“So the curtains are open?”
DeMarco looked toward the plate-glass window with its tightly drawn curtains. “Could I see inside if they weren’t? And while you’re at it, get a search warrant for Whispers too.”
“And how do I justify all this?”
“She spent the night with Huston two Thursdays ago. Plus she lied to me about it. Plus she’s smart enough to know that it wouldn’t take long for me to figure out that she lied. So now Huston is nowhere to be found, his family is dead, and she bugged out of here probably a few hours ago with most of her clothes.”
“How do you know she didn’t just take them to the dry cleaner?”
“How would you like having to pick up your own fucking spinach rolls from now on?”
When the call ended, Trooper Morgan asked, “Where to now?”
DeMarco patted his breast pocket. “I think I dropped my pen when I was out back.”
“There are two or three in the glove compartment. Help yourself.”
“This was a special pen. Give me a minute.”
DeMarco climbed out and walked quickly to the back door. Inside again a few moments later, he made his way to the front window. With a hand on the drawcord, he pulled the curtain aside just enough to peek out. Morgan was examining his teeth in the rearview mirror. DeMarco drew the curtains open by a couple of inches, then hurried back outside and to the car.
“You find it?” Morgan asked.
“Nah, it’s gone. Let’s go.”
“I can help you look for it.”
“Forget it,” DeMarco said and pulled his seat belt tight.
“But if it’s special to you…”
“It’s a fucking pen,” DeMarco told him.
Morgan started the car. “Do you realize you’ve been swearing a lot lately? A lot more than you usually do.”
“I’m sorry,” DeMarco told him. “Really. I am just overcome with fucking regret.”
Forty-Seven
The haze around the moon seemed to suggest a softening at day’s end, but DeMarco felt only the approaching chill of night. The time was not yet six p.m., but the sun was low and weak on the western horizon, the gibbous moon rising pale and clouded on the other side of the sky.
DeMarco sat on the top of three steps off his back porch, feet on the pad of interconnecting bricks he had started to lay nearly a decade earlier. He had removed the sod, excavated, and leveled the path from his porch to the side door of the garage some sixty feet away, but had laid only the first three sections of the pathway before everything was interrupted. The bricks were arranged in a herringbone pattern and ended nine feet from the porch step. He had started the pathway so Laraine would be able to walk from the garage to the house without having to step through the puddles that accumulated in the backyard after heavy rains. Now when it rained, the last fifty feet of the trench filled with muddy water, temporarily submerging the weeds that sprouted from the packed earth. Now he parked on the street and only occasionally unlocked the garage to drag out the mower. Old, split bags of grass seed and mulch and potting soil still sat in the dark corners, the clay pots Laraine had used to start her herb garden every spring, filmy plastic bags filled with dried-up gladiola and tulip bulbs.
DeMarco was weary of the unfinished path and overgrown yard, of the nubilous moon and the lowering sun. He tried to remember the energy and exuberance for life he had felt during those long ago days when he had started the brick path and the room above the garage. But it was like trying to remember a decade-old dream. The nostalgia was there, the sense of loss, but little else remained.
He dipped the edge of a whole-wheat bolillo roll into a plastic pint container filled with kalamata and other olives, sun-dried tomatoes and roasted garlic gloves, but the pleasant slipperiness of the garlicky oil registered on his tongue only distantly, it too like little more than a memory of something once savored. The cold beer in its brown, beaded bottle satisfied only in the slight burn as it went down his throat.
He had been waiting all day for the results from the search of Bonnie’s house. He knew that pubic hair from two individuals had been recovered from the bedsheet, and that a few tiny splatters of somebody’s blood had been recovered from the lavatory faucet. But it would be several days before the DNA tests were finished. Even then, they would tell him nothing until he had other DNA samples for comparison. In particular, he wanted to know whose fingerprints were on the second beer bottle on Bonnie’s coffee table. They would belong, he knew, to whatever man was with Bonnie now. He did not want to believe that Huston was that man, could not conceive of a single valid reason why Huston would make such a choice, but he also knew enough of human behavior to know that logic seldom applied when an ample supply of testosterone was stirred into the mix.
Unfortunately, Trooper Carmichael had not yet been able to run the prints through the national fingerprinting database. Computers were down somewhere. Meanwhile, another forensics team was searching Whispers. DeMarco had nothing to do but sit and wait. Bowen had ordered him to go home and get some rest—“And get something to eat, for Chrissakes”—a couple hours of enforced downtime.
DeMarco sucked on a kalamata olive, then spit the pit into the grass. Maybe an olive tree will grow, he thought. The tree of life. Maybe he would plant an apple tree beside it. The tree of knowledge. “My own fucking Garden of Eden,” he said.
The muted jangle of his cell phone startled him. He yanked the phone from his hip pocket and put it to his ear without looking at the caller ID. “It’s about fucking time,” he said.
“Excuse me?” the male voice said. “Is this Sergeant DeMarco?”
“I’m sorry. I was expecting another call. Is this Nathan?”
“Yes, sir, it is. I, uh…I just got home a couple of minutes ago and I found this disturbing message on my answering machine. I thought you should know about it.”
“Disturbing how?”
“It’s from Thomas.”
DeMarco sat up very straight. “And?”
“It came in at 4:19 p.m. I’ve been away from my apartment all day and—”
“What did he say, Nathan?”
“Hold on a minute. I’ll play it for you.”
A button clicked. Nathan’s recorded greeting. A beep. Then the voice of Thomas Huston, hoarse and slow, chilling in the flatness of its delivery:
“It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.
“I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea:
But we loved with a love that was more than love—
I and my Annabel Lee—
With a love that the winged seraphs of Heaven
Coveted her and me.
“And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsmen came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
In this kingdom by the sea.
“The angels, not half so happy in Heaven,
Went envying her and me—
Yes!—that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.
“But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we—
Of many far wiser than we—
And neither the angels in Heaven above,
Nor the demo
ns down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee:
“For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, with the night-tide, I’ll lie down by the side
Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride,
In her sepulchre there by the sea—
In her tomb by the sounding sea.”
This recitation was followed by several seconds of silence, then the beep that ended the recording. Then Nathan said, “Did you hear it okay?”
“He was reciting a poem, right?”
“Poe’s ‘Annabel Lee.’ It’s the last poem Poe ever composed.”
“I got the Annabel Lee part,” DeMarco said, “but why would he do that? Why would Thomas call you just to recite a poem?”
“I’m trying to figure that out myself. I think there’s a message in it.”
DeMarco pushed himself to his feet. He stared at the hazy moon. “Go on,” he said.
“We can assume, I think, that Annabel Lee refers to his wife, Claire.”
“I thought you said that the dancer from the club was part of his Annabel?”
“Well, yes, for the novel he was writing. But if you listen to the other lines of description, Claire is a better fit here. I mean they married young and she died too young. So that seems obvious. And they both grew up in the area, not by a sea but by Lake Erie, which, from certain rocky points, can look as vast as a sea. So that makes the first stanza fairly straightforward and autobiographical from Thomas’s point of view.”
“Okay, I’ll buy that. Keep going.”
“Of course, all of the poem can’t be autobiographical because Tom didn’t write it. But there are some lines that especially apply. The lines about the angels killing her because she was so beautiful—I don’t know if he meant those to apply or not. I mean Claire is gone, obviously, and I’m sure he’s grieving her. Maybe it’s no more than that, that he’s using the poem to express his own grief. But here’s the part that’s giving me chills, it’s four lines from the bottom. On the tape, Tom’s voice slows down and he’s sobbing. I mean, he sounds like he’s choking on his grief… And he says, ‘And so, with the night-tide, I’ll lie down by the side of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride…”
“And that means something to you, Nathan?”
“It’s not the way Poe wrote it. Not exactly the same words.”
“How is it different?”
“Poe wrote, ‘And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side of my darling,’ and so forth.”
“And Thomas’s version again?”
“‘And so, with the night-tide, I’ll lie down by the side of my darling.’”
For a few moments DeMarco considered the implications. “What are the chances that he just got it wrong? That he remembered it wrong?”
Nathan said, “Not a chance. I’ve heard him recite it in class. He knows dozens of Poe’s poems by heart. ‘The Raven,’ ‘Lenore,’ ‘The Lake,’ ‘To Annie’…dozens of them. Sometimes I think he fucking channels Poe.”
DeMarco said nothing. Slowly, his head turned from east to west, his gaze scanning the empty sky. On the far horizon the fallen sun had left a wide, irregular band of color, a graduated blending of rose, scarlet, and deep plum muted behind a haze of cloud. It reminded him of blood soaking through a bandage.
“Sergeant?” Nathan said. “Do you think it means what I think it means?”
DeMarco told him, “I’m afraid it might.”
The young man began to sob. “He called to tell me he’s going to kill himself. Tonight. That’s why he called me, isn’t it?”
“There were no other messages?” DeMarco asked. “Did I hear everything?”
“Just the poem, nothing else. Not even good-bye. Christ, can’t you guys do something to trace it? Plug into my phone records or something and find out where the call came from?”
“We’ll try, of course, but…I’m just not sure what good it will do. He’s not carrying his cell phone—we found that at the house—so he’s probably long gone from wherever he made the call.”
The sobbing became more desperate. “So it’s too late to stop him, isn’t it? Because I wasn’t here. If I had been here a couple of hours ago—”
“Listen, he reached out. That’s important. Maybe he’ll do it again. So you just sit by your phone, okay? Can you do that for me?”
“Of course I will.”
“Okay, I’m going to get to work on this. But you call me the instant you hear a word from him. The instant. You understand?”
“I will. I swear to God I will.”
Forty-Eight
DeMarco hurried back inside his house, left his beer and olives on the back porch, grabbed his car keys, and headed for the front door. He had his car in sight when the officer on duty at the barracks answered his call. He gave the officer Nathan Briessen’s phone number and the time of Huston’s call. “The second you get the address, get back to me with it.”
A minute later, he started the engine and sat in the idling vehicle, anxiously tapping his thumb against the steering wheel. He needed movement, but which way to go? He had no idea where Huston might be. He had last been seen near Lake Wilhelm, so DeMarco eased away from the curb and headed for Interstate 79. He wanted to flatten the accelerator to the floor but kept the speedometer needle at forty. He did not want to go too far in the wrong direction and have to reverse himself.
Just over fourteen minutes later, his cell phone jangled. “The call was placed from a public phone at the Qwik Stop convenience store in Conneaut, Ohio.”
“Ohio? Shit.” Then, “Wait a minute. Conneaut is straight up seven, due north of Pierpont, am I right? I’m coming up on seven now.”
“Yes, sir.”
“He did go to Whispers.”
“Sir?”
“I need a street address.”
“The store is along Route 198 on the west end of town. Corner of Franklin Avenue.”
DeMarco swung his car onto the entrance ramp. Conneaut was a full hour away. The speedometer reached seventy and kept climbing. “Okay, alert the Conneaut Police Department to send a car to the store. Huston’s probably long gone by now, but he might still be hanging around somewhere. And no fucking sirens or he’ll head for the woods again. And get the Ohio boys from the nearest barracks in the vicinity too. Have them checking out any abandoned buildings, warehouses, anyplace he might have holed up for the night. And I’m going to be flying low, so inform any of our guys who might be on traffic control on the interstate. I’m driving a light-brown Bonneville.”
“Ten-four, Sergeant.”
“Anything yet from the search of the strip club?”
“I’ll check on that and get back to you, sir.”
DeMarco hung up the radio, grabbed his dash light off the passenger seat, stuck it on the dashboard, and turned it on. The strobing light pulsed through the gloaming, punching softly into the gathering dark.
• • •
A local black-and-white was parked along the side of the convenience store lot, parking lights on, a young officer behind the wheel, a paper cup of coffee on the dash. DeMarco spotted the car while he waited for the light to change so he could turn into the lot. He had turned off his dash light upon entering town and stowed it on the floor, but here was a townie in plain view, as conspicuous as a one-ton, glowing wart. DeMarco knew that if Huston had been lingering anywhere near the store, he was long gone by now.
DeMarco backed his vehicle into a space facing the street, climbed out, and crossed to the police car. The young officer behind the wheel rolled down his window, and DeMarco showed him his ID.
“The clerk never saw your man,” the officer said. “Phone is there on the outside of the building. Probably the only pay phone left in town.”
“Huston didn’t go inside to get change for the phone?”
“Clerk says no. Says he never saw the guy.”
“So Huston was either carrying a few dollars in change or he bought a phone card somewhere.”
The officer nodded and reached for his coffee. “Every gas station and grocery store sells them. We could ask around, I suppose.”
“Doesn’t matter where he bought it,” DeMarco told him. “He’s not there now. Not here either.”
“What would bring him up this way anyway?”
DeMarco gazed out past the gas pumps. The lights threw a cold white illumination onto the concrete. A teenage girl was pumping gas into her Toyota, laughing loudly into a cell phone.
“I was surprised to even see a pay phone here,” the officer said. “They’re like relics.”
DeMarco watched the girl awhile longer. She was very pretty—long brown hair, long legs, and a thin, well-defined profile. He wondered if she was the kind of girl his son would have been attracted to. Ryan would still be just a boy, more or less the same age as Huston’s oldest son, but old enough to be sneaking glances at every girl who passed by, old enough to be wondering what it would be like to hold her and touch her, what it would be like to be wanted and loved.
When the girl climbed into her car, DeMarco took a step away from the officer’s. “You pulling second shift tonight?” he asked.
“Overtime,” the young man said. “Just waiting for you actually. We’ve only got a three-man force here.”
“Well, thanks for hanging around.” He glanced at the officer’s left hand. “I guess I kept you from your dinner, right?”
The officer shrugged. “Wouldn’t be the first time I had to eat cold meatloaf.”
“Give your wife my apologies.”
“No problem. Comes with the territory.”
DeMarco leaned down to look at him. “Nah, really, tell her I’m sorry. Tell her you’re sorry too. Tell her how much you missed her. How much you love her meatloaf.”
Two Days Gone Page 22
