Cast of Shadows - v4 (14 page)

Sitting in the hard, damp sand in a pair of old jeans and a heavy Cal Bears sweatshirt to pull over her knees, Joan felt safe here. Anonymous. No one could call her with bad news or knock on her door. When she was here, alone as far as the rest of the world was concerned — the police, Davis Moore, the Congressional Board of Oversight — Joan Burton didn’t exist.

She was angry with Davis for keeping the truth about Justin from her, and then she was mad at him for telling her. For involving her. But she was doing the right thing, she knew. Davis should never have done what he did — it was an inexcusable breach of ethics, honestly — but she could only deal with the situation as it was. What did the army call it?
The facts on the ground
. That’s what she was working with, the facts on the ground. Nothing would be served by sending Davis to prison and endangering Justin’s life. What else could she do but look after the welfare of the child? Her
patient
.

Joan had another reason to do everything she could to find AK’s killer: she might have been able to prevent her murder.

“Hey.”

A pair of guys, boys actually, were standing over her, but at a respectful distance. She guessed they were college kids, but it was getting harder to tell. They looked so young. They could be in high school for all she knew.

“Hey,” she said.

One of the boys said, “I dropped my keys. We were just looking for them.”

They were good-looking, broad-shouldered, and square-jawed — athletes, she guessed. But they hadn’t lost their keys. They were flirting.

“You haven’t seen them anywhere, have you?”

She laughed. “In the sand? In the dark?”

“We’re pretty much screwed, aren’t we?”

She nodded. They paused. She wondered if they knew how old she was. If they were as bad at gauging her age as she was at guessing theirs. If in the dark she looked good enough to be a student. A hot college girl. Maybe. In the dark. Joan didn’t say anything.

“We’ll see you around,” one of the boys said finally, and they moved on down the beach, pushing each other, joshing with each other, not looking for their keys.

As brief as it had been, as inconsequential, the attention should have made her feel better. It would have before all this. It didn’t.

A few months before she died, Anna Kat had come to see Joan at the office. Her father was away at a conference, preaching to the converted on the virtues of new fertility techniques.

“I have a problem,” AK said. “About a boy.”

She didn’t call him by name, although Joan knew AK had been seeing a kid named Dan. He’d dropped by with her one day to see her dad, and Joan, never missing a vicarious opportunity to relive her mostly enjoyable high school days, snuck a peek and found him, well, okay, she supposed. He was a little on the thin side, a little bit smug, a little heavy-lidded, a little
ordinary
. Joan didn’t know what the selection was like at Northwood East, but she was pretty sure AK should have been out of Dan’s league.

“He hurts me,” Anna Kat told her. “And I’m afraid I like it.”

“Like it?” Joan asked.

AK put her hands over her eyes. “No. Not exactly. God, this is embarrassing. I mean, I don’t enjoy it. But the fact that I don’t enjoy it doesn’t keep me away.”

“Is he really such a prize?” Joan asked.

“That’s just the thing. No. I don’t even like him, really. It’s so hard to explain.” When Joan at last looked into AK’s red eyes she understood how desperate she really felt. “It’s like, a few months ago I went to this party and got pretty smashed—”

Joan painted her a requisite but unconvincing frown.

“Whatever. I don’t even drink that much,” AK said. “In fact, the morning after that party I swore I was never going to drink again. Two weeks later, though… somebody offered me a beer and it was as if I forgot it ever happened. Things with… with this guy, it’s kind of like that. I tell him things have to change, they don’t change, but I act like I don’t care.”

Joan had wondered why AK had come to her, given all the things her mother had no doubt been saying about her around their house. Jackie had made it very clear to Joan’s face that she didn’t like her. She could only imagine what was said behind her back. Joan supposed she was younger than a lot of adults AK knew. And she was single. And a doctor. Maybe that still counted for something with some people.

And maybe, just maybe, someone else in the Moore house had been painting a different picture of her. One could hope.

On the beach, nine years later, she was disappointed in her advice to Anna Kat. She hadn’t had the guts to tell her own story of sexual assault, and since the day AK was killed, Joan had wished that she had. Instead, she told her to be true to herself. The fact that AK was coming to her at all was evidence that something wasn’t right about her relationship with D — with this guy. More than anything, Joan said, think about what your dad would want for you. He loves you so much, AK. And even if this isn’t something you can talk to him about — and no, I don’t suppose it is — keep his counsel close. Keep his love in your heart always.

“But you won’t tell him?”

“No, I won’t tell him.”

“No matter what happens?”

More than any other, that remark had haunted Joan.
No matter what happens?
From the moment she said it, Joan wondered what AK could have meant, and when she heard the news of her murder, Anna Kat’s plaintive voice came tumbling back into the fore of her mind and she was sick, just sick about it. Had AK really known she was in danger? Was she begging Joan to rescue her? Joan didn’t see Davis in the days after the murder and was going to tell him about their conversation as soon as she could, but then she heard the police had cleared Dan, the ordinary boyfriend, with a DNA test, and she decided to keep her pact of silence. For almost a decade, AK’s words had been a mystery, and Joan still wondered if there wasn’t something she could have done to protect her. If only she hadn’t kept the promise she’d made to Anna Kat that day.

“No matter what happens,” Joan had said.

So there was more than one kind of guilt gnawing away at Joan as she sat on the dark, wet beach, indifferent to coy come-ons from college boys feeling out a North Shore Friday night.

Of course, there might have been an explanation other than guilt for her sleeplessness, her nervousness, her uneasiness, her
sweatiness
.

She was in love.

Justin let himself in with the key the Barkers had given his parents before leaving for Spain. The Barkers’ dog, Austin, three quarters as high as Justin was tall, padded silently to him, and Justin consumed a few minutes petting

him in a gentle, repetitive motion between his neck and the curve of his back, with the hand that was not holding the gray plastic bucket. Austin probably spent as much time in Justin’s yard as he did in his own, and although this was the third time the boy had been in the house when the Barkers were away, it never occurred to the dog to bark suspiciously or growl or hide under a bed. His mother had fed Austin that morning, and she would again this evening, but Justin wasn’t here to serve meals. He was here to experiment.

And also to get out of the house. His parents didn’t notice Justin’s presence when they were fighting, so it was no surprise that his absence went right past them as well. Shouting now seemed their preferred form of communication. They began with low-decibel snapping in the morning and slowly pushed the volume up over the course of the day — as if somewhere in the house there were a master knob, like the one controlling the intercom system, that turned itself up and up and up — until they finally sent Justin to bed and began reproaching each other in hateful whispers, so as not to keep the boy awake.

He didn’t understand all of it, but Justin was smart enough, even at seven, to know that the things they were yelling about weren’t always the things they were mad at. On Monday his dad might come home from work and ask him to pick up his GI Joes from the living room carpet and put them in the toy box in the den. On Wednesday, however, he might say,
Jesus Christ, pick up your goddamn dolls!
You didn’t have to be ten to know that something besides GI Joes was pissing his dad off.

It had something to do, he figured out, with a woman named Denise. Justin didn’t know why, but his dad liked Denise and his mom didn’t. His mom was always calling Denise names and telling his dad that she didn’t want him to see her anymore. His dad said she was being “ridiculous” and that Denise was a nice girl and of course he
liked
her, he never would have hired Denise if he didn’t
like
her, but they weren’t having an
affair,
for crying out loud, if that was what she thought. On the other hand, by the looks of these credit card bills, his mom had gone off the budget again, whatever that was, but his mom said the budget was no good and they had to redo it because they hadn’t realized how much they’d need for Justin’s clothes this year, he was growing out of them so fast, and his dad said,
Justin’s clothes? Really? Justin’s clothes? You weren’t shopping for Justin’s clothes at Ultimo,
but he never said what she was actually shopping for there.

Following an incident at a comic book store, his mother told Justin she didn’t want him hanging around Danny Shubert anymore, because he was a “bad influence.” Trying a little bit of his dad’s logic, Justin replied, “I
like
Danny, but we’re not having an affair, if that’s what you think.” His mom fell to her knees and hugged him around the neck and cried into his T-shirt and said she was sorry and forgot to punish him, so it worked as far as that went.

Boy and dog crept to the living room and Justin pulled a bundle of dry sticks and a wad of newspaper from the bucket and placed them in the brick fireplace. Austin curled himself on the couch around a chewed tennis ball that had found its way in from the backyard. On his knees, Justin produced a book of matches and lit one on the third try, hurling it immediately at the pile of kindling. The match expired and he lit two more in the same way before the paper took the flame.

In quick succession, he added the following fuels to the pyre: army man (in kneeling position), worn paperback mystery (Dean Koontz), old CD (sound track to
Grease
), dead flies (tweezered with an entomologist’s care from his bedroom windowsill), Lincoln Log (short connector), Lego brick (blue). When each item was added he allowed the results to hold him trancelike, the memory of each reaction recorded for future consideration.

When the bucket was empty, Justin searched the room on hands and knees for something local, something belonging to the Barkers, but something that had already been forgotten, that wouldn’t be missed. Under the coffee table he found a drawer and, inside it, a cardboard pocket of photographs awaiting their appropriate place in albums or desk frames. Flipping through them he came across one he thought particularly dull, a shot of Mrs. Barker on the patio stooped next to an older woman who was smiling but shriveled like a sun-dried insect in her wheelchair. He carted it back to the fire and tossed it in with the rest. He watched the paper and plastic and chemicals warp and fold and shrink the image, the old woman and her wheelchair becoming smaller and smaller and smaller and then disappearing altogether into smelly chars.

Not until then did he notice how much smoke filled the room. Austin left the couch with a moan and trotted around the corner and up the stairs. Still unaware of the existence of dampers, Justin climbed up the back of an upholstered chair and cracked a window at the top. He would return tomorrow to collect the half-burned, half-melted mound he had made, hide it, preserve it, and then start one anew.

Clutching her big camera with one hand, like a pistol, in a park near Lake Michigan, Barwick found an old tree with thick and twisted leafless limbs. Martha and Justin had been following by a dozen thoroughbred lengths and when they caught up with her she was already framing the shot through her eyepiece.

“Here,” Sally said. “Here is perfect.”

Every few months, Martha Finn would call Barwick and have her drive up Sheridan Road to Northwood so she could take photos of growing and changing Justin, often posed in idyllic settings in the yard or here in the park or on some decorated impromptu stage in the Finn home. Once, he was dressed in a red bow tie and black shorts; another time he wore the orange and white of Terry’s alma mater, the University of Tennessee. Today, Martha called his look
young, casual chic:
new blue jeans, white dress shirt, clean deck shoes, brushed hair, face scrubbed to an ivory matte finish with pink accents.

Every fall, Scott Colleran would call Big Rob and ask for a recent photo of Justin for his anonymous client, which Barwick would reluctantly provide from the digital backup of her one-on-one photo sessions with the boy. She’d get paid twice for the same job, and in her dreams, Justin would allay her guilt.

“We are just instruments,” he’d say.