The True Detective (46 page)

Of the boy, he recalls that he only saw him a couple times after that, maybe three times. That night or the next night, when all were led out at dusk for an explanation of the stars, he found the boy, and they went together to sit up on the hill out of view or hearing of the others.

The other definite sighting was a day later. With another boy in the lead, as they carried a canoe down the bank to the lake, there was the boy, the new friend who was on his mind in all moments, coming up the bank, also carrying a canoe with a partner. They glanced at each other. They did not speak. To Vernon, then as now, the exchanged glance was as if the other boy were not only his friend but his brother, even his father, come back from Vietnam to make all things acceptable and safe.

The last time he saw the boy—he wasn’t even certain it was him. It was Get Away Day and he was standing along the circular dirt driveway that surrounded the wide parade field and passed before the different cabins. Stuck guarding his duffel bag and suitcase, as were other boys all around the dirt road, waiting for
his mother’s dull yellow car to appear, he thought he recognized the boy, across the green standing next to a single small suitcase. There was nothing much he could do or knew to do, and in only minutes anyway a glossy purple car drove in through the gate of trees and stopped next to the boy. Two women—he wondered if one would be a sister—got out of the dark purple car, helped load the boy and his suitcase, and backing around on the grass, the car drove away, disappeared through the arch of trees. The car’s license plate was orange, and not long after that, as he determined the plate to be from New York, he began to look any time he saw such a car, and he looked still, it was true, to see if the boy was in the back seat of a passing car. He may have looked as recently as yesterday. No, maybe he did not look yesterday. He looked two or three days ago, though, when the future was still his upon which to fantasize.

Another car passes him, this time from behind.

He walks on. There is no hurry.

Glancing here and there, he sees that it is love he has come to know for the small town that is coming into view now under the lightening sky. Love for life of any kind, he thinks.

Nothing is going to save him now, he can see that. Not even death, he can see in the grayness up there, will allow his soul to exist. Not now. He can see this in the sky and feel it in the air.

He moves along. His heart is going out to the tarmac street, to an uneven tarmac sidewalk, to the cracker-box seaside houses, to their small fenced-in side yards and backyards, and to the ocean smell in the air. His heart goes out, too, to the boats wrapped and tied in plastic beside houses, beside garages, to orange basketball hoops, to stacks of firewood on porches, even to a macramé flowerpot holder hanging empty from a porch ceiling. And his heart goes out to a crack of sand making its way along the street with him, as if no one knows that the earth is
involved in some hopeless attempt to recover itself, day by day, millimeter by millimeter, even as it must be aware that a road crew will show up in time and refill the crack all the way back to where it started and make it start all over again.

He knows, too, on a sinking sensation, why those who kill so seldom run away. He knows this now. As if you could ever escape, he thinks.

C
LAIRE IS THINKING MAYBE SHE SHOULD GO BACK TO WORK
. She is at the kitchen table, sipping coffee. Matt has left for school, for which she is relieved, and she is wondering if she shouldn’t go back to work herself. In the first place, she can’t believe she did not ask for sick days when she called in. Everybody used their sick days, no matter what they were doing, going to the doctor or going deer hunting. It meant she was losing pay. Three days now. Dear God. Since she needs all she brings in each week to get along, the loss will be real. In its turn, it will cause its own unbelievable problems. Week after next, when she will be paid for this week.

Of course she’d give anything to have Eric come walking back in. She’d give up a year’s pay. She’d give up anything. Still—

At least Matt won’t be falling any more behind in school, she thinks. If only she had a way to make up the money—

Claire catches herself. Good God, come to your senses! she thinks. Money doesn’t matter. To heck with money. It will work itself out. The important thing is Eric. Her place is here, waiting for him to call. Her place is looking after him, putting some weight back on him, she thinks, when he comes dragging in like a tom cat that has gotten caught up in more than it could handle.

She sips her coffee. Money comes back to her. Money is like that, she thinks. It’s always there. It always comes up. It was something she has sure learned, losing their house like they did, and living all these years on little more than minimum wage. People who didn’t know just didn’t know. It was the big
if
in everything. People would say no, that wasn’t the case, but she knew better. If they’d had just a little money, just a little, Eric would be here right now. Because she wouldn’t have been working late like that, and he wouldn’t have been left alone. It is what she knows.

Enough of that, she tells herself. She’ll get nowhere thinking like that. Nowhere except deeper into a hole.

Then, all at once, two calls she’s taken this morning suggest things to her. Betty asked her to come downtown and meet her for lunch. She declined. It seemed like going out to enjoy herself while Eric was missing. Betty told her she’d better do some things and see some people or she’d go crazy. She couldn’t just wait there day after day all alone like that. Betty did make it a temptation; still she declined.

Then Lieutenant Dulac called and asked if she could come in around eleven or eleven thirty, to look at some more pictures they hoped to have by then. She said she’d do whatever they wanted her to do, if they thought it would help, and the lieutenant said that was fine. He hung up, though, without saying a police car would come by to pick her up, and she was left
wondering if it meant something to the effect that the free ride was over or if he was so busy he forgot to mention it.

Her thought now is that if she can leave the apartment unattended for one thing, why not another? And maybe Betty was right, because it would be a relief to get out for a while and talk to someone, especially Betty, to hear what she had to say, to have Betty hear her out in turn.

Not altogether admitting her reasons to herself, she calls the police department, only to learn that the lieutenant is out of the office. To the woman who answers, she says, “Well, I’ll be there at eleven thirty, like he said, so you’ll know to pick up on my phone calls.” Then she blurts out to the woman, “I was going to have lunch with this friend downtown; would that be okay?”

“I’m sure it’s okay,” the woman says, “You go ahead and have lunch. You must be getting cabin fever staying there all the time. Is your older son in school?”

“He is, yes. I hope that’s okay.”

“That’s fine. No problem with that. There’s a plainclothesman keeping an eye on things in your neighborhood, too, Mrs. Wells, so even if Eric came walking up, we’d spot him. So don’t you worry about it. I think we’re about to catch that guy.”

“Are you?” Claire says.

“I think so,” the woman says.

Gosh, Claire says to herself when the phone is back on the wall. She thinks to go look outside from the boys’ bedroom window, too, but doesn’t. Something else seems more urgent. She is on the phone then, to the paint and wallpaper store downtown where Betty works, to say that she will meet her for lunch after all. Something feels better today, she tells Betty. She isn’t sure what it is.

D
ULAC
,
IN THE PONDSIDE COTTAGE
,
IS IN A FOUL MOOD
. I
T
is nine o’clock and even as the state police lab crew is there doing its job, he does not have a photograph. On his call to Concord, he has been told that the state police lieutenant is not yet in his office. They will have to have a photograph sometime this morning, Dulac is thinking, to have it appear in the afternoon papers. He had taken it for granted that this would follow—if something conclusive did not break in the meantime—and now he has begun to wonder. And worry. And right now, too, he’d like very much to see the
face
of the person they are so hard upon apprehending. He’d like to have a look at the face of the person with whom he feels he might have to bargain, in some unexpected way, to gain the release of the boy.

There are other reasons, too. He’d like copies of a photograph transmitted to Boston, to New York, to state police throughout New England, to guards along the Canadian border. Just in case he is wrong. He was wrong in other things; what made him think he had insight in this instance?

He also wants to see the suspect’s face to see if he can read anything there himself of the young man’s propensity for violence. Can such a thing be read? Is it highlighted in the eyes? The line of the mouth? He especially wants positive confirmation from the secret witness—Martin, contacted earlier at the second number he had written down, is in the university library at the
moment looking through yearbooks—and to hear his judgment concerning the questions of escape and violence.

Nor is that all, Dulac is thinking now. A photograph of the suspect, in all that it could do, could actually save the life of the boy. As it would affect time and stimulate action, it could save the boy’s life. It’s that important, Dulac thinks.

Dulac lights another cigarette, checks his watch yet again. Nine twenty. He should hear any minute from Laconia. How long can it possibly take to have two men enter a house, serve up papers, and locate a photograph? What a terrible mood he is in, he adds to himself, and is just stepping to the kitchen counter, thinking to see if the state police lieutenant is back on the job, to see if he can shake things up, when the telephone rings.

There is Shirley’s voice; he has neither seen nor spoken to her this morning. “They have a photograph, a good photograph,” she says. “It’s on its way to Concord right now.”

“Why didn’t they call me?” Dulac says.

“They called here—I don’t know.”

“Jesus, I made it all clear; I’ve been waiting here forty minutes and I dumped our secret witness at the library.”

“You picked him up?”

“I’ve got him looking at yearbooks—waiting, because I did not give him this number.”

“Gil, listen. You better try to ease up. You don’t sound real good.”

“I don’t know why I should sound good.”

“Gil, go have some breakfast or something. The pictures should be on their way. They should be here, in no more than an hour or an hour and a half from what they say. A stack of them.”

“I have to pick up our witness. I left him stranded.”

“I know. You said that. But have a bite to eat; have some coffee. The pictures will be here in an hour or so. Stop worrying about so many things. I’m sorry, you know. You know?”

“Fine—okay. Okay. Shirley, get back to me, though.”

“I will,” she says.

“Good,” he says.

“Have some food,” she says. “It’ll make you feel better.”

T
HERE ARE FEW CUSTOMERS IN THE SUPERMARKET WHERE
Vernon is walking now, looking at what the shelves have to suggest to him of one thing and another. There is a woman pausing with a cart. There is another woman. There is a man. Entire vegetable and bakery corners, and aisles of the store, are not populated at all at this hour. Vernon is more or less nervous, and he studies rice for some time. Wild rice, minute rice, brown rice. Why is rice used for weddings? he wonders. Does it have to do with pregnancy, with purity? Is it used because of its capacity to swell up? What does it matter to him? he wonders. Should he feel love for rice, too, over its range of meanings?

In an aisle—at the other end a woman is just pushing out of sight—he sees a child sitting on the floor, among so many cereal boxes. As he sidesteps along, not quite looking at the child directly, he realizes the cereal boxes are being used as building
blocks, as things to read. At eight or ten feet, stealing a glance, he still cannot tell from the child’s hair if it is a boy or a girl; he glimpses, as the child twists to one side to reach a box, a designer jeans label and the curve of the child’s back into its waist.

Vernon walks along the aisle. Around the corner, he places a box of rice he discovers in his hand on a shelf and goes on to leave the store, empty-handed, to return outdoors to the chilled air.

I
T IS THEIR ONE CLASS TOGETHER
,
AND HE HAS BEEN TENDING
toward it all morning. Vanessa is there in her seat when he walks into the room, but she doesn’t look up.

Nor does she look over, even as he has sat down and is keeping an eye on her. She does turn her head to look outside, through the windows to her left. And she looks to the front again. She doesn’t look his way. All the time it takes for the class to settle in and for the teacher to collect homework—he has none to give in and for an instant he feels detached from everything there is to do and know in life—and for the teacher to start the day’s work, writing a problem on the board and turning to face them, Vanessa does not look his way, for even a passing glance, and he knows that she knows he is there.

The feeling of being detached from all things stays in him. It’s not a new feeling but something he has felt many times in
the last year or so, since starting high school. Detached from all things. Maybe, he thinks, it’s why he has so taken to Vanessa. To know someone in school. Well, someone besides Cormac, although for the moment, thinking of him, he wouldn’t mind having Cormac there to make a joke at, to share the slightest joke over nothing, as they had before.

He determines to look only to the front himself. He has to be strong, he thinks.

In time, though, he glances her way. He can’t help it, it seems. All morning he looked forward to seeing her in this room, if only to exchange the faintest of looks. Now this.