Voices in the Dark (11 page)

“You said you’d give me more.”

“When you get on the bus.”

A young mother, high-hipped, all legs, scooped up her child in crossing the street and set him down near the bus stop, where the sun netted her and diminished him. A racial mix of summer students from the academy sauntered by.

“The bus will take you to Boston,” Morgan said. “Will you be all right there?”

“That’s too much to think about.” Dudley creaked his neck for a wider look at the elderly couple. “I wouldn’t mind an ice cream.”

“There’s no time.” Bothered by the heat, Morgan heaved a sigh. “I don’t know who you are, Dudley, but you worry me. I wish you didn’t.”

“I’m a puzzle, I don’t deny it.”

“I can make things add up, but I have to force the figures. You see, I just don’t know. That stuff about killing kids, it’s easy to talk cold-bloodedly in the abstract.”

Dudley conveyed a look that could have been this or that, Morgan had no way of telling, no skills, he felt in dealing with him. The businessmen were dispersing, one into the bank, the others elsewhere, the sun beating on them.

“Ease my mind, Dudley. Tell me you wouldn’t hurt a flea.”

“You’re the policeman.”

“But I don’t solve crimes. What I do is my best, which most of the time is enough.”

“You look tired,” Dudley said with an undercurrent of fellow feeling.

“I am.” Which was the whole truth. The last couple of nights he had slept poorly, allowing old sadnesses to come to bear, some in dreams. And Dudley, whom he had first viewed as a challenge, was now a burden.

“It was his birthday,” Dudley said quietly.

“Excuse me?”

“And he wore braces on his teeth.”

“Who did?”

“The boy killed in the subway.”

The mammoth approach of the bus was sudden and tumultuous. In the clamor brakes hissed and wheezed, and the back of the bus steamed. Faces peered through the square windows, some featureless because of the glare of the glass. Morgan waited for something inside him to take command.

No one got off the bus. The woman, lifting her child, got on with money ready for a ticket. With a fixed gaze Morgan watched the transaction, which seemed to take an ungodly long time. Then the bus snorted into readiness as the driver waited for the woman to find seats. Morgan stirred uneasily, as if scuffling with a decision too big for him. The bus rumbled away with a reek in its wake.

“Do you still want an ice cream?” Morgan asked.

5

MARY WILLIAMS WOKE WITH A START AND COULDN’T TELL whether it was the verge of day or the pull of night. Soldier was beside her, which startled her, and she shook him awake. “You weren’t supposed to stay,” she said angrily, watching him rub his eyes. He left the bed with a spring and pattered into her bathroom on the balls of his feet. A few minutes later, after letting in the full morning light, she joined him in the shower. “This is my home, not yours,” she said as he worked the soap over her back. “I set the rules, not you.”

“I hear you.”

He dried himself quickly in a small towel and her vigorously in a huge one that was rough on her skin, evoking memories of her grandmother, who had tossed her about in the same sort of towel. Her grandmother’s presence lingered in closets, in the sunshine that poured through the big windows, in the phantom creaks of floorboards.

She stepped on a scale, dampening it. “I’ve gained two pounds.”

“It doesn’t show.”

She stepped off. “You have no rights here except those I give you.” Then she began to cry.

Soldier lifted his sinewy arms. “It’s him you’re mad at, not me,” he said and gathered her in.

“Sometimes I’m scared, so scared,” she said.

“You got me,” Soldier said.

Left alone for a while, lips critically pursed, she got hold of herself and gazed in the mirror with only mild degrees of discontent and melancholy. Her hair, blown dry, was brushed. Her shirt dress was pima cotton, with faint blue stripes on white. Stepping out of the bedroom and glancing into the facing one, Dudley’s room, she nearly slipped back into a mood.

Soldier awaited her at the breakfast table. Coffee was ready, juice poured, toast kept warm under a plastic dome. Sensitive to his stare, she said, “Something the matter? My dress maybe?”

“You’re beautiful,” he said.

Sitting down, she scowled as he poured coffee from a Silax. “I prefer tea,” she said.

“I forgot.”

She accepted the coffee and drank the juice. With deliberation she spread jam on oatmeal toast. “You’re spending too much time here. What’s that friend of yours, the nurse, going to say?”

“I might as well tell you,” Soldier said offhandedly. “She kicked me out. Nothing to do with you, Mary. She’s a screwed-up lady.”

“We’re all screwed up, every one of us. It’s the way we come out of the womb. Then it’s the way we’re handled and touched. It all makes a difference.”

“Nothing wrong with me,” Soldier said.

Later, with a wave of resentment, she watched him clear the table, rinse off plates, bunch up cutlery, open the dishwasher. Those were Dudley’s chores, the kitchen more his than hers. Without a word she slipped away.

In Dudley’s room, the bed primly made, closets closed, drapes partly drawn, she dredged up the memory of a dream in which she had teetered on the edge of a roof, ready to take a plunge, but someone unseen had held her back, hands unfelt had kept her in place. A few days later, in the Public Garden, she had met Dudley.

Soldier called to her. “Where are you?”

In the Public Garden, hours had wandered off without their knowing it. She saw in Dudley a depth others didn’t, and he glimpsed the ghost of the lonely little girl serving pink cupcakes and glazed cookies to her dolls and playing favorite to none, unlike her mother, who favored her older sisters. Dear Dudley, he saw everything. When she suffered cramps, some of her pain appeared on his face.

Soldier embraced her from behind. “So here you are.”

Dudley was not all there, her mother had said, but neither was she. At Radcliffe teachers had thought her strange, and classmates had called her “Mental Mary.” She finished Radcliffe but quit art classes at the museum after the instructor said that her paintings lacked audacity, that the colors lay too comfortably on the canvas, that her nudes lacked the inner roar of life. Little did he know that she was holding back, bottling energies he could not possibly understand. Only Dudley would.

“I won’t be in your way,” Soldier said in her ear. “He comes back, I’ll leave. Simple as that.”

“Nothing is ever as simple as that,” she said. With Dudley her thoughts could anchor in the pleasant, in the ripples of a dreamy smile.

“My duffel bag’s packed. All I got to do is go get it.”

Dudley was precious wine, Soldier a bargain bottle of scotch she wished she had never opened. Her father had drunk only the finest, while her mother had satisfied herself with brandy and Dubonnet. Tea had been her grandmother’s beverage, and a little wine on bad days.

“Do you want to be alone here?” Soldier said. “You can tell me if you do, but I won’t believe it.”

Her head swayed. “You know how to play your cards.”

He left a little later, a snap to his step, and she made her way to her studio and, in the full force of the morning light, perched herself at a drawing board. From memory she tried to sketch the boy, Glen Bodine, and for inspiration sank into memories of her own young years spent dressing dolls, memorizing popular songs, racing through homework, and, after her father’s death, reading legends on gravestones. She worked a solid hour with the failed efforts accumulating on the floor. Too much escaped her: the set of the boy’s eyes, the unwillingness of his smile, the thoughts in his head.

She tried to sketch her father, as she remembered him in the closet, but gave up after a single effort. She had better luck with a female face. Quick strokes of the charcoal brought it to life. Smudges deepened the eyes, and keen points awakened them. She would have finished it had footsteps not startled her.

Soldier was back. Everything he owned was crammed into the duffel bag propped on his shoulder. “What room?” he asked.

“Not his,” she said in the instant.

“I didn’t think so.” Despite the weight of the bag, he moved closer with a nimble step and peered at the nearly completed drawing. “Anybody I know?”

“Only I know her.”

“She looks mean.”

The drawing was ripped from the pad and crumpled. “She’s my mother.”

• • •

Outside Brody’s Hardware Store, which was not open yet, Orville Farnham said, “What are you doing with the fella messed on my porch, Chief? First I hear you let him go, then I hear you didn’t. What’s going on, people want to know.”

“Few things I have to find out about him,” Chief Morgan said. “I want to make sure he’s not a threat to society.”

“We got to know what he’s charged with.”

“I haven’t decided yet.”

“Jesus, Chief!” Farnham’s face, never at rest, leapt up, with contours shifting. “To hold him, you have to charge him, then he’s got to be arraigned. I don’t need to be a lawyer to know that.”

“The cell’s not locked, he’s free to walk,” Morgan said.

“I’m just giving him a place to stay for a while, call it a kindly act.”

Farnham was nonplussed. “What if he walks?”

“Then I’ll really arrest him.”

“I don’t believe this,” Farnham said, his face mobile. As a selectman, he had an oath to oblige and standards to uphold. The public good was in his trust, the chief accountable to him. “Look here,” he said, mustering authority.

The hardware store was opening for business. Old man Brody smiled at them both and proclaimed that the day would be another hot one. Morgan strode toward him, and Farnham called out, “I don’t like the way you’re handling this.”

“I don’t know another way,” Morgan said over his shoulder.

Some minutes later, he left the store and crossed the green with a weighted paper bag. The sun beat through the ribs of a cloud, the rays warming his back all the way to the station. Inside, with a quick glance at Sergeant Avery, he said, “Get the Polaroid.”

Sergeant Avery scurried. “Whose picture?”

“His.”

Dudley sat on the edge of his cot with a tray in his lap, one of the Boston papers beside him, compliments of Meg O’Brien, who had brought him breakfast. He was eating Wheaties, doused with coffee cream, from the box, an individual serving. He had wanted a bowl, and Meg might have scrounged one up had he put up a fuss. “Did I miss a beat somewhere?” she asked. “I thought we were rid of him.”

“I decided against it,” Morgan said, tired of the question.

Sergeant Avery took several pictures of Dudley, who, wiping his mouth, smiling, was a willing subject. He had on a different shirt, a blue button-down oxford, one of Morgan’s which gave him a gentle look and almost a boyish cast. A necktie might have made him a scholar.

“That’s enough, Eugene,” Morgan said and ushered him and Meg from the cell. Morgan also stepped out and secured the cell door with a chain and lock from Brody’s, which Dudley viewed with a mix of amusement and alarm.

“How will I go to the bathroom?”

“You holler, we’ll hear,” Morgan said. Two small keys went with the lock. He pocketed one and gave Meg the other. He had scarcely looked at Dudley but now looked at him fully. “I’m not locking you in, I’m locking others out.”

“All I have to do is holler?”

“That’s what I said.”

Dudley crimped his brow, years returning to his face. “You mad at me?”

Morgan was already turning away. “I’ll let you know.”

In his office, he rang up the Boston Police Department, District A, and after a number of delays reached the detective who had investigated Glen Bodine’s death. “Chief who?” the detective said. He sounded busy, harried, put upon, his attention split several ways. Morgan spoke rapidly and sensed disdain when he asked about the possibility of homicide. “We got no evidence of that,” the detective snapped.

“Could you check something for me in the medical examiner’s report?” Morgan asked.

“I don’t have it handy.”

“Could you tell me if the victim wore braces on his teeth?”

“Beats the shit out of me.”

“I’ve somebody here,” Morgan pressed on, “who might know something. Problem is, he won’t give me his real name. Can I send you his picture, see if it means anything to you?”

“You do that,” the detective said and was gone.

Morgan stared momentarily into space and then, slowly, tapped out a local number he kept in his head but had never called before. Elbows on his desk, he listened to the rings; the back of his neck went prickly when Kate Bodine answered. Recognizing his voice, she was not pleased. “What is it, James?”

“There’s something I need to know about your stepson. Maybe you can tell me.”

“Why do you need to know anything? What’s this about, James?”

“Just something I have to clear up. Did he wear braces on his teeth?”

“What?”

“Please, Kate. Just tell me if he wore them.”

“How did you know?”

• • •

Hanover House, situated off a bucolic byway in a secluded part of Andover, was a private care facility, exclusive, almost secretive, quietly appreciated for its elegant comfort. The venerable stone building, generations ago the mansion of a textile tycoon, stood on grounds etherealized by the haze of willows and the listing presence of birches. Ground pink flanked the walkway, and brass studded the impressive front doors. Paul Gunner, his visits infrequent, was unexpected.

The reception hall contained fine period furniture, though Gunner was unsure of the period. The curvature and fancy footwork of the tapestry chairs impressed him, and the appearance of the administrator, Mrs. Nichols, a tall figure in dark colors, unsettled him. Hanover House was the only place in the world where he felt at a disadvantage.

“How is she, Mrs. Nichols?”

“Doing fine, Mr. Gunner.”

He let out his breath. “No problems, then?”

“There are always problems,” Mrs. Nichols said with a faintly superior smile. She was of uncertain age, wore round eyeglasses, and vaguely reminded him of Phoebe Yarbrough, perhaps because of her height, which exceeded his.