A Tap on the Window Read Online Free PDF Page B

talking. We couldn’t find the words. There was nothing to be said because there was only one thing either of us was thinking, and it hurt too much to talk about.
    I imagined making the first move. Turning over, edging closer, slipping my arm around her. Not saying a thing, at least not at first. I imagined the warmth of her body as I held her. Felt her hair on my face.
    Imagined it so perfectly, it was as though it was happening.
    I lay awake for some time, staring at the ceiling, or the digital clock on the bedside table. One in the morning, then two.
    It wasn’t all our fault.
    Not everything.
    Some of it, of course, was Scott’s. Sure, he was a kid, but he was old enough to know better.
    But there was someone else. Not the kids from Cleveland. Not the kids from Griffon who might have sold Scott marijuana and liquor.
    I wanted to find the one who gave him 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine. What the rest of the world knows as ecstasy.
    That’s what the toxicology report turned up.
    That’s the stuff that evidently made Scott believe he could fly.
    I was going to track down the guy who provided that final, fatal dose.
    We all had a lot to answer for, but that son of a bitch, as far as I was concerned, was the one who’d pulled the trigger.

FOUR
    In
the morning, the woman comes into the bedroom bearing a
tray.
    “Hey,” she says to the man, who is still under the covers.
    He raises himself up on his elbows, surveys the breakfast as the woman sets it down on the bedside table.
    “Scrambled,” he says, looking at the eggs almost suspiciously.
    “Just the way you like them,” she says. “Well cooked. You should eat them before they get cold.”
    He gets his legs out from under the covers, sits up on the edge of the bed. He is wearing a pair of faded white flannel pajamas with blue pinstripes. They are threadbare at the knees.
    “How’d you sleep?” the woman asks.
    “Okay,” he says, reaching for the napkin and spreading it on his lap. “I didn’t hear you get up.”
    “I got up around six, but I tiptoed around the kitchen so I wouldn’t disturb you. You given up your hobby?”
    “What? What do you mean?”
    “Where’s your little book? It’s usually right there.” She points to the bedside table.
    “I write in it after you leave,” he says, setting the plate atop the napkin, resting it on his knees, taking his first bite. “Good eggs.” The woman says nothing. “You want to sit down?”
    “No. I have to go to work.”
    He picks up a strip of bacon, bites into it with a crunch. “You want some help?”
    “Help with what?”
    “At work. I could come and help you.” He chews the bacon, swallows.
    “You’re confused,” she says. “You don’t come to work.”
    “I used to,” he says.
    “You just enjoy your breakfast.”
    “I could help, I really could. You know I’m good at doing the books. I catch everything.”
    The woman sighs. How many times has she had this conversation? “No,” she says.
    The man frowns. “I’d like things to be the way they used to
be.”
    “Who wouldn’t?” the woman says. “I’d like to be twenty-one again, but wishing don’t make it happen.”
    He blows on his coffee, has a sip. “What’s it like out today?”
    “Nice, I think. Rained last night.”
    “I’d like to go out, even in the rain,” the man says.
    She’s had enough. “Eat your breakfast. I’ll be back for the tray before I go.”

FIVE
    I’d arranged to meet Fritz Brott, owner of Brott’s Brats, the Tonawanda meat business I’d been watching for a couple of days, at his shop. He had an office in the back where we could talk privately.
    Brott had been a fixture in the community for more than twenty years. He’d emigrated from Germany in the seventies with his wife and infant daughter. He found work behind the deli counters at several different grocery stores over the years, but his dream had always been to have a shop of his own. In the early nineties he learned that the