The Bright Forever (14 page)

Raymond R.

A
ND I HAD
nothing to hide then, and I don’t have anything to hide now.

July 7

I
T WAS RAINING
again on Friday. Gilley woke to the pop and crack of thunder, the rattle of the rain beating against his bedroom window. It was barely daylight, but he could hear his parents moving about downstairs. He suspected that they had been awake for hours, had perhaps never gone to bed. He heard the tap-tap of cupboard doors closing, the rattle of teacups. Coffee was brewing. The radio was playing the State Farm Insurance jingle about being a good neighbor. It might have been any summer morning: the fresh coffee, the radio, the rain. Only Gilley knew it could never be that kind of morning—ordinary and carefree—never again. Katie was gone, and no one could find her. What was worse, though he could barely allow himself to think it as the days went on, he feared that no one ever would.

He sat up in bed, and through the rain-streaked window he watched the tree branches jerk and thrash in the wind.

Junior and Patsy were sitting at the breakfast table, talking about Henry Dees.

“I remember something that happened awhile back,” Patsy said. “He told me Katie was a pretty girl. It gave me an odd feeling. The way he said it. That was the day you brought Katie the new bike.”

It was all too much for Patsy, remembering the way Katie had ridden the bike in lazy circles on the drive and how her squealing laugh had sounded. How many times since Wednesday evening, when they first knew that she was gone, had Patsy imagined that she heard that laugh, that this had all been a terrible dream and now Katie was home?

She took her hands away from her eyes and reached them out to Junior. “That night in Indianapolis,” she said. “We were so young. Both of us. We were just kids.”

“Patsy.” He held her hands and felt the strength of her fingers curling over his. He knew that she was trying to say that no matter how much she regretted that night and what she believed he had forced her to do, she had finally spoken her piece about it, and now the important thing was that the two of them were together, bracing themselves for whatever lay ahead. “Patsy,” he said again, “I can’t pretend to know what makes some folks do what they do, but I’ll tell you this about Henry Dees: I trust him. Besides, Tom Evers told me someone called that night and said he’d seen Katie talking to that man, that Wright, downtown where we found her bicycle. I think Tom’s got the right man.”

Gilley came down the stairs and moved into the dining room. There, through the archway that led to the kitchen, he saw his parents at the breakfast table. They were holding hands, and they had tipped their heads forward until they were touching. In that way, they sat quietly, and Gilley imagined that they were gathering strength from each other, trying to shut out the noise of the rain and the storm raging outside.

Just for this little while, they were alone together—no police officers milling through the house, no news reporters knocking on the front door, no neighbors breezing in with casseroles and good wishes. Gilley took it all in, the stillness of this scene: his parents holding hands, their heads tipped forward, nuzzling. They might have been young and just then falling in love. He felt he had no right to disturb them with what he was about to say.

Junior heard footsteps. He pulled his head up and saw Gilley coming into the kitchen, a look of misery on his face.

Patsy recognized it as her own. She could feel it in the slackness of her jaw, the tightness around her eyes, the knitting of her brow.

“Gilley,” she said. She got up from the table and went to him and hugged him, knowing that she was greedy for his substance, for the feel of his solid body in her arms. “Dear Gilley. You’re shivering.” She held him more tightly. “I can feel the goose bumps on your arms.”

Junior looked out through the window and saw that the rain was still coming down hard. He thought of all the searchers gathering now for another day of combing fields and woods. Some of the people were strangers to him. Some had come from other towns. There were Boy Scout troops and church fellowships, farmers and store owners, horseback riding clubs and lodge groups. Civil Air Patrol planes, Army helicopters, a team of search dogs flown in all the way from Portland, Oregon. Everyone looking for Katie. Soon he and Gilley would join them. He would tell the boy to get dressed, to grab rain gear, to shake a leg.

Then Gilley showed them the snapshot of Katie, the one he had found on the porch swing. He told them that on Sunday, when everyone but him had been at church, he had found Mr. Dees in the upstairs hallway. “He was just there,” he said. “He claimed he’d gotten the days confused, and he’d come to give Katie a lesson. He let himself in. He came upstairs.”

Patsy put her hand to her throat. “Gil, I told you. There’s something odd about that man. How can you trust him?”

Gilley held out his hand. In it was the snapshot of Katie, the one he had found on the porch swing. “Look on the back,” he told his father.

Junior turned the snapshot over and saw the handwriting, neatly spelling out Katie’s name, her age. He showed it to Patsy. She looked at the handwriting, the letters made of crisp lines and curls and tails. She’d seen that handwriting on Katie’s story problem sheets. She knew that Henry Dees had taken that snapshot from the corner of Katie’s dresser mirror, where it had been all summer, and, with his fountain pen, he had written her name and age on the back as if she were his child. She turned the snapshot over and saw Katie posed on the stone bench, the sunlight falling across her face.

“Gil,” Patsy said, “I know that handwriting. It belongs to Henry Dees.”

JUNIOR DROVE THROUGH
the rain, thinking about the way Henry Dees had come into their home, had climbed the stairs to Katie’s room. At the time, what did it mean? An absentminded man. Odd duck. But now, of course, it was everything. He had stolen that snapshot, had written Katie’s name and age on the back as if he were claiming her. What else might he have done? Junior intended to find out.

The rain was still falling, slanting down with such fury that the trees and houses and the smokestacks at the glassworks wavered behind the curtain of rain as if they were shaking. Junior turned down the Tenth Street spur and drove into Gooseneck.

He didn’t even knock. Mr. Dees’s front door was unlocked, and Junior threw it open and stomped in, rainwater dripping from him.

Mr. Dees was at the kitchen counter, unwrapping the white butcher’s paper from a cut of meat. “I woke up feeling like a beefsteak for breakfast,” he said, not even bothering to give Junior a glance, as if he had been expecting him. “Steak and eggs,” he said. “Maybe some fried potatoes.”

Junior put his hands on him. He took Mr. Dees by the front of his shirt and shoved him back against the counter.

“You know something,” he said. “Something you’re not saying.”

The rainwater was running down his face, smarting his eyes. He squeezed them shut, and when he opened them, he saw that Mr. Dees had picked up a dish towel from the counter and was holding it up to him, inviting him with that simple gesture to take the towel, to dry his face, to tell him calmly what he wanted.

And that’s what Junior did. He let loose of Mr. Dees and took the towel and used it to dry the water from his face and arms. Outside, the rain had stopped. Junior could see that through the window above Mr. Dees’s sink. The sky was brightening. A single purple martin perched atop his tall house and began to sing. An ordinary thing like that. It overwhelmed Junior, made him think that if things were different, this would simply be another summer day. He sat down at Mr. Dees’s table, and for the longest time he couldn’t speak.

Mr. Dees didn’t move. He didn’t make a sound. He let Junior have the martin’s song with no noise to disturb it. Junior understood that—the kindness that Henry Dees was paying him—and he felt small in its presence.

Finally, he took the snapshot from his shirt pocket and laid it on the table. He raised his head and looked at Mr. Dees, not knowing what to say.

As it turned out, he didn’t have to say anything. Mr. Dees came to the table and sat down beside Junior, and quietly he said yes, he had been in Katie’s room, yes, he had taken the snapshot. He spoke about the life he had—years and years alone in this house—and how the children were the only light that got in. His children, he said, as bright as Heaven. And above all the others, Katie. His dear Katie. He loved her more than he could ever find words to say, loved her because she was funny and smart and spirited. But more than all that, she was kind.

“I can’t say I know what this is for you,” he told Junior, “but it hurts me, this trouble. It knocks the air right out of me. I feel it in my chest—this knot. Every time I close my eyes, I see her—Katie—and I’m sorry that my life is such that I feel this way about your little girl, but that’s the truth of it. I’m not ashamed to say it. I took her picture, but that’s all. I swear. Now I’d do anything—anything at all—to have her back.”

He said all this in a way that managed to maintain his dignity. He wasn’t asking, Junior knew, for anyone to feel sorry for him. He was only stating the facts as plainly as he could. As much as Junior wanted to match his calm, to stick only to the facts, the idea of Henry Dees in Katie’s room, making off with that snapshot, angered him, and he could barely keep himself from putting his hands on him again.

That wouldn’t help anything now, he told himself. He needed more information, so he kept his voice even. “Have you told the police everything you know?”

“No, not everything.”

“Will you tell it to me now?”

Mr. Dees stood up. “Excuse me, please,” he said. “Please, just a moment.”

He went down the hallway to his bedroom, and Junior heard a drawer open and then close. When Mr. Dees returned, he was holding his hands behind his back. “I’m not much of a man,” he said. “I keep to myself. I know people think I’m odd. I never chose Raymond Wright for a friend. I want you to know that. I was trying to patch concrete on my porch steps one day, and I looked up and there he was.”

Mr. Dees reached out his right hand and laid a book on the table. It was
The Long Winter
, and Junior knew it was one of the books that Katie had been taking back to the library. He started to reach for it, his hand trembling, but then he stopped, unable to touch the book, remembering how he had scolded Katie for not returning it that Wednesday the way he had told her. She had gotten on her bicycle and ridden away. Seeing the book now was too much for him. He could barely speak.

“Where did you get this?” he asked Mr. Dees in a whisper.

Mr. Dees was whispering, too. “From his truck.” He cleared his throat and spoke more firmly. “From Raymond Wright’s truck.”

“That night? Wednesday night?”

“He came here late, almost midnight. He needed money, he said. He was in a fix. He had to go down to Florida for a while.” Mr. Dees took a breath. Junior could see that he was trying to steady himself. “‘I don’t have any money to give you,’ I said. ‘Money?’ he said, like he didn’t know what I was talking about. Like he was drunk or hopped up on drugs. ‘You should go home,’ I told him. I led him out to his truck. He couldn’t walk straight. When I opened the driver’s door for him, this book fell out of the truck, and I picked it up. ‘What’s this?’ I asked him. ‘Some kid’s book,’ he said. ‘I never seen it before.’ Then he got in his truck and drove on down the street.”

Junior let it all sink in: Katie in Raymond Wright’s truck. “Why haven’t you told all this to the police? Why haven’t you given them this book?”

“Who do you think told them where to find that truck, where to find Raymond Wright?”

“That was you who called that night? You’re the one who saw Katie talking to Wright on the square?”

Mr. Dees nodded. “I guess it’s common knowledge that I pretty much hold to myself, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know how to help folks. Your Katie? She means the world to me. I couldn’t bear to let this book go, this thing of hers. But I’m giving it to you now, and I’m telling you that whatever you need from me, you just have to ask. I’ll do whatever I can.”

Mr. Dees

I
LIED TO
Junior Mackey about the way I got Katie’s library book—it wasn’t that way at all, the way I said Raymond R. came to my house and the book fell out of his truck. Now I’ve lied to you, and that’s what makes me the most ashamed. I asked you to trust me, and then I lied. I wouldn’t blame you if you left me now. After all, what can you believe? But if you do—if you close this book and walk away—you’ll never know the end of it all. Maybe you’re good with that. We all make our choices.

You can, if you like, go to the public library in Tower Hill—
perhaps it will be a summer day in July and you’ll think, This is what it was like that evening. It was hot and muggy and all drowsy, and there was a little girl on a bicycle. You can go to the library, find the old newspapers, and get the facts.

But the facts don’t tell the whole story. They never do. For that, I’m afraid you’ll need me. I’m all you’ve got.

Or maybe you think you already know the end. Maybe you’ve made up your mind about who’s good and who’s evil, and if you have—if you’re one of those—God help you. Ask anyone who was living in the middle of it all and they’ll tell you: it didn’t have anything to do with good and evil; it was all about love.

Maybe someday you’ll sit in the public library, listening to the drone of the oscillating fan, and you’ll hear a car going by. You’ll lift your head toward the window where the curtains will be barely stirring, and everyone you’ve been reading about—me and Raymond R. and Clare and Junior and Patsy and Gilley and Katie—will come alive, and you’ll feel your heart in your chest, and you’ll travel back thirty years and you’ll think, This is what it was; it was people like me going about their business while there was that girl and those two men and a queer-looking truck. You’ll wonder whether you could have made a difference. Would you have heard something, seen something, that would have mattered?

Here, let me give you the details again: a little girl with a slipped bicycle chain and three library books; a dope fiend and his green truck with the black circles on the doors; and me, a summer tutor, a thief, a voyeur, a man who could kiss a little girl on a porch swing on a summer afternoon. So there we are, the three of us. You write the rest of the story. I’m done with it. Go on. Try.