Enter, Night (37 page)

“You never let me do anything,” Morgan said sullenly, staring out
the window. “I hate this town.”

Christina and Jeremy exchanged a knowing look. This time it was
Christina who mouthed the word.
Hormones
.

“That’s enough, Morgan,” she said automatically. Softening, she
added, “I’m sure your friend’s dog is home by now. You can go see him
after school. I’m glad you’re making new friends. He sounds like a very
nice boy. Why don’t you invite him over?”

“Are you
kidding
me, Mom? After that scene with Grandmother
about ‘townies’ and ‘sluts’? No way. He asked me if he could come and
see the house, but I told him that it wasn’t a great idea, at least not now.”

“Tell you what,” Jeremy interjected. “I’ll talk to your grandmother
about it. I’m sure we can make it OK somehow. Like your mom says, he
sounds like a nice boy.”

“He is,” Morgan said sadly. “And I’m worried about his dog. He really
loves her.”

Christina looked at her watch, but there really wasn’t any way to
allow for a stop before school without making Morgan late. And her
mother-in-law would hear about that, she had no doubt whatsoever.

“We’re almost there, sweetheart,” Christina said. “Do you want us to
pick you up after school?”

“No, thanks, Mom. I’ll walk. And I think I will stop by Finn’s house
on the way home, unless I see him at lunchtime. He usually meets me. I
hope he has good news.”

“I hope so, too, sweetie.”

Just before they pulled up to the front of the school, Morgan asked
Jeremy to stop and let her out so she could walk the rest of the way. “Just
like all the other kids do,” she said, almost apologetically. “Is that OK?”

“Sure it is, honey,” Jeremy said. He stopped the car and Morgan
stepped out. She gave them a little wave, then hurried up the street to
Matthew Browning without turning back. When she was out of sight,
Jeremy asked Christina where she wanted to go.

“Why don’t you drop me at the library? It’s decent enough, as I recall.
You can go and see Super Cop and I’ll amuse myself in the stacks.”

“I don’t know how long it’s going to take, though. Will you be all
right?”

“Oh, please,” Christina said. “I’ll read for a bit. If you’re back in an
hour or so, we can go have lunch or something, or head back to the house.
If you’re not, I’ll walk home. It’s a nice morning. I could use the exercise.
Who knows, maybe by the time I get home, Adeline will have taken a fall
off the roof of Parr House and she will have left us all her money, and we
can get the hell out of here once and for all.”

“Dreamer,” Jeremy said. “But I admire the scope of your ambition.
Tragic death and inheritance. We’ll make a real Parr out of you yet.”

After Jeremy had dropped Christina off in front of the Parr’s Landing
library, he drove along Dagenais Street in search of a pay phone to call
the police station.

Jeremy doubted Elliot would be amenable to anything as normalizing
as a cup of coffee, much less lunch at the Pear Tree but—nothing
ventured. Who knew? Besides, it wasn’t like Jeremy had anything else
on the agenda.

The man who answered
the phone at the police station identified
himself as Sergeant Thomson.

“Good morning,” Jeremy said politely. “May I speak with Constable
McKitrick?”

“May I ask who this is, sir?”

Jeremy took a deep breath. He leaned back against the wall of the
phone booth. “This is Jeremy Parr. I was . . . I am a friend of Constable
McKitrick’s. From school. I’ve just come back to town. From Toronto,”
he added, feeling like the biggest babbling jackass that ever troubled
daylight. At the same time, he noted how artlessly he’d slipped back
into the entitlement of his family name. Not
My name is Jeremy Parr,
but
This is Jeremy Parr,
conveying the automatic expectation that the person
on the other end of the line should recognize his name and be able to
identify him. He suddenly missed the anonymity of the city even more.

There was a pause on the other end. “Of course, Mr. Parr. Welcome
home. We’d heard that you were back in town.”

The policeman’s voice was as polite as ever, and if Jeremy had
expected to hear some note of derision or condescension in it, he
was relieved not to have heard any such thing. Even though he knew
rationally that Elliot would never have willingly talked about what had
happened between them—and its terrible consequences—Jeremy’s
dominant memory was of the scandal, and he assumed everyone else in
town shared the same memory. Paranoia, obviously, but not necessarily
unfounded paranoia. To his mother, it was as though it all happened
yesterday, as she had reminded Jeremy every minute since his return to
the Landing.

“Thank you, sergeant,” Jeremy said. He waited a beat, then asked
again, “Is Constable McKitrick in the office?”

“No, I’m sorry,” Thomson said. “He’s not. He’s not on duty for a few
hours yet. I don’t expect him till early afternoon.”

Jeremy frowned and looked at his watch. It was almost eleven. He
didn’t cotton to waiting around town for two or three hours till Elliot
came on shift. “Thank you, sergeant,” he said again.

“Any message?”

“No, sergeant.” He was suddenly struck by how ridiculous he
sounded.
Who calls a police station and asks for a particular cop, but doesn’t
leave a message? Are you trying to sound weird?
“Actually, yes,” Jeremy said
firmly. “Would you tell him I called? And that I’ll try him again?”

“I will indeed, Mr. Parr. And again, welcome back to town.”

“Thank you, sergeant,” Jeremy said for a third time, then hung up.

What to do,
he pondered. Then he picked up the telephone directory
hanging from the ledge next to the phone in the booth and looked up the
phone number and address of
McKitrick, E
. The phone number was there,
right beside the address on Martina Street.

His mouth was suddenly very dry, and his heart sounded like the
echo of a trip-hammer in his ears.
No guts, no glory,
he thought, even
though he’d always hated that phrase, associating as he always had, with
clubs he would never, ever be part of. But it still rang true.

The worst case scenario would be that Elliot refused to see him, or
threw him out, or decked Jeremy for daring to show up at his house,
especially if he was with a woman. On the bright side, maybe in the
privacy of his own house, Elliot might be able to talk about his feelings.
Christina is right. I am just like a girl.

Jeremy pushed open the door of the phone booth and walked over
to where his car was parked. No guts, no glory, indeed. He slipped behind
the wheel and turned the key.

Anne Miller had decided
against taking Finn to the hospital even
though when he’d regained consciousness he’d been hysterical. He’d only
been out for a few minutes, but to his frantic mother it seemed as though
he’d been in a coma for six months. She’d shaken him and patted his face,
trying to wake him.

When he’d woken, in between great arcs of crying, Finn had tried
to tell Anne and Hank something about Sadie catching fire. It made no
sense to Anne, but the fact that he’d come home distraught and nearly
delirious without his beloved Labrador was a fact that asserted itself in
the midst of his agitation. Also, he was covered in ash, an incontrovertible
fact that chilled Ann Miller to her heart’s core.

“Finn, slow down,” she begged. “Tell us again. What happened?

Where’s Sadie?”

“I threw the buh-buh-ball,” he wept. “And she . . . she
burned up
. My dog burned up into
smoke
.”

“Finn, that’s not possible,” Hank had said, slipping automatically into the reasoned tone of fathers, a tone that usually had the power to right the world’s wrongs and bend reality with the sheer power of its unquestioned authority. “Did someone shoot Sadie? Was it maybe a gun you heard? Did you see smoke?”

“
I threw the ball and she burned up! She burned up! SADIE BURNED UP!
”
Hank went to slap Finn’s face—not out of anger, but merely a lifetime of watching movies where hysterical people are slapped across the fact to calm them. Before he could, however, Anne stepped between Hank and their son, holding Finn tightly to her breast. Over the top of Finn’s head, Anne shot her husband a look that clearly telegraphed,
Oh,
for heaven’s sake, Hank
. Finn buried his face in her bathrobe and sobbed
till his entire body shook, but even Hank could see that his mother’s embrace had a calming effect on him.

“Shhhhhh,” said Anne. “Shhhhh, Finn. It’s all right. Take your time.

It’s all right. We’ll figure out what happened to Sadie. Shhhh . . .”
And yet Finn was inconsolable. “I told you what happened. I told you.”

In his bedroom, Finn curled against his pillow as though it were Sadie’s body. She hadn’t seen that posture in her son since he was a baby, and if Finn had suddenly popped his thumb in his mouth and began to suck it, she wouldn’t have found it out of place. As his mother, Ann knew every position of his sleeping body, every curve, every mood-based physical cue. What she saw here terrified her. It was as though Finn was retreating into himself, reverting to a preconscious infantile state.
And Sadie was definitely missing—again. There wasn’t any way around it.

Finn lay on top of the coverlet. Anne took a blanket from the foot of his bed and covered him. As she watched, his shallow breathing deepened and he closed his eyes. If he was not actually sleeping, she thought, he was at least slowly calming himself. Ann ran her fingers through Finn’s hair. Her fingers came away matted with a combination of ash, sweat, tears, and snot. She wiped her hand on her bathrobe.
Ash. Sadie? On fire? It’s not possible.

Back in the living room, Hank was waiting for her, pacing the floor.
“Anne, what the
blazes
. . . ? Where’s Sadie? Did Finn say anything else?”

“He’s resting,” she said. It was as though she hadn’t heard the question. “Not sleeping, but resting. He’ll sleep.”

“Anne, where’s Sadie? Where’s the damn dog? Last night she could barely walk. This morning he takes her out for a walk and comes back without her, and with some crazy story like something out of a horror movie. Did he do something to her? Did he hurt her?”

“Jesus Christ, Hank. What do you mean, ‘did he hurt her’? Are you insane? He loves—loved—that dog like a baby. He’d never hurt her. What the hell are you asking me? Did he hurt her? What’s wrong with you?”

“Anne,” Hank said, with a patronizing patience that would normally have driven his wife to thoughts of murder, “the dog is missing. You don’t believe she burst into flames all of a sudden, do you?”

“Hank, Finn is covered with
ashes
! And Sadie isn’t here! You
bet
something happened! But what?”

Hank thought for a moment. “A gunshot? Did a hunter shoot her, maybe? Did he imagine the rest? You know the way he is, especially with those bloody Dracula comic books of his. His imagination can be the very devil.”

“Hank, if Sadie had been shot, he’d have blood on him. He doesn’t have blood on him. He has ashes on him.”

“Summer lightning, maybe . . . ? It does happen. It’s rare, but it does happen. I can’t think of any other explanation. Can you?”

Anne was silent. Then she said, “Hank, can you go out there and see if you can find her . . . her body? Even if she was struck by . . . by summer lightning, she should still be there, shouldn’t she? Can you bring her home? So we can bury her in the yard? I think it would be a good thing for Finn, don’t you?”

Hank sighed. “I can’t go now, Anne. I have to be at work. But I’ll try to cut out earlier today and head up there before sunset. I just can’t manage it any sooner than that.”

“How will you know where to look?” Tears filled her eyes at the thought of Sadie lying untended on some rock ledge somewhere up near Spirit Rock. “How will you find her?”

“Shouldn’t be hard to find her,” Hank said, his throat suddenly full.
“I’ll find her. I’ll bring her back home. You’re right. It’ll be good for Finn to see that she . . . that he didn’t . . . well, that something else didn’t happen to her.”

When Hank left for work, and Finn was finally asleep in his room, Anne did two things in quick succession. First, she telephoned the Mrs. Brocklehurst at the school and told her that Finnegan was running a high fever and wouldn’t be at school for at least the next day or two. She was keeping him home, for everyone’s sake. Yes, it
was
a pity. Yes, these sudden changes in temperature were indeed the dickens. Yes, she’d make sure his bedroom window stayed closed. Of course. Yes, thank you Mrs. B.
When Anne hung up the phone, she locked herself in the bathroom and turned the cold water tap full-blast in the sink so Finn wouldn’t hear anything. Then she sat down on the edge of the bathtub and wept her own tears, the ones she’d kept from Finn and Hank because if she fell apart, they would, too. And now Finn had fallen apart, and there was no more reason to keep the tears inside. At least not in private. She
cried for Sadie, whom she loved as though Sadie were her dog, not Finn’s.
She cried harder than she had since she was a little girl, so hard that her shoulders and her abdominal muscles throbbed with it.

But mostly, she cried for Finn, because whatever had happened this morning out there on the cliffs—whatever it was—it had destroyed something in her son she feared he’d never get back. Whatever other tragedy had happened here, something had been shattered beyond any possibility of repair.

Later, around lunchtime, through an upstairs window, she’d seen the Parr girl come up the driveway. Anne had heard the knock on the door, but hadn’t answered it. She’d prayed Finn hadn’t heard it. He was finally asleep. For her part, Anne didn’t have the faintest clue how to tell the Parr girl about Sadie, even if she’d had the heart to try.

She looked out the window again and saw the girl walking back in the direction of Matthew Browning.
A nice girl,
Anne thought, relieved that she’d left so quickly.
She reminds me of Jack. I’ll tell Finn she was by when he wakes up. He’ll appreciate that she stopped by. So sweet of her to do that.