Stony River (27 page)

“What's going on?” Tereza asked.

Dearie jerked a bit then recovered. “Forgot you was still out. Just my bum back. Can't sleep for the aching. Buddy's keeping me company. Ain't he sweet?”

It was the first time Tereza had known Dearie to lie to her.

Dearie didn't go to work the next night either. The ladies' john was full of talk about some cop's murder. One customer showed Tereza a newspaper with the word
FALLEN
in thick black letters above a picture of the cop. His face looked familiar.

MARCH 11, 1957
. The phone ruptured the silence.

Buddy and Ladonna were at work. Dearie had been in bed for two days, wanting nothing more than to sink into a dark lake of sleep. But the same dream kept fishing her out, not letting her rest: Junior with his arms over his head in surrender and Buddy's twelve-year-old face on him, a panicky look in his eyes. She'd wake feeling like a heavy stone was pressing on her chest.

She considered not answering the phone in case it was the cops. She pushed away the memory of Buddy punching himself in the face and banging his head against the wall when she'd visited him in juvenile detention.

Yesterday was the first Sunday in years she hadn't cooked a roast, or anything else. She'd blamed it on her back so that Buddy wouldn't know how poorly she was taking things. She could usually stay cheerful for his sake. She'd told him more than once, “Act like everything's normal and pretty soon you ain't acting anymore.” But right now it wasn't working for her. Talking to Alfie didn't help either; she couldn't think of what to say.

The phone wouldn't shut up.

Buddy and Ladonna had hovered around her room all day yesterday. She'd heard them in the kitchen discussing what they might coax her into eating, their cozy voices hinting at something different between them, something more personal. Part of her was relieved—maybe the hormones they'd given the boy hadn't messed him up after all—but being locked up again would. Buddy was too trusting. Later, when he came in with a bowl of chicken noodle soup for her, she couldn't tell if his eyes were wild on account of spooning or fear. On the chance it was spooning, she'd gone ahead and warned him, “Be careful around that little girly. She ain't legal age.” He'd frowned at first like he didn't get it then went red-faced and backed out of the room.

Whoever was on the phone wasn't about to give up. Dearie forced her legs over the side of the bed and shuffled to the hallway. Put the cold, black receiver against her ear.

She hadn't heard from her niece in nearly four years. Not since the twit called the cops on Buddy. Irene had made Dearie scrape and bow before she agreed not to press charges, but by then they'd slapped Buddy around and tied him to a chair in a cell.

No question whose sharp, bitter voice it was at the other end. “Don't say a word,” Irene said. “I still have a party line.”

Bile rose into Dearie's mouth but she swallowed it back. Four years ago Irene had told Buddy he was brain-damaged—a load of hooey; the doctors had ruled that out. She'd told the police Buddy was dangerous. More hooey. The boy just made poor decisions sometimes.

“If anything gets out,” Irene said, “I'll know it was you and that'll be it for your little psycho.”

Dearie could picture her mousy-haired niece with a holier-thanthou hand on her bony hip. “You threatening me?” she said. “An old lady who ain't done nothing but love you since you was a little girl? If your pa was alive he'd be ashamed of you.”

Irene hung up.

Dearie looked at the receiver for a few seconds like it might start talking on its own. She stepped into the kitchen for the Lysol. Came back and wiped down the phone in case Irene's venom had seeped through. She strode into her room, yanked the yeasty-smelling sheets off her bed and turned toward Alfie's urn. “Look at me,” she said, “lying around for two days like some dying swan. Forgetting the boy needs me to keep telling him everything's gonna be fine.”

MARCH 13, 1957
. An unexpected snowfall silenced all but the low thud of a bass drum steady as a heartbeat, leading the sixth, seventh and eighth graders out of Millard Fillmore and down the middle of Jackson Boulevard. Even kids you'd expect to sing “Found a Peanut” or do something else just as jerky were respectful. It moved Linda to tears that froze on her eyelashes.

The police had closed the route to cars. The students marched through the colored neighborhood, across Main Street and past the railroad station. One right and one left turn and they were at City Hall, where the doors and windows were draped in black and the flag flew at half-mast.

Inside, the body of Officer William Nolan lay in repose
.

Linda could picture those words at the top of a panel for “Another Audacious Adventure with Glenn and Gilda Daring.” She'd spring the idea on Richie tomorrow. It might be his big chance to get into True Crime comics.

Officer Nolan was the first Stony River cop ever killed on duty. The story had made the front pages of the three papers Daddy brought home. Linda was drawn to the photos in them: a little boy in a rowboat, a skinny young man graduating from the police academy in 1949, a white-jacketed groom the same year, his wife all lace and pearls and fingerless gloves. The one with his little girl on his shoulders would have been enough to break Gilda's heart.

According to the paper, someone who wouldn't leave his name had called and told the police to check the alley between Jacob's Hardware and Bing's Pharmacy where Officer Nolan lay dying. Linda could see the Darings showing up at the alley, Gilda with her Brownie Hawkeye to record clues the police would miss and Glenn with his magic fingerprint kit. In the comic strip townspeople like Mother would be overreacting, blaming it on hoodlums. Richie could draw their doughnut-shaped mouths wailing, “New Jersey isn't safe
anymore. We must move to Kansas.” Gilda would say, “Compassionate love is the answer.”

After they'd heard about Office Nolan, Mother said, “You're not to be out after dark, Linda, or walk around town on your own.” As if Linda had ever been allowed to. Daddy had been shaken by the news, too, especially since he'd been a policeman once. “When we lose one, we all hurt,” he said. Linda wanted to say she'd met Officer Nolan but was afraid to admit how, even a year and a half later.

The lineup of students from other schools stretched for blocks. Linda made fists inside her mittens to warm her fingers. Her toes were numb and her kerchief soaked with snow by the time she got into City Hall. She and Connie shuffled with the crowd down a slippery hallway and into a large room where a casket sat on a raised platform, guarded by two policemen standing at attention. The casket was closed.

Connie whispered, “They don't want us to see the bullet hole.”

The only other dead person Linda had ever known was Grandmother Wise, who'd looked like a corpse months before she actually died. She'd lain “in repose” in a funeral home, but few had shown up to file past her.

Richie said he didn't believe in life after death; that you lived on only in somebody's memory. As soon as the last person who ever knew you died, you would be gone for good. Linda made it a point to remember Grandmother Wise once in a while, even though she'd been cranky.

Walking to Richie's house after school the next day, Linda built the scene in her mind: a sickly looking woman breaks into the drugstore at night, looking for painkillers. A young police officer, acting on a tip that a runaway teenager is taking shelter in the store, catches the woman sneaking into the alley, her pocketbook full of pills. Little does he know she's lifted her husband's old police revolver out of the bedside table and concealed it in her coat. Gilda would arrive at the
crime scene and know exactly where the bullet that killed the officer entered. The story needed some filling out, but it would give Richie a good start.

A weary-eyed Mrs. Sulo answered the door but didn't invite Linda in. She said Richie had gone to help out his grandma in Indiana because she'd cracked a rib. Linda wondered why Mrs. Sulo, a nurse, hadn't gone instead, but it would've been impolite to ask.

“How long will he be gone?”

“Hard to tell.”

“May I have the address? I'd like to write to him.”

“That wouldn't be a good idea,” Mrs. Sulo said and shut the door.

Linda walked home on shaky legs, puzzled why Mrs. Sulo had treated her so rudely. She was more than a little hurt: would it have been too much trouble for Richie to say goodbye?

MARCH 24, 1957
. Pulling their coats tightly around them, Miranda and Doris sit on a stone bench before a statue of the Virgin, their backs to the gigantic wooden door Miranda once feared would lock her in forever. All about them, the fresh green of new life pokes through thawing ground. This part of spring is Miranda's favorite: the ground soggy from the last of the melted snow, the air smelling of fermented leaves, the trees raising their arms to receive the rain.

The pigeons that roost in St. Bernadette's eaves do their jerky, head-bobbing dance on the gravel footpath fronting the bench. No matter how far away the birds fly, Sister Theodore said, they find their way home. From the time Miranda arrived at St. Bernadette's the prospect of returning to the home she shared with James has sustained her. She knows now it will never be. Mother Alfreda informed her that the house was sold to pay for Cian's keep and her own, offering it as another reason Miranda should consider convent life. Miranda's
tears and protests against the injustice of it had no effect. “Self-pity has never reversed a turn of events,” Mother Alfreda said.

How easily all you've known can be taken away.

Miranda hasn't seen Doris in a month. Minutes ago, they embraced awkwardly outside the visitors' lounge. Doris didn't offer her typically broad smile and Miranda held back from what: insecurity, hurt, anger? Sometimes her own feelings are beyond her ken. The bench's damp cold bleeds through the dark brown coat she borrowed from the donation bin. Doris is dressed more warmly in gray trousers and a houndstooth coat but her face is pale as paper, her eyes small with fatigue. A slight breeze—
a faerie wind,
the Voice of James whispers—lifts the back of a red kerchief from her hair.

She tells Miranda it happened on the Saturday before the visitors' day she missed without explanation. She's sorry she didn't call; the pain was too new and tender. Miranda's spine begins to soften and her resistance eases into compassion as what Doris relates unfolds like a scene in a novel. A watery-eyed Frank Dunn appears at the door just after midnight, Father Wolchek, the police chaplain, right behind him. Miranda recalls Officer Dunn at her own door nearly three years ago on that sweltering day, a damp shirt sticking to his back. Although she's never met Father Wolchek, she puts Father Shandley's face on him and garbs him in a priestly cassock.

Doris grips Miranda's arm, infusing it with a gentle current of energy. “All Frank could manage was my name,” she says. “Father Wolchek had to ask if they could come in. He asked me to take a seat. Told me Bill was shot interrupting a break-in.”