“It’s okay,” the kind officer reassures her. “Sometimes details come back to us later.” He uncrosses his legs and leans back in his chair like it’s already been a long day. “Especially after something this traumatic.”
“Her hands,” Riley says suddenly, without thinking.
His dark eyebrows flicker upward. Unlike his thinning hair, they are robust and thick, as if they decided long ago to be the wild child of the family. He bends forward again. “What about her hands?”
“Oh, nothing,” Riley says, embarrassed that she’s gotten him excited about such a trivial detail. “I just remember noticing her hands, like they’d been grabbing for something. And they were freckled, I think. And rings. She wore several rings.” She watches as the officer scribbles notes on his spiral pad and nods, as if he suspected as much.
“Any chance you remember seeing her in the restaurant before...before the incident?” Riley’s eyes flicker in mild surprise. So, he’s being careful not to call it a suicide. Maybe the woman with the blond hair didn’t jump at all. Maybe she fell by mistake. Or, maybe, she was pushed.
Riley shoves away the image stuck in her mind, that of the dead woman’s body lying several yards away, and shakes her head. “No,” she says. “I don’t think so. I mean, I don’t remember seeing her in the restaurant. I only remember the sound.”
“The sound?”
“Um, the sound of, you know.” She swallows, struggling to get the words out. “When she hit the terrace, I guess.” Riley’s stomach contorts into a knot as she says this, the earsplitting blast of a human body colliding with the earth still ringing in her ears.
“And what was that like? The sound?” Riley stares at him as if he’s crazy. He really wants her to describe it?
She holds out her hands, palms up, unsure of what to say. “I don’t know. I thought the chandelier in the lobby had crashed. Or that there’d been an earthquake. Or someone had shot off a gun.” It’s weird to think that now. But the noise was so loud, so sudden, not at all how she’d imagine the sound of a body falling. “Everyone jumped. I think we were all so startled. No one knew what was going on.”
The officer nods his head and makes a few additional notes. Riley imagines he was probably handsome once and might still be to a certain type of woman. He’s the kind of man who presents himself with a certain heft, sturdy and unflappable. His hands are rough and cracked, but his fingernails are neatly trimmed, clean.
“It must have been frightening,” he says now, throwing her a bone.
She gives him a timid smile, grateful for this small kindness. “There was a lot of screaming. But that was right afterward. At least, I think so. It was total chaos, you know?” He nods again.
“And what happened immediately afterward?” Riley is unsure what he’s driving at. “Did you see anything suspicious? Anyone moving away quickly from the scene?”
She bites her lower lip sharply, so much so that she thinks she tastes blood, and tries to remember. There was the jogger, the man who took the woman’s pulse, a small group of people huddled around. And then the general manager had arrived, encouraging people to back up while he crouched down beside the woman to help. Riley didn’t see the woman’s face, turned away from the restaurant window, when he’d brushed back her hair, but she’d gathered from the manager’s expression that it wasn’t good. “Um, nothing suspicious that I know of,” Riley offers now. “The manager was on the case pretty soon afterward. It looked like everyone tried to help. Until he pushed her hair away and you saw all the blood. You kind of got the sense that they weren’t going to be able to do anything after that.”
The officer, saying nothing, continues to write in his notebook. Riley pauses to sip from the water bottle that Gillian handed her earlier. “And I think it was the manager who got the tablecloth, you know, to cover her up.” Riley thinks back to that moment, how her heart dropped when she realized that the woman was, indeed, beyond saving. Her stomach rumbles, though whether it’s because she’s hungry or upset, she’s not sure. “The paramedics came shortly after that.”
Her eyes wander back to the window, where she notices a dinner roll lying on the floor. Probably knocked off the table in the commotion after the fall. Or jump, or whatever they’re calling it. Beyond the window, someone has strung a ribbon of yellow police tape around the terrace’s perimeter to prevent pedestrians from passing through. The woman’s body, Riley knows, has since been removed, but a yellow tarp has been erected over the place where it hit near the firepit. A small team of policemen hovers just beyond it.
Her lips begin to quiver, and the officer fetches a napkin from a nearby table for her.
“Thank you.” She dabs at her eyes, blows her nose. “I’m sorry. It’s just that...it’s just that today was supposed to be wonderful. I took the afternoon off from work so my fiancé and I could sample a menu for our wedding day, and well...” She hesitates and gives a feeble laugh. “And well, this wasn’t quite what I imagined.”
“No, I wouldn’t think so.” His eyes crinkle sympathetically while he waits for her to continue.
“I’m so sorry. I’m a terrible person. Here I am talking about how my day has been ruined, and that poor woman lost her life. Does her family know yet?” Riley’s mind suddenly spins with questions.
The officer shakes his head. “We’re hoping someone on staff can identify her. We should know soon enough, though.”
When she searches the room again for Tom, he’s sitting about a hundred feet away, talking to a policewoman. His brown hair is tousled, his shirt untucked, which means Riley probably looks like she flew in on a hurricane herself. She reaches up to smooth her hair, then gives up and weaves it into a loose braid. It occurs to her that she hasn’t seen her mother-in-law-to-be since Marilyn started hyperventilating and a young man from the waitstaff had to escort her out of the dining room. A mix of worry and sympathy bubbles up inside her. She doesn’t know if Marilyn will ever recover from this day—but then again, will any of them?
“I’m sorry. I don’t know how else I can be of help, and I should really check on my fiancé and my mother-in-law. Do you mind if I go?”
The officer flips his notepad shut and says, “Not at all. I think we’re done here. I appreciate your time. You’ve been very helpful, Miss...” He double-checks his notes.
“Thorton,” Riley supplies.
“Thorton.” He tilts his head and gazes at her with a funny expression. Riley’s afraid of what might be coming next. Will he want her to go down to the station, even though she has nothing more to offer? She’s watched enough true-crime shows to understand that the police want to record everyone’s memories while they’re still fresh. But Riley didn’t really see much of anything. “I’m sorry,” he says finally. “I don’t mean to stare. It’s just that you look so familiar, and I’m usually good with faces.”