Confession

  “Well, thank God!” The woman had tossed her shears to the lawn and come up behind the man. Now she stood with her hands on her hips, her legs apart, nodding her head at us. “It’s about time!”

  “What Mom means,” the man said, looking a little embarrassed, “is that we can’t keep this up forever, looking out for David’s property the way we’ve been doing since his parents died. Somebody ought to help him sell it if he isn’t going to live here.” He smiled hopefully at us. “We’ve been glad to pitch in with the yard maintenance and to watch out for the property, please don’t misunderstand us, we’re more than happy to help David, but it’s a lot of work, you know, keeping up our home”—he gestured to a dignified dowager of a Colonial in Harvard crimson and white to the immediate south—“and this one, too.”

  His mother muttered, “Too damn much work.”

  They seemed to be assuming a certain amount of knowledge on our part, a mistake we were willing to let them make. She had on cotton gardening gloves and now she pulled off the right one and stuck out that hand first to me, then to Geof. “Please excuse the grime. Will you please tell David that we don’t mean to push him a moment sooner than he’s ready, because God knows he’s been through hell, but either he’s got to take over this yard or he’s got to hire somebody to do it. We’ve tried to be understanding, but we’ve been doing this all spring and summer now—keeping the lawn mowed, trimming the bushes, plucking the weeds, even taking off that damned mean graffiti—and it’s getting to be too much for the two of us to handle. I hope the boy will understand and that he won’t take offense, because there’s certainly none intended. Will you please tell him that?”

  “Other people help,” the man corrected her in a gentle, chiding tone. He had a softer way about him than she did, not effete, just unusually patient and pleasant Up close, I saw that he was younger than he’d appeared at first, probably only in his thirties, with a balding crew cut, a trim body, and a quite ordinary face, intelligent looking, but not remarkable in any way. I could have passed him a dozen times in the grocery store and never have recognized him from one time to the next as anybody I’d ever seen before. She looked twenty or thirty years older, with stronger features, a bolder manner, a louder voice. There was something straightforward and honest about her that I liked.

  “Help? Not so’s you’d notice, not much anymore,” she retorted, sounding ready to argue about it with him. This had the feel of an old quarrel, although how old could it be, because the Mayers had been gone for only a few months? “And I, for one, don’t blame them!” she continued, wiping at her forehead with one hand. Sweat ran down into the deep bosom of her yellow tank top. “I’d quit doing this, too, if I didn’t have such a saint for a son.” She threw him an affectionately sour look, which he received with a small smile that wrinkled the corners of his eyes and reddened the skin above his cheekbones.

  “The boy still needs our help, Mom.” He said it patiently.

  “That boy’s needed help for some time now.” She glanced at us as if to make sure we’d caught her emphasis on the word help. “And before that it was his mother who needed so much help and before that it was his father … most helpless family I ever met.” Again, that sardonic glance at us. “And let me ask you this, my sainted son. If you didn’t help the child, who is really no child at all, but a teenager, nearly a full-grown man who has family of his own who ought to be doing these chores instead of you and me, he’d have to help himself, now wouldn’t he?”

  The man glanced at us, looking embarrassed again.

  “Graffiti?” Geof said.

  I had to hide a smile. He was a cop, sho’ nuff, even if he hadn’t as yet revealed that fact to these people.

  “Please don’t tell David,” the man said.

  “Teenagers can be so mean sometimes,” his mother said.

  “Mom, we don’t know it was teen—”

  “Damon, for heaven’s sake!” She glanced at me as if counting on understanding from another woman. “Who else would it be? No adult in his right mind would do anything like that! Honestly, dear, sometimes you are so determined to see the good in people that you don’t even recognize the knife in their hand when it’s coming at you!” To Geof and me, she invited, “Come on, I’ll show you where the last of the graffiti was. But Day’s right about one thing at least—don’t tell the boy. It would be terribly hurtful to him, I’m sure.”

  We followed her up to the house, and there we observed that a block of blue-gray paint, about three feet tall by five feet wide, looked fresher than the rest.

  “What did it say?” I asked her.

  “It was an equation,” she said promptly, “written like a math problem, you know? One time what it said was, Three minus two equals one.”

  It took Geof and me both a second to grasp it, and then I exclaimed, “Oh, no,” feeling the hurt of it. Geof’s face went stoic, all in an instant.

  “More than once?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Damon spoke up from behind us, sounding wounded on David’s behalf. Unnecessarily, he translated the equation for us: “A family of three, minus both parents, equals one lonely child. Isn’t that terrible? We’ve seen graffiti like that three or four times since they died, isn’t that right, Mom?”

  “What else did it say?” Geof asked.

  “Oh, there’s been, let’s see, one plus one equals none—”

  Again, I couldn’t restrain an exclamation of dismay.

  “Yes, it’s quite cruel,” Damon said in a gentle voice, and again he translated the obvious for us: “The death of one parent plus the death of one parent equals no parents. There was also two times zero equals zero, which I believe was probably supposed to mean that when you multiply two times zero parents you still don’t have any parents. You’re still an orphan. And there was two into two equals zero.”

  “Two into two equals zero?” I said, not getting it.

  “We couldn’t figure that one out either,” his mother told me. “It’s always somewhere on the house, spray painted, always in red, which is so difficult to cover over—”

  “And a bit of particularly awful nastiness,” he interjected.

  “Yes,” she agreed. “It always happens at night, of course, when nobody’s watching. We’ve talked about posting a guard, staying up every night until we nab them, but somehow we just haven’t done it—”

  “The two of you?” I asked her.

  “And some of the other neighbors,” her son said. “The ones who’ve known David since he was a little boy, the ones who remember him … before …” His voice trailed off. He and his mother exchanged glances. I assumed they meant: before the boy’s parents died.

  “Have you reported this?” Geof asked.

  “Somebody has,” the man said. “I’m sure.”

  “Damon!” His mother was exasperated again. “Didn’t you ever check?”

  “Well, no, I trusted somebody would—”

  “Oh, you! The somebody should have been you or me!”

  As his mother probably did, I suspected this might be an instance of “everybody” thinking that “somebody” had done the job, when actually nobody ever did, like the times when the power goes off in a neighborhood and everybody assumes that “surely” all the other neighbors have called the electric company, and so they all go without lights for a while longer than necessary.

  “I guess we’ll take a look inside,” Geof said to me as if he’d only just thought of it. And to the neighbors, he said politely, vaguely, “It’s so kind of you to help out. We’ll try to talk to David about it. I might need to come back and discuss it with you some other time …”

  “Of course,” Damon said. “I’m always home.”

  I wondered what that meant. Did he work at home?

  “I’m going back to my hedges,” his mother announced. “Nice of you folks to come by … How do you know David?”

  “My husband knew David’s mother quite well,” I said.

  Geof grasped my elbow again. I t
hought his touch was a bit tight this time. “I didn’t catch your last names,” he said.

  “Montgomery,” she called back over her shoulder. “I’m Sheila.”

  Damon Montgomery stuck with us, following us up the walk and around to the south side of the house to the back door. “Why didn’t we just go in the front door?” I asked, then regretted it. Maybe there was some police reason for the fact that Geof was leading us around to the rear. But he easily covered my gaffe by saying, “I wanted to check out the house all the way around.”

  I noticed nothing remarkable on our way. It didn’t really look like a vacant house, especially when I stared in the windows and saw furniture.

  “Look here,” Damon Montgomery said suddenly just as Geof and I were walking single file up a wooden wheelchair ramp to a wide back stoop. We both turned and looked back down at the neighbor. “The thing of it is, I’ve got to warn you about something that even my mother doesn’t know. It may be pretty … unpleasant … inside.” He gave a little shudder even with the fading sun still pouring its heat down on us. In response, I felt the hair rise on my own neck, and goose pimples sprouted on my sweating forearms. “I don’t think the place has ever been cleaned up. I mean, I don’t think anybody ever sent a crew of any sort to clean up, well … afterward.”

  I felt clammy and knew my eyes had widened like an ingenue’s.

  “What?” Even the cop looked nonplussed.

  “I haven’t even told Mom,” Montgomery confessed to us, “because I’m afraid she might think we ought to go in and clean it up ourselves, and frankly, I couldn’t stand it. I think it would break my heart. As you may know, I was very close to Judy, she was probably my best friend, and I don’t think I could stand to go in there.”

  I wondered why he thought we might know that, and then I remembered: Oh, right, he thinks Geof and Judy were friends. Well, that was one way of looking at their relationship, I supposed. They were, at one time, close.

  “Anyway, I haven’t known what to do about it, about the fact that nobody’s been here to clean up. I don’t have a number to call to reach David, he was supposed to go live with those awful relatives, those”—suddenly, he laughed a little wildly—“godawful relatives! But he didn’t, so I don’t know where he is. Listen here, I’m … sorry. I feel kind of responsible now, having this knowledge and not doing anything about it. I hope it won’t be awful for you in there.”

  “No one’s been here?” Geof still sounded unbelieving.

  “I don’t think so,” Montgomery said. “I could be wrong.”

  I looked at Geof, and he glanced at me with the same thought showing in his expression that I felt in mine: God, let’s hope so. We watched the man lope away from us. Even from the back, he looked embarrassed, dejected, kind of sad and lost.

  “Do you think he knows about me?” Geof asked me as he put the key in the lock in the storm door at the back of the Mayers’ house. The doorway was extra wide; like the ramp leading up to it, it was designed for wheelchair access. “He said they were best friends.”

  “No, he said she was his best friend.”

  “There’s a difference?”

  “Yes, it means he tells her everything, but it doesn’t mean she necessarily tells him everything.”

  “Told.”

  “Yes.”

  “What would I do without you?”

  I was tempted to ask him to find that out: He sounded perfectly calm, this was all in a day’s work for him, but I was really dreading the moments to come. I knew I could back out, I could let him go in without me. In other circumstances—okay, other murders, if you will—I would have done that. I’m no cop; I don’t have to do these nasty things. But this one was different, it was personal for him. I knew he could do it alone, but I didn’t want him to, I didn’t think he should have to.

  The lock worked, turned. Geof pulled at the storm door. The handle was lower down than usual to make it easier for a woman hi a chair to grasp, and when he opened it, it stayed open. It appeared to have special hinges to hold it and then to close it very slowly to give time for Judy Mayer to wheel her way into her home. When Geof unlocked the inner door and pushed it open, it moved back at the merest touch as if welcoming whoever entered there. Somebody’d put a lot of thought and consideration into easing Judy’s comings and goings. There was no metal sill for her to have to bump over; the entrance from porch to kitchen was perfectly flat and smooth, from the wood right into linoleum. We found ourselves staring into a spacious kitchen where all of the counters had been lowered to wheelchair level and even the refrigerator door handle had been moved down a few inches.

  I was hanging back, holding my breath.

  “I guess if you’re disabled,” Geof commented, looking in, “it pays to marry a man in the construction trade.”

  “And one who loves you,” I murmured tightly.

  He glanced back at me. “You think so?”

  “Looks that way to me.”

  I wanted to delay the moment when we entered that dreadful house where we might find God-knew-what reminders of dreadful moments. In this heat, with all the time that had passed, all that blood and tissue from two deaths by gunshot … I swallowed hard. So far, no horrible odor had emanated from within, and I hadn’t seen anything terrible yet.

  Geof touched his fingertips to my face, then smiled a little. “Are we avoiding going in there, Jenny? Do you want to stay outside while I go in there by myself?”

  “Oh, no, I’m fine,” I lied. “Let’s go.”

  “You don’t have to—”

  “Open the door, dammit!”

  He laughed, pushed open the door, and walked onto the linoleum, which was a common brown and tan pattern. He looked around for a moment, then took an ostentatiously deep breath. Then he turned and grinned at me. “When we walked around the side of the house, there weren’t any flies on the insides of the windows, Jenny. Somebody’s been here to clean, whether the neighbors know it or not. I knew it would be okay for us to come in.”

  I released the breath I’d been holding.

  “Cops are jerks,” I said, stepping in behind him, and he laughed. “Why did that man tell us that if it wasn’t true?”

  Geof led our way out of the kitchen, down a long wide hallway toward the rest of the house. “Maybe he really didn’t know. Or maybe he wanted to scare us away from here.”

  “Almost worked,” I muttered behind him.

  The house had no unpleasant odor, only a faint, sweet, woody, dusty smell that was actually rather pleasant.

  “If I weren’t a cop,” he responded, “it would have worked. I’d have gone away and never come back.”

  I let him get several steps ahead of me before I whispered to his back: “It’s not too late for that, dear.” Just because Ron and Judy’s house was clean didn’t mean it was going to be pleasant.

  14

  SOMEBODY HAD BEEN IN TO CLEAN UP THE crime scene, but no amount of scrubbing could make it all go away. Deep dark stains radiated from the center of a wide doorway that separated the dining room from the living room, giving the appearance that children had tripped and spilled their glasses of grape juice on the plain beige wool carpet. It was there where Ron—presumably—had placed one of the dining chairs in which he had sat his wife and then shot her to death. A quick check of the five matching chairs around the dining room table told us which was the one, it being ruined like the carpet. The woodwork of the doorsill that arched over the spot where they died was painted a glossy version of the beige of the walls and the carpet, but its finish was defaced by dark spots that I didn’t wish to examine closely.

  The house was stuffy but not stifling as I’d expected.

  “The air conditioner’s on,” I observed, surprised.

  Geof walked over to a thermostat that we had passed on our way down the hall from the kitchen and examined it. “Should be cooler in here,” he commented, coming back hi toward me. “The thermostat’s set at sixty-two degrees.”

  “Must be
broken.”

  “Or maybe somebody only recently turned it on.”

  I considered that silently, then offered the opinion, “It would have to be very recent.” Like, within the last couple of hours. “Why would somebody just happen to turn on the AC right before we showed up, Geof?”

  “I don’t know, Jenny.”

  There was an edge to his voice that hadn’t been there before. He shifted his body enough for me to see his face then, and I noticed a tension around his mouth and eyes. Instantly, I eased up on him. Inside this disturbing house where his—alleged—son had experienced so much tragedy, Geof was emitting an edginess that was like a cloud of black spikes all around him.

  “I’m going to look at the rest of the house,” I said.

  “Fine,” he replied, his voice pitched low but tight as a string on one of those violins that my biology teacher had claimed they made out of Norwegian spruce trees. Don’t pluck with me, that tone suggested.

  I took the hint and wandered off through the rest of the house but not before taking a good long look at the “scene of the crime.” It looked exactly like the sketches and photos that Lee had showed us, except that the chair had been moved back to its place under the table and the bodies were gone. The furniture in the living room was still lined up against the walls, as if they’d pushed it all back for dancing. Just as in Lee’s sketches, the drapes in both rooms were shut, which was probably a good thing, having helped to keep the rooms cooler during this hot summer.

  I found broad hallways on the first floor of the house. Widened doorways. A minimum of furniture, and most of that moved back against walls. Mostly flat vinyl flooring, few carpets, and no throw rugs in this household. Drawers and knobs placed down low, even a special bathroom off the master bedroom, with handicapped railings and a low sink, just like public access restrooms. Everything arranged for someone in a wheelchair. I’d never seen it in a private home before, and I felt sure the extent of it was unusual, that most disabled people didn’t have it so good. Everywhere I looked, there was evidence of a contractor husband with carpenter brothers.