Stillriver

by Andrew Rosenheim

  With Cassie, surprisingly, Michael felt awkward, and they avoided those topics of conversation that might prove thorny, such as how long he was back for or what he might do next; such as Ronald, who wasn’t mentioned again after their initial exchange. They didn’t even talk about his father’s murder or who might have done it, not even after Jimmy Olds came by the house to give a self-conscious report (ninety-three people had been interviewed to date and seventeen phone calls received, of which two were anonymous), which managed to convey both the extensive activity and lack of progress of the police investigation. And though Michael had left a message for Maguire with the police in Muskegon, he had yet to hear from the detective.

  His feelings for Cassie had been so long dormant that he had imagined them extinguished, but he knew now that had never really been the case – why else had he come back to town so urgently this summer? He could see how in a matter of days she was already beginning to colour his life again, to the point where even the smallest plan he made – to run even the most pedestrian errand – had him taking Cassie and her brood into mental account.

  He did not find her greatly changed, for there was the same easy grace about her, evidenced in how she did things: he liked to watch her perform even the most everyday tasks, from washing the dishes to cleaning the barbecue with an old toothbrush, or just to watch how she laughed when Jack spilled ice-cream all over her jeans. As ever, she always had a book on the go, inevitably a novel – Anne Tyler, Diane Johnson, Joan Didion. Michael liked it when she’d describe them, talking about their characters rather than the plots he relished in the formulaic thrillers and detective novels he read. She still liked wine, but now bought him bottles from states where he had not realized grapes could prosper – Washington, Texas, even Michigan itself.

  Yet it wasn’t clear any more to him what she was feeling, and he was not confident that she wanted the same closeness again. Sometimes she behaved as if she were spending time with a member of her family whom she actually didn’t know that well. But then why was she seeing him again, and so often? Why, without ever mentioning it, had she fallen so easily into a daily routine of visiting him?

  Curiously it was a spat that dissolved the tension. At the beginning of the following week he went to her house – ‘It’s time we fed you,’ she declared. He came in through the back door of her bungalow, stepping down onto a freshly waxed linoleum floor as the screen door banged shut behind him, to find Jack going bam bam bam with the fingers of both hands wrapped around a stick, like a television detective pointing his weapon. Cassie gave Michael iced tea in a plastic glass full of ice cubes, and he stepped into the living room, surprised to find it an absolute mess. Cassie apologized and he said, ‘Don’t worry,’ but it annoyed him – this annoyance serving to annoy him further, since he knew he was unnaturally orderly in his childless bachelordom. You don’t have kids, he told himself. Remember that. You have no idea what it’s like. But something of his irritation got out, for he looked at the crooked mountain of video cassettes and the web of wires and attachments and adaptors that lay like so many black snakes on the rug underneath the television and hi-fi and tape deck and God knows what else, and asked, a little tetchily, ‘What is all this stuff?’ Was this how Ronald had taught her to live?

  ‘Don’t be stuck up,’ she said.

  ‘I’m not. I’m not a snob.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because I was married to one. So I can recognize the breed.’

  Cassie looked at him sceptically. ‘Well keep an eye on the mirror, pal. You forget, Michael, it’s a long winter here.’

  ‘I thought Sally likes to read, just like you do.’

  ‘Kids can only read so much; you can only play so many games of cards. And when Jack gets too much – you know, stir crazy with all that energy – then I thank God for videos and I thank God for cable TV.’ She looked at him and added crossly, ‘so don’t you go acting sniffy with me until you spend another winter here.’

  ‘Don’t you go . . .?’ he asked with a smile. ‘Your father never talked that way.’

  ‘You know exactly what I mean.’

  He shrugged. ‘Don’t listen to me, Cassie. It’s not for me to criticize.’

  Though she seemed to accept his apology, her mouth, firmly set, said no it isn’t.

  And when he left that night, not late but well after the kids had gone to bed, and he tried to prolong their kiss goodbye, she broke away and shook her head. ‘Let’s get one thing straight, okay?’

  ‘Sure, Cassie,’ he said, but his voice was light and nervous.

  ‘We’re not the same as way back when. If that’s what’s in your head forget it.’

  ‘I know that, Cassie. It’s not like we haven’t seen each other since then.’

  ‘Six years ago,’ she said flatly. ‘And that wasn’t for all that long. You know, when I saw you that first time again in Texas, I thought it didn’t matter that we’d each changed, because some part of us – you, me, and us together – had survived. Now I’m not so sure.’

  ‘Why? Are you that different now?’

  She looked at him in surprise. ‘Me? No, whatever Ronald did to change me happened long ago and you’ve seen it. But you’ve changed.’

  ‘No I haven’t,’ he protested. ‘I am what I’ve always been.’ When she shook her head he felt suddenly almost desperate. What he didn’t feel he could say was that yes, he knew he had changed, and that deep within him now there was a coldness that had not been there before. But she had put it there. Six years before. Didn’t she realize that? ‘You loved me way back when,’ he said plaintively. He added, ‘And I’m still the same.’ Not daring to state where the logic of this was intended to lead, but hoping she would do that herself.

  ‘I loved you then for a lot of reasons.’ She paused and laughed. ‘Because you were smarter than you knew. Because you were cute but didn’t know it. Because you were shy.’ She looked at him knowingly. ‘Don’t try and tell me you’re shy any more.’

  ‘You’re making me shy,’ he said, like a kid wheedling pocket money.

  ‘Tell me about it,’ she said curtly, but with a small smile. Then she grew serious. ‘What you are now is a cynic.’

  ‘No. I’m just not sentimental.’

  She looked at him almost pityingly. ‘Michael, all Americans are sentimental. That’s what this country is about. That’s what being an American means.’

  ‘Okay, so I’m just not naive any more.’

  She snorted. ‘Bullshit – excuse my French. You haven’t been naive since your sophomore year in college.’

  He had no answer to this and his face must have made that clear. Cassie took a step back into the kitchen. ‘I’m not trying to be hurtful, but the way you’ve been talking since you came back makes me think you’re on some expedition down Memory Lane. Maybe you’re nostalgic instead of sentimental. Donny said you acted surprised Dumas’s wasn’t there any more. Honestly, Michael.’

  4

  STEVE ATKINSON DIDN’T look like a drunk, but then, Michael charitably concluded, that was because he wasn’t a drunk any more. Michael had called and left a message for him during the week, and was surprised when the lawyer called him back late Sunday morning. ‘I’m in the office today,’ he explained, ‘catching up on things.’ He didn’t mention his extended absence from town. ‘Drop by if you like – I’ll be here ’til three.’

  Cassie and the kids were at Sheringham’s, so Michael ate lunch at home by himself. As he came out of the back door to go downstairs, he saw yet another car slow down in front, its occupants pointing at the house. Gary had told him that the town was ‘freaked’ by his father’s murder, but so far Michael has seen as much curiosity as fear – these cars slowly cruising by, the people at the Homecoming Parade staring at him, then quickly looking away.

  He disliked being the object of public interest, but he could not avoid contact with his neighbours, and he had already received a number of unsolicited visits from them, usually on t
he pretext of their offering to help: Mrs Decatur’s grandson came by with a toddler in tow, bringing a plate of chocolate chip cookies; Mr Jenkins, his way eased by his wife’s encounter with Michael at Meijers, came and talked a mile a minute about town affairs with only the briefest of references to the murder, then offered the loan of his lawnmower in case Michael wanted a ‘finer cut’. Even three Bogle boys made a showing at the back door, cleaned up for the occasion in fresh T-shirts, extending their condolences and offering to keep an (armed) eye out for unwelcome visitors to the Wolf residence.

  It was all kindly meant, Michael knew, though he suspected it was as much designed to help evacuate their fears as to assist him. He was not surprised to learn from Donny that since the murder the households of the town had taken to locking their doors at night, and that Buckling claimed his gun sales had doubled.

  He walked downtown, where Main Street was full of tourists window shopping. Atkinson’s office was in a low building of yellow brick, built badly in the ’50s on a concrete base that was now cracking, two doors down from De Witt’s Funeral Home. Michael found him sitting at his desk in the back room of his office.

  Atkinson wore chinos and a brown golf shirt and talked in a deliberate, somnolent way that reminded Michael of the first time he had worked with a colleague on Prozac. Atkinson’s father had driven the school bus in New Era; possibly as a consequence, the son was at pains to let you know he had professional qualifications.

  Now from his desk he drew out a copy of Henry Wolf’s will and put it on the desk between them. Michael pointed at it and said, ‘Gary told me my father changed that six months ago.’

  ‘That is correct. Though now it’s actually been eight months. He came in here a little after New Year.’

  Since Gary had also said that Atkinson wouldn’t discuss why their father had changed his will, Michael was surprised to find him perfectly happy to say what had changed. ‘Basically, your father simply reversed the earlier disposition of his properties.’

  ‘Reversed?’

  ‘Swapped, if you like. So what you got in the earlier version is now Gary’s, and vice versa.’ He pronounced the vowels at the end of both words.

  ‘So up until January Gary would have got the house, and I would have got the Half.’

  ‘Correct. You also would have got the lion’s share of his other assets.’

  ‘Which are nothing much, are they?’

  Steve allowed himself a shrug, not wishing to deprecate the value of his dead client’s holdings. ‘There’s some Commonwealth Edison stock, a couple of downstate utilities, a few bonds – I figure they come to about six thousand dollars. Then there’s this Detroit company.’

  ‘What is it?’

  Atkinson pursed his lips. ‘I regret to say that I haven’t been able to discover that. Your father says in the will that he wants his holding in the company divided four to one between you boys in Gary’s favour – and it said just the opposite for the earlier version. But I can’t trace the company.’

  ‘Doesn’t he give its name in the will?’

  ‘Sure he does. Fine and Son – with a P.O. Box in Detroit but no other address, and nothing saying what the company does, or who to contact. I’ve written to the P.O. Box two times now. No reply.’

  Michael shook his head in dismay, and Atkinson took this as criticism. ‘I know, I know, I should have caught it when your father changed everything, made him spell it out. But I didn’t,’ he said defiantly, as if he were being wrongly accused. ‘Frankly, I wasn’t expecting anything to happen to your father.’ He paused as this sentence seemed to curdle, then added, ‘I assure you it wasn’t because of my own problems.’

  ‘I didn’t think it was,’ said Michael. ‘I was shaking my head because the whole thing is mystifying. And I don’t know how we’re going to find out what or who this is. Should we hire a private investigator?’

  ‘I wouldn’t recommend it myself. The fact is, I don’t know what they’d discover that we can’t. The Post Office aren’t allowed to tell us who holds a box number, and a box number is all we’ve got.’

  ‘And the name – Fine and Son.’

  For the first time Atkinson smiled. ‘Somehow I think there’s more than one Mr Fine in the city of Detroit.’

  He walked home, and as he crossed the driveway he saw that Jack had left the PF Flyer underneath the spruce. One of its wheels was loose, and Michael got a screwdriver from the tool box his father kept at the top of the basement stairs and tightened the screws. As he put the screwdriver back he heard a creaking noise below him in the basement. He took out the screwdriver again and held it as he slowly walked down the stairs, feeling alternately scared and ridiculous. At the bottom of the stairs the air was musty and slightly sour, a trigger for memories of being sent down here as a boy by his mother to fetch mason jars full of peaches she’d pickled, or white asparagus spears.

  To his relief, he found that he had simply failed to close the small window properly when he’d come down here at three in the morning. He shut the window, then looked around the room. Behind the waders he found a kiddies’ blue inflatable wading pool – bought for whom? The grandchildren his father had never had? – folded flat on the concrete floor. By the boiler there was a tarpaulin crumpled in the corner, a mouldy softball and two baseball bats, one of them a red plastic bat for playing whiffle ball on the beach. The wooden bat had Roger Maris written in black on its fat, bleached, vanilla-coloured barrel. He’d been given it as a birthday present by his mother. He picked up the bat and tentatively swung it through its web of associated memories. He checked his swing and stared at the end of the bat, then brought it, still extended, closer to the bare light bulb where he looked at the faint reddish smears he could just make out in the faded grain of the bat’s ash wood.

  He went upstairs and out the back door, bat in hand, his heart suddenly pumping thunderously. Sitting down, he thought, How could they have missed it? It was right under their noses: what had they been doing? Searching the bushes, dragging the channel, enlisting bloodhounds from inland counties? When right in the basement, almost directly beneath the murder scene, lay what looked very much to Michael like the weapon that had killed his father.

  Call Jimmy, he thought, looking again at the dark strands of blood. Putting the bat down carefully, he got up and went inside, started to make the local call, thought for a moment, and dialled Muskegon instead.

  Maguire showed up two hours later in a Subaru, wearing jeans and white running shoes and looking about sixteen years old.

  ‘Sorry to interrupt your weekend,’ said Michael.

  ‘You didn’t. I’m working.’

  Michael pointed at his clothes. ‘Is Sunday dress down day?’

  Maguire looked a little embarrassed. ‘I was on a drug case hoping to bust a dealer. He didn’t show.’

  ‘I thought you were Homicide.’

  ‘Homicide is not exactly a full-time occupation in this part of the country. Now, you want to show me this bat?’

  ‘It’s right behind you,’ said Michael, pointing to the base of the tall spruce where he had placed the bat standing up.

  Maguire nodded, then went to his car and returned with two large plastic bags and a pair of rubber gloves. As he put on the gloves he asked, ‘Whose bat is this?’

  ‘Mine.’

  ‘When did you last see it?’ Maguire was putting the bat handle in one bag, the bat end in the other.

  ‘I don’t know. I haven’t been here in nearly seven years and I doubt I saw it then. I was with my wife and we only stayed a night.’

  ‘You didn’t see it this spring when you came back?’ He taped the bags together where they met in the bat’s middle, then carefully balanced the package on the seat of the director’s chair.

  Michael exhaled, thinking back. ‘I’m sure I must have gone into the basement to have a look around, but I don’t remember seeing it.’

  They went inside and down to the basement, where Michael pointed towards the boiler in t
he corner. ‘Right back there, next to the whiffle ball bat. But I just don’t know if it was here when I came back after the murder.’

  ‘I do,’ said Maguire. ‘And it wasn’t. I searched here myself the following day. And Jimmy Olds had already been through the day before. We were looking for a blunt, heavy weapon – believe me, I wouldn’t have missed a baseball bat, not sticking out like that.’

  ‘So who put it there?’ Michael asked, turning off the light and climbing the stairs. He saw a questioning look come into Maguire’s face. ‘And whatever you say,’ said Michael, his voice rising, ‘don’t say “I was hoping you’d tell me that”. I couldn’t stand it.’

  Maguire’s expression changed to one of amusement. He held his hands up in mock-surrender. ‘Okay, you win, I won’t say it. Say, I don’t suppose there’s any chance of a drink of something, is there?’

  ‘Cold beer?’

  ‘Perfect.’

  They went into the kitchen and Michael took two cans of Stroh’s out of the icebox. They sat down at the kitchen table to drink them.

  ‘You play a lot of baseball as a kid?’ asked Maguire.

  ‘Just when I was younger. I didn’t play in high school. How about you?’

  Maguire nodded. ‘High school. Then junior college. I was hoping for a while I might get drafted by the pros, but looking back I think I thought I was better than I was.’ He took a long swig from his can.

  ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘Dublin.’

  ‘Dublin? You’ve sure lost your accent, then.’

  ‘Dublin Ohio,’ he said with a smirk.