River Road (30 page)

“I know. I saw it last night and came up here to make sure you were
okay. When I saw that your door had been forced open I knew something bad had happened. I thought it was Troy.”

“You'll look for him, right?”

“I'll put out an APB. The snow's stopped.” He was standing at my desk looking out the window. I came to stand next to him. He put his arm around my waist without turning around, as if he knew where I was without having to look. “But it looks like we got over three feet. It will be at least a day before the town's dug out. Hard to organize a search operation but we'll get snowmobiles out there to cover the woods and riverbank. Amtrak will have crews digging out the tracks. We'll coordinate with them.” I could see the police officer in him coming to life, ticking off the business he had to attend to. “I'll alert the coast guard to watch out for bodies—but I'm afraid it may be until spring before we find Scully—” He turned to me, the businesslike look on his face softening. “And Troy. I know you don't want to think he's dead.”

“I keep thinking about his father.”

“I'll go talk to Van first thing I'm dug out—or rather, second thing. First thing is to get you to the hospital and get those ribs taped up and your fingers splinted. You'd better stay here while I go down to the road.”

“No way. I didn't like waiting for you last night. I can help dig out.”

I started moving away but he pressed me closer to him and kissed me. The look in his eyes was so heated I expected a romantic declaration. Instead he asked, “Do you have any Ace bandages?”

I laughed and went to find some. Evan used to keep a roll in the same gym bag I'd taken the sweats out of. Joe used it to splint my fingers and tape my ribs. It made me feel like a mummy, but it hurt less when I moved and I was able to put mittens on over my hands and follow him outside.

The sky was the brilliant cobalt blue you only see after a big snowstorm. Although it was cold—my porch thermometer read 19 degrees—the air was still and dry. The snow was powdery, easily moved
aside by the shovels I'd luckily kept on my porch since last year's snows. Still it took us a good hour to shovel a path down to Orchard Drive, where Joe's police cruiser sat under a drift of snow. It was parked at a crazy angle that revealed how rushed he'd been to find me when he saw my car abandoned in the turnaround. It was lucky he had seen it. The turnaround wasn't visible from here at all.

“Hey, Joe,” I called to him, “how did you see my car in the turnaround from here? It's completely blocked by the angle of the wall.”

“I didn't.” He was half in the car, reaching for the radio that squawked when he took it off its holder, so I thought I might have misheard him.

“But you said you saw my car.”

“I did, but not from here. I was coming down from the top of Orchard— Hello? Dispatch? This is Sergeant McAffrey.” Joe rattled off some numbers and codes as he slid into the car, giving a report of where he was and why. His face had taken on the rapt attentiveness of someone who's good at his job. I found that instead of feeling excluded I liked watching him, but then I thought I should give him some privacy. I walked up the road a bit, through knee-high snow, past where it curved. When I turned around and looked back I saw the back fender of my car sticking up out of the snow. Joe would have easily seen my car there last night before the storm buried it. Which had been lucky.

“Nan?”

I turned around and found Cressida standing behind me. She was on skis, wearing the sleek Nordic outfit she'd had on the other day and a patterned wool headband holding back her blond braids.

“Cressida, you're out early. Did you ski down from your house?”

“It was the only way to get out. I was coming to see that you were all right—and to say I was sorry about the things I said the other night.”

I felt a surge of gratitude. Outfitted in her Nordic skiing outfit, Cressida looked like an avenging Valkyrie. “You don't have to apologize. You were right—I have been drinking too much. I'm going to cut back.
It was kind of you to come check on me, but I'm okay. Joe—Sergeant McAffrey—is here.” I pointed down the road to where Joe sat in his cruiser, still talking on the radio.

“Did something happen?” Cressida asked. “Are you all right?”

The story came spilling out. Cressida listened without comment, her expression unreadable behind her dark sunglasses. Given the way Troy had yelled at her in her office a few days ago, I thought she would tell me that Troy had gotten what he deserved but she said instead, “That poor boy. No wonder he was acting out when he came to see me. The guilt must have been crippling—so much easier to blame me. You say that Scully person said he was in the river?”

“Yes, but he could have been lying. Joe's organizing a search party with snowmobiles.”

Cressida wrinkled her nose. “So loud—and that will take time to organize. I'll go now on my skis. Do you want to go with me? Your skis are still at my house.”

“I'd love to, only . . .” I was going to tell her I had a broken rib and broken fingers, but with the bandage Joe had put around my chest I felt fine and I couldn't feel my fingers at all. I looked down the hill and saw that Joe had been joined by a state trooper. “Hold on, let me just tell Joe what I'm doing.”

I walked down to Joe's car and told him I was going back with Cressida to look for Troy. “She'll take me to the hospital later to get my rib looked after.”

He looked like he wanted to argue, but the state trooper was waiting so he lowered his voice to an authoritative bass and told me, “You'd better make sure you take care of that rib.” I could tell he was being mock-serious, but the trooper must have thought he was really scolding me.

“I'll do that, Officer,” I said.

“I'll check with you later to make sure you did,” he growled.

I turned around before the state trooper could see me burst out
laughing. It was the first time Joe and I had navigated the outside world and I was reassured that we'd managed it all with a good sense of humor, even if holding in that laughter made my ribs ache by the time I got back to Cressida.

*  *  *

We skied down from Cressida's house, taking the slope as though we were on downhill skis instead of cross-country. Despite the gravity of the situation I felt a surge of excitement swooping down the slope in the bright morning air. Or maybe it was the memory of how Joe had looked at me that had my blood stirring.

The sight of the boathouse and the memory of what happened there last night sobered me.

“I've talked to Abigail Martin about having that place condemned and torn down,” Cressida said as we approached it.

“That would be a shame,” I said as I peered into the open doorway. It was the likeliest place that Troy would have come back to. Enough snow had drifted inside that I could ski across the length of the floor. “It's a historical landmark. It could be converted into a rowing club.”

“Kids would still get high in it.” Cressida had come to stand in front of Leia's self-portrait, staring at it with an unreadable expression. “Is that what this was all about—drugs?”

I began the story of Troy's Poughkeepsie odyssey as we left the boathouse and skied along the riverbank. Cressida was silent throughout and I kept my eyes on the woods and frozen river, looking for Troy. When I finished she still didn't say anything. I looked at her and was surprised to see that her face was wet with tears. It was the first time I'd ever seen her cry.

“Cressida, what is it?”

“Don't you see,” she cried, “it's all my fault.”

I stared at her. “How in the world is it
your
fault?”

“I recruited Leia for the prison initiative program. That's where
she met Shawna—and that must be where she got the idea of trying heroin.”

“I don't know,” I said. “Leia was perfectly capable of coming up with her own ideas. And it was Troy's story that led her to that bar in Poughkeepsie where she ran into Shawna and Scully. So even if she hadn't been teaching at the prison, she would have ended up asking Troy to score for her. And if Shawna hadn't been there—”

“Leia would have gotten the bad heroin and died,” Cressida finished for me.

“I suppose that's possible. And Troy would still have had Leia's death on his conscience.”

“They're like one of those doomed couples from Greek tragedy,” Cressida said, wiping her face. “No matter how they tried to evade their fate they were still destined to end up dead.”

I wanted to argue—to say that we didn't know that Troy was dead—but it was getting harder to believe he had survived the night. We'd come to the edge of the campus without a sign of him or of his drowned body. Another search party was heading toward us from the Peace Garden—three women in long coats wrapped in copious layers of scarves and shawls—plodding across the snow in snowshoes. If we were in a Greek tragedy these would be the chorus of old village women who would keen and tear their hair out in grief for the victims. When they got closer I recognized Dottie, Abigail Martin, and Joan Denning.

“Nan, thank God you're all right!” Dottie cried when she recognized me. “Abbie heard from the police that you were almost killed last night by a drug dealer from Poughkeepsie and that Troy is still missing. We came out to look for him.”

“That's good of you,” I said, looking dubiously at their cumbersome snowshoes. It was hard to imagine them getting very far on them wrapped in their multiple layers.

“I'm not doing it out of the kindness of my heart,” Joan said. “If that boy ran down Leia he needs to be caught. Drowning's too good for him.”

“We don't know for sure that Troy killed Leia,” Dottie said. I could tell from the edge in her voice and from Abigail Martin's pained expression that the two of them must have been having this argument since they began their trek across the snow. “Do we, Nan?” Dottie asked, turning to me.

I must have looked stricken at the question because Dottie's eyes filled with tears.

“See, Dottie, I told you,” Joan said. “That boy's no good. He failed my comp class and was rude to me when I tried to explain what a comma splice is.”

I wanted to tell Joan that poor grammar and rudeness did not make Troy a murderer, but I'd heard enough to have good reason to think that Troy had killed Leia. Instead I said, “Whatever Troy did, he doesn't deserve to freeze to death. Have the dorms been checked? He could have made it to campus and hidden in one of the empty buildings.”

“I have security going through all the buildings,” Abigail replied. “I'll leave it to a court to decide Troy Van Donk's guilt or innocence. I just want to make sure that he and the scum he brought up from Poughkeepsie are off my campus. Thank God it's intersession. Think if we had two criminals at large with a campus full of students! We could have an incident like Virginia Tech on our hands.”

I wanted to point out that Scully was probably hanging around the campus long before he met Troy, but I felt Cressida fidgeting beside me, stamping her skis in the snow. “Let's keep looking,” she suggested. “My muscles will cramp if I cool down.”

“Yes,” Joan said, adjusting a fringed scarf, “I'm not sure how long I can be out here in the cold.”

“Bunch of vultures,” Cressida remarked when we'd skied away.

“What, them? What do you mean?”

“Dottie's all right—and Abbie's only trying to hold on to her job after having her affair with Ross made public—but Joan, did you see how she was
enjoying
this? I've always thought she was jealous of her students.”

“Jealous? Why?”

“Because they have a future, while people like Joan . . . look at her—over fifty, adjuncting at three different colleges. She should have buckled down years ago and either gotten a PhD or teacher's certification and taught high school.”

“She's a good writer,” I said, remembering that a few days ago I'd seen my own dim future in Joan.

“She's a second-rate poet and an even worse prose writer. Did you read the maudlin essay she wrote for the campus magazine? And she always talks about this book she's been working on for years but it's never done. She's a wannabe writer who clings to teaching college classes part-time because it makes her think she's better than a high school teacher, but she's jealous of her students who have more talent than her.”

I winced at the description. She could have been talking about me. “I think we should turn around,” I said. “Troy wouldn't have come this far and I'm getting tired. My ribs and fingers are beginning to ache.” I began the long, laborious process of making a turn, my skis printing a wide fan in the snow. Then I fit my skis in my old tracks and started skiing back. The riverfront was crowded now with searchers: a half-dozen snowmobiles patrolled the woods, a police team led sniffer dogs along the riverbank, and volunteers had set up warming stations with gas stoves and thermoses of hot chocolate. Despite the gravity of the mission, the scene had a festive air. The whole community had come together to look for Troy. I recognized townspeople, faculty, college staff, and students who hadn't gone home for the holiday, many of whom greeted me by name. I was no longer the pariah. By now, a rumor had spread that Troy was responsible for Leia's death, not me. I should have felt glad to be welcomed back into the fold, but when I thought of Troy trapped dead under the ice I could feel no joy.

“You look like you're in pain,” Cressida said when we came back to the boathouse.

“I can't help but feel that it's all my fault. That if I'd just paid attention
to what was going on around me I could have prevented
all
of it—Shawna's overdose, Leia's death, Ross ending up possibly brain damaged, Troy becoming a hunted criminal—if only when Troy handed in that story I had called him aside.”