“Mike Gaffney?” I hated the feel of his name in my mouth.
“He didn’t give his name. But Luke called him Dad, I think.”
A fancy weekend house— no surprise Ace Construction had been the ones renovating. These days, they’re the biggest and best contractor in the area. Back in the day, when Luke was a teenager, Mike Gaffney did mostly small jobs like renovating our bathroom. I still remembered my mother yelling at Jane and Bethany— always inseparable— to stop deliberately huffing the paint. They’d be dead within days. The smell of drying paint still makes me nauseous.
According to the show notes, The River had spent a whole episode on Mike Gaffney. But he’d been interviewed at the time of the murders and, in the end, there’d been nothing to connect him except that work on our bathroom. Plus, he’d had an alibi.
I wonder what else this group might have “inadvertently” left out, aside from this problem with Ace Construction. Their descriptions of the night were suspiciously similar, right down to the pasta Maeve made: penne arrabiata. They’d all called it exactly that. And gave the exact same time window that Keith and Derrick had gone out for cigarettes, “nine thirty to nine thirty-five.” Drugs— I suspect that’s what they’re keeping from me. Could be they were all so high earlier they’re not exactly sure what happened. No matter how many times you tell people you don’t care about the drugs— you’re a cop. They’ll still believe you do.
Drugs could also be the reason we’ve got a dead body in a car. Could be a buy went south. The local dealers have a habit of getting unreasonably greedy.
As I round the next corner, I see the woods lit up in the distance like a sports field. There are more than a dozen vehicles lining the road, mostly cruisers, plus a larger crime scene vehicle up ahead, a shiny metal box with NEW YORK STATE FORENSIC INVESTIGATION UNIT written on its side. I drive past the line of cars until I spot an officer up ahead with a flashlight.
I roll down my window as I pull to a stop. Charles— Chuck something— I’m pretty sure.
“Park up on the right,” he says, pointing with his flashlight. “It’s flooded. Watch your step.”
Past the RV, I can see the news crews. I’m not a fan of reporters. They surrounded our house for weeks after Jane disappeared, hungrily consuming our grief and spitting out our bones. In the end, I’d given them exactly what they wanted, racing out of our front door screaming my head off when they finally found Jane. Six days of searching in rain that would not let up, and finally my sixteen-year-old sister’s decimated body had been located, her pretty face so badly smashed they had to rely on dental records to identify her. The photos of eight-year-old me running barefoot in the dark had been splashed across the front page of every local paper, and inside many of the national ones.
Or so I’d been told. It’s not just the Ace Construction renovation that’s faded from my memory. Jane’s murder erased whole swaths of my childhood, my memories of everyone and everything hopelessly blurry— my parents, my friends, Bethany. Only Jane is still painfully crystal clear.
But despite what Dan thinks, my refusal to listen to The River isn’t proof of anything, except me being a rational human. One of the biggest arguments we ever had was about him listening to it. I’d have considered it in bad taste even if he didn’t know me or Jane. Dan and Jane weren’t friends in school— Jane was in the cool crowd, Dan the nerdy kid looming in the shadows, keeping tabs on everybody. But they did know each other.
“If you don’t want me to check it out, I won’t, obviously,” Dan said at the time. “But, I mean, I do think . . . shouldn’t somebody? Just in case?”
“What? You going to find the murderer, Mr. Supersleuth?”
Dan’s gaze was unwavering. “That wasn’t what I meant, and you know it.”
“Listen if you want. If that’s your kind of thing,” I’d said as I pulled my shirt off over my head. The quickest way to end this conversation was to have sex. Dan was nothing if not linear in his thinking. “I don’t care.”
I did suspect that Dan meant well. That he was trying to help. He’d offered on many previous occasions to go back through Jane and Bethany’s files with me. I’d always refused. Because what if I finally tried to solve Jane’s case— really tried, instead of just rushing through— and I still failed? As it was, I could still pretend Jane was mine to save.