Stay Away

by Ike Hamill

  With Jessie, he had struggled. He knew fear wouldn’t work. He could have taken Jessie aside and told him about the dangers of drugs and alcohol, or about unwanted pregnancies, or about the diseases he could get from sex, but those would have only encouraged him. Jessie had never heard of a risk that he didn’t immediately want to take.

  When Jessie had talked about that day and appeared to be holding something back, Reynold had assumed that he and his friends had somehow gotten drugs or beers or something. He hadn’t wanted to ask for fear of making the issue worse.

  He was completely surprised by what Jessie said next.

  “Parts, for the moped,” Jessie said.

  Everyone was staring at Jessie.

  “What moped?” Zinnia asked.

  # # #

  “What was that kid’s name? Steve something?” Eric asked.

  “Steve Jackson,” Lily said. “He was in the grade below me. I remember when he got that stupid moped. He thought he was the coolest guy in town.”

  “He didn’t have it long,” Eric said.

  “Holdty said that because mopeds didn’t have to be registered, it would be like salvage, you know? Finders keepers?” Jessie asked.

  “Steve moved away,” Lily said. “Nobody would be looking for it anyway.”

  “Right,” Jessie said. “That’s what we were talking about that day. I think Wendell even asked why we didn’t try to trade for the parts we needed. The carburetor we had was shot from being in the river so long. We needed a new chain, too, but we didn’t know that then.”

  “So you think Wendell wanted to get you that carburetor you needed?” Zinnia asked.

  Jessie nodded slowly.

  “He did get it. It showed up here a couple of weeks after Wendell disappeared. It was on the porch when I got home from school.”

  “Where is it now?” Reynold asked. He wanted to see the thing—hold it in his hands. He was sure that Jessie couldn’t be right.

  Jessie rubbed his eye as he answered. “Under a tarp, over near Mason’s. We put it on and then hid it under a tarp for the winter. It’s all covered with snow.”

  Before he finished the sentence, Reynold had already started putting together a mental list of all the things they would need—flashlights, boots, jackets, a shovel, and maybe even the snowshoes from the basement. The woods would be deep with drifts, and they would have to hike to Mason’s.

  Zinnia seemed to read his mind.

  “Don’t be silly, Reynold, we don’t need to go see it in person.”

  “If this creep traded a carburetor to our son for his freedom, then we need to find out where the thing came from. They must have records of who shipped the thing, for Christ’s sake,” Reynold said.

  “You’re going to figure that out from a piece of metal?” she asked.

  “It’s worth a shot, isn’t it?” Reynold said. “You’ve been tracking down the slimmest of clues for months and you’re going to turn a blind eye to this.”

  “I have the box it came in,” Jessie said.

  They turned to him again.

  “Where?” Zinnia asked.

  # # #

  Reynold dug through the snow with his bare hands. Jessie was right behind him. Even when Zinnia tried to hand him gloves over the railing, Reynold kept digging. The numb hands were penance. He was atoning for the sin of not paying attention to what had been going on right under his own roof. All that time, he had suspected that Jessie was hiding something—why hadn’t he gotten the secret out of him?

  The question faded as he got to the loose section of lattice. He pulled it out of the way and Jessie took it from him. Reynold practically dove into the snow. Under the porch was a little cave of dried leaves and frozen dirt. Eric was holding the beam of a flashlight through the steps and Reynold saw the box. It was in the same spot where Reynold had hidden Eric’s stash of drugs from his backpack. The drugs were gone and the box was in its place. He wondered what other secrets were being harbored. That issue was for later. He grabbed the box and backed out into the night again.

  Inside, as the feeling began to return to fingers, he realized what he had done.

  “Oh, shit! I got fingerprints all over that. Don’t touch it! We should get the police here.”

  “Honey,” Zinnia said, rolling her eyes. “They gave up on us a long time ago.”

  “That’s not true,” Lily said.

  Zinnia put an end to her objection with a withering look. Lily would defend her boyfriend to anyone except her mother.

  With careful fingers, Zinnia moved the flaps of the box and peered inside.

  “What was in here besides the part?” she asked.

  “A piece of paper?” Jessie said. “I remember I looked at it but it didn’t say who sent it. I figured that Fish had found the money somehow and ordered it from the lawn and garden place. They had a catalog with all those parts in it.”

  “Packing list,” Zinnia said, pulling out a piece of paper between pinched fingers.

  She took it to the table and put it down under the light.

  The five of them huddled around the thing, all looking at it. From his angle, Reynold couldn’t read the folded paper.

  Zinnia read aloud.

  “Donnie’s Small Engine,” she said and read the address.

  “Where’s Muskoka, Ontario?” Lily asked.

  “Canada,” Eric said.

  “I know it’s Canada. I mean, like, where in Canada?”

  “Shhh!” Zinnia said. She kept reading. “This is where the shipping address would be, but there’s nothing listed. The carb is listed, and a chain. You said you got a chain, too?”

  “Yeah,” Jessie said. “I thought it was weird at the time because I didn’t even know we needed a chain. Holdty said the old one was going to clean up fine. It wasn’t until we got the engine running that the chain broke and we found out we needed a new one.”

  “Wait,” Reynold said. “You thought Fish ordered the part, right?”

  “Yeah, but both him and Holdty told me that they didn’t.”

  “So where did you think they came from?”

  “I dunno. Didn’t think about it, I guess.”

  Reynold rolled his eyes. He wanted to demand a better answer, but, with Jessie, he was sure that there was no further explanation coming.

  “There’s a phone number—probably cost a fortune to call—and no price listed for the part. It’s not like it was prepaid or anything. It’s like there was no charge.”

  “You can call first thing in the morning,” Reynold said.

  “Yeah,” she said, but she was already moving towards the phone. “How do I call Cananda?”

  “It’s the same,” Eric said.

  Reynold moved around the table to get a better look at the packing list. One thing jumped out that Zinnia hadn’t mentioned—the date on the slip was the same day that Wendell had disappeared.

  “Why would he order from Canada?” Reynold whispered to himself.

  “Maybe that’s the only place to get it,” Jessie said.

  “What kind of moped? What’s the make?”

  “Yamaha?” Jessie said.

  “You think they make Yamaha parts in Canada?” Reynold asked.

  Jessie blushed and looked away.

  “Hello? Yes? Is this Donnie’s Small Engine? Oh?”

  Zinnia was practically yelling at the phone.

  “They actually answered?” Reynold asked. It was a Sunday evening. He couldn’t imagine a small engine shop in Ontario being open at night on a weekend.

  She waved for him to be quiet and then plugged her ear.

  “I need information on an order placed last spring,” she said. She pointed and waved at the piece of paper until Reynold brought it to her. Reading off the invoice number, she waited and then wrinkled her forehead at the reply. “I’m trying to… Hello? Hello?”

  She set the receiver back in the cradle and turned to Reynold.

  “They hung up. I think I was talking to Donnie himself. As
soon as I told him the number from the invoice, he hung up.”

  Her hand was shaking as she dialed the number again.

  “Hello? I think we got disconnected.”

  She pulled the receiver away from her face and stared at it for a second.

  Exhaling between pursed lips, she said, “This is it. It’s connected, I know it.”

  # # #

  “In the morning, we’ll take it to the police,” Reynold said. “It’s the only logical thing to do.”

  “Come on. Are you serious?”

  “Lily’s friend is working tomorrow. She’ll go with us, right Lily?”

  Their daughter nodded.

  “He will believe us.”

  “And then what? You think they’re going to track this guy down in Canada because he happened to send some engine parts to the house?”

  “No, but I think they can call with a little bit of authority and maybe get some information out of him.”

  “You’re missing the point, Reynold. How am I supposed to explain the connection between this invoice and the disappearance of our son?”

  Reynold glanced around the kitchen and saw the faces of Jessie, Lily, and Eric all watching the argument.

  “Kids, can you give us a minute please?” he asked as he stood up to pace.

  Lily looked like she was going to object for a moment. She wasn’t a kid—she was a twenty-one-year-old woman. In the end, she complied. Lily followed Eric and Jessie up the stairs.

  “You’re right,” Reynold said.

  “You kicked them out to tell me I’m right?” Zinnia asked. Her eyebrows went up as she sat down. Forgetting about the possible fingerprints, she spun the invoice on the table while she waited for him to continue.

  “I’m saying that you’re right that it would be ridiculous for the police to investigate some small engine repairman from Canada. Bothering that carburetor salesman would be ridiculous because the whole idea is ridiculous. Are you seriously suggesting that Wendell’s disappearance has something to do with a trade made with some man near the cemetery? Based on what? Based on some vaguely remembered trade for a bicycle twenty years ago?”

  For a moment, Reynold was convinced that she wasn’t going to reply. Over the years, their biggest fights hadn’t come from yelling and carrying on, they came from silence. If Zinnia finally got to the point where she stopped saying anything at all, that’s when he knew that the fight wasn’t going to have a simple ending. At that point, even if he backtracked completely and apologized for an hour, the conflict would rage on until she finally decided to let it go on her own.

  “Reynold, that wasn’t the only trade that I witnessed,” she said.

  “Regardless,” he said, grateful that she was still talking. “You have to admit that the potential link between Wendell and this trade is a far stretch.”

  She nodded and looked down at her own hands. Zinnia was holding one hand with the other and using a fingernail to pick at the cuticle on her thumb.

  He took a breath and sat down.

  “Tell me about the other trade you saw,” he said.

  With her fingers intertwined, she managed to stop peeling back her cuticle. She looked up at him—small and frightened. The sad memory she was holding needed to spill out onto someone else. He wasn’t sure that he wanted to be there, but he had to.

  # # #

  “Rose and I were so different when we were growing up. We both had ambition and drive. She was a little smarter than I was. Things just came easily for her. I think that because of that, she never really… I don’t know.”

  “It’s okay,” Reynold said. He thought about telling her not to bother with a detailed story—it wasn’t going to change their argument. But she was so close to shutting down and going silent. He would rather listen to the story than face silence. Not knowing what else to say, he said, “I understand.”

  “She wanted a gun—a rifle, I mean. She was nine and she wanted a gun. Dad said there was no way in hell. My mother told her that if she found the money, she could walk over the trestle and down to that hunting place that’s past the bowling alley. Most places wouldn’t sell a rifle to a little girl, but for an extra dollar, that man would sell a rifle to anyone, at least that’s what my mom said. We believed her, too. After all, our aunt had shot her own husband at the kitchen table.”

  Reynold slowly closed his mouth after it fell open.

  Zinnia chuckled at him.

  “Yeah, that’s another story.”

  She straightened herself in her chair and propped her head up.

  “Anyway, like I said, stuff came so easily to Rose that she wasn’t that good at working towards what she wanted. After about a week of solid grifting, all she had to show for her effort was a handful of coins. It wasn’t remotely close to how much a rifle cost. We didn’t have to cross the trestle and walk all the way over to the train trestle to find that out. It was summer, and we were walking downtown when Rose offered to treat me to a scoop of ice cream. I told her she was never going to save up if she kept spending her money, and she told me that she had a different idea.”

  Zinnia paused for air and memories. Reynold got up and fetched her a glass of water.

  “We went back across the bridge and walked all the way down to the Trading Tree. The man showed up right away. I couldn’t say a word. I was too… I don’t know. I suppose I was entranced by his appearance. He looked so fancy to be standing next to a tree by the cemetery. I couldn’t imagine where he had come from. There wasn’t a spot of dirt on him and the road was completely muddy that day. I remember looking around, trying to see if maybe he had stepped out of a car. He hadn’t though. He just appeared from around that tree.”

  She smiled.

  “Rose was a good bargainer. He whispered his price in her ear and she didn’t once reach for her pocket. Somehow, she knew that any physical sign would weaken her negotiating position. Rose just narrowed her eyes and considered. A smile spread across his face. Either he was a really good actor, or he genuinely admired and respected her. He came forward and whispered something else. My sister nodded, said okay, and we left.”

  “Did she get the gun?”

  “Nope,” Zinnia said. “She wouldn’t tell me precisely what the man had told her, but she said that she didn’t care about the gun anymore. For weeks, I wondered what had happened, but Rose would never say a word. Other kids went and traded with the man, after Bruce’s story got around. Frank, happy as a clam with his bicycle, was a rolling advertisement of the Trader. One kid got a yo-yo. When I was in high school, a girl traded for a record player. I even heard of a boy who traded to get his father back. His dad had run off with a girl from his office and was living down in Waltham with her. The kid, Jack something, supposedly traded his dog to get his dad back and it worked. His father was back with his mom and they even had another kid eventually.”

  He could tell that she was avoiding the real story. He waited until she was ready to tell it. There was nothing to do other than wait. Zinnia had already proved that. Months of research and interviews had made her an expert on every tiny thing that had happened the day that their son disappeared. Each second, minute, and hour had been investigated and researched. She could probably compile a set of books that spelled out all the movements and interactions of each person present in the neighborhood that day.

  According to her research, only one car had passed Wendell as he walked home alone from the culvert. A woman in a brown Dodge Dart had seen him walking by the cemetery. Zinnia had managed to track down the woman with absolutely nothing to go on. Their neighbor, Helen Brillant, had noticed the car rounding the corner around the time that Wendell had gone missing. She hadn’t seen the boy, but she had noticed the car and said something to her husband about it. The car was the exact type that Helen wanted to get. Her husband sometimes traded in used cars. He had told her that he didn’t need to come to the window—he knew what a Dodge Dart looked like.

  Zinnia had interviewed Helen and tucked awa
y the information about the brown Dodge Dart with New Hampshire plates. Every time she talked to potential witnesses, she brought up the question of the car. Eventually, nearly fifteen miles away, she found a pump jockey at a gas station who remembered filling the car. He had written down the plate number on the credit receipt. Somehow, Zinnia coaxed those numbers and letters from the man and then called around until she could turn the license plate into a name and phone number.

  Zinnia had driven all the way to New Hampshire to interview the woman—a nice old lady who had been visiting her sister in Maine. It had been a dead end. The old lady had told of a boy walking along the cemetery. She remembered because she had been paying so much attention to the rock wall that she had nearly missed him. She told Zinnia that they should put in a sidewalk. It just wasn’t safe for kids walking on that road, according to her.

  Reynold had always known his wife to be tenacious, fierce, and sharp. Over the months after Wendell disappeared, he had come to realize that regardless of how high his opinion had been, he had underestimated her. They had been married for nearly twenty-five years. For more than half of his life, they had shared their lives with each other. One minute, he thought he knew everything there was to know about his wife. The next, he would be shocked by something she did or said. He was almost beyond shock by that point.

  She was finally ready to continue.

  “I was getting ready to go to college and Rose knew she couldn’t stay at home. I didn’t blame her. I wouldn’t have been able to live alone with our parents either. But there was nothing I could do about it. I had barely scraped up enough money to pay for the expenses that my scholarship wasn’t going to cover. I was trying to figure out how I was going to work and adjust to school at the same time. It was so stressful that I couldn’t spare much attention for her problems. She was hanging around with the wrong boys. Sometimes on a Saturday night she would claim that she was going to spend the night at her girlfriend’s house, but I knew that she was going to get picked up down at the depot and go off with her boyfriend, Bob.”

  Zinnia shook her head at the memory.