Girls (25 page)

“You warmed the church up,” she said. Then, her voice dropping even lower, harsher, she said, “Who are the ones you suspected?”

I shook my head.

“I suppose you’re right,” she said. “I don’t have too much more time to wait. Do you understand?”

I stared at her. It had been a pretty face, and I tried to find Janice in the tight, stained skin. She was waiting, and I finally said, “Yes.”

“Good,” she said. “Oh, didn’t you make the church
warm.
” And then she said, “So we all believe she was taken away. A distance away.”

“It’s often the case,” I said.

She moved her head. “Imagine,” she said, “it happens enough—little children are stolen into, I don’t know, are seized and taken—so you can say the word
often
about it.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Will we find her?”

I shrugged, then winced, because I had moved my shoulders and therefore my ribs too hard.

“What?” she said.

I said, “Nothing.”

“Will we ever find her, Jack?”

I almost said
God knows.
I almost said
By accident, maybe.
It was all about accidents, one and then another. I said, “Competent people are working on it.”

“Yes,” she said. I shifted my legs. She said, “And who
is
Hannah?”

The tin ceiling tiles were machine-pressed into sunburst shapes, but sunbursts made of straight lines and right angles. There was nothing round on the design that was repeated on tile after tile. Each of them was held in place with nails, I thought, and the nails were rusted. I figured they had hammered up into lath or cheap, unfinished firring strips. The radiators were chugging now, and there was plenty of heat. Mrs. Tanner kept the blanket around her, though, and I saw her mouth move slowly against the pain. And here I was, the burly fix-it guy from security, doing nothing for anyone but harm. Mr. Interrogator, I thought, who can’t find anyone to interrogate. I was nagged by something at the bottom of my thoughts, and I couldn’t find it. Probably some C-4 on a fuse that Fanny had planted for me.

Mrs. Tanner said, “Jack?”

I thought, You can give her that.

I thought, No, you can’t.

I reached into the blanket, and I found her broad, cold, weightless hand. I squeezed it.

“What did you do to your hand? You can at least tell me that.”

“Hooligans on campus,” I said. “They showed me what-for. My father always called it that when someone took a beating: They got what-for.”

“Are you in pain?”

I squatted in front of her, instructing my ribs to stay out of this. I said, “
You’re
asking anyone else about pain.”

“Don’t you talk like that to me, Jack. Don’t you make me into some hero. I’m a middle-aged woman with cancer and no more child. That’s no hero. God, maybe, is the hero. God makes the plan.”

I said, “Maybe Janice is a hero, too, though. Since nobody consulted
her
about the plan.”

Her face collapsed.

It seemed to me I had done more than enough damage. I squeezed her hand again, I made my body rise without too much drama, and I told her, “Mrs. Tanner, kids come back. Sometimes they run away and sometimes they come back. Sometimes they get stolen and they escape and come home. But sometimes, they, you know, don’t. I couldn’t be telling you anything new. You must have thought about this so much—”

Her eyes were on me. She simply nodded. I waited for her to talk about her horrible dreams of Janice, but she moved her head that one time and then she was still as she watched me.

“Your hope has to be in the authorities.”

She didn’t speak.

“And God,” I lied.

She said, “Hannah. Is she yours?”

“Was,” I said. “She was.”

“Oh, Jack,” she said.

“No,” I said, “it was years ago.”

On the car radio, one of those round, cheerful voices you hate if you aren’t feeling well said the long-range forecast was warmth. Temperatures would stay in the twenties, he said merrily, and I thought that if they did, the snow would melt off in two or three weeks. It was three and four and even five feet high in places on the banks of our road, and then it would be gone. We wouldn’t remember the cold or how we had to fight every day to get out and around. Though I wasn’t convinced. It seemed to me we were condemned to winter. I tried to see dirt, but I could only imagine snow.

I let the dog out and I took a couple of extra codeine jobs. Maybe I would get in touch with William Franklin, I thought, and ask him for something with a heavier punch. The brain waves must have been boiling that day, because as soon as I thought the word
punch
, the telephone rang, and Sergeant Bird, telling me what a considerable courtesy it was that he took the time to call, said they had followed up on my recollection of speed gloves and they had run a fighter who looked good for it, and they were holding him for me to check out. I had to hurry, he said, because if he was the one, and if he mattered to heavy people in Syracuse or Utica, a lawyer would be there taking him out on a leash in a couple of hours. I told him I was used to either military procedure, where basically I’d arrested who I’d pleased as long as he wasn’t an officer, or campus justice, where I was powerless with everyone no matter what they did.

Which, when I hung up, had me thinking of Rosalie Piri for some reason. I suppose it was the powerless part. Although that made me think of Fanny, too.

I called the dog in and gave him a rawhide stick to chew on. I noticed a great deal more white in his muzzle, and the slight thickening there that tells you how much older they are. What he did with his face, I would have described as smiling, if it didn’t make me feel too sentimental. He smelled of cold and snow. I nuzzled his face and he bumped me with his head while he worked on the rawhide.

I didn’t enjoy fitting my body into the seat of the Ford, nor did I like the backing-up part, where I strained to see. Letting it roll forward and steering small with my arms clamped to my sides made me feel better. So I did, shutting off the radio voice. I headed south,
toward the state police barracks, squinting against a bright sun that seemed to be part of the argument—Mrs. Tanner would call it a plan—about winter ending. I screwed my face up against the sunlight, but I would not have given even money on spring.

Bird wasn’t there. A square, thick uniformed trooper with very curly dark hair and a frowning mouth who called me “Sir” but didn’t enjoy it took me to an office.

He said, “This guy was easy. He was the only overweight noncontender with his hair in a ponytail who limped.”

“How many gyms did you look in?”

“Syracuse cops walked into one, walked out, walked into the other, and there he was.”

“Was he ever any good?”

He reached for the cut-glass knob and stopped. He looked amused when he said, “You mean, were you good enough to hurt a pro?” He made sure I saw him take in the splints, the bruises, the cuts, the way I stood like a man held together with tape.

“Guy stuff,” I said.

“Yeah. Well, he wasn’t in anyone’s stable. He trained on his own and he fought on his own. He did the circuit—Albany, Syracuse, Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit. He lived that way for a couple of years. He still has his eyes. You’re a lot older than he is.”

“What was his name?”

“What it still is: Joe Corona.”

“Southwestern?”

“I think he’s from around here. Probably, he liked Mexican beer.”

“Where’s the one-way glass?” I asked him, pointing at the paneled wooden door.

“In the barracks in Wampsville and on TV,” he said. “Wait here.” He went into the office and shut the door behind him. Eventually, I heard furniture scrape.

As he opened the door again, he said to someone behind him, “Do not change your position. Don’t move.”

He left the door cracked open, and he whispered to me, “Check him out.”

I looked over his shoulder, where he crouched, and I saw the
man I thought of as the Indian. His face was turned three-quarters toward me, and he held himself rigidly. This was a man who listened to instructions. His skin looked sweaty; his hair was out of the rubber band and hanging down his neck. He looked strong but out of shape. Well, so was I. All he looked was uncomfortable. I was the one with busted fingers and torn-up ribs.

I said, “Yes.”

“For certain,” he said, closing the door.

“Yes.”

“Now, you’re—”

“Yes,” I said. “Was he limping badly?”

“He said he sprained his knee.”

“I thought maybe I busted some ligaments for him.”

“You did him all right,” the trooper said.

“Good.”

“And he’s the one. Finally, officially, for once and for all.”

“Cross my heart,” I said.

“You’ll have to pick him out of a lineup with lawyers there.”

“And be surprised when I see him?”

“If you would, please, yes.”

“Isn’t justice wonderful?” I said.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “did anyone mention justice? We’re just trying to lock the fucker
up.
”

So, I thought, driving home and thinking of codeine, we had found the malefactor. He had nothing to do with Janice Tanner, something to do with the people who sold the drugs to William Franklin, who sold the drugs to the students. That traffic would continue. If the Indian knew anything, he’d be out on bail to keep him quiet. If he was a hired banger, and they were insulated from him by a cutout they trusted who’d done the hiring, he would stand for assault, and he would serve some months, maybe in the county jail. And, meanwhile, Janice Tanner was gone. The students were stoned. Rosalie Piri stretched out in the cold blue light of a room in my imagination. And Fanny was as far from me as she could get. Haven’t you done well, I told myself.

If Fanny had been in the car with me, she’d have pointed to the faintest pink color in the tips of the dark trees. She would have found a willow tree on the side of the road and showed me that its branches were the slightest bit thicker at the ends. Because I was fastened immobile by the pain, I saw little of the sky. Mostly, I saw black empty boughs and white snow, and nothing convinced me of winter ending, not even the slight softening of the snow packed ten or twelve inches onto the surface of our road.

I drove past campus, and I drove to Rosalie Piri’s house, and I pulled up her drive to park the car in back. I couldn’t have stated a reason to anyone, much less to her, and I hoped very hard that she would be in the classroom or her office or at the market or buying new tires for her terrible car. I hoped so hard that she would be gone, I forced myself out of the front seat and over to her back door, and I made myself knock.

“You aren’t here,” I said.

Opening the door, she said, “Oh yes I am. Is your wife with you?”

I shook my head.

“Would you like to come in?”

I nodded.

“Can you speak?”

“I haven’t figured out what to say yet.”

She wore big men’s boxer shorts in a yellow plaid design and a flannel shirt of green and orange that clashed horribly with the shorts. The shirt looked big enough to belong to the big brother of whoever used to own the very big shorts, and its tails hung halfway down her thighs.

“I know,” she said, closing the door, “I’m a symphony of bad taste. This is what I wear when I do homework.”

“You’re taking courses?”

“Reading for class. If they have to do it, I have to do it. Would you like a beer? A glass of wine? Juice? Buttermilk?”

I shook my head. It was not only that I didn’t know what to say but that she made me smile so hard. My face felt stretched. She was smiling, too.

She put her hand out tentatively, and she touched the side of my coat.

“It’s the other side,” I said.

She helped me take my coat off and she hung it on a hook in a little closet and came back to stand before me. She reached up and began to unbutton my woolen shirt. She saw the wrapping. She made a sound and put her lips together hard. She insisted on touching the ribs, very lightly, and I winced.

“No,” I said as she flinched. “You didn’t hurt me. I
expected
hurt, so I acted like a baby. It doesn’t hurt.”