“It’s going to be OK,” I said. “I promise, Mackie. You’re going to be OK. Sip the Crystal Light.” I held the drink up, but when I tried to angle his head to the glass, he cried out in pain. “My neck!” he said.
After a while, I went back to Mrs. Deacon’s. I don’t remember all the details. I had been told never, never to call 911, as it was asking for trouble. Our next-door neighbor had called an ambulance once and the cost of the ride had ruined her. She’d eventually lost her trailer, because of calling 911. My father had gone to jail after a bar fight during which a stranger called 911. “You hear me?” my mom had said, after one of these stories. There were so many of these stories, brought out on lazy nights for my mom and her friends to rehash, to reexamine, almost as if they could find another ending if they told the stories often enough. “Don’t ever, ever, call the police. We handle things on our own in Bluebird Acres.”
My mom was a bad mother—I allowed myself to acknowledge this. From Mrs. Deacon’s, I called 911.
By the time the ambulance arrived, Mack was already dead of bacterial meningitis.
It was a tragedy, everyone said.
Mack would be thirty years old if he had lived. He loved microwave pizza, and dogs, and his bike. He would have been the best uncle, Uncle Mack, stopping by my Barton Hills house with a bike helmet on, and even those ridiculous biker shorts, saying, “Charles, my man, you up for a ride?”
When Mack had been dead a week, I stopped at a crosswalk on my way to work at the Woods Hole Beach Club. I watched a small white van pull into one of the mansions along Woods Hole Drive. On the side of the van was a red cross, but the vehicle was not an ambulance. Under the cross, I read the words CAPE COD CONCIERGE MEDICINE—KEEPING YOU SAFE. I watched the van park, and a young woman in a white doctor coat climbed out. She went to the front door of the mansion and rang the bell.
The door opened, and I heard a voice ring out. “Dr. Wilson! Thank goodness you’re here.”
Later that night, after work, I went to the Falmouth Library and typed “Cape Cod Concierge Medicine” into a web browser. I saw that rich people had their own doctors, who came right away when you called them.
It was clear: if you were wealthy, you were safe. I’d seen how the summer kids seemed braver than me, reckless, and now I knew why. They could dive off anything, because underneath them was an invisible net of parents, doctors, coaches, teachers, money. If they fell, they had Cape Cod Concierge. If we had been rich, Mack would be alive.
* * *
—
A TEXT FROM WHITNEY brought me back from the past: NOT FROG ISLAND. MEET AT PACKERS’ POOL.
This was interesting. The Packers had put their enormous Cliffside mansion on the market over a year ago with Sotheby’s. They must have moved it over to Whitney if she wanted to meet there. I’d never been to the Packers’， just gazed at it towering above the greenbelt.
I was excited to see the inside of the Packers’ compound at last. This would be our most glamorous “dog walk” yet.
None of us had a dog.
-13-
Salvatore
SALVATORE PARKED AT THE Gus Fruh entrance to the greenbelt. As soon as he opened his car door, a familiar smell washed over him and he was sixteen again, escaping from school, meeting his friends with a hammock and two pilfered beers—or three! The afternoon cracked open with possibility and sunshine…his high school girlfriend not exactly promising she’d show up, but a maybe just as thrilling…her nineties orange hair, bangs stiff with Aqua Net…smooth stomach and a high-cut Billabong bikini…
Salvatore’s stomach cramped, making him crouch and almost vomit. How had he ended up middle-aged and alone? What could he have done differently? He bent forward, puked a watery stream of coffee-colored bile.
It hurt. It hurt so much.
Look away and it will go away. Salvatore made himself stand up, walk away from his puddle of anguish and toward the crime scene.
Barton Hills Drive was packed with cars on this 90-degree day: everybody wanted that feeling of flying through the air on the rope swing, letting go at the perfect moment and smashing into the water below.
And there was the usual chaos surrounding a murder: radio and print journalists, television news anchors （their heads shaking at a “senseless loss of life right here on our Barton Hills greenbelt”）， concerned neighbors, rubberneckers, even local politicians wanting to attach their “tough on crime” sound bites to the latest grisly headlines.
* * *
—
SALVATORE, NONDESCRIPT IN PLAINCLOTHES and sunglasses, kept his head down. He made his way along the steep trail to the creek, ducking off the marked trail. The body had been found at a relatively unknown swimming spot surrounded by cliffs. There was no public parking near this place, so it was used almost exclusively by people who could walk from their homes along the greenbelt—in other words, neighborhood kids. Salvatore’s team had blocked the scene of the crime with yellow tape, but had not released the location.
Salvatore tried to get into his mental tunnel. His job was not to discover the why. He was here for the what. If he had learned anything, it was that spinning a narrative before gathering all the facts was a mistake. He needed to focus on what had happened to his Jane Doe. （And, OK, who the hell she was.） All he knew was that she’d ingested opioids and ended up with her lungs full of water…but on land.
He’d always loved the canopy of trees, how it morphed as he descended to the creek bed. The light on the leaves changed by the hour—neon, noontime greens fading to otherworldly purples by nightfall.
This was no country club, though; it wasn’t sanitized or safe. People had drowned down here; people had been murdered. Even as the houses around the greenbelt had changed hands from old hippies to Silicon Valley refugees, the trails remained open to everyone. Many Austinites wouldn’t go near the greenbelt. It was intimidating—if you didn’t know your way around, you could wander in circles. Phones didn’t always work down here. The greenbelt might have been the one remaining place in Austin where you could get lost—where you could stay lost. Trails shifted with storms, and waterfalls appeared and disappeared. Sometimes, the turkey vultures winging overhead felt menacing.
When Salvatore reached the water, he crouched down. This secret swimming hole could be reached from two official greenbelt entrances: Spyglass Drive （you parked behind Tacodeli） and Gus Fruh （you parked on Barton Hills Drive）。 But you could also get into the greenbelt via hidden trails, or by bushwhacking a trail yourself. There was no saying how the victim had arrived here or why. She’d likely swallowed pills, gone swimming, and then…what?
Salvatore scanned the muddy bank, looking for footprints, for anything that didn’t belong. He was in the tunnel. The sun played across the water. He saw minnows under the surface, a large turtle on a floating piece of driftwood. And then…at the far end of the swimming hole…something that wasn’t right. He narrowed his eyes. A black object was half-submerged in mud; he could see why the previous team had missed it. It was probably nothing, trash. Still, he scanned the bank.
There was no way to hike to the spot.
Salvatore took his pager and phone out of his pockets and placed them on the ground. He dove in, propelling himself across. He saw a set of footprints, and in the shadows, so covered with mud it was almost invisible, a kneepad, like the one you’d make a kid wear skateboarding, or biking. Salvatore hauled himself out of the water and examined the pad. A small tag gave him his first clue: