Day One (5 page)

“This morning when the first patrol cars responded to the 9-1-1, they caught him running one direction, Luellen another. When we talked to them, she was upset, anxious. Like you’d expect. He acted like we were keeping him from something more important.”

I turn my hands over. “Susan, he wouldn’t piss on you if you were fire.”

“How about Danny?”

“What about him? He’s four years old.” I study her face, but as usual she’s a stone. “Susan, what’s this about?”

“The Bronsteins were married three years ago. According to one of his colleagues at work they only met a few months before they were married.”

“Okay. Danny isn’t his kid. So what?”

“Danny wasn’t there this morning.”

“Damn good thing too.”

“At least, that’s what she told us. ‘He’s with his grandfather now.’” She pulled at her lower lip. “
Now
. Don’t you think that’s an odd way to put it?”

Susan doesn’t talk just to hear the sound of her own voice. I know from long experience she’s trying to fit the pieces together, looking for what connects to what. Mitch, Danny and his grandfather, the .22, the blood in the kitchen, the bullet hole in the wall. I’d be doing the same thing if I was still on the job. And, in a way, maybe I am. But I have my own interest.

“Have they recovered the bullet?” I’d rather Susan answer my questions than the other way around.

“From the kitchen wall?” She nods, pensive. “There was tissue and blood present. Justin Marcille says it’s most likely .357 or .38, but he won’t know for sure until he gets it processed.”

“It went through somebody.”

Another nod.

“And definitely not from Mitch’s gun.”

“Not the one he had on him, no.”

“And you don’t believe any of that shit Mitch jabbered at the EMTs.”

“We’ll check it out.”

“What does Luellen have to say?”

Her lips squeeze together again and she raises her hand to her face. It shakes a little as she rubs one eye. Susan isn’t easily troubled, and I feel a chill run through me. Or maybe it’s the rain dribbling down inside my collar.

“Luellen and Jason are gone.”

“What do you mean? Gone where?”

“I left them in my car to catch their breath while I talked to Bronstein’s boss. They’d had a rough morning, you know?” She’s breathing through her nose again. “The officer I asked to keep an eye on them got distracted by an argument, one of your neighbors unhappy his car was inside the perimeter. When the officer got back to my car, they were gone. No one saw them leave.”

She’s losing witnesses left and right. “Whose blood is it? In the kitchen.”

“We’re pretty sure it’s not Bronstein’s. His wounds all appear to be from the exchange on the porch, and the trail goes out the back door, not toward the front of the house. It’s definitely not Luellen or Jason’s. They were both uninjured.”

Who does that leave? Susan doesn’t ask and I don’t answer, but we’re both thinking the same thing. Someone else was there. Grandpa maybe. Packing heat, whoever it was. But who got shot, and who did the shooting? Neither of us want to contemplate little Danny in that kitchen.

“Susan.” I’m trying to duck the obvious. “This isn’t the first time Eager’s appeared at a scene involving a missing gun.”

“Okay.” But then she shakes her head. “It’s not his blood either. I don’t know why he was here this morning, but a teenager making an appearance in his old neighborhood is hardly cause for a press conference.”

“He’s supposed to be in Spokane with his mother.”

“So now we’re surprised Eager Gillespie isn’t where he’s supposed to be?” She gives me a sad little smile. “Skin, I know you like him. A lot of us like him. But that doesn’t change the fact he’s a poster child for mandatory minimum sentencing. I don’t have time to deal with him and all his crap right now.”

I feel a tickle in my throat, the beginning of a cigarette craving.
Thanks, Susan, for waking that up again.
This would be the time to tell her about Eager’s tag appearing on Mitch’s door a few months back, but instead I shake my head and turn away. “Sorry for troubling you.” I try to keep the edge out of my voice, but don’t think I pull it off. I’m fuming, because I hate the feeling that a year into retirement, I rate no better than some guy down on Pioneer Courthouse Square selling Scientology or 9/11 conspiracies.

“Skin, wait.” She grabs my forearm before I can walk off. “Listen, if he’s hurt, he’ll turn up in an ER sooner or later. I’ll put the word out, make sure I’m flagged. Okay?”

“Sure. Fine.”

“I’ve got to go. We’ll be out of your place soon.” She lets go of my arm, turns toward the house.

“Susan, do me one favor at least.” She looks back at me. “Check the bullet from the kitchen against the one they pulled out of that girl.”

“Skin—”

“Just do it. Might get a surprise.”

She heads back up my walk. Sun breaks through from the east, but the rain is still falling. I glance around. The chaos continues. So many vehicles are idling, cop cars, news vans, I feel light-headed from the exhaust. Reporters hound my neighbors, some on camera, some on tape. I can hear the voices but can’t make out the words. Uniforms are talking to others, making notes. Detectives will do more detailed interviews later. Thankfully not me.

I decide it’s time to get the hell out of there. Come back when things are back to normal. But before I can lift a foot, I catch sight of a figure standing at the barricade. For a second I think it’s Eager. But only for a second, because the size and shape of their frames are the only things this fellow and Eager have in common. I almost turn away, thinking about coffee, but then I give him another look. Something about him. He’s short, half past five, and narrow at the waist but thick at the neck and forearms, dressed in what appear to be dusty scrubs under a denim jacket. His head is wrapped in dirty white cloth, a scarf of some kind, an imperfect turban. He stares at Mitch and Luellen’s house, watches as Mitch is attended by the EMTs. When they hoist Mitch onto the gurney, he turns my way, and for a moment our eyes meet—his are dark and round and unfocused, and one, the left, rolls loose and independent of the other.

I don’t interest him, though, and after only a brief pause his head keeps turning and rising until it stops, abruptly fixed. I follow his gaze up and over my shoulder to the summit of Mount Tabor behind me. When I look back, he’s still staring. Then, arms stiff at his sides, his hands flex open and his roaming eye rolls into place.
Flex, fists, flex, fists.
I can almost see the recognition in his face. But of what, I wonder. I know what I think of whenever I look that direction. Three years before, we found Eager Gillespie up there on the summit weeping beside the body of a dead young woman.

I blink, and the man is gone.

Years Long Gone

E
llie was born on a simmering June night, an event she’d recall years later with almost as much clarity as supper the day before. It didn’t occur to her there was anything odd about such a memory. She remembered the sound of her mother’s cries, and strange lateral motions and choking pressure. The first piercing sensation of light. “I’m glad I don’t have to go through that again,” she mused one morning over scrambled eggs and sliced tomatoes. Age nine. Ellie’s mother, a hard-eyed woman with forearms like canned hams, asked what possessed her little Lizzie to say such a thing. Unconscious of the sharp edge to her mother’s voice, Ellie described the pain of being turned in the womb, her sudden awareness of cold and moisture, of being smothered by her birth caul. Her mother flinched at mention of the caul and started clearing the breakfast dishes, her movements brisk.

“What’s the matter, Mommy?” Her father and brothers were already up and out, her sister still in bed. Ellie didn’t often get to be alone with her mother.

“Finish your eggs.” Spoken to the window over the kitchen sink.

“I didn’t think I was alone in there, but I guess I musta been, huh?”

Her mother turned and slapped her, a blow so powerful it spun Ellie around in her chair. She held onto her tears, but ran from the kitchen and never mentioned the memory to her mother again. The only other people she ever told were Stuart and Luellen. The admission to Stuart came in a moment of foolish weakness after Rob, her oldest brother, revealed during her mother’s funeral reception that Ellie had had a twin. It was a boy, half-developed and stillborn, buried as Aiden Kern in the children’s plot behind the adult graves. Ellie had seen the stone, but it included no dates and for her it had always been just one among many. The Kerns had been in Givern Valley for a long time, longer even than the Spanekers.

Stuart loved gossiping almost as much as talking about himself. The story of Ellie’s recollection spilled from his mouth into the ears of Pastor Wilburn and others at the Little Liver Creek Victory Chapel during Men’s Breakfast the following Saturday. The same afternoon the old man took it upon himself to drive out to the house to tell Ellie she should forget such nonsense.

When she heard why Wilburn was there, she refused to make coffee. They sat in the front room of Ellie and Stuart’s little house on the secondhand couch passed down from her grandparents.

“I don’t see what the big deal is.” She could hear Stuart in the kitchen, fridge door opening and closing, drawers slamming. No doubt making a mess as he eavesdropped.

“It’s dangerous to be thinking the devil’s thoughts.”

She pointed her chin at Wilburn. “It’s just a memory.”

It had been raining, and the old man’s hair was wet and slick against his scalp. “But it’s a false memory, Elizabeth. No one can remember being born.” He rubbed liver-spotted hands together. At least he didn’t call her Lizzie, the hated nickname she’d been saddled with when Myra, as a toddler, had mangled Elizabeth. “Satan is
trying to lure you into his fold. He wants you to remember the caul—to desire the power it promises you.”

She almost laughed out loud, but the conviction in the old pastor’s eyes stopped her.
The man watches football on a big screen television,
she thought. She looked past his ear and sighed.

Wilburn suggested some Bible passages she should read. Ellie didn’t bother to tell him the house Bible was tucked under the broken back leg of the couch he was sitting on. “It’s the influence of that Jewish girl,” she heard him tell Stuart on his way out. “They’re all atheists, you know. The Jews.” After the old man left, Stuart had a few choice words for Ellie’s careless tongue and Luellen’s unwholesome influence. Ellie listened with the stoicism reserved for all complaints about her friend.

She’d read that once upon a time a birth caul had been viewed as a sign of imminent good fortune. Ellie was still waiting. She grew up a rustic, dark-haired girl in a family of honey blondes. One of Ellie’s aunts claimed the dark hair came from an Eastern European many-great grandmother—a witch who’d also been born with a caul—but Ellie didn’t much care where she had gotten it. She loved her hair. She brushed it until it shined and refused to have it cut. “It’s my clothes,” she announced another morning at breakfast—age eleven—having spent the night before poring through Bullfinch’s
Mythology
. All she had on were a pair of white cotton panties. Her family stared at her for a long moment, then her brother Brett started laughing. “Hey, Lizzie, I can see your nips.” Her mother smacked her with a spatula and sent her running right back up stairs to get some clothes on this second, and to put her hair up in a proper bun. The Bullfinch vanished from her room while she was at school that day. From then on her mother insisted on approving all reading material in advance.

At a church picnic the following summer, Brett drew laughs recounting the story of the hair. A group of boys sat together at
a table under the birch trees at the back of the churchyard. Ellie saw them from her own place, quiet and alone among a clump of chattering girls. She could feel the boys ogling her, an experience more and more common in recent months. She went to her mother. “Tell Brett to stop talking about me.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Lizzie.” Her mother was sitting with a group of other moms. From the tightness in her jaw Ellie could tell she didn’t appreciate being interrupted.

“I’m not being ridiculous. Make them stop.”

Her mother closed her eyes, then stood and walked over to the boys’ table, arms heavy at her sides. They quieted at her approach. Ellie watched as her mother spoke with them, then returned. “Stay away from those boys.”

“I wasn’t anywhere near them.”

“Then how do you know they were talking about you?”

“I just know.”

Her mother’s mouth went hard and she looked away. “That girl was born with a caul, you know.” An anonymous whisper. Ellie’s mother clenched her teeth. “Lizzie, go find a seat and finish your dinner. I don’t want to hear another word out of you.”

Ellie still had a pile of Jello salad and a chicken leg. Most folks were done eating and sat talking, or had started to peel off for home. Half the tables were empty. Ellie dragged a folding chair off to the far side of the lawn, as far from the boys as she could go without getting yelled at, and sat down, back to the picnic, face to the sun. She spooned salad into her mouth without tasting it. Something to do. Around her she could hear conversation and laughter: her uncle complaining about the signal on his satellite dish; who was gonna apply at Jeld-Wen; endless discussions about irrigation and prospects for new water certificates. After a little while, she felt them gather behind her and to either side. The boys. Brett’s friends. They smelled like sweat and grape Kool-Aid.