13
Halloran decided against leaving. Maybe he didn’t want to make a scene, pushing his way through the crowd, or maybe his decision had to do with his friend, who had reached out and tried to take Danny’s hand. Danny wouldn’t let him.
The point was now moot. Darby blocked his path.
‘Hello, Danny. I’m sorry to interrupt, but I need a moment of your time. My name is Darby McCormick.’ She showed him her badge, but he didn’t look at it. His friend did. His face tightened, the olive skin flexing across the bone. He sat up straight in his chair, looking to Danny for an explanation.
Danny slid back into his seat and leaned forward across the table, his voice low as he tried to calm his friend. ‘It’s okay, Vic. It’s not about –’
‘You promised,’ Vic said, then lowered his voice. ‘You promised me you were clean.’
‘I am. It’s not about that.’
‘No,’ Darby added. ‘It’s not.’
‘So why did you want to run?’ Vic asked.
Danny rubbed his mouth with the back of his wrist. ‘I’ll explain everything later, I promise. I’ll meet you back at your place. This won’t take long.’
Vic didn’t look happy about it. He looked downright hurt as he waited for a hug goodbye. Danny’s face flushed, and he offered up a pained smile, his gaze dropping to his lap, not wanting to show any sign of affection, she guessed, because he wasn’t officially out of the closet yet, or maybe he just didn’t want her to know.
Darby took Vic’s seat. It was warm, and his cologne lingered in the air.
‘Have we met before?’ she asked.
Halloran shook his head. He seemed so delicate, like he was about to crack. Or maybe she thought that because of his porcelain features.
‘My father told me you might be looking for me,’ he said.
Halloran’s father, Kennedy had told her, was a Belham cop. ‘And he gave you, what, a physical description?’
‘I didn’t know who you were, so I looked you up online.’ He kept twisting his hands on his lap. He had the kind of long eyelashes women envied, a narrow jaw and full lips that were chapped from the cold. ‘I saw your pictures and that story about the guy who kidnapped people and hunted them down in that dungeon or whatever it was. Who told you I was here?’
‘What does it matter?’ Darby smiled. ‘I’m here, and I want to talk to you about that night on the Hill.’
He rolled his eyes. Then he glanced to his right, where two men were sharing a sticky bun, engaged in a conversation about yet another nor’easter that was expected to hit the city sometime later next week.
Danny turned back to her and leaned his chest against the edge of the table, his hands still on his lap. ‘Look,’ he said, keeping his voice low, ‘all due respect, this is harassment. I’ve talked to I don’t know how many cops over the years, FBI agents – I even spoke to those guys they have from that group that specializes in crimes against kids.’
‘Investigative Support Unit.’
‘Right. I even did hypnosis back when I was a kid, to see if I remembered anything from that night – and I didn’t. Everything I knew, I told.’ He didn’t hide his frustration, and she saw a barely concealed anger burning in his blue eyes – a rare colour for a redhead. ‘I’ve told all of you the truth from day one.’
‘No one’s accusing you otherwise.’
‘So why do you people keep acting like I’m keeping secrets from you? Why do you keep coming around bothering me?’
‘You’re the only one who saw him.’
‘I didn’t see him. How many times do I have to say it? The guy who stepped up next to me – he could have been the Cookie Monster for all I knew. I didn’t see his face. I didn’t see a face.’
‘Danny,’ she said. ‘Byrne is dying.’
That took a bite out of him. ‘Yeah,’ he said, bowing his head. ‘Yeah, I know,’ he sighed.
‘I’m just asking you to walk me through it.’
He stared down at the table, as though the answers he needed were buried somewhere on the scarred wood surface. He bounced a leg up and down, and he gave off the kind of manic energy that made her wonder if he were about to push the table aside and bolt for the door.
‘You mind telling me why you’re so nervous?’ she asked.
He looked up at her and studied her face, testing the seriousness of her question.
‘Everyone is expecting me to pull a rabbit out of my ass, come up with some last-minute … miracle that’ll show that Byrne is, you know, the guy. What you people forget is that I was nine. I was there that night to try out my new snowboard.’ He closed his eyes for a moment and shook his head. ‘I should never have helped her.’
‘Helped her?’
‘Claire Flynn. I didn’t know who she was that night; I found that out later. She was … Okay.’ He sighed again, resigned to the fact that he had to share his experience again. ‘Okay,’ he said again, and folded his hands on the table. He leaned forward, so they could talk privately, and kept his voice low. ‘I read you’re from Belham.’
‘Born and raised.’
‘So you know the Hill.’
Darby nodded. ‘Spent plenty of time there as a kid.’
‘So that night, it’s, like, five or so, and it’s already pitch black. The snow had picked up and at the top there’s … not a line but it’s really crowded. I was on the farther side of the Hill, the place near the entrance for the parking lot, because that’s where the older kids went sledding, you know, to keep away from the little kids, so we wouldn’t run into ’em. That’s when I see Ericka Kelly. I knew her from school. Everyone knows her because everyone in town knows her father.’
‘Big Jim Kelly.’
‘You know him?’
‘I went to school with him.’
‘Okay, so you know how massive the guy is. Six-foot-six, three bills, has a diamond stud in each ear and a sleeve of tats on each arm. One look at the guy and you can feel your nuts shrink. My point is everyone in town knows who Big Jim Kelly is, and this meltdown from school, this kid Tommy MacDonald – he’s on the welfare-project crew, getting into it with Big Jim’s daughter ’cause she’s holding everyone up to help this little girl in a pink snowsuit get on her sled – the girl we all find out later is Claire Flynn.’ He snorted. ‘You know he’s dead, right? Tommy Mac?’
Darby nodded. It was in the report: Tommy MacDonald, driving drunk when he was seventeen, had crashed into a telephone pole in Belham and killed himself and the two friends he had with him in the stolen car.
‘Tommy Mac looks like he’s going to clock her,’ Danny said. ‘Instead, he forces her on to her inner tube, one of those inflatable jobs that fly across the snow, and pushes her down the Hill. After that bit of fun, I notice the little girl in the pink snowsuit is walking away – only she’s moving towards the part of the Hill where you can’t sled because of all the rocks and trees and shit. There’s, like, a ledge there, and I’m thinking, “Shit, what if she trips and falls.” That’s when I go to help her.’
So far everything he’d shared jibed with what she’d read in the reports. He’d told this story so many times, to so many detectives, that it sounded as though he had memorized it by rote.
‘When I reach her,’ he said, ‘she’s balling like someone chopped her arms off. I can’t get her to calm down, and she’s going on and on about her glasses, how she can’t see without them, she can’t find her glasses. I couldn’t just, you know, leave her there, so I get down on my hands and knees, searching through the snow while she’s bawling, and that’s when a guy I assumed was her father steps up next to her. Not me – her.’
‘Why did you think the man was her father?’
‘You’re not listening. I just assumed he was. I wasn’t, you know, paying attention. It’s not like he was carrying rope or some shit or wearing a sign that said “Warning: child abductor”. I was nine. What was I supposed to think?’
‘Danny, I’m not blaming you. It’s just a question.’
He rubbed his forehead. Then he folded his hands on the table and looked out of the window, at the people waiting in line, and sucked in air sharply through his nose. His nostrils flared, and, when he looked back at her, she saw traces of the nine-year-old who had grown into a confused young man, unable to understand why this event had been visited upon his life, which had been changed in ways he could never have expected.
‘Where I was, there wasn’t a lot of light,’ he said. ‘Some of the cars in the parking lot had their lights on, because the snow had turned bad and the wind had picked up, so some people were leaving. He’s standing sort of sideways, with his back to me. Her back is to me too.’
‘How far away were you?’
‘Four, maybe six feet. I’m down on my knees when he stepped up next to her. I looked up and saw a guy of what I thought was average height.’
‘But you said you couldn’t see his face.’
‘That’s right, I couldn’t. I assumed it was a guy because he’s wearing the kind of coat a guy would wear. It was navy-blue or black – definitely dark – and it came down a little past the waist. You know, a big, bulky thing. The coat had a hood and he had it tied down at the neck so it wouldn’t blow off. The hood was lined with fur that made me think of a raccoon. I remember thinking his jacket looked like the one Han Solo wore at the beginning of Empire, you know, that scene on Hoth, in all the snow?’
‘In the report, I read something about a scarf.’
‘I think it was a scarf. I caught a really brief glimpse of something wrapped around his mouth and nose – you know, the way people do when it’s really cold out – and it was getting colder out, I remember that. But I couldn’t tell you if he was white, black, whatever.’
‘And then you spoke to him.’
‘Correct. I says, “She lost her glasses, I’m trying to help her find them.” I said that ’cause she’s still crying, and I’m thinking he’s going to blame me for hurting her or something. He says nothing. I couldn’t tell you if he moved his lips because, like I said, I can’t see his face. I can’t tell you if he heard me or if he ignored me. Then he reaches down and grabs the girl’s hand. She yanks it back.’
‘Did she say anything?’
‘If she did, I didn’t hear it. What people forget is that there was a lot of noise up there – you know, people talking and shouting and laughing. Then you had the wind and the cars in the lot – the engines are running, tyres crunching across the snow. That stuff. That was another reason why I went over there to help her. I didn’t want her to get hit by a car.’
‘What ran through your mind when she yanked her hand away?’
‘I thought she was being just a typical kid. When they get upset, you can’t reason with them, do anything to calm them down. You just gotta let ’em ride it out.’
‘He got down on one knee and got real close to her. That’s when I noticed the blanket. He had it tucked under his arm. It looked heavy, like wool, maybe, and it was a solid colour – a dark blue, maybe black. Again, I couldn’t see his face, and it wasn’t like I was looking at him. I was looking to get out of there.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I didn’t want to get in trouble,’ he said. ‘I just assumed this guy was thinking that I’d done something to his kid, when I hadn’t. I’d just been trying to help her.’
‘And Claire, what did she do when he wrapped the blanket around her?’
‘Nothing. Not a thing. That was the last thing I saw. I decided to pick up my snowboard and leave.’ He was studying her face again. ‘I’m sorry, okay?’
‘For what?’
‘For not being able to give you or any of the others what you want. Every time I do this, you all get the look you have right now. Disappointment.’
‘You didn’t do anything wrong.’
‘And yet you all make me feel as though I did, which is why I keep apologizing, again and again and again.’
And Darby saw how it still ate at him: the guilt for not remembering tiny details that even an adult would have been unable to recall; for not paying more attention; for not knowing something was wrong and for not doing something about it, even though he realized, deep down, there was nothing he could have done.
‘You did nothing wrong,’ Darby said, hoping he heard the genuine empathy in her voice.
‘That’s what everyone keeps telling me.’
‘I’m not bullshitting you. Hey, look at me. I was fifteen when someone broke into my house and tried to kill me. I had barricaded myself in my parents’ bedroom, and downstairs this guy was holding a knife to my friend, using her to try to lure me out.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I ran for help.’ She could see he didn’t believe her. ‘Go online and you’ll find the story.’
Darby took out her card. ‘I know the names of a couple of great therapists who specialize in survivor’s guilt. You want their names – anything – you call me.’
She slid her card across the table. When he reached out for it, she saw the track scars in the webbing between his fingers.
He saw her looking and said, ‘I’m clean.’
‘Good. That stuff will kill you.’
‘You ever done it?’
Darby shook her head.
‘So you don’t know what it’s like,’ he said. ‘How it just … rights everything wrong inside you. It’s like this glue that mends all your broken pieces, puts you back together the way God made you when you were born.’
‘You didn’t do anything wrong that night,’ she said again.
‘You going to tell my father?’
‘About what? Our conversation?’
‘I meant my … sexual preference.’
So that’s why he was so nervous, Darby thought. ‘Don’t be ashamed of who you are.’
Her words didn’t reassure him. He looked scared.
‘It’s none of his business,’ Darby said. ‘It’s not anyone’s business but yours.’
‘So you won’t say anything.’
‘Of course not.’
‘Good,’ he said, glancing at his needle scars. ‘I’ve already disappointed him enough.’
Driving back to Belham, Darby kept replaying that moment up on the Hill when the man wrapped the blanket around Claire Flynn and spoke softly into her ear, no doubt reassuring the six-year-old over and over again there was no reason to cry. I’m not going to hurt you, Darby imagined her would-be killer saying. Just come with me and we’ll call your mommy and daddy. Everything’s going to be fine, you’ll see.