Page 51 of Coram House

I hold up a hand to stop him. “Discuss an ongoing investigation. Yeah, I heard. But come on. Even with another body at the dump?”

His surprise lasts only a second. So Stedsan was right. There is another body.

Parker rotates his glass so the brown liquid catches the light. “I’m not going to ask how you know that.”

I hiccup. Dammit. “Stedsan.”

He sighs. “I said I didn’t want to know. Aren’t you supposed to protect your sources?”

“Maybe if my source didn’t piss me off so much. And anyways, someone else is dead and I know Jeannette Leroy is connected to all this crazy shit somehow and—”

He puts his finger to his lips, asking me to lower my voice. I glare at him.

“It’s not a body,” he says. “Not exactly.”

Well, that shuts me right up. Not only because he’s clearly saying something he shouldn’t, but also what does that even mean? I look at him closely. “Are you drunk?”

He coughs into his fist. Or maybe it’s a laugh. “We did get an early start,” he says. “Retirement party. But no.”

“Because I don’t want to be taking advantage of you.”

That gets an actual smile. He clears his throat. “It’s not a body—it’s bones. We haven’t identified them yet, but they look old.” He shrugs. “There’s no reason to think this has any connection to Jeannette Leroy.”

“Bones,” I say. “At the dump.”

“Another?” The bartender appears out of nowhere again. How does he keep doing that?

I look down at my glass. Empty again. I nod, mutely.

“We’ll take them to go,” Parker says. “Come on. Let’s get some air.”

The slap of cold doesn’t dull the buzz of the whisky exactly, but it sharpens everything else. The pinprick stars in the black sky, the smell of woodsmoke in the air. We cross Church Street, the boutiques and bakeries shut down for the night, and cut through an alley that spits us into the park behind city hall. It’s empty and dark, except for pools of light cast by the streetlamps, a long chain of yellow circles. We walk in silence, but it’s not heavy with anything.

The night is still—no wind blowing off the lake—and I assume that’s where we’re headed. That huge expanse of ice has its own gravitational pull. I sip from the paper cup. The whisky’s warmth spreads through my body like a tree putting down roots.

Two blocks later, the street cants sharply downhill and crosses a set of train tracks. Then we’re on a boardwalk, heading for the pier that juts into the harbor. Patches of ice crunch beneath my boots. A row of empty bench swings are positioned to take in the view. At the end of the pier, we stop. Surrounded by ice on all sides. Nowhere left to go.

“This feels illegal,” I say, sipping my drink. “It’s going to look very bad for me if I get arrested.”

“I hear the cops have other things on their minds these days,” Parker says, and raises his cup in a toast. He leans on the railing so the arms of our jackets are almost touching. Warmth radiates off him.

It’s so quiet. There’s the soft groan of ice shifting as water moves underneath. I imagine all the fish asleep for the winter, floating in place.

The night is clear with no moon, just a scattering of stars, but it’s light enough to make out the dark shape of Rock Point in the distance. Out there, I know, the water is still moving. Still alive. Behind the point, the sky glows softly. Like the early hours of sunrise. Or industrial construction lights. Coram House.

He follows my gaze. “So, what do you think of it?”

“I wouldn’t want to live there.”

He takes a long sip. “Why? Because it’s haunted?”

He doesn’t ask it like he’s making a joke, so I don’t answer that way either.

“Not haunted exactly, or not by ghosts, at least. But sometimes I wonder if all those feelings—cruelty, terror, happiness—can sink into a place. Change its character somehow.”

It’s certainly how I felt about our apartment after Adam died. It was sad. Empty. Colorless. Or maybe that was just me. “Plus,” I go on, before he can laugh at me, “it would make me feel complicit. Like I was benefiting from the things that happened there.”

He looks surprised. “People could say the same about this book you’re writing, you know.”

---