Dennis Lehane - Since We Fell

Seconds after, Rachel realized, because the tip of the black woman’s cigarette glowed a fresh red in the second photo. Her mother’s smile was gone and she was turning back to the bar, her eyes on the bottles to the right of the cash register. Whiskey bottles, Rachel was mildly surprised to note, not the vodka bottles she would have expected her mother to show an interest in. Her mother was no longer smiling but she looked happier because of it. Her face bore an intensity that Rachel would have characterized as erotically charged had its focus been anything but the bottles of whiskey. It appeared as if her mother had been caught in a reverie, in anticipation of an encounter with whomever she was leaving that bar with or meeting up with afterward.

Or she was just glancing at whiskey bottles and wondering what she’d have for breakfast tomorrow. Rachel realized with no small amount of shame that she was projecting at a nearly unforgivable level because she wanted to find value in photos that had none.

“This is silly.” She went to get the bottle of wine they’d left on the counter.

“What about it is silly?” Jeremy placed both photos side by side.

“I feel like we’re looking for him here.”

“We are looking for him here.”

“It’s two photographs from a night at a bar when she was in grad school.” She refilled their glasses and left the bottle on the table between them. “Nothing more.”

“I lived with your mother for three years. Except for pictures of you, there were no pictures. Not one. I now discover the existence of these two, tucked away somewhere the whole time I lived with her but never to be shared with me. Why? What’s in these pictures on this night that matters? I say it’s your father.”

“Could just be a night she was fond of.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“Could just be two pictures she forgot she had.”

The eyebrow stayed up.

“Fine,” she said. “Make your pitch.”

He pointed at the man closest to her mother, Velour Man with the feathered brown hair. “He has the same color eyes as you.”

Fair enough. Like Rachel, he did have green eyes, though his were a much brighter shade; hers were so light they were almost gray. And like Rachel, he did have brown hair. The shape of his head wasn’t far off from Rachel’s own; the size of the nose was about right. His chin was quite pointed, whereas Rachel’s was more squared off, but then her mother’s had been squared off too, so one could argue she’d simply gotten her mother’s chin but her father’s eyes and hair. He was a handsome man, porn ’stache notwithstanding, but there was something lightweight about him. And her mother did not have a known affinity for the lightweight. Jeremy and Giles might not have been the most overtly masculine men Rachel had ever come across but there was steel at the core of both of them and their intelligence was prodigious and immediately identifiable. Velour Man, on the other hand, looked like he was on his way to emcee a Junior Miss pageant.

“Does he seem like her type?” Rachel said.

“Did I?” Jeremy asked.

“You have gravitas,” Rachel said. “My mother dug gravitas.”

“Well, it’s not this guy.” Jeremy put his finger on the heavyset guy with the eyesore of a sport coat. “And it’s not this guy.” He put his finger on the black guy. “Maybe the cameraman?”

“Camerawoman.” Rachel showed him the reflection in the bar mirror of a woman with a mane of brown hair spilling from underneath a multicolored knit cap, the camera held in two hands.

“Ah.”

She looked at the other people who’d been inadvertently captured on film. Two old men and a middle-aged couple sat midway down the bar. The bartender made change at the cash register. And a youngish guy in a black leather jacket was frozen in midstride after coming through the front doors.

“What about him?” she asked.

Jeremy adjusted his glasses and hunched in close to the photo. “Can’t get a good enough look. Wait, wait, wait.” He got up and went to the canvas backpack he took everywhere on his research trips. He removed a magnifying glass paperweight and brought it to the table. He held it over the face of the guy in the leather jacket. The guy had the surprised look of a man who’d almost stepped into a photographer’s shot and ruined it. He was also darker skinned than he’d appeared from a remove. Latin American or Native American possibly. But not in line with Rachel’s own ethnic makeup, in either case.

Jeremy moved the magnifying glass back over to Velour Man. He definitely had the same color eyes as Rachel. What had her mother said? Look for yourself in his eyes . Rachel stared at Velour Man’s magnified eyes until they blurred. She looked away to readjust her vision and then back again.

“Are those my eyes?” she asked Jeremy.

“They’re your color,” he said. “Different shape, but you got your bone structure from Elizabeth anyway. Do you want me to make a couple calls?”

“To whom?”

He placed the paperweight down on the table. “Let’s take another leap and consider that these were her fellow students in the Ph.D. program at JHU that year. If that presumption is correct, everyone in this picture is probably identifiable. If it’s incorrect, I’m only out a few phone calls to friends who work there.”

“Okay.”

He took pictures of both photographs with his phone, checked the images to make sure they were captured correctly, and put the phone in his pocket.

At her door, he turned back and said, “Are you all right?”

“Fine. Why?”

“You seem kinda hollowed out suddenly.”

It took her a minute to find the words. “You’re not my father.”

“No.”

“But I wish you were. Then this would be over. And I’d have a cool guy like you for a dad.”

He adjusted his glasses, something she learned he did whenever he felt uncomfortable. “I’ve never in my life been called a cool guy.”

“That’s why you’re cool,” she said and kissed his cheek.

She received her first e-mail from Brian Delacroix in two years. It was brief — three lines — and complimented her on a series of stories she’d done two weeks before on allegations of kickbacks and patronage in the Massachusetts probation department. The head of the department, Douglas “Dougie” O’Halloran, had run the department like his personal fiefdom, but now, based on work done by Rachel and some of her old colleagues at the Globe, the DA was prepping indictments.

When Dougie saw you coming toward him, Brian wrote, he looked fit to shit a collie.

She caught herself beaming.

It’s good to know you’re out there, Miss Childs.

You too, she considered writing back.

But then she saw his PS:

Crossing back across the southern border. Returning to New England. Any ’hoods you’d recommend?

She immediately Googled him, something she’d consciously refrained from doing until now. There was only one picture of him in Google Images, slightly grainy, which had first appeared in the Toronto Sun coverage of a charity gala in 2000. But there he was, in an incongruous tux, head turned to the side, identified in the caption as “Lumber scion Brian Delacroix III.” In the accompanying article, he was described as “low-key” and “notoriously private,” a graduate of Brown with an MBA from Wharton. Who’d then taken those degrees and become...

A private investigator in Chicopee, Massachusetts, for a year?

She smiled to remember him in that shoebox office, a golden boy trying to reject the path his family had laid out for him but clearly conflicted about this choice he’d made. So earnest, so honest. If she’d walked through any other door, handed any other private investigator her case, he or she would have done exactly what Brian had warned her they would — bled her dry.