Voices in the Dark (10 page)

“I painted water as if it were gasoline, and in my mind I put a match to it and let the brush do the rest.”

“Looks like the brush didn’t do what you wanted.” He spotted letters scratched into the rough wood of the frame. “Says, ‘Swimmer.’ I don’t see any.”

“There isn’t one, Soldier. Only a face, but you need eyes to see it.”

“Whose face? Yours?”

“Doesn’t matter if you can’t see it.” Much rumbled in her head, but she didn’t let it bother her.

He slid the canvas back into its place and began poking about, disturbing things, prying. His sneakers slithered over a length of tarpaulin to a cluttered table, where he picked up an art magazine and riffled for nudes. Then he turned his attention to a folio of travel photography, some of it exotic. “You been to these places?”

She had never been out of the continental United States; had never been on the ocean, fear of the depths; had never been on a flight, fear of the universe. “My grandmother, not I.”

A watercolor she had done years ago kept her grandmother alive for her, but it was not for his eyes. It showed her grandmother struggling with a corset, a woman warrior donning pink armor, with thighs pocked, starred, and chewed from the rigors of battle.

“I’ve been all over the world,” Soldier said. “Eighteen when I joined the army, thirty-year man when I got out. Little I haven’t seen.”

“Don’t touch that,” she said, for he was opening an old sketch pad, the pages brittle and the edges tattered. She moved swiftly over the tarpaulin but not in time to stop him, and she knew immediately the sketch that engaged him, a painful one of herself at sixteen, the only personal evidence that she had ever been that age. He stared harder.

“Is this you?”

“No.”

“There’s a mark on the cheek, like yours.”

“Then maybe it is.” She slid the pad from his grasp and closed the cover, but he was already snatching up another, not as old but not new. She grabbed it from him and flipped it open. “What do you think of this?”

He tilted his head. “It’s a kid. So what?”

Pastels gave the little Gunner girl a shell pink complexion, quince yellow hair, and Wedgwood eyes, along with a gossamer air, as if the drawing had been done in a false light. The girl could have almost passed as a childhood doll long preserved in tissue and now making a tentative gift of herself. “You don’t know, do you, Soldier?”

Her voice had deepened, and he gave her a curious look. “It’s not you, I know that.”

Her smile was uncanny. “I’ve shared a secret with you,” she said, “and you don’t even know it.”

• • •

Kate Bodine spent the afternoon on the telephone, calls to Boston, each of the television stations, letting people know she wanted to get back in the business, though no one offered hope. Times were tough. Station managers were laying off, not hiring, which of course she had known. Her old boss, a fatherly sort, said, “Otherwise, how are things, Kate?”

She was seated at a little desk in a bow window. Without warning, tears sprang into her eyes, but she kept them out of her voice. “The mere fact I’m alive always excites me.”

“That sounds like you. How’s married life?”

“Fine, Charlie. Sunshine and roses.” She spoke too flippantly, and he was quiet for a few seconds. She ran a finger along the crust of a notepad where pages had been ripped away.

“I’m sorry, Kate. If things change here, you know I’ll keep you in mind.”

“But no promises.”

“You know what promises mean in this business.”

“Then you’re sweet not to make any.”

Consulting a directory, she jotted down the numbers of Boston’s two dailies. She spoke to Driscoll at the
Globe
, afterward to a lesser personage at the
Herald.
Neither, though graciously polite, could offer anything. Each asked about her marriage, and the lies she told tightened the mask on her face.

Later she carried a glass of chablis outside and sat in a canvas chair under a dogwood. The day was still hot. The sun bled. Roses, fed all the right ingredients, luxuriated on a vine. Brick paving girded a riot of flaming hybrid lilies she had planted in the spring. Gardening had produced the only fruit of her marriage.

She had finished her chablis and may have dozed off, for when she raised her eyes she saw her husband. His jacket was off, his tie loosened, and his lips pinched around a cigarette. His footsteps marked the grass. Moving without vitality, he dropped himself into a chair away from hers. She had no idea how long he had been home.

“You surprised me,” she said.

He shrugged. The heat dimmed his eyes, and she was unsure whether he was looking at her or only seeming to.

“That cigarette, Harley, it’s not you.”

“I am what I am,” he said almost inaudibly. “Nothing more, nothing less.”

She tried to recall what she had seen in him, other than that he had been a departure from others in her life, men in love with themselves, a sportscaster for one, a weekend anchor for another. “Help me, Harley. Tell me what’s wrong.”

“If something’s wrong, you tell me.” His tone was distancing, as if she were a stranger.

“Do you want to talk about Glen?”

“Why should I want to talk about him? He’s dead.”

“I know that, Harley. I know that as well as you.”

He leaned an arm over the side of his chair and snuffed out his cigarette. He was constrained, silent; then his face went crooked. “Are you seeing anybody?”

The question, which should not have surprised her, took her aback. “If you’re asking whether I’m having an affair, the answer’s no.”

“If you’re not having one, why are you seeing the police chief?”

She could not stop herself from coloring, for the blood came too fast. She did not want to lie, but neither did she want to reveal anything that was only half true. “I’m not
seeing
him. He’s someone I met at the library, and we chat now and then. That’s as far as it goes.”

“What’s he been asking?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“What do you tell him about me?”

Much more than he would have liked, but she had never mentioned his meanness with money, the way he shortchanged waiters and waitresses, cheated the paperboy, evaded payments to merchants and repairmen, as if everyone were trying to put something over on him. Nor had she mentioned his restlessness in the night, which had driven her into a bedroom of her own.

“Well?”

“What is there to tell?” she said.

“When’s the last time you saw him?”

Her thoughts eddied, and her mind shouted at him to shut up, for she did not want to answer any more questions. “I don’t remember.”

“It couldn’t have been long ago.”

“Maybe it wasn’t.”

“Maybe you don’t want to talk about it.”

She remembered thinking that marriage was the only irrevocable step she had taken in her life, a one-way adventure into a new world, the possibilities boundless. She forced herself to speak. “I’m looking for a job.”

Without comment he looked away. Flying insects, silver-bodied in the sun’s brilliance, swarmed over emerging mums, and bees were at the roses. The humid air was rhythmic with the activity. She lifted herself up. “I’m going in.”

He rose too and approached her. He looked at her with tired eyes and spoke too close to her face. His breath had turned. “How would you like a child?”

“I wouldn’t,” she said.

• • •

Windows were open, and the heat of the day, laced with pollen, lay dense in her bedroom. Emerging from the chaos of a sneeze, she plucked a Kleenex from the night table and blew hard. Wiping her nose, she said, “Put on the air conditioner.”

“No,” he said. “Then we can’t hear anything.”

They were sitting cross-legged and barefoot on her bed, library books between them. She reached behind her head and fantailed her heavy black hair. Her shirt was open, the cups of her inadequate bra overfilled. “I was going to knock on their door last night,” she said, “but they were getting it off.”

“Why shouldn’t they? They’re married.”

“I know, but doesn’t it make you feel kind of itchy? My mom. Your dad.”

“You’re too much, Hannaford.” In private he called her by her surname because it isolated their differences. What he liked best about her was the high promise she carried of her mother’s likeness.

“I wish we had a joint,” she said.

“Your mother would smell it in a minute.”

“Forget her. You worry too much.”

His own mother had died when he was nine. When he was eight, he had seen her in her bath and had waited for God to strike him dead. He had glimpsed the tense line of a breast and had anticipated a thunderbolt.

“What time is she coming home?” he asked.

“How do I know?”

“Where’d she say she was going?”

There was a laugh. “Are you afraid of her, Tony?”

“Don’t be silly,” he said.

“Do you have a thing for her?”

“Cool it, Hannaford.”

He asserted himself by leaning over the books, breathing her air, expanding his chest. She lifted his T-shirt and counted ribs, then pinked his stomach with a sharp finger. He squeezed her feet. Her painted toes glittered like candy. She kicked free, her legs leaping from a denim skirt.

“What do you think of my new panties?”

“Jesus, Hannaford!”

She wasn’t wearing any. Her private hair was a narrow wedge pointed down at a bare cleft, the price paid to accommodate the brevity of swimwear, the currency hot wax. Her brown eyes gained luster as she snapped forward to sweep the books off the bed. “Do you want me to do you?”

He was nervous, apprehensive, his ears wide open for threatening sounds. “Not now. It’s too hot.”

“Then do me,” she said, dropping back.

It was as if she were offering him a cup from which to staunch a thirst. Jaws thrust forward, he felt the growing weight of his head on the back of his neck, with an opposing force coming from the sudden clamp of her hand. He exulted in the thrilling odor of her but twice thought he heard a car and another time footsteps behind him. Still, he brought her off, or perhaps she brought herself off. He was never sure.

“I’d better get out of here,” he said with a fast look at his watch. He leapt away, struggled with his sneakers, then the laces, and grabbed books that were his. She smiled languidly from the bed and scratched an ankle with the toe of the other foot, as if he were no longer essential to a mood or relevant to her life.

“You did your duty,” she said in a teasing tone.

He slipped out of the room, leaving the door ajar. Carpeting in the wide corridor, which soaked up his footsteps, also muted the
plocks
of Regina Smith’s high heels. His breath caught when he saw her round the top of the staircase. Approaching him, she cast fiercely maternal eyes toward her daughter’s room.

“What were you doing in there?”

A book slipped from his grasp. His T-shirt was sweat-soaked. “Talking.”

Her face contorted. “It better not be what I think,” she said and swept past him.

• • •

Chief Morgan crunched the key into the ignition lock and told Dudley, who was sitting beside him, to buckle up. Dudley did so with a vacancy in his smile, as though a major portion of him were on automatic. For no obvious reason, Morgan took the long way around the green, past the post office, the church. As they neared Tuck’s General Store, Dudley pointed. “Fellow in there stutters.”

“You know a lot about us,” Morgan replied. “I wish we knew something about you.”

“Are you really letting me go?”

“That’s the idea.”

There were better routes to Andover, but Morgan meandered onto Summer Street, where dense hedges separated small properties and trellises supported overloads of roses. House fronts, set close to the sidewalk, shone with respectability.

“Some people I haven’t said good-bye to, like those fellows at the fire station.”

“Chub and Zach. I’ll do it for you.”

Morgan made an elbow turn onto Spring Street, where the gory remains of a woodlot animal lay on the road. He drove around it, almost onto the walkway to an old Victorian with gingerbread trim.

“Woman in there was nice to me, gave me a powdered doughnut.”

“I’m glad you didn’t mention that to her husband. He’s the town clerk, the fella who wanted to take you apart.”

Spring Street took them to Ruskin Road, which eventually led them into the Heights, where a yellow trash truck was grinding up the litter of affluence. Grand houses on rolling grounds, some with stone beasts lounging at the gateways, celebrated their worth with balconies and cupolas, arches and columns. An estate of manorial pretensions loomed on a rise.

“People named Gunner live there,” Morgan said with a gesture. “He’s a genius, they say. Three years ago their little girl drowned in the Charles River, Cambridge side.”

“Then that’s where her spirit is.”

“She’s buried here, Bensington.”

“It could be in both places.”

A little later Morgan gestured again, with a slower hand. “The man here lost his son not long ago. The boy, only sixteen, was killed by a subway train in Boston. You must’ve seen it in the papers.”

“I never read those kind of stories.”

“His name was Bodine. That name mean anything to you?”

“No,” Dudley said with a shrug, “but it has a good ring. Could be a character from a historical romance, the sort my mother read. And Gunner. That could be from a World War I poem.”

Several minutes later they crossed the line into Andover, bigger than Bensington in scope and population, with numerous enclaves of affluence. The roads were wider, the traffic swifter, especially on South Main, where overblown development occupied the memory of an apple orchard. Phillips Academy lay ahead, its bell tower a beacon. When they drove by the campus, Dudley looked left and right, for it sprawled on each side of the divided street.

“I went there,” he said.

“You went here?”

He paused. “It may have been Exeter.”

Downtown, Morgan parked across the street from the bus stop and glanced at his watch. “We’ve got a few minutes,” he said and settled back. A knot of young businessmen with a harmony of short haircuts and broad smiles were gabbing near Andover Bank. Outside Brigham’s an elderly couple shared an ice cream cone, one lick for her, two for the old gent. Morgan said, “Do you still have your dollar?”