She didn't know, couldn't remember. All she knew was she, Sarah, and Grace had gotten through the funeral with their dignity intact, but now the funeral was over, her life as a single mom (oh, that horrible phrase) stretched ahead of her, and the cheerful music was driving her mad with sorrow. Every harmonized vocal, each clever George Harrison riff, was a fresh wound. Twice she had gotten up from where she sat at the kitchen table with a cooling cup of coffee in front of her. Twice she had gone to the foot of the stairs and drawn in breath to shout, No more! Shut it off! And twice she had gone back to the kitchen. They were grieving, too.
This time when she got up, Marcy went to the utensil drawer and pulled it all the way out. She thought there would be nothing there, but her hand found a pack of Winston cigarettes. There were three left inside. No, make that four--one was hiding all the way in back. She hadn't smoked since her younger daughter's fifth birthday, when she'd had a coughing fit while mixing the batter for Gracie's cake, and had vowed there and then to quit forever. Yet instead of throwing these last soldiers of cancer out, she had tossed them in back of the utensil drawer, as if some dark and prescient part of her had known she would eventually need them again.
They're five years old. They'll be stale as hell. You'll probably cough until you pass out.
Good. So much the better.
She took one from the pack, greedy for it already. Smokers never stop, they only pause, she thought. She went to the stairs and cocked her head. "And I Love Her" had given way to "Tell Me Why" (that eternal question). She could imagine the girls sitting on Grace's bed, not talking, just listening. Holding hands, maybe. Taking the sacrament of Daddy. Daddy's albums, some bought at Turn Back the Hands of Time, the record store in Cap City, some bought online, all held in the hands that had once held his daughters.
She crossed the living room to the little potbellied stove they lit only on really cold winter nights, and reached blindly for the box of Diamond matches on the nearby shelf, blindly because on that shelf also stood a row of pictures she could not currently bear to look at. Maybe in a month she could. Maybe in a year. How long did it take to recover from the first, rawest stage of grief? She could probably find a fairly definitive answer on WebMD, but was afraid to look.
At least the reporters had gone away after the funeral, rushing back to Cap City to cover some fresh political scandal, and she wouldn't have to risk the back porch, where one of the girls might look out the window and see her renewing her old vice. Or in the garage, where they might smell the smoke if they came out for a fresh bundle of LPs.
She opened the front door, and there stood Ralph Anderson, with his fist raised to knock.
11
The horror with which she stared at him--as if he were some kind of monster, maybe a zombie from that TV show--struck Ralph like a blow to the chest. He had time to see the disarray of her hair, a splotch of something on the lapel of her robe (which was too big for her; maybe it was Terry's), the slightly bent cigarette between her fingers. And something else. She had always been a fine-looking woman, but she was losing her looks already. He would have called that impossible.
"Marcy--"
"No. You don't belong here. You need to get out of here." Her voice was low, breathless, as if someone had punched her.
"I need to talk to you. Please let me talk to you."
"You killed my husband. There's nothing else to say."
She started to swing the door closed. Ralph held it with his hand. "I didn't kill him, but yes, I played a part. Call me an accomplice, if that's what you want. I never should have arrested him the way I did. It was wrong on God knows how many different levels. I had my reasons, but they weren't good reasons. I--"
"Take your hand off the door. Do it now, or I'll have you arrested."
"Marcy--"
"Don't call me that. You have no right to call me that, not after what you did. The only reason I'm not screaming my head off is because my daughters are upstairs, listening to their dead father's records."
"Please." He thought to say, Don't make me beg, but that was wrong because it wasn't enough. "I'm begging you. Please talk to me."
She held up the cigarette and uttered a terrible toneless laugh. "I thought, now that the little lice are gone, I can have a smoke on my doorstep. And look, here's the big louse, the louse of louses. Last warning, Mr. Louse who got my husband killed. Get . . . the fuck . . . off my doorstep."
"What if he didn't do it?"
Her eyes widened and the pressure of her hand on the door slackened, at least for the moment.
"What if he . . . ? Jesus Christ, he told you he didn't do it! He told you as he lay there dying! What else do you want, a hand-delivered telegram from the Angel Gabriel?"
"If he didn't, whoever did is still out there, and he's responsible for the destruction of the Peterson family, as well as yours."
She considered this for a moment, then said: "Oliver Peterson is dead because you and that sonofabitch Samuels had to put on your circus. And you killed him, didn't you, Detective Anderson? Shot him in the head. Got your man. Excuse me, your boy."
She slammed the door in his face. Ralph again raised his hand to knock, thought better of it, and turned away.
12
Marcy stood trembling on her side of the door. She felt her knees go loose, and managed to make it to the bench near the door where people sat when they took off boots or muddy shoes. Upstairs, the Beatle who had been murdered was singing about all the things he was going to do when he got home. Marcy looked at the cigarette between her fingers as if unsure how it had gotten there, then snapped it in two and slipped the pieces into the pocket of the robe she was wearing (it was indeed Terry's). At least he saved me from starting up that shit again, she thought. Maybe I should write him a thank-you note.
The nerve of him coming to her door, after taking a wrecking bar to her family and flailing around with it until all was in ruins. The pure cruel in-your-face nerve of it. Only . . .
If he didn't, whoever did is still out there.
And how was she supposed to handle that, when she couldn't even find the strength to go on WebMD and find out how long the first stage of grief lasted? And why was she supposed to do anything? How was it her responsibility? The police had gotten the wrong man and stubbornly persisted even after checking Terry's alibi and finding it as solid as Gibraltar. Let them find the right one, if they had the guts to do so. Her job was to get through today without going insane, and then--in some future that was hard to contemplate--figure out what came next in her life. Was she supposed to live here, when half the town believed the man who had assassinated her husband was doing God's work? Was she supposed to condemn her daughters to those cannibal societies known as middle school and high school, where even wearing the wrong sneakers could get you ridiculed and ostracized?
Sending Anderson away was the right thing. I cannot have him in my house. Yes, I heard the honesty in his voice--at least I think I did--but how can I, after what he did?
If he didn't, whoever did . . .
"Shut up," she whispered to herself. "Just shut up, please shut up."
. . . is still out there.
And what if he did it again?
13
Most of the folks in Flint City's better class of citizenry thought Howard Gold had been born rich, or at least well-to-do. Although he wasn't ashamed of his catch-as-catch-can upbringing, not a bit, he didn't go out of his way to disabuse those folks. It so happened he was the son of an itinerant plowboy, sometime wrangler, and occasional rodeo rider who had traveled around the Southwest in an Airstream trailer with his wife and two sons, Howard and Edward. Howard had put himself through college, then helped to do the same for Eddie. He took care of his parents in their retirement (Andrew Gold had saved nary a nickel), and had plenty left over.
He was a member of Rotary and the Rolling Hills Country Club. He took important clients to dinner at Flint City's best restaurants (there were two), and supported a dozen different
charities, including the athletic fields at Estelle Barga Park. He could order fine wine with the best of them and sent his biggest clients elaborate Harry & David gift boxes each Christmas. Yet when he was in his office by himself, as he was this Friday noon, he preferred to eat as he had as a boy on the road between Hoot, Oklahoma, and Holler, Nevada, and then back again, listening to Clint Black on the radio and studying his lessons at his mother's side when he wasn't in school someplace. He supposed his gall bladder would put a stop to his solitary, grease-soaked meals eventually, but he had reached his early sixties without hearing a peep from it, so God bless heredity. When the phone rang, he was working his way through a fried egg sandwich, heavy on the mayo, and French fries done just the way he liked them, cooked to a blackened crisp and slathered with ketchup. Waiting at the edge of the desk was a slice of apple pie with ice cream melting on top.
"Howard Gold speaking."
"It's Marcy, Howie. Ralph Anderson was here this morning."
Howie frowned. "He came to your house? He's got no business doing that. He's on administrative leave. Won't be active police again for some time, assuming he decides to come back at all. Did you want me to call Chief Geller, and put a bug in his ear?"
"No. I slammed the door in his face."
"Good for you!"
"It doesn't feel good. He said something I can't get out of my mind. Howard, tell me the truth. Do you think Terry killed that boy?"
"Jesus, no. I told you. There's evidence for it, we both know that, but there's too much against it. He would have walked. But never mind that, he just didn't have such an act in him. Also, there was his dying declaration."
"People will say that was because he didn't want to admit it in front of me. They're probably already saying it."
Honey, he thought, I'm not sure he even knew you were there.
"I think he was telling the truth."
"So do I, and if he was, whoever did it is still free, and if he killed one child, sooner or later he'll kill another one."
"So that's what Anderson put in your mind," Howie said. He pushed away what remained of his sandwich. He no longer wanted it. "I'm not surprised, the guilt-trip is an old police trick, but he was wrong to try it on you. Ralph needs to take some heat for it. A strong reprimand that goes in his jacket, at the very least. You just buried your husband, for God's sake."
"But what he said was true."
Maybe it was, Howie thought, but that begs the question--why did he say it to you?
"And there's something else," she said. "If the real killer isn't found, the girls and I will have to leave town. Maybe I could stand up to the whispers and the gossip if I was on my own, but it isn't fair to ask the girls to do that. The only place I can think of to go is my sister's in Michigan, and that wouldn't be fair to Debra and Sam. They've got two kids of their own, and the house is small. It would mean starting all over again for me, and I feel too tired to do that. I feel . . . Howie, I feel broken."
"I understand that. What is it you want me to do?"
"Call Anderson. Tell him I'll meet with him here at the house tonight, and he can ask his questions. But I want you here, too. You and the investigator you use, if he's free and willing to come. Will you do that?"
"Of course, if it's what you want. And I'm sure Alec would come. But I want to . . . not warn you, exactly, but put you on your guard. I'm sure Ralph feels terrible about what happened, and I'm guessing he apologized--"
"He said he was begging me."
That was sort of amazing, but maybe not entirely out of character.
"He's not a bad man," Howie said. "He's a good man who made a bad mistake. But Marcy, he's still got a vested interest in proving it was Terry who killed the Peterson boy. If he can do that, his career is back on track. If it's never proved conclusively one way or the other, his career is still back on track. But if the real killer turns up, Ralph is finished as a member of the FC police. His next job will be working security in Cap City at half the salary. And that's not even figuring in the suits he might be facing."
"I understand that, but--"
"I'm not finished. Any questions he's got for you have to be about Terry. Maybe he's just flailing around, but it's possible he thinks he's got something that ties Terry to the murder in a different way. Now, do you still want me to set up a meeting?"
There was silence for a moment, and then Marcy said, "Jamie Mattingly is my best friend on Barnum Court. She took the girls in after Terry was arrested at the ballfield, but now she won't answer her phone when I call, and she's unfriended me on Facebook. My best friend has officially unfriended me."
"She'll come around."
"She will if the real killer is caught. Then she'll come to me on her hands and knees. Maybe I'll forgive her for knuckling under to her husband--because that's what happened, count on it--and maybe I won't. But that's a decision I can't make until things change for the better. If they ever do. Which is my way of saying go ahead and set up the meeting. You'll be there to protect me. Mr. Pelley, too. I want to know why Anderson got up enough guts to show his face at my door."
14
At four o'clock that afternoon, an old Dodge pickup rattled along a ranch road fifteen miles south of Flint City, pulling up a rooster-tail of dust. It passed an abandoned windmill with broken vanes, a deserted ranchhouse with glaring holes where the windows had been, a long-abandoned cemetery locally known as the Cowboy Graveyard, a boulder with TRUMP MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN TRUMP painted on the side in fading letters. Galvanized milk cans rolled around in the truckbed and banged off the sides. Behind the wheel was a seventeen-year-old boy named Dougie Elfman. He kept checking his cell phone as he drove. By the time he got to Highway 79, he had two bars, and reckoned that would be enough. He stopped at the crossing, got out, and looked behind him. Nothing. Of course there was nothing. And still, he was relieved. He called his daddy. Clark Elfman answered on the second ring.
"Were those cans out there in that barn?"
"Yuh," Dougie said. "I got two dozen, but they'll have to be warshed out. Still smell like clabbered milk."
"What about the hoss-tack?"
"All gone, Daddy."
"Well, that ain't the best news of the week, but no more than what I expected. What you callin for, son? And where are you? Sound like you're on the dark side of the moon."
"I'm out at 79. Listen, Daddy, somebody been stayin out there."
"What? You mean like hobos or hippies?"
"It ain't that. There's no mess--beercans or wrappers or liquor bottles--and no sign anyone took a dump anywhere, unless they walked a quarter of a mile to the nearest bushes. No campfire sign, either."
"Thank Christ for that," Elfman said, "dry as it's been. What did you find? Not that I guess it matters, nothing left to steal and them old buildings half fallen down and not worth pea-turkey."
Dougie kept looking back. The road looked empty, all right, but he wished the dust would settle faster.
"I found a pair of bluejeans that look new, and Jockey underpants that look new, and some expensive sneakers, them with the gel insides, that also look new. Only they're all stained with something, and so's the hay they was lyin in."
"Blood?"
"No, it ain't blood. Turned the hay black, whatever it was."
"Oil? Motor oil? Somethin like 'at?"
"No, the stuff wasn't black, just the hay it got on. I don't know what it was."
But he knew what those stiff patches on the jeans and underpants looked like; he had been masturbating three and sometimes four times a day since he turned fourteen, using an old piece of towel to shoot his spunk into, and then using the backyard tap to rinse it out when his parents were gone. Sometimes he forgot, though, and that piece of toweling got pretty crusty.
Only there had been a lot of that stuff, a lot, and really, who would jizz off on a brand-new pair of Adipowers, high-class kicks that cost upward of a hundred and forty dollars, even at Wally World? Dougie might have thought about taking them for h
imself under other circumstances, but not with that crap on them, and not with the other thing he'd noticed.
"Well, let it go and just come on home," Elfman said. "You got those cans, at least."
"No, Daddy, you need to get the police out. There was a belt in them jeans, and it's got a shiny silver buckle in the shape of a horse's head."
"That means nothing to me, son, but I guess it does to you."
"On the news, they said that Terry Maitland was wearing a buckle like that when he was seen at the train station in Dubrow. After he killed that little boy."
"They said that?"
"Yes, Daddy."
"Well, shit. You wait there at the crossing until I call you back, but I guess the cops will want to come. I'll come, too."
"Tell them I'll meet them at Biddle's store."
"Biddle's . . . Dougie, that's five miles back toward Flint!"
"I know. But I don't want to stay here." The dust had settled now, and there was nothing to be seen, but Dougie still didn't feel right. Not a single car had passed on the main road since he started talking to his father, and he wanted to be where there were people.
"What's wrong, son?"
"When I was in that barn where I found the clothes--I'd already got the cans by then, and was lookin for that tack you said might be out there--I started to feel all wrong. Like someone was watchin me."
"You just got the creeps. The man who killed that boy is dead as dirt."
"I know, but tell the cops I'll meet em at Biddle's, and I'll take em out there, but I'm not staying here by myself." He ended the call before his father could argue with him.