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river, you could mistake it for a winter field.
    As I neared the dam, I saw that a channel had been opened in the middle of the river where the state police scuba rescue team had extended their search for Brian’s body. Big slabs of broken ice lined both sides of the open water. They’d apparently given up about a mile down from the dam.
    Brian and Jenny had crashed through the snowbank and the guardrail and smashed into the water directly across the river from the old Reddington powder mill. It was one of those typical nineteenth-century New England brick factory buildings—five stories high, a hundred yards long, built right on the water’s edge. Someone had optimistically begun to renovate it for office suites in the economic boom of the eighties. But the boom busted before they finished, and now the old factory’s
flat back wall loomed up over the river, and its dark empty windows gazed forlornly across the water to the place where Jenny and Brian had died.
    For about a hundred yards downstream from the dam the riverbank was riprapped with big jagged hunks of blasted granite. Here, River Road was just two lanes wide, bounded by a steep hillside on the left and the river on the right. It curved slightly, then followed tight to the riverbank, with a narrow frozen sand shoulder barely wide enough for a car to pull off. You’d have to be driving awfully fast not to negotiate that soft curve.
    It wasn’t hard to spot the place where Jenny Rolando’s car had gone in. A car’s width of guardrail and old plowed snow was torn away.
    A black Chevrolet pickup truck was pulled against the guardrail just past the site of the accident. I pulled in behind it and walked back.
    The swollen river poured over the top of the dam into a heavy tumult of water funneling between the rocky riprapped banks. Here it was twenty-five or thirty yards across. The dam itself was about ten feet high, and at its base where the water crashed down onto itself, a faint mist rose into the wintry air.
    The water was dark and swift and cold-looking, and the powerful currents and eddies swirled and scraped across the riverbed. It was easy to see how they could suck a person down and smash and tumble him against the rocky bottom until he lost all sense of direction. The river widened below where the riprap ended. There the now-frozen water flattened out into the placid, shallow, meandering river that typified the Reddington all the way down to Rhode Island, where it merged with a couple of other rivers before it emptied into the sea.
    Chief Sprague had said it: If Jenny and Brian had gone off the road anywhere else along the river, they’d probably have survived.
    Two figures were sitting on the big squarish hunks of granite
along the top of the riverbank where the guardrail was broken away. Their backs were to me, and as I approached them I saw that they were tossing white flowers into the water. They were young women. Teenagers. Friends of Jenny and Brian, I guessed, come here to remember and to mourn.
    I didn’t want to interrupt them. I stood there quietly for a minute and thought about Brian. When my thoughts flipped to Billy and Joey, my own sons, I let out a long breath and turned back for my car.
    â€œHey, mister.”
    I stopped and looked back.
    One of the girls had stood up, and she was shielding her eyes with her hand and squinting into the afternoon sun at me. She wore a red parka and baggy blue jeans and Bean boots.
    I lifted my hand. “Hi.”
    She approached me. She had a bunch of daisies in one hand. “Who’re you?” she said. “You’re not from Reddington.”
    â€œThe Golds are friends of mine,” I said.
    She was a chunky girl with hair so black that I figured it was dyed. She stood in front of me and frowned. “You’re not one of those gawkers?”
    â€œI’m not gawking,” I said.
    â€œThere have been a lot of gawkers. You should’ve been