The Riverman (The Riverman Trilogy) (23 page)

“No. No. No. No. No.”

“I wish I could have done everything better,” she said. “But you can’t change your mistakes. You can only try to make up for them.”

And she turned away. As she walked back in the direction of her house, she left footprints in the snow. Fiona left footprints everywhere. That was her problem. She was always walking away, inserting herself and then going, needing me and then not needing me. She left reminders of herself, but she didn’t leave herself, and I was sick of it. I hurried after her.

“You don’t do this to me,” I said. “You don’t bring me this far and tell me these things and then leave.”

She paused for a moment. “I’m sorry. I’ve been selfish. But I’m trying to be better. Tell you what. When it’s all over, meet me out by the rock.”

“When what’s all over?” I asked.

She didn’t answer. Instead, she smiled and kissed the tips of her fingers again, like she had a few nights before when we were on the side of the road with our bikes, and as she raised her hand to touch it to my forehead, I caught her by the wrist.

“No,” I said. “Please. A real kiss.”

She stared at me for a moment. I lowered her hand and placed it on my chest so she could feel what she was putting me through. She did, and she sighed. And she wet her lips with her tongue. Finally, she closed her eyes, leaned in, and pressed her lips to mine.

It only lasted a second, and as soon as it was over, she walked away. I hardly remember what it felt like, but I’ll always remember that look—that
finally
look—on her face as she pulled away. Yes, it was a
finally
look. Trust me. It couldn’t be anything else.

S
ATURDAY
, N
OVEMBER
4

P
ART
III

The morning came, and I’m not sure how to describe this exactly, but I felt an absence, a dreadful sensation that something was missing from my body. In bed, looking up at the ceiling, it was like all the cracks that had been spreading over my world had finally opened up and things were slipping into them.

The snow held until the sun came out, and then it escaped as vapor into the air or it seeped as water into the ground. In slippers, I walked through our soggy yard and pulled the thin Saturday morning newspaper from the mailbox and held it under my arm as I looked up the street toward Fiona’s house and down the street toward Charlie’s house and across the street through the cluster of houses that made up the only place I had ever called home.

This place was the same place it had always been. The street was the same street I had walked and biked along so many times. Yet everything felt different, slanted, peeled of its skin. And it felt like that for the rest of the morning.

When the afternoon arrived, it brought news of what was gone.

The phone rang, and my dad answered.

“Hey, buddy, it’s been ages,” he said into the receiver. “Really … that’s … oh, buddy, I’m so sorry to hear that. Of course I’ll ask him. And if there’s anything else … we’ll, well, I’ll ask him. And I’ll get right back to you. Goodbye.”

He set the phone down and ran a hand across his face and into his hair, as if wiping an awful image from his mind.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Fiona.” He sighed. “Her parents haven’t seen her since last night. You haven’t seen her, have you?”

I shook my head and I got up from the couch, and I grabbed on to my dad and hugged him like I hadn’t hugged him in forever, and I wanted nothing more than for him to pick me up and carry me away.

S
UNDAY
, N
OVEMBER
5

AND

M
ONDAY
, N
OVEMBER
6

There was still no word from Fiona on Sunday. The police went door-to-door. Families from the neighborhood collected in their yards or in their driveways. Watching, waiting, trying to figure out what they could do to help. My mom cooked a big Sunday dinner, as she always did, but this time she made an extra pan of lasagna, which she wrapped in foil. Because she didn’t want to “be a bother,” she set the pan on the Loomises’ front step with a note that read:
We’re here for you. Anything you need, simply ask. Love, The Clearys.

By Monday, Fiona’s picture began appearing on the television news and in the newspaper. At school Principal Braugher held another assembly, and the same officer who had warned us about the dangers of fireworks now warned us about the dangers of keeping information from the police.

“We all want to see Fiona home,” he said. “If you know something, anything, you need to tell us. There’s a girl out there who depends on it.”

I was called to the police station that evening, and my dad joined me there. We sat at a round table in the middle of the station with two detectives—one man and one woman—both eating fried chicken and coleslaw as they asked me about my relationship with Fiona.

“She was my girlfriend, I guess,” I told them.

“And how long had you been dating?”

“A few weeks.”

“Did she ever talk about running away?”

“No.”

“Was there anyone who might have reason to hurt her?”

“Have you talked to her uncle?” I replied. “Have you investigated the death of her grandmother?”

They didn’t record this. They didn’t take notes. They nodded at my answers and they ate. I couldn’t be coy anymore. I had to lay it all out there.

“Fiona knew about these other missing kids,” I went on. “Chua Ling was one of them. And there’s a kid from Germany named Werner. Then there’s Boaz and Rodrigo, and probably lots more, all over the world. I don’t know all the details, but there must be databases of missing kids. I think her uncle Dorian kidnapped them.”

The woman was Detective Driscoll, and she was like a ventriloquist without a dummy. When she spoke, her lips hardly moved. “And did Miss Loomis tell you that her uncle was responsible for the disappearances of these children?”

“Not in those words exactly. But she made up these crazy stories and she implied it.”

The man was Detective Jackson, and he spoke with the cadence of a man who knew more than he was ever willing to tell you. “Here’s the thing. We’ve spoken to Dorian Loomis already. And there is no reason to believe this guy wants anything other than his niece home safe and sound.”

“But the other kids,” I said. “You have to look into them. It would have happened over the last couple of years, and—”

Driscoll chuckled under her breath, still not moving her lips. “That would be quite a feat, because Dorian Loomis hasn’t been much of a traveler. For the last couple of years he’s been a ward of the state on account of his persistent recreational activities.”

Jackson pinched his thumb and forefinger together and raised it to his mouth like he was smoking something. He squinted and nodded to my dad.

“A what of the state?” I asked.

“Incarcerated,” Driscoll said. “In prison.”

I stuttered. “But he … he … Then what about Fiona’s grandma? Her death might not have been … natural.”

“Eighty-two years old with a weak heart and dementia is as natural as it gets,” Jackson remarked.

Driscoll sipped her coffee and watched me over the rim of her mug. “Tell us a bit more about Kyle Dwyer,” she said.

I told them that Kyle was my friend and that I had confided my suspicions about Dorian to him. But I didn’t tell them about the gun. I didn’t tell them about his plan to leave. I assured them that Kyle had nothing to do with Fiona’s disappearance. And they let me go.

On the drive home, my dad didn’t scold me or ask me to explain myself. All he said was, “When I was young, there was a widow named Mrs. Maynard who lived down the street. We’d knock on her door and she’d invite us kids in and sit us on the couch and give us ribbon candy and pop. She didn’t expect anything but a chat. Then we’d be on our way. We didn’t tell our parents about it because we worried they’d think we were taking advantage of her. She was quite senile, you see. Starting to lose touch with reality. Some things she said were so off-the-wall that we decided she must have been receiving transmissions from outer space. You know, beamed down through the atmosphere and into the silver fillings in her teeth? We believed it too. It’s amazing the stories you can make yourself believe.”

We drove the rest of the way in silence.

T
UESDAY
, N
OVEMBER
7

Three days after Fiona disappeared, on a windy evening when the air smelled like bark and gravel, I rode my bike to her house. News vans and police cars were already regular visitors there, but for a short window that evening the only vehicle in the driveway was Dorian’s truck. The only lights on were the ones in the garage.

Mrs. Carmine sat on her front steps, watching me. “What are you doing, Alistair?” she asked.

“Never mind,” I replied.

“I told you to keep your distance from that man,” she said.

“You didn’t tell me what he did. You didn’t tell me the truth.”

She shook her head. “You’re confused. Go home.”

“Not until I talk to him.”

“He’s been talked to already.”

“Not by me.”

She sighed and didn’t say anything else. A few minutes later she went inside, and I rolled my bike down the driveway, walked to the garage door, and knocked on it. The knock was answered by the grind of a chain and the door drawing up and open. Dorian stood at the threshold, his black T-shirt covered in little flecks of wood. I squeezed the handgrips of my bike and pushed all my confidence into my shoulders.

“I carved this for her,” Dorian said before I could get a word out. He presented his hand. Resting in the palm was a small wooden figurine with big ears and a tail. “She has this stuffed animal from when she was real young. Calls it a bush baby. I based it on that. She loves monkeys and stuff.”

Loves.
Present tense. Not
loved
. I noticed that immediately.

Dorian pushed the wood at me, urging me to take it. I did, and I was struck by how smooth it felt. “It’s almost like glass,” I told him.

“Been whittling and sanding it for near two hours.” In his face I saw a mixture of pride and sadness—a smile that wasn’t a smile, a downward brow, eyes squinting to slits. Behind him, on a workbench, I saw the stuffed animal from his truck. I saw that long thin blade resting in a pile of sawdust and wood shavings.

“The police asked me about her, but I don’t know where she is,” I told him. It was not what I had planned to say, but they seemed like the words he needed to hear.

“I know you don’t,” he said. “I’ve spoken to the cops too. Sorry, but I had to tell them about your pal with the van.”

I didn’t respond. I kept running my hand over the wood, entranced by the grace of the thing.

“Not sure who you two think I am,” he went on, “but it ain’t accur … it ain’t the truth.” He noticed how much sawdust was still on his shirt, so he gave it a shake, unleashing a swarm of wood particles.

“I made some mistakes,” I admitted. I was there to tell him that I was sorry, but this was the best I could manage. Dorian’s innocence was devastating. It meant I was a fool. It meant I knew nothing.

He nodded, but he wasn’t nodding a yes. “No one’s blaming you,” he said.

A nice man, a sweet man.
That’s what Fiona called him. Did that mean he was also an honest man? A wise man? “What do you think happened to her?” I asked.

He shrugged limply. “Fi wasn’t happy here. I could see that. It wasn’t like she was sulking about or anything. She was smart. Clever. Quick with a joke. But she was making phone calls to other parts of the world. Dreaming of escape, I guess. She was never really part of this place, if you catch my drift.”

I did.

“And sometimes a kid has to get up and go,” he went on. “I know. Someone so young? It don’t make much sense. But that’s what the police think, anyhow. I mean, there’s no evidence of anyone messing about the house. And they’ve dealt with younger runaways. Kids who hop a bus and end up in a new city and … Well, you can imagine how this sorta thing goes.”

The idea of Fiona wandering alone through a landscape of skyscrapers and graffiti made me sad in a way I hadn’t felt yet. In the past she had asked me for help, but before that moment, I had never thought of her as completely helpless.

“You think she’ll be okay?” I asked.

He shrugged again. “You care for her, don’t you?”

“Yessir.”

“And she cares for you. When Ma passed, Fi asked if it was okay to invite you along to the memorial. We asked why, and Fi said that it was because ‘Alistair is a kid you can trust, a kid you can count on.’”

“She said that?”

“She did. And Fi is a damn good judge of character. That’s why I’m asking you … if there’s anything … anything you haven’t told the cops, even if it’s a secret between you and her, you’re gonna have to tell them. You’re gonna have to be that kid, the one Fi says you are.”

Our conversation ended there. Dorian insisted that I keep the figurine, and so I brought it home and set it on my nightstand.

W
EDNESDAY
, N
OVEMBER
8

TO

F
RIDAY
, N
OVEMBER
10

Three more days. I went to school, I came home, I sat with my family at dinner, I did homework. The phone seemed to ring incessantly. One of the calls was from Charlie.

“Tell him I don’t want to talk right now,” I told my mom.

“He says that’s fine. He’s says whenever you’re ready.”

Charlie is the Riverman. Charlie is the Riverman. Charlie is the Riverman.

I said it over and over to myself, as if saying it over and over could make it seem possible. But it wasn’t possible. Aquavania wasn’t possible. Charlie was Charlie. That’s all he could ever be—the kid who had shared a sandbox with me and who had been there for the birthday parties and the games of flashlight tag and for everything. For everything.

So what was Fiona telling me? Was she jealous of my friendship with Charlie? Was she trying to pull us apart? Why bring Charlie into this?