I drive slowly all the way back to town from the coast. Cars pass me every couple of minutes, the drivers glaring back at me like I’m some lunatic for driving under the speed limit. And honestly, any other day I might agree with them. But right now I’m in shock, and I can’t bring myself to drive any faster than thirty-five. My hands have a clawlike vice grip on the steering wheel, and I’m holding on so tightly and rigidly that some part of my brain worries I might end up with carpal tunnel or a sprained wrist. I have to remind myself to blink my eyes every now and then, as I stare glassy-eyed at the road in front of me. I’ve got the Ford rental on cruise control, and my mind is drifting far, far away.
Back to the parking lot miles behind me.
Back to the man with the flashing green eyes and the wicked, damning half-smile.
Something about him awakens a long-buried sentiment deep in my soul, sunken under over a decade of memories. When he grasped my wrists, when he pulled me out of that squad car, I felt a disturbing sense of deja vu. Like he’s done it before.
But that’s insane. I’ve never been anywhere near a situation like this before, and I certainly don’t know who the guy really is. In fact, all I do know about him is that he’s dangerous. He’s got some kind of motorcycle group and he’s got at least one crooked cop on his side. I also know that he is willing to chain a guy to the filthy floor of an abandoned warehouse — and murder scene — to interrogate him mercilessly.
So, no. I don’t think I know him. There’s no way.
But then why does he feel familiar?
It’s not a conscious recognition. More like a soft, subtle stirring of a strained memory from another lifetime, as though he’s stepped into my world from a parallel universe. Like he’s an acquaintance of some other Cherry LaBeau, a version of myself I wouldn’t recognize today.
I drive the Focus into town, intending to head for the hotel to check in, recuperate and change into some different shoes. But after zoning out for a while, lost in my thoughts, I suddenly realize with a startle that I’m not driving toward the hotel. In fact, I’m on the other side of town entirely, en route to a destination I can find on autopilot, even after all these years.
My dad’s old place. My childhood home.
I haven’t been back there since my father’s death. The funeral was held a few days ago, in a church just outside of town. Even after the service, I returned to my hotel room in Newark, not wanting to commit to a night in Bayonne just yet. It was too close. I couldn’t take it.
But today I’m supposed to check into an inn on the west side of town. After all, I didn’t leave New York just to hide out in Newark while the mystery of my father’s death festers and runs cold in my hometown. I force myself to rip my gaze off the road for a second to check the time. Just after half-past-two. Still early in the afternoon. I suppose since my automatic instincts have guided me back toward home — my old home — I might as well oblige them and go ahead.
Driving down the familiar streets, I’m struck by just how little has changed in the time I’ve been away. The same mailbox on the hairpin bend is crooked, leaning at a forty-five degree angle like it always has. I swallow back a lump in my throat when I drive past the tall, majestic silver maple in a vacant, overgrown lot I used to climb as a child. Seeing the lacy white undersides of the leaves triggers instant memories in my head, reminding me of how I used to collect the fallen leaves in early autumn into my pockets and dump them into a massive pile in my front yard, poring over the pretty foliage for hours.
When I drive down the road I lived on with my father, I can’t stop the tears from burning in my eyes. I don’t let them fall just yet, but the urge is definitely building. I haven’t cried at all yet. Not even at the funeral. I think the day of the service, I was still in a state of profound shock. Straight off the train from New York City, I was dressed in my sleekest, slinky black dress and a designer blazer. I was in stark contrast to the working-class attendees, my father’s friends from the industrial side of town, dressed in shabby suits and well-worn shoes. The older women wore outdated, moth-eaten dresses that probably hadn’t seen the light of day since 1995. My professional-grade makeup job made me look like a total fish out of water in comparison to the mostly bare faces filling the pews. Everyone else mourned loudly, unabashedly, unafraid to release their grief and pay their respects, displaying a kind of vulnerability New Yorkers don’t dare embrace.
Meanwhile, I sat in the front pew alone, unaccompanied, looking more like a character from a Lifetime movie about a funeral than an actual mourner in real life. I was cordial and responsive to the other funeral-goers when it was required of me, but I didn’t say much. I mostly sat quietly and kept to myself until it was over, when I returned to my Newark hotel room.
Even then, alone in my hotel bathtub that night, I did not cry. I wanted to. I tried to. But the tears just sat stubbornly behind my eyes, burning and threatening but never quite spilling free. I suppose I was simply too numb to fully embrace my devastation yet. And then, deciding to visit the warehouse in which he died was more of a whim than anything else. I didn’t think it through. I certainly didn’t plan it very well.
I realize now, pulling my car into the gravel driveway, that perhaps I was acting recklessly because I didn’t have anyone left in the world to tell me not to. My mother disappeared from my life when I was a child, and my father was the only one who ever successfully kept me in line. To be fair, I wasn’t a terribly misbehaved little girl — but I have always been obstinate and willful, causing some trouble for my teachers and babysitters growing up. But my dad… my dear, patient, honest father, all he ever had to do was give me a disappointed look and I immediately shaped up. He never raised his voice or lifted a hand in anger, never did anything to clip my wings or tether me down to earth.
He simply loved me, so deeply and unconditionally, that I could not bear the thought of disappointing or hurting him. It was the way I wanted to raise my own children someday. A very distant someday, I think sadly, as I have never even had a serious relationship that lasted more than six or seven months. I was a serial dater, not a serious dater.
Every man I meet seems to want to tie me down and keep me from flying away, even if at first they pretend to be fine with my career ambitions. I suppose my image and reputation precedes me and damns me in this regard. Cherry LaBeau the puff-piece writer doesn’t have big dreams beyond attending New York Fashion Week and landing a Tiffany diamond someday. But the real Cherry LaBeau — the real me that nobody sees reflected in my flimsy, gossipy published pieces — wants something more meaningful, more real. When it comes down to it, when the ditzy pretty-girl image is ripped away, no man ever wants to stick around.
But I know my father would never want his only daughter to be anyone’s trophy wife. He wanted so much more for me, and he believed in me when nobody else did. I just need to find a guy who will have my back, who can keep up with me.
Someone strong and commanding, but mischievous and adventurous…
Instantly and inexplicably, Leon pops into my head. Sitting in the front seat of my car, idling in the driveway of my late father’s house, I snort out loud. What is wrong with me? Is there a “temporary insanity” step to the phases of grief I don’t know about? Why the hell am I fantasizing about a guy who chased me for miles and pinned me to a crooked cop’s car and threatened my life? I watched him torture a guy chained to a warehouse floor, for God’s sake! Obviously my father’s death is sending me into some kind of bizarre crazy-person spiral.
Morbidly, I hesitate over the ignition, almost afraid to cut the engine. As long as I’m idling, it’s like I’m not really here. Like this is all a bad dream, and I’m going to wake up any moment now. Biting my lip, I close my eyes and turn the key. The gentle vibrations of the engine cut out, leaving me in the still silence of a dead man’s driveway.
I don’t know why I’m here, but I tell myself that it’s to gather more information about how my dad might have died. I convince myself that there’s a good reason for me to get out of my car, climb the front steps to the screened-in porch, and fumble for the key in my pocket. The house was left to me, along with everything else my dad had to his name. Which wasn’t much.
I unlock the door and walk into the front foyer, glancing around. The electricity and air conditioning are still running, as his death is so recent. Everything looks pretty much the same way it always did. The house is only about 1,400 square feet, with two bedrooms and one cramped little bathroom. The living room coffee table is covered in papers. I cock my head at this odd sight; my father was always shockingly neat and organized. He never left documents just lying around, whether they were important or not. I wonder, with a pang of guilt, if maybe he just got a little messier over the years, without me around to help out. Not that he was even that old when he passed. He and my mother got together in their teens — they were highschool sweethearts. My parents were only in their early twenties when I was born, so my dad was just shy of his forty-eighth birthday when he died.
It hits me now, again, just how strange his death is. He wasn’t even fifty yet. What kind of physically active, religiously healthy forty-seven-year-old just drops dead out of nowhere? Sure, the police told me it was an industrial accident — that he was simply killed doing the same kind of thing he did every day of his life for over twenty years. A freak incident. A moment’s slip. A little mistake with a massive cost. Simply in the right place at the wrong time.
I knew, though, that something wasn’t right about it. That there’s no way this was an accident. And in school, they always told me to trust my gut. That it would lead to the truth.
“He was a hardworking, honest man right down to the very last,” one of his coworkers told me at the funeral, clasping my hand in both of his. There were tears shining in his eyes, a frown on his weathered face. I vaguely recalled him from my childhood as one of my dad’s friends — a man named Chuck, I think. His wife used to bring over casseroles on Sundays every once in awhile. I remember they tasted like salt and sawdust, but she was so sweet that we ate the whole thing every damn time anyway.
I sit down on the sunken-in, decades-old couch and tuck my curly red hair behind my ear to look over the papers on the coffee table. I can’t resist. And this makes me feel like I’m doing something, like I’ve got a reason to be here snooping around. It’s business.
I scoop up a stack of papers and lean back on the couch to look them over, only to hear a strange crinkling noise from underneath me. I wriggle to the side and reach inside the cushions, my fingertips coming in contact with what feels like more papers. But smoother. Slick. Glossy.
Photographs.
I extract them and look through them with a dubious expression. They’re pictures of equipment from his workplace, with names, dates, and notes scribbled on the back. The documents look like health code violation notices, employee complaints, and some handwritten letters. Some of them are in my father’s signature left-handed scrawl, while others I don’t recognize at all.
“What the hell was he doing with all this?” I mumble aloud, shaking my head.
Just then, I hear a strange rumble from outside. I look up in confusion, thinking at first that someone must have pulled into the driveway. But then I realize it’s the combined sounds of several smaller, louder engines. My heart stops for a moment and I jump to my feet, the papers and photographs falling in disarray on the floor.
Motorcycles.