by P J Parrish
Before and after.
That’s how he had come to think of his life lately. The before part was when he was eight, before he had come to Phillip and Frances Lawrence’s home in Plymouth.
The before was a mostly a blank, like his brain had only taken snapshots of his boyhood in Mississippi. His mother Lila—not the memory of the alcoholic dying in her bed, but the framed photograph of the pretty young woman that sat on his bookshelf now. No pictures of his half-sister Yolanda and his half-brother Robert, just shadows now. And stuck in a box somewhere in the bottom of a drawer back at his apartment, one faded Polaroid of the white man—his face hidden by a hat brim—who had fathered him and run away.
Fathered. Father.
Jordan Kincaid was a ghost. But Phillip Lawrence?
Phillip had given him the after. Dozens of foster boys had passed through the Lawrence house. Louis had seen their pictures on the wall of Frances’s foyer, that gallery of good boys—Boy Scouts, high school grads, Kmart Christmas portraits. Louis was in there with the others, but it was just one blurry snapshot taken at Edgewater Park, and he was wedged between two white boys, sullen and small. Once, just after Louis graduated from college, he and Phillip were down in the knotty pine basement and, after a couple brandies, Louis had worked up the guts to ask Phillip why he didn’t merit his own portrait on the wall like the others.
Because you’re not like the others, Louis. You’re like a son to me.
Louis looked up, catching his blurred reflection in the big, aluminum coffee urn.
Walter Bushman was wrong. Not everyone could save themselves. Sometimes, someone else had to be there to help. How that person came to you, well, who knew what was behind that?
“You need anything else?”
Louis looked up at the counter man. “Just the check, please.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
When he got back in the Explorer, Louis pulled Bushman’s business card from his pocket, picked up the cell phone, and dialed the escort service number.
A woman answered. “Midnight Lace Models, this is Sylvia. How can I help you?”
After he gave his name and identified himself as a detective with the Michigan State Police, there was a long pause before the woman spoke again. “Yes, officer?”
The purr was gone from her voice. She had some experience talking to cops.
“I need to talk to whoever is in charge, please,” he said.
“That would be me. I am the owner of Midnight Lace.”
Louis had a vision of a housewife in a caftan and curlers, sitting out in a suburban tri-level, answering the phone. He doubted Midnight Lace even had a real office. These outfits rarely did.
“I’m calling about one of your clients,” he began, adding that he needed to verify Bushman’s whereabouts last night. Sylvia countered with a few quick parries about wanting proof of Louis’s position and that she wasn’t going to give out personal information about clients, but finally Louis interrupted.
“Sylvia,” he said. “Listen to me. I don’t care what Walter Bushman was doing last night or what kind of place you really run there. I just need to verify he was doing it with your escorts.”
A long pause. “Walt told you to call?”
“That’s what I said.”
“I’m going to put you on hold.”
She was gone before he could object. He sat there, taking in the gray downtown buildings and listening to honking horns. He was well past tired now and moving fast toward exhaustion.
“Officer?” The purr was back in her voice.
“Detective.”
“Detective . . . Mr. Bushman said it was okay to talk to you. Yes, he was with two of our ladies last night.”
“I need proof.”
“Mr. Bushman said you might. I can fax you his Visa receipt. And Amber and Shannon are at work right now but will be happy to talk to you tomorrow at your leisure.”
The receipt didn’t prove where Bushman had spent the night and the word of two hookers wasn’t golden. But at least it was something to take back to Steele for now. He gave Sylvia the task force fax number and told her to include the women’s phone numbers.
“Thank you, Sylvia, you’ve been very helpful,” he said.
“Call us anytime, Detective. You have our number.”
He hit the button to end the call then sat there, staring at the phone. It gave him an odd sense of power knowing he could get anyone anywhere at the punch of a button. His thoughts drifted to Joe. He hadn’t talked to her since his first night in his new apartment. And yet, as he stared at the strange device in his hand, he had the thought that—although he was only a phone call away and Echo Bay was a mere four-hour drive—for some reason, he felt farther from her now than he did when he was in Florida.
He picked up the phone and was about to call her when it rang. He stabbed at the button. “Detective Kincaid.”
“This is Camille, Louis. I’ve been trying to reach you. I left you three messages on the phone.”
He didn’t want to tell her he hadn’t figured out yet how to retrieve messages from the cell. “I’m sorry. I just got back into the car.”
“I’m calling to get a status report.”
Louis quickly summarized his interview with Bushman and his follow-up with the escort service.
“Captain Steele wants the team assembled at the church tomorrow at nine a.m.,” Camille said. “He said grab a room down there, get some rest, and head home tomorrow.”
“Got it.”
“One more thing, Louis. You had a call today from a Reverend Grascoeur.”
Louis sat up straighter. The minister of the Church of the Northern Lights up in the U.P. “What did he say?”
“Just that he got your message and needed to talk to you.” Camille paused. “Do you have a pen? I’ll give you his number.”
Louis grabbed a pen and scribbled the number on his palm. He thanked Camille, hung up, and dialed the new number.
“Pierre Grascoeur here. Life is short and I’m getting long in the tooth, so let’s make this quick.”
The name came out with a French accent but all the rest had the distinctive Yooper lilt. Louis thought of the rainbow-painted log cabin church up in Copper Harbor and a picture formed in his head of Reverend Grascoeur as Jerry Garcia in a monk’s robe and sandals.
“This is Louis Kincaid, state police, returning your call, sir. Thank you for—”
“State police! Yes, yes . . . well! I’m sorry for being smart there. It’s been a long day. Thank you for calling back. I didn’t think anyone actually would.”
“Why not, sir?”
“It’s been . . . well, it’s been such a long time since . . .” the voice trailed off.
“Reverend Grascoeur, did your sister tell you why I was trying to get in touch with you?”
“Yes. This is about the two boys.”
“Right, sir. I was told you might have presided over their memorial service and—”
“No, no . . .”
Louis slumped slightly in the seat. Shit. Another dead end.
“I was supposed to do it,” Grascoeur went on, “but the sheriff told me it wasn’t necessary.”
“Sheriff Halko?”
“Yes, he told me . . .”
The line went silent and for a second Louis thought they had been disconnected.
“Detective, I can’t do this,” Grascoeur said.
“Reverend, this is important. If you—”
“Yes, I know. It is important. Which is why I can’t do this over the phone. Can you come up here?”
“I can’t get back to Copper Harbor, sir.”
“No, no, no . . . I’m downstate, here in Saginaw.”
Saginaw. That was only about a ninety-minute drive north from Detroit. Louis ran a hand over his face. The Coneys and cheese fries were fighting a fierce battle in his gut. But no way was Steele going to let him go back to the U.P. any time soon for a detour back to the boys in the box case. He couldn’t let this ch
ance go by.
“Where do you want to meet?” Louis asked.
“How about the Savoy Bar and Grill? You know where it’s at?”
“No, sir,” Louis said. “But I’ll find it.”
The art deco neon sign for the Savoy Bar and Grill stood out like a beacon in the misty night. The interior looked like someone had crossed a speakeasy with a diner—one long room with a towering tin ceiling, scarred wood floor, and an old wood-rail staircase near the entrance leading up into the shadows.
As Louis stood just inside the door, looking for anyone who matched the picture in his mind of Reverend Grascoeur, a hand waved from a booth in the back.
Louis went toward the booth. The man sitting at the table wiped his face with a paper napkin, stood up, and extended his hand. “Detective Kincaid, I’m Reverend Grascoeur,” he said.
His handshake was strong, his face even stronger—craggy and heavily lined, with a prominent, thin nose and piercing, deep-set, dark eyes. He was bald except for a fringe of white hair. He was wearing a white dress shirt, sleeves rolled, and a gray, striped tie was bunched on the booth seat next to him. Sheriff Nurmi had said Grascoeur had been in Copper Harbor for a long time, and Louis estimated the reverend was probably in his mid-seventies, but he wore the years well, looking more like a small-town doctor than the aging weed-wilted hippie Louis had been expecting.
“Sit down, please,” Grascoeur said, gesturing. “I hope you don’t mind but I went ahead and ordered. I’ve been working all day and this is the first moment I had to eat.”
Grascoeur’s plate of half-finished liver and onions made Louis’s stomach churn. “I already ate, thanks,” he said.
“Yes, well,” Grascoeur seemed suddenly nervous, staring hard, and Louis had the feeling he was being sized up. Louis was used to it, especially after his trip to the Upper Peninsula where black faces were rare.
“I’m glad we could meet,” Grascoeur said finally. “I don’t get downstate very often but I had business here in Saginaw. I’m on the board of the Castle Museum here. Do you know it?”
“No, sir. I’m not from here.”
The reverend nodded. “It’s dedicated to the preservation of French-Canadian heritage here in Michigan. My family, they have been here since the 1800s.”
“So you’ve lived up in the Keweenaw Peninsula all your life then?” Louis asked.
“I was born in Escanaba, yes, but the turns of life took me away for quite a while. I didn’t come home until 1975.” He paused. “That I am downstate at this time and you are here, I take it as a sign.”
A waitress appeared and Louis asked for just a glass of water. “Reverend Grascoeur,” Louis said, after she left, “why couldn’t you talk to me over the phone?”
“I had to see who I was dealing with first,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“I had to see who was taking an interest in this after all these years.” He paused. “I had to know it was somebody who was going to follow through, someone with sisu.”
“Sitz-what?”
“It’s a Yooper term. It means tenacity, like a pitbull. It’s spelled S-I-S-U.”
SISU . . . that’s what had been on the front of Monica Nurmi’s sweatshirt and he has mistaken it for a college name.
“I take it then you’ve gone to the authorities before?” Louis asked.
Grascoeur hesitated. “I did once. I talked to Sheriff Halko but he didn’t seem to care much about two unidentified boys. Then the years went by and I tried to forget about it. Then my sister told me you called.”
Louis took out his binder and a pen. “Do you have information about the boys?”
“The boys,” Grascoeur said softly. His eyes drifted away, but Louis was certain he wasn’t seeing anything in the bar. “They were so very small,” he said.
Louis sat forward. “You knew them?”
The reverend drifted back. “Knew? No, no one knew them. I just saw their bones. Once, just once, laid out on a table in the sheriff’s office. I had heard about it in town—I had just returned to the Eagle River area back then—that children’s bones had been found in the mine, so I went to the sheriff’s office. I don’t know why really. It was too late for last rites, of course, but I thought someone should pray for their souls.”
“Last rites? That’s a Catholic ritual,” Louis said.
Grascoeur’s hesitated. “I was a Catholic back then.”
That was interesting. A priest turned new-age prophet. Louis thought about asking why he had left the church but decided it was probably more than he needed to know about this man right now.
“Do you know what happened to the bones?” Louis asked.
Grascoeur shook his head slowly. “Several weeks went by and when no one came forward to claim them, the folks in town decided to hold a memorial service and bury the boys in Evergreen Cemetery. But two days before I was supposed to do the service, Sheriff Halko called me and said someone had claimed the remains and taken them away.”
Louis sat back in the booth, his fatigue deepening. So there it was then, the answer to the mystery. It had been there in the back of Louis’s mind since the moment he had opened that foot locker back in Jennifer Halko’s barn. Most likely, Halko had taken the bones to sell in his macabre souvenir business, and God only knew where the remains had ended up. Maybe there was something left to trace back in Jennifer’s farmhouse—a ledger of Halko’s business dealings, a receipt maybe. But Steele would never let him go back to the U.P. anytime soon, especially with Jonas Prince barely cold in the morgue back in Grand Rapids.
Louis closed his binder. “Thank you for your time,” he said.
“So you’re going to keep looking for the boys, for their remains, I mean?”
The reverend’s eyes felt like they were piercing right into Louis’s deepest parts. For a moment, Louis considered telling him about Halko’s hobby. But wasn’t it better to let the old man believe his prayers had been for some good?
“I’ll do what I can,” Louis said. “But you have to understand, old cases like this are really hard to solve. Evidence gets lost, witnesses die, people forget things.”
Louis rose, pocketing his pen. He stuck out his hand. “Thanks for your time, Reverend.”
Grascoeur took it, but he didn’t shake it. He held it, like he didn’t want to let go. Louis slowly slipped back down into the booth.
“Do you have something else you want to tell me, Reverend?”
Grascoeur was quiet. Louis watched the shifting shadows of emotions slide across the reverend’s face until finally only one was left: agony.
“Are you Catholic?” Grascoeur asked.
Louis shook his head.
“Do you know what the Seal of the Confessional is?”
“Something about not revealing anything when someone confesses?”
Grascoeur nodded slowly. “Let no priest betray the sinner.” The waitress reappeared and set a water glass by Louis’s elbow. Grascoeur watched her leave then looked back at Louis.
“It happened four months after the bones were found,” he said softly. “By then, the bones were gone, winter came, and folks in town had pretty much forgotten about the incident. It was a bad winter that year and everyone just pulled way down into themselves the way we do up there. We were in the middle of a three-week sub-zero blizzard. I still held mass, but by that third Sunday, I was talking only to myself. The wind was raging so hard, I don’t think even He heard me.”
Louis almost asked who “he” was, but then understood.
“We lost power the night of that third Sunday,” Grascoeur went on. “I sent my housekeeper and assistant home and I stayed in the church office alone that night because it had a wood stove. That’s where I was, huddled there in a blanket with a fifth of brandy, when I heard a noise out in the sanctuary.”
Grascoeur picked up his water glass and took a long drink before he started again.
“It was a man,” he said. “He said he wanted to make his confession.�
��
Louis leaned forward. “Who was he?”
“I don’t know. You don’t ask the sinner his name.”
“What did he say?”
That expression was back, a dark shadow of pain passing over the old man’s face. He shut his eyes and shook his head slowly.
“He said he killed the two boys. He said he put them in a box and put the box in the mine.”
“What did you do?”
Grascoeur opened his eyes. There were tears in them. “What did I do? I listened to him. Then I told him he needed to go to the police and turn himself in.”
“What did he say to that?”
“He said he was afraid.”
“Afraid of what?”
Grascoeur’s brow was knit, as if he were concentrating hard. “He said he was afraid of the Father hating him forever.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him the Lord does not hate. The Lord forgives.”
Louis leaned back in the booth. He had a suspect, yes, but one as insubstantial as a ghost. He wanted to ask Grascoeur why he hadn’t gone to the police that night, but he didn’t. Because he could read Grascoeur’s face, read that the old man was asking himself the exact same thing. How many times had he asked himself that over the years?
“What did you do next?” Louis prodded.
“I repeated that he needed to go to the police, then I gave him his penance, and told him to give thanks to the Lord for He is good, and His mercy endures forever.”
“Then what?” Louis pressed.
“Then he was gone.”
“Gone? What do you mean gone?”
“I don’t know. By the time I emerged from the confessional booth, the front door was wide open and the snow was blowing in.” Grascoeur let out a long breath. “He was just gone.”
The old man bowed his head, and for a second Louis thought he was praying. Louis let the moment lengthen but then he couldn’t stand it any longer.
