Your turn to tell me, he wanted to say, since he sensed he was being drawn on something Maguire already knew. He waited until the detective added, ‘He doesn’t seem to think they’re a joke.’
‘I don’t think it’s something he feels especially strongly about.’
‘Strong enough to attend meetings, I understand.’
Gary, you idiot, he thought, and found himself growing irritated. ‘Well, in that case you understand more than me.’
Maguire changed tack. ‘Was your father a popular teacher?’
Michael thought for a moment. ‘I’d say respected rather than popular.’
‘For his intellect?’
Michael laughed for the second time. ‘Probably more for his size.’
Maguire persevered. ‘But he was pretty intellectual, wasn’t he? I mean, that room,’ – he nodded his head towards the study – ‘it’s just full of books.’
‘He read a lot. I wouldn’t have called him intellectual.’ He felt weary of the questioning. ‘I’m not sure I’m helping you much, Detective, so let me ask you something.’
‘Shoot.’
‘Do you have any idea who did this?’
Maguire shook his head. ‘Not really. The one thing I would have to say is that this was a very violent crime.’ Seeming to remember that he was talking to the son of the victim, he suddenly stopped talking.
‘It’s okay,’ said Michael. ‘Jimmy told me my father was hit more than once. It seems a pretty messy way to kill somebody.’
‘Exactly,’ said Maguire. ‘And yet it must have been carefully planned; the doctor thinks it happened at three in the morning, give or take an hour. Whoever did it wasn’t staying here – at least, there weren’t any indications that your father had an overnight guest. But I would bet my bottom dollar this was not a burglary. Nothing got stolen. Whoever did it snuck in quite deliberately. Either he knew your father always left the door unlocked, or he was going to force his way in and just got lucky.’
Michael said, ‘If you wanted to kill a man, this wasn’t the most reliable way to do it, was it? You’d use a gun, maybe with a silencer. Or you’d use a knife.’
Maguire nodded, and Michael concluded, ‘So whoever did this had more hate in him than sense.’
Maguire looked at Michael thoughtfully. ‘I hope you’re right there, because that will make it a lot easier to catch him. The problem is, this person was really very careful. We haven’t got hammered shit to work with: forensics haven’t found a thing. So I’m sorry to have asked all these nosy questions, and I appreciate your patience with me, especially when I must be barking up quite a few wrong trees. But to be honest, that’s about all I can do right now: bark, and then hope something falls out of the tree.’
5
TUESDAY EVENING HE sat in his car with the lights out underneath a large sycamore tree outside Buckling’s Gun Shop, which was a dirty shack of a place, filled with stray ammo and shotguns and rifles held in badly-fitting racks and old cupboards. The shop was closed and the night was moonless dark, but if he peered carefully, with his window rolled down, he could see quite clearly into the kitchen of the low bungalow across the street, where an overhead light bathed the room in a honey-coloured glow.
He watched as she set the table for breakfast, carefully arranging three places, then putting out two big boxes of cereal. Finished, she began ironing, setting up the board next to the stove, taking each garment out of a purple plastic tub of clean laundry.
The soft black hair was shorter now, cut just above the shoulders in back with a straight fringe in front that brushed her eyebrows. She wore blue jeans and a long-sleeved flannel shirt that looked far too big for her. As she ironed, she bit her lower lip with her front teeth, a sign of intense concentration he had liked in her from the start.
The little boy came in, dressed in pyjamas, and she put the iron down and hugged him, then took him by the hand and led him out of the kitchen. After a few minutes a light went off in a room at the side of the house, and he decided she was saying goodnight to her son. In a minute she returned to the kitchen and resumed her ironing until her daughter appeared, also dressed for bed, and the same ritual was repeated.
He watched, and wondered what had brought him here, why he was sitting outside spying – that was, after all, what he was doing. He was very tired and had a long trip ahead of him the next day (and the day after that) back to his reconstructed bridge on the west coast of Scotland. And before he left, he would still have one final conversation with the police. It’s only Jimmy Olds, he told himself, and he could imagine the language of the autopsy report: a bisectional trapezoid concussion of the left cranial quadrant measuring 3.23 inches by .65 inches . . . Blah blah blah. What they really meant to say was somebody smashed his head in.
He would also need to make plans with Gary about what had to be done, and try to find out without a major fight just why his little brother would, of all things, attend local meetings of the Michigan Marines. Then he’d have to go downtown to the bank to sort out his father’s accounts, and leave a note for Atkinson the lawyer to call him about the will (if there was a will) whenever Atkinson returned from drying out, and no doubt there would be countless other chores he hadn’t even thought of yet. But despite, or perhaps because of all these things to do, he was happy now to sit in the car watching through her kitchen window as she continued ironing.
It seemed both as if he’d been back for months and as if he had barely been back at all. The funeral had been simple and straightforward, conducted in a light drizzle by an earnest young Episcopal minister he had never met, on a slope of the new part of the cemetery unsheltered by trees. He had felt upset only when the minister mentioned the proximity of his mother’s grave to the freshly dug one in which they were about to put his father.
Other than that brief moment, he had felt . . . well, nothing much at all, not even when the cousins had come back and tried to make friendly small talk with him and Gary (who had cried during the service), trying to disguise their manifest curiosity about this old wooden house where their relative – his mother – had elected to come and spend her life, clearly struggling to understand why she would have left the fine lawns and large modern rooms of a Grand Rapids suburb to live with the slightly mysterious man they had just buried.
He hadn’t gone by Donny’s house, not because he didn’t want to see his boyhood friend, but because he didn’t want to see another family’s happiness right then. After her sole visit to Stillriver, his ex-wife Sarah had declared, ‘I wish I’d known your family while your mother was alive . . . Because now it’s totally dysfunctional.’ And Michael had snapped back, ‘It’s not dysfunctional. It doesn’t function at all.’
He was, he knew, a master of repressed emotion. Repressed? In his day-to-day life now, there was almost nothing he felt strongly about; he had no emotions to repress. And what he did feel was always tied up in his past, visiting him on occasion, unbidden, unwanted. Why, if his father had managed to send his own past away, or leave it, couldn’t his son do the same? So he was surprised to be struck for the second time since his return by an almost overpowering feeling of sadness, though he was too well trained and too self-conscious to yield to it, even here alone in his car – as an adult, he had never been able to cry. With the sadness came a powerful sense of regret, one that seemed to sweep through his past as he surveyed it. Regret that his mother had died when he still needed her so badly, regret that his father had died before the two of them had made their peace, and regret that he had not been here to save his father as his father had once saved him. Finally, and achingly, regret that she was there inside, while he sat outside, alone in a rental car. I am wifeless, childless, loveless, he told himself, not for the first time.
But at least I am here, he told himself, at least I still care enough to spy. And as he recognized this in himself, for the first time in . . . how long? Six, seven years? For the first time in that long he saw at least the remote possibility that the cloud he felt around him �
�� the cloud he thought of as the past – might lift, and that just possibly, in time, he might find himself able to live in the present. Present and well accounted for. He looked through the window and saw that Cassie was no longer there, then the kitchen light went out.
Two
1
HER NAME, ACCORDING to Donny, was Cassie Gilbert. ‘Funny kind of name,’ said Donny.
‘Gilbert? What’s funny about that?’
‘Not that name. Cassie. What’s it stand for?’
‘How would I know?’ asked Michael, and changed the subject.
He hadn’t really noticed the new girl in class because he was entranced by geometry. He had always been good at math, but found ‘tinkering with numbers’ (his father’s phrase) too finicky to inspire him, and somehow soulless. In geometry he found a purity that made him feel clean.
He noticed her after this, and would have eventually anyway, since she was pretty, and the students in his year comprised only sixty-five teenage boys and girls. But the quiet, attractive girl who dressed so demurely – knee socks (knee socks for God’s sake!) and skirts or corduroy pants – was not going to intrude in his world. He didn’t want a girlfriend anyway, he told himself, though part of him did. The problem was simple: he knew enough, even just turned sixteen, to sense that any girl he was interested in was going to suffer by comparison to his mother two years dead.
Still, he proved easy prey when Nancy Sheringham cornered him at break one morning, a little over a month later. ‘What are you doing tomorrow after school?’
‘Working.’
‘No you’re not. It’s Wednesday. Store’s closed at one.’
He had forgotten what day it was. He looked at her suspiciously. ‘So?’
‘There’s something I want you to do for me. A favour.’
‘What’s that then?’
She hesitated for the first time. ‘Well, it’s not exactly for me, you see.’
Nancy was never this coy. ‘Oh?’
‘A friend of mine needs help with the math test on Friday, and you’re elected. That’s the bad news.’
What was going on? It didn’t work that way, as he wanted to say to Nancy. Sure, you might help your friends on occasion – but on something specific: how long was the Rio Grande, say, right before a quiz, or tell me the plot of the story I didn’t read. There was even mild cheating in the classroom itself, like when Candy Simmons dropped the contents of her purse all over the floor so Mr Walwicki’s attention was diverted while Louise Grade flipped her chemistry notes to Sarah Fane during the end of term exam. But an hour? Unheard of. Nancy must be out of her mind. Now he said as much to her.
‘Ah, but you haven’t heard the good news yet, buster. Your pupil is the nicest girl in class. Probably the prettiest too.’
Cathy Stallover was the prettiest girl in the class by miles, but in the lowest fifth percentile when it came to nice. She was also in a different league socially – her last boyfriend had been a marine. He looked at Nancy, who seemed strangely confident he was going to do what she asked, and said, ‘If you’re feeling sorry for Lindsay Morag again,’ – Lindsay, who might have been pretty if God had omitted to put a hump halfway down her back – ‘you can find another sucker.’
Nancy was shaking her head. ‘What a way to talk,’ she scolded. And then she laughed, a loud laugh that for some reason always reminded Michael of munching apples. A harsh but happy sound. ‘No, it’s not Lindsay Morag. Would I do that to you?’
‘Without batting an eye. So who is it?’ ‘Cassie Gilbert.’ And she stood back with visible pride to watch his reaction.
Which, inexplicably, was to blush, something he usually did only when he was trying to insist a lie he’d told was true. ‘Since when is she your friend?’ He hadn’t even seen them talk together, much less act like bosom pals.
‘Since she came out for basketball. She’s good, too.’ High praise from the women’s team captain and high scorer the year before. ‘She was all-county reserve her last year of junior high. That was down in Saugatuck.’
‘That’s what she says.’
Nancy shook her head. ‘I saw the photograph at her house. They’re living in that little house across from the Episcopal Church.’
‘Why did they move here?’
Nancy looked at him. ‘Her mother died last spring. Her daddy took early retirement after that and they moved to Stillriver because he wanted to. But I don’t think he’s very well either – Cassie has to go home every day to make his lunch. Not that he sounds grateful. I think he’s pretty tough on her. That’s where you come in.’
‘How’s that?’ As was often the case dealing with Nancy, he was starting to feel slightly jello-like, being shaped and reshaped to accord with her requirements.
‘He won’t let her play basketball unless she gets all As and Bs. She said the way it’s going now she won’t even get a C in geometry – she almost flunked that first quiz. So over to you, Mr Math Whiz.’
‘You expect me to spend my free time helping your new friend so she can play basketball with you?’
Nancy looked him right in the eye. ‘That’s right.’ She put a hand on his shoulder and pushed him playfully. ‘It’s not so bad, Michael. Who knows? Maybe she’ll think you’re cute.’
And for the first time in more than two years, Michael found himself looking forward to something.
When his mother died, he was in the eighth grade and not quite fourteen years old. Later, he could never remember much about the first few months after her death in April.
He had gone back to school after the funeral, played baseball that spring, but his days seemed completely empty, directionless, pilotless. For he had lost his lodestar. It was not that he had been a clingy child, or in any sense a ‘mama’s boy’. Rather, he had been so favoured by his mother, so instilled with confidence, that he could use her – ‘use’ was the word; he felt guilty about this – as a touchstone to which he could return from his forays, increasingly adventurous, into the world. He had been like a puppy charging ahead on an extendable lead, full of a happy illusion of complete independence, knowing in the back of his mind that the lead was there if he got into serious trouble. And then the lead had snapped.
At school he kept to himself, not speaking much even to Donny, going home every afternoon and sitting in his own bedroom, listless, unwilling to do his homework, unable to read anything else. He had tried listening to music, he had tried listening to himself – thinking about thinking he grew to call it – but nothing helped. Time passed like molasses with sand in it, infinitely slow yet abrasive and painful. He thought: I have to get out of here before I die too. But where could he go? He had exactly forty-three dollars saved and not even a prospective haven in his head. His uncle’s place in Grand Rapids? He’d ship him back the same day. The streets of Chicago or Detroit? No thanks, forty-three dollars wouldn’t last long there. No, he was stuck in Stillriver at least until the end of high school. Four more years. It looked like a century to him.
In the absence of his mother, Michael might have grown closer to his father, particularly had there been any overtures from him. But instead his father withdrew, growing even more aloof, managing to double his official territory as a parent (since he was forced to assume his dead wife’s responsibilities as well) while actually shrinking his emotional range. Henry Wolf hunkered down into a routine that was deliberately solitary: he read during virtually every spare moment he had outside of teaching and the cooking and household chores he now did. And walked, long walks out Park Street, usually on weekend mornings, though sometimes also in the evenings during spring and summer when the light held late.
Years later, Sarah showed Michael a story she’d read by a man in New York who had grown up in the Midwest and lost his mother as a little boy. Every evening after supper, he and his father would walk round and round the dining room table, the father’s arm slung loosely over the little boy’s shoulder, walking away their grief in a daily ritual. Michael had thought, W
hy couldn’t my father have done that with me?
What interest his father did take in his sons seemed confined to Gary; sometimes he took him along on his walks, while Michael went over to Donny’s house. This upset Michael more than he would admit even to himself, and it also mystified him, since he found Gary just plain irritating. He didn’t play baseball, he didn’t like to read; all he seemed to want to do was hog the television and watch his dumb-ass cartoons. And he was a little thief, too, as Michael discovered when he caught Gary red-handed, taking three dollars out of his chest of drawers. When Michael exploded their father had come into the room, but it was Michael he shook roughly before Michael had a chance to explain.
That evening his father had called him into his study and Michael had thought, Maybe he’ll say he’s sorry. But there had been no apology for grabbing him, only more expressions of concern about his younger brother: ‘He’s just a little guy. I need you to help me watch out for him.’ Which Michael assumed was supposed to flatter him and make him feel grown up. But he didn’t feel grown up at all. Don’t I need watching out for too? he had thought. His father wouldn’t even help him with his homework: ‘Son, it wouldn’t really be right,’ he’d claimed. ‘I teach there after all.’ And Michael had thought, So what? You’re my dad, aren’t you? Mom would have helped me.
It didn’t seem a family any more. The three of them ate together (unless Michael went for supper at a friend’s house, usually Donny’s), sometimes shopped together, and twice a year (Christmas and Easter) attended church together. But in their time together there was no joy for any of them, and there were no more outings of the informal kind that marked his childhood – trips to the Half and long rides through the Back Country, picnics on the banks of the south branch of the Pere Marquette, a sudden decision to turn off the record player and go to the movies on Saturday night. Oddly for a man of his generation, his father had always left the driving to his wife. In her absence now he drove only when absolutely required to, and spontaneous fun had become an impossibility. On Michael’s birthday that first summer, his father gave him a cheque instead of a present.
Stillriver Page 6
