The True Detective (16 page)

“It’s being done,” Dulac says.

“Tomorrow,” the chief says, “if the kid hasn’t shown up, we’ll put it out to the newspapers and to the networks in Boston. What about the budget, Adam?”

“It’s going to be a problem, just calling in people today. I’d say keep the crew as lean as possible. Neil Mizener, say, to assist. Then, two uniformed officers to do a neighborhood search and canvass; they can call in a couple of cadets to help with that. How’s that sound?”

“One other thing,” Dulac says, “How about Shirley Moss coming in at five, to set up a base operation here? She can do a central clearing thing, deal with the phone, build the file, and so on. Keep an eye on the cadets. Shirley’s good at that.”

“Okay,” the chief says. “You could get a bunch of calls. Shirley can handle that. Use 4022.”

“Okay,” Dulac says. “Good. Only two uniformed isn’t enough. Four is more like it.”

“Two,” the chief says.

“This, then,” Dulac says. “We run it on the six o’clock news. Say it gets to be eight or eight thirty, and the kid is still out there somewhere—how about asking the Boston stations to run a nine o’clock spot on a boy missing in—”

“No, that’s out,” the chief says.

“They’d never do it anyway,” the captain says. “Not this soon. You know something else, Gil? You put out a blitz like this, you’re going to scare the shit out of whoever is holding that kid. They could get nasty with the kid.”

“Aren’t chances just as good they’ll let him go? Chief, what’s your feeling on that?”

“Well, gee, chances are of course, if he’s been abducted, it’s someone known to him or in his own family. As you know. And that they’ve taken very few steps to cover themselves. Chances are, of course, if it is an abduction, that he’s dead by now. That’s the way it usually goes. You know? Anyway, of course you’re going to scare whoever picked him up, if that’s what happened.”

“I’ll still put my money on the father,” the captain says.

The chief is backing away from the table, taking up his empty cup. “Tell Shirley to keep me informed,” he is saying.
“Regular updates. I’ll be home all day and all evening. I’m not going anywhere.”

Dulac takes up his cup, too, and the metal ashtray as he has used. He brushes his hand over his area of the table, before heading back to his cubicle.

Detective Sergeant Mizener—Neil—welcomes the call. “I’m about to take my oldest kid’s head off,” he says to Dulac. “It’s just as well I get out of here.”

He is not a close friend and Dulac doesn’t know if his oldest is a son or a daughter. He believes the man has four children. They have never clashed but have always stayed more or less aloof from one another.

Shirley Moss is less willing. Her husband’s sister and brother-in-law are supposed to stop by. “What the hell,” she says.

Dulac explains the case. “Shirley, you were my recommendation,” he says. “And it looks a little scary to me. This boy’s been missing since yesterday evening.”

“Who is it?” Shirley says.

“I’ll tell you when you get here. It’s a little boy—nobody important.”

Dulac makes other calls. He confirms Claire Wells’s account with the bartender Smitty. “Claire is just a good soul you can always count on,” the man says. “I had an idea it wasn’t any small thing when she said she had to leave even though it did leave us shorthanded.”

“Anything unusual happen before or after?” Dulac asks.

“Nothing,” the man says. “It was just another Saturday night.”

When a false note rings for the first time Dulac almost misses it. It comes in a phone conversation with the older son’s friend, fifteen-year-old Cormac Hughes. “I’m sorry,” Dulac says
to him. “You say you and Matt split at about five thirty? He left the movie theater?”

“Yah,” the boy says.

“How did he leave—why did he leave? Was the movie over?”

“The movie wasn’t over. He just left. He got up and walked out.”

“What do you mean?”

“He was acting weird, that’s all.”

“How so, weird?”

“I don’t know. It was like he was mad.”

“About what?”

“I don’t know,” the boy says.

“What did he say?”

“Nothing. He just said he was leaving. Said he’d see me in school.”

“He never acted like that at other times?”

“No. Never.”

“You see him after the movie or any time since?”

“Nope.”

“What time did you leave the movie theater?”

“I don’t know. Six thirty or so.”

“Okay,” Dulac says. “Listen. I don’t want you to talk to Matt or to anyone else in the meantime about this. Not even to your parents. We’re going to stop by and get a statement from you. So you stick around until we get there. It’ll be within an hour.”

“What’s happening?” the boy says.

“I’ll tell you when we get there,” Dulac says, and concludes the call.

He pauses to think a moment then over the yellow pad on his desk. The hours match up. He sits staring away. “Jesus,” he says aloud. “His brother . . .”

C
LAIRE IS IN THE CHILLED CRAWL SPACE LOOKING INSIDE
cardboard boxes. She knows too well that there is no recent photograph of Eric here, or anywhere; still she keeps looking as if there is. She has put aside a collapsing shoe box filled with photographs she is going to take out to the kitchen table in a minute to inspect. They are old, though, she knows, and will provide nothing showing what Eric looks like now. In the meantime, she is looking wherever she can think to look, on that huge detective’s suggestion or insistence on the phone that some Instamatic or Polaroid snapshot might have made its way home and ended up
somewhere,
that a photograph is important.

Backing out, getting to her feet in the living room with the old shoe box, she starts to the kitchen. “I can’t find anything,” she calls down the slight hallway to Matt. “Can you?”

There is no reply.

Shame is what is bothering Claire as she places the box on the table. It is shameful, she believes, not to have any recent pictures. Her sons growing up so fast and changing so much. It’s as if, without pictures, their life adds up to nothing.

The handful of old photographs she lifts from the box begins to touch her all at once, however mixed and confused they are in time and place. There is Helen, her sister, who lives up near Bangor still. There are Helen and Manse. Warren in his army uniform. There are her mother and father in separate small
photographs with disintegrating, scalloped edges. There, everywhere, is time passing. Shooting stars.

It is a pet, though, her childhood dog, Bonnie, that strikes her with loss. She had forgotten Bonnie. She never thought of her at all anymore; she’s been dead now some thirty years. In the photograph, however, the dog calls up all that had ever been right in her life.

She continues. There is Warren and the boys. They are so small, such disguises of themselves, and they are innocent while Warren, in retrospect, is not. She sees into him here, although she hadn’t seen into him at the time. She experiences wisdom she has never experienced before. What keeps stabbing her in the photographs is the foreshortening of life. In perspective, it is all so misunderstood.

She lifts and sorts. Altogether, there are hardly a dozen pictures of Matt and Eric, together or alone, and she knows even as she sets them aside that they are useless to her present need. Nor does she know why she has sorted out both when of course it is only Eric’s picture they are coming to pick up.

She looks over the dozen. None will do. All are too old. Too young. Or they are blurred, some of them, so they look like old black-and-white pictures taken from a speeding car.

Here’s Eric. He’s in those little tan swimming trunks he had, standing ankle-deep in the lake near Bangor when they visited her sister. Sunlight is in his eyes. His head angled one way, his eyes squinting. It was several summers ago. Three? Could it be four? She knows it’s her most recent picture of Eric. She
knows
this but isn’t ready to admit it to herself, as if to do so will say the intervening years have not quite happened.

She kisses the photograph. She thinks to call Matt, to see it, but doesn’t.

The background of the picture is filled with those giant pine trees up there. It was that time, she recalls, that same day that Manse took them out at the crack of dawn in his pickup truck and they saw a bull moose and two cows standing up to their bellies in the water of some pond or river. Boy, did they think that was something, especially Eric. Riding those dirt roads in the back of that old wreck of a truck. The way they enjoyed telling and retelling of seeing the moose, trying to decide if one was the calf of the pair, as Manse, after a time, said it was, when Matt or Eric asked something about there being two females. The image of the moose family, standing deep in the water, surrounded by the great dark trees, was the high point of her trip, too, however secondhand, for the way it thrilled, the way it enchanted her sons. It was a vision. It was the reason she had scraped and finagled to take her two sons north, even if she hadn’t known her mission exactly before it happened.

She comes back around. Eric was nine in the picture, she thinks. Did he weigh fifty pounds? She knew from a health card sent home from school just a few weeks ago, as she had told the detective, that he now weighed nearly a hundred. Did the card say ninety-three? Ninety-five? She signed it, to be returned to school, and now she cannot remember. Maybe it was ninety-seven?

That big detective, she thinks. She hopes he is the one who comes after the picture and the list she’d made. He seemed to be a nice man and she did not think he would say anything about her not having school pictures. The young policeman who was here last night, who said to her, “You mean your son was on his own all this time?” She could imagine him saying,
You don’t have any school pictures? Are you serious?

Walking into the hall, she is going to call to Matt, to see if he has had any luck, but there he is coming toward her. “You find anything?” she says.

“Any what?” he says.

“Pictures! My gosh, Matt. They’re coming to get a picture. I told you!”

“Mom, you know we don’t have any pictures.”

“Well, where can we get one? Wouldn’t someone have one?”

“How should I know?”

“Well, you’ve got to know. You’ve got to help me, Matt. What are you doing? Where are you going?”

“I’m going out to look for Eric.”

“To look where?”

“Anywhere. Places we used to hide. Maybe—I don’t know—maybe he got locked in or something. I don’t know. I’m just going to look, on my own, that’s all.”

He is upset, too, Claire sees, and she pauses as he takes down his jacket and slips it on.

“Matt,” she says. “Do you want something to eat? We’re going to have to eat.”

“Not now. I’m just not hungry now. Maybe I can find him.”

The door closes and he is gone. Claire thought he was starting to cry, again, and the emotion brings tears to her own eyes. She hears him go out downstairs, and she stands, afloat it seems for the moment, in the new emptiness of their apartment.

Their home, she thinks. She’d never quite appreciated it before this moment. This is their home; it is something, one thing, they have.

In the kitchen she looks once more through the photographs. None will do. There’s no reason to have them out. Still, she is thinking to show them to the detective, as if to verify something.

Her feelings of shame stir up again.
We just haven’t had money for school pictures,
she hears herself trying to explain.
It was that, it was come up with four or five dollars for those pictures, or money for lunch. It was worse than that—if you want to hear the truth. I’d have two dollars in my purse, if I was lucky. I’d give them each a dollar for lunch. There just wasn’t any money for pictures. Is that so hard to understand?

“L
ISTEN NOW
,” V
ERNON SAYS
. “W
E
’
RE GOING TO STOP FOR GAS
. I’ve been thinking about it. I have to buy some gas and we’re going to stop.”

Time has skipped again for Vernon. Here he is driving, recognizing that he is south now, near Plaistow, near the Massachusetts state line, and recognizing that his gas gauge is on E, but the experience of getting here seems to have vanished.

Pulling into an unopened gas station, he lifts the doughnuts from the rear seat and opens the box.

“A doughnut?” he says.

The boy remains in a slump, looking away, refusing to speak.

“You see,” Vernon says, “I can forgive you for doing something. Why can’t you forgive me?”

The boy gives no response.

“There are cinnamon, powdered sugar, and plain,” Vernon says.

The boy says nothing.

“What kind do you want? Vernon says.

“Cinnamon,” the boy says.

Vernon places one of the cinnamon doughnuts in the boy’s hands. Watching him take a bite then, with his wrists tied together, he feels a rush of sympathy for him.

“I only wanted to be your friend,” he says.

The boy is taking another bite of the doughnut. He doesn’t look at Vernon, and no new expression comes to his face. He pays no attention, either, to the doughnut crumbs which fall to his lap.

“I know there’s a self-serve gas station along here,” Vernon says. “That’s where I’m going. I just hope you don’t make me put you in the trunk. I will, though. You make any fuss, like you did before, I’ll just drive away, and I’ll put you in the trunk. I’ll gag you, too. Then I’ll go back and buy the gas. Do you hear me?”

The boy sits there.

“I want you to say so,” Vernon says to him. “I want you to say you understand or I’ll just take you and put you in the trunk anyway. Do you understand?”

The boy doesn’t respond.

“Say it,” Vernon says. “Say you understand or I’m going to do it.”

“Okay,” the boy says.

“You do understand?”

“Okay,” the boy says.

“You want another doughnut?” Vernon says. The boy shakes his head. With no appetite for doughnuts himself, Vernon reaches the box to the back seat.