The True Detective (29 page)

He is walking through the loose sand, on an angle, making his way to the ribbon of sand that is firm with water. Once there, he walks along, and as he does so he imagines the boy opening the car door, slipping out, moving, even limping, away. In just a few more minutes, Vernon thinks, he’ll return to his car, head out the way he came, and return to his life.

Even if the boy wanted to, he is telling himself as he walks in the thickening sea air, he could not identify him or tell where they had been. Would anyone even care? Oh, he’d be nervous for
a while all right, in fear of being caught, but days would pass and things would fade and soon all would be left behind.

He walks along, watching the water roll in on the beach in its misangled waves. He watches the whitecaps, some flapping like gulls’ wings, some snapping here and there like towels over the pale green surface, and he begins to feel hopeful. All at once, though, a woman passes him from behind, striding hard on the wet-packed sand with a German shepherd moving and sniffing here and there as if at the end of a rope.

The woman marches on. Vernon hesitates. Well, time enough, he tells himself. Time enough. Turning, he starts back, looking down at his own footmarks now as the wind rushes over him.

Moments later he is driving once more over the blacktop causeway and the boy is beside him as before. The boy appears not to have moved, not yet, and Vernon’s anger with him now seems as confused as the mix of thoughts in his mind.

“Aren’t you hungry?” Vernon says, close to tears. “Don’t you want to wake up and have something to eat?” He hardly glances at the boy, though, but looks to the windshield close before him, and a little to the roadway he is following, as if he is going mad.

D
ULAC HAS PULLED OVER AND IS SITTING IN HIS CAR ON A SIDE
street. Dinnertime is approaching and he is between the police
station and home. Except that he feels down, he isn’t sure why he has stopped. He has decided to drive Claire Wells to Portland himself, to have her appeal videotaped for the eleven o’clock news, and leaving the station he thought he would stop at home for a bite to eat. Beatrice will just be getting home from her job, however, and he knows he isn’t very hungry. Maybe he isn’t hungry at all.

What is on his mind, more or less, is porn. It’s been there throughout the day. As policemen they were given a policy that seemed to presuppose an attitude, his attitude, but all along he knows he hasn’t been sure. The war, its endless hangover—that had been all around them, too. Everything they did as policemen had changed in his time and he had never been comfortable—he had always been upset—with the implication that a policeman was not a good or humane person.

Of porn, all he can say—he sees in this moment—is that it makes the air around it different. It creates an air in which life has a different value. Less value. Uninspired. As a policeman, it put him between the devil and the deep blue sea. The goods do seem educational, he thinks. What are they teaching? Are they teaching something new?

C
LAIRE
,
IN THE APARTMENT ALONE
,
IS THINKING OF SEARCHING
through Matt’s belongings. The idea has been in her mind for
several minutes. She is standing at the stove, heating a small amount of canned stew she has spooned into a saucepan. Matt has gone to the grocery store for milk. There seems something terribly wrong in the idea, and more than once she has told herself it is something she will not do. No way. Still, she keeps returning to it.

Trust is what it is. To make such a search would say she doesn’t trust her own son. She has read notes in his pants pockets before, and taken looks here and there, but she has never gone looking for something out of pure suspicion.

Turning off the soup, she senses herself like another person, walking to their bedroom. Something is attracting her. It is his dresser drawers, spaces between T-shirts, under shelf paper. Within pairs of socks.

She pauses, considers returning to the kitchen. She makes no move to do so.

In the closet, crouching—when she has looked through his clothes on the rack and found nothing—she looks inside his old shoes, and inside Eric’s, too. She looks into and between boxes. Standing, returning to the clothes on the rack, she even checks watch pockets, inserting a finger and touching corner to corner.

Pulling up a chair to stand on, searching under and between sweaters and old clothes on the shelf, at last she removes something which clearly has been hidden. It is on Matt’s side, under his sweaters—a book.

Taking it down for better light, she can tell with her fingers that things are inserted between the book’s pages. Her pulse and her temples are working. Dear God, she has found something.

The book, she sees, stepping down from the chair, is a Hardy Boys mystery that she remembers Warren giving to Matt years ago. Opening to the first object between pages, she sees a Christmas gift tag. On a short red string, its message is, “To Matt With Lots Of Love / Dad.”

She holds a moment. Then she sits down on the chair. Other inserts in the book, she sees, are other tags and small gift cards. There is one from Eric, which says “To Matt / Happy Birthday / Eric.” She recognizes the last one, which is hardly two months old. It says, “Merry Christmas To A Wonderful Son / Mom.” They are the gifts of Matt’s life. A handful of words, all they had ever given him.

Closing the book, Claire sits still and cannot hold back the hurt welling up in her. She sits and holds her face in one hand, as the universe spins within her.

S
TUDENTS
’
CARS
are often towed from the Shop ’n Save parking lot during morning and midday hours, but seldom this late in the afternoon. Still, as most students with cars know, spotting them parking in the supermarket lot while they go to classes is one of the favorite activities of the town police. For this and other reasons, turning into the lot with the boy slumped yet in the front seat beside him, only partially covered by the flannel-lined sleeping bag, Vernon drives to the main concentration of cars, to conceal himself there at the same time that he flirts with the risk of someone seeing them or seeing the boy, or having the boy cry out to signal someone.

Turning off the motor, Vernon sits a moment. The anxiety or nervousness he feels is in his throat. He’s far enough from the
supermarket, he thinks, so most people coming and going will not walk past his car, but close enough for the danger of what he is doing to be real.

He wonders what he
is
doing. All he can determine is that he doesn’t know. He is drawn to taking this chance, he can see that, but he doesn’t know why. Does he think that someone is going to come up and take the boy away and everything will return to normal? Is he here because this is home to him and he doesn’t know where else to go? Is it in his mind, in his fantasies, that Anthony will walk up any minute and tap on his window, and not be exhausted or muddled, and tell him in his superior way exactly what to do to extricate himself from this otherwise impossible situation?

Or is he simply here to be caught, to put an end to things?

He doesn’t lock the car door. Getting out, closing the door, not caring, he turns and starts across the parking lot in the direction of the university, away from the shoulder-to-shoulder stores to whom the parking places belong. Stop me, he thinks. Tow my car. It’s what I want you to do.

Nothing happens. He reaches the street and crosses.

I
N THE LIBRARY
, walking aimlessly, he imagines running into Anthony and begins to look for him. He has no reason to think Anthony would be here at this time, but given the flow of students it isn’t out of the question. He makes his way to the third floor, where he has done much of his studying, and sits and broods for a time at a window overlooking the campus.

Between the trees, lights are already on in the windows of other buildings, and in his loneliness and exhaustion, Vernon rests his face in his hand and stares away. This is the lonely floor. He has always liked it here. Now he loves it, as if more than
any other place this—this carrel beside a window—is where he has been most content. He actually speaks aloud then, saying, “Please somebody—”

Nothing happens.

Moments later, in the third floor men’s room, a man exposes himself. Vernon is standing at a urinal, preoccupied with his fears. The man, who does not appear to be a student, is standing two or three urinals away. Glancing, seeing the man lift his eyebrows, but not comprehending a signal, Vernon realizes then that the man is pivoting enough to reveal an erection. Vernon thinks of Uncle Sally, but remains unaffected. In a moment, avoiding any eye contact, he is making his way out and then along the carpeting to the stairway.

H
E SEES A
photograph. He is walking back along the small town’s main street and there is a photograph of a boy on the front page of a newspaper. The boy, he realizes, is the boy he left in his car; he realizes, too that something in his bowels has forsaken control and that he is in a state of shock. The paper is in a blue wire rack before a luncheonette.

He is walking on, he knows.

BOY
, 12,
MISSING
, the headline said.

He shifts to the store side of the sidewalk and stops. He feels he could slide to the ground. People are passing in both directions. He stands there.

Something has him step back to the luncheonette, whose windows are steamed over. He looks again. There is the boy. It is the boy he left in his car. It isn’t a good likeness; you’d have to know him to recognize him, he thinks. His hair looks darker in the picture. His features are not very clear. You’d have to know him to recognize him.

Another paper in the wire rack—a more local paper, Vernon realizes—shows artists’ sketches of two men, both bearded, under a headline saying, “
POLICE SEEKING
2
MEN
.” Looking closer, Vernon reads, “Police today issued a warning to area residents concerning two separate incidents of sexual harassment that occurred within the past week.”

Two other papers in the rack are
The Boston Globe
and
The New York Times.
Each of the out-of-state papers, Vernon notices, has a front-page story starting with the phrase “Post-Vietnam . . .” Vernon looks over the papers, trying to think that nothing matters, that in the newspaper or not, it will go unread, unnoticed. Or will it? Time seems for the moment to tumble through his chest and stomach like a video game.

Inside, at a glass counter, he places a dollar on the surface and says,
“Portsmouth Herald.”
It is a paper he has never bought before; his thought is that if he asks the price, everyone will turn to him and they will know he is the one. He takes up coins in change.

Outside, folding over the copy without looking at it, he carries it in his hand. Realizing he still has his change in his left hand, and that his palm is sticky in spite of the cool air, he releases the coins into his pocket. As he walks, he glances to the sky. It is heavily gray now. Perhaps it will rain, he thinks.

Reentering the small shopping center, he looks down over the rows of parked cars. People are walking back and forth here, too, and he doesn’t see anything unusual. Still, he walks along before the rows of stores, trying to spot his car—he cannot seem to locate it—and turns into the supermarket.

On his way out, he goes through a checkout line to pay for a single purchase. The store is busy now—dinner hour is here, students are buying food—and even in the express aisle there are four or five people ahead of him. The boxed pastry he has
picked up is expensive—$1.98—but remembering how little the boy ate of the soup, his thought is to tempt him with something special. And to drop him off at a hospital emergency room, he thinks. Or do something else with him, get rid of him, he thinks in this moment, allowing this forbidden thought at last, going along in the line of customers.

“You get the paper here?” a young woman says, ready to poke a key.

Vernon is looking at her but doesn’t know what is being asked.

“Our newspaper or yours?” she says.

“Mine,” he says.

She places some coins in his hand and sacks his single purchase. You don’t have any idea what I am thinking, he is thinking as he takes the bag from the woman’s hands. It seems he could tell her, too, could tell her something in this moment, as he has been able to tell himself, of the enormity of his thought, but she has already shifted her attention to the next customer, and he is left to go on his way.

Everyone is so busy, he thinks, walking along. Oh, God, he wants to cry out.

Through the pneumatic door, into the cool air, he strolls along the curbed pedestrian walkway before the stores until he can spot the front of his car. A van is parked next to it, blocking most of it from view.

He pauses before the window of a hardware store. Could it be the police hiding in the van? he wonders. Ha, he thinks. They wouldn’t be so clever.

Nor, he thinks, if they found the boy would they leave him there as bait. They’d take him away, he thinks. They’d take him away and there’d be six police cars pulled up by now, surrounding his car with lights flashing.

Carrying the newspaper and grocery sack, he walks in an adjacent aisle past his own car. When he is opposite, he glances over to see if the boy is still in the front seat.

He sees in a glance that he is.

Circling, he comes into the aisle behind his car. Nothing appears unusual. On a burst of nerve, he turns in between the van and his car, opens the door without rushing, slides in behind the wheel, and closes the door.

He takes a breath.

“Got you something to eat,” he says.

The boy actually stirs, makes a sound, in response to his voice.

“Pastry,” Vernon says. “Apple something. Pastry.”