There's No Place Like Here (18 page)

“It is, actually,” I said tiredly. “I have three hundred and sixty-four more days of being twenty-one, so we’ve lots of time to celebrate.”

“Oh, you know it’s not the same.”

“You know what I’m like at those things,” I said, referring to the party idea.

“I know, I know. Well, I want you to enjoy your day. Would you think about coming home for dinner at all? At the weekend, maybe? We could just do a small thing, just me, you and your dad. We won’t even mention the birthday word.”

I paused and decided to lie. “No, I can’t this weekend, sorry. Things are really busy at work.”

“Oh, OK, well, what about if I come to Dublin for a few hours? I won’t even stay over; we can have a coffee or something. A quick chat and I’ll be gone, I promise.” She gave a nervous laugh. “I just want to mark the day with you in some way. I’d love to see you.”

“I can’t, Mum, sorry.”

There was a silence. For far too long.

Dad came on the phone cheerily. “Happy birthday, love. We understand you’re busy so we’ll let you get back to doing what you were doing.”

“Where’s Mum?”

“Oh, she, eh, had to answer the door.” He was as bad at lying as I was.

She was crying, I knew it.

“OK, well, have a great day, honey. Try to enjoy yourself, OK?” he added softly.

“OK,” I said quietly, and the phone clicked and went dead.

I groaned, hung the phone back up on my bedside locker, and threw the pillow off my head. I allowed my eyes to adjust to the bright light my cheap curtains were incapable of keeping out. It was ten A.M. on a Monday morning and I finally had a day off. What I was going to do with it, I had no idea. I would have preferred to work on my birthday, although I would busy myself with working on a missing case that had recently run into a dead end. A little girl named Robin Geraghty had disappeared while playing in her front garden. All the signs were implicating her middle-aged neighbor next door. However, no matter how hard we’d dug into this case, we weren’t hitting the treasure chest at the bottom. Recently I had started following up on such cases by myself, unable to switch off the file that was locked away in a cabinet.

I turned to lie on my back and noticed from the corner of my eye a lump beside me in the bed. The lump was on its side, a tousle of dark brown hair lying on the pillow. I jumped, gathering my bedclothes and wrapping them around me tighter. The lump began to move to face me, his eyes opened. Bloodshot, tired eyes.

“I thought you were never going to answer that phone,” he said croakily.

“Who are you?” I asked in disgust, clambering out of bed and taking the covers with me, leaving him lying on the bed spread-eagled and naked. He smiled, rested his hands behind his head sleepily, and winked.

I groaned. It was meant to be a silent, inward groan but it forced its way out of my mouth. “I’m going to the bathroom and when I get back you will be gone.” I picked up what I assumed were his clothes and threw them onto the bed. I picked up my own stray clothes that were resting on a chair, hugged them close to me and banged the door shut. Almost immediately I returned and grabbed my wallet, much to his disgust. I wasn’t about to leave that there.

Not after the last time.

I stayed in the bathroom down the hall for as long as I could until Mr. Rankin from next door began pounding on the door and telling me and everyone else in the building how he was going to burst an area of his body that I didn’t care to think much about. I opened the door immediately and went back to my bedsit hoping the hairy stranger had vanished. No such luck. He was closing the door behind him.

I walked toward him slowly, not knowing what to say. He didn’t seem to know either, but nor did he care, his smirk still on his face.

“Did we…?” I asked.

“Twice.” He winked and my insides churned. “By the way, before you throw me out of your building, some guy came by when you were in the bathroom. I told him he could wait if he wanted, but you probably wouldn’t recognize him when you saw him.” He grinned again.

“What guy?” I racked my brain.

“See, I told him you wouldn’t remember him.”

“Is he in there?” I looked toward the closed door.

“No, I guess he didn’t feel like hanging around a bedsit with a naked hairy man.”

“You answered the door naked?” I asked angrily.

“I thought it was you.” He shrugged. “Anyway, he left this card for you.” He handed me the business card. “I don’t suppose there’s any point in me giving you my number?”

I shook my head, took the card from his hand. “Thanks, eh…” I began weakly.

“Steve,” he said, holding out his hand.

“Nice to meet you.” I smiled and he laughed. He was kind of cute but still I watched him walk down the stairs.

“We met before, by the way,” he called up to me, not turning around as he made his way down the steps.

I was silent while I tried to remember.

“At Louise Drummond’s Christmas party last year?” He stopped and looked up hopefully.

I frowned.

“Ah, it doesn’t matter.” He waved his hand dismissively. “You didn’t remember the next morning then, either.” Then he smiled and was gone.

There was a moment of guilt until I remembered the business card in my hand and the bad feelings vanished. My knees went weak when I saw the name.

It seemed Mr. Burton had set up a clinic in Dublin, Scathach House on Leeson Street. Wait a minute,
Dr
. Burton; he’d passed his exams at last.

I danced around excitedly on the spot. I heard the toilet flush and Mr. Rankin left with a newspaper in his hand and caught me dancing.

“You need to go again? I wouldn’t go back in there for a while.” He wafted the newspaper.

I ignored him and went back into my bedsit. Mr. Burton was here now. He’d found me three years after I’d moved away and that’s all that mattered. At last, one odd sock had showed up.

26

O
h, Dr. Burton.” Jack sat up in the car seat and pressed the phone closer to his ear. “I remember why I’d made a note of it now. Actually it’s not me that I’m enquiring about. It’s about a friend of mine who had an appointment yesterday with Doctor…” He stopped, already forgetting the surname.

“Burton,” the secretary finished for him, and he could hear another phone ringing in the background. “I’m sorry, could you just hold for a moment, please, sir?”

“Yes.” Jack waited and listened to Duran Duran playing over the phone while he tried to formulate some sort of a plan. He scribbled Dr. Gregory Burton’s name and address into his notebook. Later he would go through Sandy’s missed calls, received calls, and dialed numbers that her phone had recorded over the last few days and he would try to piece together where she had gone, even if it meant ringing everyone in her phonebook.

The secretary returned on the line. “I’m sorry, it’s very busy here today. How can I help you?”

“I was wondering if you could tell me whether my friend Sandy Shortt showed up for her appointment yesterday?”

“I’m sorry, Mr….?”

Jack thought fast. “Le Bon.” Not fast enough.
Le Bon?

“I’m sorry, Mr. Le Bon, but we can’t give out information about our clients.”

“Oh, of course you can’t, I understand that, but I’m not looking for any personal information. My friend has been terribly sick lately but she has been afraid to do anything about it in case it’s more serious than she anticipates. It’s her stomach; it’s been giving her trouble for months. I made an appointment for her and she says she went to Dr. Burton yesterday but I’m afraid she’s lying to us all. The family are all so worried. Could you at least just let us know if she arrived for the appointment? I’m not asking for any personal details.”

“You’re enquiring about Sandy Shortt?”

He sat back relieved. “Yes, Sandy,” he replied happily. “Her appointment was for one o’clock.”

“I see. Well, I’m afraid I can’t help you as this is not a medical clinic, Mr. Le Bon. It’s a counseling center, so you can’t have made the appointment for her regarding stomach problems. Is there anything else I can help you with?” Her voice was firm, angry even.

“Em,” Jack said, his face red with embarrassment. “No.”

“Thank you for calling.” She hung up.

He stared in embarrassment at the appointment made for one o’clock in Sandy’s diary. Suddenly Sandy’s phone began ringing and the name “Gregory B” flashed up on the screen. Jack’s heart thumped like a drum. He ignored the ring tone, relieved when it finally stopped and beeped to signal a message. He picked up the phone and dialed into her messaging service.

“Hi, Sandy. Gregory here. I’ve tried calling you a few times but there’s no answer. I presume you’ve gone wandering the deep abyss again. I was just calling to let you know that a man named…” He moved his mouth away from the phone. “Carol, what was his name?”

Jack heard the secretary’s voice saying “Mr. Le Bon.”

“Right, yeah.” Gregory came back on the phone. “A Mr. Le Bon, I assume that’s not his real name,” he said laughing, “rang our offices looking for you. He was wondering if you’d made your appointment yesterday for your
stomach
problem?” His voice got quieter. “Just be careful, OK? I don’t suppose there’s any chance you’ve considered getting a real job yet, waitressing or something. There’s little chance nuts would be chasing you then. You could go door-to-door, selling bibles; in fact a nice woman dressed head to toe in tweed came to my door last night, which quite obviously made me immediately think of you, so I took her card. Think about calling her. It’s a fine, uplifting card with Our Lord looking miserable on the cross. And it’s recycled paper so she really must care.” He laughed again. “Anyway, if you don’t think you could endure the tweed, get a nine to five. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it, it’s this thing that people do. It allows them to have a life outside of work hours. That’s ‘life,’ L-I-F-E, you can look it up in your dictionary when you get the chance. Anyway…” He sighed and was quiet for a while as if deciding what to say, or more likely he knew exactly what to say and was deciding whether to say it or not. Jack knew that silence well. “Right,” his voice suddenly got louder and more businesslike. “Talk to you soon.”

Knuckles rapping loudly on the glass of the passenger side of the car caused Jack to jump and drop the phone. He looked up to see Alan’s mother, a round-faced frump of a woman glaring in the window. He leaned over and rolled down the window.

“Hello, Mrs. O’Connor.”

“Who’s that?” She scrunched up her face and stuck her head in the window. Wiry hairs escaped from her jawline. Her false teeth unclamped themselves from her gums and moved around in her mouth as she spoke. “Do I know you?” she shouted, spit landing on Jack’s lip.

“Yes, Mrs. O’Connor.” He wiped his lip and raised his voice, knowing she had bad hearing. “I’m Jack Ruttle, Donal’s brother.”

“Merciful hour, baby Donal’s brother. What are you doing sitting out here? Get out and let me have a look at you.”

She shuffled away in maroon-colored velvet slippers, her jaw moving as she looked him up and down, teeth still sloshing around in her mouth. She was dressed in the same outfit she appeared to have been wearing since the forties. “Make Do and Mend” had always been a part of the O’Connors’ way of life, recycling textiles around the house to clothe the twelve children she had reared without their father, who came for one thing and left when he got it. Jack remembered Alan coming along on a day out with Donal when they were kids, wearing white shorts made from pillowcases. Donal never seemed to care, refusing to mock his friend as the other kids did. Not that Alan endured the taunts, instead choosing to knock the bejaysus out of anyone who even looked at him the wrong way. But he protected Donal from everyone, and his friend’s disappearance had hit him particularly hard.

“Com’ere to me, aren’t ya all grown up?” She rubbed Jack’s hands and tousled his hair as though he had just reached adolescence that very day. “You’re the image of your father, God rest his soul,” she said, blessing herself.

“Thank you, Mrs. O’Connor. You look great too,” he said, though it was a lie.

“Ah, I don’t.” She waved her hand dismissively and began to shuffle back toward her ground-floor flat in the high-rise building. Two bedrooms and twelve kids; he wondered how she had managed it. No wonder Alan had spent so much time in the Ruttles’ house, being satiated with food by Jack’s mother.

“Is Alan here? I came to talk to him.”

“No, he’s not. He finally moved in with that young thing. In a house now, wouldn’t you know. He’s only with her because of the house but she only gets it because of her kid, mind you. Fancy houses they get nowadays, the single mothers. I had nothin’ like it in my day, not that I was single, but I was as good as, and all the better for it,” she continued, shuffling to her door.

Jack laughed. Alan was always involved in something, landing on his feet no matter what the circumstances. Donal had named him “The Cat.”

“I won’t disturb you, Mrs. O’Connor. I’ll go over to Alan at the house if that’s OK.”

“You think he done something wrong?” She looked worried.

“Not to me, anyway.” Jack smiled, and she nodded, relief written all over her hard face.

Alan must have received a phone call from his mother, because he was outside in the driveway waiting. He looked thin, thinner than usual, and his face was pale and drawn, paler and more drawn than usual. But didn’t they all, hadn’t everyone and everything been affected by Donal’s disappearance? It was as if, when he left the chipper that night, bumping against the door frames in his drunken state, he had managed to bump the earth off its axis, causing it to swirl at top speed in the wrong direction on the wrong path. Everything felt out of place.

They greeted each other with a hug. Alan immediately began to cry and Jack fought the urge to join him. Instead, he stiffened, allowing the younger man to weep on his shoulder, swallowing back the lump in his throat, blinking back the tears and trying to focus on everything around him that was real and that he could touch—everything except Donal.

They sat in the living room. Alan’s hands shook as he tapped ash from his cigarette into one of the empty beer cans piled alongside the couch. The room was deathly silent; Jack wished they could put on the television as a background distraction.