The Last Summer of the Camperdowns (22 page)

Chapter Twenty

I
HAVE A CLEAR MEMORY OF THE WAY THE NEXT DAY STARTED:
blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, yellow light, and an even more vivid memory of the way it ended. It was 3:30 in the afternoon, a hot day, the beginning of the second week in August, and I was riding home from the library in Wellfleet, the wheels of my old bike churning along the narrow, winding Cape roads. I was reading
The Collector
—and, enamored of a certain kind of repetition, renewed it to read again; in those days, my masochism outranked my sense of irony.

When I turned onto my road I saw them. All those police cars, blunt and startling, like a poke in the eye. They were parked along the lane, four or five black-and-whites flanked on all sides by the dunes, tall brown grasses waving in the breeze; behind them, the indigo ocean, sunlight sparkling on its rolling surface.

My mother met me at the door. “Riddle, you’re home,” she said, her voice showy and decorative, sounding positively sprightly, as if she were a sales rep greeting a potential customer. Immediately, I recognized the symptoms. Acting. There were men and women in uniform and men in plainclothes. All of them looked up simultaneously as I stepped inside the door. The women smiled sadly.

“Camp!” I said, surprised into exclaiming. My father was standing among the police officers, deep in conversation, convivial, nodding and laughing, gesturing expansively. He looked up when I called his name, smiled and waved his index finger at me, then refocused his attention on the police, who laughed appreciatively at something he said.

“Your father came home when he heard,” my mother said.

“Why? What’s going on?” I asked, unable to hear the sound of my voice over the loud beating of my heart. Were they here to arrest me?

My mother pulled me into the kitchen, where Lou was making coffee and looking worried. “Some man walking his dog along the beach found Charlie Devlin’s jacket in the dunes.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“No one does, Riddle,” she said frowning with impatience. “Who knows how long it’s been there? Or where it came from? It could have drifted in on the water. It may have been there all along, buried by the sand. Who knows?”

“How do they know it was Charlie’s?” My mouth was so dry I was having trouble formulating speech.

“His initials were sewn into the lining of the collar, apparently. His wallet was in his pocket.”

“What does it mean?”

Bang! Bang! I jumped at the sound of rapid pounding on the door accompanied by shouting. There was an eruption of loud voices in the entranceway.

“Whoa! Whoa!” I heard someone shout.

“What in the hell is my boy’s jacket doing on your property?” A recognizable voice rang out, ragged and tinged with fury.

“Oh my God,” my mother said, running from me and into the living room as I walked slowly behind her, soaring anxiety levels like braces on my legs.

“Calm down, Michael,” my father was saying. “You’re upset.”

“You’re goddamn right I’m upset. Of all the places in the world, Charlie’s jacket shows up here? Yards from your house? Camp, for Christ’s sake! Mother of God. What have you done? You hate me this much?”

“You need to get ahold of yourself,” my father said. “I don’t know any more about this than you do. I came home the moment I got the news.”

“You son of a bitch,” Michael said. “You goddamn lousy son of a bitch. I knew you were capable of . . . But this?”

“Jesus,” my father said, going on the offensive. “Control yourself, man! What do you think, that I’m in the habit of murdering children and then littering my property with the evidence? Are you insane?”

One of the detectives jerked his head with enough force to give himself whiplash. The others were obviously astonished by what they were hearing.

“Michael, Michael, you need to listen,” my mother said, rushing over to him, linking her arm through his. “You’re overwrought. You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“I know what your husband has inside him. Nothing! A great vacancy. There’s is nothing there, do you understand?”

I was stunned. What was he talking about?

Camp looked at him, incredulous. “Have you gone completely mad?”

“Oh God,” Michael said, overwhelmed, as if he was being toppled by the weight of the world. “Where is he? What’s happened to Charlie?”

For a moment I thought he was going to collapse. He leaned into my mother for support. The policewoman had her arm around his shoulders. The detectives looked grave. Someone offered him a glass of water. He shook his head.

My mother whispered something into his ear, withdrew her arm from his, vanished and just as quickly reappeared. She had a glass of something stronger in her hand.

“Here. Drink this,” she said extending him the glass. He slid down into the nearest chair, took a sip and closed his eyes. I had rarely seen her be so solicitous.

“Are you all right?” she asked him.

“He’s fine,” my father said drily as Michael nodded and thanked her.

Outside I could see a group of men dotted in clusters around the dunes, a dozen officers or more. Some were down on their hands and knees, raking their fingers through the grass and sand, using sight, using touch, using everything at their disposal in an attempt to dig up some tiny piece of Charlie.

My father never let anyone walk on the dunes. He was obsessed by the need to protect their integrity. Over the years, I’d seen him come close to blows with people—tourists mostly—who ignored his admonitions. Now he was watching all these cops swarm over their sandy inclines, his jaw clenching and unclenching.

The doorbell rang. I looked over at my mother. She was kneeling in front of Michael, their foreheads practically touching. They spoke quietly together. Her head popped up at the sound of the door.

“Harry!” She rose to her feet as Harry, ignoring all of us, limping slightly, entered the room trailed by a couple of the detectives.

“Dad,” he said, spotting his father, who refused to look up at him. “Did you tell them?”

“Harry, please,” Michael said. “You need to go back home.”

My father, in solemn discussion with two of the detectives, stopped in mid-conversation.

“Dad, it’s gone too far. I mean it. If you don’t tell them, I will.”

I grew rigid with fear, wondering what he had to say, terrified of the possibilities.

“Harry, you shut up. Shut up right now! Do you hear me?” Michael said, blunt as lead and almost threatening, invoking the parental power of veto over his older son.

His mind made up, Harry turned to the nearest police officer and began to speak in a firm, steady voice. “My brother came home the night he disappeared. He banged on the door and my father wouldn’t let him in. He walked down the road toward town and found a pay phone and he called . . .”

Michael let out a long, slow sigh and buried his head in his hands. “Jesus,” he said. “Harry, stop, please. That’s enough.”

The detectives exchanged a brief glance, multiple sets of eyebrows raised as if they were synchronized swimmers in a competition. My mother and father looked at each other, my father releasing a long, low whistle as he shook his head, a knowing smile briefly crossing his face.

“How long have you known about this?” one of the policemen asked.

“I just found out today,” Harry said. “My dad told me when he heard about Charlie’s jacket.”

“Go on,” one of the detectives said in that affectless way the police possess.

Harry looked over at his father imploringly. “Dad, tell them. They need to know. How else are we ever going to find Charlie?”

Michael sat for a moment. We all stared at him expectantly. Dorothy wandered over to him as we waited for him to break the silence. She put her big head into his lap. He rubbed her ears, took another sip of his drink and then began to speak. I was so on edge that I jumped, startled at the sound of his voice.

“I’d been having a few problems with Charlie. Nothing serious—in hindsight, nothing serious at all. He was just a boy, typical of his age. Experimenting. Challenging the rules. He was getting in trouble at school. I had gotten quite a few complaints from the priests about him sneaking out at night, missing curfew, that sort of thing. Same thing when he was home. Right, Harry? You remember?”

“Yeah, I remember. It was no big deal.”

“We had a few scenes. The usual father-son stuff. The weekend he disappeared, he sneaked out of the house after being grounded. I was so mad at him that I decided to lock him out.” He looked imploringly around the room. “Try to understand. I was trying to teach him a lesson. Around two or three in the morning, I heard him banging at the door. I wanted to let him in. I really did. Jesus, Jesus, why didn’t I let him in? He was home, for Christ’s sake.” Michael covered his face with his hands.

“Take your time,” one of the detectives said before Michael resumed his story.

“A half hour passed, when the phone rang. I answered. Charlie was calling from a phone booth. He wanted me to come and get him. He wanted to come home.”

“Don’t say it,” Harry said, exhaling long and painfully.

I stared at him, the full horror of what I was hearing beginning to take hold of me.

“I said no. I told him that it was time he started facing some of the consequences of his actions. I told him not to bother coming home because the doors would be locked. I told him that someday he would understand. I told him that someday he would thank me for teaching him what it meant to be a man. He just listened and then he said, ‘Okay, Dad.’ I said goodbye and he said, ‘Dad, please,’ but I hung up.”

“Holy Christ, I can’t listen to this ever again,” Harry said before his father could launch a second wave. Harry turned and walked toward the French doors leading to the hallway. He walked with difficulty. His limp was more pronounced than when he had first arrived, his pace less sure. I heard the front door open and then shut.

Michael looked up, tears streaming down his cheeks. “I hung up on him. I hung up on him.” He repeated himself, as if he couldn’t believe what he had done. “When I got off the phone, I felt proud of myself for taking such a tough stance. Proud.” He paused, shaking his head, staring sightlessly ahead, vision turned inward.

“I see,” one of the detectives said, stammering a little, struggling to construct a proper response.

“Please,” Michael said. “I’m begging all of you, this is not for public consumption. Please, I couldn’t stand it.”

When I remember that moment, the sound of the front door shutting, the sight of Harry alone and limping, the despairing picture of Michael Devlin, his sorrowful admission, the limitless scope of his shame, the sadness a kind of enveloping gray fog, I remember it as being one of the worst moments of my life.

Even my mother seemed moved. She stole another glance at my father, who was listening intently, making a meal of it, concentration etched along his brow line.

Finally, Camp cleared his throat and spoke. “You’ve got to be kidding if you expect me to keep any more secrets for you. You’ve got a hell of a nerve, Devlin.”

Michael stiffened but otherwise betrayed no response, just continued staring down at the floor. As for me, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, so astounded was I at my father’s seeming callousness. The police were paying rapt attention—the air in the room crackled with so much tension it was as if we were waiting for something to explode.

“Camp!” my mother rebuked him as Michael looked up at her gratefully, causing my father to laugh out loud.

“Priceless,” he said as the police studiously avoided looking at one another, the intensity of their unspoken communication a soft, stingless buzz.

“Hmm.” The lead detective leaned forward from his spot on the sofa and set his empty coffee cup down on the table in front of him. “Well.” He finally looked back at two of his colleagues sitting alongside him. “That’s quite a story. Naturally, this is information that I wish we had had from the start. It’s a very serious omission. Certainly we can’t overlook it in trying to piece together the puzzle of Charlie’s disappearance.”

“Yes, yes,” my mother said, hurrying him along, “you’re absolutely right. So, now we know. What’s to be gained from releasing this information to the public?”

“How about finding out what happened to the kid, for a start?” Camp said.

One of the cops shrugged. “What’s to be gained? Everything, potentially. We have a timeline. We can place him according to that timeline. We have his state of mind to consider. Was he drunk? Did he seem under the influence of something?”

Michael shook his head. “He sounded okay.”

The detective continued: “Those aren’t incidental details. Maybe he was mad enough to run away. Although,” he paused, “finding his wallet and his jacket seems to point away from that conclusion.”

“I’ll never forgive myself if I’ve done anything to hinder the investigation,” Michael said.

“Oh, I’m sure you’ll find a way to let yourself off the hook eventually,” Camp said.

My mother ignored him and spoke directly to Michael. She talked slowly, as if she were picking up rationalizations like wildflowers along the way. “You thought you were doing the right thing. You’re human. Sometimes our mistakes have . . . unintended consequences. People behave differently under pressure than they do under normal circumstances. I promise to take this story to the grave with me.”