a hit and run, Ms. Lewis. Hit and
run
. That means the driver didn't stop, didn't report it, left Ms. Dawson to die on the side of the road. We're looking for the driver. You were driving home around the time Leia Dawson was hit. Your car was left on the side of the road with visible damage to the front left bumper. You were drinking—”

“Only a glass!”

“Or two.”

“I hit a deer.”

“That you didn't see and couldn't find.”

I stared at him. He wasn't smiling now. His mouth was hard, his eyes unreadable. “Should I call a lawyer?”

He shrugged, his shoulders rolling under his jacket with a smoothness that suggested a hidden reserve of strength. “That depends”—he put his notepad away, braced his hands on his knees, and leaned forward to get up—“on what we find on your car.”

*  *  *

I pulled on rubber boots over my bare feet and followed him down my unplowed driveway and across the road to the turnaround through shin-deep snow. We'd gotten over a foot. The snow lay on the top and trunk of my car, but had been cleared off the hood. A narrow strip had been shoveled around the front tires, where a police officer knelt taking pictures. In the bright sunlight the damage looked worse than it had last night, the left side of the hood crumpled. A flatbed tow truck was idling on Orchard Drive, its exhaust pluming blue in the cold, still air.

“You're going to take my car?”

“After the initial forensics, yes—”

“Don't you need a warrant to confiscate my property?”

“A damaged car in the vicinity of a hit and run constitutes probable
cause.” The cop smiled at me. “I learned that at your college in Intro to Criminal Justice.”

“I'm calling my lawyer,” I said, taking my cell phone out of my pocket.

“That's probably wise, Ms. Lewis,” he said more kindly, which scared me worse than when he'd been mean. “And look, if we find deer fur and blood and no trace of Leia Dawson on your car you'll be in the clear.”

My stomach turned at the words
trace of Leia Dawson.
He must have seen it on my face.

“We just want to find the person who hit that girl and left her for dead in the road. You of all people must understand that.” His face softened and he looked like he was going to say something else, but then the other police officer called his name—
Joe—
and as he turned I suddenly remembered him. He was the officer who'd responded when Emmy was hit.

He said excuse me—he'd been polite that morning too—and walked toward the cop who was crouched in front of my left front tire. As he knelt down next to the cop, I remembered him kneeling beside me on the road all those years ago. The paramedics wanted to take Emmy but I was still holding her hand. The police officer—
Joe
—had knelt down beside me in the mud and laid his hand over mine. I remembered that the warmth of his flesh had shocked me and that when I turned to him his face had been as white as Emmy's.
Why, he's so young
, I'd thought,
only a boy himself.

He was leaning forward now, looking at something in a plastic bag that the other cop was holding up for him. When he got up all of the softness in his face was gone and he looked like he'd aged way more than six years since that morning when he'd knelt down beside me in the mud.

“You're going to have to come down to the station now, ma'am.”

“But why? I told you, I hit a deer.”

“We've found blood and white wool fibers in your tire. The fibers look like a match for the scarf Leia Dawson was wearing last night.”

M
cAffrey let me get my coat and make a phone call but when I asked if I could shower and change he said he'd prefer I didn't, his face hard, no trace of the young officer who'd comforted a bereaved mother.

“Can I at least go to the bathroom?” I asked, feeling like a child. A scared child.

He nodded, embarrassed, and blushed when I plucked my bra out of the sofa cushions. I did too, but I didn't want to sit in a police station without a bra.

I called my college roommate, Anat Greenberg, who was a lawyer with a practice in Poughkeepsie, from the bathroom. She made me repeat everything twice. I could hear McAffrey shifting his weight over a creaky floorboard on the other side of the door.

“So he hasn't arrested you?” Anat asked.

“No. No one's read me my rights or anything.”

“Okay, so they must not have enough evidence. Listen, Nan, there's a lot of pressure in these cases to make an arrest. Don't answer any questions until I get there.”

I told her I wouldn't and flushed the toilet even though I'd been too nervous to pee. Then I ran cold water over my hands until they stopped shaking. I wished I could brush my teeth but the brush was in the upstairs bathroom.

When I stepped out I saw McAffrey had retreated to the living room. He was standing at the desk underneath the window that looked out over the front lawn. It was piled high with books and folders. I hadn't sat at that desk since the day Emmy died. He looked up from a copy of
The Odyssey
I'd used in the Great Books class I'd taught this semester and it was on the tip of my tongue to make a comment—like,
do you like Greek literature?
—but when I saw his face I closed my mouth. The time for idle pleasantries had passed when he saw that blood on my tires.

He motioned for me to walk in front of him and I followed him down my unplowed driveway to his patrol car. He opened the back door for me and I got in, feeling like a suspect in a cop show. I stared through the thick bulletproof glass barrier between the front and back seats and felt like I was underwater looking up through a glaze of ice. When I looked out the side window I saw that my car was already gone. He made a U-turn in the turnaround, drove down the steep hill, and made a right on River Road, heading toward town. A flash of yellow caught my eye as we turned. I looked back through the rear window and saw another police car and yellow tape flapping from the old stone wall. I stared at it until the road curved and I couldn't see it anymore. When I turned back in my seat I caught McAffrey's eyes watching me in the rearview mirror.

“Is that where you found Leia?” I asked.

“Uh-huh.” His voice was flat. He was still looking at me in the mirror, studying me as if expecting me to break down at the scene of the crime.

“That's where Emmy died,” I said.

“I remember,” he said. “It's a bad curve. Poor visibility. People take it too fast. Maybe you came around it too fast and didn't see Ms. Dawson—”

“It was a deer!” I said, shutting my eyes so I didn't have to see the cold look in his eyes. I felt that horrible
thump
and saw the white underbelly of the deer flying toward me. It had looked like a long white scarf—like the one Leia had been wearing.
Could it have been Leia I hit?

But no, I'd looked up and down the road for the deer.
Hadn't I?
I
remembered that I'd been a little unsteady on my feet. But I hadn't been drunk. I'd have seen Leia lying on the road. And when I came back—

When I came back the ground was covered with snow, so much snow that I'd barely gotten out of the ditch—