The Innocence Game (14 page)

The green-and-white house appeared to be all its age in the morning light. On his third pass down the block, he saw the boy leave and noted three men in a black sedan at the corner. The men made their move fifteen minutes later. They forced the front door, stayed for almost an hour, and came out the way they went in. That was four hours ago. Now he approached the house and pushed at the door. It creaked open. His nostrils quivered. The smell of stale fear permeated the space. He wandered through the first floor, stopping here and there to touch something. They’d done a thorough job of searching the place. And hadn’t tried to hide it. He made his way down a hallway. The door to the basement was still locked. He forced it open and walked down the steps. The long, thick table was sleeping under a layer of dust. He wanted to take off his gloves and feel its surface, but couldn’t. Instead, he dropped to his hands and knees in a corner and felt along the floor for a seam. Then he took out a flat bar and began to work. Three minutes later, he’d pried up a foot-square block of cement. He plunged his hand into the dark hole, but it was empty. The man with the yellow eyes cursed. A single word that rang off the brick walls. A car pulled up outside with a squeak of springs. The man fitted the square of cement back into the floor and filled in the seams with dirt. Then he slipped into the backyard and worked his way around the block.

The boy was just getting out of the car. There was a girl behind the wheel. The same one from the lake. The boy carried himself like a man, but he wasn’t. Not yet. Maybe never. The girl pulled away from the curb. She cruised past the man with yellow eyes, barely aware he was there. He committed her tag number to memory. Then he watched the boy walk up the path to his front door. By the time the boy turned around, the man was gone.

I stared at the open door for what seemed like a day and a half, then spun around and took a look behind me. Sarah was gone. The sidewalk was empty. I thought about calling the Evanston cops but decided to go inside instead. I got a baseball bat out of my front closet and walked into the living room. They hadn’t trashed the place. Just moved around enough things so I knew they’d been there. I checked the kitchen, then went upstairs. My mom’s bedroom was halfway down the hall. I hadn’t been in it since she’d passed. Now I pushed open the door. Her clothes still stood on hangers in the closet. A hairbrush, some pictures of me, and her jewelry were arranged on the dresser. The checkered band of a Chicago police hat lay in the middle of her bed. I picked up the band and sat with it, wondering how long they’d been here, what they’d touched. I walked back downstairs. The basement door stood ajar. In the cellar, I crouched over the sealed-up hole in the floor. There were fresh chisel marks on the smooth stone. I walked across the room and removed a piece of paneling up high on the wall. Behind it was a camera with a pinhole lens and a portable recorder. I took out the recorder’s memory chip and slipped it into my pocket. Then I went back upstairs and called a locksmith. After that I made a second call.

Smitty met me in the dirt parking lot behind Mustard’s.

“What are ye all about, Ian?”

“Nothing, Smitty.”

He shielded his eyes with his hand and blinked against the sun. “You sure?”

“Yeah.”

“Someone kicked in your door, Ian. Why aren’t you calling the coppers?”

“Be better if I don’t. Can I get my stuff?”

Smitty gave me another hard look, then led me inside, to a small kitchen prep area. He grabbed a handle screwed into the planked flooring and pulled. A section of the floor swung up, revealing a short flight of stairs. We went down, Smitty first.

“Watch your head,” he said and snapped on a light. The basement was maybe a hundred feet square, the ceiling, barely six feet high. Havens’s boxes were stacked along one wall, between cartons of frying oil and a reach-in cooler.

“You want to take them out of here?” Smitty said.

“Just a few things.”

“Turn out the light when you’re done.”

Smitty left, and I was alone with the ViCAP files. Everything seemed to be in order. I pulled out the bite-mark photos Havens had shown me, along with a handful of supporting documents. Then I turned out the light. Upstairs, I ordered a dog and fries. I sat at a table outside, ate my dinner, and watched the traffic breeze past. The band from the cop’s hat lay on the table in front of me. Along with the photos and the memory chip from my camera. It was the third of July. I was being watched. And I needed to figure out why.

A guard tugged open the gates to Calvary Cemetery and waved me in. I waved back and pulled into an empty parking lot. The Fourth had started out overcast, with gusts of rain blowing in off the lake. I locked my car and took a walk among the headstones. Calvary was the oldest existing Catholic cemetery in Chicagoland, and I was in the oldest part of it. To my left a statue of an angel looked down, arms spread, face rubbed smooth by the passage of time. Beneath the angel, I found the grave of Kevin Barry Byrne, dead in 1866. Next to Kevin was a large stone with a single line chiseled on it.

1804–1860 lost on lady elgin

I’d done my homework from the last time I was here. The
Lady Elgin
was a side-wheel wooden steamship that was rammed by a schooner during a storm on Lake Michigan. More than three hundred people died, many of the bodies washing up on the rocks near Northwestern’s campus. People don’t think they can learn much in a cemetery, but there you go.

I walked past the marker for
Lady Elgin
’s nameless victim and came face-to-face with a young boy. He was maybe three feet tall and hewn out of white marble. The boy stood in a small black box with a glass face. The hinges and handle on the box were made of metal and green with age. The boy was frowning at me, wondering what I was doing here with the dead. I tickled my fingers across the top of the box and walked on.

My brother was where he always was. Under a tree, with a peek at Lake Michigan when it wasn’t cloudy. I took out a tight bunch of flowers and put them on his grave. Then I sat on the grass and stared at his headstone.

matthew joyce
february 6
,
1990–july 4, 2000

I edged a finger into the cuttings on the stone and searched for the right feeling. But there were only the clouds and the smell of rain. The dirt and the grass. And my brother’s remains, moldering in a box below me. So I stopped trying. And the tears came. Hot and wet like always. When they stopped, it was just as quick. And just as mysterious. I wiped my face and wondered if it would always be like this. It wasn’t that I couldn’t handle it. I handled it just fine, thank you.

I stayed at the grave for almost an hour. I didn’t see another soul the entire time. Except for a coyote, looking for his breakfast. He was gray with a swatch of brown over his shoulders and down his back. I watched him until he started watching me. Then I turned away. When I looked back, he was gone.

I was threading my way back to the parking lot when I heard a footfall. It was a woman, maybe thirty yards away, bundled up against the weather and walking away from me on a path to my left. Something seemed familiar. Was it the cut of her coat? Maybe a flash of color? I turned for a second look, but the woman had disappeared. In the parking lot, two cars had joined mine. One was a beat-up red Toyota. The other, Z’s lime-green VW. I crept into the graveyard again, careful this time not to make a sound.

I found her in the poorest section of Calvary, hard by the exhaust and noise from Chicago Avenue. I knew the section well because Matthew almost wound up there. Until my mom found some cash. And Matthew slept where he slept.

Z was dressed in black, a wisp of a hat riding atop her mop of red hair. She stood ramrod straight, hands clasped in front of her, and stared at a small patch of ground. I watched her lips move as she prayed and ducked behind a tree when she blessed herself. She knelt and placed something on the ground, blessed herself again, and got up to go. I waited, then walked over to the plot she’d been standing before. Z had placed a set of black rosary beads beside the grave marker. I left the beads where they were and jotted down the name carved in the rock. When I got back to the parking lot, Z’s VW was gone. I started up my car and followed suit.

By the time I got home from Calvary, the skies had cleared and the day was beginning to heat up. Even better, Sarah Gold sat on my front steps.

“You’re early,” I said.

“It’s my first parade. I’m excited.”

“What do you got there?” I pointed to a white bag by her feet.

Sarah pulled out a handful of silver tubes. “What do you think?”

“What is it?”

“Face paint. Red, white, and blue.”

“Not happening.”

“It’s the Fourth of July.”

I shook my head. Sarah already had a tube of red open and a tube of blue. She smeared a couple of fingers worth down both sides of her face.

“I live here, Sarah.”

“It will be fun.” She handed me the tube of red. “Please?”

I squirted a little on my finger and wondered what I’d gotten myself into. Maybe it was just what I needed.

A half hour later, we were standing in front of a diner on Central called Prairie Joe’s. They sat us at a table outside. Sarah ordered the huevos rancheros. I got scrambled eggs. Our orders were served with warm tortillas and coffee. By the time we finished, it was almost eleven, and the street was filling up with life. We walked for a bit and drank it in. Parents carrying cups of Starbucks and pushing strollers. Kids in baseball caps. Ice cream. Balloons. Flags. And face paint. I’d agreed to turn myself into a red, white, and blue fool, but only once the parade actually started.

We stopped at an antiques shop where Sarah looked at an old set of silver and a wooden box of some sort. Then we walked next door to the Spice House. I’d never been in the Spice House and, apparently, with good reason. The moment I walked through the door, I started sneezing.

“You all right?”

I shook my head and retreated to a bench outside.

“What’s in there?” I said.

“Spices.”

“What kind of spices?”

“Well, the sign says they have eight different kinds of paprika.”

“Great.”

I stayed on the bench while Sarah perused the stores of paprika, pepper, and whatever else they ground up inside the god-awful place. She came out with a small bag she kept at a careful distance.

“Sorry about that,” she said.

“What did you get?”

“Cumin, red pepper, and chili powder. Good for tacos.”

We walked some more. The sun was bright and hot now. A trombone had fired up somewhere, and the parade started. I bought us some ice cream. People smiled at us. Mostly because of Sarah, but I smiled back anyway. She linked her arm in mine and whispered in my ear.

“Time for the face paint.”

I laughed and let her smear my face with streaks of color. Then I did the same to her. After that, we painted the faces of a couple of kids whose parents weren’t around. We watched the parade go by. Yelled and cheered at the Evanston Marching Kazoo Band. Then some cops and firemen. Uncle Sam on a high two-wheeled bicycle did crazy circles around the parade mascot, Sparky the Firecracker. Kids floated by on floats. Old people rode past in cars that were even older. The governor of Illinois stopped to shake my hand. Best I could tell, he wasn’t even wearing a monitoring bracelet.

We watched for two hours and got sunburned until someone gave us some sunscreen. Then we headed down the block to a bar called Clarence’s. It had an outdoor patio that was filled with parade people. We found a table, and I went up to get a couple of beers. Sarah drank half of hers in one go.

“Fun?” I said.

“Wonderful.” She clinked her nearly empty glass into mine. “Thank you very much.”

“You don’t go to parades in Michigan?”

“Charlevoix has a parade. We usually watch it from our boat.”

“Nice.”

“Not really. You sit out there all day with the same seven people.”

“I guess it would be all right if it were the right seven people?”

“I guess. You want another one?”

“Sure.”

Sarah started to get up, but a waitress was nearby and took her order. Sarah sat back down. We’d wiped off the face paint, but a handful of guys at the bar couldn’t keep their eyes off her anyway. She was wearing shorts, a yellow tank top, and oversize sunglasses. With her hair pulled back and the glow from her day in the sun, I couldn’t blame them.

“What?” Sarah slid the glasses up on her forehead.

“Huh?”

“You’re sitting there, smiling.”

“Can’t I smile?”

“It’s just that you don’t do it that often.”

“Do what?”

“Smile.” She broke out a killer as the waitress put down our second round of beers. “It looks good on you, Ian. The smile, that is.”

“You think so?”

“I do.”

The beer was cold. Sarah insisted we clink glasses again. She giggled and slid her eyes over my shoulder, toward her admirers at the bar.

“They’ve been ogling you since we got here,” I said.

She put down her beer and leaned close until our lips were almost touching. “Want to give them something to talk about?”

“I thought we were friends?” I said.

“We are.” She eased back in her chair and took another sip from her pint. “Actually, I was worried about you this morning.”

“Why?”

“You got out of your car like a black cloud. Grim.”

“Sorry.”

She waved her hands around us. “It’s the summer. A parade. We’re young and drinking beer. How bad can that be?”

“You’re right.”

“I know I’m right. So why?”

“Don’t mess around, Sarah.”

She slipped her hands over mine. They were warm and strong.

“I’m not messing around, Ian. If you have a problem, I’d like to think I can help.”

“It’s not a problem.”

“Then what is it?”

Maybe it was the beer. Maybe it was her. Maybe it was just the need to feel something more. Something I could hang on to. Whatever it was, it opened the door. And I walked through.