Reservation Road Read Online Free PDF Page A

your son at this time?”
    “I told you. He was by the road.”
    “Can you tell me what time this would have been?”
    “Time? I don’t . . . it must have been close to nine. I checked my watch when we pulled in. I was impatient. I wanted to get home. It must have been about a quarter to.”
    Sergeant Burke made a note on his pad. “How long did you spend inside the office?”
    “I don’t know. He had to go get the stuff. Three, maybe five minutes.”
    “Did you see your son during that time?”
    “I . . . no. No, I did not.”
    The breath went out of me. Time went from whirling to stillness, and suddenly where the question had floated between us, hanging in the air, there was an impenetrable black silence, which was my guilt; nothing else was real. I saw Josh standing by the dark road, his back to me. Slowly, I saw myself turning away from him, discarding him, until he was behind me, and gone.
    “It’s my fault,” I whispered. Without knowing it, I had fallen into a crouch, a kind of squat, my hands touching the hard ground.
    Sergeant Burke gave no sign that he had heard. He looked away, into the brightly lit office, where, in a terrible pantomime, his partner was busily writing down something the gas-station attendant was telling him. Sergeant Burke shifted his feet. I remained where I was, almost on the ground, not quite.
    “I saw him just before I went inside,” I said. “I checked, and he was just standing by the road looking at nothing. Thinking. I thought maybe about music. And I’d already hurt him by worrying. So I left him alone.”
    “When did you see him next?”
    “When I came out.”
    “What occurred then?”
    “What do you think?” I snapped.
    The skin on Sergeant Burke’s face tightened and he looked away. I made myself get to my feet. “Excuse me,” I said. “That was rude.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “This is hard.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “I was looking at the ground when I came out. I was—I was tired and I was thinking about myself—about nothing—when I heard the sound of the tires. . . .”
    “From which direction?”
    “There. To the left.”
    “And then?”
    “I looked for Josh. I looked where he’d been, but he wasn’t there. He was in the road. Just standing there. I called out. . . .”
    The car was coming again, striking him in the chest, his body flying into the bushes. A line of blood leading from his mouth, a dent the size of a fence-post hole in his chest. Crushed. When I lifted him up, his head dropped back and his mouth gaped open. His teeth were painted with blood that looked black in the darkness.
    “Can you tell me anything about the vehicle?”
    I closed my eyes. Inside the dark, racing car there was a glowing orange pinpoint: a cigarette. A man driving. “There was a man,” I said.
    Sergeant Burke grew very still. “Driving?”
    I nodded.
    “Anyone else there with him?”
    “No.” I had raised my head, and for a moment, as the car raced by, it had felt almost as though he’d turned his face in my direction. “He looked at me.”
    “Could you describe him?”
    “He was smoking. There was a lit cigarette in his mouth.”
    Sergeant Burke waited. I tried to see something, anything, more about the man who had killed my son, but I could not. “No,” I said bitterly. “Nothing.”
    Sergeant Burke stood quietly, staring at the notepad in his hands. Then he said, “Let’s move on. Can you tell me anything about the vehicle itself?”
    Now I felt an edge of panic. Trying to picture the car in my mind, I saw just the glowing tip of the cigarette, the man hidden in shadow. “I don’t know.”
    A barely audible sigh escaped Sergeant Burke’s lips. He turned his head five degrees to the right and looked at me from there. “Anything.”
    “Let me think.” I made myself go back to before. Tires crying out. An apparition out of the trees. “One of the headlights was broken.”
    Sergeant Burke touched the pen tip to the paper. “Right headlight or