The River King (37 page)

A motion had already been passed by both the board of trustees at the school and the town council to name the health center after Helen Davis and a bronze plaque with her name etched upon it had been set into the cornerstone. The dean had asked Betsy Chase to commemorate the occasion with a photograph, and she was there to preserve the moment when Sam Arthur shook hands with Bob Thomas, each man standing with one foot balanced on the cornerstone. Betsy was then asked to photograph the doctors who'd been wooed away from an HMO in Boston, along with the center's new administrator, Kelly Avon's cousin, Janet Lloyd, who was delighted to be moving back to Haddan after eight years of exile at Mass General.

On the way over, Betsy had noticed the cruiser Abe drove, one of dozens of cars left at the curb along Main Street, where the no-parking signs had been covered with burlap hoods. In spite of herself, Betsy found herself looking for him, but the place was crowded, filled with people Betsy didn't know, and she didn't see Abe until the Chazz Dixon band was playing its final set. He was standing beside the makeshift cloakroom, a direction Betsy needed to go toward anyway, in order to retrieve her coat.

“Hey,” she said as she approached. “Remember me?”

“Sure I do.” Abe raised his drink to her and said, “Have fun,” then quickly moved on. He had decided that he was finished getting hit over the head with rejection, so he made his way to the bar to get himself another beer. In spite of all the initial hoopla, people were managing just fine without Abel Grey on the police force. Mrs. Evans, for instance, had taken to phoning Doug Lauder about the raccoon that came into her yard to eat her bird-seed and rattle her trash cans. A new uniformed cop had been hired and in the mornings he could be seen at the crosswalk in front of the elementary school. On days when the garden club met, he was posted outside town hall, directing traffic and gratefully accepting the thermoses of hot chocolate Kelly Avon had taken to delivering. Residents who had invited Abe into the most personal moments of their lives—Sam Arthur, for instance, with whom Abe sat vigil when his wife, Lorriane, was in that head-on collision while visiting their daughter in Virginia, and Mrs. Jeremy, who had wept while Abe talked AJ out of jumping out a second-story window one horrible spring night, a leap that probably wouldn't have done any more than rattle a few of AJ's bones considering how drunk he'd been—now seemed startled when they ran into him, embarrassed by all the secrets he'd once been privy to. Actually, Abe himself didn't feel that comfortable with most people, what with Joey and Mary Beth clearly avoiding him and all those busybodies from Haddan School who'd reported him for harassment keeping an eye on him.

The only reason he'd shown up at the festivities was to pay his respects to Helen Davis. He'd already had two beers in honor of her memory and he figured a third wouldn't hurt. He'd have a couple of drinks and get out, no damage done, but when he turned he saw that Betsy had also come to the bar. She was asking for a glass of white wine, and looking his way.

“There you go, following me again,” Abe said, and he was surprised when she didn't deny it. “Give her the good stuff, George,” Abe told the bartender, George Nichols from the Millstone.

“The school's footing the bill,” George said. “Trust me, there is no good stuff.”

“I heard you got fired,” Betsy said as she moved aside to let AJ Jeremy get to the bar.

“I prefer to think of it as a permanent vacation.” Abe looked past AJ and signaled for George Nichols to add only a small amount of vodka to the double vodka tonic AJ had ordered. “Looks like they roped you into being the inquiring photographer,” he said when Betsy stepped back to take a shot of Chazz Dixon, wailing on his saxophone with a fervor that shocked many of his music students. Betsy turned and found Abe in her viewfinder. Most subjects were shy, they tended to look away, but Abe stared back at her with an intensity that flustered her and made her snap his picture before she was ready. It was those blue eyes that were to blame, and had been from the start.

“My turn,” Abe said.

“You have no idea how to take a decent picture.” Betsy laughed as she handed over the camera.

“Now you'll always remember this day,” Abe told her after he'd taken her picture. “Isn't that what they say about a photograph?”

It was a big mistake not to just walk away from each other and they both knew it, but they stood together awhile longer and watched the band.

“Maybe you should hire them to play at your wedding,” Abe said of the musicians.

“Very funny.” Betsy drank her wine too fast; later in the day she'd have a headache, but right now she didn't care.

“I don't think it's funny at all.” He was reaching toward her.

“What are you doing?”

Betsy was so certain that he was about to kiss her, that she found it difficult to breathe. But instead, Abe showed her the quarter he'd pulled from behind her ear. He'd been practicing, and although the trick still needed work, in his many free hours he'd discovered that he had a gift for sleight of hand. Already, he'd finagled close to a hundred bucks out of Teddy Humphrey, who still could not figure out how Abe always discerned which card Teddy picked from the deck.

“You're good at that,” Betsy said. “Just the way you're good at breaking into places.”

“Is this an official investigation or a personal accusation?”

Betsy swayed to the music. She refused to say more, even though as soon as she'd heard about the robbery at Eric's, her first thought was of Abe. Even now she wondered if the student they'd expelled, Harry McKenna, might have been innocent of that particular crime. “I think it's too bad Helen Davis couldn't be here.”

“She would have hated it,” Abe said. “Crowds, noise, bad wine. ”

“They've found someone to take her place.” As the new head of the department, Eric had been on the hiring committee. A young historian fresh out of graduate school had been chosen, someone too fresh and insecure to question authority. “They wasted no time replacing her.”

“Here's to Helen.” Abe raised his beer aloft, then finished it off in a few gulps.

Betsy had a dreamy look on her face; lately she had been especially aware of how a single choice could alter life's course. She wasn't used to drinking wine in the afternoon, and maybe that was why she was being so chummy with Abe. “What do you think Helen would have changed if she could have chosen to live her life differently?”

Abe thought this over, then said, “I think she would have run off with me.”

Betsy let out a yelp of laughter.

“You think I'm kidding?” Abe grinned.

“Oh, no. I think you're serious. You definitely would have made an interesting couple.”

Now when Abe reached for her he really did kiss her, there in front of the Chazz Dixon band and everyone else. He just went ahead and did it and Betsy didn't even try to stop him. She kissed him right back until she was dizzy and her legs felt as though they might give out. Eric was over by Dr. Jones's table with the rest of the Haddan faculty and might easily have seen them had he looked behind him; Lois Jeremy and Charlotte Evans were walking right past, chattering about the good turnout, and still Betsy went on kissing him. She might have gone on indefinitely if the drummer in the Dixon band hadn't reached for his cymbals and startled her into pulling away.

Some of the crowd had decided to create a dance floor, up beyond the coatroom, and several locals were letting loose before the band packed up. AJ Jeremy, who had managed to get looped despite his mother's watchful eye, was dancing with Doreen Becker. Teddy Humphrey had taken the opportunity to ask his ex-wife to accompany him to the dance floor, and to everyone's surprise Nikki had agreed.

“Well,” Betsy said, trying to compose herself after their kiss. Her lips were hot. “What was that for?”

She looked up at Abe but she couldn't see his eyes. So much the better, for if she had she would have known exactly what the kiss was for. At least she was smart enough not to watch when Abe walked away. She told him once there had never been anything between them, now she just had to convince herself of the very same thing. She ordered herself another glass of wine, drank it too quickly, then got her coat and buttoned it against the changing weather. Above the tent, the flags snapped back and forth in the wind, and the late afternoon sky had begun to darken, with clouds turning to black. It was the end of the celebration, and by then Eric had found her.

“What's wrong?” he asked, for her face was flushed and she seemed unsteady. “Not feeling well?”

“No, I'm fine. I just want to go home.”

Before they could leave there was the sound of thunder, rolling in from the east, and the sky was darker still.

“Bad timing,” Eric said. Through the fabric of the tent they could see a fork of lightning. “We'll just have to wait it out.”

But Betsy couldn't wait. She could feel little bits of electricity up and down her skin each time the sky was illuminated, and before Eric could stop her, she dashed out of the tent. As she made her way along Main Street, the sky rumbled, and another line of lightning crossed the horizon. The storm was moving closer, and there were several large oak trees on Main Street and on Lovewell Lane that were particularly susceptible to a strike, but that didn't stop Betsy on her way back to the school. Before long, fat raindrops had begun to fall, and Betsy stood with her face upturned. Even with the rain washing over her, she continued to burn; she hadn't talked herself out of anything.

Bob Thomas had asked her to rush the photographs, so she went directly to the art building. She was happy to be working, hoping she might keep her mind off Abe, and as it turned out, the photographs she'd taken that afternoon were quite good. One or two of the prints would make their way to the front page of the Sunday edition of the
Haddan Tribune
—the one of Sam Arthur and Bob Thomas shaking hands and another of Chazz Dixon wailing away. It was amazing how the lens of a camera could pick up information that was otherwise invisible to the naked eye. The suspicion on Sam Arthur's face, for instance, when he gazed at the dean; the sweat on Chazz Dixon's brow. Betsy had assumed she'd be most rattled by the photograph of Abe, but in fact he had moved and the image was blurry. It did him no justice at all. No, it was the photograph Abe had taken of her that turned out to be the most disturbing. Betsy let that print sit in the developing vat for quite some time, until it was overdeveloped and streaky, but even then, it was impossible to ignore what this picture revealed. There, for all the world to see, was a woman who'd fallen in love.

IN THE PEARLY SKIES OF MARCH there were countless sorrows in New England. The world had closed down for so long it seemed as though the ice would never melt. The very lack of color could leave a person despondent. After a while the black bark of trees in a rainstorm brought on waves of melancholy. A flock of geese soaring across the pale sky could cause a person to weep. Soon enough, there would be a renewal, sap would again rise in the maples, robins would reappear on the lawns, but such things were easily forgotten in the hazy March light. It was the season of despair and it lasted for four dismal weeks, during which time more damage was done in the households of Haddan than the combined wreckage of every storm that had ever passed through town.

In March, more divorces came before old Judge Aubrey and more love affairs unraveled. Men admitted to addictions that were sure to bring ruin; women were so preoccupied they set fire to their houses accidentally while cooking bacon or ironing table-cloths. The hospital in Hamilton was always filled to capacity during this month, and toothaches were so commonplace both dentists in Hamilton were forced to work overtime. Not many tourists came to Haddan during this season. Most residents insisted that October was the best month to visit the village, with so much marvelous foliage, the golden elms and red oaks aflame in the bright afternoon sunshine. Others said May was best, that sweet green time when lilacs bloomed and gardens along Main Street were filled with sugary pink peonies and Dutch tulips.

Margaret Grey, however, always came back to Haddan in March, despite the unpredictable weather. She arrived on the twentieth of the month, her boy Frank's birthday, taking a morning flight up from Florida and staying overnight with Abe. Abe's father, Ernest, could not be asked to accompany her; Margaret wouldn't have expected her husband to face the cemetery any more than she would have insisted Abe pick her up at the airport in Boston. She took the train up to Haddan, looking out at the landscape she once knew so well; it all seemed terribly unfamiliar, the stone walls and the fields, the flocks of blackbirds, the multitudes of warblers who returned at this time of year, marking Frank's birthday by swooping across the cold, wide sky.

Abe waited for his mother at the Haddan train station, the way he did every year. But for once he was early and the train was late, held up outside Hamilton by a cow on the tracks.

“You're on time,” Margaret commented when Abe came to give her a hug and collect her suitcase, for he was notoriously late on the occasion of these visits, postponing the sorrow that inevitably accompanied the day.

“I'm unemployed now,” he reminded his mother. “I've got all the time in the world.”

“I recognize this car,” Margaret said when Abe led her over to Wright's cruiser. “It wasn't safe to drive twenty years ago.”

They stopped at the Lucky Day Florist where Ettie Nelson hugged her old friend and told Margaret how jealous she was of anyone who lived in Florida, where it was already summer when here in Haddan they still had to struggle with dreadful blustery weather. Abe and his mother bought a single bunch of daffodils, as they always did, although Margaret stopped to admire Ettie's garlands.