Late Rain (16 page)

Corrine heard the words, but they didn’t register.

For a brief moment, she thought she saw Ben Decovic out of uniform and standing at the back of the crowd watching her. When she wiped her eyes and checked a second time, he was gone.

The manager wouldn’t stop apologizing, and Corrine couldn’t stop crying, and the crowd of onlookers kept growing.

A stockboy appeared and picked up Stanley.

Stanley’s head peered over the stockboy’s shoulder as he headed toward two doors at the rear of the store, but it was not Stanley’s eyes that spooked her, not his eyes that left her insides feeling as if they’d suddenly been torn loose and caused her to involuntarily raise one hand and touch the hair on the back of her head twice, a gesture from her childhood, like the practice of putting a pebble on her bedroom windowsill, all the childish attempts to conjure up a magic potent enough to meet what the dark or an empty house held.

It was not the eyes.

No.

It was the smile.

A cardboard smile with its own truth.

The manager and the others were looking at her, not the smile, so they missed what it held.

Corrine didn’t.

The smile told her she’d been wrong about one thing:

Maybe even more than the living, the dead were forever hungry too.

AFTERNOON BUMPED INTO EVENING, and the sky began to leak its light into the cloudbanks that had amassed to the east over the Atlantic. The pine trees and live oaks in Anne Carson’s backyard were coated in half shadows, and the wind carried its unseasonable warmth like a low-grade fever.

Ben Decovic stood at the counter below the kitchen windows and made a tuna fish sandwich. He cut the toast on a diagonal and set the finished sandwich on a white plate and bracketed it with two dill pickles. Then he poured a tall glass of ginger ale and dropped in ice cubes. He put everything on a tray and then shook out Jack Carson’s evening meds. He carried the tray into the living room where Jack sat and watched television with the volume off.

Ben set the tray next to Jack. The screen was filled with a black and white shot of a sky swollen with hundreds of descending paratroopers. Ben wasn’t sure if it was footage from a historical documentary or an early-fifties war movie.

“It was the right thing,” Jack said, looking over at Ben.

“What was?”

“Coming back home, Raymond,” Jack said. “You should never have left like you did. You have a wife and child, and they need you. I can’t carry all the weight myself. It’s not right.”

Ben quietly explained that he wasn’t Raymond.

“Thank you for the sandwich,” Jack said. “You remembered to fix it exactly the way I like it.” He went back to watching the television screen and the descending paratroopers. “They look like uprooted mushrooms,” he said between bites.

Ben’s cell phone rang. He walked back into the kitchen to answer it.

“We’re going to be later than expected,” Anne said. “They’re running behind schedule with the conferences.” She paused, then added, “Things ok with Dad?”

“Everything’s under control,” Ben said. “You take care of things there.”

“This is not going to be pleasant,” Anne said. “There are a lot of hurt feelings.”

Ben assured her that things were ok and said they’d order a couple pizzas when Paige and she got home.

From what Ben gathered, Paige had managed to add a couple bonus features to the standard parent-teacher conference package.

Not surprisingly, there were no problems with academics. Paige was consistently working far beyond grade level in all her classes, Math and Language Arts in particular, but everywhere else, she’d garnered Public Enemy status for her behavior and attitude. Students, teachers, and parents alike had complained about her. She verbally bullied and mocked her peers and worked guerilla warfare on her teachers, alternately playing to and undermining their classroom authority. The principal had insisted the guidance counselor, a Mr. Deane, be present and a part of this evening’s conference with the aggrieved teachers.

Anne wanted to blame all the behavioral problems on the hormonal turmoil stemming from the fact that Paige had just had her first period a month ago. It was a plausible explanation, but Ben still had his doubts. Anne was convinced that Paige had no inkling of Ben’s late-night arrivals and early-morning departures from Anne’s bed, but he’d felt on more than one occasion the weight of Paige’s assessing gaze and thought Anne was overoptimistic about how much Paige actually missed.

Time, Ben thought. That’s what they all needed.

Last night, in the fading arc of their orgasms, Anne and he had finally talked about the long shadows thrown by Anne’s ex, Ray, and Ben’s wife, Diane, over their days. Her head on Ben’s chest, his arm cradling her spine and his hand resting on the rise of her buttocks, Anne told him about Ray and a marriage that imploded after nine years. In the beginning, Anne planning her freshman year at the University of South Carolina, Ray her high school sweetheart, their relationship run on the reckless intoxication of opposites, one that eventually ran aground when a condom slipped, Paige becoming a dot on a nine-month horizon, Anne dropping the college plans and marrying Ray because that’s what you did, and they stayed married because that’s what you did, and Anne overlooked Ray’s all-night drinking sessions with his buddies and the sleeping around because that’s what you did for the sake of family, and three years ago when your father’s Alzheimer’s was diagnosed you took him in because that’s what you did, and then you awoke one morning a month later and found that your husband had left you, so you kept on working at the Salt Box and budgeted and watched your money and raised your daughter and cared for a father who didn’t recognize you most of the time because that’s what you did.

Ben’s turn, when it came, was troublesome. Though Anne was quietly encouraging, Ben stumbled on his words and choked on his life. He could not explain their love. He started, backed up, and started again, managing only to turn her and their life into grist for a made-to-order sentimental romance with a tear-jerker ending.

Ben kept starting and stopping. Anne rested her hand against his cheek and, a moment later, she reached over and turned off the bedside lamp.

In the dark, Ben found his voice. He told Anne everything. Life before and after Greg Hollinger and his Beretta semi-automatic. Everything between Ben and Diane’s meeting and first kiss to Diane bleeding out in the parking lot of Central Cleaners on a cold and clear January afternoon, and the ghosts of the children they never had following him around his apartment at three AM.

When he finished, Ben let out a long breath and then kissed the top of Anne’s head. She said something he didn’t catch. He leaned across her to turn on the lamp, but Anne put her hand on his arm, stopping him, and in the dark, they’d made love again.

Time, Ben thought.

That’s all anyone needed. Anne and he had found each other. It didn’t matter how quickly or gradually it had happened. That was the point. It happened. That’s what mattered. Your life started on the other side of that.

Ben checked missed calls before repocketing his cell phone. Three from his old partner in Homicide, Andy Calucci, all after midnight over the last three nights when Ben had been at the house with Anne. He made a mental note to call Calucci back later.

Ben took the voice-activated recorder out of Jack’s pocket, then replayed and erased the afternoon’s non-sequiturs and white noise. He gathered up the dish and glass and made sure Jack had taken all his meds. The local news started. Ben stood next to Jack and watched a dumb show sequence of images. The mayor. Buddy Tedros. Stanley Tedros. Stanley Tedros’s house and backyard. Ross Tines, the Magnolia Beach Chief of Police. The main gates at Stanco Beverages. The mayor again. The shot of the beach that was used on the city’s website as the home page.

Jack looked over and up at Ben. “You’re that policeman,” he said.

“Yes I am.” Ben waited for Jack to add something, but he returned his attention to the television screen and a commercial for half-pound hamburgers.

Ben checked his watch, figured Anne and Paige would be at least another half-hour minimum. He checked the to-do list taped to the front of the refrigerator and decided to start a load of laundry. Anne had gone in to work early to compensate for the time she’d taken off for the parent-teacher conference, and he knew she’d be tired, more than tired, by the time she and Paige got home.

He walked down the hallway off the living room into Anne’s bedroom and began stripping the sheets. They held a faint tidal flats smell and a series of pale Rorschach Blot stains from their lovemaking.

He bundled the bedclothes in his arms and hesitated for a moment next to the bedside nightstand. Then he started for the wash room. He dropped the clothes in the toploader and emptied the hamper. He set the water level and temperature and cycle. When the washer filled and began agitating, he added bleach.

Ben went back to the kitchen for a beer. He cracked it, not bothering to ink his wrist with a hash mark, and walked into the living room and stood next to Jack, who must have changed channels because the news was over and in its place was a horror film featuring a stocky man in the process of being transformed into a werewolf. The special effects were low-budget and the color watery. The volume was still muted.

Ben looked down the hall.

He walked back to Anne’s bedroom and went to the night-stand. Anne and he kept the condoms in the top drawer. Ben opened the one below it.

The journal was bound in imitation leather. Anne’s initials were embossed on its cover. Along its spine was a small sleeve for holding a pen. There was no clasp or lock.

Ben sat on the edge of the bare bed and opened the journal.

On the first page, Anne had written “My Time, My Life” and below that, the date, a September ninth three years ago.

The next page was blank.

As was every other page Ben flipped to.

He looked around the room. He closed the journal and put it back in the drawer. He went to the kitchen for another beer. He hesitated, then inked his left wrist with a single hash-mark.

He pulled over a chair and joined Jack in the living room. They watched the stocky man, now a full-blown werewolf, run through a park, then stop to tilt back his head and silently howl at a moon full and burning and wreathed in clouds.

SHE DIDN’T KNOW WHY she’d done it. Ben Decovic had asked her about the traffic jam, and Corrine Tedros should have just told him she didn’t remember any problems, but Croy Wendall having killed Stanley off schedule and under different circumstances from the ones they’d originally set up had left Corrine uneasy, a little too vulnerable, and Ben Decovic had had the same effect on her, Decovic tall and gaunt and God-haunted, looking like he belonged in one of the stained glass windows Corrine had seen in the Greek Orthodox Church during Stanley’s funeral, and when Decovic had pushed the questions about the timeline and her whereabouts, Corrine had lied, and the lie had been easy and automatic, but it had returned with a new set of teeth, and it kept returning, and though Corrine wanted to believe that everything was still all right, that she was simply overreacting, the phone call from Terri Illes had left her in a simmering panic.

Decovic had been around to talk to her too. Corrine had no doubt Terri Illes had used the interview to slander her. Terri was a permanent fixture at the Magnolia Beach Country Club, all social position and tanning beds and book groups. She was married to one of those mid-level managerial types at Stanco Beverages who always stood closer than necessary when talking to Corrine and tried to hide the fact he wanted to get in her pants by giving her boyish grins and telling self-deprecating stories about his golf game.

During the course of the twenty minute phone call, Terri had tormented Corrine with her sympathy and concern, continually evoking Stanley’s death and her shock at its violence, repeatedly offering a sisterly shoulder for Corrine’s grief while subtly taunting Corrine by withholding the particulars of Ben Decovic’s line of questioning.

Afterwards, Corrine kept replaying her own interview with Decovic. She hadn’t expected to have to account for her whereabouts more than once. She thought she’d had that covered, but then Croy Wendall had thrown everything off by killing Stanley almost five hours later than he was supposed to. Still, she told herself, everything in her statement came down to her word against Decovic’s.

Except her reply to his offhanded question about traffic problems. That and her follow-up lie about having to stop at Walgreens for tampons.

Her period had started this morning.

Corrine wondered if Decovic was planning on getting around to talking to Buddy.

Two periods in one month. It’d be a little hard to explain that one away.

Buddy, though, was still too broken up by grief to ask for sex. Corrine could play the same card if she had to and put Buddy off until her period ended.

That left Decovic’s question about the traffic problem.

It probably meant nothing.

It nagged though. She had a feeling about Decovic. Corrine had dealt with cops before and recognized the type.

She debated with herself over the next fifteen minutes and then put in a call to the Magnolia Beach Police Department and asked to speak with the dispatcher in the Traffic division. When the call was transferred, she put as much honey and helplessness as she could in her voice, telling the dispatcher she worked for a local insurance agency and needed to double-check the date and time for a claim involving an accident on Queensland and Old Market Boulevard.

The dispatcher ran it for her and then told Corrine there’d been no accident report filed for the date and time she’d given him.

It had taken four tries before she got through to Raychard Balen. By the time he was on the line, Corrine’s nerves were shredded.

Balen kept telling her to calm down.

Corrine couldn’t. She was lost to the same confusing mix of helplessness and rage that she’d felt when she stepped up to the placard of Stanley Tedros at the grocery store.