The Orphan (22 page)

Beth, Raya and Chad left the house around eleven for a day of shopping and lunch down in Cherry Creek, Denver’s most affluent suburb and shopping mecca, an hour’s drive south of Boulder. They had invited Dad along but the thought of a shopping mall, all that browsing and waiting for Raya to try stuff on, wore him out just thinking about it, and he wanted to stay home in case the police checked in. He kissed them both goodbye.

‘You’re a stronger man than I am,’ he told Chad. ‘Have fun and bring me a surprise. I need a new hat.’

‘What kind of hat? Chad said.

‘He’s joking, Chad,’ Beth said. ‘The last thing he needs is a new hat. He has forty or fifty old ones in the shop.’

After they were gone, Darren went out to the Bike Cave, thinking it was time to make some calls about the Cinelli. He could reach out to bike shops nationally, try to track down the Cinelli dealers who had been around a long time, see if there was a way to get in touch with the company headquarters and find out if the serial number could be traced to its original shipping date and destination here in the U.S.

The bike was where he had left it on the main floor. He pulled the serial number from under the bottom bracket shell, then decided to stash the bike in the attic. Thinking about it was enough. Looking at it was too much of a distraction and led to bad things. He carried the Cinelli back up the stairs to the attic space above the showroom. A bundled form in the darkened corner rolled over and stared up at Darren from twenty feet away with the expressionless face of a corpse.

‘Oh Jesus!’ Darren said, hair standing on end, so surprised he nearly dropped the bike. His heart felt like it was going to burst through his sternum and his mouth went dry. He set the bike down with shaking hands and wiped his face. ‘God damn you, you scared the shit out of me.’

‘Sorry,’ Adam said, sitting up. His backpack was on the floor where he had been using it for a pillow. ‘I had nowhere else to go.’

‘You’ve been here? All this time?’ Darren was incredulous.

‘Just since last night. I thought of something important.’

‘Do you have any idea —’ But he stopped himself. If he told Adam the police were after him, the kid would only bolt again and that wouldn’t solve anything. ‘What’s so important you had to come back?’

Adam got to his feet. He looked tired, worn out, his same old clothes dirtier than ever. He picked up his backpack and pulled it over his shoulders.

‘Tommy Berkley,’ he said. ‘Remember the Wonderland Hills Gang?’

Darren sighed. ‘What about him?’

‘We have to find him. He knows things about my family. I think he can tell us what happened to me. Have you talked to him? Do you know where he is?’

‘How did you get in here?’ Darren said. ‘I set the alarm every night.’

‘I told you, I can learn things by touching them. I picked up your code the other day, when we first came inside. Or Ryan Triguay, we could check on him too. But I think we should start with Tommy. He was the one who was nicest to me.’

Until he heard Adam use that term for their old riding crew, it had never occurred to Darren that the former members of the Wonderland Hills Gang might still live in or near Boulder. He turned away from Adam and went down the stairs, into the office.

‘I have no idea where those guys are,’ Darren said.

Adam followed, asking, ‘You moved back here almost a year ago and haven’t bothered to look up any of your old friends?’

‘It wasn’t a conscious thing. I’ve been busy moving, unpacking, remodeling the shop, settling in. For the past twenty years Beth’s been the one to maintain our social calendar.’

‘Sounds like a lot of excuses to me. How hard is it to call some friends?’

‘I haven’t talked to any of those guys since junior high. The odds of them being in Boulder are slim. People move away all the time, Adam.’

‘And sometimes they come back,’ Adam said. ‘You did.’

‘Maybe they’re on Facebook.’

‘What’s Facebook?’

Darren frowned. ‘This is so messed up, you know that? You scare me.’

The first number they retrieved from information belonged to a college-aged Thomas Berkley, according to his roommate, a young woman who informed Darren that ‘Tom’ had moved back east, to Rhode Island. Wrong Tommy.

The second number rang seven or eight times.

‘No one’s answering,’ Darren said, preparing to disconnect.

‘Wait!’

Darren frowned. On the tenth or eleventh ring, a man answered. He sounded too old, his voice raspy but light, pleasant.

‘Hi, I’m looking for Tom Berkley. Tommy, as I knew him back in school.’

‘Oh yeah? And who’s calling?’

‘My name’s Darren Lynwood.’

Delayed silence. The man on the other end cleared his throat. ‘Darren Lynwood? Mr BMX Darren Lynwood?’

‘Oh, man,’ Darren said. ‘Is that you, Tommy?’

Adam was grinning like a fool.

‘Saw you in the paper a month or so ago,’ Tommy said. ‘Didn’t even know you were back in town. Kinda never expected to hear from you again.’

‘I know. Sorry to call you out of the blue like this. I was hoping we could catch up on a few things.’

‘Is that right? And what would that be about?’

‘I have a bike story for you,’ Darren said. ‘A crazy one. I could use your help.’

‘Hm.’

‘It’s important, Tommy. Extremely.’

‘Oh, well, I guess you could swing out to the farm. I’m none too busy these days.’

Tommy gave him directions. They took the Firebird, not wanting to drive the Acura with its busted windshield. Twenty-five minutes later, east of Boulder, they found the dirt drive off County Line Road, out in a rural patch between newer housing developments that had sprung up all around Erie, a small town that had been a sleepy little place when Darren was a kid but which had since become another suburban bedroom community feeding into Boulder and Denver. Darren parked close to the road, on the side of a small barn, hoping to keep Adam out of sight.

The kid reached for the door.

‘I think you better wait in the car,’ Darren said to his passenger.

‘Why?’

‘Because we don’t want to give him a heart attack.’

‘Tell him I’m your cousin. Your son. Whatever. I won’t give it away.’

‘I think… no.’

‘He’ll see me, anyway,’ Adam whined.

‘Stay put. I can’t think straight with you. If he asks who you are, I’ll make something up, but don’t screw around, you got it?’

Adam fumed for a moment, then sunk down into the seat.

Darren got out and approached the main house, a three-story white Craftsman farmhouse in decent repair, plus a smaller guest house across the dirt turnaround. A hundred feet to the north stood three rows of horse stables and what appeared to be an indoor training arena. In between, there wasn’t much of a yard, just a wide swath of packed dirt and weeds. A giant cottonwood threw shade over a picnic table, a plastic kiddie pool filled with wet leaves and muck, and the largest homemade barbecue Darren had ever seen. It looked like two oil drums split open and mated to a small train engine.

A blond-bearded man in green Carhartt coveralls waddled out from the shade of an open garage, his duck boots squeaking. He must have weighed three-twenty or three-fifty, he stood at least four or five inches taller than Darren, and he had the good-natured smile of a ten-year-old boy holding an ice-cream cone. His eyes were buried behind two rosy hills of cherubic flesh. A pair of black glacier glasses hung from an orange nylon lanyard around his neck, but he did not put them on, despite the sun glare.

‘You don’t look like Darren Lynwood,’ Tommy said before he got close enough to shake hands.

Darren felt his intestines cramping from nervous tension. The sun was very bright, even though he was wearing one of his twenty-four pairs of Oakley Frogskins. This was a bad idea. He knew already it was going to turn out bad. The only question was how bad and over what.

‘But I guess I don’t look much like I used to either,’ Tommy added. ‘I’m too damned big to get on a BMX bike, that’s for sure. What the hell are you doing still monkeying around with those things? Aren’t you ever gonna grow up?’

Darren chuckled. Oh, where to begin?

They had made the usual small talk for about fifteen minutes. Where you been? Where are you now? Married? Kids? What brought you back to Boulder? Darren told his side of it as quickly as he could.

Tommy told a longer tale involving a lot of juvenile delinquency, drug abuse, an alcoholic father who earned a fortune in stock from IBM and took an early buy-out to retire on the farm to raise horses, screw as many bad women as he could, and drink himself to death. The old man had been renting out horse stalls and the living quarters attached to the arena to some fellows who turned out to be part of a Mexican drug cartel with a gambling interest in horse doping. Tommy’s mother had died of bone cancer when Tommy was still in high school. During what should have been the college years, Tommy and his younger brother Nate had got into crystal meth and the dog tracks, but since then Tommy had found love and religion and sobered up while Nathan was still on the loose somewhere down in Albuquerque.

Darren recalled none of this. The more Tommy talked, the more Darren realized he had no memory of the kid beyond age twelve.

After Tommy’s father bequeathed him the farm, Tommy had sent the Mexican dopers packing and nowadays he rented the stalls to decent people. He rented the guest house to three lesbians who were trying to make a go of organic farming. Tommy performed repairs and updates around the farm and fed and cleaned the horses for some of his clients. On weekends he liked to walk out to the pond on the back hundred acres and shoot his guns. ‘I have a lot of guns. Mostly for target practice and the occasional coyote or nosy coon.’ He was waiting for the farm to reach two-point-five million in value, at which point he would sell it, pay off his brother’s debts, and downsize to a regular house, smooth retirement. He seemed to have found peace out here.

Eventually they got around to Adam, by way of talking bikes and the rest of the Wonderland Hills Gang. Darren told him about the Cinelli, how it had come to him with no shipping labels. Tommy hadn’t sent the bike – ‘Why the heck would I send you a six-thousand-dollar bike, you nitwit?’ – and he didn’t remember a Cinelli. They talked of other bikes, naturally linking them to the other guys from the gang.

‘Whatever happened to Ryan?’ Darren said. ‘Any idea?’

‘He’s dead,’ Tommy said. ‘Suicide. About, what? Fifteen years ago? Somethin’ like that. Parked his car in the garage, ate the fumes, left a wife and daughter behind.’

‘Jesus. Sorry to hear that. What was the problem?’

‘Who knows?’ Tommy said. His jovial demeanor dialed way down, the way it happens when old friends recall the loss of one who did not make it into adulthood. ‘Depression, alcoholism, money problems. I saw him at the five-year reunion. He looked like he was dead already. Could hardly put together two sentences. You didn’t make it to that one, did you?’

‘The reunion? No. I missed all of them.’

Tommy nodded, as if this confirmed something damning about Darren. Maybe it did. Darren opened his mouth to raise the subject, but Tommy said it first.

‘Adam Burkett. You remember that sorry case?’

Darren decided to play it loose, see what Tommy recalled without prompting. ‘Adam, right. The kid with the Huffy. Yeah, vaguely.’

‘We were vicious to that kid,’ Tommy said. ‘Unbelievably cruel. Ruining his bike wasn’t the half of it. Dunking him that day at the pool about drowned him. Things we did, we oughta gone to jail. I carried that guilt for fifteen years. Only thing got me past it was meeting Charlotte, and the church. Do you go to church, Darren?’

‘No, we don’t. Maybe I should.’

‘There’s forgiveness to be had. Forgiveness is real, if you believe in it.’

Darren chuckled again. He couldn’t seem to stop chuckling, though there was no heart in it. Tommy had not invited him inside and Darren had the feeling his old friend was playing nice but wanted to keep his distance.

‘Social Outcast,’ Tommy said. ‘That’s what we called him. And sometimes just shithead.’

‘To tell you the truth,’ Darren lied, ‘I remember that day we wrecked his bike in Palo Park, but not much after that. I sort of recall something bad happened to him, there was more, but it’s been so long. You were friendlier with him. Anything else you can tell me about him? His family?’

Tommy studied Darren with what appeared to be real skepticism, or contempt.

‘I wasn’t his friend, but I knew a kid who lived in his neighborhood, Brad Cader. Up there in that trailer park just north of Crest View. Brad and I used to ride sometimes, he had an old Mongoose Motomag, I think. He told me some real morsels about the Burkett clan. You really don’t remember any of this?’

Darren shook his head. ‘What can I tell ya? I was an asshole rich kid from the other side of the tracks.’

Tommy laughed. ‘You were quite the asshole. That’s true.’

Darren sighed. ‘I hardly remember anything between the ages of twelve and eighteen, after we moved away. Things were different in Wisconsin. A lot of my memories of growing up out here sort of vanished.’

Tommy looked down at his boots, stomped something into the dirt, and went on with his story. ‘Cader used to dink around the trailer park with Adam from time to time. Maybe he played in that house on one or two occasions, Adam’s trailer. He was a softie like me. He didn’t have anything against kids like Adam. Back then you’d play with whoever was free. But Adam’s pop was a real mean old bastard. Drunk all the time, running drugs, driving around late at night picking up hitchhikers just to mess with them. He carried a baseball bat in the truck and used to go downtown and sweep up the hippies for fun. Me and Cader, we’d see his truck at the BustTop sometimes, three o’clock in the afternoon.’

Darren recalled that the BustTop had been Boulder’s only topless bar, and not a ritzy one at that. He wondered if it was still in business.

‘The mom was no better,’ Tommy continued. ‘I saw her a few times at school, picking Adam up for this or that. She was a dark lady.’