Page 15 of The Night We Lost Him

“So, he ran the investigation?”

He opens the car door. “Apparently not well.”

* * *

“You took a long flight for me to tell you what the report lays out,” Detective O’Brien says. “We’re confident we don’t have a lot of unanswered questions…”

Clark has gone back inside and we are walking the property with Detective O’Brien. Or rather, O’Brien is walking several paces ahead of us. He moves quickly, not stopping as he looks down at his clipboard and the police department’s incident report. A report that is tucked into my blue folder.

“The fall happened between approximately eight fifteen and eight thirty p.m.,” he says.

He keeps walking toward the southwest edge of the property. We all know, without him saying it out loud, that he’s moving in the direction that the police department ascertained our father was walking that night. In the direction of the spot where he fell.

“Considering that it was a rainy night, we are lucky that there were people on the beach to corroborate.”

“I don’t know if lucky is the word I’d use,” Sam says.

Detective O’Brien turns back, offers a small smirk.

“There were three pedestrians on the beach. A couple was walking their dog and approaching the accident site from the west,” he says. “And a jogger, who circled back from Loon Point…”

He motions up the beach as we arrive at the edge of the property, the grass ending, rocky stones leading to the small stone palisades, the edge of the cliffside just beyond it.

“Their witness statements locked in a tight timeline.”

I look down to see a yellow stake in the ground, so inconsequential it could signify anything—plants, a rosebush, where you lost your father.

I step past the stake and grind my sneakers into the rocky edge, slippery even when dry like this. And I can imagine it so easily: two steps too many and you are clinging to that cliffside. But why would he stand so close? He wouldn’t, unless he didn’t realize he was so close, a drink in his hand, a trippy look over the edge, and suddenly he was plummeting down the eighty feet to the beach below, the rocks catching him almost before he knew what was happening.

“Our conjecture is that your father fell from right near here,” he says. “And that he was killed on impact…”

Killed on impact. The words feel harsh and clinical coming out of his mouth.

“How did you determine that?” I ask.

“Excuse me?”

“That he died on impact?”

“No one could survive that fall,” he says, as though that answers the question. As though that addresses my concerns.

But it’s becoming more and more clear that Detective O’Brien doesn’t have a lot of interest in our concerns—nor does he care that we are grieving. Maybe he even thinks what I thought of Sam when he showed up at the brownstone yesterday. That whatever we are here about, it’s not about what we are saying it is.

I try to take a different tack to make him less defensive, to move him closer to our side. Shouldn’t we all be on the same side here?

“Detective, you’re certainly much more well-versed on all of this than I am, so I really do appreciate you taking the time to go over it again,” I say. “But… could we back up a bit? It feels to me like we are still missing large pieces of this puzzle.”

“What puzzle?”

“We don’t think he was here alone that night,” Sam says, less diplomatically.

“I can assure you that he was,” he says.

Detective O’Brien looks back and forth between us, like that seals it.

“Okay. Why’s that?” I ask.

“Noone Property’s internal security confirmed early on that it was a last-minute change in his itinerary for your father to be out here,” he says. “He was supposed to be at an event in New York. No one on his team was informed about his impending arrival at Windbreak. The property’s caretaker just reconfirmed that he wasn’t even made aware.”

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