Voices in the Dark (21 page)

When it was over, he lay with his head high in her husband’s pillow, his prick still a post, an emblem of prosperity. The whole of summer, he knew without a doubt, would be wrapped in this single evening, fat and succulent, oozing its own juice.

“Don’t look so smug.”

“This is more than I expected,” he said.

“It may not have been what I intended.”

He touched her. She was open. “Like the comb of a rooster,” he said.

“How’s your shoulder?”

“Burning.”

“There are risks in everything.”

“Perhaps I know that better than you,” he said.

The room was dark, a breeze billowing the curtains, when the shrill of the phone jolted them. Like before, she let it ring and ring. When it stopped, he said, “What does Ira mean to you?”

“Nearly everything, but he’s let me down.”

“How?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“Try me.” He felt they could say anything to each other now, reveal any secret with no fear of censure or loss of stature.

“It’s about my stepson,” she said.

“What about him?”

“He’s a toad in my house.”

• • •

“Am I calling at a bad time?”

“He’s not here, if that’s what you mean.”

“Are you writing?”

“It’s more like I’m kidding myself.”

“Tell your husband I won’t be bothering him anymore. Tell him … I’m sorry.”

“Have you scared me for nothing, James? Are you saying you were wrong?”

“I’m telling you I don’t know where the truth lies and probably never will.”

“Where does that leave me?”

“I don’t know, Kate. I don’t even know where it leaves me.”

When he put the phone down, his face was drawn, his head heavy. Alone in the small kitchen of his house, he ghost-walked to the refrigerator and held the door open longer than needed because he enjoyed the cool. At the table he ate cheese on crackers, drank dark beer, and read an article in a police magazine detailing crimes in which the perpetrators walked the streets because the evidence never fell into place, too many missing pieces. Thumbnail photos showed detectives, some retired, haunted by their frustrations.

He felt little in common with them, instead picturing himself as someone who, occasionally aflame with empty purpose, sees life only from the tail of his eye. With comfortable creases in his face, with still no gray in his hair, of which he was inordinately proud, he looked as if nothing bothered him when nearly everything did. He was clearing the table when the telephone rang.

A woman said, “Are you investigating something?”

The voice was unfamiliar, perhaps disguised, a flavoring agent added to it. A woman named Bowman used to call the station and ask for Chief Cock. Christine Poole, who still lived in the Heights, would lower her voice so that she sounded like a man.

“Hello?”

“Yes, I’m here,” he said. “Who is this, please?”

“Can’t you answer my question?”

He was dealing with a crank, he was sure. And not sure. A quality of desperation lurked in the voice. “What investigation are you referring to?”

“This one.”

“Which one?”

“Please,” she said, “could we meet somewhere? Maybe we know different things. We could put them together.”

He looked at his watch, seven exactly, time for the network news. “Where do you want to meet?” he asked, true to form, ready to pluck evidence from the wind instead of from reality.

“Away from town,” she said quickly.

“There’s a place called Rembrandt’s in Andover, right off the square. We could meet in the lounge.”

“What time?” Her voice sounded giddy.

“Eight all right?”

“I’ll be there.”

“How will I know you?”

“I’ll come naked.”

9

THEIR TABLE WAS A SMALL ONE AGAINST THE WALL. CHIEF Morgan glugged Heineken beer into a frosted glass. “Are you sure you won’t have something?” he asked.

“Positive.”

“You’re not naked.”

“I thought better of it.”

A wide-brimmed straw hat, aided by dark glasses, gave her the parody of a Garbo look. All he could see of her face was the tip of her nose, the movement of her mouth, and the softness of her chin. “You’re Mrs. Gunner,” he said.

“Once,” she said, “for a very thrilling moment, I considered lacing his soup with weed killer.”

“Whose soup?”

“My husband’s.”

A maroon paper doily stuck to the bottom of his glass. The cold beer iced his throat. “Could you take off your hat, Mrs. Gunner? And you don’t really need those glasses.”

She did as she was asked, without fuss. Her shell of hair fell loose on one side. Her hand went to her brow. She was off color, a touch of something. “Maybe I will have a drink.”

A glass of white wine was delivered. The waitress, a sprightly Frenchwoman who frequently chatted with Morgan when he was there alone, sensed drama and vanished quickly.

“He won’t allow me to give meaning to my daughter’s life.”

“Why not?”

“Perhaps because he feels it had none.”

“I understand she was retarded,” he said gently.

“No, Chief Morgan, she was special. She went to a special school, here in Andover. I drove her there every day and picked her up at three-thirty. He
never
did.”

“Tell me about her death.”

“A class trip to Cambridge, a picnic on the bank of the Charles, and my Fay wandered off. Someone should have been watching, but no one was. They found her in the river.”

He started to speak and stopped himself. Tables near them stood vacant. A cluster of couples at the far corner of the bar were joking with the bartender.

“I’m sorry,” she said. Tears had made her face a torn thing. With a napkin she blotted one eye and then the other. “Paul sued the school. Harley Bodine negotiated a settlement, and Paul gave it all to charity in Fay’s name. It was the only good thing he did.”

“What do you mean?”

“He wasn’t sad at the funeral. He only pretended to be. A wife knows.”

Morgan sipped his beer. He waited. When he felt it was safe, he said, “Do you have any reason to think Fay’s death might not have been accidental?”

“What else could it have been? I want you to tell me.”

He lifted the Polaroid of Dudley from his shirt pocket and handed it over. She looked at the back to see if anything was written on it. Nothing was. She turned the front of it to the light and, peering hard, held it this way and that.

“I’ve never seen him before, but I feel I have. Who is he?”

“He may be no more than a vagrant, one of those crackpots who read newspapers and intrude into other people’s tragedies.”

“Please.” Her features tightened. “Be honest with me.”

He feared telling her too much, fearing she couldn’t handle it, but he told her everything, suspicions only mildly tempered by doubts, thoughts with flimsy claims on logic, purging himself of speculations not entirely consistent or reasonable. All the while he watched her closely and hoped to God he wasn’t feeding a fire, placing arson among his crimes.

When he finished, she was quiet, removed. Finally she said, “Are you on my side, Chief Morgan?”

He knew the proper response, the one a real policeman would be obliged to give. He gave, instead, his own. “Yes, I am.”

They were, it now seemed, snarled in each other’s existence. She said, “For years I’ve wished it possible to rent someone’s kindness for an evening, long enough to get me into a sleep so sound no dream would be remembered. Do you know what I’m talking about, Chief Morgan?”

He knew only of a loneliness that could strike without warning, even with companions at his side. “Don’t you want your wine?”

“I want something stronger. A gin and tonic.”

He ordered her one, and soon she wanted another. “Sometimes,” she said, “I make myself fall into a mood in which my mother and father are still alive and my brother rides his bicycle around the block. My brother’s in the leather business and travels around the world, China, South Africa, everywhere. In Poland, he says, the coffee is a pretense, the milk chunky, and the water unfit. Their cigarettes tear at your lungs. Do you mind if I smoke?”

He lit the cigarette for her, concern in his eyes. “Does your husband know you’re here?”

“I do things on my own now.”

He waited for her to say more, to tell him what was now in her head. Her thoughts were still on her brother, from whom she received postcards, seldom a phone call, so many demands on his time. She understood. She understood much, she said.

A while later she said, “I’m perfectly fine, but you may have to drive me home.”

He used the phone at the bar to call Sergeant Avery, who was off duty and at home. In a low voice he said, “I want you to pick me up in twenty minutes, in the Heights. I’ll be on the street near the Gunners’ house.”

“Sure, Chief. What’s up?”

“Just do as I say, Eugene.”

When he returned to the table, she was on her feet, stiff and deliberate in her stance, her hat held flush against her leg. Leaving the lounge, she accepted his arm trustingly. The night sky was rose-tinged. “All falling stars are named Icarus,” she said and surrendered the keys to her car, a blue Volvo that still smelled brand-new when he opened the passenger door for her.

“Beautiful automobile,” he said.

“If it were in my name, I’d give it to you.”

He stepped around to the driver’s side and climbed in. It took him a few moments to sort out the right key and to find the ignition switch. She smiled, offering no help, giving him no clue of what was percolating through her brain. She sat collected, bound up, the smile incongruous, as if she didn’t know it was there.

When he ran the car onto the street, she said, “I’d like to talk to the man in the picture.”

“I don’t have him in custody at the moment.”

“You let him go?”

“I can round him up.”

The drivers of two Camaros poised at a set of lights were trying to out-rev each other. When the lights flashed green, one Camaro blasted off with a blood-curdling screech that brought to Morgan’s mind flares around a highway tragedy. He drove around the other Camaro, which had stalled.

Beverly Gunner said, “I wonder how many killers lurk in my husband’s ancestry.”

• • •

They walked the beach in the darkening air, and people strolling by them knew they were lovers, young and glorious creatures tuned a pitch higher than anyone else. Glossy black hair and vanilla skin, Patricia wore an open white shirt over her bikini. Anthony, bare-chested, unyieldingly slim, pushed fair hair from his eyes. The beach was aluminum under a glassy moon. It was high tide. Waves heaved and surged, thundered when they broke.

“Do you think your mother believed you?”

“She expects to be lied to,” Patricia replied.

“Why do you say that?”

“My dad lied to her, all the time. He was unfaithful. That’s why she divorced him.” The crash of a wave dismembering itself hurled up an arc of spray. In the salt breeze Patricia’s white shirt floated behind her. “Would you lie to me, Tony?”

“Why would I want to?”

“Boys like to.”

“I have no need.”

Up ahead ghostly figures were poised in the mist of the surf. Patricia stopped in her tracks. Kneeling, she scooped up sand and shifted it from hand to hand, some of it sifting through her fingers. “I’d like to stay longer.”

“That would be pushing it.”

She went quietly, entranced by the way each muscular wave, like a lover, reared up, crested white, and hesitated inside a shiver before collapsing. Anthony was looking up at the night sky, at the flashlight quality of stars.

“Mr. Pitkin says if the big bang theory is correct, the universe is simply far-flung debris with a lot of fires still burning.”

“Tell your Mr. Pitkin I only know about the fire below,” she said, rising with sand printed on each knee. Her voice deepened. “We’ll be going back to school soon. I won’t see you.”

“We can write, talk on the phone.”

“It’s not the same. Tony, what do I mean to you?”

“A lot. Why are you asking this stuff?”

She moved close to him. “Don’t you know?”

“Know what?”

“How much I love you.”

He looked disturbed, embarrassed. “I thought you were just playing with me.”

“It’s not play. It’s me, Tony. Everything I do is a way to get your attention.”

Their bellies touched. She had sand on hers, which grated on his. Waves rousting pebbles gave out a language, and water spumed over their feet. She kissed his shoulder and licked the skin for the taste of tanning lotion.

“Please, Tony, let’s stay through the weekend.” They had a room at the Dunes, a motel on the boulevard with a public dining room that served a variety of pancakes, a choice of several syrups. “We could go back on Monday.”

“Your mother would kill us.”

“How long will we be young, Tony?” She held him in the depths of her dark eyes. “How long will we be able to do this?”

Regina Smith stiffened and turned her head on the pillow. Harley Bodine had fallen asleep, his face visible in a patch of light from the bathroom. She shook him awake. “You’d better go.”

“What time is it?”

“I don’t know. Late.”

He rubbed an eye.

“Move, Harley. You have a wife waiting.”

His big toe touched her heel. “You’re my wife.”

“Don’t talk nonsense.”

“You know something, Regina? Kate was never for me, I only thought she was. I’ve never really been comfortable with her.”

“For better or worse, Harley, that’s how it’s supposed to work. If you can’t hack it, that’s your problem.”

He flung an arm over her. “May I see you again? Soon?”

“It’s something to think about,” she said.

“You’re still on my face and fingers.”

“Then you’d better have a wash.”

“No, it stays.”

“At least comb your hair.”

“I’ll have to use Ira’s comb.”

She watched him rise reluctantly in a new temper of circumstance and movement. He swayed on his feet. “Don’t leave hairs in it,” she said.

Later, when he was finally gone, she slipped from the bed and pattered into the bathroom with a pleasurable lightness. A large mirror gave her a lurid and fantastic look at herself. A feminine solution, antiseptic and odorless, left her smarting and clean. She felt her own eyes commenting on herself, making statements, judgments, all of which she could live with.