MY HE AD WAS spinning when I left the bar. I tried to make sense of what Jack had said. Hurley had known from the beginning about Tommy, my mother and the fight that night. But he’d put none of it in his report. He had to figure one or both of them had been involved in the accident and had done nothing to help. Instead they’d left my father to die. Why?
I didn’t want to think about why. Even if it explained all the crazy secrets of the last thirty-four years. My mother hadn’t been the best mother in the world, but she’d tried. And she’d called children’s services when she couldn’t. I still had memories of her rocking me in her arms. Humming a tune or whispering funny stories in my ear. I remembered her sticking labels all around the house and playing word games to try to teach me to read.
But she’d been lost in another world a lot of the time. Was this why? Was she stuck back in that night, reliving the crash, the panic and the decision to leave Wes in the snow? Had he been conscious? Had he screamed for help? Was this the picture she could never erase from her mind? The way I could never erase the afternoon when Hurley took me to see the rock face?
In the back of my mind was another question I’d never wanted to face. Had my mother hit that rock face on purpose? Aunt Penny had once said none of it was my fault. That my mother had depressions, just like her mother before her. But maybe the rock face was her way of escaping forever the ghosts that hounded her. Had this been the ghost she couldn’t escape?
After a while I began to get beyond that awful thought. Maybe she hadn’t walked away from the crash on her own. Maybe it was Tommy who’d dragged her away. She was sixteen, and he was ten years older, a big man in his prime. Or maybe she’d been hurt, even unconscious, and Tommy had picked her up, put her on his snowmobile and taken her home. Maybe she didn’t remember the accident and didn’t know Wes was dead until the body was found. And by then maybe Tommy had sworn her to secrecy, saying they would both be charged.
It was a small light of hope, but I wanted to hang on to it. Was it enough to explain her guilt and the rock face?
There was only one person who knew. Now, finally, I was going to have to face him, because I knew Steve wouldn’t have hesitated. Like an army tank, he would have gone straight over to confront him.
With a loaded shotgun in his truck.
Folks in town say Uncle Tommy is a straight-up kind of guy who never cheats his customers or cuts corners on a job. But back in the days when he was drinking, he had a bad temper. I didn’t know how he’d react to Steve or to me. I didn’t want a fist to the head. I knew he was working on a cottage by the lake, on the other side of town. I hoped he’d be civil to me with the cottage owner in earshot.
But there was only one vehicle in the cottage’s gravel lane. A new black pickup with The Tool Guys on the side. My heart beat faster, and my palms turned sweaty. I parked beside it, and as soon as I climbed out, I heard the hammer. I found him on the other side of the wood frame, hammering a plywood subfloor. I hadn’t seen him in at least ten years. He had a shaved head and a full beard that was mostly gray. Tattoos crawled over his leathery skin. At the sound of my footsteps, he looked up.
He said nothing.
“You know why I’m here?” I asked.
He looked down and slammed in a nail. One blow, dead accurate.
“Did Steve come to see you?”
Another nail down.
“He’s missing. Do you know anything about that?”
He was lining up for a third nail.
“Damn it, Uncle Tommy! Look at me, you bastard!”
It was the wrong word to use. He stopped, his hammer in the air, and looked up. “Look who’s calling me that.”
I walked over to sit on a stool and tried to stop shaking. “I don’t care what you think of me, and I don’t care if you never talk to me again. But like it or not, I am your nephew. All my life I’ve had no one but my mother. You guys washed your hands of us. It was a cruel thing to do to an innocent kid. Okay fine, I can live with that. But it would be nice to have a brother. I know Steve came to see you. What did you tell him?”
“Never saw him.”
I tried again for calm. “He may have been drunk. He may have been in rough shape, even—” I stopped short of saying violent. “He’s been through a lot, three tours in Afghanistan, shot up his leg, just lost his mother. So now he wants to know…we think our father was this guy Wes who came to stay with you, the guy who died in a snowmobile accident.”
The hammer came down. Crooked. “Who’s been telling you this shit?”
“Jack Ripley. He was at the bar with you that night, remember? He says you and Wes left together and my mother was on the back of Wes’s snowmobile.”
“Jack Ripley was drunk as a skunk. He wouldn’t have noticed if Jesus himself had come into the bar.”
“He made a lot of sense just now.” I pressed my hands together to hide their shaking. I couldn’t do anything about my voice. “What the hell happened that night, Tommy? Did you—”
“Leave it, Rick!” Tommy’s voice cracked like a whip. “No good will come from digging it all up.”
I felt tears gathering. Jesus, not now. “No good for me, or for you?”
“For anyone. I don’t know what happened. We went our separate ways. What the hell do you think?”
“Is that what you told Steve?”
“Like I said, never saw him.”
“I know him. He’d go straight from Jack Ripley to you, looking for answers.” And now he’s disappeared, I thought with a jolt of fear. “What the hell happened?”
“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” Tommy said. He stood up stiffly and walked over to pack up his toolbox. “I don’t know where he is, but from the sound of it, you’re better off without him.”