One Cold Night

until she was six months along,” Carole answered. “I was like that, too. She looked like she was letting herself go a little, that’s all.”
    “And you’re sure Peter never knew?” Ramos asked.
    “We were sure,” Susan said with a slight waver in her voice. “I mean, my family moved all the way across the state. I went to a different school, had new friends. We never saw each other at all after that, and as far as I know he never made any effort to find me. Peter had plenty of friends and all the girls liked him. I just assumed he moved on with his life.”
    “He knew your parents adopted a baby?” Ramos asked. “I mean, he must have known.”
    “Not that I’m aware of.”
    “But people talk in small towns, no?” Ramos’s pink nails drummed the tabletop.
    “Ma’am,” Bill said, “let me tell you that where we come from, one county is as big as your city here. We moved twelve whole counties away. We’re talking hundreds of miles of land. The chain of gossip gets broken in a twenty-mile radius, wouldn’t you say, dear?”
    “Yes,” Carole agreed. “I’d say so.”
    “So you moved,” Ramos said, “and life went back to normal. Sort of.”
    Dave watched Susan’s face as she struggled to recall the chaos she must have felt at fifteen with a life suddenly bereft of any real normality at all.
    “Yes,” Susan said quietly. “I finished high school and left for college. My parents raised Lisa.”
    “It was the idea of the abortion,” Carole explained. “It may be legal, but down where we’re from, back then especially, it wasn’t done. At least, it wasn’t talked about.”
    “That boy never looked for us after we moved to Carthage,” Bill said. “Not one time.”
    “No,” Susan agreed. “Never.”
    “Suzie made the best decision she could at the time,” Bill said. “We all did.”
    An exhausted lull spread across the room, and then Susan said, “This probably isn’t important, but Peter had pretty bad rashes.”
    “What kind of rashes?” Ramos asked.
    “Skin rashes,” Susan answered. “Eczema, all down the insides of his arms. He’d scratch it like crazy and sometimes it would bleed.”
    “His arms could look pretty bad,” Carole said.
    “Sometimes, even in the heat, he’d wear long-sleeved shirts to hide the rash,” Susan said.
    “Not just to hide the rash.” Bill’s tone was firm. “Suzie, you’ve got to tell them about the rest of it.”
    Carole nodded heavily, as if the rest was unpleasant but needed to be heard. “Tell them about his sorrow. ”
    “I will, Dad,” Susan said. “I was going to.” But then she seemed to flounder. Dave smiled gently at her; she smiled back, took a breath and got started. “He had an older brother, Robbie, who died the year before I met Peter. There was a big swimming hole in Vernon. All the older kids swam in it summers; the little kids weren’t allowed, because it was deep. Robbie and Peter were there alone one afternoon, and Robbie fell in and drowned.”
    “He was a good swimmer,” Carole said.
    “That’s right,” Bill said. “Hearing the story, it never made a lot of sense that such a good swimmer would drown in calm water.”
    “Peter was the only one there that day,” Susan said, “and he said Robbie slipped on a mossy part of the big flat stone over the water and fell in.”
    “He idolized his big brother.” Carole’s voice had grown soft, remembering.
    “Yes,” Bill said in a sharper tone. “He certainly did. Go on, Suzie, tell them.”
    Dave leaned forward. “Go on.”
    Susan looked from Dave to Ramos. “Peter cut his wrists after his brother died. He just tried once, but there were scars.”
    “Peter would not discuss it,” Bill said. “All of us, the whole town, kept silent on the matter.”
    “And the mother,” Carole said, “well, she was just destroyed.”
    “Not that we knew these people,” Bill said, “until Suzie and Peter started dating. But their story was common knowledge.”
    “Was there a father in the picture?” Ramos asked.
    “He died when the boys were very young,” Susan said. “Cancer.”
    “Did Peter ever try to kill himself again?”
    Susan shook her head no, but Dave thought she looked uncertain. How could she be sure, not having seen him since he was seventeen? “By the time I knew Peter, it seemed like he had worked his way through it.”
    “We all thought that boy got all the luck in that family,” Bill said, “considering. He was basically a solid