Fall Guy

differently. It's human nature.“
    „Then...“
    „You did the best you could. You know what they say about the messenger?“
    „Yes, I do. But she was mad at herself.“
    „Not at you?“
    „She was mad at me, too. Very mad.“
    „Give her a bit of time. Try her again in a day or two.“
    „Okay,“ I said. „I will. Detective?“
    „Yes?“
    „How do you . .. ?“
    „Long story. I'll buy you a drink one night and tell you all about it.“
    „I'm sorry if I bothered you.“
    „You didn't bother me at all. I'll call you tomorrow, when I hear about the release.“
    As soon as I put the phone down, it rang again. But I didn't pick it up. Instead, I took the stairs two at a time to the office and listened to the machine pick up, Dashiell barking, my outgoing message and then Parker Bowling, sounding impaired and frustrated.
    „She's still not there,“ he said. „What now?“
    Another voice, farther away from the phone, said, „Who am I, fucking Martha Stewart, I got the answer to everything?“
    „Bitch,“ Parker said.
    I wasn't sure which one of us he meant. Then I heard the disconnect.
    I went back downstairs and poured a glass of wine, sitting at the table where I'd left O'Fallon's album. There were adults in some of the pictures and those same kids again, and again, and again, in different combinations. Family, I thought. So Tim had a brother, too. Dennis. But he hadn't been mentioned in the will. What was that all about?
    I paged through the rest of the album, thinking I'd see those kids growing up, thinking I'd be able to figure out which one grew up to be Tim. But they all stayed frozen in time. In the beginning of the album, the kids were ten or eleven through fifteen or sixteen. At the end, the same. Same kids, same ages, same goofy smiles, funny haircuts, high energy, high jinks and, every once in a while, a grown-up in the picture or a more formal shot, the kids dressed up and looking as if they hated it. Nothing written in the album. It didn't say „Tim's fifteenth birthday“ or „Aunt Colleen's wedding.“ No dates, either, no „Summer Vacation, 1979,“ nothing like that. And no one was holding up a newspaper, the way hostages do so that you know they are alive on a certain date. I could only guess from the fading and my assumption that Tim was one of those boys, that Maggie was the little girl, that the contents of the album were around twenty-five years old, give or take a year or two in either direction.
    After looking at the end and seeing that no one had aged, I paged through rather quickly, but near the end of the album, I found a lumpy page. It wasn't a real photo album, the photographs held on by those little black corners my father had used in ours. This was a loose-leaf book with plastic sleeves and a sheet of black paper in the middle of the photos. The lumpy page had two black sheets so that whatever was between them didn't show through from either side. I slipped in two fingers and pulled it out, a newspaper article. It had oxidized to a yellowish-brown color and the paper was very dry. I unfolded it very carefully, noting that it had been folded and unfolded many times. The creases were torn right through in several places. The name of the newspaper wasn't there, but the date was. The article had been published twenty-nine years ago. I began to read.

FATAL ACCIDENT AT BREYER’S LANDING

A local Piermont boy, Joseph Patrick O’Fallon, 12, died yesterday in a dive into the swimming hole at Breyer’s Landing. His brothers, Timothy and Dennis, were with him, as well as two cousins, Liam and Francis Connor. The boys, aged 12 to 15, said that although they warned Joseph not to jump from the highest point, he did. When he didn’t come back to the surface, the two oldest boys, Timothy and Liam, went in after him but were unable to find him. Francis Connor, 12, ran home to tell his mother, who called the paramedics. The body was recovered later that day.
„The neighborhood boys had been told repeatedly not to use the swimming hole at Breyer’s Landing because it is unsafe and there is no supervision,” Detective Anthony Rizzo of the Orangeburg Police Department said, „but it was sort of a rite of passage for the local kids, jumping off that rocky ledge into the ice-cold water. I did it myself when I was growing up.”
Joseph’s father, Detective Colin O’Fallon of the New York City Police Department, said he’d warned the boys too, but to no avail. „If there’s