River Road (4 page)

The patrol car came to a sudden stop and I remembered the lurch of my car last night and the grinding noise it had made when I backed out of the ditch. Bile rose in my throat. I opened my eyes and met McAffrey's gaze in the mirror.

“I think I know what happened,” I said.

*  *  *

Although Anat had warned me not to talk until she got there I could barely wait until we were in the interview room to tell my story to Sergeant McAffrey and his colleague Detective Stan Haight, a heavy man with a thick mustache who
did
look young enough to be one of my students. I wanted to clear everything up. I wanted to erase that flat, cold look in McAffrey's eyes.

“When I pulled off the road after hitting the deer I went into the ditch. My left tire cleared the ditch but my right tire was stuck in it.” I demonstrated with my hands how the car had come to rest unevenly. “When I came back from looking for the deer the ground was covered with snow. I could barely get my car out—the left tire went into the ditch. . . .” I swallowed hard to keep down the bile that rose every time I thought about that sickening lurch and horrible grinding sound. “Don't you see, Leia was
in
the ditch. I ran over her backing out.”

I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand and looked around for a box of tissues. There was none. There was nothing useful or comforting in this room. The fever-yellow paint was water-stained and peeling. There was an old poster about AIDS prevention. The air smelled like sweat and burnt coffee. The two men across the scarred table stared blankly at me for a moment and then exchanged a quick look—some kind of prearranged signal that indicated who should talk. Detective Haight won.

“Let me get this straight,” he said, spreading his hands out, palms up. “You're saying that after you hit”—he made air quotes with his fingers—“ ‘the deer' you pulled over into a ditch. Then you went into the woods to look for the deer, which you didn't find, and while you were in the woods someone
else
hit Leia Dawson in the same exact location. She landed
under
your front left tire. When you came back you didn't see her because so much snow had fallen and you backed up over her?”

He leaned a little closer to me with each emphasized word until his face was only inches from mine and I could smell stale coffee and something sweet, like maple syrup, on his breath. I had to force myself not to push my chair back to get away from the smell, which was making me feel even sicker.

“Yes,” I said, “I know it sounds . . . unlikely.” The right side of Detective Haight's mouth twitched in a poorly suppressed sneer. “But that's what must have happened. I hit a deer, not Leia. I
looked
for the deer. If Leia had been lying there I'd have seen her.”

“Because there wasn't any snow on the ground when you went into the woods,” Sergeant McAffrey said almost gently.

“Right.”

“But there was so much snow on the ground when you came back that Leia Dawson's body was covered by it?” Detective Haight asked.

“Yes. It started snowing when I went into the woods.”

“And how long were you in the woods?” Haight asked.

“I-I'm not sure. I sat down for a bit.”

“You sat down?” Haight asked, his eyes sliding toward his colleague. But McAffrey didn't meet his amused glance. He was staring straight at me, a look of sorrow on his face, as if I'd personally disappointed him. The look I'd wanted to banish from his face had only set harder, like quick-drying cement. I remembered now that when he'd looked up from Emmy's body and met my eyes he'd told me he was going to find the bastard who had done this.

“I was tired,” I said. “It had been a long day. Finals, conferencing with students, the faculty party . . .”

“Where you'd had how much to drink?”

“Just a glass.”

“Or two,” McAffrey added. I was beginning to think maybe I shouldn't have spoken until Anat got here.

“I don't think I should answer any more questions until my lawyer gets here.”

Detective Haight made a sound in the back of his throat—something between a snort and a guffaw. “Your call, Ms. Lewis. Interview terminated . . .” He said the time into the tape recorder and pushed his chair back from the table. The metal legs dragging over the linoleum floor sounded like the underbelly of my car scraping against the ground last night and this time I could almost see Leia's blood smearing over the snow.

*  *  *

McAffrey led me back through the waiting room. I looked to see if Anat had arrived but instead I saw Kelsey Manning shifting her two-hundred-dollar-a-pair True Religion jeans–clad behind in a cheap plastic chair, chewing the ends of her waist-length ironed hair.

“Professor Lewis, what are you doing here?”

I could have asked her the same thing. Earlier today she had made it sound like she had to get off campus before the final so she could leave for Vail. “I'm just—”

“Aiding the police in our inquiries,” McAffrey smoothly supplied. I stared at him, surprised he was trying to spare me the embarrassment of telling my student I was a suspect.

“Really? Did you see it happen? Can you give me a quote?” She turned to McAffrey. “I work for
Vox Pop
, that's our campus paper, it means—”

“Voice of the People,” McAffrey said. “I took eight years of Latin. And I'm familiar with the campus paper. I read the piece on ‘police brutality' when we detained one of your classmates for trying to buy liquor with a fake ID.”

“Oops,” Kelsey said with an engaging smile and a tilt of her slim
hips. “Our bad. But I didn't write that. I know that boy—he's an ass. Can you give me a quote, Officer”—she stood on tiptoe to read McAffrey's brass name tag—“McCafferty. I'll make sure I spell your name right and make you look good.”

“Sergeant
McAffrey
doesn't need you to make him look good,” I told Kelsey. “When my daughter was killed in a hit and run six years ago he found who did it. He'll find who did this too.”

Kelsey's eyes widened and she licked her shiny gelled lips. “Is that why you're here, Professor Lewis, because you have a personal connection to the tragedy? Do you think it could be the same person who did it? Like a serial drunk driver?”

“That's enough,” McAffrey barked. “Ms. Lewis is here to answer our questions, not yours.”

He placed his hand on my elbow and propelled me forward. I saw Kelsey's eyes, which I thought were as wide as three coats of Maybelline could get them, widen to the size of manga princess proportions. When I looked back I saw her bent over her phone, furiously double-thumb typing.

*  *  *

“For a college professor you're pretty stupid,” McAffrey said when he brought me to a windowless room that looked like it was once a supply closet.

“I beg your pardon!”

“You gave that girl all the ammunition she needed to write a damning story about you.”

“I was just trying to speak up for you.”

“As you said, I don't need anyone to make me look good. You're the one in deep shit here, Ms. Lewis. That story about going into the woods and falling asleep while Leia was hit by someone else—” He shook his head, his jaw clenched so tight I could see the muscle throb. Then he turned on his heel and walked out the door, slamming it behind him.

*  *  *

Anat came half an hour later. “I told you not to talk until I got here,” she said firmly after giving me a hug. Anat had spent her summers in Israel and her winters in the Bronx. Her curly brown hair had started going gray at thirty and she refused to color it on principle. The white streaks, flaring out from her temples, made her look like an avenging comic-book action figure. She'd spent most of our time together in college telling me I thought too well of people. She'd stopped that after Emmy died.

“When I realized what must have happened I thought I could clear everything up,” I said. She rolled her eyes. “I see now that was a mistake.”

Her lip quirked, she tried to rein it in, but lost the battle and snorted.
I see now that was a mistake
was what we'd say to each other after misspent nights mixing tequila and rum.

“Okay,” she said more gently. “Tell me this story.”

I told her what I'd told McAffrey and Haight. She made me repeat it twice, then she repeated it back to me. She didn't use air quotes or ironic emphasis but I could tell she wasn't happy. “It's a big coincidence,” she pointed out, “and I don't like the time lapse in the woods. It sounds like you passed out drunk—” Her eyes slid away from me and I remembered that the last time we'd gotten together I'd had a few too many glasses of wine over dinner.
Hey, we're not in college anymore!
she'd joked, but the next time she'd called she had asked if maybe I shouldn't
rein it in
a bit. I'd told her that it was just being with her that had made me have those few extra . . . memories of our misspent youth and she'd laughed. But now I saw a flicker of doubt in her eyes as she looked back at me. “How much
did
you have to drink?”

“One, maybe two glasses of wine. I wasn't drunk; I was tired and angry.” I told her about not getting tenure.

“That sucks, Nan. I know how much you love teaching. But they'll make out you drank more because you were pissed.”

“Who will make out?” I asked, my skin feeling icy. “Do you think
they're going to arrest me? Won't they leave me alone when they find out who really hit Leia?”

“
If
they find the real perpetrator. Right now they think they've got her. Look,” she added, seeing the tears in my eyes, “I'm going to go talk to the boys in charge. Stay put”—her eyes roved around the room, lighting on a stack of toner cartons—“and try to stay out of trouble.”

She was gone forty minutes. I wished I'd brought papers to grade or a book to read. I tried getting internet on my phone but there was no cell phone service and the police Wi-Fi was password protected. I scrolled through old phone messages. I'd gotten five calls this morning—one from Ross, one from Cressida, three from Dottie.

When Anat came back her face looked grim but she put on a smile for me. “I've got good news and bad news,” she said. She didn't ask me which I wanted to hear first. “The good news is they're releasing you. As I pointed out to the hunky Sergeant McAffrey, the evidence is circumstantial. The forensic evidence isn't in yet. They haven't gotten back the DNA report on the blood or analysis of Leia's clothing. The fibers they found in the tires could have gotten there anywhere, anytime. They don't have a witness to the hit and run, you have no previous offenses, and you're an upstanding member of the college community who suffered her own tragedy in this very town.”

I nodded at each point feeling a small glimmer of hope prickling my skin. I noticed that she hadn't said anything about my story or the likelihood that the blood on my tires
would
match Leia Dawson's. “What's the bad news?” I asked.

The smile disappeared from Anat's face. “The bad news is they have a witness from the faculty party who says you were drunk and belligerent and that you were heard coming out of the kitchen yelling at your department chair that if you couldn't teach anymore you might as well go drive to the Kingston Bridge and throw yourself in the river.”

“I
didn't mean it,” I said for the fourth or fifth time on the drive back to my house.

“I should hope not,” Anat said, her eyes fixed to the road as she took each icy curve like a personal affront. “Because it would be a shitty thing to do to the people who love you. It would be a shitty thing to do to
me
. It's not like I didn't worry after Emmy . . . and then when Evan left and then the last time I saw you I noticed that you were drinking more . . .”

“I haven't. I swear I didn't have that much to drink. Two glasses tops.” It was true I'd only filled my glass two times, but hadn't Cressida topped off my glass when she was telling me about the tenure decision? I'd been so upset I hadn't been paying attention.

Anat didn't reply. I thought because she didn't believe me, but then I noticed she was leaning forward in her seat and slowing down. “Is that it?” she asked. “Is that where it happened?”

A scrap of yellow still fluttered from the stone wall but the police car was gone. “Yes, it's where Emmy was hit too.”

“Damn, the town should lower the speed limit, put up a sign.”

I didn't point out that she'd been driving ten miles over the limit. She pulled over to the shoulder, put on her flashers, and got out. “Come on,” she called when I didn't get out right away. “Walk me through it.”

The last thing I wanted to do was stand in that spot that had claimed Emmy and now Leia. Maybe it was cursed. Maybe all the traffic signs and blinking lights in the world couldn't stop people from dying here. But I followed Anat because I knew she would stand there, hands on hips, shivering in her thin suit jacket, until I did.

“Show me what happened,” she ordered.

I started walking around the curve but a car came around going too fast and I stepped into the ditch, hugging the stone wall. I noticed a SUNY Acheron sticker on the sports car as it sped up River Road. Students blowing out of town for the winter break.

“Shit,” Anat swore, “this is a death trap.”

I shivered at the expression but agreed. “You can't see anything until you come around the wall there. The deer leapt out from the opposite side of the road. I didn't see it until I hit it. Then I pulled over to the side . . . here . . . I almost hit the wall.” I showed her how my tires had angled in the ditch, trying not to look
in
the ditch. Would there still be blood? The thought of Leia lying there made my knees weak. I looked instead at the stone wall and saw that someone had swept away the snow and placed a candle there. It was one of those saint candles they sold in the Mexican grocery in town. Something yellow fluttered next to it—an offering at the shrine—but it wasn't police tape as I'd first thought. I took a step closer, my boots sinking into the snow, and saw that it was a bouquet of yellow daffodils.