The False Friend (17 page)

He retrieved a pack of something sugarless and berry-flavored. Celia smiled but didn’t move.

Gryzbowski shrugged. “I gave up smoking when I got divorced. Figured as long as I was miserable I might as well break up with cigarettes too. I used to chew four packs a day, but now I’m down to one.” He laughed. “That’s progress, right? Here, let me at least get you some water.” He walked to a dispenser and returned with a paper cup.

“Thank you,” she said. She thought she might be ready to try again. “When they tore down the trees …”

“Right, right,” Gryzbowski said. “Ripley Road. Now that
was
my time. ’98, ’97, something like that. A few nature freaks had a petition going around, but I was glad to see that road widened. There were always teenagers speeding on that thing, too many of them wrapping their cars around trees. You wanted to know if they found anything when they tore it up, but there wouldn’t have been anything to find. Those woods got searched like crazy back when it happened. After the Pearson girl got snatched, they had the K-9 unit out there; they had state troopers; they had volunteer search parties. Frank had real mixed feelings about them putting in the throughway. Ripley was his last link to the case, and I’m not sure he was ready to give that up. He retired from the force a few years back, moved out to Arizona. Not a bad plan, if you ask me. I’ve been thinking that I might be just about done with Jensenville, you know? It might be time for me to turn over a bunch of new leaves.”

Gryzbowski leaned back and stretched his arms behind his
head, revealing darker ovals at the underarms of his shirt. He peered at Celia over the length of his elongated body. “So tell me, Celia Durst, where did you go to leave all this behind?”

“Chicago,” she said. Two other desks were empty. Through a door, she could hear a voice talking into a phone. She turned toward the entry, as if looking might conjure someone else.

“Chicago, huh? That’s on a lake, right? I think I might be able to live in a city if it was next to a lake.” He retracted himself and leaned across the ravaged surface of his desk. “Look, you wouldn’t happen to be free for dinner, would you? I could take you to a real nice Italian place in Maynard. You could tell me what Chicago’s all about.”

Her short, sharp laugh was like a wayward belch. “I don’t think so,” she said, her voice an octave higher. “My boyfriend—”

Gryzbowski’s blunt fingers waved the question away. “Hey, I didn’t see a ring so I figured it couldn’t hurt to ask. I’ve got to level with you, Celia. The guy with the crush back in high school was me.”

“Oh,” she said. “Well, that’s very flattering—”

“But totally inappropriate. One of my professional weaknesses. Forget I said anything. And sorry I couldn’t give you better news about Ripley Road. Though if you ask me, the creep who took the Pearson girl would never have put her back where he found her.”

“What about a hole?” she asked, the words rushing out of her.

“A what?”

“A hole.” She considered turning around and walking out. “Like an old, abandoned well?” She tried to think of a way to put it that wouldn’t give herself away. “What if—what if he dumped her there and then left her,” she said. “What if he did it after the search parties were done, after there was no one looking for her anymore?”

Gryzbowski shook his head. “Now you’re beginning to sound like Frank,” he said with something like admiration. “Years later, he was still going over all the angles. I bet it was hard, huh? A nice girl like you, losing a friend like that at such a tender age?”

He leaned closer.

“Let me tell you something about this sort of crime,” he said. “It’s a crime of opportunity. A guy like that sees a girl, and maybe he’s been looking for a girl for a while, or maybe he sees her and something just snaps inside him, but he takes her, okay? After that, one of three things happens: he either kills her—usually after doing completely fucked up, animal things to her—or he keeps her tucked away somewhere—a basement, or even a tent in his backyard—or he sells her. I tell my daughter: someone sketchy tries to talk to you, scream ‘No!’ and run away. Don’t wait to hear what they’re going to say.” He shook his head. “That Pearson girl didn’t stand a chance. If he killed her, I suppose she could have turned up in the woods, but then we would have found her. Maybe not right away, maybe not for years, even, but let me tell you, if there had ever been anything to find, Frank would have found it.”

“But when they widened the road,” Celia persisted, “what if Frank didn’t think to—”

She was stopped by the look on Mitch Gryzbowski’s face.

“Captain DiNado was the finest police officer I ever had the privilege to know. And if anyone ever tries to tell you otherwise …” Gryzbowski shook his head. “He sacrificed himself for the force,” he said. “And I mean
sacrificed
, okay? To this day it haunts him that little girl was never found. Frank DiNado is a haunted man.”

Something fierce in him flared and then died.

Celia stood, bracing herself against the chair for support. “Well,” she said softly, “thank you for your time.”

Gryzbowski smiled. “Celia Durst,” he said. “The pleasure was all mine. I’m going to tell Frank that I saw you. He’ll be happy to know that you turned out all right.” She thought at first he was waving but it was just his pencil, slicing empty circles into the air.

S
he drove along the commercial drag of Jensenville’s east side, calmed by four lanes of sparse traffic brought to its knees by untimed stoplights. No ghosts of Djuna haunted the carpet emporium or the trailer home dealership, the Salvation Army thrift store or the fabric outlet. Each was heralded by an outsized parking lot whose dimensions were magnified by a dearth of parked cars. Sidewalks were sandwiched by skimpy lines of ailing grass, interrupted at cruelly irregular intervals by bus stops whose patrons wore long-distance stares, their stillness not a show of patience but of abject dependence on a bus that had not come. Until Celia saw the sign, the anonymity of this landscape was a tonic, a space to clear her brain.

The paint job had faded but was otherwise unchanged,
PAULI’S SPIEDIES
stacking itself vertically beside a painted meat skewer of massive proportion. Each individual pork cube was the size of a mastiff, the area’s sole native delicacy puncturing the horizon like an admonishing finger. Celia had been here before. This had been Leanne’s part of town, Pauli’s passed on the way to a birthday party reconstituted from memory’s slurry of hats, paper tablecloths, and balloons. Leanne’s had been a throwback to the old model. By fifth grade it was nearly all sleepovers, girls in nightgowns circling one another chanting, “Light as a feather, stiff as a board.” The only partygoer aside from the four of them had been a neighbor in a Boy Scout uniform who did little more than silently glare at them from across the room. Leanne’s mother had spent the party patting their shoulders, repeating how happy she was to meet her daughter’s girlfriends. Celia remembered the chemical smell of the plastic furniture covers; a kitchen nook from which Mrs. Forrest had produced a homemade cake; an aging photo of a sallow-skinned, pink-swaddled baby beside Leanne’s school portrait in the living room,
Heaven’s Littlest Angel
engraved on its tarnished frame. Leanne’s house was a revelation, the first kitchen/family room combo Celia had ever seen, and no dining room at all. Had the baby sister lived, she would have had to bunk with Leanne in the bedroom Celia glimpsed in a reconnaissance mission disguised as a bathroom foray, a bedroom not much bigger than the single child’s bed it contained. Celia had only ever passed houses like Leanne’s on her way somewhere else. She’d never thought of them as inhabited, certainly not by anyone she knew. Leanne’s birthday party
represented the first time Celia’s own good fortune slapped her across the face.

Huck was arriving that afternoon. Their plan called for him to rent a car at the terminal to spare Celia’s parents the need to chauffeur them back to the airport on Sunday. This had made sense when they’d had no particular need to be alone. Celia stayed on Commerce Road just long enough to reach the turn-off for the Syracuse-bound lanes of Route 81.

Huck’s time in Baltimore, during their relationship’s precocious infancy, had been one of the last summers in the history of young love to rely on the postal service. Huck’s envelopes had been covered with doodles, Celia’s with carefully selected stamps. Huck wrote on a napkin from Bertha’s Mussels; Celia enclosed sand from North Beach. She’d scouted the mailbox with the earliest pickup time, walking five extra blocks in case that might shave three hours off her letter’s East Coast arrival. By surprising Huck now, the two of them would be gaining ninety minutes, more if Celia told her parents they had hit highway traffic. After seventy-five miles, the silhouette of the airport’s control tower appeared in Celia’s windshield like a lighthouse calling her stray ship home.

He was not expecting her and so was not looking, having resigned himself to the loneliness of airports. Before Celia could discern features, she gleaned his lean shoulders and lanky arms from Terminal A’s stream of arrivals. The escalator’s descent brought the square jaw into view, the indefatigable cowlick, Huck’s hand resting on the moving rail as if he had been born at a 30-degree angle. Even the stillness imposed by a crowded escalator looked good on him, the only passenger who did not
glance down to finesse his first, resumptive step. Celia could no sooner unlearn how to read than lose her ability to spot Huck at a distance, even were she to stop being the one he returned to. She had come, in part, to see what would happen when she stepped into his line of sight, if his face would still trade its public expression for one she thought of as hers alone: the eyes widening, the pupils dilating, the nostrils flaring as if picking up a familiar scent. When Huck spotted her, his eyebrows arched in concert with the corners of his mouth, prelude to the wide, goofy grin that was the purest, most timeless expression of his delight, a circus and ice-cream-cone holdover minted in boyhood and kept in circulation ever since. Huck’s face flushed from the uptick in his pulse. His gaze claimed Celia as the person he knew best. Their eyes acknowledged their mutual expertise, no society more elite, a club capped at two. Celia called Huck’s name. She grasped his shoulders and pulled herself in. They were the same height, their lips the most natural conjunction. A kiss in an airport is like an orange in the desert.

“You surprised me.”

“This buys us some time,” she said. “I couldn’t imagine marching straight into the den with my folks and acting as if—”

“Kiss me again,” he said.

Celia was uncomfortable with public displays, even in the sanctioned zone of Arrivals. Huck liked romantic tableaus. Their compromise was a second kiss slightly shorter than the first, followed by the clasping of hands.

“I’m glad you came,” he said.

She knew his clothes would be fresh for the flight in order to be worn again tomorrow, that his blue carry-on contained everything he deemed necessary: one additional outfit, a small bag of toiletries, a book, CDs for the road. She sought refuge in these small certainties.

“How were the girls when you left?” she asked.

“Impossible,” he said. “You know how they were all week, so you can imagine what it was like trying to take them to the kennel.”

“Weren’t you going to pay Jenna extra to do weekend walks?” she asked.

“I was,” he said, “only she wasn’t sure she’d be able to do two on Sunday and the girls were already so mopey from you not being around that I decided I didn’t want to freak them out any more by leaving them alone in the apartment. I took them to that fancy place with the indoor and outdoor play areas. Bella perked up as soon as she saw the other dogs, but Sylvie gave me the dirtiest look.”

“Poor Sylvie.” Celia sighed. “She probably hates me by now.”

“Nah,” Huck said. “She’s still crazy about you.”

A sliding glass door released them from the terminal’s canned air into an environment that transmitted actual weather. They crossed to the parking garage, a breeze tugging at them like an exuberant child. Reunion and sex offered similar comforts. Time-honored habits created a temporary sanctuary from what was new or in doubt, a place where everything was as it had always been.

“You’ve got your mom’s car?” Huck asked. “Right, stupid question. He just got a new one, didn’t he?”

“Didn’t I tell you? This one’s silver.”

“Oh right, with the moonroof! Well, would you mind driving then? I don’t trust that weird lumbar thing your mom swears by.”

Celia nodded as if this were a spontaneous decision, as if they had not both already known she’d be behind the wheel. Huck’s innate grace was a localized phenomenon, a physical currency that turned to buttons outside his body’s domain. Objects held or worn—a guitar, skates, a carving knife—were subject to his mastery, but anything larger—a bicycle, a car—left him artless. Huck’s late entry into automotive life kept him to the far right-hand lanes, rigidly observing the speed limit as every other car passed him by. For Celia, who had been driving since she was sixteen, being Huck’s passenger was an exercise in managed frustration. They maintained the illusion of shared driving less for Huck’s ego than for the sake of their relationship’s equitability. The housework was split between them, the mortgage jointly held. During their first months of cohabitation they had regularly switched places in bed, but the practicality of His and Hers—bastion of personal reading preferences, nocturnal hygiene regimens, and sleep aids—finally overrode Huck’s fear of becoming his parents. Equity, they came to realize, was not the same thing as equivalence, as evidenced by bedside tables and snowflakes the world over.

Route 81 offered vistas of forest and hill, the water views south of Syracuse giving way to barn silos and plowed fields.
Huck slid back the front passenger seat to prop his heels on his end of the dashboard, the soles of his sneakers pressed against the windshield’s interior glass. It was his preferred road trip position, which he made look so natural that Celia had once tried it for five seconds before discovering how ridiculously uncomfortable it was for anyone else. Across the front seat, the two of them traded five days of half-remembered dreams and short-lived discomforts, small felicities and minor setbacks, minutiae that proximity made pertinent again. Huck’s intensity as he spoke was something Celia had first known in her father, but which maturity had allowed her to find sexy when transposed. Huck teased that they could have been spared years of heartache had they met earlier, but Celia disagreed. Her prior love life had been too binary, the replication or repudiation of her parents consuming its earliest daisy petals. Had they met any sooner, Celia might have tossed Huck away.