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  This was John Dromoor’s first kill in the NFPD. It would not be his last.

  The Friend

  PEOPLE YOU MEET, MOST of them make little impression. Others, they make a strong impression. Even if you don’t meet them again, if your paths don’t cross. Still.

  She recognized him from local TV, newspapers. His face, that is. His name she would not have recognized, though it was a strange name and one she murmured aloud, smiling: “Dro-moor.”

  At the Horseshoe Bar & Grill they were introduced. This was not long after Dromoor’s citation for valor, a public ceremony covered by local TV, newspapers. Dromoor was credited with saving the life of his partner in a shooting and such events, though not rare in the sprawling city of Buffalo close by, were rare enough in the depopulated city of Niagara Falls to draw media interest. Yet Dromoor refused to talk much about what he’d done. You did not perceive him as a modest man, rather a man largely indifferent to others’ opinions of him as he was indifferent to others’ opinions of all things. When Teena Maguire congratulated him on the citation, Dromoor said, without irony, “That was back in August.” It was mid-September now.

  The Horseshoe had once been a Falls supper club, glitzy, glamorous. In the economic recessions of the waning twentieth century it had devolved into a neighborhood tavern, favored by cops and courthouse staff. Martine Maguire—Teena to her friends—was known there. She was a widow with a young daughter. Many of the regular customers at the Horseshoe had known her husband, Ross Maguire. He had worked at Goodyear Tire, he’d died of a quickly spreading melanoma cancer several years before. A few of the men at the Horseshoe had dated Teena. Possibly there’d been some emotional entanglements. But no lingering resentments. Teena was well liked, admired. She was flirtatious without being aggressive. She got along with women as easily as she got along with men, single women like herself, dropping by the Horseshoe on a Friday evening after work.

  By chance she’d met Dromoor that evening. He was new to the NFPD and to Niagara Falls. She would recall afterward that he’d said very little to her, but he had listened. She’d had the impression he was moved by hearing she was a widow, and so young. And she had a daughter to raise alone. When Dromoor offered to buy her a drink and Teena declined, he didn’t insist. Though they remained together at the bar. There was no one else there who so interested them as they interested each other. Dromoor drank ale. Dark ale from the tap. His eyes were lighter than his face, which appeared mask-like, like baked clay. Near the end of the evening, as Teena was about to leave, she told Dromoor he should call her sometime, if he had the time. Dromoor frowned and told her in a lowered voice so that no one else at the bar could hear that he’d like that, except he was married and his wife was having their first baby in about twenty days.

  Teena laughed, and said she appreciated that. Being told.

  “John Dromoor. You’re my friend.”

  She leaned upward to kiss his cheek. Brush her lips across his baked-clay cheek. Just a touch, a gesture. She’d really liked this guy, and she guessed he liked her, to a degree. But this was it. No more than this. The next time Teena Maguire and John Dromoor were in such close proximity to each other it would be nearly two years later in the boathouse at Rocky Point Park and Teena Maguire would be unconscious.

  Luck

  HOW A LIFE IS decided. How a life is ended.

  Good luck, bad luck. Purely luck.

  When your mother leaned over you to blow into your ear. “Bethie-baby! Let’s go.”

  It was a few minutes before midnight, Fourth of July 1996. You’d fallen asleep on the creaky outdoor sofa on Casey’s front porch. After the fireworks ended on the river. Waiting for your mother to leave but the party wasn’t showing signs of winding down.

  Your face smarted from sunburn. Eyes burned in their sockets. It had been a long giddy day: like a roller-coaster ride. Momma was laughing at you saying she’d better get you home to bed, it was almost midnight.

  You objected you were okay. You weren’t a little kid. You didn’t want to go home yet.

  Casey said, sliding his arm around your mother’s shoulders in a fierce-playful hug, “Bethie can sleep upstairs if she wants to. There’s room. Stay a while longer, Teena? C’mon.”

  Momma was tempted. She was having a good time, she loved casual neighborhood parties. And she loved Casey, sort of.

  But Momma decided no.

  Like Mother, Like Daughter

  YOU WERE BETHEL MAGUIRE everybody called Bethie. Your childhood ended when you were twelve years old.

  Always you would think If. If Momma had not said no.

  You’d have stayed at Casey’s that night. Both of you. And what would happen in Rocky Point Park would not happen and no one would have knowledge of the possibility of its having happened and so your childhood would not have ended that night.

  Good luck, bad luck. Hit by lightning, spared by lightning.

  Mostly you liked the neighborhood parties, summer picnics that began in backyards and spilled out into the street. Amplified music. Rock, country-and-western, bluegrass. Ray Casey favored bluegrass and if you were a friend of Casey’s you got to like it, too. As Momma said either that or plug up your ears.

  At Casey’s that night lots of people were dancing. Just disco-dancing, wild and fun. Teena Maguire was one of the best dancers, no guy could keep up with her. Only other women.

  That Teena! Look at her!

  Teena’s hot tonight!

  Often you were told that you’d inherited Teena Maguire’s tawny-blond hair and fair skin. Except you knew you weren’t pretty like Teena and never would be.

  Watching Momma dance and flirt and laugh so hard her eyes were shut to slits, seeing how other people looked at her, you worried sometimes. That Teena Maguire made a certain impression that wasn’t exactly her.

  Drinking too much at these parties. Acting kind of breathless, excited. Like a high school girl not a woman in her midthirties. (So old! You were too fastidious to wish to know your mother’s exact age.) Her tank top slipping off her shoulder, you could see Teena wasn’t wearing a bra beneath.

  Her hair, scissor-cut in layers, which she’d had “lightened,” falling into her eyes.

  Her skin that, if you touched, you could feel: heat lifting from it.

  Her laughter, in surprised-sounding peals like glass breaking.

  You knew: your mother deserved some good times. She was really nice compared to most of your friends’ mothers. She loved you, and it wasn’t any exaggeration she’d do anything for you. She missed your father but did not wish to dwell on the past. She did not complain, anyway not much. Her favored remark was Things could be a helluva lot worse delivered with a TV-comic shrug. She was under a lot of tension at her job, receptionist for two bossy dentists who were always critical of her. And there was her own mother depending on her to visit sometimes twice a day and wanting her and you to move in with her in the brick house on Baltic Avenue.

  Momma protested she could not! Just could not.

  It would be the easy thing to do. Move back in with Grandma. Of course she would save money but then she would never remarry. Her life would be over, her life as a woman. She could not bear that.

  Your mother was a woman who liked men. Sometimes, too much.

  Had it coming. Asked for it. Everybody knows what she was.

  Over the years there’d been a number of men in your mother’s life and yet none had ever stayed overnight in your house on Ninth Street. Your mother wouldn’t allow this, she didn’t want to upset you.

  Not that she’d told you this. But you figured.

  Now it was Ray Casey, your mother had been seeing for about a year.

  Were Momma and Casey going to get married? You could not ask.

  You told Momma you liked Casey a lot, which was true. You told her it was okay with you if they got married but really it was not.

  If they got married, if Momma brought you to live in Casey’s house, you believed that Momma would love you less. Mom
ma would have less time for you. Momma would love him.

  You were jealous of Casey, sometimes you wished Casey would get back together with his wife. Or move away. Or die.

  Four years seven months since Ross Maguire your father had died yet you thought of him a lot. More like the idea of Dad, Daddy sometimes than any actual memory. When you were fully awake, his face was kind of blurred. But drifting off to sleep you would see him, suddenly! You would hear his voice, the deep, comforting sound of his voice, you would see his face, his smile, you felt his presence in the house. Before he’d gotten sick and went to the hospital and did not return there’d been two times: the feel of the house when Daddy was there, and when Daddy was not there.

  It would be wrong. It would be not-right. For another man to pretend to be your daddy.

  Some mean-mouthed people in the neighborhood were saying that Ray Casey had left his wife for Teena Maguire but that was not true. Casey’s wife had left Niagara Falls, with their children. Moved back to live with her family in Corning, New York. It was a hard commute for Casey to see his kids. He was hurt, he was disgusted. He was baffled what he’d done wrong. His marriage was finished, he said. His marriage was dead. Casey had a way of saying dead! with a certain vehemence. He would say he was crazy in love with Teena Maguire. Crazy in love uttered with a certain vehemence, too.

  It would be said that Teena Maguire had had a quarrel with her boyfriend Casey that night. That’s why she left the party, took her daughter, and went to walk home. That’s why she was in Rocky Point Park at midnight. They were drunk, fighting. She ran off. He let her go.

  Just after dark the fireworks display began on the Niagara River a mile and a half away. A few kids went upstairs in Casey’s house, climbed out the front windows to squat on the porch to see the dazzling lights, you were one of them, hoping your mother wouldn’t notice.

  She did, though. Or somebody tipped her off.

  “Bethie, get down! Damn you, get down before you break your neck.”

  You protested the roof was practically flat, you weren’t going to fall off, but Momma insisted, threatening to come upstairs and get you. It was embarrassing how much fuss your mother was making over you on a porch roof not fifteen feet from the ground but this was typical of her obsessing about your safety. Casey tried to make a joke of it saying you could jump down and he’d catch you, like a fireman.

  In fact, Casey was a volunteer fireman.

  Naturally, your mother got her way. You were mortified having to crawl back up the roof and through the window, while the other kids watched. Rolling your eyes, muttering, “Damn my mother, she’s always bossing me around. Treats me like some stupid kid five years old.” You sounded harsher than you meant. Really it was meant to be funny.

  Later, after the fireworks ended, you must have fallen asleep on the rattan sofa. Amid the loud music and raised voices and laughter you slept for about an hour until your mother stooped to blow into your ear, waking you.

  “Bethie. Time to go home, sweetie.”

  “I wasn’t asleep. . . .”

  You were confused at first, your face throbbed with sunburn.

  More than twelve hours before you’d been playing softball in the park. Swimming in the pool that was jammed with screaming kids, and exposed to the hot sun. Your stomach was queasy, all the delicious corn on the cob you’d eaten. Casey’s grilled hamburgers, Momma’s potato salad with slices of hard-boiled egg. Carrot cake, ice cream. God knows how many soft drinks out of the ice chest in the backyard.

  The daughter was drinking beer, too. Like mother, like daughter in that family.

  There was a final shake of the dice. Another time it might have been averted. When Casey said, “Teena, let me drive you two home. Wait a minute, I’ll get the car,” and your mother thanked him and kissed him on the cheek, telling him not to bother—“We want to walk, don’t we, Bethie? It’s a perfect night.”

  The Boathouse

  BY 1:25 A.M. of July 5, 1996, it would be cordoned off by Niagara Falls police as a crime scene.

  It was a low shingleboard service building beside the Rocky Point lagoon. It was used for the storage of park equipment: rowboats and canoes not in use, picnic tables, benches, folding chairs, trash barrels. In the interior there was a smell of stagnant water, rodents, rotting wood. There was a lingering odor of stale urine, for homeless men sometimes slept here.

  On the filthy floor near the front entrance, the gang-rape victim would almost die. It would be speculated that she’d been left to die. If her rapists had been thinking, not so drunk, or so drugged, not so excited, they’d have made sure she was dead. And her twelve-year-old daughter who’d crawled behind the stacked boats to hide.

  A witness. Two witnesses! To identify the rapists, testify against them.

  But the rapists hadn’t been thinking. They had not had time to think and they were not in a state to think. Had not thought out what they would do to their thirty-five-year-old victim beyond the frenzied act of doing.

  The Lagoon

  BY DAY YOU SOMETIMES bicycled along this path. Alone, or with friends. Weeping willow branches brushed against your face, whiplike. The brick path was uneven, bumpy. In the corner of your eye you saw the figures of homeless men slumped against the service buildings, or lying seemingly comatose on the grass. By day, you felt no danger.

  By night, the path was lighted. But half the lights had been broken or were burned out.

  Still you could see the surface of the lagoon. Moonlight reflected in broken patches. The water was covered in a faint scum that rippled and shivered like the skin of a nervous beast. The sky was gauzy drifting clouds high overhead. Near the Falls there was always mist, clouds of vapor. You could see the moon’s battered face, what looked like a winking eye.

  It would have been a ten-minute walk through Rocky Point Park, from Casey’s house to your house. Except Momma wanted to take the lagoon path. Where it was so pretty.

  Saying in her happy-wistful voice you dreaded, “Your father used to take the three of us out in a rowboat on the lagoon, Bethie, do you remember? Sometimes just him and you in a canoe. You took your dolls along.”

  “I always hated dolls, Momma.”

  On the lagoon were scattered feathers. No swans, no mallards or geese, must’ve been sleeping in the rushes at shore. Or maybe kids tossing firecrackers had caused them to fly away.

  On the other side of the park, the high school baseball game had long ended. The bright lights on thirty-foot poles at the field had long been extinguished. The bleachers were empty and most of the park was deserted. There was little traffic on the roadways. Now and then you would hear the rapid-fire crack-crack-crack! of firecrackers and young-male laughter.

  Beer cans and litter floating in the lagoon. Still it was beautiful by moonlight, Teena Maguire insisted.

  The ornamental stucco facade of the waterworks was lighted. This was an old “historic” building designed by a renowned architect and in its derelict state it retained still some measure of dignity. Dark brick, cream-colored stucco, mortar now badly crumbling. Once-elegant iron scrollwork over the windows and doors. Heroic stone figures in recessed alcoves and at the edge of the roof: nude male warriors with swords and shields, females with blank faces and hair to their waists. One of them was a mermaid with a ridiculous curving fish tail instead of legs.

  You asked your mother what’s the point of a mermaid—“It’s so silly.”

  You didn’t want to say the mermaid scared you, somehow. Since you’d been a little girl, seeing it above the lagoon. A freaky deformed female with no legs.

  Momma said, “What’s the point of anything made up? Just something exotic for men to look at, I guess. Men make these things up.”

  “But, Momma, there has got to be some point.”

  Suddenly you were angry with your mother. Not knowing why.

  There was a small spit of land, out into the lagoon, you could walk out to see a low-built dam over which water flowed in a constant frothy st
ream. You hoped your mother wouldn’t want to walk there, where the path was poorly lighted.

  You hoped your mother wouldn’t bring up the subject of your father again tonight. It wasn’t the right time, July Fourth. It was meant to be a silly-happy time. An empty-headed time. At Casey’s, the way Momma stared up at you on the porch roof like you were in actual danger of your life, you were so embarrassed! Teena Maguire was one to exaggerate certain things while completely ignoring others.

  She was staring at the boathouse now. It was closed for the night, a metal shutter had been clamped down on the side facing the lagoon. The boathouse was covered in graffiti like deranged shouts. KIKI LOVES R. D. TO DEATH SUCK ASON FUCK YOU!!! FUK ST THOMASS.