Darkness, Take My Hand

  Out on Harvard, I blinked into the sudden glare, then looked both ways for Angie, Jason, or the guy with the goatee. Nothing. I walked up to Beacon, but they weren’t there either. Angie and I long ago agreed that the one separated from the chase was the one who went home without the car. So I hummed “O Sole Mio” until I flagged down a cab and rode it back to the neighborhood.

  Jason and the guy with the goatee had met for lunch at the Sunset Grill on Brighton Avenue. Angie photographed them from across the street, and in one shot, the hands of both men had disappeared under the table. My initial assumption was drug deal.

  They split the tab and, back out on Brighton Ave., their hands grazed against each other, and they both smiled shyly. The smile on Jason’s face wasn’t one I’d seen in the previous ten days. His usual smile was something of a cocky smirk, a lazy grin, rife with confidence. But this smile was unaffected, with a hint of a gush to it, as if he’d had no time to consider it before it broke across his cheeks.

  Angie caught the smile and hand-grazing on film. And my assumption changed.

  The guy with the goatee walked up Brighton toward Union Square, while Jason walked back to Bryce.

  Angie and I spread her photos on her kitchen table that night and tried to decide what to tell Diandra Warren.

  This was one of those points when my responsibility to my client was a bit unclear. I had no reason to think Jason’s apparent bisexuality had anything to do with the threatening calls Diandra had received. And I had no reason, on the other hand, not to tell her about the encounter. Still, I didn’t know if Jason was out of the closet or not, and I wasn’t comfortable outing him, particularly when, in that one photograph, I was looking at a kid who, in all the time I’d observed him, looked purely happy for the one and only time.

  “Okay,” Angie said, “I think I have a solution.”

  She handed me a photograph of Jason and the guy with the goatee in which both were eating, neither really looking at the other, but instead concentrating on their food.

  “He met him,” Angie said, “had lunch, that’s all. We show this to Diandra, along with ones of Jason and his women, ask if she knows this guy, but unless she offers, we don’t bring up the possibility of a romance.”

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  “No,” Diandra said. “I’ve never seen this man before. Who is he?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. Eric?”

  Eric looked at the photo for a long time, eventually shook his head. “No.” He handed it back to me. “No,” he said again.

  Angie said, “Doctor Warren, in over a week, this is all we’ve come up with. Jason’s social circle is pretty limited and until this day, exclusively female.”

  She nodded, then tapped the head of Jason’s friend with her finger. “Are they lovers?”

  I looked at Angie. She looked at me.

  “Come now, Mr. Kenzie, you don’t think I know about Jason’s sexuality? He’s my son.”

  “So he’s open about it?” I said.

  “Hardly. He’s never spoken to me about it, but I’ve known, I think, since he was a child. And I’ve let him know that I have absolutely no problem with homosexuality or bisexuality or any possible permutation thereof without mentioning the possibility of his own. But I still think he’s either embarrassed or confused by his sexuality.” She tapped the photo again. “Is this man a threat?”

  “We don’t have any reason to think so.”

  She lit a cigarette, leaned back in her couch and watched me. “So where does that leave us?”

  “You’ve received no more threats or photos in the mail?”

  “No.”

  “Then I don’t see that we’re doing much more than wasting your money, Doctor Warren.”

  She looked at Eric and he shrugged.

  She turned back toward us. “Jason and I are going up to a house we have in New Hampshire for the weekend. When we come back, would you resume watching Jason for just a few more days, put a mother’s mind at rest?”

  “Sure.”

  Friday morning Angie called to say Diandra had picked up Jason and left for New Hampshire. I’d watched him all through Thursday evening and nothing had happened. No threats, no suspicious characters lurking outside his dorm, no liaison with the guy with the goatee.

  We’d worked our asses off trying to identify the guy with the goatee, but it was as if he’d come from mist and to mist he’d returned. He wasn’t a student or teacher at Bryce. He didn’t work at any of the establishments in a mile radius of campus. We’d even had a cop friend of Angie’s run his face through a computer for a felon match, and come up empty. Since he’d met Jason in the open and their meeting had been more than cordial, there was no reason to consider him a threat, so we decided to keep our eyes open until he popped back up again. Maybe he was from out of state. Maybe he was a mirage.

  “So we got the weekend off,” Angie said. “What’re you going to do?”

  “Spend as much of it as possible with Grace.”

  “You’re whipped.”

  “I am. How about yourself?”

  “I’ll never tell.”

  “Be good.”

  “No,” she said.

  “Be safe.”

  “Okay.”

  I cleaned my house and it was short work because I’m rarely there long enough to mess it up. When I came across the “HI!” note and bumper stickers again, I felt a warm prickle begin to knot under the skin at the base of my brain, but I shrugged it off, tossed everything in a cabinet of my entertainment center.

  I called Richie Colgan again, got his voice mail, left a message, and then there was nothing left to do but shower and shave and go meet Grace at her place. Oh happy day.

  As I went down the stairs, I could hear two people breathing heavily in the foyer. I turned the last corner and there were Stanis and Liva, squaring off for round one million or so.

  Stanis was wearing about a half gallon of oatmeal for a hat and his wife’s blowsy housecoat was covered with ketchup and scrambled eggs so fresh they steamed. They stared at each other, the veins in his neck protruding, her left eyelid twitching madly as she kneaded an orange in her right hand.

  I knew better than to ask.

  I tiptoed past and opened the first door, closed it behind me as I entered the small hallway and stepped on a white envelope on the floor. The black rubber strip underneath the front door clamps so tightly over the threshold you’d have an easier time squeezing a hippo through a clarinet than you would sliding a piece of paper under the front door.

  I looked at the envelope. No scuff marks or wrinkles.

  The words “patrick kenzie” were typed in the center.

  I opened the door into the foyer again and Stanis and Liva were still frozen as I’d left them, food on their bodies steaming, Liva’s hand wrapped around the orange.

  “Stanis,” I said, “did you open the door to anyone this morning? In the last half hour or so?”

  He shook his head and some oatmeal fell to the floor, but he never took his eyes off his wife. “Open door to who? Stranger? You think I crazy?” He pointed at Liva. “She crazy.”

  “I show you crazy,” she said and hit him in the head with the orange.

  He screamed, “Aaargh,” or something similar and I backed out quickly and shut the door.

  I stood in the hallway, envelope in my hands, and I felt a greasy swelling of dread in my stomach, though I couldn’t articulate why completely.

  Why? a voice whispered.

  This envelope. The “HI!” note. The bumper stickers.

  None of which are threatening, the voice whispered. At least not overtly. Just words and paper.

  I opened the door, stepped out onto the porch. In the schoolyard across from me, recess was in full swing and the nuns were chasing children around by the hopscotch area, and I saw a boy pull the hair of a girl who reminded me of Mae, the way she stood with her head cocked slightly to one side as if listening for the air to tell her a secret.
When the boy pulled her hair, she screamed and slapped at the back of her head as if she were being attacked by bats, and the boy ran off into a crowd of other boys and the girl stopped shrieking and looked around, confused and alone, and I wanted to cross the avenue and find the little prick and pull his hair, make him feel confused and alone, even if I’d probably done the same thing myself a hundred times when I was his age.

  I guess my impulse had something to do with growing older, with looking back and seeing very few innocent violences committed against the young, in knowing that every tiny pain scars and chips away at what is pure and infinitely breakable in a child.

  Or maybe I was just in a bad mood.

  I looked down at the envelope in my hand and something told me I wasn’t going to be too keen on what I read if I opened it. But I did. And after I read it, I looked back at my front door and its imposing, heavy wood and portal glass fringed by alarm tape and three brass bolt locks gleaming in the late morning sunlight, and it seemed to mock me.

  The note read:

  patrick,

  don’tforgettolockup.

  13

  “Careful, Mae,” Grace said.

  We were crossing the Mass. Ave. Bridge from the Cambridge side. Below us the Charles was the color of caramel in the dying light and the Harvard crew team made chugging noises as they slid along, their oars slicing as clean as cutlasses through the water.

  Mae stood up on the six-inch shoulder that separated the sidewalk from traffic, the fingers of her right hand resting loosely in mine as she tried to keep her balance.

  “Smoots?” she said again, her lips smacking around the word as if it were chocolate. “How come smoots, Patrick?”

  “That’s how they measured the bridge,” I said. “They turned Oliver Smoot over and over again, across the bridge.”

  “Didn’t they like him?” She looked down at the next yellow smoot marker, her face darkening.

  “Yeah, they liked him. Everyone was just playing.”

  “A game?” She looked up into my face and smiled.

  I nodded. “That’s how they got the Smoot measurements.”

  “Smoots,” she said and giggled. “Smoots, smoots.”

  A truck rumbled past, shaking the bridge under our feet.

  “Time to come down, honey,” Grace said.

  “I—”

  “Now.”

  She hopped off beside me. “Smoots,” she said to me with a crazy grin, as if it were our private joke now.

  In 1958, some MIT seniors laid Oliver Smoot end to end across the Mass. Ave. Bridge and declared the bridge to be 364 smoots long, plus an ear. Somehow, the measurement became a treasure to be shared by Boston and Cambridge, and whenever the bridge is touched up, the Smoot markings are freshly painted.

  We walked off the bridge and headed east along the river path. It was early evening and the air was the color of scotch and the trees had a burnished glow, the smoky dark gold of the sky contrasting starkly with the explosion of cherry reds, lime greens, and bright yellows in the canopies of leaves stretched above us.

  “So run this by me again,” Grace said, wrapping her arm in mine. “Your client met a woman who claimed she was the girlfriend of a mob guy.”

  “But she wasn’t, and he has nothing to do with any of this as far as we can tell, and the woman vanished, and we can’t find any record of her having existed in the first place. The kid, Jason, doesn’t seem to have any skeletons in his closet outside of maybe bisexuality, which doesn’t bother the mother. We’ve tracked the kid for a week and a half and come up with nothing but some guy in a goatee who might be having an affair with the kid, but who vanished into the air.”

  “And this girl you knew? The one who was killed?”

  I shrugged. “Nothing. All her known acquaintances have been cleared, even the scumbags she hung out with, and Devin isn’t taking my calls. It’s sort of fuck—”

  “Patrick,” Grace said.

  I looked down, saw Mae.

  “Whoops,” I said. “It’s sort of messed up.”

  “Much better.”

  “Scottie,” Mae said. “Scottie.”

  Just ahead, a middle-aged couple sat on the lawn by the jogging path, a black Scottish terrier lying beside the man’s knee as he petted it absently.

  “Can I?” Mae asked Grace.

  “Ask the man first.”

  Mae walked off the path onto the grass with a slight hesitancy as if approaching a strange, uncharted frontier.

  The man and woman smiled at her, then looked at us and we waved.

  “Is your dog friendly?”

  The man nodded. “Too friendly.”

  Mae held out a hand about nine inches from the head of the Scottie, who still hadn’t noticed her. “He won’t bite?”

  “He never bites,” the woman said. “What’s your name?”

  “Mae.”

  The dog looked up and Mae jerked her arm back, but the dog merely rose slowly on its hind legs and sniffed.

  “Mae,” the woman said, “this is Indy.”

  Indy sniffed Mae’s leg and she looked back over her shoulder at us, uncertain.

  “He wants to be petted,” I said.

  In increments, she lowered her body and touched his head. He turned his snout into her palm, and she lowered herself even more. The closer she got to him, the more I wanted to ask the couple if they were sure their dog didn’t bite. It was and odd feeling. On the danger scale, Scottish terriers fall somewhere in between guppies and sunflowers, but that wasn’t much comfort as I watched Mae’s tiny body inch closer and closer to something with teeth.

  When Indy jumped on Mae, I almost dove at them, but Grace put a hand on my arm, and Mae shrieked and she and the dog rolled around on the grass like old pals.

  Grace sighed. “That was a clean dress she was wearing.”

  We sat down on a bench and watched for a while as Mae and Indy chased each other and stumbled into each other and tackled each other and got up and did it again.

  “You have a beautiful daughter,” the woman said.

  “Thank you,” Grace said.

  Mae came dashing past the bench, hands up at her head, shrieking as Indy nipped at her heels. They went about another twenty yards and then went down in a tiny explosion of grass and dirt.

  “How long have you been married?” the woman asked.

  Before I could answer, Grace dug her fingers into my thigh.

  “Five years,” she said.

  “You seem like newlyweds,” the woman said.

  “So do you.”

  The man laughed and his wife poked him with an elbow.

  “We feel like newlyweds,” Grace said. “Don’t we, honey?”

  “We put Mae to bed around eight, and she dropped off quickly, her fuel supply exhausted by our long walk around the river and her game of tag with Indy. When we came back into the living room, Grace immediately began picking things up off the floor—coloring books, toys, tabloid magazines, and horror paperbacks. The tabloids and books weren’t Grace’s, they were Annabeth’s. Grace’s father died when she was in college, and he left both girls a modest fortune. Grace depleted hers pretty quickly by paying what wasn’t covered by her scholarship during her final two years at Yale, then supporting herself, her then-husband Bryan, and Mae before Bryan left her and Tufts Medical accepted her on fellowship, and she burned through most of what remained on living expenses.

  Annabeth, four years younger, did a year of community college and then blew through the bulk of her inheritence during a year in Europe. She kept photographs of the trip taped to her headboard and vanity, and every one of them was taken in a bar. How to Drink Your Way Through Europe on Forty Grand.

  She was great with Mae, though—made sure she was in bed on time, made sure she ate right and brushed her teeth and never crossed the street without holding her hand. She took her to children’s school shows and to the Children’s Museum and to playgrounds and did all the things that Grace didn’t have time for
while working ninety-hour weeks.

  We finished cleaning up after Mae and Annabeth and then curled up on the couch and tried to find something worth watching on TV and failed. Springsteen was right—fifty-seven channels and nothing on.

  So we shut it off and sat facing each other, legs crossed at the knees, and she told me about her past three days in ER, how they kept coming, the bodies stacking up on gurneys like cordwood in a winter cabin, and the noise level reaching the pitch of a heavy metal concert, and an old woman who’d been knocked over in a purse-snatching and banged her head against the sidewalk holding Grace’s wrists as silent tears leaked from both eyes and she died just like that. Of fourteen-year-old gang members with baby’s faces and blood sluicing off their chests like wet paint as doctors tried to plug the leaks and a baby brought in with a left arm twisted completely backwards at the shoulder joint and broken in three places around the elbow, his parents claiming he’d fallen. Of a crack addict screaming and fighting the orderlies because she needed her next fix and didn’t give a shit if the doctors wanted to remove the knife from her eye first.

  “And you think my job is violent?” I said.

  She placed her forehead against mine. “One more year and I’m in cardiology. One more year.” She leaned back, took my hands in hers, rested them on her lap. “That girl who got killed in the park,” she said, “isn’t connected to this other case, is she?”

  “What gave you that idea?”

  “Nothing. I was just wondering.”

  “No. Just happens we took the Warren case around the same time Kara was murdered. Why’d you think that?”

  She ran her hands up my arms. “Because you’re tense, Patrick. Tenser than I’ve ever seen you.”

  “How so?”

  “Oh, you’re acting real well, but I can feel it in your body, see it in the way you stand, like you’re expecting to get hit by a truck.” She kissed me. “Something’s got you wigged out.”

  I thought of the last eleven days. I’d sat at a dinner table with three psychotics, four if you counted Pine. Then I saw a woman crucified to a hill. Then someone sent me a package of bumper stickers and a “HI!” Then I found the “don’tforgettolockup” note. People were shooting up abortion clinics and subway cars and blowing up embassies. Homes were sliding off the sides of hills in California and falling through the earth in India. Maybe I had reason to be wigged out.