Impulse (10 page)
Dexter walked along the perimeter road until he found an opening in the thick underbrush. He left the shoulder and pushed into the woods. The path that used to lead from the main gate should be to his left. The copse he sought would be to the right. He couldn’t be sure. Nothing looked the same. He smiled. For some reason, people think their memories of places will always endure, that they can go back to their hometown, or school, or battlefield and it will be exactly as they remembered it, that the passage of years, decades even, will not affect the shape of things. Then, they are shocked at the change. Now strangers lived in their house, strangers with very bad taste. The streets were wider or missing or renamed. He turned right and left hoping to find a landmark, anything that would tell him which way to go. But twenty-five years is a long time. Trees die, new ones grow up in their place, and streams change their courses. Nothing ever stays the same. That is the lesson of sobriety, he thought. Intoxication, on the other hand, allowed one to believe that nothing changed, to live in a time warp where problems could be held at bay and relationships remain in any state one wished. But today, sober and very thirsty, Dexter surveyed his woods and his life. He did not recognize either.
He moved a few yards deeper into the forest until he spotted the bole of an old black walnut. The limbs were stripped of their foliage and the bark had begun to flake away from the trunk. No dark, finger-staining fruit lay on the ground, only a few ancient husks lay scattered about. But he knew the tree. It once had blue panicles festooned from its limbs, the promise of fruit. Nuts to keep the population of gray squirrels through the winter. He took a breath and turned to his right. The copse should be just ahead, if it still existed. Twenty-five years. The underbrush was thicker than he remembered. He almost needed a machete.
It was the forsythia that first caught his eye. Their yellow blossoms beckoned him forward. In twenty-five years, they had spread, and he had no idea if the original circle with its center clearing still existed, but he needed to find out. The honeysuckle presented an almost insurmountable barrier. In the old days there had been two or three gaps in the wall formed from its tendrils. He stopped, looking for a way in, if there was one. He was sure the clearing he sought was closer to the road back then. The privacy it afforded depended on thick brush to screen them. He worked his way back toward the road. Finally he found a gap. A small one, but passable. He twisted to his right and wriggled through. The clearing appeared smaller and the grass in its center rougher and higher. A tree had fallen sometime back and bisected the clearing, its limbs all but obscuring the space. But he could pick out the old perimeter and remembered it as it once was.
He sat on the tree trunk, took the water bottle from his pocket and drank. The cloying scent of honeysuckle hung in the air. Honeybees worked its thousands of blossoms. He scanned every inch of the clearing looking for signs of life, for signs the place had been used recently. There were none. The copse and its secrets had been lost to this generation of students. He wondered if other places and secrets existed nearby or if other students over the century and a half of the school’s history had constructed their own lairs and hideouts like this one, had used them and then forgotten them. He wondered if other students or faculty had come to this very place or one like it to meet, to talk, or to lie in the grass on a thin blanket and make love on a soft Saturday afternoon in May. He felt a wave of sadness wash over him.
“What did you expect?” he said. “That she’d pop out of the bushes unchanged and ready to start again? She’d be in her mid fifties now. And the child, he’d be what, twenty-four, twenty five?” Who would have guessed it would turn out this way?
***
“Excuse me, Mrs. Gardiner?”
“Yes, Mr. Light.” Mrs. Gardiner never called any of the students by their first name, insisting on the formal
Mr
. And while Mrs. Parker, her assistant in the library, was known to the students as “Hot Pants,” Mrs. Gardiner soldiered on as “Iron Pants.”
“Yes, Ma’am…um…I need to see Mrs. Parker about something. Is she around?”
“No, she isn’t.”
“Oh. Do you know when she will be?”
“She is gone, Mr. Light.”
“Gone? When will she be back?”
“I do not think she will be back, Mr. Light. Not now, not ever.”
“I don’t understand. She’s not here?”
“Mr. Light, let me give you some advice.” Mrs. Gardiner lowered her voice and looked at him with something approaching compassion. “She is gone. She has left the campus. It is highly unusual and Headmaster is very upset. He made it clear it is not a situation to be discussed with or among the students. Headmaster Daigle was quite adamant about that, but….” She paused and led him back toward the end of the checkout counter. “Because of what I presume to be the situation between you and Mrs. Parker, I will tell you this: She and her husband are separated. He supposed she may have been unfaithful to him; I do not know if that is the case or not. The reasons are not important. In any event, the best thing for you, Mr. Light, is to say nothing, know nothing, and believe me when I say this, it is the best thing to have happened to you.”
Dexter felt cold fingers clutch at his heart, half dismay, half panic.
“Ma’am?”
“I may seem a dried-up old bag to you and your generation,” she continued quietly, “but I feel like you do, only with the experience that comes with age. When I say it is the best thing to have happened to you, I mean both the before and now, the after.”
He stared at her, confused. She pulled herself up and sighed. Dexter had never really looked at Mrs. Gardiner before. The only object worth viewing in the library was the now departed Mrs. Parker—for Dexter and all the students who attended the school during the six years she worked there.
“Everyone falls in love, Mr. Light,” she said softly. A hint of a smile crossed her face. “At your age it comes fast and hard. You find yourself saying and doing foolish things, even rash and stupid things. You act on impulses driven by new moons and hormones, but it goes away. When you get older, say Mrs. Parker’s age, that rashness and impulsiveness often lead to tragedy. Hold on to your memories, but forget your love. Do you understand what I am saying?”
He nodded, not convinced.
“I have nothing more to add, Mr. Light. I’ve said too much already. Here, she left you this.” She shoved an envelope across the desk at him and walked away.
The note was written in Luella Mae’s schoolgirl scrawl, half printing, half cursive, the distinctive trademark of an all-girl’s school alumna.
***
They’d met only once after that. She sought him out in his first year at the Naval Academy. He had to go over the wall to meet her. He’d been caught on that first offense. Later, when it was compounded with the heavy drinking that started shortly thereafter, it resulted in his dismissal during his second year. His parents were devastated and cut him loose. Four years in the army as an enlisted man did not straighten him out as his father had hoped, and after his discharge, he slid downhill, moving from job to job, each a little less remunerative, a little less prestigious than the last. And now he sat on a fallen tree trunk in the middle of Old Oak Woods in a place he had not seen in two and a half decades, wondering where all the years had gone.
A long time ago, she’d left him there. “Give me five minutes,” she’d said. He remembered her scent, the feel of her skin, the…all of it. He felt tears again. He took the picture from his wallet and stared at it as if seeing it for the first time. In it she remained a perpetual thirty-two. She smiled at the camera, standing in front of an antique car, and held the baby in her arms.
“Who’s your daddy?” he said softly, and tore up the picture, letting the pieces fall on the spot where, a quarter of a century before, he had known her for the last time.
The game had been close and Loyola lost to the University of Maryland by one goal in the last five seconds. His grandchildren were alternately bummed and elated. Tooth rooted for the Terps and cheered the win. Jesse, whose Greyhounds let a midfielder through to score, returned home glum.
“Your guys were just lucky,” he grumbled.
“Better team,” Tooth grinned, showing new incisors that Frank swore were far too big for his mouth. They argued all the way home.
Barbara had not said a word to him since he left with the kids for the game. He didn’t know if she harbored some residual anger or was embarrassed by the drift their conversation had taken. Either way, he thought it best to make his exit with Rosemary as unobtrusively as possible. He showered and dressed, timing his actions so that he would be downstairs and ready to leave at precisely six-thirty, the time Rosemary said she’d pick him up. He hoped she would be prompt. He really did not want to deal with what he supposed would be Barbara’s reaction to Rosemary.
“You look nice,” Barbara said as he stepped into the foyer. She reached over and adjusted his collar. “No anonymous golf club blazer, I see.” Cool, very cool. So much for careful planning.
“No, not tonight. I managed to find enough gray cells to sort through my clothes this evening, but I did come close to wearing that coat.” He kept his gaze fixed on the street outside. He saw the car round the corner, hesitate, and then pull into the driveway.
“Here’s my ride,” He opened the front door and waved. “Well, goodbye, don’t wait up.”
“I wouldn’t think of it.” Barbara followed him down the steps to the driveway. Rosemary opened the driver’s side door and got out to greet him.
“Hi, Frank.” Rosemary greeted him with a huge smile, a smile much too broad, much too personal to be gifted to someone categorized as just an old friend. It was a smile with a secret. Frank winced. “Would you like to drive, or shall I?” she asked and then, without waiting for an answer, turned to Barbara. “Hello, I’m Rosemary Mitchell. Your dad and I go back a long ways—a very long ways.”
“Yes? Well…how do you do?” Barbara seemed taken aback.
“You drive, it’s your car.” Frank moved toward the passenger side door.
“It’s nice to meet you,” Barbara and Rosemary said in unison.
Frank stood anxiously to one side watching the scene play out, like a theater critic unsure how the drama would end, and at the same time nearing panic for fear his daughter would drop any pretense at civility and grill Rosemary.
“Is the party nearby?” Barbara’s tone ranged somewhere between icy and Arctic. She knew full well where the party was.
“No, it’s out in the county. Don’t worry, I’ll take care of your father.”
“I’m sure you will.”
Rosemary studied Barbara for a second and then smiled. “Well. Let’s go, Frank.”
“Here’s Bob,” Frank said, before Barbara could reply. Her husband drove up and paused in the street, his turn signal winking at the driveway. Frank waved and hustled Rosemary into the car and climbed in on the opposite side. “Let’s get out of here.”
Rosemary backed out of the driveway and they pulled away as Bob took her place.
“Look in the rearview mirror. What are they doing?”
“Who?”
“Barbara and Bob, what are they doing?”
“I can’t tell. Talking, I think.”
“Do they look angry?”
“Frank, we’re a block away now. I can’t make out what they’re doing. Is there a problem?”
“I don’t know, maybe. Probably. It’s another mystery for me to solve, I guess.”
“You want to tell me, or is it a family thing?”
“No, I don’t suppose it would hurt. I could use a woman’s point of view.”
He filled her in on Barbara’s suspicions and fears. She waited until he finished. She had a habit, when she thought hard about things, of squinting her right eye and pulling the same side of her mouth up. It made her look a little like Popeye.
“You know, Frank, women value security over position, and men hold to the reverse, so your daughter is afraid of losing her place, her nest, if you will. Her husband has a wholly different set of worries. If he can’t provide for her, what does that do to his self-image?”
“But she’s afraid he’s seeing another woman.”
“It’s not the other woman that has her worried as much as the thought of losing him to her. You see?”
He didn’t.
“Either way, Frank, they are adults and they need to solve their problems themselves. And you need to stay out of it, but be prepared to pick up the pieces, if any.”
“I said I’d check around.”
“Not a good idea.”
“How come you know so much about this stuff?’
“I read books, take courses, and I’ve been there.” She gunned the car onto the expressway.
***
The party went well. The host had piled two tables with hors d’oeuvres. One table featured Chesapeake Bay cuisine, including small crab cakes and jumbo shrimp. The other end held the usual array of meatballs, cheese squares, and sausages. Another table had sensible food—salads, raw vegetables, and fruit. Nobody seemed interested in it.
Frank managed to avoid Bill Powers and spent a relatively pleasant evening reminiscing with the remnant of his class. Rosemary moved more easily among them than he did. She had been a part of their meetings for years; he had avoided all contact with them for fifty.
By ten-thirty, he had listened to all the stories he cared to, put names to faces, and stuffed himself with crabmeat. He did not want to talk about his books, hear any more stories about his father, and suffer through the embarrassed silences that followed an accidental mention of his brother’s name. Rosemary slipped up beside him.
“Are we having fun yet?”
“I am done—cooked. You?”
“I have eaten too much, drunk too much, and my feet are killing me.”
“Let’s blow this joint.”
“Would you mind driving? My night vision isn’t very good anymore.”
“I’m not sure mine’s any better. Maybe between the two of us we can navigate our way back.”
He made his way through the labyrinth of suburban streets to the beltway. Once on it he turned to her.
“Where to?”
“You mean like, ‘your place or mine?’”
“Can’t be mine, I don’t think. We could stop somewhere.”
“You have a problem with my house all of a sudden?”
“No, I just don’t want to—”
“Well, I do. You okay with that?”
“I’m okay.”
The drive back to Ruxton took a bit longer than the trip out. He drove much more carefully at night and the streets were not familiar to him.
He parked her car in the driveway.
“Do you have nosey neighbors?” he asked.
“Probably.”
“You’re not worried about what they might say?”
“Should I be?”
Inside, she shed her jacket and he loosened his tie. Arizona is not a venue for tie wearing and he no longer felt comfortable with one. He had had to search the closet in his guest room where he stored his “Back East” clothes to find a tie. She fixed them drinks and then fetched another thick envelope from the little green desk.
“Now what?”
“While you’ve been amusing yourself with sports and games, I’ve been working. This is four hours on the Internet searching for anything I could find out about the missing boys. There are print-outs from the
Baltimore Sun
and the now defunct
News-Post
, sorry,
American
. I can never remember which is correct. Anyway, they cover the three weeks following the disappearance as well. There’s a squib from
Newsweek
and some bits and pieces from sites that I thought you might find useful. One says Martians picked them up.”
“That’s useful?”
“Actually, it is. It defines the investigation’s dead-end. The disappearance was so absolute, they might as well have been kidnapped by aliens. You see?”
“Okay.” He leafed through the stack of papers. “Did anything in here strike you?”
“No, not yet, but I want to read through them again.”
“We should visit Elizabeth Roulx, I think.”
“Who?”
“She teaches English at Scott and is the school’s archivist. There may be something in the archives that will help.”
“More than what we have already?” Rosemary looked doubtful.
“You never know, and we will want to read the police reports, witness statements, too, if they’ll let us.”
“Why wouldn’t they?”
“Well, the police are not that keen on amateurs poking around in their files. That’s in the first place. Then there is the problem I pose.”
“You?”
“They will check me out with the police back home and then ‘Hell will freeze over’ so to speak.”
“Then, I will ask for the reports. I will say I am writing a book or something, but what good will having the police reports do? They have gone over them again and again. What can we find that they can’t?”
“We will play
what if.
”
“What if?”
“Look, we know those boys weren’t beamed up into a UFO and whisked off to the galaxy of Andromeda. They walked into those woods and vanished. Whatever happened to them, you can be sure neither magic nor extraterrestrial abductions played any role in it. Somewhere in those reports there’s a detail, some small thing someone said or saw that didn’t seem important at the time but will solve this thing. So we play
what if
.”
“I still don’t see.”
“Okay. Let’s say someone claims to be sleeping at the time and couldn’t have done this or that. We say,
what if
he wasn’t asleep, or
what if
he wasn’t in Detroit or taking a bath. Will the dominos fall a different way then? The whole story might change.”
“How will we know if we found the right
what if
?”
“People who were not thought of as significant at the time become important, things like that—dates, times, sequence. At least we should try.”
“I’ll see about the police reports. I have a friend who’s a county judge and his father is a retired county cop.”
“It’s nice to be connected.” He picked up the papers. “Now tell me about these.”
“Now? It’s pretty late. What about Barbara?”
“You told me it wasn’t my problem.”
“Right, but—”
“Past your bed time?”
“You should know me better than that by now. Where do you want me to start?”
