About That Night (6 page)

He finds the Lab a hundred yards from the trail in a dense stand of pine. The dog is circling a tree, barking nonstop. Regis readies the leash to snap onto the dog collar.

“Barney!”

The dog reminds him of a windup toy, the way he goes around and around and around. Regis reaches for his collar and attaches the leash. Only then does he see what's got the dog going. There's someone under the tree—someone who isn't moving.

Nine

W
ith the bracelet more or less under control—she isn't even sure how it has become her top priority—Jordie turns her mind back to Derek. It's been two full days now that he's been missing. She can understand his not returning her phone calls or texts, but not answering his mom or dad? What kind of sense does that make? Mrs. Maugham must be right. Something must have happened to him. The more she thinks about it, the more convinced Jordie is that he left because of her, because of what she said. She feels guiltier than ever.

She still isn't sure when he left the house. She's checked with her parents and her sister. No one heard him. And as far as she can tell from her twice-daily phone calls to his parents, the police haven't located anyone who saw him that night. If only he'd stayed downstairs on the pull-out couch in Jordie's basement. If only…

But he didn't stay down there. He left the house and went off somewhere. There are two possibilities that make sense to her. One, he was angry at what she said and went out for a walk sometime in the night, and something happened to him. Or, two, he went home to get the bracelet he bought her for their anniversary, to prove to her that what Ronan saw wasn't the bracelet he gave Jordie. If he left for the first reason, she has no idea where he might have gone. But if he left for the second reason, well, not only does she know where he went, but she knows the route he most likely followed. But she hasn't told the Maughams this, because she hasn't wanted to admit to them, or to anyone else, including herself, that this might be all her fault. She hasn't told anyone about the argument she had with Derek. But she has information that no one else has. Doesn't she have a duty to tell someone?

The easiest thing would be to pick up the phone and call the police: I'm Derek Maugham's girlfriend (no need for anyone to know that was about to change) and I'm pretty sure he went home that night to get something. But easiest isn't always best. If she's responsible for his leaving the safety of her basement and somehow coming to harm, she has to confess to that. And the best person to confess to is his parents. It seems only right somehow, although she can't explain exactly how.

She pulls on her coat and boots. She wraps a scarf around her neck. She plops a hat on her head and tugs gloves onto her hands. She trudges out into the snow. She walks to the edge of town and through the metal gateway that signals an entrance to the old rail line, now a hiking trail that runs along the north end of town and through the meadows on the right-of-way to the next town. She scans both sides of the trail on her way, looking for, hoping to see, Derek emerging from the woods, waving:
Here I am!
She can see that others have been here, notices hundreds of deep footprints, knee-high, some of them thigh-high, in the snow at the bottom of the slope on one side of the trail. She sees animal tracks too. The police have been here. Have there also been volunteers? Have there been dogs? Have they found anything?

She quickens her pace, and soon she is marching up the hill that leads to Derek's house, the hill they have flown down on the dented metal Magic Saucer that belongs to his dad, and that his dad used to sled on back when he was a kid. First she sees the snow-covered roofs of two houses, the Diehls' on the north side of the road and the Maughams' on the south side, their smoking chimneys peeking through. Next come windows and porch roofs and—cop cars. There are cop cars in front of Derek's house.

She runs.

She's panting by the time she reaches the two squad cars parked in the road between the two houses. Mr. and Mrs. Maugham are out there. So is Lieutenant Diehl—
Mr
. Diehl, he's been telling everyone to call him lately; Jordie can't get used to thinking of him that way. She races to Mrs. Maugham.

“What's going on? Did something happen? Did they find Derek?”

Mrs. Maugham's face is a quilt of hurt, worry, surprise, despair. But there are no tears.

“I think it's about Elise Diehl. But they haven't said what yet.”

Jordie lets out the beginning of a sigh of relief. She has heard—everyone has heard—that Mrs. Diehl is missing too. If she and Derek had anything in common, it would seem like the beginning of an epidemic or maybe of some old black-and-white science fiction movie. But Mrs. Diehl's disappearance is not unusual. There's nothing peculiar about it. She wandered off. She's been wandering for some time now.

Jordie still can't get over it. She had Mrs. Diehl for sixth grade. Half the kids in town have had her. She was the best teacher ever—fun, funny, sharp and fair. That was the thing kids loved about her. She was fair. She gave everyone a chance. She used to say that every person had a gift. But so what—lots of grownups say that, right? Right. But the thing is, Mrs. Diehl not only believed it, but also found that gift and helped its bearer recognize and celebrate it. She was the one who had made Jordie see that she didn't have to settle for what her parents had settled for, that she could get to college and make something of herself. She was the one who had encouraged Craig Harlan when he scribbled those poems and stories—Craig, who was two years older than Jordie and was now doing a fine-arts degree clear across the country. She was the one who had bought new sneakers for Martin DeLuce when she saw how fast he was, putting him on track for where he was headed next fall: a first-string college on an athletic scholarship. Mrs. Diehl had made a lot of kids what they were today, and the whole time she had been making them, fate had been unmaking her. She had been slipping away. Early-onset Alzheimer's. Slow at first, so she just seemed forgetful. Then faster, so you couldn't have a conversation with her—not a real one anyway. And then came the wandering.

Jordie glances at the cops, at Sergeant Tritt huddled with Mr. Diehl. She's definitely not going to talk to them about Derek, not when everyone looks so serious. She looks instead at Mrs. Maugham.

“There's something I need to tell you about that night,” she begins.

Mrs. Maugham takes her eyes off her neighbor.

“Derek and I had a sort of argument,” Jordie says.

“Oh?” There is an archness to Mrs. Maugham's voice that startles Jordie, as if this confession is something the woman has been waiting for, as if she has suspected all along that Jordie is somehow to blame for her son's disappearance. “You never mentioned that.”

“It wasn't a big deal. I mean, it wasn't like we were breaking up or anything.” Jordie wants to make that clear right away, even if subsequent thinking on her part has more or less rendered the last statement a lie. “We didn't yell at each other or anything. We watched a movie afterward. But I think, on account of the argument, that Derek might have come home to get something that night.”

“Come home? You mean here, to our house?” Mrs. Maugham frowns as she digests this piece of information, struggling, it seems, to make sense of it.

“Yes.”

“But he's not here now. I looked.” Her face drains of color. “Richard!”

Mr. Maugham, standing closer to the end of the driveway, turns his head.

“Richard, did you look in the basement?”

“The basement?” Jordie can see that Mr. Maugham is out at sea. He doesn't understand why his wife is asking him this. “What for?”

“For Derek.”

Mr. Maugham's whole body turns now. “Derek's in the basement? What the hell is he doing down there?”

“It's the one place we didn't look.” Mrs. Maugham is already being drawn to the house. “Maybe he fell down the stairs. Maybe someone broke in. Maybe—” She lets out a moan that attracts the attention of Diehl and the earnest police. Mr. Maugham is quick to reassure them that everything is okay, that his wife is just feeling the strain of worry about their son. He runs after her, and together they go through the side door of the house, headed, Jordie knows, for the basement. This wasn't what she meant at all. She's almost sorry that she came.

Across the street, Sergeant Tritt lays a hand on Diehl's shoulder.

“If it's any consolation,” Tritt says, “they say freezing to death is painless. And in her condition…” He leaves the thought there and lets Diehl fill in the details.

He wonders if he should tell him the rest—that Elise's knuckles are crusted with blood, that his best guess is she tried to get in someplace warm, maybe tried to batter down a door or maybe knocked somewhere, somewhere deserted, so hard that she skinned her knuckles.

But maybe that's not what happened. He's seen Elise a couple of times in the past two months that Diehl has been on leave. She didn't know what she was doing half the time. Maybe she pounded her fists against a tree. Maybe she thought the tree was a person. It's possible. In any case, Diehl will see her knuckles himself soon enough. He will draw his own conclusions. Tritt starts to steer Diehl to one of the squad cars. But his cell phone interrupts him. He lifts it to his ear, stepping away from Diehl as he answers. He keeps walking and stands up the road in the snow, his back to everyone. It isn't long before he slips the phone into the pocket of his jacket. He beckons to one of the patrol officers.

“Take the lieutenant to the morgue and stay with him. Make sure he's okay.”

The patrol officer nods.

“Everything okay?” Diehl asks Tritt.

“Another call. Nothing I can't handle. Look, Mike, Pete'll take care of you. I'll check in on you later, okay?”

Diehl is frowning, as if he senses something is wrong. But he lets Pete guide him to a patrol car and slides into the backseat. Still, he looks over his shoulder at Tritt as the car crunches over the snow on its way down the hill.

Tritt's boots squeak beneath him. He talks to the two patrol officers who remain, and they get into their car. They all drive away, leaving Jordie alone on the street and unsure what to do. The Maughams do not reappear. In the end, Jordie trudges home. It is dark by the time she gets there.

» » »

It's on the news that night—Elise Diehl has been found dead in the woods by the river that runs north from town. She is said to have wandered away from her family home in the middle of the night and been unable to find her way back. The news announcer recalls her as a popular elementary schoolteacher who has recently suffered from Alzheimer's disease. Her husband, local police lieutenant Mike Diehl, has no comment, and no announcement has been made yet about funeral or memorial services.

“So sad,” Jordie's mother says. “Especially so soon after her father's passing.”

“It's a cruel disease,” Jordie's father says. One of his aunts is afflicted with the same disease and is in a nursing home. She recognizes no one, does not speak and cannot look after herself.

“She was the best teacher I ever had,” Jordie says.

“I think she was already losing her mind when I had her,” Carly chimes in. “She used to spend an awful lot of time looking for stuff that was right on her desk and asking kids if they were new.” In fact, Mrs. Diehl retired from teaching the year after Carly was in her class. Her face lost its bright smile and cheerful glow after that and became slack and pale. Her eyes lost their sparkle. The few times that Jordie saw her around lately, before her father died, Mrs. Diehl seemed to look right through her, as if Jordie were a window.

“Poor Lieutenant Diehl,” Jordie's mother says. “I heard he took a leave of absence to look after her. Her father was determined she not be institutionalized, you know. The lieutenant isn't that old. Heavens, she wasn't that old, especially to have such a terrible disease. I suppose he'll go back to work soon. I can't see a man like that staying cooped up in that house all alone.”

The weather comes on the
TV
. More snow is forecast, which the weatherman is sure will make the ski-resort operators happy. Then it's on to
Wheel of Fortune
, which Jordie's mother watches every night, followed by
Jeopardy
. Her father sits on the couch with her, but he is usually hidden behind a magazine or a newspaper, and by the time
Wheel
is half over, he is dozing. Jordie goes upstairs and lies on her bed. She could watch something on her computer. She could listen to some music. She could read—she likes to read, and she got some books for Christmas. But she does none of these things. Instead, she thinks about Ronan.

Ronan, not Derek who is missing. Or, rather, Ronan at first and then she thinks, What am I doing? Derek is missing. He's the one I should be thinking about. But her mind goes back to Ronan. She wonders what he is doing. She doesn't think he's seeing anyone else—she's pretty sure that if he was, she would have seen or heard something at school. For sure someone would have told her if he'd been seen with someone else. But that hasn't happened.

Does he miss her? Did he miss her for a while and then get over her? It drives her crazy that she wasn't able to decipher the look on his face when he was standing on her porch the other night. Did it bother him that Derek was there? Did it bother him that Derek was staying there for a few days? Ronan had never done that. Her parents, especially her mother, found him hard to warm up to. “He's so quiet,” Mrs. Cross said on more than one occasion. “And the way he looks at a person—it's like he's thinking something that you're sure you don't want to hear.”

Jordie knows this isn't true—or at least, she used to think she knew that. The reason she broke up with him: she realized she didn't know what he was thinking, so it is more than merely possible that her mother was right. So why is Jordie thinking about him now? Why isn't she thinking about Derek? Why isn't she out looking for Derek?