All Things Cease to Appear (43 page)

Behavioral Science

1

IT’S TOO EARLY
to go in, so he stops at a doughnut shop down the road from the college. He sits there a moment, looking through his windshield. A few stragglers go inside. The cold hits him when he gets out. He buttons his coat, but the lining’s torn and a draft seeps up his back. A banker’s coat, he thinks, either a banker or a gangster, one of his father’s hand-me-downs that he’s been wearing since graduate school. He meant to have his wife mend it—sewing being one of her many practical talents—but now he decides he should just get rid of it. Like most things, the coat has outlived its usefulness.

The sweet warmth wafts over him when he steps inside. The smell of coffee and powdered sugar. He tells them what he wants and then takes the coffee and doughnut over to a table on a little brown tray. The windows are so bright it hurts to look out. The plastic chair barks when he sits down and takes off his gloves. He has to concentrate on picking up the cup, putting it down. The coffee is too hot. With his hands in his lap, he watches the black woman behind the counter as she takes care of her customers, her smile flashing bright before going flat again as soon as the person turns away. Such dishonesty is a riddle, he thinks. At this hour it’s mostly construction workers pulling up in diesel pickups, no women to speak of except the one behind the counter and another mopping the floor, and he smells the restroom every time somebody goes through the door. The doughnut is nice to look at, a pillow of fried dough filled with jelly. It reminds him of sticking his tongue into something. Taking a bite, he knows to be careful not to drop any of it on his clothes. It’s the sort of thing that can ruin a shirt.

2

THEY GET OUT
early, since it’s the start of winter recess. People are going away. Not him, he’s not going anywhere. But he is glad to be out of school.

Mr. Clare had asked him. He knew it was a half-day and said he’d pay extra.

The shades are pulled. That’s the first thing he notices. But her car’s here, parked under the big tree, as usual. Maybe she’s sewing, sitting at her machine. But when he goes inside, through the unlocked door, he doesn’t hear the hum of the machine or anything else. He stands there a minute, listening. The house is quiet. Only the windows trembling a little. And then he sees the money.

He moves the sugar bowl and counts out the bills. A hundred dollars. More money than he’s ever seen in his life. He wonders: Is this for me?

There’s a note, too. From him.
My wife is ill, please do not disturb her. Franny should take her usual nap. Her bottle is in the fridge. You can go once she’s asleep.

He shoves the note in his pocket with the money. He can feel the wad of cash on his leg. Hello? Anybody here? Franny?

He hears Franny upstairs in the hall. She comes down the stairs on her bottom, one step at a time. She’s still in her PJs. The house smells a little like throw-up and the stuff you use to clean it up with.

Hey, Franny.

Momma sick, she says, dragging her bunny.

I know.

Franny frowns and shakes her head. Momma
sick,
she says again.

Should I go up?

She whines a little and collapses to all fours. With her head jerking she looks like a whinnying horse. I want my momma, she cries.

Cole stands there trying to think. Franny doesn’t seem right. Wound up, loopy, maybe a little sick. Want to watch TV?

They curl up on the couch in the living room and watch cartoons.

After a while, Franny says she’s hungry. They go into the kitchen to see what there is to eat. There’s a plate of sandwiches in the fridge and he brings that out. They sit at the table and Franny eats and he pours her some apple juice. He can tell Mr. Clare made the sandwiches, because the crusts are still on and Mrs. Clare always cuts them off. But Franny eats them anyway, leaving the crusts on the plate. He decides he’s hungry, too, and makes a sandwich for himself and pours himself a glass of milk.

I want my bobba, she says, seeing her bottle.

Why are you talking like a baby, Franny?

She stamps her feet and jumps up and down. I want my momma!

Be quiet, she’s sleeping.

But I want her, Cole.

I know. But she’s sick. Let’s go back and watch TV.

They watch for another hour, and he says, Are you ready to take your nap?

She nods. I want my bobba!

Okay, okay.

When he takes the bottle out, something sticky gets on his hands. There’s a smell, too, like grape, and he thinks there’s something in it.

I thirsty, she says, reaching for it.

You’re too old for a bobba.

No I ant! She starts to fuss and cry and jump around again.

So he gives it to her. Be quiet, you’re going to wake your mother up.

Momma sick.

I know. Shhhhh!

Franny puts her finger to her lips. Shhhhh!

It’s dark in her room, the shades pulled over the windows, the night-light burning. It registers in his mind that no one came in here today. Usually, by the time he gets here, the light’s shining in and her bed is made. But now the room’s messy and dark. Since she’s about to take her nap, he leaves it alone. You sleepy?

Franny nods and climbs up on the bed and he covers her and hands her the bunny and she squeezes it tight. She’s just a little girl, he thinks. For some reason it worries him.

Drink your bobba, Franny.

She does. And her eyes flutter closed.

Out in the hall it’s quiet. Too quiet, he thinks.

He knocks lightly on the Clares’ door. Mrs. Clare?

Nothing.

He puts his hand on the knob. Mrs. Clare? Catherine? No answer. I’m going now, he says, a little louder. She’s sleeping, he decides, and leaves, just as Mr. Clare had instructed him to in his note.

Walking up to the ridge, he tries to remember if his mother ever got sick. She caught colds every now and then, jamming her used tissues up her sleeves, but she never took to her bed like this. She was too busy to be sick. There had been times when Cole faked sick. One morning when he didn’t get up to milk and his brothers accused him of faking, she sat on the side of his bed and pushed the hair off his forehead and said he felt a little warm, even though they both knew he wasn’t sick, just being lazy. He remembers her saying that going to school or not was up to him, it was his business, and that she assumed he had his reasons for not wanting to go and that was all right with her. You need to make up your own mind, she’d said. And then she brought him tea and toast and even bought him comics later, when she went into town.

For some reason he starts running. Something telling him to get far from that house. How weird the trees look, like they’re outlined in pencil, the clouds hard and full like their cows’ udders. The field is deep, his boots fill with snow and a chill rises up his legs. He almost can’t make it. He gets through the woods to the empty lot and then cuts through backyards, hearing people in their houses, mothers calling in their kids, and he’s relieved to be back in town.

He finds Eugene at Bell’s, playing pinball. Where were you?

Nowhere. He kicks the snow off his boots and drops off his coat.

You can go, Eugene says, and Cole takes a turn, shaking the warm sides of the machine with all his strength. The ball shoots up and he wins a free game. The whole time, he’s aware of the money in his pocket. It feels like something dangerous. He tries to forget the absolute silence of Mrs. Clare’s room. He knows that silence. He knows, because the house told him.

3

FINALLY,
late in the day, the corridor dwindles to silence. George straightens the files on his desk and pulls the beaded gold chain of his desk lamp. In the darkening room he puts on his coat, staring out at the trees, then steps into the empty corridor. He walks a bit aimlessly, in no particular hurry, across the green linoleum. All along the corridor the large plate-glass windows are now painted white with winter sky. It puts him in mind of that painting at the MoMA, the Barnett Newman, a white canvas that asks for nothing, and it fills him with a kind of deluded hope.

The overhead lights are dim, creating the strange, intermittent half-dark of a sinking ship, and his balance is briefly compromised. As he walks through the Art History Department, its stark walls corrupted by posters espousing every variety of life-changing opportunity, it occurs to him what a betrayal life is. How nothing turns out even close to what you thought.

He drives home in silence with the heat vents blasting, the snow built up in heaps along the road. The salt trucks are out, making their rounds. After only half a year here in the country, the winter is already getting to him. Already he’s had enough of it.

The house looks dark. He eases the car up the driveway and drives around to the garage, then gets out to open the doors, a routine he has come to hate. He always thought down the road they’d install an electric, overhead door, but there doesn’t seem much point in doing that now. He pulls into the darkness, like a cave, he thinks, and sits there a minute, letting the engine idle, pulling on his gloves.

4

TRAVIS’S SECRETARY TAKES
the call at 4:57 on a Friday afternoon, just when he’s heading out the door. He didn’t get lunch and hoped to get home, but now that’s not happening. He can already predict the accidents, weekenders from the city with no business driving on unplowed country roads.

It’s a friend of yours, Brigid says. A Joe Pratt?

An old college buddy from RPI, now an engineer with GE. He takes the call in his office.

I got my neighbor here, Pratt says. Something happened to his wife. He muffles the phone a minute, then comes back on. I think he may have killed her.

Travis and his undersheriff, Wiley Burke, set out in the unmarked car, the tire-chains grinding through the snow. The snow is falling, thick and fast. They don’t have much cause to come this far north, the wealthiest section in their jurisdiction and filled with spoiled New Yorkers buying up the old farms.
Too rich for my blood,
he likes to goad the old-timers down at the Windowbox, people who grew up working these fields and tending the livestock and now can’t pay the taxes on their farms. Back in the day, he used to work summers on the Hale farm. Good memories.

Pratt owns a small cape on the outskirts that might have been a sharecropper’s cottage at one time, a modest place with a split-rail fence and kennels in the back for the dogs. His wife, June, runs a rescue outfit in the back of the house, something he’s always respected her for. Just a little slip of a thing, working with dogs that could rip you to pieces. George Clare is standing in their living room like a man under a low-flying helicopter, looking windblown. The little girl fusses in his arms, wriggling to get down. Clare’s dressed in khaki trousers and an oxford shirt, penny loafers. He looks well tended.

George, Travis says.

Hello, Travis.

Let’s go take a look, shall we?

They leave the child with the Pratts and walk down the road up to the house. Even with the new paint it looks forlorn. Mary always says houses are like children, they don’t forget the bad things that happen to them.

They go in through the porch, just as George had earlier that afternoon.

Somebody did this, George says, pointing out the broken window, the glass scattered on the cement floor.

Inside, like some choreographed procession, they climb the stairs in single file.

I can’t go in there, Clare says.

All right. You stay right here.

The last time he was in this room was to clear out Ella and Cal. People say this house is cursed and he’s starting to believe it.

Catherine Clare is lying in the bed with an ax in her head.

In all his years of police work it is something he’s never seen.

Facing the door, she lies on her side in an elongated fetal position. It comes to him that the flannel nightgown is familiar because it’s the same one he’s seen on his wife.

They stand there looking at her.

Jesus, Wiley mutters.

Just like Mary, she’s on the side closest to the door. Even dead, a mother can get her point across, and with a deal like this you can’t ignore the elusive systems of cohabitation, the humdrum accord of married life.

Good and cold, isn’t it? Wiley says.

Yup.

They both look at the open window.

Yup, it sure is. She’s good and stiff, too.

I’ll go radio the unit, Burke says.

Get him in the car.

Out here, they don’t have their own forensic team. They have to call on Albany County for help. Eventually, in a case like this, the FBI will step in, but for now it’s him in charge. And a long night ahead.

He looks at the woman, the taste of bile in his throat. Getting too old for this nonsense, he thinks. Gone soft, all out of heartless grit. Used to be he’d feel useful, even kind of a hero. Not anymore. Over the years he’s seen just about everything—every twisted machination, most ill-conceived or plain stupid—but you get to the point, you get to the fucking point where you don’t want to see it anymore. He’d had this Origin of the Species epiphany and from then on he’s been a changed man.

Cops. They see things—they
see.

Mary’s the churchgoer in their house. She believes people get their just deserts. But what if they don’t?

He stands at the foot of the bed, just looking at her. It’s an ordinary ax. Nearly everybody in town owns one just like it. Every hardware store has one in stock.

He studies the bed. On her side the sheets are down near her ankles, but on his they’re undisturbed, the blanket and sheets still tucked in.

We got company, Travis.

He glances out at the lights as the parade starts—the crime-scene truck, three staties, a handful of pickups with cherry tops and volunteer firefighters, an ambulance they won’t be needing. The thing about rural towns, anybody with a pair of hands shows up to use them and help out. Travis can’t imagine what the world would be like without their good service. These people know how to work.