Confession

  Geof parked in some gravel at the side of the house.

  When he got out of his car and looked up at the house, he had a feeling he’d been there before. After a football game? At a party? Probably, although he wasn’t a jock like Ron. He didn’t hang around with jocks, and he didn’t go to respectable parties, and his recollection of the Mayers was that they were extremely “respectable.” There wouldn’t have been any booze at any party of theirs, which would have eliminated Geof right away, because according to his own testimony he drank like an intake valve back then. And they certainly wouldn’t have had any dope, no drugs, no necking parties, no drunken brawls, nothing that would have attracted Geof’s itinerant attention. If he’d ever been in the Mayers’ house, it would only have been to get kicked out, and when he had that thought, he knew: Yes, he had, indeed, been booted out that baronial front door! And it was, indeed, for arriving for a party with a beer can in his hand.

  Standing in their drive, all these years later, he smiled. The house was also familiar from driving past the cul-de-sac for so many years. He didn’t think any police duty had ever brought him out here. Not that those in this quiet, stately neighborhood didn’t suffer—or commit—illegal acts; they did, including a homicide every quarter century or so, but Geof was sure that he’d never entered this house during any investigation while he was a homicide detective.

  He recalled the family: five brothers, Ron being the oldest, but he couldn’t think of the other brothers’ names. They were blanks to him, as were the parents. He did have a “memory” of elegance, intimidating, forbidding elegance, and propriety, and … godliness. Godliness? Where in hell, he wondered, did he get that word to describe them?

  “Silly bullshit,” he muttered, losing patience with himself.

  He walked up the gravel to the front door and rang their bell.

  There were woods behind the house, cypress rising tall and dark like a living curtain that was always pulled down, hiding whatever was behind it: the next block, other houses, the neighbors. It gave him the same somber feeling he got in the tropics, where big old houses hid among the heavy foliage. Here he was, walking up to the door of an archetypal New England mansion, and yet he wouldn’t have been too surprised to see a lizard dart out of the bushes in front of him or to have a green snake fall from the trees and land near his feet. He half expected to smell magnolia or to look up and glimpse a black maid shaking out a blanket from one of the bedroom windows on the second floor.

  “You are fucking nuts,” he said to himself.

  He rang the bell again.

  In a moment, the door opened to reveal an older woman.

  “How do you do,” she said in the exquisitely polite but frigid way that only proper New England matrons can ever really master. She was in her seventies, Geof decided, straight backed, with white hair that she wore short and straight in a bowl cut, and she stared at him with a stern, questioning expression set in softly lined skin. She was wearing a suit; Geof thought maybe it was linen, white and cool looking. She was tall; standing slightly higher than he was on the front porch she looked him in the eyes. And then he noticed her high heels. Also white. White hosiery that made him think of nurses. He looked at her left hand when she touched her neck. No fingernail polish, though her short nails looked shiny and the cuticles looked immaculately neat and clean. Prominent veins traced paths like blue rivers on the backs of her hands. (Some of these details come from what Geof told me and the rest from my own later observations. Sometimes it’s hard to tell where Geof’s brain leaves off and my own begins.) “Yes?” she said, prompting him to state his purpose, this stranger at her door, this whoever-he-was who hadn’t telephoned first and who now stood gazing at her. “What is it?”

  This time he had identification to show her, rather than a beer.

  “Mrs. Mayer?”

  When she nodded reluctantly, he continued: “Ma’am, I’m Lieutenant Bushfield with the Port Frederick Police Department. I’m sorry to bother you, but there are a few matters, simple questions, that still need to be cleared up in regard to the deaths of your son and his wife.” He paused, looking into gray eyes that had suddenly darkened with surprise and evident pain. “I’m sorry.”

  “That can’t be so!” she protested. Geof thought he saw dread and a mist of tears in the gray eyes. “I can’t believe there’s anything more to say. You people told us you wouldn’t bother us anymore. It was all over, months ago.”

  “I’d like to talk to the boy,” Geof said as an opening gambit. “To David.”

  She held her right hand, palm up toward him. “I won’t allow it.”

  Geof knew how to act as if the other person hadn’t spoken. “Can I find him here, ma’am? Is he living with you now?”

  “No, and don’t expect me to tell you where he is, because I don’t want that child to be bothered.” Her voice held indignation, but her eyes still registered immense pain. “He’s my grandson …”

  “Yes,” Geof said gently. “I know.” He let the silence grow for a moment to let her see that he wasn’t going to go away just because she willed him to. “If I can’t speak to the boy, may I speak to you and your husband? It won’t take more than a few minutes, and right now would be best if you could manage it.” He was a persistent sod, my husband—he’d gotten me to marry him, he’d never given up working on me to agree to have a child, and he wasn’t going to let her get off easily either, not even if she was a grieving grandmother.

  She turned her head as if attentive to some sound within her house. “All right, yes, come in, we’ll talk to you.” For a moment she seemed confused, disoriented, and Geof felt an impulse of sympathy for her and of loathing for himself: her oldest son dead, her daughter-in-law dead, killed by that son. Yes, a grandmother would want to protect the child of that deadly union, would want to defend him against the possibility of being hurt by tactless questions from unfeeling police officers. He watched her gather herself together again, watched her appear to grow ever taller as she drew dignity from a pool deep inside herself.

  She pushed open the screen door to let him in, and he followed her rigid white-clothed back into a living room.

  “Mrs. Mayer,” he said, “did you used to have French Provincial furniture in here?” He recalled a glimpse of white elegance.

  She looked startled. “Why, yes, but that was years ago.”

  A man, taller than she, also white haired and straight backed and wearing a white cotton suit with a white shirt and white summer loafers with white socks, stepped into the living room through a far door. “How did you know that, Lieutenant?”

  “How did you know I’m police?”

  Ronald Mayer, Sr., smiled as he walked forward; Geof thought he’d seen wanner smiles on murderers. “I know who you are, Lieutenant Bushfield. I’ve seen your picture in the paper and your wife’s. I knew your parents slightly. They are Tom and Susanne Bushfield, dear,” he told his wife. “You remember. And his wife is a Cain, the daughter of Margaret and James …”

  “Ah,” she murmured and moved toward a sofa to sit down.

  She motioned for the men to take seats as well.

  Not for the first time, Geof wondered what it would be like to live in a truly big city, like Boston, to be anonymous, to meet in your line of work only strangers who’d never heard of you or of any relative of yours or of your wife’s. In some ways, this was easier, because sometimes the familiarity of living in his hometown established an instant rapport with a lot of people, but sometimes it was harder to keep things official when people insisted on saying things to him like, “So, how’s your old man?”

  “You’re here to see us about …?” Mr. Mayer let it hang.

  It was his wife who replied in a voice barely above a whisper: “David.”

  “David,” the grandfather said heavily, “is supposed to be living with our second eldest son, Matthew, and his wife. That was what we all agreed when Ron and Judy died.” The old man said that without so much as a pause in his breathing
or a stutter over his son’s name or a blink of his narrowed eyes. “But my grandson has a mind of his own. He has decided to disown us all, because he doesn’t like our religion, I gather. Any child who lives with us is expected to go to church, to pray, to attend to certain spiritual duties. We do not, however, chain anyone to a pew.” His lips moved in an ironic smile. “David is only a few months away from being of legal age, and he’s a mature boy, capable of surviving on his own. Since that appears to be what he wishes to do, we have acceded to his wishes. I don’t say we like it. My wife, especially, finds this very hard. We wish he would at least call us now and then or live someplace where it would be easier for us to contact him, but he seems to want to cut us off, and we can’t force the pieces back together again. Not until he’s ready.” He looked at Geof directly. “Now. Is there anything else you want to know about David?” There wasn’t any questioning inflection at the end of that sentence, it was a statement, a challenge, as if to say, There, I have met your questions before you asked them.

  But Geof was not so easily fobbed off. “What about your late daughter-in-law’s family?”

  The Mayers didn’t respond.

  “Could he be living with any of them?” Geof prodded.

  “Impossible,” Mr. Mayer said quickly, just as his wife was saying, “There’s only his other grandmother, and she’s …”

  “Unsuitable,” her husband pronounced as if finishing his wife’s sentence for her. “Mrs. Baker—Annabelle Baker, Judy’s mother—is a businesswoman, far too busy to take care of a teenage boy.”

  “Then where does he live?” Geof insisted.

  “In a boarding house downtown, I’ll give you the address.”

  “No …” Mrs. Mayer raised her hands as if pleading with her husband, but then surrendered, crossing her hands over her chest. Her husband glanced over at her for a long moment, then looked back at Geof. “Perhaps you think I am uncaring, but you can see that my wife is very concerned about the boy.”

  An interesting sentence, Geof thought, with its emphases, its omissions. He felt an urge to rattle the old man out of his arrogance. He wanted suddenly and deeply to know what words or emotions might cascade out of the woman on the couch if something were to nick the skin of her dignity. He looked for a resemblance to David in both of them and thought he found it, unfortunately, in the old man’s haughtiness, the old woman’s stiffness of posture. Suddenly he was thankful for the kid’s heat and fury; at least David Mayer still had passion, nobody had successfully chained that down yet. Geof sought Mrs. Mayer’s gaze and asked her, “Do you believe that your son killed Judy and then killed himself?”

  It worked so well that he nearly felt ashamed of himself. It elicited an odd sound, like a grunt, from the old man and it made her suck in her breath and then to exclaim, “No! No! I never did believe it! But I’m only his mother.”

  “Why do you ask that now, Lieutenant?”

  But her voice, which had dropped nearly to a whisper before, overrode her husband’s, growing loud, bitter, even while she avoided her husband’s stare. “No one in this family trusts my opinion about my children!”

  “There’s no reason to doubt the sad facts, Lieutenant.”

  Geof ignored her husband, too, and told her quietly, “Try me. Why didn’t Ron do it, Mrs. Mayer?” He could see in her eyes that she appreciated the fact that he had not said, “Why do you believe Ron didn’t do it,” that instead, he was willing to consider her opinion as possible fact Nevertheless, her gaze wavered, and she seemed suddenly much less definite, more vague and tentative than she had at any moment since she’d first opened the door to him.

  “He just wouldn’t,” she said. “He couldn’t.” Her face was flushed beneath her careful makeup as if she knew how clichéd she sounded and she felt humiliated by it, as if she knew that she sounded exactly like the typical mother of a criminal as she loyally and desperately denied the demonstrable fact of her child’s guilt. It sounded so lame. Geof was disappointed in her; he’d hoped for better from her, not just a mother’s wishful thinking.

  “My wife,” said the old man, recalling Geof’s attention to himself, “will always believe that.” His stare seemed to defy Geof to say anything that might disturb a mother’s touching trust in her dead son.

  “And you, sir?”

  “What about me?”

  “Do you think your son did what they say?”

  “They?” Mr. Mayer laughed contemptuously. “The ‘they’ you speak of is your own police department. ‘They’ are you.” When Geof didn’t rise to any defense, the old man said, “I believe my son was a loving husband who was under more strain than any of us will ever experience and that he finally did what he sincerely believed in his heart was the right thing to do.”

  Mrs. Mayer moaned, a harsh and shocking sound in that proper room. Geof had a sudden mental image of a wild creature confined to a cage. When he looked over at her, he saw only a woman whose face was held rigidly neutral and whose hands were clenched at her sides on the couch, and he wondered if he had only imagined the strange, brutal sound that could only have escaped against her will. And then he saw her knuckles: white as her hair, white as her clothes. Her face was milked of color, too, her cheeks sunken, her skin loose against her bones. David’s grandmother looked bloodless, a corpse propped upright and beautifully dressed upon a couch.

  He had to drag his gaze away from her.

  He asked her husband one more time: “Was it, Mr. Mayer? The right thing for Ron to do?”

  The old man seemed shaken, either by the question or by the visible transformation in his wife. Geof felt as if something had actually managed to provoke authentic feeling in the old son of a bitch. A flash of agony passed across Ronald Mayer, Sr.’s face, as if somebody had stabbed him, but then he said in a hard voice that hammered each word as if it were a nail in his son’s coffin, “I believe in hell.”

  The terrible words hung in the room. Even the old man sank down a bit in his seat, his head hanging slightly as if his neck had lost the strength to hold it upright. His wife got to her feet shakily and walked slowly out of the living room, holding onto the backs of the furniture and then touching walls, doorsills, banisters, to support her way. She looked as if she had aged a hundred years since the moment when she first opened the door to Geof, and he nearly had to sit on his own hands to keep himself from rushing to her, putting his arm around her, assisting her. Her own husband didn’t move, but he watched her leave. In the silence of the big house, Geof heard her quiet footsteps slowly ascending the stairs in the main hallway.

  Geof stood up. “Mr. Mayer, do you have any reason to think that the deaths of your son and his wife occurred in any way that is different from the finding of murder/ suicide?”

  “No,” the old man muttered, still gazing toward the stairway.

  “Does anyone in your family doubt the finding?”

  “No!” Now the proud face raised, and blue eyes glared at Geof. “Do you think we wouldn’t doubt it if we could? Do you think we want to have a dead son, a dead brother, who committed deadly sins? Why are you asking these questions? Do you have doubts? For God’s sake, and I mean that literally, for the sake of God who desires for his son Ronald to return to him in heaven, tell me what they are! Let my wife have some hope that our son is not the worst kind of sinner who is damned to eternal torment! For God’s sake, man!”

  “It is our policy,” Geof prevaricated, “to take a second look at all major crimes at some time after they have been solved in order to confirm that we came to the right conclusions at the time. Hindsight gives us perspective. It can be a disturbing process, but we feel that it’s necessary for effective law enforcement. I’m sorry to have upset your wife.”

  That last part, he meant sincerely. He didn’t know where the first part came from.

  He turned to leave the room, knowing his good-bye wasn’t needed or wanted. But the old man’s voice followed him. “You didn’t answer my question. Have you been in this house before
, Lieutenant?”

  Geof turned around again, smiled. “Not quite.” He hesitated. “I was a friend of Ron’s. I came here for a party sometime.”

  “No, you weren’t a friend of his.”

  “Really, Mr. Mayer?”

  The old man got up, seeming to regain vigor with every movement. He barely bothered to glance at Geof as he spoke, leaving the room by the back doorway through which he had entered. “I made sure I knew all of Ron’s friends. I would never have allowed him to be friends with a boy like you.”

  Geof was left regarding an empty room.

  As he climbed back into the Jeep, he thought about me, and he wondered if I was having any luck in finding David that day.

  12

  AT THAT MOMENT, I WAS FEELING AS IF I could ride on the back of that motorcycle for the rest of my life. My body swayed with the turns in the road, my hips melted into the seat, my legs loosely held the sides of the bike and my feet sat on the pedals as comfortably as the toes of a queen touching the floor of her throne. Within a few windy miles of being out on the highway leaving town, I felt as at home on that bike as a country girl riding bareback behind her friend on a horse. The thrust of the engine threw me into another world, one in which everything flew by as if it didn’t matter—all decisions, deadlines, worry. Nothing existed but the warmth flowing from David’s back and the heat crawling up my legs from the bike and the sun on my back. There was nothing in the world anymore except the hand of the wind caressing my cheek and lifting the hairs on my bare arms and pillowing my T-shirt out in back. There was only the smell of honeysuckle when we passed by patches at the side of the highway and oniony freshcut grass and the smell of horses in meadows and the smell of hot melting pavement under our wheels. The world came down to movement and sensation; there was no more thinking, no emotion except exhilaration, no intuition. There was only what information came in by way of my tongue and skin and nose and eyes and ears, and all of it was good news. On the back of the bike, there was no bad news, there were no wars, no accidents, no pain or anxiety, there was only liquid happiness that roared in my ears like a constant waterfall. The sound was like a powerful surf that only came in and never ebbed. On the back of a motorcycle, I discovered a tide that was always in, full of mystery and treasure; the wind washed around my ankles just like the sea soaks the legs of a playing child. I was the child, and the grown-up on that bike was the teenage boy who rode in front of me, the kid who drove now with such panache, such sureness, such adult confidence, such a magical combination of aggression and lightness of touch upon the road. Or maybe he was driving just the same as he had in town; maybe I was the one who’d changed from a frightened passenger to an easy rider.