Sleepwalk by John Saul

groaning sound—the longed-for moan that would tell him she wasn’t dead after all.
    It was the silence—the absence of the siren’s wail as the ambulance disappeared back into the night—that told Jed the girl he’d known all his life was truly dead, that what was happening was not simply a nightmare from which he would awaken to find himself back on the sofa in his living room, the television still droning in the background.
    “You ready to talk about what happened?”
    Jed looked up to see the two policemen, Billy Clark and Dan Rogers, standing on the riverbank, watching him. Clark switched his flashlight on, shining it directly into Jed’s eyes, and the boy’s arm went up defensively as he turned away from the blinding glare.
    “We need to know what happened, boy,” Clark growled.
    Jed shook his head, trying to clear it, but the image of Heather refused to go away. “N-Nothin’ happened,” he said, his voice barely audible. “I went through the Chute, and when I got to the bottom, there she was.”
    Billy Clark’s lip curled. “Oh, sure. You and your punk buddies weren’t doin’ a thing, right? Just came up for a little swim, and there’s your girlfriend, drowned. You think anyone’s gonna believe that? Now, why don’t you tell us what really happened?”
    Jed swallowed nervously and glanced around. A few yards away, sitting in the front seat of the Plymouth, Randy Sparks and Jeff Hankins were watching him worriedly. “But that’s what happened,” Jed said. “Didn’t you ask Jeff and Randy?”
    “I’m asking you, boy,” Clark growled. “And I can tellyou right now the coroner’s going to be going over that girl, looking to find out what happened to her. And if he finds out she had sex tonight, he’s also gonna find out who it was with. You understand me,
breed?
The best thing you can do for yourself is tell the truth, and tell it right now.”
    Jed felt the familiar tight knot of anger begin to push the shock out of his mind. With narrowed eyes, and fists clenched against the desire to strike out against the insult, he said: “Come off it, Clark. If you’re gonna arrest me, go ahead and do it, and then call my dad. But if you want to know what happened, I’m trying to tell you.”
    Clark seemed about to say something to Jed, but Dan Rogers interceded. “Come on, Billy. Everyone in town knows Jed goes with Gina Alvarez, and even if Heather had been his girlfriend, it doesn’t make any difference.” He turned to Jed, his voice friendly. “No one’s saying you did anything, Jed. We just want to know what happened.”
    Slowly, almost hesitantly, Jed repeated what he’d said before, beginning with the moment Randy and Jeff had showed up at his house shortly after his father had gone to work. When he was finished, he looked up at Billy Clark, his eyes challenging the policeman. “It’s the truth,” he said. “I swear it is.”
    Clark stared at him silently for a long moment, but finally, almost reluctantly, nodded his head. “All right. It jibes with what your buddies said. And the medics seemed to think she’d been in the water for at least an hour.”
    Jed closed his eyes and felt a little of the tension drain out of his body. “Wh-What happened to her?” he asked.
    It was Dan Rogers who answered him. “Don’t know. It looks like she might have fallen off the top, or gotten pushed. We’ll have a lot better idea after we find out what she was up to tonight.” He turned to Clark. “Billy, why don’t you call a couple of the day guys and go see Heather’s folks. I’ll take the boys back to the station and get statements from all of them.”
    Clark seemed about to argue, then apparently changed his mind. Wordlessly, he went back to one of the squad cars, and a moment later disappeared into the night.
    “You want to ride with me?” Dan Rogers asked as he walked back toward Jeff Hankins’s Plymouth with Jed at his side. “I figure you must be feeling a little