Once Burned

by Gerry Boyle

  WHEN I GO YOUR GONNA KNOW IT. GONNA GO OUT IN A BLAZE OF FIRE. LOOK OUT YOU DONT GET BURNED UP. WRITE THAT FIRE STORY, JACK MCMORROW, WRITE THIS. GO 2 HELL YOU MOFO BABYKILLR BITCHES.

  Roxanne spun away from me, went inside. I followed, and while Roxanne was cleaning up around Sophie, saying “Honey, let me get you some new soup,” I went to the study, flipped my laptop open, went to the Channel 11 website, the column headed:

  BREAKING NEWS:

  Distraught Woman Threatens Suicide over DHHS Child Death

  By Caitlyn Carpenter

  A Gardiner woman whose toddler son died in state custody was threatening suicide Wednesday over what she said was callous treatment by the Department of Health and Human Services.

  In a series of profanity-laced text messages sent to this station, Beth Leserve, 22, pledged to kill herself over the death of her son, Ratchet.

  The child died while in foster care after being removed from Leserve’s home last year. A state investigation is under way, looking into the circumstances of the child’s death in the home of DHHS foster parent Sandy St. John. Leserve has also criticized the actions of then-DHHS child protective worker Roxanne Masterson. Masterson, 38, of Prosperity, left the agency shortly after removing the child from the home.

  In her messages, Leserve criticizes both women and blames them for her child’s death, from blunt force trauma. St. John claims the child fell from a chair. Leserve charges that he died due to physical abuse. She also charges that the DHHS has not been responsive since her son’s death.

  A State Police spokesperson on Wednesday said authorities were aware of Leserve’s threats and were attempting to locate her. Those attempts were made more difficult by the fact that the Gardiner woman was apparently texting from her car, the whereabouts of which were unknown.

  “We’re looking for her,” said spokesperson Jeanne Dunlap. “It’s only a matter of time before she turns up.”

  The child’s father, Alphonse Celine, was released from prison to attend his son’s funeral. He escaped during the service and remains at large.

  Anthony Shea said DHHS officials were concerned about Leserve’s well-being and hoped she could be located soon so she could receive appropriate assistance.

  St. John and Masterson could not be reached for comment Wednesday morning.

  The article was followed by Beth Leserve’s text messages, like an online chat with a distraught, drunken, emotionally disturbed young woman.

  I glanced across the screen, saw that the Leserve story was the most read and shared on the Channel 11 website.

  “God,” I said. “Is this what we’ve come to?”

  I got up and walked to the kitchen.

  Roxanne had gotten out flour, butter, and chocolate chips. Sophie was standing on a chair at the counter, wearing her apron.

  “We’re making cookies, Daddy,” Sophie said.

  “And no eating—” Roxanne said.

  “—the dough,” Sophie said.

  “Gotcha,” I said. “I’ll wait for the real thing.”

  To Roxanne I said, “When did they call?”

  “Starting at eleven. Every ten minutes after that.”

  “Mommy said not to answer the phone,” Sophie said. “Somebody was selling something.”

  “And we’re not buying,” I said.

  “No,” Roxanne said. “We’re not buying.”

  “Talk to Clair?”

  “Not yet. I feel like every time something happens—”

  “We call him? He’d be upset if we didn’t,” I said.

  He was there in ten minutes. Sophie got a special treat, a DVD of The Jungle Book and a bowl of Cheez-Its. She watched the movie on my laptop on the couch while the three of us stood on the deck, under the canvas awning. It had started to rain, a soft but heavy mist, and the drips came off the edge of the awning and splashed against our legs.

  Roxanne backed up closer to me and I put my arm around her. Clair stood with his back to the house, facing the woods, like Wyatt Earp with his chair against the saloon wall.

  “I’m sure they’ll find her,” I said. “If she’s driving around drunk or high, or whatever she is.”

  “I don’t want her to hurt herself,” Roxanne said. “I don’t want that on my head, too.”

  “Why she’s doing this . . .,” Clair said. “She’s decided to hurt you in any way she can. A public suicide, even the threat of it—”

  “She’s all talk,” I said.

  “I don’t know,” Clair said. “Filled with drugs?”

  “When I pulled Ratchet, she was really into meth,” Roxanne said.

  “Then she could go for days,” I said.

  “You can come to our house,” Clair said.

  “No,” Roxanne said. “We can’t keep doing that.”

  “Then you stay here,” Clair said. “I’ll keep an eye on things.”

  “But you won’t get any sleep,” Roxanne said.

  “Wouldn’t get any sleep anyway,” Clair said.

  We spent the rest of the rainy afternoon trying to pretend everything was normal. Roxanne did laundry, put dishes away, listened to a news show on NPR, and kept the phone off the hook. I sat at my study chair and went over notes for the story, began a rough outline. Sophie said she wanted to do a campout, so I made a tent with blankets in her room, putting her stuffed animals into sleeping bags made of towels.

  I came back downstairs.

  “Goddamn it,” Roxanne said. “This is just nuts.”

  Her cell phone buzzed at 2:48 and 3:19. Each time she stared at it, walked away, then walked back and picked it up. Each time it was a text message from Beth.

  MAYBE I’LL DO IT ON THE STATEHOUSE STEPS . . . I HOPE SANDY DIES SLOW . . . ROXANNE, EVERY TIME YOU HOLD YOUR DAUGHTR, KNOW THATS A FEELING I’LL NEVER HAVE AGAIN . . .

  At 3:30, Sophie came downstairs, a stuffed animal under each arm. Roxanne gathered her up and they snuggled on the couch and Roxanne told her a story about when Sophie was little.

  “I couldn’t talk at all?” Sophie asked.

  More messages, 4:05 and 5:19.

  HOW CAN YOU FUCKEN PEOPLE SLEEP AT NIGHT? . . . WHY SHOULD I DIE ALONE, SANDY? I WANT YOU WITH ME . . .

  Roxanne got up, made coffee.

  “I want to call Sandy,” she said.

  “You can’t,” I said.

  “I want to ask her what happened. Again.”

  “You don’t believe her?”

  “I don’t know what to believe anymore,” Roxanne said. “About this, or about anything.”

  She turned away from me, went back to the couch.

  At 5:45 p.m. the three of us went to the barn to see Pokey. I called Clair on his cell and told him we were coming. He met us on the path, materializing out of the trees.

  Clair had the pony tethered in the small pasture outside of the paddock, next to the barn. Pokey looked up when he saw us, then lowered his head and continued grazing. Sophie helped Roxanne fill his grain bucket and gave him water and raked the stall, which Clair had already mucked out. He and I stood in the shop door and watched them, listened to Sophie’s chatter.

  “No music?” I said.

  “Sometimes you need to hear what’s going on around you,” he said.

  “You think she might do something?”

  “To herself? Fifty-fifty. To you guys? Twenty-eighty.”

  “But still.”

  “Hope for the best, plan for the worst,” Clair said.

  “Yes.”

  “She’s enjoying the melodrama.”

  “Definitely getting her fifteen minutes,” I said.

  “Wonderful world we live in,” he said.

  Mary appeared at the back door of the house, called, “You’re staying for dinner,” and then closed the door and went back inside.

  “They can stay,” I said. “I might go back to the house.”

  Clair nodded, turned and stepped into the barn and the shop. There was a bulge at his waist, under his T-shirt. I followed him to t
he workbench, where he reached to a shelf above his head, the butt of a pistol showing above his belt. He took down another, a handgun in a small black fiber holster.

  “You want this, just in case?”

  I took it from him.

  “Waist holster,” he said. “Glock twenty-three. Light but very reliable. Forty-caliber, good punch.”

  He handed me an extra clip. “Thirteen rounds.”

  I slipped the gun out of the holster, popped the clip out, and jammed it back in. It felt cold and lethal, like I was handling a poisonous snake. I slipped the second clip into the pocket of my jeans.

  “If I have it, I won’t need it?” I said.

  “Like when you bring an umbrella,” Clair said.

  “And it never rains,” I said.

  “Almost never,” he said.

  Roxanne and Sophie came out of the barn, walked around the paddock to the pony. Roxanne undid the tether from its stake and Sophie led Pokey to the barn door, Roxanne alongside. She looked at me, pointed to the house. I shook my head. She nodded.

  “I’ll walk them back,” Clair said.

  “I don’t think she’d come through the woods,” I said.

  “No. More likely try to crash her car into your house.”

  “Or blow her brains out on the front lawn.”

  What was the good news?

  I turned and headed for home. The path wound through a glade of birches, then dense thickets of blackberries, high as my head. Halfway there I took the gun from the holster, snapped the clip in and out. There was something reassuring about the metallic clack. I holstered the gun, the holster clipped to the back of my jeans. I walked on, scanning the thickets, then the clumps of sumac, the patches of spruce.

  When I reached the house, I circled it once, checked the front and side doors. I walked to the end of the driveway and looked up and down. It was quiet, robins clucking in the trees, a phalanx of goldfinches flushing themselves from the brush on the far side of the road. I looked up, saw a pair of turkey vultures circling high above. I glanced once more up and down the road. As I walked back to the house, I adjusted the gun at my waist.

  They came home at 7:30, Clair watching from the lawn as they came in through the sliding door. I waved and he did, too, and was gone.

  Sophie was telling me they’d brought me a package and she ran to the table with a brown paper bag and stood on the chair as she opened it. She named the items as she pulled them out.

  “Potato salad. Coleslaw. Salmon. Mary said you can heat it up ’cause it’s cold now. She said she couldn’t give you ice cream because it would melt, even if I ran.”

  I said it all looked great and I was starved.

  Roxanne smiled, helped Sophie pull the lid off a plastic container.

  “Pickles,” Sophie said. “Mary knows you like her pickles.”

  “Yes, I do,” I said. And I turned away, listened.

  A car was crunching the gravel on the road, slowing. I looked at Roxanne. She glanced toward the road.

  I went to the mudroom door, opened it. I heard a motor idling, adjusted the gun, and stepped out.

  The cruiser was in the driveway. Trooper Foley got out, reached back into the car and got his hat, put it on. He turned to me, nodded.

  I met him by the front of the cruiser.

  “Evening, sir,” he said.

  “What is it?”

  “Beth Leserve.”

  “Yes.”

  “I just want to let you know, we found her car.”

  Roxanne appeared in the doorway, stepped out. She was carrying her phone.

  “Where?” she said.

  “About ten miles from here. In Palermo.”

  “Was she in it?” I said.

  “No,” he said. “She was not.”

  “Well, was she beside it? What?” Roxanne said.

  “Her car was in the driveway of a home. There’s an indication—”

  He hesitated.

  “Of what?” I said.

  “It appears Ms. Leserve broke into the house and got keys and took a car or truck from the residence. She also took other items, we believe.”

  “Such as?”

  “At least two firearms,” the trooper said.

  “Jesus,” Roxanne said.

  “A two-seventy deer rifle and a nine-millimeter handgun.”

  “Ammunition?”

  Another small hesitation.

  “We believe she also took ammunition for both firearms.”

  “You’re looking for the car?” Roxanne said.

  “Well, we’re checking that. The owners of the house live out of state. They own multiple vehicles. There’s some confusion as to which vehicle was at the house.”

  We stood there as it sank in. I touched the gun at my waist, under my shirt.

  “So where the hell is she?” I said.

  Roxanne’s phone chimed. A real call.

  28

  She looked at the number, pressed a button, and held the phone out. Speaker.

  “Yes,” Roxanne said.

  “He’s dead,” Beth said. “I’ll never hold my baby again.”

  Roxanne looked at the trooper.

  “I know that, Beth,” she said.

  “We’re all dead,” Beth said.

  “What about Heaven, Beth?” Roxanne said. “Don’t blow this. Don’t blow your chance to see Ratchet.”

  There was a clatter, road noise, the dinging of a car with a door open or a seat belt unfastened.

  “Changed my mind on that,” Beth said. “I got to thinking. I’m thinking there’s no God ’cause he wouldn’t’ve let my baby die.”

  “Where are you, Beth? Let’s talk.”

  A car door closing. The motor starting, the roar of a V8.

  “Oh, ‘Let’s talk,’ ” Beth mimicked. “Sicka fucking talking. Is talking gonna bring my baby back? Huh? You tell me. What the fuck is there to talk about?”

  And the phone went dead.

  Silence hung like a cloud. And then Foley said, “Maybe you folks will want to move in with a friend or something. Until we locate her.”

  Roxanne looked at me. Gave her head a little shake.

  “I think we’ll be better off here,” I said.

  “Well, we’ll have units in the area,” the trooper said. “It’s not like you’ll be alone.”

  I thought of Clair.

  “No,” I said. “We won’t be alone.”

  Sophie had a bath, with lots of soap, a rubber duck, and a squirt gun. Sophie floated the duck at one end of the tub and fired away from the other.

  Join the club.

  At nine, as they sloshed and chattered upstairs, I went outside, exiting onto the deck out back, circling the yard, pausing in the shadows at the east side of the house. I listened, watched the dusky woods. Birds flitted, looking for roosts. Bats were out and one passed near my head, so close I felt the wash of his passing, the flutter of bat wing. I stayed still for a minute more, than walked toward the woods. At the edge of the brush, I turned toward the road. At the edge of the ditch, I paused. Looked down the road toward Clair’s, and jumped across.

  “Seven-point two from the Russian judge,” a voice said.

  I turned. Clair was sitting in a camouflaged camp chair at the edge of the trees. He was dressed in olive and black. A black ball cap covered his silver hair. He was cradling a rifle, his favorite Mauser.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Nice night,” he said. He looked up at the sky, the light dribbling away to the west.

  “Been here long?”

  “About an hour. Have another chair out back, northwest side by the woods. Has a sight line three directions—east, southeast, and south.”

  I glanced at the rifle.

  “See you brought the heavy artillery,” I said.

  “Your State Police friend said she took a handgun and a deer rifle.”

  “I doubt she knows how to use it,” I said. “She’s a city girl.”

  “You never want to be outgunned. Ra
nge is everything in open terrain.”

  We stood, looked up the road. The strip of gray gravel was light against the dark woods.

  “Why snipers were so effective in the hill country,” Clair said. “Set up, shoot across a valley. Knowing you’re out of enemy range is a damn good feeling.”

  Another pause. The bats had found us, the bugs we’d attracted. They swooped and fluttered. Clair said, “I could watch them for hours.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  We did, and then I said, “I think they’ll find her passed out in a car someplace, once she reaches the end of this jag.”

  “Maybe so,” Clair said.

  “Call me when you’re ready to head home,” I said.

  “Oh, I will,” he said. He was looking up at the sky. His expression was calm, peaceful, nearly beatific.

  “A gift to see these sorts of things,” Clair said. “You know I saw a bobcat cross the road a little while ago. Big male.”

  “Did it see you?” I said.

  “No,” Clair said. A pause, and he added, “Woods are full of things that are invisible to most people. Foxes, coyotes, weasels, martens.”

  “Creatures that are at home in the woods at night. Like you, and whoever is burning the town down.”

  “Yes,” he said. “At least this Beth, you see her coming.”

  “Count my blessings,” I said, and I walked back toward the house, cut across the front lawn, and looked back. Clair was gone.

  Sophie was in bed, waiting for me to say good night. Roxanne kissed her forehead, gave the blanket another tug, and left the room. I sat on the edge of the bed and held Sophie’s hand, small in my palm, little fingers gripping mine.

  “You’re up late,” I said.

  “I can’t sleep,” she said.

  “You haven’t tried yet.”

  “I’m worried,” Sophie said. “About Pokey.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s all alone,” she said. “And it’s dark in the barn.”

  “Horses are used to the dark.”

  “Not Pokey. He likes it when it’s light out. And when we’re with him.”

  “We can go see him first thing in the morning.”

  Sophie looked doubtful, frowning with the sheet tucked her under chin.

  “That’s a long time from now,” she said.