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Natalie

Natalie reads the latest news story a second time just to make sure she didn’t misunderstand.

The PPD has revealed the location of the dumpster where the weapon was found—behind Mick’s Rock Café on Congress Street. Police are still searching for anyone who witnessed the disposal of a gun on or after the night of June 6.

Mick’s Rock Café is an over-twenty-one venue on the west side of town. That’s where her father had played on the night of Tim’s murder. She knows this firsthand, because she tried to get into the club that night, even after he told her she couldn’t attend.

It didn’t work. The bouncer turned her away at the door, and she’d gone back to Tessa’s house.

The gun was found behind Mick’s ?

She feels sick. Although a hundred people must have seen her dad on that stage with his bass. He wouldn’t be able to play a gig and shoot a guy at the same time.

Except bands take breaks, and the club is on the same side of town as the mansion.

She rubs her bare arms, which are suddenly cold in the school library’s air-conditioning. There’s only fifteen minutes until she has to take her next exam.

Any other week, she would have been outside in the sunshine with her friends. Tessa is out there with a handful of other kids from her class. The problem is they all know what happened last night, judging by the stares she received first thing this morning when her eyes were still gritty from crying.

“Are you okay ?” Tessa had asked.

“Fine. Why wouldn’t I be?” she’d lied. Because you can’t show fear. Not even to your best friend.

The dumbest part is that she’d brought Tessa along for the express purpose of telling people about their trip to hear her dad’s band. It was supposed to be Natalie’s only badass moment, like, ever . Because nobody else’s dad looks like Harrison or plays the bass.

If her mom hadn’t shown up last night, everything would be fine. Great even.

It’s just so mortifying. And this morning, when she’d snuck into her mom’s bedroom to dig her phone out from her mother’s bedside table, she’d found a two-word message from her father. I’m sorry .

She doesn’t even know why he’s apologizing when she’s the one who lied. Unless he’s an even bigger liar. Or a murderer.

It hurts to think about.

She opens the library’s research portal and types in her father’s full name, adding Portland Maine arrest to the query.

It’s been a while since she tried this. When she googled him at home, all the articles about her dad were trapped behind paywalls. But the school library has paid access, and now she can actually read the details of her father’s crime.

The first story she finds is super short. Massachusetts Man Assaulted at the Parker House Bar. Local Man Arrested . There are barely two paragraphs about the fight and her father’s arrest.

She tries again, incorporating the victim’s name into her search, and finds a more extensive story. She hadn’t known that the man her father assaulted was a stranger.

That’s somehow even more disturbing. And the victim’s wife’s statement is downright horrifying: That man was completely out of control. He was terrifying, and I’ve never been so scared in my life .

Natalie has to look away from the computer screen.

When she was little, she used to ask what happened to her father. She knew he existed, because there was a single picture of Natalie in his arms in the family photo album.

Her mother’s answers to her questions about him changed as Natalie aged. At first she’d explained, “He made some bad choices, and he had to leave us.”

When Natalie was in fifth grade, she expanded. “He was taking drugs. And I guess he couldn’t stop. It’s called a substance use disorder. When you were just a year old, he got high and got into a bar fight. The other guy got hurt really badly, so your father had to go to jail.”

A bar fight sounds like an argument that got out of hand. A few punches thrown. But now she knows that the victim—Barry Peterson—suffered a brain injury and spent several months in a rehab unit.

Steeling herself, she rereads Barry Peterson’s wife’s account of the fight. He kept screaming at Barry . Don’t look at her. Don’t (expletive) look at her. Don’t you (expletive) dare. I thought he was going to kill Barry, and then me, too .

She looks away again. Her pencil case is spilled open on the desk, and she straightens it and zips it shut. As if to organize the chaos in her heart.

The problem is that she’d liked him. At the coffee shop and at the bar he’d seemed kind. And interesting. And a little tentative—like he cared, but he was still just winging it and hoping for the best. Which is how she feels pretty much all the time. He felt familiar .

But the Harrison in these newspaper articles is someone she never wants to meet. He went to jail, and he stayed there a long time.

That doesn’t happen to people who keep their worst urges locked down.

She closes the browser tab and searches Tim Kovak murder as she’s done before. But now she’s reading with fresh eyes. She tries to imagine her father enraged and shooting Tim in the face.

It doesn’t make any sense. Then again, she can’t make sense of anyone shooting someone in the face.

Tim stares back at her from the photo accompanying the article. He stands on the deck of a boat with the ocean behind him. He’s smiling faintly. It’s the sort of picture that’s meant to make you think Now there’s a nice guy .

But nice guys don’t search through your phone.

“Natalie?” the librarian says. “Don’t you have somewhere you have to be?”

She kills the browser window and leaps to her feet. Her exam starts in two minutes. “Right. I’m going.”

Hurrying down to the classroom, she’ll spend the next two hours writing about the Bill of Rights and the three branches of government.

It will take another twenty hours for her to hear that the police have arrested her father and taken him to the Cumberland County Jail.