Elizabeth Hand - Generation Loss

“I’ll be doing the investigation,” he said. “You said next of kin’s in there? And the sheriff?”

“Yeah.”

He headed toward the house. I let him get a few yards ahead of me then followed.

Gryffin opened the door. Hakkala introduced himself and went into the kitchen to confer with John Stone. Gryffin remained in the mudroom with me.

“You look pretty bad,” I said.

“I am. God, this is awful.”

I hesitated then asked, “Do they have any idea what happened?”

“‘They?’ Who’s ‘they?’” He glanced into the next room. “There is no they . There’s John Stone, and now this guy. He’ll call the medical examiner, they’ll do an autopsy. I have to arrange some kind of funeral…”

He buried his head in his hands.

“I’m sorry.” I felt a real pang of grief—not for Aphrodite but for him. I touched his shoulder. “Really. It’s—well, I’m just sorry, is all.”

He nodded and put his hand on mine, just for an instant.

“Yeah,” he said at last and looked away. “I gather this guy is going to ask us a few more questions and then do whatever he does up there at the crime scene.”

The back of my neck went cold. “Crime scene?”

“That’s what they call it. An unattended death—they treat it like a homicide. He didn’t think it was anything but her falling, three sheets to the wind, as usual. That’s what the autopsy will tell them, anyway. I guess it takes a few weeks before they sign off on everything.”

“Do I need to wait around?”

He shot me a grim look. “No. This guy’ll question you, and the sheriff wants to question us about the girl in the motel. Then you can go, I guess.”

For a minute we stood in silence. Finally I said, “Me being here … I guess I made it worse.”

“No, Cass.” He started for the kitchen. “You just made it weird.”

The detective didn’t spend much time with me. I answered his questions, he wrote everything down. Then he went to see Gryffin in the living room. I remained with John Stone in the kitchen, watching as he fed the woodstove.

“Been up here before?” He nudged the stove door shut with his foot.

“No.”

“Probably won’t be in much of a hurry to come back, now.”

I shrugged. “I dunno. I kind of like it, except for the cold.”

“Not much besides the cold. For the next six months, anyway.”

He looked up as Gryffin stepped back into the room.

“He’s on the phone,” Gryffin said. “This could take a while.”

John Stone glanced from him to me. “Mind if I ask you a few quick questions about Merrill Libby’s girl?”

Gryffin sank into a chair. “Go ahead.”

“Well, did either one of you see her the other night? I gather you did—Everett said his daughter was on the computer with Merrill’s girl. She said she’d seen you at the Lighthouse.” He turned to me. “And that Robert Stanley, the one works for Mr. Provenzano—he said you was talking to Merrill’s girl. That’s what she told him, anyway.”

“MacKenzie,” I said. The sheriff looked confused. “Libby’s girl—she’s got a name. MacKenzie.”

John Stone blinked. “Well, yes, of course she does. But she—did you see her?”

“She checked me into the motel. Afterward, she came to my room—I’d asked her father if there was someplace to eat. He said no, but she wanted to tell me there was a place, that restaurant down at the harbor. The Good Tern.”

“She enter your room?”

“Yeah. For, like, a minute. It was freezing, I didn’t want to make her stand outside. She told me about the restaurant. Then she left. End of story.”

“Some of the kids—well, one of them, Robert, he said that the girl—that MacKenzie told him you were going to give her a ride somewhere.”

Fucking Robert . I felt myself grow hot. “I didn’t tell her that. I didn’t tell her anything. I said about five words to her, and that was it.”

John Stone allowed himself a wry smile. “Five words, huh? Well, Miss Neary, we picked up a lot of chatter—teenagers talking, you know. They may confiscate her computer, see what shows up on there.”

My mouth went dry. “What do you mean?”

“Computer records. We had a incident last year, a juvenile met someone online and was abducted. Picked her up down in Portsmouth.”

He shook his head. “Least she was alive. Me, I wouldn’t let my kids do that stuff. God knows who they meet up with. So you were at the Good Tern that night? Did you see her there?”

“No.”

Stone stared out the window again, brooding. “I talked to Toby Barrett yesterday evening, he said you’d been there with him and Gryffin here.”

He looked at Gryffin. “You were at the motel too, right? You and Miss Neary—you were in adjacent rooms? And Toby said you were at the Good Tern afterward. But Miss Neary, you said you only met him yesterday.”

I stared at John Stone. So did Gryffin.

“I forgot,” I said at last. “I mean—I saw him at the motel. I bumped into him.”

“ Really bumped into me,” said Gryffin. “Outside my room.”

“What does this have to do with MacKenzie Libby?” I said. “Because my father’s an attorney, and if you’re going to do any kind of questioning, I’m going to call him right now.”

John Stone lifted a placating hand. “No, no—Merrill Libby said he hadn’t seen the two of you together when you checked in. He said he always rents those two rooms out in the winter, something about the heat. We just—he’s obviously concerned about the young lady. MacKenzie. He says she’s a good kid. A good girl.”

He sighed. “These kids … I got a grandson that age, you don’t want to think of what can happen to them. Right now they’ve got the Game Warden searching for her.”

“Game warden?” I broke in. “An old lady dies of natural causes and you send out a homicide detective, but this kid disappears and she gets a freaking game warden? Like she’s a dog?”

John Stone looked taken aback. “Well, it’s standard procedure. They’re starting to organize people to search for her. Merrill Libby, he’ll mobilize the whole town. But I’ll you the truth, Miss Neary—you wander off into the woods, you’re a lot better off having the warden service look for you with trained dogs. He knows those woods better’n anybody.”

“But you just said she might have taken off with someone. Not that she’s lost in the woods.”

John Stone shrugged. “Well, probably that’s all that happened. Probably she got ticked at her dad and run off. Then it got cold, it got dark, she started back but she got disorientated and she’s out there now. I just hope she didn’t take a fall somewhere, like if she went down to that pier at Burnt Harbor.”

He made a grim face. “Probably not cold enough for someone to freeze to death, long as she didn’t go in the water, not a young person in good health, anyway.”

He turned to where Hakkala was putting away his phone. “Well, I think that’s about it. Time to go find Everett, take me back over. You think of anything else about Merrill Libby’s girl, you let me know, okay?”

“Kenzie,” I said, but John Stone didn’t hear. He set down his clipboard and headed into the next room. Gryffin went with him.

I looked at the table. Stone’s ballpoint was lying on top of the papers he’d filled out. It was a nice pen, dark blue with gold lettering on the barrel. I picked it up and read paswegas county police department: proud to serve. I glanced to where Stone and Gryffin were talking, their backs to me, then slid the pen into my jacket pocket.

“Sorry again for your loss,” the sheriff said. He shook hands with Gryffin, stepped over to have a word with Hakkala. Gryffin walked back to me.