The Divide (6 page)

The ones whose names he knew and whom he had called for news every few weeks were civil enough though rarely friendly. But Kendrick was different. He seemed genuinely sympathetic and had almost become a friend, though Ben had only ever met him once. They even called each other by their first names now. Maybe he was just better at his job than the others. He certainly made Ben feel more at ease and, of course, if he felt that way, he might more likely let something slip, some secret snippet of information that might help them catch and convict his daughter. Ben only wished he had such a secret.

“Ben, how’re you doing?”

“I’m fine. How are you doing?”

“I’m okay. Do you have someone with you?”

It seemed an odd question, given that he’d just spoken with Eve.

“Yeah. We’re just watching a movie. Why?”

“I’ve got some news. About Abbie. They were going to get one of our guys in Albuquerque to drive up and tell you in person but I thought you’d rather hear it from me.”

He paused. Ben was way ahead of him.

“I’m afraid it’s not good news.”

But still his heart chimed. What was good news or bad news when it came to Abbie? And good or bad for whom? She hadn’t called any of them—not him, nor Sarah, nor even her brother Josh—in almost three years now. If the FBI had caught her that would surely qualify as good news, wouldn’t it? He swallowed.

“Uh-huh?”

“They found her body up on the Front Range in Montana, west of Great Falls. She’d been there awhile. Ben, I’m really sorry.”

Cary Grant was about to get beaten up by two heavies. He was trying to charm his way out but it wasn’t working. Ben’s brain felt closed. His daughter dead? He could see it almost dispassionately as a concept but it wasn’t something he was going to let into his head. It wasn’t possible. Eve appeared in the doorway with two mugs of green tea. She stopped there and stood very still, her loosened hair raven against the pale of her shoulders, steam curling from the mugs, the candlelight dancing in the creases of her peach satin robe. Watching with those still brown eyes, knowing.

“What kind of condition . . .”

Ben couldn’t allow himself to finish the thought. His little girl decaying, a carcass picked at by savage animals. No.

“I mean, are you sure it’s her?”

“A hundred percent. Fingerprints and DNA. Ben, I’m so sorry.”

There was a long silence. Ben felt as if he were watching his world unhinge and twirl slowly away from him. Eve put down the tea and came to sit beside him on the bed. She laid a cool arm around his shoulders. Kendrick waited and when Ben was ready they talked some more. About practical things, from which Ben began to fashion a fragile shield from the shock. Kendrick delicately asked if he should let Sarah know, but Ben said he would do it himself and that, in any case, she was in Italy. From his weekly phone call to Josh two days ago, he knew she wasn’t due home until Monday.

Kendrick said once more how sorry he was and that he would call again in the morning. They could decide then what to do about funeral arrangements and what to tell the media. There would, of course, have to be some sort of statement.

“Yes,” Ben said. “Of course.”

Ben thanked him and hung up and sat there staring at the TV. The credits were rolling. He found the remote and killed the picture. And only then did he start to weep.

An hour later, lying with his head still cradled on Eve’s breast, her nightgown patched with his tears, they began to discuss what was to be done. Ben wondered if it might be best not to tell Sarah until she got back. Spare her all those long hours on the plane with no one to comfort her, cloistered alone with her grief. Maybe he should fly to New York and meet her off the plane and tell her then. But Eve, clearer-headed than he and, as a mother, wiser in such matters, said he couldn’t leave it that long. Sarah had a right to be told straightaway and would hold against him any failure to do so.

In Venice, they calculated, it was now six o’clock in the morning. Too early to call. Let her sleep, Ben thought. Give her two more hours without the pain. Without this new pain. He would phone at midnight. They could then decide between the two of them how to break the news to Josh and the grandparents and whoever else needed to know.

While they waited, he told her what Kendrick had said about releasing the news to the media. A couple of years ago, Abbie Cooper, little rich girl turned ecoterrorist, wanted all across America for murder, had been big news. There had been whole TV shows devoted to her, with dramatized reconstructions of what she was alleged to have done. For months Ben had to field half a dozen calls a week from reporters, mostly trying to follow up on some new angle. But as time went by and there was still no arrest, they seemed to lose interest and the circus had moved on. Maybe they wouldn’t make too much of a meal out of her being found dead. Or maybe they would.

At midnight, when he called Venice, he was told that Signora Cooper had already left the hotel. And when he called again two hours later she still hadn’t returned. They waited, fading in and out of sleep, holding each other while the candles burned low and guttered and one by one died. Once, while Eve slept on beside him, facing away from him, a curve of hip warm against his belly, he woke and wept again while a slice of moon traversed the window.

He was jolted from his sleep just before seven. Eve was standing beside the bed, handing him his ringing cell phone.

“It’s Sarah,” she said.

He saw the name on the little screen and so disoriented was he by sleep that for a moment he wondered why she might be calling. Then the leaden reality reassembled. Their daughter was dead.

Eve was already dressed. Sunlight flecked with dust was slanting in through the window behind her. He sat up and took the phone and she kissed his forehead and walked out. She had left a mug of coffee on the bedside table. He could hear Pablo calling from the kitchen. He pressed the green button on the phone and said hello.

“Benjamin?”

Her voice sounded tight and throaty, barely recognizable. She was the only one in the world who ever called him Benjamin.

“Sweetheart—”

She had reprimanded him more than once for calling her that—
Whatever I am to you now, Benjamin, I’m certainly not your sweetheart
—but it was hard to break a habit of so many years. This time she cut in on him before the word was fully uttered.

“What is it?” she said. “Is it Abbie? Have they found her?”

It startled him that she should know. But it was only to discuss their children that they ever talked nowadays. Then Ben realized that by
found,
she meant alive. He swallowed, still struggling to clear his head.

“Sarah—”

“For heaven’s sake, Benjamin! Tell me!”

“She’s dead.”

“What?”

It was more an intake of breath than a word. How could he blurt it out like that? Kendrick had broken the news to him with so much more finesse. He stumbled on.

“They found her body. In Montana. Somewhere in the mountains.”

“No. Abbie. Oh, no. No . . .”

She began a low, moaning wail and then tried to say something but couldn’t. And because the sound was so harrowing he began to talk, just to keep it from his ears. He talked and went on talking, trying to seem calm and clear, telling her what he knew, about the DNA and the fingerprints and where the body was being kept and about the decisions that they were going to have to make, until she screamed at him and told him to stop. At that his voice cracked and he lost control, as if all his words had emptied and weakened him.

And, separated by so many thousand miles and by distance of another kind far greater, they sobbed as one but each alone for the young life they had together spawned and loved and separately lost.

 

 

 

The funeral home, so Ben had been told, was only a short drive from Missoula Airport and he had already resolved that he would go there as soon as his flight got in. He hadn’t told Sarah he was going to do this and he knew he should probably wait until she arrived from New York so they could go there together. But when he landed and switched on his cell phone there was a message from her saying she was having to take a later flight. She wouldn’t be getting into Missoula until the evening, by which time the funeral home would be shut. That meant going there with her tomorrow. He couldn’t wait that long.

Despite Kendrick’s assurance that the identification was one hundred percent certain, there lingered in Ben’s mind just a sliver of doubt that they might have made a mistake. He’d once read about a case where this had happened. Someone had mixed up two sets of samples and put the wrong names on them. He had to see her, see with his own eyes that it was Abbie.

He had brought only hand baggage and was one of the first off the flight. The chirpy young woman at the Hertz desk welcomed him like an old friend but that was probably just how they were trained.

“On vacation?” she asked.

“No, I’m here . . . to see my daughter.”

“That’s nice. She’s at UM, right?”

“She was, yes.”

It took her only a few minutes to process the paperwork. She told him the bay number of the car and handed him the documents and keys.

“So, you’re all set. You have a great time.”

Ben thanked her and went out through the double glass doors. The sky was vaulted in slate-colored cloud and the air felt warm and restless as if at any moment it might rain. Abbie used to say the weather in Montana was like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates: You never knew what you were gonna get. He remembered that first visit to Missoula, more than five years ago, when he and Sarah had flown here with her to check out the university. It was late October and when they arrived it was eighty degrees. They woke the next day to a foot of snow and had to go out and buy warmer clothes. At a store on North Higgins they had bought Abbie a cerise Patagonia ski jacket that cost more than two hundred bucks. God, she’d looked so beautiful that day. So confident, so full of joy.

Ben stopped himself. He mustn’t think about her that way. There was too much to be sorted out, important decisions to be made, people to talk to, the sheriff, the local FBI people, find out what they thought had happened. If he let himself remember her like that, all aglow and happy, then he would be sure to lose it and be unable to think straight. Above all, Sarah would need him to be strong. He didn’t want to let her down, give her yet another reason to hate him.

The car was a little silver Japanese thing. He had to shift the seat all the way back to get his legs under the steering wheel. Sarah would probably think he was being cheap and should have rented something bigger. They hadn’t seen each other in more than a year and he already felt dread welling in his stomach. He started the car up, reversed from the parking bay and slowly headed out toward the highway.

The second time they had spoken on the phone, before Sarah flew home from Italy, she had fully regained composure. She was cool, almost businesslike. Not a tear was shed by either of them. Ben had been expecting a discussion but it was more like listening to a series of announcements. The body would be shipped back to New York, she said, and that was where the funeral would be, where all Abbie’s loved ones lived. The
all
excluded Ben, of course, but he let it pass. And it would be a burial, which was how Sarah’s family had always done these things. Ben had been planning to suggest a cremation, with the ashes scattered here in Montana, the place Abbie had so often said she loved best in all the world. But he wasn’t going to get into a fight about it.

There was more to come. Sarah had already phoned Josh in New York. He was, she informed Ben, “devastated but okay.” How to break the news to their son was another thing Ben had been expecting to discuss. He was furious. He had been all set to fly to New York to do it in person and now wished he hadn’t waited. Moreover, Sarah had also organized for the boy to go stay in Bedford with her parents. Indeed, they had already driven to the city to collect him. Sarah would see him, albeit briefly, when she got back, then fly on to Missoula. Josh, she said, would not be coming with her.

Ben had thus been thoroughly preempted and excised. And, as usual, he swallowed his anger and said nothing. It was a technique Sarah had used over and over again since he left her and she now had it honed to perfection, excluding him from important decisions about their children with such a casual—sometimes even friendly—aplomb, that to complain seemed churlish. The underlying message was always the same: By leaving, he had revealed his total lack of love for them and had thereby forfeited all rights of consultation.

Sometimes she did it so brilliantly, he couldn’t help but be impressed. And though it surprised him that she should choose to do it now, in their shared desolation, he realized later that she had in fact surpassed herself. For now he would have to call Josh in the enemy camp of his former in-laws. George and Ella Davenport had always considered him unworthy of their golden daughter and his desertion had vindicated their contempt. Ben was now properly consigned to some lower stratum of cheats, liars, and ne’er-do-wells.

Immediately after he had finished listening to Sarah’s list of decisions, he called Josh’s cell phone.

“Hey, Joshie.”

“Hi.”

“I was going to fly over and tell you about Abbie, but Mom says she already told you.”

“Yeah.”

“How are you doing?”

“Okay, I guess.”

There was a long pause. Ben thought he could hear whispers in the background.

“Are you with your grandma and grandpa?”

“Yeah. We’re in the car.”

“Oh. Right. Well, say hi to them for me.”

“Okay.”

“Mom says you’re not coming out to Missoula.”

“What’s the point?”

His voice was so flat and colorless that Ben wondered if the boy had taken too many of those antidepressant pills he’d been on for the last few months. Or perhaps he was just dazed by the news or embarrassed to talk in front of Ella and George. Ben cursed himself for not going to New York. It was he who should be with his son at this time, not those two.