CHAPTER SEVEN

DANIEL FARADAY SAT IN the basement room andth= D‡ felt his grief slowly give way to anger. His son had been dead for four days, and his body still lay in the morgue. They had been assured that he would be released for burial the next day. The chief had promised them as much during his visit earlier that afternoon.

In the days since the discovery of Bobby’s remains, Daniel and his wife had become ghosts in their own home, creatures defined only by loss, and absence, and grief. Their only son was gone, and Daniel knew that his passing signaled also the death of their marriage in all but name. Bobby had kept his parents together, but his father had not realized the extent of their debt to him until he had left for college, and then returned. So much of their conversation had revolved around the activities of their beloved son: their hopes for him, their fears, their occasional disappointments, although the latter now seemed so trivial that Daniel silently berated himself for ever having raised them with the boy. He regretted every harsh word, every argument, every hour of sullen silence that had passed in the aftermath of conflict. Even as he did so, he recalled the circumstances of each disagreement, and knew that every word spoken in anger had also been spoken out of love.

This had been his son’s space. There was a TV, and a stereo, and a dock for his iPod, although Bobby was one of the only kids in town who still preferred to listen to music on vinyl when he was at home. He had inherited his father’s old record collection, most of it classic stuff from the sixties and seventies, adding to it from the racks of used-record stores and the occasional yard sale. There was still an LP sitting on the turntable, an original copy of After the Gold Rush by Neil Young, its surface a network of tiny scratches yet clearly, as far as Bobby had been concerned, still listenable, the pops and hisses a part of the record’s history, its warmth and humanity enhanced by the flaws it had accumulated over the years.

Most of the basement floor was covered by a huge rug that always smelled faintly of spilled beer and old potato chips. There were bookshelves, and a gunmetal gray filing cabinet whose drawers had been used mainly for storing old photographs, college notes, and textbooks, and, unbeknownst to the boy’s mother, some mild pornography. There was a battered red couch with a stained blue pillow at one end facing the TV. The pillow still bore the imprint of his son’s head and the couch had retained the shape of his body so that, in the dim light cast by the basement’s sole lamp, it seemed that the ghost of his son had somehow returned to this place, occupying his old familiar position, a thing invisible yet with weight and substance. Daniel wanted so much to curl up there, to mold his body into the ridges and hollows of the couch, to become one with his lost son, yet he did not. To do so would be to disturb the impression that remained, and with it to banish something of the boy’s essence. He would not lie there. Nobody would lie there. It would remain as a memorial to all that had been taken from him, from them.

At first, there had been only shock. Bobby could not be gone. He could not be dead. Death was for the old and the sick. Death was for the children of other men. His son was mortal, but not yet shadowed by mortality. His passing should have been a distant thing, and his father and mother should have predeceased him. He should have mourned them. It was not right, not natural, that they should now be forced to cry over his remains, to watch as his coffin was lowered into the ground. He remembered again the sight of his son’s body on the gurney in the morgue, draped with a sheet, swollen with the gases of decay, a deep red line circling his throat where the rope had cut into him.

Suicide. That had been the initial verdict. Bobby had asphyxiated himself by tying a rope to a tree, dropping the noose at the other end around his neck, and leaning forward with the full weight of his body. At some point, he had realized the awfulness of what was about to happen and had struggled to release himself, scratching and tearing at his flesh, even ripping loose one of his fingernails, but by then the rope had cinched itself tight, the knot designed so that, if his courage failed him, the instrument of his self-destruction would not.

The chief had asked them, in those first hours, if they knew why Bobby might have wanted to kill himself. Was he unhappy? Were there unusual stresses and tensions in his life? Did he owe money to anyone? The autopsy showed that he had been drinking heavily before he died, and his motorcycle was found in a ditch at the edge of the field. It was a wonder, the coroner said, that the boy had managed to ride the bike so far considering the amount of alcohol he had consumed.

And all Daniel Faraday could think of was the girl, Emily, the one for whom his son had not been good enough.

But then the chief had returned to them that afternoon, and everything had changed. It was a question of angles and force, he had told them, although he, and the state police detectives, had already voiced their suspicions among themselves, given the nature of the wounds that the rope had left on his skin. There had been two injuries to his son’s neck, but the first had been obscured by the second, and it had taken the arrival of the state’s chief medical examiner to confirm the suspicions of her deputy. Two injuries: the first inflicted by asphyxiation from behind, possibly while the boy was lying flat on the ground, judging by some bruises to his back where his attacker had perhaps knelt upon him. The initial injury was not fatal, but had resulted only in a loss of consciousness. Death had occurred from the second injury. The noose had been kept around the boy’s neck as he was lifted to his knees, the other end of the rope secured around the trunk of the tree. His killer, or killers, had then put further pressure on his back, forcing him forward so that he slowly strangled.

The chief had said that it must have taken considerable strength and effort to kill big, strong Bobby Faraday in that way. The rope was being tested for traces of DNA, as was the lower part of the tree, but-

They had waited for him to continue.

The person or persons responsible for Bobby’s death had been careful, he told them. Bobby’s hair and clothing had been soaked with pond water and mud, along with his fingernails and the skin of his hands. The intention had clearly been to corrupt any trace evidence, and it had been successful. The authorities weren’t going to give up on finding Bobby’s killer, he reassured them, but their task had been made a great deal more difficult. He had asked them to keep this information to themselves for the time being, and they had agreed to do so.

After the chief left, Daniel held his wife as she wept in his arms. He was not sure why she was crying, and he was only surprised that she had any tears left to shed. Perhaps she was weeping at the horror of it, or because this was a new grief caused by the knowledge that her son had not taken his own life, but that his life had instead been taken from him by others. She did not say, and he did not ask her. But when he felt the first of his own tears slide down his cheek, he understood that his were not tears of loss, or of horror, or even of anger. He was relieved. In that moment, he realized that he had felt a kind ofas Ñlt a kind hatred for his son for killing himself. He had been raging at him for the selfishness of the act, for the stupidity of it, for not turning to those who loved him in his moment of direst need. He had hated his son for rendering his father powerless, and for leaving his parents to bear the weight of his awful grief in his stead. For the time that he had believed his son had died at his own hand, Daniel had contemplated the horror of the act during the long, still days and nights, the hours creeping by with relentless sloth. Grief, it seemed, was a kind of matter: it could not be created or destroyed, but merely altered in form. In dying, the sadness that might have driven Bobby to such an act had not dissipated, but had merely transferred itself to those left behind. There had been no note, no explanation, as though any explanation could have sufficed. Instead, there had only been unanswered questions, and the gnawing sense that they had failed their son in some way.