Dennis Lehane - Since We Fell

“How’d you get rid of them?”

“They got rid of me,” she admitted.

That pierced something in him. She could see the pain find him, and she loved him very much at that moment.

He reached out with the same hand that had slapped his friend and caressed her cheek.

“Fools,” he whispered. “They were all fools.”

She spent the morning after the party Googling with a hangover while Brian went for a run along the river.

First she looked up “Since I Fell for You.” As she’d expected, the first page contained nothing but links to versions of the song. On the second page she found a reference to an episode of a TV show, L.A. Law, that had been on when she was in grade school. She remembered her mother watching the show religiously and once putting her hands to her mouth as one of the characters — a woman with tall hair and wide lapels — fell down an elevator shaft. Rachel looked up the “Since I Fell for You” episode on IMDb and nothing about the description struck any chords.

On the third page, she found a link to a movie from 2002 starring Robert Hays, Vivica A. Fox, Kristy Gale, and Brett Alden, with special appearances by Stephen Dorff and Gary Busey. She clicked on the link and got a 401 message that the site no longer existed. So she opened a fresh window and Googled “Since I Fell for You 2002 movie.”

Even with the added specificity, most of the links that appeared were to the song. Finally, though, one to “Since I Fell for You/May-December (2002) VHS eBay.” When she clicked the link, it brought her to eBay and a screenshot of a VHS tape. The enlargement function was for shit, but she did get close enough to make out the two main actors’ faces. It took her a minute to recognize the male as the guy who’d starred in Airplane . The female, she was pretty sure, was in Independence Day; she’d played the twit who’d risked everybody’s life at one point to save her dog. To the right of the photo was a description, probably pulled from the back of the VHS:

Widower Tom (Hays) finds himself falling for lovely housekeeper LaToya (Fox), who’s half his age. Meanwhile, Tom’s son (Alden) and LaToya’s handicapped roommate (Gale) are also falling for each other in this heartfelt dramedy that asks if love can ever be wrong.

Rachel hopped back on IMDb and cross-referenced Robert Hays’s and Vivica A. Fox’s credits for other links or information. She found none. She did further due diligence and checked for the title in the credits of Stephen Dorff, Gary Busey, and the two actors she’d never heard of, Kristy Gale and Brett Alden.

Messrs. Dorff and Busey didn’t even list the film in their credits.

Kristy Gale seemed to have had a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it career in straight-to-video and had appeared in only one major theatrical release, Scary Movie 3, as “Girl on Unicycle.” Her page hadn’t been updated since 2007, which was also the date of her last credit, something called Lethal Kill . (Was there another kind? Rachel wondered.)

No page existed for Brett Alden. He must have had his one acrid taste of the off-off-off Hollywood Boulevard life and run back home to Iowa or Wisconsin. Rachel clicked back on the open eBay window and purchased the tape for $4.87 and chose second-day air for delivery.

She got another cup of coffee and came back to her laptop, still in her pajamas, and looked out at the river. Sometime last night, it had stopped raining. And sometime this morning, the sun — yes, the sun — rose. Everything appeared not just clean but polished, the sky looking like a frozen tidal wave, the trees along the river as sharp as jade. And here she sat indoors, with a hangover that thumped in her head and throbbed in her chest and made every synapse hiccup at least once before it fired. She clicked on her music folder and chose a playlist she’d compiled to chill herself out on days when the nerves were too close to the skin — The National, Lord Huron, Atoms for Peace, My Morning Jacket, and others of that ilk — and started looking into Baker Lake.

There were three of them — the biggest in Washington State, another in the Canadian Arctic, and a third in Maine. The one in Washington looked touristy, the one in Canada was populated mostly by Inuit, and the one in Maine was wilderness, the nearest town, by the looks of it, forty miles away. As for proximity to a major city, it was actually closer to Quebec City than Bangor.

“Camping trip?”

She spun with the chair to face him: Brian, covered in sweat from his run, standing eight feet behind her, drinking from a water bottle.

“Reading over my shoulder?” She smiled.

He matched her smile. “Just walked in, happened to see the back of my wife’s head and ‘Baker Lake’ beyond it.”

She dug her toe into the rug and swiveled the chair again, back and forth this time. “Your friend mentioned it last night.”

“Which friend?”

She gave him an arched eyebrow.

“I had several there last night.”

“Any others that you bitch-slapped?”

“Ah.” He took a small step back and another sip of water.

“Yes. Ah. What was that about?”

“He got drunk, nearly got us tossed from our favorite bar, and then took a swing at me on the sidewalk.”

“Yes, but why?”

“Why?” He peered at her in a way she found vaguely reptilian. “He’s a violent drunk. He always was.”

“So why did Caleb bring him two drinks at the same time?”

“Because he’s Caleb. I dunno. Ask him.”

“It just seems an odd thing to do — give a violent drunk a plethora of liquor as soon as he walks through the door.”

“Plethora?”

She nodded. “Plethora.”

He shrugged. “Again, you’d have to ask Caleb. Maybe next time you guys hang out while I’m away.”

She mock-pouted, something she knew irritated him to no end. “That threatens you?”

“Didn’t say it did.” A blithe shrug from his broad shoulders, trying to play it cool while the temperature in the room ticked up five degrees.

“That you can’t trust your partner?” she said. “Or you can’t trust your wife?”

“I can trust both of you. I just find it odd that you, virtually a shut-in for the last two years, hopped a cab to Cambridge and stumbled across my business partner.”

“I didn’t stumble across him. I went to your building.”

He squatted on the rug and rolled the bottle between his palms. “And why would you do that?”

“Because I thought you were lying to me.”

“This again?” His laugh was unpleasant.

“I guess so.”

“You understand how nuts you sound?”

“No. Illuminate it for me.”

He rose up and down on his haunches several times, as if preparing his calves for the blast of a starter’s pistol. “You thought you saw me in Boston when I was actually thirty thousand feet in the air.”

“Unless” — she crinkled her nose at him — “you weren’t.”

He batted his eyelashes at her. “Then you put me through a series of hoops to prove I was actually in London. Hoops that I successfully jumped through. But that wasn’t enough. You” — he coughed out a laugh of sudden disbelief — “you walk around for the last week giving me looks like I’m the... the leader of a fucking sleeper cell.”

“Or,” she said, “you could be like that guy who pretended to be a Rockefeller.”

“I could.” He nodded as if that made absolute sense. Drained his water. “He killed people, didn’t he?”

She stared back at him. “I believe that he did, yes.”

“Left the wife alive,” he said.

“That was sporting of him.” She felt an inexplicable smirk tugging at the corners of her mouth.