Blood Ties (15 page)

He could do this. All he needed was to take his time and be very, very careful.

Then, when he had the key so that it matched the impression perfectly, and took it home to try it out, he discovered that it was too thick to fit the lock. This meant another trip to the hardware store—and another movie missed—to purchase a flat file (price $2.49). He then had to hunt up a discarded brick so he would have a flat surface on which to plane the key down.

Still, in the end he had his key.

He carried it around in his pocket most of the next day, waiting for school to end, but when he got home Dad was already there, reading his newspapers at the kitchen table. The next day was a Saturday, so Stephen had to wait through the weekend with the key hidden under his mattress.

Finally Monday came. He waited through school, then took the bus home. His father was nowhere around.

The key fit and the suitcase lock snapped open. Inside were women's clothes, two pairs of flat women's shoes and a red wallet. He recognized the wallet at once. It was his mother's.

Inside the wallet he found a driver's license, issued by the State of Ohio some fourteen years previous and bearing his mother's picture and signature. The name on the license was Elizabeth Dabney, which must have been her maiden name. The address given was 1380 Route 9, Circleville, Ohio 43113.

It was the first time he had seen his mother's face in four years. He held the license in his two hands and wept bitterly.

In the change purse he found his mother's wedding ring.

That was enough. He put the ring back in the change purse, dropped the wallet into the suitcase and closed the suitcase, reminding himself to relock it.

He got out of the closet, out of his father's room and out of the house as quickly as he could. He went across the road and down to the creek, where he sat with his knees under his chin, his arms wrapped around his legs, for a long time.

At least, he assumed it was a long time. He was perfectly unaware of the passage of time. He was completely absorbed in his private misery.

He wished to God he had forgotten all about his mother. He wished he had never looked inside that suitcase.

When the shadows of the trees became long and dark over the water, he knew he would have to go home. He would have to face his father and keep all of this inside himself. There wasn't any choice.

*   *   *

Two weeks later, Dad traded in his pickup truck and bought a van, a dark blue Chevy Astro.

“She was ready to die on us,” he said about the truck. “A hundred and seventy thousand hard miles. We'll be able to carry more stuff in the van.”

“Are we leaving here?”

“Yeah.” Dad nodded slowly, as if the idea had just occurred to him. “Time to shake the dust again. We'll leave Saturday, after I've been paid. That'll give us Friday evening to load up.”

And Saturday morning they were on Interstate 64, heading for Arkansas. Stephen, who hadn't had much sleep the night before, was dozing when his father reached over and shook him awake.

“Did you return that library book?” he asked.

“Yeah. Sure. Day before yesterday.”

“What was it called?”

Stephen tried to remember, wondering what difference it made. “
Advanced Mathematics
. It was a sort of introduction to calculus.”

“Is that what you were studying in school?”

“Oh Lord, no.” Stephen found the question amusing. “They're still doing long division.”

“Then what good's that stuff gonna do you?”

“I just like it.”

“Why?”

“I like solving problems.”

His father considered this answer for perhaps three seconds and then threw back his head and laughed.

“I'll just bet you do, sport. I'll just bet.”

 

12

Mound City, Arkansas (population, approximately 300) was their last home. A developer was putting up some condos in Marion, and Dad got a job doing electrical work. He rented a house about a half-hour walk from the Mississippi River.

It was the middle of summer and the temperature outside would be close to eighty degrees by daybreak. The countryside was flat and uninteresting. With school out, there was nothing to do. Dad seemed to come home only to sleep. Sometimes he would be gone the whole weekend.

Mound City was just a village full of bedrooms. There was no library and hardly any businesses. On foot, which was the only way Stephen was going to get anywhere, West Memphis was a good hour and a half away. For about two weeks he walked it nearly every day, looking for odd jobs. It was something to do. But the local kids, turned loose from school, were also looking and didn't relish the competition. After he got beat up a second time, Stephen decided to stay home.

And at home he was left with plenty of time to think.

He kept coming back to the fact of his mother's suitcase, trying to find some way to exonerate his father. Why did he have her wedding ring? Had she given it to him, a parting gesture? That was at least imaginable. But why would she leave her clothes and wallet? Had she run away with nothing?

By the time she disappeared, the driver's license would have been some years past its expiration date. If she had renewed it, or gotten another in some other state, why would she have kept the old one in her wallet? In all his memories of their travels, his father had driven. It was always Dad who went to the store. Stephen had no memory of his mother ever having driven the truck. Given Dad's choice of houses—solitary places, a mile or more outside of town—she would have been almost a prisoner.

No, not
almost
a prisoner. A prisoner.

Then how had she escaped, except into death?

The third Saturday after they arrived in Mound City was Stephen's twelfth birthday. His father hadn't come home Friday night and didn't show up again until late Sunday afternoon. He just came home, sat down to eat his dinner, which he had brought with him in a McDonald's bag, then went to bed. The birthday was never mentioned.

Always before there had been something. Not a present, usually. Rarely a present, or even a card. But usually a smile and a “Happy Birthday, Steve.”

This year, silence.

And that silence underlined a change in the relationship between father and son that had begun … when? When they arrived in Arkansas? Before? Stephen couldn't be sure.

But recent. Dad had started getting careless about some things, like groceries. He didn't always make sure, before he disappeared for a few days, that there was enough in the refrigerator. Stephen's recent birthday dinner had consisted of a few handfuls of Sugar Corn Pops and a beer. That was all there was.

It was almost like Dad thought he was living alone.

Maybe that was it. Maybe, in his head, he had already parted from his son. And, if so, what was going to happen to Stephen? Would he disappear like his mother?

Who would notice? Did anyone in this place even know he existed? Probably not. He wasn't registered in school, and there was no trace of his presence on earth that wouldn't fill a suitcase. A suitcase like his mother's.

A man and his son live four months in one town, off by themselves, and then take to the road for God alone knew where. In the new town the son is almost invisible. Who would inquire if he vanished?

In the week that followed, Stephen began to grow really frightened. He felt as if he could see his grave being dug, as if he could hear the hiss of the shovel as it sliced into the dirt.

Dad hadn't started bringing home the local newspapers yet, and there were no books in the house. There was, however, a television set. All the stations seemed to be broadcasting from across the river in Memphis. There were the networks, a couple of movie channels, traffic, some cooking shows and a station that ran the local news on a constantly repeating basis.

On the Monday after Stephen's birthday, there was a story about the nude body of an unidentified woman found in a refuse bin behind the Walmart on Elvis Presley Boulevard. The police were offering no details but were treating it as a homicide. On Wednesday morning a captain of inspectors read a statement that the woman had been identified but that her identity would not be released pending notification of her family. By four o'clock that afternoon the local news was running the photograph, obviously somebody's snapshot, of a reasonably attractive blonde named Tiffany Klaff, age thirty-one.

Tuesday evening, when he came home from the condo site, Dad brought a couple of the Memphis papers with him. He was still reading them at the kitchen table when Stephen went to bed.

Two days later the story made it to the networks when the coroner released his preliminary report. Tiffany Klaff had been systematically beaten to death. She was discovered with duct tape over her mouth, and her arms, knees and lower back had all been broken, apparently before she died of a blunt instrument trauma to the head. The coroner described her injuries as “particularly savage.”

For several days, Stephen found it difficult to sleep. He found he had to take a nap in the middle of the day, when he was alone in the house. For the first time that he could remember, he was afraid of the dark.

And then, over the next three or four weeks, things began returning to their normal pattern. Dad started keeping food in the house. One night he even took Stephen into West Memphis for a pizza. Once he read aloud from a newspaper review of a book about the history of mathematics.

“That sounds like it would be right up your street,” he said, as if he had just arrived at an important conclusion. “You ought to get that one out of the library.”

“The library is six or seven miles from here.”

“Is that a fact? Well, maybe I can drive you in before I go to work tomorrow.”

The next morning he left early, having apparently forgotten all about the library. But that wasn't surprising. He usually forgot things like that. What was surprising was that he had thought of it in the first place.

Gradually, Stephen began to relax.

As fear subsided, so did suspicion. After all, he told himself, he was barely twelve years old. How could he really understand what had happened between his parents? The adult world was a foreign country to him. Maybe his father had simply put his mother on a bus back to Ohio. Maybe she had just left stuff behind.

A part of him even began to believe it.

The Tiffany Klaff investigation disappeared from television and was mentioned only briefly in the newspapers Dad brought home.

His mind had been playing tricks on him, he decided. He was bored and needed a distraction.

Then he remembered the book review Dad had read him.
A History of Mathematics
. The library in West Memphis might have a copy. Anyway, it would be something to do.

The next morning, as soon as his father had left for work, Stephen set out on his expedition. He arrived slightly after ten and inquired at the front desk. Klem's
History of Mathematics
was not in the catalog, but they might be able to get it through interlibrary loan. For that, he was told, he would need a library card. Did he have a library card? No. The nice lady told him to come back with a parent. The cards were free to all residents of Crittenden County and his would be mailed to his home address.

“Okay. Thank you. But today can I just look around?”

“Of course you can. You just won't be able to check anything out.”

In the stacks there was a small mathematics section, consisting mainly of high school and college textbooks. No Klem. Stephen took down a thick volume titled
Calculus I
. Sitting in a chair in the main reading room, he worked his way quickly through the first ten or so pages.

I can do this, he thought to himself. He was reasonably sure he could have the whole book completed by the end of the summer.

The problem was, there was no chance of getting a library card. If he asked Dad to take him in to get one, Dad would say “sure” and then forget all about it. If then Stephen tried to remind him, he would just get angry, then agree, then forget about it all over again. Stephen wasn't going to get him inside the library. That wasn't the way it worked.

So he would do it here, in the library, which was air-conditioned and comfortable and full of people.

For the next several days, Stephen's mind was happily occupied with slope theory, integrals and chain rules. The librarian, when she figured out what he was doing, didn't ask any awkward questions but kept him supplied with paper and pencils and found him a small table to use as a writing desk.

“You understand this stuff?” she asked him once.

“Yes. It's not difficult.”

“How old are you?”

“Twelve.”

She went away, shaking her head.

At three in the afternoon, he would give the calculus book and his scribbled-over pages to the librarian, who put them on a shelf in the back room, then he would walk back to Mound City. He had studied a map and figured out a short route, so the walk both ways only took him about two and a half hours. Usually he got home before his father returned from work.

One time he didn't. Dad was in the kitchen, drinking a beer and reading the newspaper.

“Where you been?” he asked, without looking up. “I got home an hour ago.”

“I was at the library in West Memphis. I'm learning calculus.”

Dad raised his head. “They got teachers there?”

“No. I'm learning it out of a book.”

“Okay.”

The subject, apparently, was closed, and for a quarter of an hour neither of them spoke. Stephen went to the refrigerator and got out a Coke.

“You feel like some fried chicken for dinner? They got a KFC up in Marion.”

“Okay.”

His father seemed pleased, so he threw in a bonus.

“On the way I'll show you the job site,” he said. “It's comin' along pretty good.”