The Damage Done

by P J Parrish

  “Can I see it today?” he interrupted.

  “Now?”

  “Yes. I’m only in town for a couple hours.”

  “Well, I’m at the office now, mister . . .”

  “Kincaid. Louis Kincaid.”

  “Mr. Kincaid. Yes, well, Mr. Kincaid . . .”

  She was going to kiss him off. He had to get in the house.

  “I’m representing an investment group. Detroit redevelopment.” He remembered the sign on Bushman’s office building. “Motor City on the Move.”

  “Oh! Yes, I know about that. Okay, look. I can’t get there for a half hour or so.” She went silent and he was thinking about just telling her he was a cop when she continued.

  “Look, I’m not supposed to do this because I’d be liable for any damage you do, but the place is in rough shape anyway.” She paused. “I can give you the code for the lock box.”

  She rattled off a four-digit code, told him she would try to hurry, and hung up. Louis set the phone back in its cradle and looked back at the house.

  Why was he hesitating?

  “Screw this,” he whispered and pushed open his door.

  The lock box was hanging on the door knob. He punched in the code, released the key inside, and unlocked the door.

  He paused in the small foyer to put the key in his pocket as he surveyed the living room. The place was empty and cold, the wood floors scarred, the fireplace dark with soot, and the walls dotted with rectangles on the faded blue wallpaper, imprints from the picture frames that once hung there.

  Pictures? Had there been anything remotely ornamental hanging on these walls? He couldn’t remember anything like that.

  It was quiet, the drizzle a steady tick-tick-tick against the windows. From somewhere outside, Louis could hear the boom-thucka-boom of a car’s speakers blaring music. The sound grew, built to a crescendo, then tapered off. His heart kept time to the dull beat as it died away down the street.

  When he looked toward the corner, he could see a TV in his mind, pulsating orange with fire, and Moe slumped in a chair murmuring at the TV. Something about burning it all down . . .

  Another memory came to him, what he had thought that first day he had set foot in Moe’s house, that he would be okay here because Moe was black like him and he would know.

  Louis walked slowly through the living room and the dining room with its sconces dangling by wires from the walls. He found his way to the kitchen, dark in the rainy dusk. Curling green linoleum, pale green countertops, ivy-print wallpaper, yellowed with the years and nicotine.

  Another memory. He and Sammy sitting at the table, giggling as they used their spoons to catapult peas at each other.

  One moment. One precious good moment.

  A noise, somewhere near the front door. A creak of a door. Footsteps on old wood.

  “Mr. Kincaid? Yoo-hoo! Anybody here? Mr. Kincaid?”

  He went back to the living room. A pudgy woman in a raincoat was standing in the foyer. She spun when she saw him emerge from the shadows, and it was there in her face before she could hide it, that look that told him she was the kind of woman who voted Democrat when the curtain was closed but at night would always cross the street to avoid a black man.

  “My goodness, you startled me!” She hesitated, glanced back at the open front door then thrust out her hand. “Jane Talley,” she said.

  He went to her, shook her hand then took a step back to distance himself from her perfume.

  She looked beyond him toward the living room, then pasted a weak smile back on her face when she turned back to him. “So! Have you looked around?”

  “Some.”

  She dug a paper from her tote bag. “Here’s the sheet,” she said, holding out the paper.

  Louis scanned it quickly then folded it in half. Another car was coming down the street, and he could hear its rumbling music, a dirge for an old house in a dying neighborhood.

  The real estate woman was babbling, something about no one living in the house for years even though it had been a pretty house in its day before Detroit started going to pot and the mayor who didn’t know his butt from a hole in the ground was letting everything go and no matter what anyone said the new casinos down on the river and in Greek Town were not going to bring people back downtown but this was 1991 after all and who didn’t want to live out in suburbs where at least you could walk the streets at night and your kids didn’t have to go through metal detectors at school . . .

  Louis’s head started to pound, something that felt like the beginnings of a headache but not quite. He shut his eyes.

  “Mr. Kincaid?”

  He opened his eyes. The real estate woman had backed up, standing closer to the open front door. He considered that she probably hadn’t connected him to the bubble-light state cruiser sitting out at the curb, and he thought about flashing his badge. But why did he owe this woman the reassurance that he wasn’t a thug or rapist? The pounding in his head was growing worse.

  He rubbed his temple as he looked at the woman, and suddenly he wasn’t seeing her as a white woman scared of being alone with a black man. He was seeing her as a real estate agent who had probably been advised to never be alone with any man of any color in an empty old house.

  “I’d like to look around some more,” he said. “If you need to leave, I can put the key back when I am done.”

  She looked relieved. “I’d appreciate that. I am actually late for another showing.” She nodded to the paper in his hand. “That’s my card stapled to the top. Call me and we’ll talk. The owner is very motivated.”

  She hurried out into the drizzle, and Louis watched her until she was in her car then closed the front door. He tried a light switch but nothing came on.

  His eyes went to the staircase, and he peered into the darkness above. That was where he had to go, he knew.

  The stairs groaned under his weight and when he got to the second floor, he had to stop and orient himself, trying to remember where the bedroom was that he had shared with Sammy. He peered into the nearest room, but it triggered nothing in his memory, so he continued down the hallway. He passed a grimy bathroom with a pedestal sink dripping water into a rusty basin. At a closed door, he paused before jerking it open. But it was just a closet. The pounding in his head got worse for a second, but then subsided.

  This isn’t it. This isn’t the place.

  Another bedroom and another blank. Then he was at the end of the hallway, facing a final door. He opened it.

  The room was small, painted a bright orange with sixties-style flower decals on the walls. But he could still see the room as it once was—pale blue walls marred with small handprints and crayon scribbles, the small wood dresser with the broken bottom drawer and, over by the window, the bunk beds where he and Sammy had slept.

  Louis went to the middle of the room. The pounding in his head was stronger now, as if he had finally found the gravitational center to some faraway and long-forgotten universe.

  Images drifted in and out of his thoughts, glimpsed but then gone, like those weird, floating string-things he got in his vision when he was tired.

  He closed his eyes, trying to bring something, anything, into focus. He could smell something, the faint tang of urine from the other nameless boys who had slept here and wet the bed. He could hear voices, a hard loud one yelling at them to be quiet, and a soft one whispering in the dark from the bunk above.

  Louis? Louis? You asleep, Louis?

  No.

  I’m scared.

  Be quiet, Sammy.

  I’m scared. Louis, can I come down there with you? Louis?

  No, stay up there. Be quiet. You gotta be quiet or he’ll come in here again.

  But Sammy wasn’t quiet. He was crying. Louis could hear him clearly now, hear Sammy’s sniffles in the dark above him.

  Louis opened his eyes. The only sound in the empty room was the rain on the window and the awful rushing in his head. He turned slowly in a tight circle.

  T
here it was, there in the corner. The closet.

  And there it was in his head, a memory so sharp and clear that he felt it like a slap in the face.

  Run. Run! Faster. Faster!

  Come on! Come on!

  He was running up the stairs and Sammy was behind him. There were footsteps behind them on the stairs—heavy, unsteady footsteps.

  Get in the closet! Quick!

  That is where they hid when things got really bad, when Moe came after them stinking of sweat and whiskey.

  Louis went to the closet. He hesitated, hand on the knob, but then opened it. It was small and narrow, lined with scarred cedar. Louis touched the glass door knob inside, remembering how he had looped a piece of rope around it so he could hold it closed from inside. He stared into the small space, his gut twisting into a hard knot. Something bad had happened here. Why couldn’t he remember? Seven . . . he had been only seven years old then, but if this was the center of his nightmares, surely the memory had to be somewhere inside him still. Why couldn’t he remember what had happened?

  He needed to remember. He had to know.

  Weems . . .

  The worker in Grand Rapids. Louis thought about how Cam had coaxed out his memories of what he had seen outside Jonas Prince’s house.

  Louis stared into the closet. He knew what he had to do. He stepped into the closet and crouched down. Then he slowly pulled the door shut.

  Darkness.

  No, not all darkness. There was a slit of gray light at the bottom of the door. Just like there had been that cold November night twenty-three years ago. Louis stared hard at the sliver of light, but even as it began to blur, his memory began to sharpen. Stabs of sensation at first—the rough feel of the rope in his fingers. The swirl of cold air—Sammy’s breath warm against his cheek. The whisper of Sammy’s voice as he prayed.

  And the memory of what he had thought in that moment, that no one was going to hear it, not man or God.

  It was cold in the closet, just like it had been that day, but Louis was sweating. He shut his eyes, still gripping the glass door knob, wanting to get out but knowing he had to stay right where he was. Because . . .

  The creak of the floorboards outside the closet.

  Then the burn of the rope on his palms as Moe ripped the door open and Sammy’s screams as he was pulled out of the closet.

  Louis’s eyes shot open and he focused on the slit of light under the door. What had happened next? It was like he was looking at a mirror. No, not a mirror, just broken pieces of one lying on a floor.

  Mirror . . .

  Louis let go of the glass knob. The door swung open a few inches and now, for the first time, Louis saw the full-length mirror on the inside of the closet door.

  And suddenly he saw it. He saw everything in the mirror, just as he had that night. He had crouched in this closet and watched what happened outside in the reflection of this mirror because he was too afraid to watch it for real, and too afraid to leave the closet. He watched in the mirror as Moe tossed Sammy against the bunk beds like he was rag doll. Watched Moe kick him and beat him. Watched Sammy curl into a ball as the blood pooled on the floor. Watched as Sammy went limp and silent. Watched as Sammy . . .

  Louis flung the door open and fell out of the closet, gasping for air. He stumbled to his feet and bolted out of the room. He half-fell down the stairs, yanked open the front door and stumbled out onto the porch. He braced himself against the railing, feeling sick.

  With a trembling hand, he got the key from his pocket and put it back in the lock box. He went down the steps and paused on the sidewalk.

  It was raining, and he raised his face to let it wash over him. He pulled a deep breath of cold air into his lungs, then another. Finally, when he felt steadier, he straightened and looked back at the house.

  The sting of tears came to his eyes, and he wiped a shaking hand over his face.

  Other memories were there now. He could remember how big the men in blue looked, how they filled up the living room. He could remember the warmth of the blanket someone put over his shoulders.

  More fragments. The tuna fish smell of the white woman in the plaid coat who took his hand and led him outside to a car. The blue and red lights washing over the faces of the neighbors who had come outside to stare. And one more thing so awful and clear that he couldn’t believe now he had ever forgotten it.

  Moe . . . sitting in the backseat of the police car. Moe turning to look back at him one last time through the back window.

  Louis was staring down the street now, still seeing that face. But there was another face he wasn’t seeing in all this.

  Sammy.

  Sammy wasn’t there.

  The rain was turning icy cold. Louis went to his cruiser and got in. The sleet had caused the windshield to freeze over, giving the black bare trees a wavy, surreal look. Louis sat perfectly still, hands gripping the wheel, his breath pluming in the cold womb of the car.

  There were still gaps in his memory, but at least now he understood the truth.

  He had stayed in that closet and hadn’t done anything to help Sammy. Sammy had died, but he had lived.

  Louis laid his head against the steering wheel and closed his eyes.

  Over the years he had managed to bury much of his childhood, stuffing it so deep inside him that it had shriveled and calcified, becoming little more than a rock-hard tumor he had been unable to cut out, so he had simply learned to live with it.

  But this . . .

  What did he do with a truth like this?

  He started the engine and turned on the wipers. For a few seconds, he kept his foot on the brake, as if there was something else keeping him here, something more for him to do. Then he hit the accelerator, spitting up ice behind the tires as he pulled away.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  St. Michael’s was empty, filled with a slow-moving light show of grays and silvers that slipped across the walls and desktops like a restless spirit looking for a place to settle.

  Louis closed his eyes.

  It was just past seven in the evening, and he had only been back in the church for a half-hour. During the drive back from Detroit, he had tried to blot out the thoughts left over from the house on Strathmoor by turning the car radio up loud, but all he caught was talk radio and old rock and roll from the seventies. So finally, he settled on silence. And the company of a ghost named Sammy.

  A soft tapping started up in the loft. Louis figured it had to be Steele. It wasn’t rare for him to be here long after everyone else had left for the day. Louis rubbed his eyes and picked up the top folder from the stack on his desk. It was Tooki’s updated financial records on the Prince family. Louis opened it, but it was just a blur. He was too tired to think. He’d take it and Bushman’s PI report home to read.

  He rose, stuffed the files in his briefcase and put on his windbreaker. As he passed the main computer in the middle of the nave, he paused. Someone had left it on, and it was open to the state criminal database.

  Louis looked up at the loft. He set his briefcase down, sat down at the computer, and tabbed the curser over to the open field for subject’s name. He couldn’t remember Moe’s last name. Hell, he wasn’t sure Moe was his real first name or if it wasn’t short for Morrie or Murray. But he typed it in anyway, along with the Strathmoor address, and the year he was removed from the house. He hit search for records.

  A message flashed: No Results.

  It should have been here, if Moe had been arrested. But Tooki had said not all the records were in the system yet. And the child services offices wouldn’t open until Monday morning. Louis glanced at the phone, thinking about calling Phillip. His foster father might know Moe’s last name, or have it in some old paperwork, but Louis didn’t want Phillip to know he was digging into what happened on Strathmoor, even though they had talked of it once, briefly, a few years ago.

  The episode still hung heavy in Louis’s memory. Louis had provoked his foster father with some stupid remark about
Phillip ignoring Louis’s blackness. The moment had culminated in Phillip tossing a couple of old photos of Louis’s scarred back on the kitchen table and telling Louis he had never cared what color he was. To Phillip, Louis was a just a child in need.

  “What are you looking for?”

  Louis spun around in the chair. Steele was standing at the bottom of the spiral staircase, his tie loose, a raincoat draped over his arm.

  Louis closed the database and the screen went black.

  “Nothing.”

  Steele came closer, stopping close enough to take a long look at the blank computer screen.

  “Did you get that PI report from Bushman?” Steele asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You had a chance to go over it yet?”

  That slow simmer of anger he sometimes felt for this man started up the back of Louis’s neck and he knew where it was coming from—those five cases tacked to the back of the bulletin board, that walk through the Strathmoor house, and the idea that, for some reason, this asshole had set him up to relive all of it.

  Louis drew a slow breath. “Not yet. I plan to go over it tonight.”

  Steele shifted his coat to the other arm. “You might get a better grip on it if you go to Grand Rapids tomorrow and physically walk through it, paragraph by paragraph.” Steele paused a beat. “Put yourself in the shoes of the private investigator, so to speak.”

  Was that condescension in Steele’s voice? A subtle reminder of the exile Steele had rescued him from?

  Steele was heading toward the door, pulling on his raincoat.

  Don’t say it. Don’t say a word.

  But he did. And he said it loud enough to make sure Steele heard him across the echoing nave.

  “That should be pretty easy for me, right?”

  Steele stopped and turned to face Louis. “With all due respect, Louis, yes. It should be easy for you. You were a PI for five years.”

  Louis wasn’t sure how to respond, not sure he even wanted to have this conversation at this moment. What did it matter now?