The Edge of Sleep (34 page)

Reggie looked briefly at George, who seemed to be hiding a smirk. He wanted to be here for the excitement, of course, but would he help her? Not in this lifetime. Stand there dumb as a post when he might be of some assistance, then strut around when they were gone and tell any fool who would listen about how he helped in an FBI investigation. Helped who? Not his wife.

Reggie shrugged. “I may have been wrong about a child, I never actually saw him, I told you that the first time. I just saw a toothbrush, but that doesn’t change the fact that something very strange was going on in that cabin.”

The woman agent sighed. “No, it doesn’t change that. They didn’t leave a forwarding address or mention where they might be going?”

Reggie snorted. “They didn’t even wave goodbye, but good riddance to bad rubbish, I say.” She looked meaningfully at George, who dropped his eyes to the ground and slumped his shoulders, just like the male agent. Like carbon copies of each other, Reggie thought. Lost causes, all of them.

“I guess that will be all, then,” the woman said. She looked once more toward her male partner, but he had already turned on his heel and was heading back toward the car.

Reggie watched them drive off with a sense of disappointment. She had won her battle completely, she had gotten rid of that Dee woman and her hideous “husband” without any loss of property, and had even had the satisfaction of siccing the FBI onto them, but still she felt oddly cheated. Just what of, she could not have said. When she turned to speak to George, he had already slunk off.

The silence in the car was so thick that Karen felt as if it sloshed back and forth with each turn in the road like so much liquid. Becker would not even look at her and she could think of nothing to break the silence except to turn on the radio, which seemed cold and insensitive. There seemed no point in even discussing the couple from the motel. They had no child with them and there was no reason to suspect them of anything, and that was that. She did not blame them for leaving the motel so abruptly. After that kind of showdown with the owner. Karen felt she might well have done the same. Their only offense lay in being weird and in overtipping the proprietor with four days of prepaid rent. As for breaking off their relationship, it was clear that Becker had nothing to say, no defense, no argument. For all she could read into his attitude, apart from the insult of being the jilted party, he didn’t seem to care at all.

The phone was a blessing when it rang. Karen snatched it up before the ring had ceased to echo in the car.

“Crist,” she said, then listened for several moments. Becker watched her listening the way an actor listens, with subtle exaggeration, pursing her lips, squinting with concentration, nodding her head in silent agreement. It was a small show she was putting on for his benefit, he realized, making it clear that she was a woman with more pressing things to do than deal with him. At one point she looked directly at him, smiled and shrugged as if to say, what could she do; she was a helpless captive of higher purposes.

Becker was grateful for her little pantomime; it gave them both an excuse to move away from the awkwardness and tension that rode between them like a hulking stranger.

Any distraction would serve, and work was the best. They did not have to feign an interest there.

She moved the phone from her mouth and whispered “Malva” in Becker’s direction, then nodded again, as if to reassure Malva she was still listening. Becker hoped the phone call would last for the rest of the ride home. He had been painfully aware of her intense scrutiny since she dropped the bombshell. Even during the perfunctory interrogation at the motel he knew she had been observing his every move and expression. Something was expected of him, Becker knew that, some display of rage, or sorrow, some deftly articulated show of emotion accompanied by the practiced flourishes of exaggerated loss of control of a high-wire artist. She wanted to see him teetering on the edge of disaster, almost lost it there! Arms flailing to regain balance, careful now or it’s into the abyss of sorrow! She wanted a reaction. Women always wanted a reaction, but Becker could not give it to her. He responded to the pain as if he’d been kicked in the solar plexus. Paralyzed by the sudden blow, gasping for breath, it was all he could do to curl himself around the pain and try to hang on. He had no strength left over to perform the dance she expected of him. It was for her, he imagined, a very unsatisfying jilting.

“Malva,” she repeated when she hung up the phone at last. For the final moments of the call she had ceased her thespian antics and just held the receiver quietly to her ear. Becker wondered if Malva had not hung up long ago and Karen was trying to prolong the excuse to avoid him, no more eager to return to their strained silence than he was.

“Bobby Reynolds’s school says there was no school nurse on that outing and there never is. The Bickford mall does not have a nurse on duty. Hemmings has gone through the interview notes on two of the snatches besides Bickford so far. Nothing from one of them. At the other, in Peabody, a security guard mentioned having seen a nurse around the time of the boy’s disappearance, but he wasn’t sure if it was before or after. He remembered it because he said she was moving so quickly that he thought somebody must be injured somewhere. Then he said that right after the boy was discovered missing, a lot of people were moving around quickly. The interviewing agent asked the guard if there was anything particularly notable about the nurse and he said no, he thought he remembered her just because of the uniform.”

“Does the Peabody mall have nurses on duty?”

“No, but they do have an eye clinic. The nurse there wears a uniform.”

“Does the Bickford Mall have an eye clinic?”

“I’ll tell Malva to find out. What else?”

“We’ll have to go through the list of sudden departures again and check for women this time, see if any names repeat.”

“I’ll put Hemmings on it after he finishes reviewing the notes.”

Becker paused. Karen waited, then lifted the phone again. Becker stopped her with a gesture.

“If you wore a nurse’s uniform with all that starch, would you do it yourself? Wash it, starch it, iron it, whatever? The uniform on the nurse at the motel, you could cut your finger on the creases. Is that the kind of job a woman would do for herself?”

“You could, I suppose. I’m no expert on laundry, but if it was my uniform. I’d send it out, have it done professionally.”

“So would I. Which means that if I had to leave town immediately, I might have left a uniform or two in a laundry somewhere, right?”

“If our theory is right and a boy has just been killed and you’re packing up and leaving right away, you wouldn’t wait around for the laundry to get done, that’s true.”

“We can check the possible cleaners by phone, no need to have a man go to each one personally. An unclaimed nurse’s uniform shouldn’t be that common an item.”

“Hemmings,” Karen said with a chuckle as she punched in the number on the telephone. Hemmings was a minor legend in the Bureau, one of the very few agents who actually preferred desk work to being in the field. Where most agents sought the solid satisfaction of an actual collar, Hemmings found his thrills in the slow sifting of details on paper. In an era when the computer had replaced the library and file cabinet, Hemmings was a throwback to the literary age, an archivist at heart. What made him a legend rather than a curiosity, however, was his appearance. Bald and hairless since birth, Hemmings began each day by donning a toupee and applying artificial eyebrows. Tagged “Hairy” Hemmings by Bureau wags, the agent also affected facial hair of varying styles and lengths so that some days he sported a goatee, some days a pencil-thin mustache, some days a full beard. With a color sense no more consistent than his taste in tonsorial styles, he offered over the course of a year a kaleidoscopic variety of hair colors ranging from mouse to Irish red and Swedish blond. He was referred to by the agents as the man with a thousand disguises, none of them adequate. Above all, however, Hemmings was very good at his job. He worked the phones with the avidity of a teenaged girl, and when it came to paperwork it was rumored that he could find a pattern in a pane of window glass.

Becker shared Karen’s small laugh at the expense of “Hairy” Hemmings. He found that his chest seemed lighter. The sense that his cheeks and ears were ablaze with humiliation had lessened. He still didn’t want to look Karen in the eye, but he was able to feign levity.

She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel, waiting for Malva to answer. It wasn’t much, but at least they were working.

Chapter 19

D
EE FOUND THEM A MOTEL OUTSIDE
of Hinsdale in the Berkshires. From the window Ash could see the mountains rising softly on all sides with the gentle curves of a woman’s body. If he squinted he could imagine he was lying on the floor, looking up at Dee’s naked body where she lay on the bed, one mountain being the rounded mound of her breast, another the swell of hip and thigh.

Dee was away, looking for work, and Ash was alone. The television was very disappointing; the mountains interfered with reception and there was no cable service. It was the least modem of all the many motels in which Dee and Ash had stayed together. Too far from the Berkshire Festival and Tanglewood to get the summer tourists, too remote from any sizable city to attract traveling businessmen, located on too small a road to pull in even random travelers, the motel existed primarily on local trade, which meant high schoolers looking for a place to drink after the prom, illicit lovers, homeowners whose bedrooms were being painted or whose houses were being fumigated.

Fifty yards from the motel, without any line of demarcation, a car sat on cement blocks next to a pickup truck, its engine parts scattered among the weedy lawn. Immediately beyond the autos was a ramshackle house with a line of wash hanging behind it. Two children played under the clothesline, screaming at each other with abandon as they slashed with sticks at each other’s shins.

Behind the motel, parallel to the road, was the forest that surrounded all of man’s incursions in this part of the country. Ash could not see from his side window just how close it was to the motel in the back, but he knew it was there, close by, a perfect home for bears. He imagined himself venturing into it some night, shuffling up the mountain amid the trees, smelling the trails of the other animals, hearing them scurry off at his approach. It pleased him to think of finding a cave high up the mountain, one known to other bears before him but never seen by man, where he could live on berries and fish and water from the high country streams. Dee could find him, of course—an eagle could go anywhere—but his lair would be too high and too steep for anyone else to dare. When winter came he would curl up amongst the leaves and sleep for months. No one would suffer because he slept because none would be within his reach.

Ash looked at the distant mountain with simple longing. Perhaps, if Dee brought no one home, she would let him seek the woods and mountains one night soon. But he knew she would bring someone home. And soon. She had taken no pills since Tommy left but had not crashed into her abyss of depression. There was a difference in her mood, however. It was no longer wide-ranging ebullience but seemed tempered and directed by a strain of hostility. Dee appeared to have found a target for her energies and was focusing on it in a way Ash had never seen before. When she got work, which never took her long, Ash expected her to bring someone home again. His chances to get into the woods were fading quickly.

Dee was successful at the third nursing home she tried. As usual the manager looked at her as if she were a gift from heaven. In a business with a chronic shortage of qualified personnel, a young, attractive, white registered nurse with experience and the willingness to work in less than glamorous conditions on any shift and for low pay was even too much to pray for. And, of course, too good to be true. The manager understood that the woman was recently divorced and relocated, along with the implicit suggestion that this job would be temporary. How long could it be before someone like this found a better job or remarried or moved to a big city? Not very long, the manager thought, but however long it was, it was worth it. As usual, she asked Dee as few questions as possible and hired her on the spot.

Driving back to the motel. Dee formulated her plans. The situation was new for her. She had never had a specific target before, and thus had never really had a plan. Just a method. She had employed it when the circumstances seemed right and the need was overwhelming, but always with a strong element of randomness in the process. This time was different.

She felt a swelling sense of excitement. This time she would not only fulfill her irresistible need, she would also be performing an act of retribution. Take and it shall be taken from you, she thought triumphantly. There was a Biblical ring to it, and a Biblical fitness to what she would do as well. She would have her son back at long last, and those who had taken him away would suffer. Dee felt exceptionally good. The laughter bubbled in her chest and burst from her throat as she approached the motel. She was quickly laughing so hard she had to slow down to avoid swerving into the wrong lane.

She could see Ash’s finger stuck between the slots of the room’s Venetian blind. He was gazing out at the mountains again, and exposing himself to discovery in the process, but Dee could not be angry with him, she felt too good.

“Put on your hiking boots,” she said as she opened the motel door. Ash sprang guiltily away from the window.

“Where are we going?”

“To the mountains, of course,” Dee said. “I tried, but they won’t come to us.”

She was smiling so broadly that Ash’s heart sank.

Becker wished he were a drinker. Rejection and sorrow seemed to call for burying one’s nose in a glass of sour mash, but Becker only found himself getting sleepy after the first drink and downright stupid if he forced himself to have the second. The sense of being out of control that alcohol caused frightened him far worse than being unhappy, so he took his mourning sober.