Summer's Song: Pine Point, Book 1 (17 page)

Again he heard her confession that she’d given T.J. directions. It took all his strength not to punch the nearest solid surface.
I trusted her.
Okay, maybe she hadn’t known who T.J. was. But shouldn’t she have suspected something? Where the hell was woman’s intuition at a time like that?

“What are we doing?” he demanded. “What can I do?”

The cop rested his hands on an ample belly. “Got two patrol cars out in town now. We’ve notified every department between here and Albany to the east, Syracuse to the west.” He cleared his throat. “If you can find a recent picture of your sister, that would help. Not much else you can do except wait.”

Damian found some extra copies of Dinah’s school picture and handed three to the officer. Then he trudged to the sink and splashed water on his face. His fists opened and closed. Staring out the window, he pictured T.J. there, waiting in the shadows of the lawn, creeping around the house to find the weak spot. Like a fox sniffing out his prey. He brought a hand close to his mouth and then retched. His mother turned away, and the cop cleared his throat. Damian retched again, turned on the water to rinse it away and wept.

Ten minutes passed. Twenty. He paced around the first floor like a jaguar. Restless. Angry. Needing out. Hannah picked up a sponge and circled it over the kitchen counter in a sweeping motion, again and again, her eyes somewhere beyond the house.

The three of them waited, silent, as the minutes marched by. The clock on the stove read six fifty. Six fifty-five. Seven o’clock. Hannah returned to her seat at the table. Damian continued to pace, cracking his knuckles and staring from the refrigerator to the countertops to his mother and back again. The policeman’s radio crackled with static.

Suddenly the cop who’d been watching the front door strode into the room. “We have a lead.”

Hannah rose with a start, the napkin shredded to soggy confetti in her lap. “Tell me,” she said, her voice clear and steady. Her fingers pinched the table and she swayed on her feet. “Tell me you found my daughter.”

Damian fought to keep his heart from leaping out of his chest.
No bad news
, it thudded.
No bad news. If he’s done something to Dinah, I’ll rip every limb from his body.

“Apparently the kidnapper called the police station a few minutes ago. Says he wants guaranteed full custody of the girl.” He cleared his throat. “We weren’t able to get a trace on the call. But ah—right now he’s considered armed and dangerous. From what he said, there’s a possibility he has a weapon of some sort.”

Hannah’s face lost all color. “He has a gun?”

“We don’t know that,” Officer Burdick responded. “Ma’am, we have our best negotiator waiting for him to call back. Odds are, if your ex-husband really wants custody of his daughter, he’s not gonna do anything to hurt her.”

“But you don’t know that for sure,” Damian said. Fear choked him. He knew T.J. better than these men did. He knew what the bastard was capable of.

“No,” the policeman said. “We don’t.”

Chapter Nineteen

“Did you hear about Dinah?” Summer closed the ambulance corps’ break room door. She’d come straight here as soon as the sun crested the hills, unable to think of anything else. When she walked in the front entrance, the kid sitting behind the desk simply pointed to where Gabe waited in the back.

He nodded. “A few minutes ago, on the scanner. I’m sorry.”

She rubbed away more tears. “How can this happen? Here in Pine Point—how?”

“I don’t know.” He sat on the arm of a chair and cracked his knuckles. Neither of them spoke for a few minutes. “Is that why you came? To see if I could help? I don’t know if I can. I mean, I’ll try, see if maybe—”

“No.” She shook her head. “I w-wanted to tell you—that I remembered. Just this morning.” She drew in a deep breath. “I remember what happened the night my brother died.” She looked straight at him. “You lied.”

Gabe said nothing.

“You told them you were driving the night of the accident.”

He waited an eternity before answering. “Yes.”

“But why?” She could barely breathe. “Why would you do that?”

He sank onto the couch in the center of the room. “It’s hard to explain.”

After a minute, she sat beside him. Her fingers brushed his. “You let me drive because you were drinking. And because I wanted to.”

His chin dipped in acknowledgement.

“I didn’t have a license.” She recalled the arguments with her father over that.
Too dangerous
, he’d say.
You don’t need to learn. Not until you’re eighteen. I’ll take you wherever you need to go.

She said the next words quietly, piecing them together as she went, unearthing her own history though it pained her with every breath. “You were at a party. At the Hadleys’.”

“Only until you got off work.”

“I know.” She’d never suspected Gabe of cheating on her, and she didn’t now. “We didn’t go to the drive-in?” That was the only part that remained fuzzy.

“We did, but it was crowded. So we left. It was late, anyway, and Donnie was supposed to be home—”

Summer pressed her hand on top of his. She remembered the rest. Taking the keys from Gabe when she smelled beer on his breath. Insisting she drive his car. Thinking the few times her father had let her practice were enough.

But with her teenage crush beside her, the warmth and excitement of the night and the bright headlights at the intersection—it had all confused and distracted her. “I should have stopped.” There wasn’t a sign in her direction, just a flashing yellow light, but she should have stopped anyway. She should have known; it was a dangerous crossing, and people blew through it all the time.

“
Oh, God. Wait—what’s—why isn’t that car stopping? Gabe?”

Her foot moved from the gas pedal to the brake, but not in time. A flash in the rearview mirror, her brother’s pale face, flew across the periphery of her vision. Exploding metal. Screaming tires. An impact that shook every tooth in her head.

Then nothing at all.

“How could you tell them that?” She sobbed. “Why?”

“It wasn’t your fault.”

She let herself lean against him and bear the weight of her head and shoulders. Her eyes closed, and she began to shake with silent sobs.
Of course it was.

Gabe put an arm around her. “Summer, Mr. Hartwell ran the red in the other direction. He had a stop. You had a yield. Plus he’d been drinking, was bombed out of his mind. Everyone knew that.”

She couldn’t answer.
That was why we rushed to get out of the car
. Gabe hadn’t wanted anyone to see that she was driving. She, the one without a license. She’d been at the wheel the night her brother died. Not Gabe. Pinpricks of light behind her eyes turned to black.

“Son, come over here, please. Just have a couple of questions to ask you…”

As the cop turned his back, Gabe peeled her fingers open and pried the car keys from Summer’s sweaty palm.

“B-but…you went to jail for me.”

Gabe sighed, and for the first time, she heard sadness in his voice. “Well, I thought Hartwell was gonna make it. Thought they’d charge him. I never guessed…”

“That they’d charge you instead?”

She felt him nod against her cheek. With one arm around her, he sat motionless.

“Why didn’t you just tell them the truth?” She whispered the words into his shirtfront.

He didn’t have to answer. She could tell by the pulse in the hand that touched her cheek, and in the way his chest heaved with the weight of the last ten years.

“It was the right thing to do, Summer,” Gabe said after a long time. His voice was rough. “Your dad—he lost his son that night. I didn’t want him to lose his daughter too.”

* * * * *

Summer sat on a stone bench in the town park long after Gabe had left for a call in Silver Valley.

“I didn’t want him to lose his daughter too…”

His daughter. Like Dinah. Summer pressed one hand against her mouth. What if another child was about to die in Pine Point? They hadn’t heard anything in the hour she’d stayed at the ambulance corps. No news of Dinah, good or bad, had crackled over the police scanner.

The bench bit into the backs of her legs. An ant crawled over her toe and continued on to climb a blade of grass. She didn’t move. If she did, she thought she might break. She couldn’t go back to the house. She could barely remain upright. The sun burned the back of her neck, but she didn’t care. She was surprised she could still feel anything at all. A horn beeped somewhere over on Main Street. She didn’t look up. Instead she studied the veins on the backs of her hands and the blood that ran through them.

So much blood that night…

Now that she’d cracked open that part of her memory, it seemed the details wouldn’t stop coming. Her brother’s Yankees hat sitting astride the double line in the road. The police sirens screaming in her ears. The tears that wet her shirtfront. A single stoplight flashing red one way, yellow the other, in a macabre smear of color that lit up the sky. The blood on her hands and Gabe’s face, the shattered glass sprayed everywhere she looked.

How did I forget?

She turned her hands slightly and watched the shadows they cast on the pavement. It was funny, the way the mind worked. If she hadn’t forgotten, she probably would have gone mad.

It wasn’t your fault.

Her head swung back and forth as she silently answered Gabe’s reassurance. It was, of course. Gabe might not have avoided the accident if he’d been driving, but then again, he might have. He would certainly have slowed at the yellow light. And he might have paid better attention. He might have seen the other car, braked sooner, or swerved into the safety of the shoulder. Or he might not have.

The historian in her whispered something else.
You can study every last detail
, her favorite college professor had told a full lecture hall.
You can put all the pieces of an artifact back together. You can match up all the edges, mend the lines until they become invisible, but you still won’t know it all. You will never be able to step back with both feet to that moment of creation and truly relive it. We can only work with the knowledge we have now. We can only imagine.

And so, Summer had made a life out of imagining. She’d spent hours putting together the pieces of other people’s lives. She’d become fascinated with unearthing clues and determined to write stories that would decipher them. She lived the museum, loved it, made it the career that consumed her. Until now. Until she was faced with her own pieces. Unlike all the rest of history, she didn’t have to conjure any part of this story; she knew it front to back and beginning to end.

After a long time, she opened her eyes. Every part of her felt as though it weighed a hundred pounds—her head, her eyelids, her hands, and her feet when she tried to make them work. It took her two tries to remain standing.

She might have ruined her relationship with Damian, she might have endangered Dinah’s welfare, but one thing was simple enough: she couldn’t let the residents of Pine Point go on thinking Gabe had killed her brother. She had to make that right, anyway.

* * * * *

Summer walked the half-mile from the ambulance corps to downtown Pine Point. Zeb’s Diner had been a fixture on Main Street for as long as she could remember, and as she crossed to it, she gazed with nostalgia at its red-and-white striped awnings. How many heartaches had she and Rachael nursed here? How much gossip had they shared? She hadn’t stepped foot inside the place for ten years, yet the jukebox sat against the same wall, and the brightly lit menu hung above the same shiny counter. Even the color scheme remained identical—turquoise leatherette booths with silver chrome molding and a black-and-white checkerboard floor. Old photos of 1920s celebrities hung at crooked angles on the wall.

She met Rachael at a back booth and spilled the entire story in a matter of minutes. “…and so thanks for coming.”

Rachael fished a stack of napkins from the dented dispenser and handed them over. “My dad told me,” she said as Summer started to cry. “He’s got the scanner turned on. Police from here to Silver Valley have all the roads blocked. They’ll find the guy.”

Summer blew her nose. “What if they don’t?”

“Don’t say that. They
will.
”

She reached for a menu. She wasn’t hungry, but she needed to distract herself. And she needed something to hold onto.

“I know you’re upset,” Rachael said around her straw, “but it’s not like it’s your fault. The guy sounds like a total psycho.”

Summer choked. “Actually, I think it might be. My fault, I mean.”

The straw dropped from Rachael’s mouth. “What do you mean? How?”

“I gave him directions to their house.”

“What?”

She told the story as quickly as she could.

“Stop it,” Rachael said before she had finished. She shook her head. “You told him how to get to County Route 78? That’s it? That’s what you’re beating yourself up about?”

Summer didn’t know what to say.
Of course.

Rachael handed her some more napkins. “Big deal. You know how long that road is? How many people live on it? You didn’t know who he was or who he was looking for.”

“But I should have.”

“Why?” Rachael dismissed her with a wave of one hand. “You’re being ridiculous. It wasn’t your fault. If you didn’t give him directions, the next person to come along would have. You know that. And if not last night, he would have taken her another time.”

“Maybe.” Summer still couldn’t shake the guilt or the accusing look on Damian’s face as he stormed away. She took a deep breath. “But that isn’t the only thing.”

Rachael frowned and waited for her to go on.

She squared her shoulders and laced her fingers together. “Remember how I told you I could never remember what happened the night Donnie died?”

“Yeah. What does that have to do with anything?”

She pressed her fingertips to her lips and fought for composure. She’d have to tell this story more than once. People needed to know, starting with her best friend.
Get it over with. The first time will be the hardest
. “This morning, I remembered. I was driving. The night Donnie died, I was driving Gabe’s car.”

“Wait—what?” Rachael stared at her. “But you didn’t have your license.”

“Exactly.”

Rachael sat back in the booth. “I can’t believe it. You’re wrong. You have to be.”

“I’m not, Rach. I think maybe with what happened with Dinah—it triggered it or something. I was thinking about her, and about Donnie, and then…I just remembered everything. I was driving because Gabe had been at a party earlier that night. He’d been drinking.” She gulped. “So I thought it would be better if I drove us home. Safer.”

“He went to jail,” Rachael whispered.

“I know.” Tears covered her face. “But why didn’t anyone tell me that? Why didn’t you?” Maybe she would have remembered sooner, or been able to change the outcome of the sentencing. Frustration and guilt seeped into her pores. She’d never be able to give those two years back to Gabe. Never.

Rachael rested her chin on one palm. “We didn’t talk for—what? Almost a year after you left. And when we did, you were so…fragile. Confused. I didn’t know what you knew and what you didn’t. All you talked about was college or your latest job. Never anything about the accident or your brother. And definitely never anything about Gabe.”

“I didn’t know where to start.”

“And now? What the hell are you gonna do now?”

She met her best friend’s gaze. “I have to tell people. They have to know the truth. I was driving, and I didn’t see the other car, and I was the one who didn’t stop in time. Not him.”

“Oh, Summer.” Rachael got up and slid into the booth beside her. She folded her friend in a hug, and they sat there a long time without speaking.

It is these small pieces that heal
.
The pieces you dig up, dust off and show to the light, hoping they’ll hold their form without shattering. One at a time.
She closed her eyes and wept into Rachael’s shoulder.

“I want to go on Channel 6. As soon as I can.”

Rachael pulled back with a look of horror. “Are you kidding? You don’t have to announce it to the world.”

But she’d made up her mind. The only thing she needed to do was call the local cable station and find out when she could get airtime.