"Jay-"

"Bowman broke into my apartment. Cold c.o.c.ked me in the dark. Knocked me out. What if my wife and son had been there? You know, I still get headaches-"

"Jay!"

"What?"

Charlie gestured at the college girls who had now stopped their conversation, gawking at me. I realized how loud I'd been talking.

"Listen, man," Charlie said, "for your own good-you need to get past your hatred of that family. Coach Lombardi is dead."

"No s.h.i.t. Doesn't change the facts. I'm just calling it like I see it."

"No, Jay, you're not. For one, you're making it sound like Adam and Michael Lombardi were born with silver spoons. I never liked Adam, but the guy worked his a.s.s off to build up that construction company of his. And I don't know how someone gets into politics, but the Lombardis aren't the Kennedys. Michael keeps getting reelected for a reason. Gerry Lombardi was a high school math teacher and wrestling coach."

"And a pedophile."

"Maybe. But you have no evidence of that. Nothing admissible, anyway. His sons had successful careers and your brother was acting crazy, breaking into construction sites, terrorizing that family. High as s.h.i.t. I mean, how would you expect them to respond?"

"Since when did you become such a fan of the Lombardis?"

"I'm not. Come on, man, I was right there with you, chasing after Chris last winter. n.o.body's saying the Lombardis are choirboys. But this jealousy and envy-hating them-it's not bringing your brother back." He waited. "And I think it might be pushing your wife and kid away." He stopped, expression pained. "I mean, I don't know, man. I'm drunk."

"No," I said. "You're right."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah." I reached out for his shoulder.

Charlie slapped my hand away. "Need a couch?"

"Might not be the worst idea."

I'd give Jenny the rest of the night off, s.p.a.ce best for all parties involved. Everything looks better in the light of a new day.

It had been a while since I'd gotten good and ripped.

The weekend crowd finally showed toward midnight, place filling up. College girls were replaced by townies and regulars from Charlie's dart league, everyone congregating on the tiki smoking porch, where Charlie and I had remained rooted, at first freezing our a.s.ses off until, soon, we felt nothing at all. I didn't think about Jenny or my responsibilities. Beer flowed on endless stream from the tap. People kept shoving shots in front of me. Whiskey, bourbon, scotch. Never a good idea to mix and match. I didn't care. I pounded each back like a challenge.

Soon the lights began to flicker, signaling closing time. Charlie pulled his wallet, slapped down a few twenties, and then polished off the rest of his beer.

I could barely stand. "I think I will take you up on the offer of a couch."

"No problem, amigo. But don't you have to work tomorrow?"

"It's Friday night, Charlie."

We swayed to the sidewalk, a pair of desperados in a border town.

"Go home, Finn," someone shouted from a pa.s.sing car. "You're drunk."

"See you tomorrow?" a girl called out, though whether to Charlie or me or someone else, I had no idea.

"s.h.i.t," I said. "How we getting back to your place?" No way either of us could drive in this condition. We sure as sin couldn't walk. It was almost two a.m., and without the smoking porch enclosure to absorb some of the brunt, I felt every negative degree of Lamentation's subzero a.s.sault.

"I'm fine," Charlie said, pulling his keys, which I tried s.n.a.t.c.hing. He was too quick. "f.u.c.k you, Porter. I drink like this every night." He held up the ring, dangling them in front of me. To prove victory, I guess. But he dropped the keys in a snow bank on the sidewalk. We both reached for the keys at the same time, bonking heads, slipping on the ice, falling into a snow mound and wrestling for them on the ground, cracking up, hysterical drunk.

I didn't see the flashing lights until they were on top of us. Then came the familiar voice.

CHAPTER FOUR.

"OKAY," SHERIFF ROB Turley said. "On your feet, you two."

Charlie and I stopped wrestling. We both stared up at fat-a.s.s Rob Turley, hitching his trousers and holster, trying to play the heavy in his wide-brimmed lawman's hat. Which made Charlie and me howl harder.

Turley made me leave my truck at the Dubliner, and chauffeured us out to Charlie's house on the plains. Sitting in the back of the cruiser, I didn't answer any of Turley's attempts at small talk, questions about the wife, the new job and town, the kid, and soon he gave up trying.

Charlie was right about one thing. He was used to drinking this hard. I wasn't. Within minutes of getting dropped off at his place, my best friend was pa.s.sed out in the bedroom; I spent the next half hour hurling chunks over the railing.

I didn't even remember falling asleep. When I woke to take a p.i.s.s in the middle of the night, I was facedown on the floral-print couch, string of vomit drool connecting head to hand like some degenerate marionette.

Staggering into the kitchen, I filled a tall gla.s.s with tepid tap water at the sink, and sat in the dark rehydrating, staring up at the Lamentation Mountains, waiting for a sun to rise over the peaks.

I didn't open my eyes again until ten a.m., cheek glued to the table. Charlie flipped on the coffeemaker. Neither of us spoke, day-after movements excruciating. Spoons clanking off clay walls made my skull hurt. Back when I was nineteen, twenty, I could tie one on till three in the morning, take an hour nap, and still make it to the farm by five. I was grateful today was Sat.u.r.day. I'd need half the day to recuperate.

We arranged a ride back to Dubliner to fetch my Chevy and his old Subaru.

"Be nice to your wife," Charlie said as I was getting in. "Jenny's a good woman. You ain't the easiest guy to be around."

On the way back to Plasterville, I stopped at the gas station and filled up. I grabbed a newspaper and another pack of cigarettes, which I stashed for my next emergency. I also bought a dozen roses.

The heater was off when I got home, my wife out. Grocery shopping, I figured, since Sat.u.r.day had the best bargains at the Price Chopper. I dropped the flowers on the stove and cranked the thermostat. Then I hopped in the shower, mulling over how I should handle the Brian Olisky situation. After everything that family had been through, I didn't feel right ratting him out. Even if it was my job. Returning from Libby Brook so late yesterday, I hadn't bothered stopping off at the office, everyone already gone for the weekend. Which gave me until Monday when I had to turn in my report. The burden weighted my shoulders, and I still felt nauseated from the hard alcohol. I stayed under the hot stream until the room fogged like a sauna and some of the poison washed out of my pores.

Stepping from the water, skin scrubbed new-baby pink, I slipped on sweats and a tee, and put on some coffee. Waiting for the pot to brew, I sat at the table to read the paper. I skimmed an article about the old TC Truck Stop in Ashton, which had been demolished last summer to make way for new ski condominiums. Looked like they were sc.r.a.pping that project in favor of a new detention center, advocates citing the need to combat the growing drug epidemic up here. Great. Just what addicts need. More lock-up. Less rehabilitation options. A ballot measure had been proposed in an upcoming special election to circ.u.mvent legal hurdles and pave the way. I decided to set the paper aside until I was in a better mood. Anything related to drugs tended to incite my rage, and I needed to remain calm if I hoped to repair my marriage.

After a couple cups of coffee, my hangover started to clear. I ran over the apology in my head, practicing points of contrition. Sounded good to me. Heartfelt and sincere with enough self-deprecation to maybe make Jenny laugh. My wife was one of the few people who appreciated my sense of humor.

That's when I saw the Dear John letter in the empty fruit bowl on the table.

"What the h.e.l.l's going on?"

"You read the note?" Jenny said.

"Yeah. I read it. But what the f.u.c.k?" I whispered this last part, like Aiden was playing with blocks in the next room. Which of course he wasn't. My wife had taken him, across state lines, almost three hours away, to her mother's place in Burlington. "What is this? You're leaving me?"

"I needed a break. Aiden needed a break. I think you need a break."

"Thanks for telling me what I need."

"Don't."

"Don't what?"

"Play the victim."

"When are you coming back?"

"I don't know."

My heart sank. Everything I wanted, right there in front of me, and somehow I'd managed to screw it all up. The panic returned, washing over me in waves. Jenny could sense my anxiety.

"Calm down," she said. "This isn't me asking for a divorce. My mom's been bugging me to come up with Aiden, and with everything going on with you, now seemed like a good time to take her up on the offer."

"You're not leaving?"

"We're married. I don't give up that easy."

I wasn't sure if I was relieved or p.i.s.sed. I wanted to feel some indignation for having been wronged, except I had no right. Jenny didn't need my permission to visit her mom. That's all the letter said, "I'm taking Aiden to my mother's." I a.s.sumed the worst, because, on some level, I knew I deserved it.

"I'm sorry," I said.

My wife waited for the rest.

"I know I haven't been-"

"What?"

"Myself lately, I guess. I mean, since my brother died."

I didn't mention any wrong turns or construction sites. Didn't talk about a wrestling superstar popping too many pills or the painful memories it evoked. These were the excuses I'd used to get myself worked up, feel a sense of self-righteousness. Charlie's bluntness at the Dubliner had put everything in perspective. I was pushing my family away, and all the evidence I needed of that was on the other end of the line.

"I know it's been hard, Jay, losing him the way you did, but you have to find a way to deal. Or it's going to destroy you."

"I have all this stuff inside me, Jenny. Things I want to say to you, good things, but I can't seem to do it. Nothing comes out right."

"I'm not saying you have to call Dr. Shapiro-Weiss, but maybe she could-"

"I already called her," I lied.

"That's good to hear, baby."

"Can I talk to Aiden?"

"Of course. Hold on."

I heard Jenny call our son from the other room, followed by the pitter-patter of busy feet.

"Hi, Daddy."

I knew Aiden was only visiting his grandma in Vermont, but the boxy connection made his voice sound tinny and a million miles away. I got the sudden, aching feeling I'd never see my son again.

"You miss Daddy?"

"Yes."

"How much?"

"Um. Infinity plus forty-six plus seventy-two."

"Wow," I said. "That much? That's a lot."

I loved my son's twisted understanding of mathematics.

"Daddy?"

"Yes?"

"Bye-bye, Daddy. Grandma has cookies."

I heard the phone drop and tap dance off tile. I waited for my wife to come back on the line. But she never did.

I stood in the kitchen listening to a dial tone for ten seconds before I finally hung up. I searched for relief from the conversation. That had been good news, right? I replayed what my wife said. She'd been clear this was temporary, a brief vacation, no splitting up. She called me "baby." But she also got her point across, loud and clear: I needed to get my s.h.i.t together.

Coffee in hand, I retrieved the Marlboros from my glove compartment, and then headed to my workshop in the garage. I packed the smokes against my wrist and wedged the side door ajar. Until my wife came home, I might as well enjoy the thing I'd missed most about smoking: that first one in the morning.

In a dusty, dark corner I unlocked the top drawer of the gray filing cabinet, and dug around back, extracting the thick, rubber-banded binder. I fanned my collection across the workbench, the curious cutouts and clippings from last year that had been my preoccupation. Or obsession was more like it.

Right after the shooting, the Herald ran a series on my brother's death. Not as much about the person as the addiction that defined his life, highlighting how a former star athlete had fallen from grace, an angle the media loves, culminating with the raid on the farmhouse where he died, which the paper parlayed into the push for drug reform. That was the real reason behind these stories. No one gave a s.h.i.t about a dead junkie.

Chris' pa.s.sing came to represent what had become of our hometown. Even if I now lived fifty miles west in Plasterville, a very real part of me would always be in Ashton. Drugs had infiltrated much of northern New Hampshire, but Ashton remained ground zero because of the seedy Desmond Turnpike.

I'd cut out every article I could find pertaining to the scandal last December and January. Except no one had the real story. Chris' a.s.sertion, that Gerry Lombardi had molested little boys, couldn't be proven, the pictures he'd copied from that hard drive blurry and inconclusive. But what Charlie, Fisher, and I had stumbled onto last winter couldn't be denied either. The computer had come from Adam Lombardi's construction site, and there were pictures of little boys on it. Even if we couldn't be sure it was Mr. Lombardi in those photos, there had to be a reason Adam and Michael were so nervous. Of all the bizarre things that happened last winter, perhaps most d.a.m.ning of all was a man named Roger Paul, who had masqueraded as a Concord detective, infiltrating Ashton's hick police force. He ended up s.n.a.t.c.hing my brother, bringing him up the mountain with plans to bury him beneath the ice of Echo Lake. And if I hadn't arrived on the scene, running them off Ragged Pa.s.s, he would've gotten away with it. Of course none of this could be proven. My word against theirs. And nothing could be tied to the Lombardis.

The cover story that the car crash and Roger Paul's death was the result of a drug deal gone bad was bulls.h.i.t. I could see why the local PD wouldn't want that egg on their face. But the rest of the story was whitewashed, too. Not one word about incriminating hard drives. The name Gerry Lombardi appeared nowhere. The only bad guy in any of this: drugs. Not money. Not greed. Not the luckless b.a.s.t.a.r.ds foraging in squalor on the Turnpike. Drugs.

Once Gerry Lombardi was in the ground, what was the point of digging any further? Even before he kicked it, I'd asked Charlie and Fisher to back off the investigation. The Lombardis were too big a local inst.i.tution to take down, the photos pure conjecture. I had a wife and child to think about now. I needed to leave this behind.