Voices in the Dark (14 page)

• • •

At eleven-thirty Harley Bodine left his wife’s bed, partially clothed himself, and paused to listen to the rain. A wind chafed the trees. From the bed, her face tattered in shadows, Kate said, “Close the door when you leave.”

He descended the stairway deliberately in minimal light, entered semidarkness through a double doorway, and, picking up a cordless phone, went to an open window. He wanted fresh air on his skin and in his lungs. He rang Gunner’s number, and promptly Gunner’s voice was in his ear.

“What’s the problem?”

“That friend of yours is in town. The police chief has him in a cell.”

“I should have warned you. He tends to be unpredictable afterward.”

“The chief took me to see him. The silly son of a bitch looked me right in the eye.”

“And?”

“Nothing,” Bodine said. “It was like we were feeding each other lines. It was a stage play. What’s with him?”

“He likes to hold a razor against his throat,” Gunner said.

“I felt it was against mine.”

“No danger of that.”

Bodine found a cigarette and lit it. “How can you be sure?”

“The man’s certifiable, and so’s the woman. That’s always been the kicker. I thought you understood.”

Exhaling smoke, Bodine enjoyed the twirling sensation in his stomach, that of a man operating beyond the ordinary pitch of life. He said, “The chief mentioned your daughter.”

“But our friend didn’t.”

“No.”

“It’s late,” Gunner said. “Go to bed. Enjoy your lovely wife.”

“I already have,” said Bodine.

6

MRS. NICHOLS LOOKED IN ON HER. THE ROUND EYEGLASSES and dark colors stood static in the doorway, like sculpture, but the scent of musk marched in. “How are we this morning?”

Sitting up in bed, Mrs. Gunner scratched a whiskery underarm. A cockled leg eased out of the cover. “I’m an old lady, so you figure it out.”

“Did we have a good night?”

“I wasn’t ravished.”

“Wonderful,” Mrs. Nichols said. “Are we joining the others for breakfast?”

“I’ll eat here.”

Maria, new at Hanover House, came in later to make the bed, pick up soiled clothes, run a bath, and empty the pot. Then she helped Mrs. Gunner into the tub, toys floating on the water, metal bars within range for Mrs. Gunner to hoist or lower herself. Within reach was a button to press in the event she was alone and in distress. When she slipped deep into the water, a rubber duck floated up and nudged her chin.

“I suppose you think I’m cracked.”

“I think it’s grand,” the young woman said.

Mrs. Gunner let herself sink into her shapeless past, so many years running together. Here she was a girl, there she wasn’t. Here was her husband, who didn’t want conversation, only the physical, and there he was in another light, the complete edition of the child they had produced.

A luxuriant towel awaited her; then a rubdown to smarten her flesh, against which she held a grudge. It had submitted too wantonly to age and mocked her cruelly in the mirror. An outsize dress obviated a bra. Moccasins accommodated her bare feet. Maria came forth with a comb, but she warded it off.

“I want my breakfast.”

Gustav had been her husband’s name, his brutality always casual, spontaneous, part of a moment that passed. Later her bruises surprised him, angered him a little, as if she were throwing them up in his face. But he forgave. She did not.

Much that had been forgotten came back.

Maria returned with breakfast on a gilt tray, which she placed on a café table near the window where the sun angled in with the grace of a tiger extending a paw. Seconds later Isabel Williams entered with a steaming mug of coffee and a fresh-lit cigarette and, snatching up an ashtray available for her, joined Mrs. Gunner at the table. Her voice was sere. “You could’ve done your hair, Hilda.”

“Who’s to see?” Mrs. Gunner tapped the shell of a soft-boiled egg. “I don’t smell, that’s what counts with old people.”

Isabel sipped coffee, the red of her mouth splotching the edge of the mug. Thicknesses of mascara gave her eyes the look of bullet holes in a pâpier-maché face. Her nose expelled smoke. “Did you sleep through the rain?”

“Never heard it.”

“The thunder was like racehorses charging ’round the bend.”

“Didn’t hear that either.” Mrs. Gunner fired a look at Maria, who was dusting crystal figurines and examining photographs in stand-up frames. “Don’t break anything.”

Maria lifted a picture framed in silver. “Big boys.”

“Swines,” Mrs. Gunner replied, shocking the young woman. “Ill-mannered and repulsive.”

“Her grandsons,” Isabel said evenly.

“No better than their father,” Mrs. Gunner stated, egg yolk on a corner of her mouth. Her eyes narrowed from an image of her final month of pregnancy, when her belly had been a globe of the world. A phantom cramp made the recollection hurtful. “I’m a great expense to him now. I’m glad.”

Maria said stoutly, “In my family we revere children.”

“You’re in America now,” Mrs. Gunner said, picking up toast that had been buttered for her.

Isabel dashed her cigarette. “Are you Hispanic, dear?” she asked, and the young woman nodded. The ashtray was porcelain. The ashes were fastidiously deposited in a single corner, the lipstick-soaked butt put to rest nearby, as if Isabel were the cleanest of cats. “You sound quite intelligent. Where’s your accent?”

“I was born here.”

“But you’re still a spic,” Mrs. Gunner said, “same as I’m a kraut. Mrs. Williams here is Mayflower, a bit too la-di-da for my liking.”

Maria, boy-figured, picked up another picture, this one in a small, insignificant frame. “Such a pretty girl,” she said. “Is this your granddaughter?”

“The child is dead,” Isabel interjected. “Mrs. Gunner sometimes forgets.”

“I know she’s dead!” The voice was harsh, blistery. “They put her under three years ago.” The voice dropped. “But she’s alive in my heart. Put the picture back.”

The young woman returned the picture to its place and continued dusting. Crunching toast, Mrs. Gunner gazed in a wounded way out the window. The grounds were greener from the rain, the flowerbeds overfull. A crow gracefully beat the air. Isabel said, “You have egg on you,” and wiped it off with spit.

“He never shed a tear,” Mrs. Gunner said. “He wanted her dead.”

“Let’s not get on that subject.”

“Can’t help it. She was my sweetie.” Mrs. Gunner’s face heated up as memories ramified feelings, and feelings tangled her mood. Her breath came out hot. “I don’t blame the mother, just him.”

“Not in front of a stranger, Hilda dear.”

“He’ll go to hell, the little girl’s in heaven,” Mrs. Gunner said.

Maria, stepping back from her dusting, started to speak, but Isabel, with a gesture, went momentarily cross-eyed to indicate that Mrs. Gunner wasn’t all there.

“He’ll burn,” Mrs. Gunner said with satisfaction, and Isabel lit another cigarette, the flame leaping high from the disposable lighter.

“Won’t we all, dear.”

• • •

Chief Morgan left his car near the chapel and, seeking the administration building, approached a gaggle of summer students. A girl whose face black eye pencil gave arguable drama pointed the way. The Phillips campus was a hamlet of venerable brick and well-behaved greenery sweetened by wafting fragrances of phlox. The grandeur of the bigger buildings, fronted by stately columns, evoked memorials. Morgan felt like an obtruding presence and a loud voice inside the echoing personnel office, where a man of measured formality studied the Polaroid of Dudley and said, “Sorry, no one we know. Should we be worried?”

In the alumni office a rose-haired woman obliged him with old yearbooks, in which he tried to match a young face with Dudley’s dimpled one. Resemblances popped up, but none panned out. “It was a shot in the dark,” he confessed to the woman. He asked to be put in touch with someone who had known the Bodine boy. The name she gave him was Pitkin.

Aerobic shoes gave balding and bespectacled Ted Pitkin a bouncy step as he and Morgan walked over campus grass golden green in the sun, every blade in place. Trees stood brassy. “I recognized you right away,” Pitkin said. Roomy short sleeves diminished his arms. His mouth was liver inside a wiry beard of dubious color. “I was at the Gunners’ the evening you brought the bad news. Glen Bodine was a brilliant student, one of my best.”

“Tell me about him,” Morgan said, shortening his stride.

“Polite, sensitive, shy … and brave. Yes, very brave.”

“Was he depressed?”

Pitkin shrugged small shoulders. “If so, it was his secret. Are you asking if I think it was suicide?”

“Yes.”

“People with treacherous illnesses are inscrutable. They live within themselves. I have a theory, Chief. I believe people carrying such burdens are prone to macabre accidents, violent deaths. Life sneaks up on them with an air of combat.”

“But the boy was brave, you said. He would have fought.”

“Bravery is usually foolhardy. Cowardice is calculated. It’s what keeps most of us alive.”

They paused in the shade of a rhododendron grown to magnificent proportions. Morgan lifted his face, his skin absorbing the breath of dark green foliage. The sky was aggressively blue. “Tell me about his father,” he said.

“I scarcely know him.”

“But you know the Gunners.”

“I tutor the two boys, advanced mathematics. Mr. Gunner wants them to be a credit to him. He looks upon them as his little thoroughbreds, though of course they’re not so little. Rather gross, I’m afraid.”

“The family lost a daughter.”

“The boys never mention her, nor does Mr. Gunner. Mrs. Gunner did once, but she was talking more to herself than to me. Are these questions leading to something, Chief? Has something new come up?”

“I’m just gathering opinions.”

“Why?”

“It seems to be my job,” Morgan said, and they moved on, but not far. A beech tree offered more shade. A shed condom of shocking pink lay near the trunk like a wad of bubble gum. Ignoring it, Morgan produced the Polaroid. “This face mean anything to you?”

Rising on his toes, Pitkin looked at it one way and then another. His mouth blossomed in his beard. “Is there a connection? Who is he?”

“Maybe make-believe.”

Pitkin seemed to enjoy a puzzle. “Fictional?”

“Funny pages,” Morgan said. Vague noises ripened into voices. Students were passing, boys and girls in lollipop colors. Morgan returned the picture to his breast pocket. “He could be nothing more than a coincidence.”

“In your work,” Pitkin said, straining to help, “I’d assume all coincidences are suspect till proven otherwise.”

Morgan stepped into sunlight, tossed a last look at the students, and said, “That’s my theory.”

• • •

When Beverly Gunner crept into her husband’s bedroom to wake him, the immense stillness of his body frightened her. At first she thought he was dead — and, God have mercy, she hoped with all her heart it was so. Then the mass of a belly, visible through his open pajama top, rumbled. Profoundly disappointed, she backed out of the room and soundlessly shut the door.

Still in her robe, she carried coffee outdoors and sat in a canvas chair wet from the night’s rain. A lemon veil of sunlight gave the flower bed the aura of a fairy tale. She tried not to think, tried not to see or to hear, but near the honeysuckle a fanciful figure hopscotched on the grass. Her daughter as image and metaphor. Song and dance. A smile christened the little face, a scab emblazoned each knee. She tried to hold the vision, but her hand shook. Coffee slurped.

“I’m here, darling.”

Birds spurted from a fruit tree and dissolved in the air, as if sunlight, not feathers and wings, had whisked them off. From the house came sounds of her sons, which activated a nerve in her face. She finished her coffee, rose from the chair, and tightened her robe, her bottom soaked from the chair.

They awaited her at the breakfast table, much ill humor in their identical full faces. What in Christ had she done now? The elder, Gustav, named after his grandfather, was scornfully good at staring her down. When he grinned, his eyes closed. The younger, Herman, was best at pouting. Both looked as if they were still in the suckling stage; both were subject to tantrums, often in competition. The elder said, “Your hair’s all scraggly.”

One of them had spilled sugar, which she found unnerving to walk on. “I haven’t done it yet,” she said, glugging milk into a bowl, cracking eggs into a mix.

“She looks like Nana,” the younger said.

“Something’s jumping in her face,” Gustav observed.

She was nobody on her own, simply a mechanical part of a family composition.

Gustav glimpsed the back of her robe. “Did you piss yourself, Mama?”

Herman the younger broke up. “She needs Nana’s potty.”

Their births had been easy. Fay’s had been the difficult one, the doctor joking to the nurse as he forced the delivery, then cursing himself, panic stitched into his brow. Her baby, her child, always she had dressed her in happy clothes.

She placed a platter of pancakes between her sons, with the unavoidable thought that she was slopping hogs.

When she returned to the outdoors, weariness embraced her and set her down hard in the canvas chair. The honeysuckle yielded shivers of light but no images, no phantoms. Her coffee, a fresh cup, was steady in her hand. Her husband barked from an upper window. Why hadn’t she woken him? He wanted his breakfast, his newspapers. She raised her eyes and saw a quarter of his face, more than enough.

“Did you hear me?”

In a voice nearly as loud as his, she said, “Ants look out for their dead, Paul? Why can’t we?”

“What?”

“Why can’t we talk about her, Paul? Why can’t I ever mention her name?”

“Shut up,” he said. “You want the boys to hear?”

The man holds the greedy seed, the woman the selective egg. He blamed her, not the doctor, not the nurse, for Fay. “She’s alive, Paul. I see her every day.”

He closed the window, shut her out of his hearing.

She screamed.

• • •

Chief Morgan drove into Boston, made his way through the noontime snarl of Kenmore Square, and crossed into Brookline. The street he had trouble finding was off Commonwealth Avenue, directions provided by the first Mrs. Bodine, whom he had phoned from the academy. She lived in a complex of brick called Dexter Park, fronted by pruned trees and ivy ground cover. An electric buzzer let him into the foyer, and a security guard indicated the way to the stairs, which he conquered two at a time to the second floor. Midway down the long corridor a door opened, a woman waited.