“You know what,everybodystruggles through their twenties. Everybody’s making mistakes left and right. Making all those dumbass mistakes is how we turned into the wise, self-sufficient citizens we are today.”
“Uh, yeah. As we sit here closing down a bar in a remote mountain village in New Hampshirein February.”
“I’m serious, though. All this garbage about how she had to feel like the walls were closing in on her.”
“Well, but—”
“She walked away from every single disasterunscathed. West Point let her resign, so she popped over to UMass, where she changed majors—what doesthattell you?—and was thriving. She was on the Dean’s List.”
I opened my mouth, and Hailey demanded, “What’s the first sign a kid is struggling?”
I opened my mouth again, and again she cut me off. “Their grades start to fall.”
“That’s one, sure, but—”
“She was allowed to walk away from credit-card fraud with an assurance that if she kept her nose clean, her record would be wiped in three months. She wrecks her dad’s car after a party, and she’s not breathalyzed, she doesn’t get so much as a ticket. They drive her back to her dad’s motel room!Andher dad’s insurance company agrees to cover everything.”
Right. That was another cause for alarm among the conspiracy theorists. Pat had come up to Amherst the weekend before Deirdre went missing to take her car-shopping. He’d rented a motel room for his stay, and let Deirdre borrow his new car to go to a party that evening with friends.
Deirdre left the party sometime after three a.m. and hit a guardrail, totaling the new car. After the accident, the tow-truck driver dropped her off at Pat’s motel to spend the remainder of the night. This triggered all kinds of suspicions from people with limited practical experience. Twenty years later, they were still arguing about why Pat would allow his alcoholic daughter to borrow his car (Maybe because she wasn’t an alcoholic and her own car was unreliable?), the number of beds in the room (The motel was on record that all rooms in that wing had two beds.), how Deirdre could have gained access to Pat’s room (Pat was given two keys at check-in.), who had used Pat’s phone to call Tommy (Who the hell do you think?), and why Deirdre hadn’t asked the tow-truck driver to take her back to her college dorm (Perhaps because she had some ’splaining to do to her dad in the morning?).
Though I saw the case the same way Hailey did, for the sake of argument, I said, “But her dad admitted he’d chewed her out after the crash.”
“That’s what dads do!”
I took another swallow of beer and wished I hadn’t. My mouth was starting to taste of stale beer. It had been a long evening, and I’d started a lot of drinks even if I hadn’t finished most of them.
I said, “And that shewasupset.”
“Hell yes, she was upset. She’d have been a sociopath if she wasn’t remorseful about wrecking her dad’s car.”
I felt a weird shift in my equilibrium, as though my body suddenly, belatedly recognized a change in altitude. I tried to focus. “She was also upset about some things happening with her sister.”
“Of course. She loved her sister. But if anyone was going to kill herself, wouldn’t it be the sister?”
“Yeah, probably. I do think one reason she didn’t tell her family she was taking off for the week was they were already worried about Eva. She wouldn’t want to add to their worries.”
Hailey said with asperity, “That and the fact that Deirdre was twenty-one and maybe wanted to sort some things out herself without having a bunch of input from other people who meant well but just didn’t get it?”
“Been there, done that.” Speaking as a member of a close-knit family who just couldn’t help thinking they knew more about what I needed than I did.
“Back then, nobody thought she’d killed herself but the police, and even the police didn’t think it for long.”
“Right,” I said. All at once, I was having trouble caring. It was such alongtime ago. It wasn’t like there was going to be a happy ending for the poor kid. I rubbed my forehead. I really should have had the coffee because I felt as tired as if I’d made the trip from Los Angeles on foot.
“Did you want another beer?”
I shook my head, blinked tiredly at her. She looked like she was sitting a mile away from me. “I think I’m going to bed.”
“It’s just a little after ten.”
“Yeah, but it’s late, and I’m meeting Pat in the morning.”
Hailey squeaked, “You’rewhat?”
One leg off the barstool, one leg still hooked over it, I squinted at her, trying to remember what I’d said.
Oh shit.
