Blood Ties (5 page)

The Warrenstown exit brought me to tree-shaded streets lined with old houses with porches and fenced backyards, newer split-levels with wide lawns and shrubs. I stopped and asked directions in a downtown of two-story brick shops centered on a well-trimmed park. A banner across the main street reminded everyone that the Hamlin's game was Saturday, that the bus would leave at nine. I didn't understand about the bus, and I wasn't sure what the game could be. This late in the fall, the football season must be over, surely, and the basketball season not yet begun.

I drove on, found what I'd been directed to: a new subdivision of vaguely colonial homes on streets carefully curved to provide both interest and easy steering radiuses. In front of a house with pale gray siding and gray-blue shutters, different only in small details from the houses around it, I pulled up and parked. Chrysanthemums bristled along the concrete walk leading to the door; two carved pumpkins, staying beyond Halloween, stood on the low stoop. One grinned a lopsided grin. The other sneered.

I pressed the button and heard two tones ring inside. A dog barked. I waited and the door was pulled open. A brown-haired girl in glasses, jeans, and a blue Pokémon tee shirt stared at me a moment, seemed caught off guard. She had her hand on the collar of a black Doberman that glared and growled warningly. The girl, manners returning, said, “Yes?”

“Hi, Jennifer,” I said. “You don't remember me, but I'm your uncle Bill. Is your mom home?”

Confusion washed over her face. “Oh,” she said, then called over her shoulder, “Mom? It's Uncle Bill.”

Another girl, smaller, dressed in corduroys and a flowered turtleneck shirt, came running to the door to have a look at me. For a moment, it was just the three of us. Then, coming down the stairs, pushing her hair back with her hand, her blue eyes unsure and unsmiling, was my sister Helen.

“Bill,” she said, stopping behind her daughters. The girls looked from one of us to the other. Helen was wearing jeans and a white turtleneck with fall leaves embroidered on the collar. She was small, high-cheekboned, fair-skinned. Delicate and pretty. Her daughters both looked like that. It's the men in our family who are always big. Gary, my father. Helen's husband Scott is a big man, too. And me.

Helen started to say something else, seemed undecided, stopped, settled on, “What are you doing here?”

“Can I come in?” I asked, not certain of the answer.

“Yes,” she said after a moment, stepping aside at the door. “Yes, of course.”

I moved past her into a vestibule lined with raincoats and rubber boots. A child's snow shovel leaned in the corner; umbrellas large and small stood, each in its own slot, in a rack with plenty of empty spaces for visitors and friends. From inside the house came the sweet smell of maple syrup: Breakfast had been pancakes, a hearty breakfast for a cool fall morning.

“Go on, get your things,” Helen said to the girls. They skipped off with backward glances—whatever we were doing was more interesting than making sure they had all their homework and books for another school day.

Helen led me into her living room, a sunny, rose-carpeted place where the upholstered furniture looked used and comfortable, the slate fireplace ready for the chilly nights to come. Lined up on the mantel were family pictures: the three kids as babies; in Halloween costumes; on the floor in front of a Christmas tree surrounded by toys and torn wrapping paper and untied ribbons. One photo showed Gary in a football uniform, helmet under his arm, wide grin on his face. The black grease smeared on his cheekbones mocked the dark circles I'd seen last night under his eyes.

There were photos, too, of adults I didn't know, probably Scott's parents; and there was a small one, a snapshot really, of my mother, framed now behind glass, but bent and tattered. In the picture, my mother wore a sunhat, and she smiled, and she was younger than Helen was now. It struck me that Helen must have taken that picture with her twenty-five years ago, when she left.

“What are you doing here?” Helen asked me again. As it had at the door, it sounded like not quite the right question.

The answer was wrong, too, but I stuck to the narrow path: “I want to find Gary,” I said. “I need to know why he went to New York.”

Helen hesitated. “Scott told you to leave it alone. He said he'd find him.”

“Do you think he can?”

She looked away, not answering that.

“Forget everything else,” I said. “I'm a detective. This is what I do. Gary's in trouble, Helen.”

She looked at me swiftly, resentment in her eyes. “He's a good boy.”

“A good boy in trouble. It can happen.”

I let that wait, and the sounds of cars and children's voices from outside the windows seemed to surround but not penetrate the silence between us.

“Mom?” came tentatively from the wide doorway into the hall. Jennifer and Paula stood there, backpacks strapped on, sneakers tied. Jennifer said, “We better go.”

Helen looked at me. “I have to walk the girls to school.”

“I'll come along.”

She nodded, put the dog on a leash, and lifted a jacket off a peg as we trooped through the vestibule. We went down the walk, past the Chevy Blazer in the driveway with the
WARRENSTOWN WARRIORS
sticker on the bumper, and made our way through the curving subdivision to the sidewalks of the older part of town. Here the streets were straight and the trees were large and old, their arching branches offering shelter from the full glare of the morning sun. The trees near Helen's house were too young to do that, yet.

“They could go on the bus,” Helen said as we walked, the girls kicking at fallen leaves. “But I like to take them.”

I wasn't sure why she told me that. It seemed to me she wasn't sure, either.

three

For a while we said nothing as we walked, Helen and I, and I let that be. Helen greeted kids and their mothers as we passed them, and girls called out the open windows of the school bus to Jennifer and Paula. They'd only been at this school, in this town, a couple of months. But the younger you were when you came to a new place, the easier it was to make friends, to belong. I remembered that. I also remembered that leaving again was just as hard.

We didn't speak, just strolled through the suburban streets as though this were something we'd done many times before, my sister and her children and I. Every now and then I caught Jennifer's dark eyes on me, though I pretended I didn't see. I wondered if it bothered her, how much I looked like her brother; I wondered what the girls had been told about Gary being gone.

We turned a corner and the school came into view, a group of long low brick buildings with big windows, set back on a broad lawn.
WARRENSTOWN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL
spread in bronze letters above the open glass doors. A walkway ran between young maple trees wearing their November burgundy, and the air was filled with sunlight and children's voices. Hastily dropped backpacks and jackets, some a smaller version of Gary's maroon-and-white one and reading
JUNIOR WARRIORS
, were piled on the lawn between the path and a pickup football game.

As soon as we crossed the street Jennifer and Paula patted the dog, politely told me, “'Bye,” waved to their mother, and hurried up the sidewalk to find their friends. That left Helen and me standing alone. She watched her children as they disappeared through the big glass doors, and I did, too. When they were gone there was nothing for her to do but look at me.

“Scott went to New York,” she said.

“Does he know why Gary went?” I asked. “Where he might be?”

She looked down at the sidewalk, shaking her head. “We don't know. This just isn't like him.”

“What is like him?”

“He's a good boy,” she said, repeating that as though it could protect him.

I looked around, the quiet suburban street, the low brick building that sheltered the children of the people who belonged here. “All I want,” I said carefully, “is to find him. Send him home. That's all.”

Her eyes searched my face as though it were new to her. I wondered, suddenly, how much there was left in me of the brother she'd grown up with. I wondered, too, if that's what she was looking for.

She spoke suddenly, quickly, as though she wanted to get the words said before she could stop herself.

“It's mostly Scott. Because you were in jail. Because of what you do. Because . . .” She trailed off.

“It doesn't matter,” I said. “That's not what this is about.” It wasn't; this was about Gary. But I would have stopped her anyway. I didn't want to hear any more, didn't want to listen to her lying to me.

I pulled out my cigarettes, shook one from the pack.

“You're still smoking,” she said.

I lit up, shook the match, dropped it on the walk. “If Scott doesn't know why Gary went,” I said, “he won't have much luck. I can do better. I know how to do this, Helen. Give me pictures of Gary, tell me who his friends are.”

“The police talked to his friends already.”

“I can ask different questions. Please,” I said, and thought how much I sounded like Gary, asking me for help.

We stood on the sidewalk in front of the school and she looked at me for a long time. I turned away, watched the kids streaming up the walkway between the maples. The last of the stragglers was inside, the doors had closed, and the first bell had rung when Helen's eyes, without warning, filled with tears. She wiped them away and said, “Oh, God, yes. God, please. Can you really find him?”

Yellow leaves drifted at our feet as Helen and I walked beyond the school, down to where tall oaks shaded a street of shops. Most of the shops had
GO WARRIORS
! posters in their windows, in school colors, maroon and white like Gary's jacket.

We slipped the dog's leash over a parking meter, went into the bakery, sat over coffee while I asked Helen the questions I'd ask any client. Had Gary been depressed lately, distracted, different from usual? No, she said. He liked this new school, was excited to have made the varsity, looked forward to the school year, to the football games. His grades were good, and he'd played well when he'd gotten in, which wasn't often, of course. He was only a sophomore, and he was new.

Nothing he wouldn't talk about, nothing she or Scott had sensed? No, nothing. Was he involved with drugs, I asked casually, either that she knew about, or even just suspected? No, of course not, she answered firmly but without heat, making me think that though Gary might be hiding something from her, she was not hiding it from me.

I asked, how long had they lived in Warrenstown? Since June; they'd left Sarasota right after the school year ended. Scott had grown up here, she told me, though he left after high school and never came back. At “never came back” a pink flush crept onto her cheeks, and she looked at the table, out the window, anywhere but at me. She and I both knew about people who left and never came back, though we saw that picture from opposite sides.

I said nothing, drank my coffee. It was rich and fragrant, hometown coffee served with hometown smiles by women who knew most of their customers and called them by name.

Helen picked at the cinnamon bun in front of her and went on with her story. When the firm Scott worked for was bought by a bigger one, he was offered a promotion, given a choice of three branch offices to relocate to. He'd chosen Newark. He'd always talked about Warrenstown, what a great place it was to grow up, and he'd been saying it was time to come back. They'd packed up the family and moved.

Did she like it here? I asked, wondering why I was asking. It didn't matter to the job I was doing. But she answered just as she had everything else I'd asked. I was the expert she'd decided she needed, and my role seemed to give me rights she didn't question. She wouldn't argue with the plumber over which valve to repair, with the doctor over which drug to prescribe. She wouldn't argue with Scott over whether to uproot them all and move, over and over again, and she wouldn't think to wonder how I chose my questions. I felt my shoulders tighten, wanted a cigarette, settled for getting up for another cup of coffee. Helen had barely touched her first cup, didn't want more.

Yes, she did like it here, she told me when I sat again, and she hoped they'd stay, and I tried to listen through my new impatience, my need to be in motion. It would be nice for the kids to be able to settle somewhere, she said. Of course, that would depend on Scott's job. Each time they'd moved it had been so Scott could do better, provide better for his family, and he'd done well and she was proud of him. It was nice, she added, it was a kind of relief, to be where Scott had grown up, where it felt like the family had some roots. Did I understand that? Although moving around, well, it wasn't so bad, really, and it could even be fun—we knew all about that, she and I.

She gave me a small smile when she said that, the first I'd had from her. I smiled back automatically, the smile I use to reassure a client. She glanced away uncertainly, and I didn't know if that was because of my smile or her own.

“Tell me who Gary's friends are, Helen.” I took pen and paper from my pocket. “The ones the police already talked to, and anyone else you can think of. Any girls he's interested in?”

She sipped her coffee, though it must have been cold by now. “He was seeing a girl for a little while in the summer, but that stopped before school started. He's too young to really date, but they went for ice cream and things like that.”

“What's her name?”

Her brow creased in thought. “Victoria,” she finally said. “Such a lovely name, old-fashioned. They call her Tory.”