Stillriver

by Andrew Rosenheim

  Michael was not surprised, but the fact still chilled him. He remembered the heft of the bat in his hand. ‘And the prints?’ he asked.

  ‘There’re some of yours of course, but it also looks like your brother played more baseball than you knew. His prints are all over the bat.’

  Shit. ‘That doesn’t mean a thing. It would have been odder if they weren’t there.’

  Maguire hummed lightly on the other end of the line. ‘Maybe so. But I need to talk to him. Any idea where he’s gone?’

  ‘You know where he lives.’

  ‘He’s not there. Neighbours say he hasn’t been there for a while. Jimmy Olds went by and says the place is spick and span, like he’d gone away for a while.’

  ‘I saw him two days ago, not long after you left.’

  ‘And?’

  What do you want me to say? I mention Raleigh Somerset and the dynamite and he takes off like a frightened deer. ‘He seemed fine to me, even when I told him about the bat.’

  Maguire snorted. ‘I need to find him ASAP. Don’t hold back on this one. That’s official.’

  Official? He didn’t require this warning. ‘I understand,’ he said insincerely.

  ‘Good. Don’t you want to know what else we found?’

  ‘Go on, surprise me,’ he said. ‘Oscar Peters’ palm prints everywhere.’

  ‘Who’s Oscar Peters?’

  ‘Never mind. What did you find?’ asked Michael, suddenly thinking, he’s going to say ‘no one’s’.

  Maguire paused, as if to heighten the effect. ‘We found eight prints: some smudged, a couple really clear, all belonging to the same individual.’

  ‘Who is?’

  ‘Beats the hell out of me. There isn’t a match in the database, and we checked the Washington one too. But that’s not surprising.’

  ‘Why? I thought they had millions of fingerprints stored.’

  ‘They do. But they’re almost all adult ones. And the prints we pulled, according to the technician, seem to belong to a child. There’s no way to tell gender, and we can’t be precise about the person’s age, but there’s no way these are the fingerprints of a grown man. How do you figure that one, Mr Wolf?’

  Four

  1

  HE WAS IN Burlington at Mitchell’s lumber and hardware store on route ten. His father was talking two-by-fours with Mr Mitchell while Michael walked up and down the aisles, looking at paint ranges and hoping for a glimpse of Mitchell’s daughter, who was pretty.

  Well, not pretty – sexy. She was a couple of years older than Michael, quite short, with streaked blonde hair, a stub nose, a Bardot bouche of a mouth, and breasts that bounced like beach balls underneath her tight pink T-shirt. If she caught you looking at her (and she usually did) she would glance back with a flirty, fleeting look of her own that seemed to say I know how you are feeling about me, and maybe I feel likewise.

  As he moved past paint to nails and screws, he asked himself, Why am I trying to find her? and felt guilty about Cassie. They had made love the day before, in the soft grass of the meadow out at the Half, and here he was lusting for someone else within twenty-four hours. Was that supposed to happen? Maybe when you’re married that all goes away. He turned the corner and managed to bump right into Ronald Duverson.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said faintly.

  To Michael’s astonishment Ronald’s voice was warm and relaxed. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said. ‘How you doing? I hope your friend is all right.’

  Donny? Larry Bottel? ‘Huh?’ he said.

  ‘You know, your friend at the Dairy Queen. I didn’t mean to beat him so bad.’ Ronald shrugged with a kind of aw-shucks modesty.

  ‘He wasn’t my friend,’ Michael blurted out, and immediately regretted it. Sorry Dicky.

  Ronald’s eyes widened and then he laughed, rich and deeply from inside his chest. ‘Well, that’s okay then.’ Michael saw that his front teeth were chipped.

  ‘Ronald.’ The voice was low and heavy and came from a man who suddenly appeared behind Duverson. Michael looked at his hard face and suddenly saw him elsewhere – by the cigarette counter, mean-looking, perspiring. Hot? You think it’s hot? . . . Poor baby’s hot.

  ‘Coming Pa,’ said Ronald. ‘Good to see you,’ he said amiably to Michael, and slapped him a little too hard on the shoulder before leaving the store with his father.

  ‘He was nice to me,’ he insisted to Donny.

  Donny shook his head knowingly. ‘A snake says hi to a mouse. Then Pow!’

  His SAT scores came as a surprise. The entire class took them late, in autumn of their senior year, and Michael received 580 in English, which was respectable, and 750 in math – the only score over 700 in his year.

  ‘I knew you’d do well,’ Cassie crowed, happier than Michael, who was slightly bewildered by his score. He tried to affect an air of nonchalance, but she was having none of it. ‘My genius!’ she exclaimed, though she had done well in English, scoring 680.

  ‘I bet we like Ann Arbor,’ he said, for they had agreed that summer to go to the same college, and to make U of M their first choice.

  ‘We’ll see,’ said Cassie smiling. ‘Don’t count your chickens.’

  He had good grades – an A-average – and was working hard to keep them that way that first crucial term. He saw Cassie every day at school, but despite their now-official status as boyfriend and girlfriend, Michael saw her less often elsewhere. For her father seemed constantly to be ill, and although Michael was not precisely barred from the Gilberts’ house, he visited infrequently and briefly when Cassie’s father was at home, and then only when the parson was resting upstairs.

  His own house became something of a refuge for Cassie, and she would come for breaks from looking after her father, growing so comfortable at Michael’s that sometimes she would drop by even when she knew he was working in the drugstore. He would come home to find her playing cards with Gary (trying for the hundredth time to teach him Hearts) or talking with his father; Michael still found it astonishing how easy she seemed to find it to talk to his father, and even more astonishing the way his father would let her tease him. He even let Cassie plant flowers in the patch in back by the cedars which he had left untended since Michael’s mother’s death. Ethel would come over, following Cassie around like a lapdog, and together they planted sunflowers and zinnias and, at Ethel’s insistence, two rows of pink carnations.

  Michael was surprised by how obviously Cassie felt at home; he admitted to her that he hadn’t felt comfortable in his own house since his mother had died. ‘So does it bother you?’ she asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That I like your house. It’s so big compared to ours. The ceilings are so high. And I like Gary, and I like your father. Is that okay with you?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said insincerely, for though he was happy that she fit in so easily, he was slightly irked that this meant he spent more time at home in the company of his brother and father.

  ‘Your father’s a good man.’

  ‘Sure,’ he said sarcastically.

  ‘I know you’re not close, but he does care about you.’

  ‘He didn’t when I needed it,’ he said, for Cassie knew that he felt a lingering resentment about his father’s detachment.

  ‘Maybe you weren’t there for him either,’ she said softly.

  ‘He’s the father.’

  ‘He suffered too when your mother died. More than anybody. Remember that.’

  He looked at her thinking, He suffered more than me? How would you know? Cassie was looking at him calmly; he could not get angry with her. ‘I’ll try,’ he said quietly.

  They could find the time and privacy to sleep together only with careful planning – when her father went to one of his meetings at Marshall College, near Grand Rapids, a Baptist school of 600 students where he was the token Episcopal Trustee; less often, when they could be sure Michael’s father and Gary were out of the house. It was rarely more than a couple of times a month. She seemed unperturbed
by this, which bothered Michael; they had the easy contact of the closest friends, but what he wanted more of was the intimacy of lovers. He hated sharing her or, specifically, hated the feeling he was ever sharing her love. The very gentleness which had first attracted him, almost drove him crazy when it was extended to others in any way that seemed to threaten his primacy in her affections.

  One afternoon, when his father had gone to a teachers’ convention in Whitehall and Gary was busy at a boy scouts’ meeting at a friend’s house, Michael had led Cassie upstairs to his bedroom and, having laughingly removed all of her clothes, was about to join her in the bed when a loud, continuous wailing came from outside on the street. He closed the window but the noise continued. It was Ethel, bawling her heart out in the wake of some unkindness from her foster-father or foster-brother Benny or twin sister Daisy or somebody, since God knows even a romantic novel could upset her and make her cry. And having taken off his own clothes by now, Michael joined Cassie under the sheets and tried to kiss her, ignoring the sobs below. But Cassie pushed him away, not roughly but with firmness, and within thirty seconds she was out of the bed, dressed and moving towards the stairs. He knew that there really wasn’t any point even hoping that Cassie would ignore Ethel’s misery in order to satisfy his lust.

  But at college there would be a different kind of life, and his agitation at the prospect of leaving Stillriver was reduced by knowing Cassie and he could enjoy a real privacy. In the drugstore he said nothing about his plans to go to Ann Arbor. Larry Bottel had gone off to college that autumn, intending to major in real estate somewhere near Grand Rapids (‘That’s a major?’ his father had said) so Michael was often alone in the store with Marilyn and Alvin. He told Marilyn he was applying to Ferris, knowing she would tell Alvin, and he duly did fill out its application form, along with ones for U of M and Michigan State. He did not consider any college outside the state, but then no one in his class was going to leave Michigan, except for Cathy Stallover, whose parents were paying to send her to modelling school in Milwaukee.

  He still wasn’t old enough to sell liquor, but otherwise knew the store so well by now that he could even place the order with Charlie, the candy salesman, one afternoon when Alvin had gone to a funeral in Elmira and it was Marilyn’s half-day off. Too many Lifesavers, Alvin had commented when the order arrived, but he was teasing, and Michael knew he trusted him since he had to cash out the registers and lock up two days running when Marilyn was on vacation.

  And then Alvin got sick in December, seriously ill with gastric ulcers that put him in the hospital and kept him off work for almost two months. Leonard Scopes, a retired pharmacist from Shelby, came in four afternoons a week to fill prescriptions, and Alvin’s wife Betty, a clever woman with a taste for fine clothes and jewellery, kept up with the books in a primitive way and signed the pay cheques. But otherwise the store was run by Marilyn, and she made it clear she needed Michael’s help.

  He had a driving licence now, though with no car of his own he only got to drive on the few occasions when he had the grudging loan of his father’s ageing station wagon. But with Alvin out, he had to take the store’s pickup truck each Saturday morning to the state liquor store in Burlington, load the liquor cases, drive back and stack them in the store’s dank basement. To help Marilyn, he took over replacement of the stock. The greater the detail the more he liked the job; he was glad to think he would be working summers there during college.

  The snow had come early, just after Thanksgiving, and stayed, packing down into a frozen hard layer on the street, supplemented after Christmas by several new falls. For the first time in years, Stillriver Lake was completely frozen, and one Sunday afternoon when Michael and Cassie walked down and stood on the deck of Nelson’s boathouse they saw families skating on a large circle of ice. They’d brushed off the snow, piling it up in a low wall that surrounded their temporary arena. Further down, by the causeway link to South Beach, the ice fishermen sat on folding chairs outside their shacks.

  In the cold weather Cassie’s father became virtually house-bound, and soon they had no place to make love, since Cassie adamantly refused to in his father’s car on the very rare occasions he could cadge the use of it. ‘It’s just too trashy,’ she said when he’d first proposed using the back seat. So I can’t wait for spring became his catchword for the time when they could sleep together again in the high grass of the Half, or, after dusk, on a blanket among the marram grass and sand cherry of the dunes north of town. Cassie would smile when he said the words, and he would momentarily forget his frustration and feel a deep love for her.

  But in the absence of a sex life he found his sexual fantasy life virtually unceasing – he felt guilty when he thought about other girls, but think about them he did. I have sex on the brain, he thought, which was one reason (the sheer busyness of his life was another) that he had forgotten about Ronald Duverson – his surprising friendliness in Burlington, as well as Donny’s remark that Ronald had taken a shine to Cassie. Until one Saturday afternoon, in the glum days of early February, when he was working in the store but had arranged to take the night shift off.

  He had somehow managed to wangle the car from his father, and planned to pick up Cassie from New Era where she was playing basketball. Alvin was back in the store, but he had lost a lot of weight. Once a big man in Michael’s eyes, he now seemed to have shrunk overnight. Suddenly, at six feet, Michael was taller than Alvin, and no longer stick-like against the man’s bulk. Michael had begun to fill out where Alvin seemed to have withered.

  After lunchtime Alvin suddenly said he felt faint, and he looked terribly off-colour. Alvin was not normally a complainer, so Marilyn right away called Betty, who came and drove her husband home before calling Dr Fell. Knowing Michael was due to pick up Cassie, Marilyn said she could hold the fort on her own, but he knew that even on a slow February Saturday night this would be exhausting for her. So he called the New Era High School and, getting through to someone still working on a Saturday afternoon, asked them to get word to Cassie or at least Coach Brower, that he wouldn’t be there to collect her. He stayed and worked that night, which was just as well since it was busy and he didn’t see how Marilyn could have managed alone. When he got home after closing his father said that Cassie had rung when she’d got home to let Michael know she’d got back all right.

  And that would have been all, except that Sunday morning Anthea Heaton, who was also on the basketball team, came in to buy the Free Press for her parents. ‘Who won the game?’ he asked her.

  She looked at him. ‘Didn’t Cassie tell you?’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I haven’t seen her. I couldn’t pick her up.’

  ‘But she wasn’t on the bus.’

  He shrugged, trying to disguise the fact he was surprised. ‘She must have got a ride,’ he said, and turned to the other customers waiting to pay for their papers.

  He went by Cassie’s house after the one o’clock closing, hoping her father was napping. When Cassie answered the door she hugged him spontaneously, then kissed him for a long time, and he thought, What am I worrying about?

  They sat in the kitchen and she made the peppermint tea she liked on these cold afternoons.

  ‘I hear you won yesterday,’ he said, as she gave him his tea and sat down across from him.

  ‘We did.’

  ‘How many points you get?’

  ‘Fourteen,’ she said with a slight smile.

  ‘High scorer?’

  She thought about this. ‘I’m not sure. Nancy played really well. Maybe she was.’

  ‘Bet you were.’ He blew on the tea, which was too hot to sip. ‘How did you get back? Anthea Heaton said you weren’t on the bus.’

  ‘Mex gave me a lift.’

  Ronald’s brother, a sophomore. He stared at Cassie. ‘Mex’s not old enough to drive.’

  ‘I didn’t say he drove. His brother was there. He drove us both back. And Janie Waters.’

  ‘Ronald drove you back?’ He was fl
abbergasted, aware of the gulf between what he knew about Ronald and what Cassie did, and uncertain how to bridge it. Take it easy, he told himself, and promptly burned his tongue on the tea. ‘Shit,’ he said sharply, then covered his mouth with his hand. ‘Sorry.’

  Cassie laughed. ‘Daddy’s sound asleep.’

  ‘Why did you go back with them?’

  ‘I don’t know. Janie seemed to want me to.’

  He felt he was digging himself into a hole he wasn’t going to like being in, but he also felt he couldn’t help digging. ‘I just don’t like it. He’s not a nice guy.’

  She knew he didn’t mean Mex. ‘I know people say that. But he seemed very nice to me. Very polite.’

  ‘You sit in the front?’

  Cassie gave him a look. ‘As a matter of fact I did. What’s the matter with you? Are you getting jealous?’

  He shrugged. ‘Should I be?’

  ‘Of course not.’ But for the first time she looked uncomfortable. She ran a hand through her hair.

  ‘Did he ask you out?’

  ‘Honestly, Michael.’

  ‘Did he?’

  Her expression hardened. ‘He asked if I was seeing anybody. I said I was. Then I thanked him for the ride and got out of the car. That’s all.’ She reached over and placed her hand on his. ‘Stop being silly, okay? I don’t like it.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said, with an artificial brightness. There was no point asking any more questions of Cassie, for it was Ronald who held the answers. Why was he asking Cassie out when he already knew she was Michael’s girlfriend?

  *

  After this he became aware of Ronald Duverson floating in and out of the fringes of his daily life. He was not a major presence, but not forgettable either. It reminded Michael of how, on learning the meaning of a new word – intuition, say, or perspicacity – you suddenly couldn’t pick up the newspaper without finding it littering its columns.

  Michael knew little about him, but gradually – from an overheard remark here, a casually placed question put there; the kind of information that his job in the drugstore made him almost uniquely qualified to gather – a picture of sorts emerged.