Darkness peering (8 page)

What a brutal night, stars nailed to an indifferent sky. He took the
cat bell out of his pocket and flung it as far as he could into the
swamp. He thought he heard the rustling of the upland lady fern as the
cat bell landed, but it could've been his imagination. The wind picked
up, a dull roar in his ears, and he drew his service revolver. Perhaps
some other persevering do-gooder would find Billy guilty of murder, but
it wasn't going to be him. His chest rose and fell, rose and fell, and
suddenly it occurred to him that he'd lived his entire life as if
someone were holding a gun to his head.

You ready?

He remembered many years ago putting his arms around his wife and
feeling her pregnancy, her waist thick with new life. She eventually
gave him a son. And now his son looked at him as if he were a
stranger.

He shut his eyes. His wife sank against his chest, her flesh much
weaker and softer than it gave the impression of being. "I'm sorry,"
he told her, imagining her bruised and hurting all over. He didn't
want to hurt anyone. He'd never had an extramarital affair. He'd
never wanted another woman. His body was in perfect health.
Maddeningly alive. Blood coursing through his veins, lungs expanding
and contracting, heart pounding ... thub-dub ... thub-dub ... You
ready?

He listened to the wind, the horrible lonely sound of it. His hands
were steady. He placed the cold barrel in his mouth, gazed for a
moment at the stars, the brightest ones representing the people he
loved most in this world--wife, daughter, son. And when the stars
became smears of light, he pulled the trigger.

DETECTIVE RACHEL STORROW WAS ON HER WAY HOME WHEN

the call came in. "Possible forty-five," the dispatcher's voice
blurted between hisses of static, and Rachel's hands gripped the wheel.
A forty-five meant a corpse.

She made a U-turn in the middle of Pumpkin Run Road, tires chirping as
she headed back across town. She'd spent the better part of the day
knee-deep in garbage, looking for the gun a victim claimed her husband
had shot her with. He confessed he'd thrown his Saturday Night Special
in the town dump, but they hadn't been able to locate it yet.

Rachel's clothes reeked, the fabric clammy with sweat. A fetid aroma
of wet cardboard and rotten lettuce filled the car, the kind of smell
that lingered for days. She'd been on her way home to take a hot bath,
but that would have to wait.

Cruising the familiar neighborhood, she glanced into windows of passing
houses and felt a twinge of nostalgia for their buttery light, their
illusion of safety; she caught a glimpse of a mother tugging a curtain
shut, a child changing channels on the TV, cozy scenes of domestic
bliss she'd left behind forever like old children's books. People
didn't realize how vulnerable they were. If they knew Flowering
Dogwood the way she knew it, they'd turn their homes into armed
fortresses.

Now she came up behind a tractor hauling a load of manure, doing
fifteen miles an hour, and flashed her high beams until the driver
pulled over to let her pass. She waved at Neal Fliss, an old friend of
her brother's. They hadn't spoken in years, not since Billy had gone
off to Amherst, and now Neal was a dairy farmer like his old
man--exactly what he'd once sworn he'd

never be--and married with three kids. He was shirtless, smoking a
cigarette, baseball cap smashed flat on his head, and she couldn't
believe she'd once had a major crush on him.

Pumpkin Run Road traveled through dense woods of white pine and birch,
their tangled branches catching in her headlight beams. The road
slowly descended into the rolling valley, a stunning view of the White
Mountains looming on the horizon. As she approached Holderness Street,
the white-steepled First Congregational Church rose above the town
center, a lovely green fronted by elegant Federal and Colonial-style
houses. This was the nicest part of downtown, the part that poverty,
progress and unemployment hadn't touched.

Rachel pulled into the parking lot, then crossed the blacktop toward
the church's back door. The September moon was a sliver, clouds like
lichens growing over a granite-colored sky. Rachel knocked on the
door, and the Reverend answered. "Wow, that was fast."

"Hi, Reverend."

"C'mon in, Rachel." Hughie Boudreau had once been a cop, way back when
her father was still alive, but at some point along the way he'd had a
spiritual awakening and had decided to join the ministry. His Sunday
sermons were quite popular, according to what she heard. At
forty-five, Hughie had a shock of polar bear-white hair, dainty
features and a restless gaze that had once upset her, but now she
rather liked him. The Reverend Hughie Boudreau had presided over her
mother's funeral three years ago.

"We got a call about a dead body," Rachel said.

"One of my homeless folks. Right this way." He led her through his
private residence toward the rear of the church, and they passed his
wife, a petite brunette with a pert smile, now talking on the phone.
She waved at Rachel, who waved back.

"You remember that little girl who got murdered about eighteen years
ago?" the Reverend asked as he opened the carved mahogany stairwell
door. "The little girl with Down's syndrome?"

"Vaguely," Rachel said, recalling how she and her friends used to tease
Melissa D'Agostino. If you got too close, you could smell her, people
said. She smelled dirty. She sucked her thumb and looked like a baby
monster. And once, in the girls' room at Fischer Elementary School,
Melissa had asked Rachel in a plaintive voice, "Would you be my
friend?" In response, Rachel had run away.

"Well," Hughie continued, "the gentleman downstairs is her father."

The basement of the First Congregational Church had been converted into
a homeless mission of sorts, partitioned off in an attempt to provide
privacy for the dozen or so men, women, and children who'd taken up
residence and were now sleeping soundly on their cots. They tiptoed
past this snoring flock, detoured through a spotless kitchen into a
small private room where an elderly man lay curled in a fetal position
on a narrow bed, clean white sheets tucked securely under his chin as
if he were somebody's child.

"He had his own room?" Rachel asked.

"I considered Marty to be a permanent resident. He died in his sleep,
looks like to me."

The room was spartan, the furniture mostly secondhand. Books littered
the rickety bedside table. On the dresser was a photograph of a man,
woman and child--Melissa as a toddler. Her mother held her with
supreme tenderness and delicacy, as if she were made of hand blown
glass, and everyone was smiling.

Rev. Boudreau picked up the picture from the dresser. "After his
daughter was murdered, his wife, Frances, just fell apart and had to be
committed. In one fell swoop, Marty lost everything ... his family,
his job, his home."

"And that's when you took him in?"

"Heavens, no. He rode the rails for several years. I don't know what
happened to him during that time. We never discussed it."

Rachel checked for a pulse. The old man's skin was cold and livor
mortis was evident, indicating he'd been dead for at least a couple of
hours. After a brief inspection, she said, "And the murder of his
daughter ... that case was never solved?"

"I have my suspicions." He looked at her oddly. "You don't remember
any of this, do you?"

She shook her head, an old sadness reasserting itself. "My father
committed suicide right around that time."

"Oh yes," he said tenderly. "I remember."

When Rachel was young, there were scary things she wasn't supposed to
talk about. Secrets. Bad things. Like Billy killing those cats.
Like her father's dark moods and her mother's anger. Like the retarded
girl. Rachel and her friends used to take turns acting out the murder.
Rachel often played the victim, and her best friend, Anne Marie, would
wrap her hands around Rachel's throat and squeeze, and once Rachel
almost blacked out. There was a murderer loose in town, but then her
lather shot himself, and none of her friends ever mentioned Melissa
D'Agostino again.

After Rachel's father committed suicide, a hole opened up inside of
her. She couldn't stop thinking about the last few seconds of his
life. She hoped he wasn't in any pain when the gun went off. She
hoped he blinked out like a light. As the years passed, the hole
inside her filled up with tears and guilt, and then one day she stopped
thinking about it altogether.

Her mother had been inconsolable. Her mother's sorrow had stretched
across the landscape like a blanket of snow, smothering all color,
suffocating the world.

"You said you had your suspicions, Reverend?"

He glanced down at Marty D'Agostino's body and sighed. "Ozzie Rudd.
Perhaps a few others."

"Are you serious?"

"I wouldn't kid about a thing like that."

"But no suspect was ever arrested, isn't that right?"

"Correct." He shrugged. "The evidence was circumstantial, at best.
No confessions. No eyewitnesses. You have to realize, these kids were
all from influential families. The D.A. wouldn't touch it."

"What makes you so sure it was Ozzie?"

"I'm not sure. It's just a hunch. Ozzie Rudd admitted to us that he
and some friends picked Melissa up after school on the day of the
murder. And that they later dropped her off at Black Hill Road."

Her stomach knotted. "What friends?"

He gave a pained expression. "It's all in the case file."

"You're not suggesting I reopen the case, are you, Reverend?"

"I'm not suggesting anything."

She didn't know much about Billy and the cats. Her parents had
protected her from the truth, and she'd buried the memory like a
shameful thought. She didn't feel sorry for herself for having lost
her father so young. Instead she locked the mystery away in her heart
and kept it there, snug. Her private fury. Daddy was gone. He had
given so much, and yet he'd taken away even more.

Rachel shook her head, refusing to accept it. "Ozzie Rudd wouldn't
hurt a flea."

His smile was kind. "Your father was a good man, Rachel. Melissa
D'Agostino's death troubled him a great deal. You know, he didn't
drink, didn't smoke ... didn't have the kind of vices most people use
to numb their pain with."

She blinked back the tears that had inexplicably sprung to her eyes.
"Do you know why my father killed himself, Reverend?"

"It's the grip of Satan," he whispered, his slender fingers encircling
her wrist. "He's got a grip on this world like you wouldn't
believe."

With a shiver, she reclaimed her hand.

RACHEL GOT TO THE STATION AROUND MIDNIGHT. THE OVERhead fluorescent
light in the storage room kept flickering on and off as she rummaged
through stacks of dusty cardboard boxes until she found what she was
looking for. She pulled out Melissa D'Agostino's case file, its worn
seams held together by silver duct tape, a round orange sticker on the
front indicating that the case remained unsolved. She felt the kind of
elation and sense of discovery she'd rarely experienced in her four
short years on the force and didn't stop reading until three hours
later, when she went home exhausted.

At eight o'clock the following morning, Rachel walked into the chief's
office and shut the door behind her. Police Chief Jim McKissack, at
fifty, was a brash combative man with a voice as scratchy as beard
burn. He was leaning back in his chair, talking on the phone. When he
saw her, he took his feet off his desk and shot forward. "Yeah," he
said into the receiver, "okay ... call me back this afternoon." He
hung up.

She dropped the case file on his desk. "I can't believe you never told
me about this."

He glanced at the file. "I didn't think it was relevant."

"Not relevant?" Her face flushed. "Not relevant that my brother came
this close to being a murder suspect?"

McKissack shrugged. "Put a police officer in a dark room with a
sixteen-year-old boy and you could probably get him to say he was on
the grassy knoll in 1963."

"So you don't think Billy had anything to do with it?"

"I didn't say that." He gestured for her to sit, but she kept pacing
back and forth in front of his desk. The office was warm.

Stuffy. She studied his impassive face and wondered if he was
deliberately trying to provoke her. His eyes were the solid color of
dusk, without any specks or flaws in the iris.

"So what are you saying, McKissack?"

"That he was guilty of being an impressionable kid who hung out with
the wrong crowd. Siddown, you're making me seasick."

She slumped in the wooden captain's chair, trying to solve in an
instant what had remained a mystery for almost eighteen years. "The
cats were this big deal in our house. I remember my father being so
outraged, and Billy just moping around and basically feeling rotten.
My friends and I would scare each other to death with decapitated-cat
stories, but after a while, nobody mentioned it anymore, and sometimes
I thought I must've dreamt it."

"Oh it's true, all right." McKissack lit a cigarette and gazed at her
over the curl of smoke. His hard-muscled body was full of compressed,
unreleased energy. She didn't know how to bridge the gap between them.
They'd ended their affair three months ago. McKissack was married, and
she knew his wife, Sheila. She liked Sheila, and she'd met his kids,
ages ten, twelve, and fourteen. Good kids. A wonderful family.
Still, her desire for him was as smooth and light as water.

"I've always had a sense there was some connection between my father's
suicide and the dead cats, but I couldn't be sure. I had this vague
feeling it had something to do with the retarded girl, too, but I
didn't know how, exactly." She stood up and leaned against his desk.
"You don't honestly think the two cases are related, do your"