Winter and Night Read Online Free PDF Page A

when I was fifteen, I'd done a lot of things for the rush. Stupider things than dropping from a window. Worse things than running away. And the things I'd done, wild and bad, hadn't had reasons behind them, not the kind of reason Gary seemed to have.
    "You think it's true he didn't just run away from home?" Lydia asked. I sat on the couch again, lit another cigarette. She took the big armchair, folded her legs up under her. "Your brother-in-law doesn't sound like any prize."
    "He's a son of a bitch. I can see wanting to get away from him. But Gary said not. He said there's something important he has to do." I dropped the cigarette pack, empty now, on the table. "What was important to you when you were fifteen?"
    She frowned as she thought. "Boys. Staying out late. Getting my brothers off my back. Getting good grades." She sipped some tea, said in a tone of confession, "But mostly, being cool."
    I smiled in spite of myself. "I can't imagine you ever not being cool."
    "I am totally cool, it's true," she said airily. "But what I mean, if you want to be serious, is making sure the kids I thought were cool thought I was cool, too."
    "Did they?"
    "Never enough."
    "I'm going out to Warrenstown," I said. "Someone must have some idea why Gary came here. If not his parents, then his friends."
    "Want me to come?"
    "No. I want you to stay here and start looking."
    "A needle in a haystack," she said. "My specialty."
    I kept my gaze on her for a few moments, then got up and went to the desk, opened the bottom drawer. From an envelope in the back I took out a stack of old photos. I leafed through them, pulled one out: two guys in uniform, clowning around. I handed it to her. "The guy on the left," I said.
    She looked from the photo in her hand to me, back to the photo again. "This is you," she said.
    "I was seventeen, in the navy. Gary looks like that, except his eyes are blue."
    After Lydia left, I showered, shaved, and went to get my car. Lydia would get the photo enlarged and copied and start handing it around; she'd get it to Midtown South and they'd fax it to the other precincts. Gary had said he needed money to go do what he had to do; he'd asked me for it and I hadn't given him any. Maybe he'd try to roll another drunk, get himself picked up again.
    Or maybe he'd try something dumber.
    "What about your brother-in-law?" Lydia had asked as she'd pocketed the photo. "He said he was coming to New York to look for Gary."
    "He may come," I'd answered. "And he may know something we don't, and find him. So maybe this is useless. But I can't sit here and do nothing."
    * * *
    Traffic headed out of New York was light and I was through the tunnel and rolling west on the Garden State ten minutes after I left the lot. Warrenstown was about an hour into New Jersey, one of those plump, prosperous places where three quarters of the working population commute into New York and the others keep the picture-postcard small-town home fires burning.
    If Scott really had gone to New York, if we were passing each other somewhere on these roads, it would at least make talking to my sister easier. If he hadn't, it was still the professional thing to do: a kid runs away, talk to the family first.
    Not that that had worked years ago, when Helen left. But there were other reasons for that.
    For the first half hour, most of what I saw was strip mall: gas stations, garish fast-food joints, dull price club warehouses with an intense blue sky arching over them and the autumn hills in the distance behind. Then I switched roads and the hills came closer. It was mid-November, and some trees still held tightly to their leaves, glowed crimson and gold in the early morning sun. Some trees were bare.
    I'd brought the Gould CD with me, Bach Inventions, put it in when I started, but I didn't get far. For the first time, the pieces seemed forced. I'd always heard them before as the result of equal parts exuberance and discipline; but now all I heard was necessity, and a hint of