Peter.
Shivering to the core of my soul, I stared at the maps and the placement of the towns. From Brockton southeast to Loganville in Ohio, then farther southeast to the town in Kentucky, then east to West Virginia, then northeast to Pennsylvania, then northwest to the town in Ohio, a hundred miles from where I was raised in the middle of that state. One month. One year. Eight years. Thirteen years.
He’d been to far—off places in the country during the intervals (his FBI crime report made that clear), but something kept making him return to this general area, and I couldn’t help feeling that the placement of towns on the maps wasn’t random, that it had a center, that he’d been skirting his ultimate destination, each time getting closer, drawn relentlessly back to where everything had begun.
Part Six
1
It had been more than a quarter of a century since my mother and I had been forced to leave Woodford to live with her parents in Columbus. Payne had told me that the town was now a flourishing bedroom community for the encroaching city. But I hadn’t fully realized what that meant. After I steered from the interstate, following a newly paved road into town, I tested my memory. I’d been barely fourteen when Mom and I had left. Even so, from all the times that she and Dad had taken Petey and me to visit her parents, I remembered that there’d been a lot of farmland on the way to the interstate. Much of that was gone now, replaced by subdivisions of large houses on small lots. The panoramic outdoor view that owners had initially been attracted to had been obliterated by further development. Expensive landscaping compensated.
On what had once been the edge of town, I passed the furniture factory where my dad had been a foreman. It was now a restaurant/movie theater/shopping mall complex. The industrial exterior had been retained, giving it a sense of local history. Downtown—a grid of six blocks of stores—looked better than it had in my youth. Its adjoining two—story brick structures had been freshly sandblasted, everything appearing new, even though the buildings came from the early 1900s. One street had been blocked off and converted into a pedestrian mall, trees and planters interspersed among outdoor cafés, a fountain, and a small bandstand.
The area was busy enough that it took me a while to find a parking spot. My emotions pushed and pulled me. When I’d been a kid, downtown had seemed so big. Now the effect was the same, but for different reasons—helplessness made me feel small. Despite the passage of years, I managed to orient myself as I passed a comicbook store and an ice—cream shop, neither of which had been in those places when I was a kid. I came to the corner of Lincoln and Washington (the names returned to me) and stared at a shadowy doorway across the street. It was between a bank and a drugstore, businesses that had been in those places when I was a kid. I remembered because of all the times my mother had walked Petey and me to that doorway and had taken us up the narrow echoing stairway to our least favorite place in the world: the dentist’s office.
That stairway had seemed towering and ominous when I’d climbed it in my youth. Now, trying to calm myself, I counted each of its thirty steps as I went up. At the top, I stood under a skylight (another change) and faced the same frosted—glass door that had led into the dentist, except that the name on the door was now COS—GROVE INSURANCE AGENCY.
A young woman with her hair pulled back looked up from stapling documents together. “Yes, sir?”
“I … When I was a kid, this used to be a dentist’s office.” I couldn’t help looking past the receptionist toward the corridor that had led to the chamber of horrors.
She looked puzzled. “Yes?”
“He has some dental records I need, but I don’t know how to get in touch with him because I’ve forgotten his name.”
“I’m afraid I’m not the person to ask. I started working for Mr. Cosgrove only six months ago, and I never heard anything about a dentist’s office.”
“Perhaps Mr. Cosgrove would know.”
She went down the hallway to the office that I’d dreaded and came back in less than a minute. “He says he’s been here eight years. Before then, this was a Realtor’s office.”
“Oh.”
“Sorry.”
“Sure.” Something sank in me. “I guess it was too much to hope for.” Discouraged, I turned toward the door, then stopped with a sudden thought. “A Realtor?”
“Excuse me?”
“You said a Realtor used to be in this office?”
“Yes.” She was looking at me now as if I’d become a nuisance.
“Does he or she manage properties, do you suppose?”
“What?”
“Assuming that Mr. Cosgrove doesn’t own this building, who’s his landlord?”
2
“You mean the Dwyer Building.” The bantamweight man in a bow tie stubbed out a cigarette. His desk was flanked on three sides by tall filing cabinets. “I’ve been managing it for Mr. Dwyer’s heirs the past twenty years.”
“The office Mr. Cosgrove is in.”
“Unit—Two—C.”
“Can you tell me who rented it back then? I’m looking for the name of a dentist who used to be there.”
“Why on earth would you want—”
“Some dental records. If it’s a nuisance for you to look it up, I’ll gladly pay you a service fee.”
“Nuisance? Hell, it’s the easiest thing in the world. The secret to managing property is being organized.” He pivoted in his swivel chair and pushed its rollers toward a filing cabinet on his right that was marked D.
“Dwyer Building.” He searched through files. “Here.” He sorted through papers in it. “Sure. I remember now. Dr. Raymond Faraday. He had a heart attack. Eighteen years ago. Died in the middle of giving somebody a root canal.”
After what I’d been through, the grotesqueness of his death somehow didn’t seem unusual. “Did he have any relatives here? Are they still in town?”
“Haven’t the faintest idea, but check this phone book.”
3
“… a long time ago. Dr. Raymond Faraday. I’m trying to find a relative of his.” Back at my car, I was using my cell phone. There’d been only two Faradays in the book. This was my second try.
“My husband’s his son,” a suspicious—sounding woman said. “Frank’s at work now. What’s this got to do with his father?”
I straightened. “When my brother and I were kids, Dr. Faraday was our dentist. It’s very important that I get my brother’s dental X rays. To identify him.”
“Your brother’s dead?”
“Yes.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“It would be very helpful if you could tell me what happened to the records.”
“His patients took their records with them when they chose a new dentist.”
“But what about patients who hadn’t been his clients for a while? My brother and I had stopped going to Dr. Faraday several years earlier.”
“Didn’t your parents transfer the records to your new dentist?”
“No.” I remembered bitterly that after my father had died in the car accident and it turned out that his life—insurance policy had lapsed, my mother hadn’t been able to afford things like taking me to a dentist.
The woman exhaled, as if annoyed about something. “I have no idea what my husband did with the old records. You’ll have to ask him when he gets home from the office.”
4
The baseball field hadn’t changed. As the lowering sun cast my shadow, I stood at the bicycle rack where my friends and I had chained and locked our bikes so long ago. Behind me, the bleachers along the third—base line were crowded with parents yelling encouragement to kids playing what looked like a Little League game. I heard the crack of a ball off a bat. Cheers. Howls of disappointment. Other cheers. I assumed that a fly ball, seemingly a home run, had been caught.
But I kept my gaze on the bicycles, remembering how Petey had used a clothespin to attach a playing card to the front fender of his bike and how it had created a clackclackclackcl
ack sound against the spokes when the wheel turned. It pained me that I couldn’t remember the names of the two friends I’d been with and for whom I’d destroyed Petey’s life. But I certainly remembered the gist of what we’d said.
“For crissake, Brad, your little brother’s getting on my nerves. Tell him to beat it, would ya?”
“Yeah, he tags along everywhere. I’m tired of the little squirt. The friggin’ noise his bike makes drives me nuts.”
“He’s just hanging around. He doesn’t mean anything.”
“Bull. How do you think my mom found out I was smoking if he didn’t tell your mom?”
“We don’t know for sure he told my mom.”
“Then who did tell her, the goddamn tooth fairy?”
“All right, all right.”
Petey had nearly bumped into me when I’d turned. I’d thought about that moment so often and so painfully that it was seared into my memory. He’d been short even for nine, and he’d looked even shorter because of his droopy jeans. His baseball glove had been too big for his hand.
“Sorry, Petey, you have to go home.”
“But …”
“You’re just too little. You’d hold up the game.”
His eyes had glistened with the threat of tears.
To my later shame, I’d worried about what my friends would think if my kid brother started crying around them. “I mean it, Petey. Bug off. Go home. Watch cartoons or something.”
His chin had quivered.
“Petey, I’m telling you, go. Scram. Get lost.”
My friends had run toward where the other kids were choosing sides for the game. As I’d rushed to join them, I’d heard the clackclackclack of Petey’s bike. I’d looked back toward where the little guy was pedaling away. His head was down.
Standing now by the bicycle rack, remembering how things had been, wishing with all my heart that I could return to that moment and tell my friends that they were jerks, that Petey was going to stay with me, I wept.
5
Unlike the baseball field, the house had changed a great deal. In fact, the whole street had. The trees were taller (to be expected), and there were more of them, as well as more shrubs and hedges. But those changes weren’t what struck me. In my youth, the neighborhood had been all single—story ranch houses, modest homes for people who worked at the factory where my dad had been a foreman. But now second stories had been added to several of the houses, or rooms had been added to the back, taking away most of the rear yards. Both changes had occurred to the house I’d lived in. The front porch had been enclosed to add space to the living room. The freestanding single—car garage at the end of the driveway had been rebuilt into a double—car garage with stairs leading up to a room.
Parking across the street, seeing the red of the setting sun reflected off the house’s windows, I was so startled by the change that I wondered if I’d made a mistake. Maybe I wasn’t on the right street (but the sign had clearly said Locust) or maybe this wasn’t the right house (but the number 108 was fixed vertically next to the front door, just as it had been in my youth). I felt absolutely no identification with the place. In my memory, I saw a different, simpler house, the one from which my dad and I had hurried that evening, scrambling into his car, rushing toward the baseball diamond in hopes of finding Petey loitering along the way.
A wary man from the property next door came out and frowned at me, as if to say, What are you staring at?
I put the car in gear. As I drove away, I noticed half a dozen FOR SALE signs, remembering that in the old days everyone on the street had been so dependent on the furniture factory that no one had ever moved.
6
Mr. Faraday had thin lips and pinched cheeks. “My wife says your brother died or something?”
“Yes.”
“That’s why you need the dental records? To identify him?”
“He disappeared a long time ago. Now we might have found him.”
“His body?”
“Yes.”
“Well, if it wasn’t something important like that, I wouldn’t go to the trouble.” Faraday motioned me into the house. I heard a television from the living room as he opened a door halfway along the corridor to the kitchen. The quick impression I got was of excessive neatness, everything in its place, plastic covers on chair arms in the living room, pots on hooks in the kitchen, lids above them, everything arranged by size.
Cool air rose from the open basement door. Faraday flicked a light switch and gestured for me to follow. Our descending footsteps thumped on sturdy wooden stairs.
I’d never seen a basement so carefully organized. It was filled with boxes stacked in rows that formed mini—corridors, but there wasn’t the slightest sense of clutter and chaos.
Two fans whirred: from dehumidifiers at each end of the basement.
“I can’t get rid of the dampness down here,” Faraday said. He took me along one of the minicorridors, turned left, and came to a corner, where he lifted boxes off a footlocker.
“What can I do to help?” I asked.
“Nothing. I don’t want to get things mixed up.”
He raised the lid on the locker, revealing bundles of documents. “My wife complains about all the stuff I save, but how do I know what I might need later on?” Faraday pointed toward a stack of boxes farther along. “All my tax returns.” He pointed toward another stack of boxes. “The bills I’ve paid. And this stuff …” He indicated the documents in the locker. “My father’s business records. The ones I could find, anyway.” He sorted through the bundles and came up with a stack of file folders. “What was your brother’s name?”
“Peter Denning.”
“Denning. Let’s see. Denning. Denning. Ann. Brad. Nicholas. Peter. Here.” His voice was filled with satisfaction as he held out the file.
I tried to keep my hand steady when I took it.
“What about these others? Do you want yours? Who are Ann and Nicholas?”
“My parents.” I felt heavy in my chest. “Yes, if it’s okay with you, I’ll take them all.”
“My wife’ll be thrilled to see me getting rid of some of this stuff.”
7
By the time I got back to the car, dusk had set in. I had to switch on the interior lights so I could see to search through Petey’s file. No longer able to keep my hand from trembling, I pulled out a set of X rays. I’d never touched anything so valuable.
Back in Denver, when I’d gone to the dentist to get a copy of the X rays he’d taken of the man who claimed to be my brother, I’d made sure to get a duplicate set in case the FBI lost the ones I gave them or in case I needed copies in my search. Now I could barely wait to get to a motel. Driving to the outskirts of town, I picked the first one I saw that had a vacancy. After checking in, I rushed to my room, too hurried to bring everything from my car except my suitcase, which I yanked open, pulling out the X rays from Denver.
A child’s teeth and an adult’s have major differences, which made it difficult to tell if these X rays came from the same person. For one thing, when Petey had been kidnapped, some of his permanent teeth would not yet have grown in. But some of them would have, my dentist had said. Look at the roots, he’d said. On a particular tooth, are there three roots or four? Four are less common. Do the roots grow in any unusual directions?
With the adult’s X rays in my left hand and the child’s in my right, I held them up to my bedside lamp. But its shade blocked much of the illumination. I almost took off the shade before I thought of the bathroom and the bright lights that motels often have there. Hurrying past the bed, I found that this particular motel had a large mirror in front of a makeup area. When I jabbed the light switch, I blinked from the sudden glare above the mirror. After raising both sets of X rays to the fluorescent lights, I shifted my gaze quickly back and forth between them, desperate to find differences or similarities, frantic to learn the truth. The child’s teeth looked so pathetically tiny. I imagined Petey’s frightened helplessness as he w
as grabbed. The adult’s. Whose were they? Slowly, I understood what I was looking at. As the implications swept over me, as the various pieces of information that I’d found began fitting into place, I lowered the X rays. I drooped my head. God help Kate and Jason, I prayed. God help us all.
8
An organ blared as I opened the church’s front door: a solemn hymn I didn’t recognize. To the right of the vestibule, stairs led up to the choir loft. They creaked as I climbed them. It was shortly after noon. I’d been to eleven Protestant churches before this one. With only six more to go, I was losing hope.
The choir loft was shadowy except for a light above the organ. As the minister finished the hymn, in the gathering silence my echoing footsteps made him turn.
“Sorry to bother you, Reverend.” I walked nearer, holding out the photograph. “The secretary at your office said that you were almost done getting ready for choir practice. I’m trying to find this man. I wonder if you recognize him.”
Puzzled, the minister took the photograph, pushed his glasses back on his nose, and studied it.
A long moment later, he nodded. “Possibly.”
I tried not to show a reaction. Even so, my heart hammered so loudly that I was sure the minister could hear it.
“The intensity of the eyes is the same.” The minister put the photograph under the organ’s light. “But the man I’m thinking of has a beard.” He pointed toward my own.
Beard? I’d been right. He’d grown a beard to hide his scar. “Perhaps if you put your hand over the lower part of his face.” I tried to sound calm, despite the tension that squeezed my throat.