Habit (7 page)

“Alright.”

“Okay,” said Brendan. “Almost finished.”

Kettering said nothing. The armor of his convivial nature, it appeared, had been penetrated.

“What about Rebecca’s child?”

Light came back into the man’s eyes again. Brendan saw a few things Donald Kettering seemed to countenance at once: protectiveness, love, pain, and vulnerability.

Like a parent, thought Brendan.

“Leah,” said Kettering, pronouncing it
lay-uh
.

“Leah? That’s the girl’s name? Is she yours, Donald?”

A tear slipped out of the corner of the man’s eye, which he wiped away with a knuckle. “No,” he said. “She’s not.”

Brendan’s voice was soft. The room was very quiet. “So she was Rebecca’s child with another man. When did you first meet her?”

“Not until Rebecca finally moved in. She brought Leah up only a few times. Once was . . . I guess two years ago. I convinced her to go to the mall with me in Rome. They have a, uh, you know, a studio there.” He frowned. “I know it’s old hat, getting pictures done in a mall – everyone just snaps cell phone pictures today. But I wanted to. It was our anniversary.”

“I understand,” said Brendan. “That was a nice idea.” He shifted a little in his seat.

Kettering looked positively broken. He hunched forward, staring down at his desk.

“Did you ever meet Leah’s father?”

Kettering’s head came up, and something flashed in his dark eyes. “No,” he said. “And she never wanted to talk about him. Rebecca just . . .” Now he pushed back from the desk, the chair pealing out another rusty squawk, and turned his head to the side and put a hand to his mouth. He was a man showing frustration; it was an outlet, perhaps, from grief. Like putting on a happy face might be.

“She was just . . . she just did as she pleased, like I said. If she didn’t want to do it, she didn’t do it. Didn’t want to get married, didn’t want to move in. Leah mostly stayed away from the area. And I would say, ‘Just come up here full time. I have enough money, you don’t need anything. We can make a home for Leah. We can make a life.’” He reached out his hands then, as if seeking to embrace that phantom life, and then dropped them on his lap and blew air out of his lips. “But I guess little Boonville, little hick-ville, wasn’t it for her. I don’t know what was
it
for that girl. It wasn’t me, I know that. It wasn’t this. But she was after . . . something.”

He turned, finally, and looked at Brendan, and his mien evoked a kind of man-to-man attitude now. “I don’t even live in Boonville. I have a beautiful place in Alder Creek. Right on Kayuta Lake. Just beautiful. Perfect place for a kid to grow up. Just . . . you know.”

“I know,” said Brendan consolingly. “Can you give me the name of Leah’s father?”

“Eddie,” Donald said. “That’s all I know.”

“Thank you. Last question, Donald. Can someone, maybe one of your employees, place you here between seven and nine this morning?”

Kettering stopped and inhaled through his nostrils. He folded his hands together for a moment, and seemed to be getting a hold of himself. “Of course. You can talk to Jason Pert, right out at the counter. He comes in at eight, after I open the shop at seven-thirty. Or Community Bank, just down the street, where I was right at nine. Or, if you need something earlier, I stopped at a little place in Forestport for coffee and a breakfast sandwich at seven this morning.”

Brendan was nodding. “Thank you. That’s more than enough. I’ll just have a word with Mr. Pert on the way out and that will be it.”

Brendan picked up the recorder, shut it off, and stood. Kettering stood, too. They shook hands again across the desk. “I can show myself out,” Brendan said. “Thank you so much for your time. You’ve been immensely helpful.”

Kettering, for once, didn’t seem to have anything to say. He just nodded.

CHAPTER NINE / THURSDAY, 4:08 PM

He was a few minutes late arriving at Olivia Jane’s house, just outside of Barneveld. She lived in a Cape Cod-style house with a columned, wrap-around porch. The home was on Trenton Falls Road and sat across from a river that burbled softly in the afternoon. Brendan stepped out of the air conditioned Camry, the atmosphere was hazy and humid, the heat cloying, like a thick blanket. With any luck it would start to burn off in the next hour. The radio claimed the temperature had hit 95 in Utica.

He had parked in the driveway behind her pea-green Aztec, and now walked up the short path to the front door. She must have heard his approach, because the door swung open before he reached the bottom of the steps to the porch.

“Hi,” she said. She had traded in her blue jeans for a pair of brown shorts, and her white blouse for a red tank top. Her brown hair was tied back showing her forehead dewy with perspiration. A smudge of dirt was on her jawline. “Come on in. I’m just pulling some more vegetables.”

Brendan smiled and walked into the house, which was cooler than the outside, but not by much. The place was roomy. An open area just inside the doors turned right into a dining area and kitchen, left into a living room with two couches facing each other and a baby grand piano in the far corner. Straight ahead were mahogany stairs that went up to the second floor.

Olivia walked past the small dining table and through the kitchen and into a back mudroom, Brendan close behind. “Come outside if you wouldn’t mind,” she said, and headed out a back door and into a vibrant garden.

There was a wheelbarrow in one of the paths between the raised beds of vegetables and wildflowers. In the wheelbarrow was a crop of carrots, and what looked like rutabaga, beets, squash, beans, and more. “Wow,” said Brendan.

“I love the harvest,” she said. “I’ve just got this last row and then I can clean up and we can talk. But we can talk too, now, absolutely. I’ll just be . . . let me just tend to this last bit.”

“Of course,” Brendan smiled, and added, “I don’t feel so bad for being late.”

She was already on her knees and leaning forward into a row of green sprigs of something. She lifted her head and turned to look at him. “Are you late? What time is it?”

He took out his cell phone. “4:10.”

She turned back to what she was doing. “Wow. It never ceases to amaze me how I just get lost out here.”

“I’ll bet. What have you got?”

She looked at him again, unsure what he meant.

“For a yield, I mean. What did you grow?”

“Oh. Everything and anything that will grow. Cucumber, peas, celery, beets, carrots, you name it. There’s some potatoes in that barrel there on the end. And herbs. Cilantro, Oregano, Basil, Dill, Mint. It’s tough to grow mint.”

“It is?”

“It looks like clematis. It just blends in. Chives are easy. Chives grow if you stomp on them and call them bad names. They just keep growing.”

“Resilient.”

He put his hands in his pockets, and suddenly felt strangely self-conscious. He found himself looking down at his appearance. He was wearing jean-like khaki pants and monk strap shoes, black. He had changed his shirt at the office before going to Boonville – it had been soaked with sweat – and opted for another button down, white. He felt oddly overdressed, like he ought to be in jeans and a t-shirt. He wondered how Olivia Jane kept her hours. Here it was mid-week and she was gardening at four p.m. Likely she made her own schedule.

“So,” he said, “How does it work? With your . . . field? You’re out on your own, so to speak?”

She nodded, her head half-buried in the greenery. “I got my licensure a few years ago after working with the county. I started my own private practice. Thing is, grief very often doesn’t want to come to you. You have to go to it.”

“Denial,” he said softly.

She retreated from the garden bed and glanced at him approvingly. “Exactly. The first step in the process of absorbing a tragedy or a loss doesn’t exactly get them out and about and ready to talk feelings.”

Her attention returned to the vegetables. She started pulling several out, clumping them together. Bright orange carrots. “So I continue to work with Oneida, but it’s not at the clinic. They call me when someone has . . . well, you know.”

“Right. So, how was he?”

“Well,” she said, grunting and getting to her feet, “that’s a good question.” She turned and dropped the bunch of carrots in the wheel barrow. Then she dusted off her hands. “Let me go wash up. You drink iced coffee?”

“Sure.”

“Okay. Thanks for letting me finish that up. I hate leaving things undone.”

“Me too,” he said. He followed her back into the house.

* * *

She sat him at the dining room table. The white curtains blew in the breeze coming in from the casement windows, which were swung open about half the way. She washed up and spent only a minute making the iced coffee – there was already coffee brewed in a pot on the stove, and she poured this over ice cubes, and added milk and sugar, per his approval. Then she sat down across from him.

“Kevin is experiencing the acute loss of his sister, of that there is no question,” she said, affecting an instantaneously professional demeanor. “He also is a very troubled young guy.”

“In what way?”

She shrugged. “In every way. He resents his family, he is shiftless, without a job or what he feels is a calling. He doesn’t want his family’s money but he needs to live, so he feels bad about taking an allowance. He has no spiritual ballast that he can describe. He’s basically atheist, which there isn’t anything wrong with, but in his case, he’s searching for something.”

“Where was he this morning? At the motel?”

She raised an eyebrow. “That’s where your job begins and mine ends, Mr. Healy. I didn’t inquire as to his whereabouts. I tried to help him deal with the pain and loss of his departed older sister. My job is to help people try to find the coping mechanisms in their own lives to help them face the immense challenges that come with the loss of a loved one. It’s not easy. Most people, they do what they know how to do. They drink, they retreat into themselves, they engage in some sort of compulsive behavior, anything to keep distracted, to keep the pain and grief away. I’m not all rah rah, siss boom bah, bring on the pain; that’s not the point. You don’t try to cultivate grief where there is none, or make yourself suffer if you are not. Sure, there’s healing in a good cry, but some people just don’t cry. Kevin, he’s not a stoic. I think his father is, but he’s not. He’s more sensitive. But he has no way to cope that I could see, or he could share with me.”

“He seemed okay when I was with him,” Brendan said. He raised a hand from his coffee to indicate he wasn’t being argumentative. “I mean, he was certainly distraught. Which is why I wanted him to see . . . someone. But he seemed to be dealing.”

He made a mental note that Olivia had mentioned the father, Alex, as if she knew something about him.

“Sure, Kevin was dealing. I deal. You deal. We all deal. We’re more afraid of social impropriety than we are of actual, physical pain. That’s been shown in studies. It’s true. We’ll choose a broken arm over a public humiliation any old day of the week. That’s a lead-pipe cinch as my grandmother would say. We’re conditioned from a young age to have manners, be polite, speak in turn, and so on, until it becomes like a part of our DNA, like an instinct, like adrenaline. It’s actually quite easy to act like nothing is wrong.”

“A huge habit,” he offered.

“That’s right. Unless someone is oppositional-defiant, or has an anti-social personality, or these types of things, they tend to be very afraid of bad social graces.”

“And you don’t think he has any of these . . . things you said?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Healy. I just met him. I couldn’t diagnose that. Besides, that’s not my area. I work with grieving people. People who have just been in crisis. Their personalities, or any disorders certainly have bearing on how they cope with that grief, but I tend to consult with other therapists about that, wherever possible. Psychiatrists sometimes, too.”

“But you said he was volatile.”

“I said he was troubled. And that’s not to mince words. Is there something troubling you in particular?” Her eyes were kind but direct and no-nonsense.

“It’s just that he lied to me.”

“About?”

“He said his sister, the victim, had no children. But, as it turns out, she does.”

He could have been mistaken, but he thought he saw something pass over Olivia’s features. A memory, perhaps, or something she chose to keep internalized.

Her mouth opened. “He needs a grief counselor, and I’d . . .”

As she spoke, Brendan heard the approach of a motorcycle on the road along the river. It made the noise of some giant, angry wasp. Olivia must have sensed Brendan’s distractedness, because she abruptly stopped talking. But she heard the bike, too, which now sounded like it was slowing. She opened her mouth again, perhaps to comment on the traffic outside her home, when the window exploded behind Brendan’s head.

The first thought that flashed through his mind was that the bike had driven right up to the house and launched into it. This dissonant, unrealistic notion was followed less than a second later by the idea that a rock or some other heavy object had been thrown. Neither of these scenarios smacked of the truth, but they passed lightning-fast through Brendan’s mind before more gunshots slapped the air.

* * *

The window exploded again, and Brendan launched himself from the table and hit the floor. He started crawling on his hands and knees around to the other side of the table as splinters of glass rained down around him. Olivia was half out of her seat by the time he reached her. Her arms were thrown up over her head and she was bent to one side. Brendan reached up and grabbed her by the elbow and yanked her down to the floor with him.

He had counted seven shots in all. His ears were ringing. The floor was covered in shining glass shards that glinted in the sunlight. Olivia was taking deep, startled breaths. She was trying to get up; some instinct was telling her to stand upright and look, perhaps to see who was firing, or assess the damage, or run away. Brendan held her fast. “Stay down,” he whispered.

There was one more shot. A bullet punched into the exterior of the house, missing the window this time. The shooter was just far enough away that the velocity of the bullet and the time for the sound to travel were about the same. The impact and the explosion of gunpowder had created a simultaneous boom. Then, silence. Brendan waited to hear the motorcycle take off again, and roar away down the road. His ears still rang with the resonance of all the shattering glass. He didn’t hear the motorcycle engine rev up to speed again. Instead, he thought he heard someone approaching on foot.

The shooter had gotten off the bike and was walking up to the house. Even through the ringing in his ears, Brendan thought he could make out the sound of a fresh clip of ammunition being slammed home. The shooter was coming, and he had just reloaded.

“Jesus Christ,” breathed Brendan. He scrambled to get to his feet, keeping bent at the waist. He bent and reached for Olivia, who was on her side, drawn up into a fetal position, her arms wrapped protectively around her head. He pulled her arm, and she looked up with wide eyes. She seemed to understand what was happening, based on his expression. She rolled over onto her front and with his help got to her feet, as well.

“Come on.” He took her hand in his. Together, bent in this running-from-the-helicopter fashion, they headed towards the back of the house. As they entered the kitchen, Brendan glanced behind them. There on the front porch, the shooter stepped into view. He was just a shape in the doorway, a dark human form behind the white linen curtain that hung in the front door window. A second later, the door flew open.

Brendan faced forward again. He pulled on Olivia and they ran through the kitchen and into the mudroom area, and then into the rear of the house, where the back door led to the garden. The shooter opened fire. As Brendan and Olivia exited out the back, the kitchen was exploding. Ceramic dishes and jars of things were smashed to bits by the rounds pumped into the space. At the last second, just before Brendan and Olivia leapt down the three steps onto the ground in back of the house, one bullet penetrated the wood of the door casing, while another slapped a groove in the air just next to Brendan’s ear. The shooter had come into the kitchen and gotten a straight line of sight.

They almost lost their balance when the two of them hit the grass. Brendan managed to keep his feet underneath him, and still had a good grip on Olivia, though she was mostly making it on her own. He considered letting go of her now that they were outside; they would make smaller targets on their own. Further, he couldn’t get to his weapon, strapped to a holster next to the left side of his torso, unless he had his hands free. But he held on to her, anyway.

He looked around. Beyond the half dozen garden beds was a small shed. It had a sharp angled roof and a single door in front. At the peak of the roof it was probably only six feet, and the steep pitch would make it very cramped in there. Not a good place to get stuck in. Surrounding it were higher grasses, some giant sunflowers, and cattails. He threw a glance to his right: Olivia’s single car garage was there. To the left, more high grass and then trees. There were no visible neighbors. He opted to get them around to the other side of the garage. If they could keep the shooter following them, Brendan thought maybe they could buy a few precious seconds, then make like hell for his car and get away.