River’s End

father’s eyes levelly. “About twenty years now. It’s Sam Tanner, Dad.”
    There was a little hitch in Frank’s heart rate. Beat, hesitation, beat. He didn’t jolt. He’
    d been a cop too long to jump at shadows and ghosts, but he braced. “I see. No, I don’t see.” he said immediately and pushed out of his chair. “I put that son of a bitch away and now he writes to you? He wants to talk to the son of the man who helped send him over, who’s made goddamn sure he stayed over for twenty years?
    That’s bullshit, Noah. Dangerous bullshit.”
    “He mentioned the connection.” Noah kept his tone mild. He didn’t want to argue, hated knowing he was going to upset his father, but his decision was already made. “
    Why did you go to all his parole hearings’.’“
    “Some things you don’t forget. And because you don’t, because you can’t, you make sure the job stays done.” And he’d made a promise to a young girl with haunted eyes as they’d stood in the deep shadows of the forest. “He hasn’t forgotten either. What better way to pay me back than to use you?”
    “He can’t hurt me. Dad.”
    “I imagine that’s just what Julie MacBride thought the night she opened the door to him. Stay away from him, Noah. Put this one aside.”
    “You haven’t.” He held up a hand before Frank could speak. “Just listen a minute. You did your job. It cost you. I remember how it was. You’d pace the floor at night, or come out here to sit in the dark. I know there were others that followed you home, but nothing ever like this one. So I never forgot it either. I guess you could say it’s followed me, too. This one’s part of us. All of us. I’ve wanted to write this book for years. I have to talk to Sam Tanner.”
    “If you do that, Noah, and go on to write this book, drag out all that ugliness again, do you realize what it might do to Tanner’s other victims? The parents, the sister. Her child?”
    Olivia. No, Noah told himself, he was not going to cloud the issue with Olivia. Not now. “I thought about what it might do to you. That’s why I’m here. I wanted you to know what I’m going to do.”
    “It’s a mistake.”
    “Maybe, but it’s my life now, and my job.”
    “You think he’d have contacted you if you weren’t mine?” Fear and fury sprang out in equal measures, turning Frank’s eyes hard, snapping into his voice like the crack of a bullet. “The son of a bitch refuses to talk to anyone for years—and they’ve tried to get to him. Brokaw, Walters, Oprah. No comment, no interviews, no nothing. Now, just months before he’s likely to get out, he contacts you, offers you the story on a plate. Damn it, Noah, it doesn’t have to do with your work. It has to do with mine.”
    “Maybe.” Noah’s tone chilled as he slipped his sunglasses back on. “And maybe it has to do with both. Whether or not you respect my work, it’s what I do. And what I’m going to keep doing.”
    “I never said I didn’t respect your work.”
    “No, but you never said otherwise either.” It was a bruise Noah just realized he’d been nursing. “I’ll take my breaks where I find them and make them work for me. I learned that from you. I’ll see you Sunday.”
    Frank stepped forward, started to speak. But Noah was already striding away. So he sat, feeling his age, and stared down at his own hands.
    Noah’s foul mood drove home with him, like a separate energy, an irritable passenger in the stone-gray BMW. He kept the top down, the radio up, trying to blow away the anger, drown out his thoughts.
    He hated the sudden discovery that he was hurt because his father had never done a tap dance of joy over the success of his books.
    It was stupid, he thought. He was old enough not to need the whistles and claps of parental approval. He wasn’t eighteen and scoring the winning basket at the tail of the fourth quarter any longer. He was a grown man both happy and successful in his profession. He was well paid, and his ego got all the boosts it required from reviews and royalty checks, thank you very much.
    But he knew, had known all along, that his father disapproved of the path he’d taken with his writing. Because neither had wanted to confront the other, little had been said.
    Until today, Noah thought.
    Sam Tanner had done more than offer a story to be told. He’d put the first visible crack in a relationship Noah had counted on all his life. It had been there before, hidden, from the first