Prayers for Rain

by Dennis Lehane

  “Do you know him?”

  “Christopher Dawe?” She shook her head. “Only by reputation.”

  “And what’s his reputation?”

  “Brilliant surgeon, weird man.” She handed me the manila folder, looked down the river, then out at the street. “So, okay, well…Look, I…I have to go. It was nice seeing you.”

  “I’ll walk you back.”

  She put a hand to my chest. “I’d be grateful if you didn’t.”

  I looked in her eyes and saw regret and maybe a kind of wild nervousness over the uncertainty of her future, a sense of the buildings that rose behind us closing in.

  “We did love each other, didn’t we?” she said.

  “Yeah, we sure did.”

  “That’s too bad, isn’t it?”

  I stood by the river and watched her walk up to the light in her blue scrubs and white lab jacket, her ash-blond hair damp with the moisture that still hung in the air.

  I loved Angie. Probably always had. Some part of me still loved Grace Cole, though. Some ghost of myself still lived back in the days when we’d shared a bed and talked of the future. But that love we’d had and those selves we’d been were gone, placed in a box like old photographs and letters you’d never read again.

  As she disappeared in the throng of medical people and medical buildings, I found myself agreeing with her. It was too bad. It was a fucking shame.

  Bubba had placed his bullets in stacked white cases beside his chair by the time I got back to the apartment. He and Angie played Stratego on the dining room table, shared some vodka, and had Muddy Waters playing on my stereo.

  Bubba’s rarely good at games. He gets frustrated and usually ends up dumping the board in your lap, but at Stratego, he’s tough to beat. Must be all those bombs. He places them in the last place you’d suspect, and gets downright kamikaze with his scouts, wading into certain death with glee in his baby’s face.

  I waited till Bubba took Angie’s flag, studying the intake and birth and death forms on Naomi Dawe, and finding absolutely nothing unusual.

  Bubba shouted, “Ha! Now take me to your daughters,” and Angie swept her hand across the board, knocked the pieces to the floor.

  “Man, she’s a sore loser.”

  “I’m competitive,” Angie said, and bent to pick up the pieces. “There’s a difference.”

  Bubba rolled his eyes and then looked at the papers I’d spread across my side of the table. He got out of his chair, stretched, and looked over my shoulder. “What’re those?”

  “Hospital records,” I said. “Mother’s intake when she came to give birth. Daughter’s birth. Daughter’s death.”

  He looked down at the forms. “They don’t make sense.”

  “They make perfect sense. Which word’s giving you trouble?”

  He slapped the back of my head. “How come she’s got two blood types?”

  Angie raised her head from the other side of the table. “What?”

  Bubba pointed down at Naomi’s birth record, and then her death record. “She’s O neg in that one.”

  I looked at the death record. “And B positive in this one.”

  Angie came over to our side of the table. “What are you two talking about?”

  We showed her.

  “What the hell could it mean?” I said.

  Bubba snorted. “Means only one thing. The kid who was born on that day”—he stabbed the birth record with his finger—“ain’t the same kid who died”—he stabbed the death record—“on this day. Man, you guys are slow sometimes.”

  26

  “That’s her,” I said as Siobhan walked down the Dawes’ street, her small head and body hunched as if she expected hail.

  “Hi,” I said as she passed the Porsche.

  “Hello.” Her flat gaze said she wasn’t particularly surprised to see me.

  “We need to see the Dawes.”

  She nodded. “He spoke of a restraining order against you.”

  “Just talk,” I said. “I haven’t done anything.”

  “Yet,” she said.

  “Yet. I understand they’re in Nova Scotia. I need an address.”

  “And why should I help you?”

  “Because he treats you like the help.”

  “I am the help.”

  “It’s your job,” I said. “Not who you are.”

  She nodded to herself, looked at Angie. “You’re the partner then?”

  Angie held out her hand, introduced herself. Siobhan shook it, said, “Well, they’re not in Nova Scotia.”

  “No?”

  She shook her head. “There right back there. In the house.”

  “They never left?”

  “They left.” She looked over her shoulder at the house. “They came back. I’d say your partner there, pretty as she is, could ring the bell, get them to open the door, as long as you’re nowhere to be seen, Mr. Kenzie.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Don’t thank me. Just, for fuck’s sake, don’t kill them. I need the job.”

  She lowered her head, hunched into herself, and walked away.

  “That’s one hard chick,” Angie said.

  “Talks cool, though.”

  “‘For fook’s saik,’” Angie said with a grin.

  We parked up the street, walked back to the Dawes’ house, and walked swiftly up the path leading to the door, hoping no one was watching from the window, because there was no alternative but to just gut it out and hope they didn’t spot me from inside, bolt the door, and call the Weston police.

  We reached the front door and I stood to the right of it as Angie swung the screen door wide and rang the bell.

  It took a minute, but then the front door opened and I heard Christopher Dawe say, “Yes?”

  “Dr. Dawe?” Angie asked.

  “How can I help you, miss?”

  “My name is Angela Gennaro. I’m here to speak to you about your daughter.”

  “Karen? Good God, are you from a paper? It was a tragedy that happened over—”

  “Naomi,” Angie said. “Not Karen.”

  I stepped around the door and met Christopher Dawe’s eyes. His mouth was open and his face was bone white and he held a shaky hand to his goatee.

  “Hi,” I said. “Remember me?”

  Christopher Dawe led us out to an enclosed rear porch that looked out upon his expansive swimming pool, expansive lawn, and a small liquid dime of a pond far off through a small stand of trees. He grimaced as we settled into the seats across from him.

  Dr. Dawe placed a hand over his eyes and peered through the gaps between fingers at us. When he spoke he sounded as if he hadn’t slept that week. “My wife is at the club. How much do you want?”

  “A ton,” I said. “How much you got?”

  “So,” he said, “you are working with Wesley.”

  Angie shook her head. “Against. Definitely against.” She pointed at my swollen jaw.

  Christopher Dawe dropped his hand from his eyes. “Wesley did that to you?”

  I nodded.

  “Wesley,” he said.

  “Apparently he knows his way around a dojo.”

  He studied my face. “How exactly did he do this to you, Mr. Kenzie?”

  “The jaw, I think, was a spin kick. I’m not real sure. He was moving pretty fast. Then he just went all David Carradine on me and chopped me up.”

  “My son doesn’t know karate.”

  “When’s the last time you saw him?” Angie asked.

  “Ten years ago.”

  “Let’s assume,” I said, “he picked it up. Back to Naomi.”

  Christopher Dawe held up a hand. “Just one moment. Tell me how he moves.”

  “How he moves?”

  He spread his hands. “How he moves. Walks, for example.”

  “Fluidly,” Angie said. “You could say he almost glides.”

  Christopher Dawe opened his mouth, then covered it with his fingers, bewildered.

  “What?”
Angie said.

  “My son,” Christopher Dawe said, “was born with one leg a full two and a half inches shorter than the other. There are a lot of things distinctive about my son’s gait, but grace isn’t one of them.”

  Angie reached in her bag, pulled out a photo of Wesley and me on the roof. She handed it to Dr. Dawe. “This is Wesley Dawe.”

  Dr. Dawe looked at the photo, then placed it on the coffee table between us.

  “That man,” Christopher Dawe said, “is not my son.”

  From the porch, and through the small stand of trees, the pond where Naomi Dawe died looked like a blue puddle. It was flat and seemed shriveled by the heat, as if it might disappear as you watched, be sucked back into the earth and replaced by dark mud. It seemed far too inconsequential a pockmark of nature to have taken a life.

  I turned from the screen, glanced down at the photo on the coffee table. “Then who is this guy?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea.”

  I stabbed the photo with my index finger. “You’re sure?”

  “We’re talking about my son,” Christopher Dawe said.

  “It’s been ten years.”

  “My son,” he said. “There’s barely a resemblance. Maybe in the chin, perhaps, but that’s all.”

  I threw up my hands, walked back to the screen, watched the great house’s reflection undulate in the swimming pool.

  “How long has he been blackmailing you?”

  “For five years.”

  “But he’s been gone for ten.”

  He nodded. “The first five years, he drew off a trust. When that ran out, he contacted me.”

  “How?”

  “He called.”

  “Did you recognize his voice?”

  He shrugged. “He whispered. But he spoke of things—childhood memories—only Wesley would know. He instructed me to send ten thousand in cash every two weeks by regular mail. The addresses I sent it to changed frequently—sometimes post office boxes, other times hotels, occasionally street addresses. Different cities, different towns, different states.”

  “Was there any sort of consistency?” I asked.

  “The amount of money. For four years, ten thousand every two weeks, and the mailboxes where I was instructed to drop the money were always somewhere in Back Bay. Beyond that, no.”

  “You said it was consistent for four years,” Angie said. “What happened within the last year?”

  He spoke in a hoarse voice. “He decided he wanted half.”

  “Half your fortune?”

  He nodded.

  “How much would that be, Doctor?”

  “I don’t feel the need to divulge the size of my family fortune to you, Mr. Kenzie.”

  “Doctor, I have hospital intake records that show pretty conclusively that the girl who drowned in your pond was not the girl your wife gave birth to. You’ll tell me anything I want to know.”

  He sighed. “Six-point-seven million, roughly. A sum whose foundation was laid ninety-six years ago by my grandfather when he came to these shores and—”

  I waved him off. I didn’t give a shit about his family history, his sense of legend.

  “Is that figure exclusive of real estate?”

  He nodded. “Six-point-seven in stocks, bonds, negotiable securities, T-bills, and cash reserves.”

  “And Wesley—or Wesley’s impersonator, go-between, whoever the hell he is—demanded half.”

  “Yes. Said he’d never bother us again.”

  “Did you believe him?”

  “No. As he saw it, however, I had no choice but to comply. Unfortunately, as it turned out, I didn’t agree. I thought I had one simple option.” He sighed. “We felt we had an option. My wife and I. We called Wesley’s bluff, Mr. Kenzie, Miss Gennaro. We decided not to pay him anything, not one more dime. If he chose to go to the police, he could, and he’d get nothing still. Either way, we were tired of hiding and tired of paying.”

  “How did Wesley respond?” Angie asked.

  “He laughed,” Christopher Dawe said. “He said, and I quote, ‘Money’s not the only commodity I can strip you of.’” He shook his head. “I thought he was talking about this house or the vacation house, some classic antiques and art we own. But he wasn’t.”

  “Karen,” Angie said.

  Christopher Dawe nodded wearily. “Karen,” he whispered. “We didn’t so much as suspect until near the very, very end. She’d always been…” He raised his hand, grasped for the word.

  “Weak?” I said.

  “Weak,” he agreed. “And then her life took a bad turn. What happened to David was an accident, and we believed she simply wasn’t strong enough to bear up. I hated her failure. Despised it. The more she slipped downward, the more scorn I felt.”

  “When she came to you for help, though?”

  “She was on drugs. She acted like a whore. She—” He raised his hands to his head. “How were we to know it was Wesley behind it? How could one begin to assume a person would consciously set out to drive another person mad? His sister? How? How were we to know?”

  He pulled his hands down from his head, covered his face with them, stared at me from between the fingers again.

  “Naomi,” Angie said. “Switched at birth.”

  A nod.

  “Why?”

  He dropped his hands. “She had a heart condition known as Truncus Arteriosis. Not something anyone picked up on in the delivery room, but she was my child, I did my own exams. I discovered a murmur and ran a few more tests. In those days, Truncus Arteriosis was thought to be inoperable. Even now, it’s often fatal.”

  “So you traded your child in,” Angie said, “for a better model?”

  “It was hardly a snap decision,” he said, eyes wide. “I agonized. I did. But once the idea took hold, I…You don’t have children. I can tell. You have no idea what it takes to raise a healthy one, never mind a terminally sick one. The mother, the birth mother of the child I switched, had hemmorhaged in labor. She’d died in childbirth in the ambulance. The child had no relatives. It all seemed as if God were telling me—no, directing me—to do it. So I did.”

  “How?” I asked.

  He gave me a shaky smile. “You’d be saddened to realize how easy it was. I’m a renowned cardiologist, Mr. Kenzie, with an international reputation. No nurse or intern is going to question my presence in a maternity ward, especially when my wife has just given birth.” He shrugged. “I switched the charts.”

  “And the computer files,” I said.

  He nodded. “But I forgot about the intake form.”

  “And,” Angie paused, shaking slightly, tremors of outrage coursing under her skin as she clenched a fist on her knee, “when your real child was adopted, how were her parents supposed to feel when she died?”

  “She lived,” he said quietly as tears fell silently from under his hand and down his face. “She was adopted by a Brookline family. Her name is,” he choked on it, “Alexandra. She’s thirteen, and I understand she sees a heart specialist at Beth Israel who seems to have done amazing things, because Alexandra swims, she plays volleyball, she runs, she rides a bicycle.” The tears came in torrents now, but still silently, like rain from a summer cloud. “She didn’t fall through a frozen pond and drown. You see? She didn’t. She lives.”

  He tilted his chin up and smiled brightly as the tears leaked into his mouth. “That’s irony, Mr. Kenzie, Miss Gennaro. That’s titanic irony, don’t you think?”

  Angie shook her head. “With all due respect, Dr. Dawe, it sounds more like justice.”

  He gave her a bitter nod, then wiped the tears from his face. He stood.

  We looked up at him. Eventually, we stood, too.

  He walked us back to the foyer, and as we had the first time I’d been here, we stopped by the shrine they’d erected to their daughter. This time, however, Christopher Dawe acknowledged it. He squared his shoulders to it and placed his hands in his pockets and glanced at the photographs one by one, his head mo
ving in shifts so slight they were nearly imperceptible.

  I studied the ones in which Wesley appeared, and I realized that except for the height and the blond hair, he didn’t look much like the man I’d come to believe was him. The young Wesley in these photos had small eyes, weak lips, a tremulous sag to his entire face, as if it were sinking under the combined weight of genius and psychosis.

  “A couple of mornings before she died,” Christopher Dawe said, “Naomi came in the kitchen and asked me what doctors did. I said we healed sick people. She asked why people got sick. Was God punishing them for being bad? I said no. She said, ‘Then why?’” He looked over his shoulder at us, gave us a faint smile. “I didn’t have an answer. I stalled. I smiled like an idiot and still had the dumb smile on my face when her mother called her and she ran out of the room.” He turned his head back to the pictures of the small, dark-haired girl. “I wonder if that’s what she thought as her lungs filled with water—that she’d done something bad, and God was punishing her.”

  He sucked a breath loudly through his nostrils and his shoulders tensed for a moment.

  “He seldom calls anymore. He usually writes. When he does call, he whispers. Maybe it’s not my son.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “I won’t pay him another dime. I’ve told him. I’ve told him he has nothing left to threaten me with.”

  “How’d he react?”

  “He hung up.” Dr. Dawe turned away from the photos. “I suspect he’ll come after Carrie soon.”

  “And then what will you do?”

  He shrugged. “Bear up. Find out how strong we really are. You see, even if we pay him, he’ll destroy us anyway. I think he’s drunk with it, this power he seems to have. I think he’d do it whether it brought him financial gain or not. This man—whoever he is, my son, my son’s friend, my son’s captor, whoever—he sees this as his life’s work, I think.” He gave us a dead, hopeless smile. “And he really loves his job.”

  27

  Information about Wesley, or the man who called himself Wesley, had the character of Wesley himself: It appeared in scant flashes, bright and fast, and then disappeared. For three days we worked out of the belfry office and my apartment trying to glean, from notes, photos, and rough transcripts of the interviews we’d conducted, any tangible proof of who this guy was. Using contacts at the Registry of Motor Vehicles, BPD, and even agents I’d once worked with from both the FBI and the Justice Department, we ran the photos of Wesley through computers that interfaced with every known justice agency, including Interpol, and got zip.