Before He Finds Her (39 page)

Still, Melanie wishes he’d return. There will always be a light on for him. But that’s his decision.

She has decisions to make, too. She is enrolled part time at the community college but is still too many credits away from graduating. Her major—journalism—is a dying field, she’s coming to find. Or at least it’s shifting too quickly for her academic courses to adjust. Lately, she’s been thinking of something completely different: enrolling in the police academy. At first it was only a fleeting thought, but she’s warming to the idea. When she floated it to Phillip a couple of months ago, he shrugged and said, “Well, you’re tough enough.”

She agrees with him—she
is
tough, but not tough enough to join the force while she’s pregnant or has a newborn. She can wait a couple of years, she supposes.

“Okay, kiddo,” she says to Brianna. “Last one.”

“Then the turtles!”

“That’s right.”

Silver Bay is hers now. She hasn’t returned to Fredonia and knows she never will. She visited Kendra, once, in prison in Maryland early on in her sentence. There were things Melanie wanted to know.

I was so young,
Kendra said into the phone receiver on the opposite side of the thick glass divider,
and I loved him so much.
He kept me safe when we were in foster care and made sure I didn’t get it too bad. When he left for New Jersey, I fell apart. I spent two months crying. Three years, he was away—I saw him a few times, but he seemed older. He was tougher. Then he came back all of a sudden. And he needed me so badly.

Kendra sobbed into the telephone the whole time she spoke.

But all those years
, Melanie said.
My whole life—you were never suspicious?

He had those letters from the Marshal’s office. And why would I doubt him?
Why would I try to wreck our family?

Almost immediately, Melanie realized it was foolish to have driven the three hours expecting an honest look into Kendra’s heart when Kendra herself was unwilling to look there. A full minute passed without either of them saying anything.

Melanie tried again:
But how could you never even wonder?

Anger flashed in Kendra’s eyes.
I could ask you the same thing
, she said. Then she began to weep again.

The visit was scheduled to last a half hour, but after twenty awkward minutes, Melanie stood up to leave, and Kendra said, pleadingly,
When are you going to visit me again? You have to tell me when
. Her eyes were shot through with red. Melanie left the prison knowing little more than she knew before coming, and with no better sense of in what proportion to feel hatred or pity for the woman who had raised her.

It doesn’t matter, Melanie told herself then and has continued to remind herself. I’m home now. This is my home.

The beach, the bay, the roads, the neighborhoods, the shops and restaurants. The schools and cemeteries. At some point this week she’ll visit the cemetery off Cedar Lane, where her mother is buried and where Melanie does her best thinking. Should she try to become a police officer? she’ll ask her mother. Then she’ll ask Arthur Good-ale, who is buried there, too. She’ll leave flowers by both graves. She tries to make a point of doing that regularly, though she often goes too long between visits. With a young child, everything is hard.

How hard it must have been for her mother, she often thinks, with her father away so much of the time. Phillip goes to Atlantic City for the New Jersey teachers’ convention just two nights each fall, and she always dreads it.

But it must have been hard for her father, too, being away, knowing he was missing all those small moments that transform a child every day, it seems. She wishes that Ramsey could meet his granddaughter, get to know her. But if he were going to reach out, he’d have done it by now. She knows that. She also knows that her father might not be alive. Yet she chooses to believe Eric’s assessment. Since her return to Silver Bay, Eric has introduced her to a side of her father that was unavailable in any newspaper, the side of him that explained why he once had friends and a wife who loved him and a daughter who did, too. So she chooses to believe, as Eric does, that Ramsey Miller is too stubborn to die, and is still out there somewhere.

Of the several scenarios that she imagines for her father—he has a new, adoring family; he works as a mechanic in the mountains, maybe Colorado; he drives a big rig under an alias—here is what she always comes back to.

Somewhere outside of the United States, maybe in Panama or Costa Rica, a quiet man with a slight limp rents out his small fishing boat for day trips. He has a kind face and is the most mild-mannered man anyone has ever met, and although he’s only in his fifties, he seems much older. He never misses a day of work unless the ocean is very rough. Each night, he returns home to his cabin in the woods, away from everyone and everything. He pours himself a single drink, looks up at the stars, and thinks about his wife and daughter with nothing but fondness and light.

To Melanie’s surprise, after going down the slide one more time, Brianna comes right over and takes her hand.

“Did you remember the bread?” Brianna asks. (Three weeks ago, Melanie forgot the bread, an oversight that caused a full-on tantrum.)

Melanie removes the zip-lock bag from her purse. “Right here.”

Brianna drops Melanie’s hand and runs toward the footbridge, stopping at the center. Melanie follows her, and when they’re together on the wooden bridge they both look over the railing.

“There’s one!” Brianna says. A small turtle is sunning on a branch sticking out of the shallow water. Moments later, a second turtle swims their way. The turtles know. For years, decades, people have been feeding them from this footbridge. Now, all you have to do is stand on the bridge and the turtles begin to gather.

Melanie removes the slice of bread from the zip-lock bag and hands it to Brianna, saying, “Remember—small pieces.”

Brianna breaks off a corner and tosses it over the railing and into the water.

The second turtle swims closer, jerks its head forward, and grabs the bread. Brianna breaks off a few more pieces and throws them into the water as more turtles gather. As always, the turtles multiply, until there are fifteen, twenty, thirty, of every size. The largest are probably forty pounds and almost certainly swam this pond before Melanie was born.

By now the turtles are churning up the water only a few feet below. It’s a little unnerving, all those prehistoric creatures jockeying for bits of stale bread, furiously snapping and climbing over one another. But Brianna isn’t afraid.

She feeds the turtles one small piece of bread at a time. And when a third of the slice is left, the massive head of one of the largest, oldest snapping turtles rises above the surface.

“Look, Brianna!” Melanie points. “Over there.”

There are probably only three or four turtles this large and old in the whole pond. They’re so heavy that usually only their heads rise out of the murk. But something about the sunlight this morning, the early hour, makes more of the shell visible—faded green and splotched with moss. The animal is easily sixty pounds and as many years old.

“Look at it!” Brianna beams. She knows this is a rare sight. All the locals know it.

“Why don’t you give him the whole piece,” Melanie says.

“
All
of it?” asks Brianna.

Melanie nods. So Brianna holds what remains of the bread over the railing—tentatively, with beautiful anticipation—before letting it fall down to the water. A perfect drop, it lands inches from the turtle’s head, which shoots forward and back again like a cobra’s strike, the bread vanishing in its jaws, and then the old animal drops beneath the surface and is gone.

~

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Acknowledgements

Michael Kardos

More books by Michael Kardos

An invitation from the publisher

Preview

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They are life long friends. Their lives are routine, even boring. But that is about to change.

Will, Jeffrey and Nolan have been friends since college. Their lives are normal, even boring. Until one shocking moment changes everything.

One night, in a moment of madness, Jeffrey robs a convenience store and drags the only witness into Will’s car. Before they know it, Will, Jeffrey and Nolan are holding a young girl hostage, with no idea what to do next. They have three days to decide her fate. Three days to choose between right and wrong, prison and freedom. Three days to manipulate each other into a unanimous decision.

These ordinary men are already guilty of abduction and robbery. What else are they capable of?

Prologue

S
IX YEARS AGO, MY
band’s bassist was shot dead in a New York nightclub. Her name was Gwen Dalton, and she’d only been with the band a few months when she was killed.

Our original bassist, Andy, had surprised us all when he decided to move to Los Angeles with his girlfriend. We were annoyed that he would leave New York just when the band was finally creating a stir. High Noon had been together for five years, and we’d worked hard to build up a following. We were finally packing the Wetlands and CBGB, and a small indie record label was talking to us about recording a CD. So how can you leave us now? we asked him. How can you do that to us?

“I’m doing it for love,” he explained.

And how do you argue with that?

We held auditions at Fred McPhee’s apartment in the East Village. Fred was the band’s guitarist and lead vocalist. I was the drummer. We’d already heard half a dozen players stumble their way through our songs when Gwen showed up.

In all the years I’d played in rock groups, starting at the age of fourteen, I hadn’t ever been bandmates with a woman before, and for a brief moment I was doubtful. Then Gwen lifted the
instrument out of its case, and I saw that it was a custom-made, six-string Fodera—four grand easy. As she tuned up, her fingers ran nimbly up and down the fretboard. Underneath her spiky hair and pink lipstick was a delicate face, but her fingers were stubby and callused. A musician’s fingers. We taught her one of our tunes, which she picked up immediately. The second time through, she was already adding licks that Andy couldn’t have played. By then we were all loosened up. She was smiling to herself, head tilted in concentration, and it was obvious that we’d found our new bassist.

All that fall we played shows throughout New York and Connecticut and New Jersey. Gwen had infused our jangly rock sound with a hint of funk and looked good doing it. But on Sunday morning, December 5, 1999, at 2:10
AM
, while we were packing up our equipment after a gig at the Cobra Club near the Columbia University campus, somebody fired a gun outside on the street. The bullet passed through a window and struck Gwen just above her right cheekbone. She had been talking to me at the time. I was standing less than three feet away. When she got hit, her head jerked to the side a little, as if an invisible hand had slapped her. She stood there for the next few seconds, and I stood watching her and wondering why she’d suddenly stopped talking.

The shooting was a drive-by, the intended target somebody out on the street who fled the scene. It had nothing to do with us. No one was ever caught. Gwen died two days later at St. Luke’s Hospital. I was there in the critical care unit at the time, pacing outside her room. I remember looking in and seeing the nurses moving their hands and a doctor shaking his head and the setting sun absurdly bathing her parents’ faces in the prettiest orange light.

That night, I told Fred that I wouldn’t be playing the drums anytime soon.

My wife, Cynthia, and I had always thought of ourselves as city people. She was from Philadelphia. I had grown up in Bayonne, and
lived in Greenwich Village since graduating from college. But now my heart would lurch with every sudden noise. I’d spend most nights wired on coffee, sitting by the window of our third-story walk-up and staring out at shadows. I felt wholly unable to protect either myself or my new bride from any of a thousand brutal deaths. One day during the week before Christmas, we went exploring on the Jersey side of the Holland Tunnel and kept driving until the traffic lightened, the trees became plentiful, and we had ourselves a good, quiet suburb.