“Don’t give up hope, son,” his father said, clapping a hand on his shoulder. “Your beloved is in the city somewhere.”
He might have been, but with every minute that ticked by, Beckett was afraid he was getting farther away from Noah instead of closer to him.
About twenty minutes after they started searching, Marcus’s call of, “Beckett! Over here! You need to hear this at once,” sent Beckett’s heart rate soaring.
He and his father rushed over to the edge of the park, where Marcus and Graham stood talking to a policeman. Blaise stood back, concealing herself in the shadows, likely so the policeman wouldn’t look too closely.
“That’s just what I heard,” the policeman was in the middle of telling Graham. “I haven’t verified it or anything yet.”
“Heard what?” Beckett asked, his stomach already churning.
Graham and Marcus both looked at him with anxious looks. The policeman turned to Beckett as well.
“You the ones looking for your friend?” the policeman asked.
“We are,” Beckett’s father answered for him, his voice steady and dripping with authority.
The policeman nodded. “Well, I can’t say as it’s him or not, but I heard from some others who was out that way just a few minutes ago that some foreigner jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge.”
Beckett gasped so loud his lungs burned and he started to cough. He doubled over, afraid he might vomit as well. His father had to scoop him up and hold him steady to keep him from crumpling entirely.
“Like I said,” the policeman rushed to add, holding his arms out, “I can’t say as it really happened or not. We get reports of folks jumping off the bridge a couple times a week. Sometimes they’re true, sometimes they ain’t.”
It was a weak hope, but it was something to go on.
“We have to go to the Brooklyn Bridge,” Beckett wheezed through his nausea. “If there’s any truth to it at all, we have to get to Noah before he…before….”
“Yes,” his father said, still holding him up. “We need to get there at once. Officer, do you know the fastest way we can get there?”
“Well, er, I suppose I could give you a lift,” the policeman said.
Beckett straightened even more, the kernel of hope sprouting. “Could you?” he asked. “We need to be there immediately.”
“I can’t promise immediately, but I’ve got the wagon we usually use to round up drunks right up on State Street. It should be a quick drive from there.”
“Then by all means,” Beckett said, wanting to surge forward and run to the wagon, but with no idea where it was, “we need to hurry. My…my friend might not be in his right mind. He…he suffers.”
To Beckett’s surprise, the policeman looked sympathetic. At least, that was how his expression seemed in the dark.
“I’ll get you up there, sir,” he said, glancing to the rest of them as well. “You seem like good people. Your friend is lucky.”
Beckett hoped that Noah truly was lucky. He hoped that they were all lucky enough to find him before Noah did something rash that couldn’t be reversed.
ChapterNineteen
The night was dark and cold, and Noah was lost in it. He felt the same on the inside as he felt in his body. Even though people had stared at him all through his streetcar ride down to the point of Manhattan, he hadn’t been able to stop himself from weeping.
A tired older woman who seemed to be on her way home from work of some sort asked if he was alright and if he needed help. A man with a shabby overcoat who appeared to be drunk himself told her off and said he just needed to sleep it off. Still another passenger on the streetcar got up and moved to a different part of the conveyance, eyeing Noah as though he would rob them all blind.
Noah couldn’t bear it, and as soon as the streetcar stopped, even though he didn’t know where he was, he got off. He staggered through darkened streets, hardly seeing anything around him, not knowing where he was going, uncertain about where he’d been. He only knew what he had to do.
He loved Beckett, but he couldn’t go on the way things were. Beckett deserved a better life than the one he would have if Noah stayed with him. And since he had no one else and nothing left to his name, there was only one way he could go.
He wandered for a while on his search for the place he knew he needed to go. When he saw the massive, looming shape of the Brooklyn Bridge rising from the darkness, everything seemed to come together. It made sense. He could jump into the icy East River and be done with it. There wouldn’t even be a mess to clean up when he was done. What was left of him would just float out to sea and have peace at last.
It took a while to find the road that traveled over the bridge, then to stride out onto the impressive structure without being seen. Several police officers patrolled around the entrance to the bridge, and it wasn’t any wonder why. In the six weeks or so that he’d been in New York, Noah had read several stories of men jumping off the bridge and the consternation of the city leaders because of it. But if they hadn’t wanted people to use the bridge for the ultimate purpose, they shouldn’t have constructed it so beautifully.
All the same, it was surprisingly difficult to figure out how to actually go about finding a spot to jump. It wasn’t difficult to climb over the side of the bridge so that he could stand on the lip that extended past its low wall, and to look straight down to the black water below, but it wasn’t until he walked past the first support tower so that he would be hidden from anyone who might be watching from the shore that he felt he’d found the right spot.