Harry was briefly blinded—the bright May sun hitting just the right spot on his windshield—as he turned onto the crushed-shell driveway of the house in Kennewick Village. He pulled his Civic next to the orange Volvo station wagon—a car his father had loved—and covered his face with his hands and almost cried.
Alice, his father’s second wife, had called Harry early the previous morning to tell him that his father, Bill, was dead.
“What? How?” Harry asked. He was on his cell phone, walking across the tree-lined quad toward his dormitory. He’d been thinking about graduation, less than a week away, worrying about what he was going to do for the rest of his life.
“He slipped and fell.” Alice was speaking with gaps between the words. Harry realized she was crying, and trying not to show it, trying to sound calm and reasonable.
“Where?” Harry asked. His whole body was cold and his legs had turned to rubber. He stopped walking, and the girl behind him, also on her cell phone, grazed against his backpack as she moved around him on the brick walkway.
“Out on the cliff path, where he liked to walk.” Alice was now audibly crying, the words sounding like they were coming through a wet towel.
“Who found him?”
“They were tourists. I don’t know. They didn’t know him, Harry.”
It took a second phone call later that day to get all the details. Alice had gone out in the afternoon to do errands. She’d stopped by the store to see Bill, and he’d told her that he planned on going for a walk before it got dark and that he’d be home for dinner. She’d told him to be careful, as she always did, and that she was making shepherd’s pie for dinner, the way he liked it, with the cubed lamb instead of ground hamburger. The food was ready by six, the time they normally ate dinner, but there was no sign of Bill. And he wasn’t answering his phone. She called John, the only other employee at the bookstore, and he said that all he knew was what Alice knew. Bill had left a little before five to go for a walk. It was dark now, and Alice called the police station, where she was patched through to an Officer Wheatley. Just as he was explaining to Alice that there was nothing they could do if he’d only been missing a little over an hour, she heard another voice interrupt him in the background. The officer told Alice to hang on for a moment, and that was when she knew. When he came back on the line, his voice had altered, and he told her he’d be transferring her to a Detective Dixon. A body had just been found near Kennewick Harbor, and would Alice be available to make an identification.
“How did he die?” Harry asked.
“They won’t rule anything out, but they seemed to think he slipped and fell and hit his head.”
“He did that walk every day.”
“I know. I told them that. We’ll find out more, Harry.”
“I just don’t understand.” He felt as though he’d thought those words a hundred times that day.