This stood him in good stead in other countries, where the civic authorities were more eager to save money than boost national pride. A steady succession of jobs came Michael’s way, chiefly in the northern climes – Sweden, Germany, briefly in Finland – which he preferred. His divorce with Sarah came through two years after he left New York, when she initiated proceedings in order to marry Oakley Hale. It was perfectly amicable, chiefly because he didn’t have the money to fight a protracted case. When the dust cleared, he was left with $11,000 to his name; so much for marrying an upper-class girl.
But he was making better money now, and though he continued to work almost entirely for the McLaren company, he became an independent consultant, and his freelance market value meant McLaren had to pay him a day rate more than twice that of the salary he had been drawing. With new savings and the money from the divorce, he scratched together a sufficient down payment to buy the two-bedroom flat in Ealing. Michael liked it precisely for its dullness, the civility of his neighbours, the way it brought the privacy he wanted without (as in New York when he first arrived) making him feel anonymous. He liked the English as well; they had a quiet scepticism that complemented his own persisting, glum detachment.
He was not unreceptive to the individual cultures he worked in, and tried in each location to learn something about the people and the country he was seeing all too briefly. He acquired a working knowledge of German, and once spent Christmas in Lapland, among reindeer and seven feet of snow, where he had a fling with a woman of independent means from Cohasset, Massachusetts. But it was difficult to soak up much culture, since he had enough responsibility for the projects not to be able to stray far from them, and he was not being paid to broaden his life experience. He knew the postcards he sent home to his father and to Nancy Sheringham must sound deep, exotic notes, but he found it hard to take pleasure from his travels when his personal life remained rootless and solitary.
His sense of isolation was heightened when Streatley married a much younger English woman, had twin daughters, and promptly took the pledge. Envying his friend the pleasures of a domesticity he was convinced he would never have in the normal way, Michael briefly looked at abnormal avenues, and actually considered the acquisition of a mail order bride from Thailand, or perhaps the Philippines. He reasoned that such a marriage would be no more artificial than any relationship he could now have with a western woman, and probably more honest than one he tried to forge on a supposed basis of love. The cynicism of this only partly deterred him; what really stopped him from acting on it was the recognition that he would simply be extending the loveless nature of his own life and inflicting it on someone else.
As well as sending postcards, he rang his father on Christmas and his birthday in autumn. Reluctant to talk about himself, Michael used these occasions to ask about Stillriver, though there was a sadness in his father’s recital since increasingly, inevitably, it comprised news of death and decline: Alvin died of pancreatic cancer, Larry Bottel’s father dropped dead while opening the bakery one morning, Marilyn had a stroke. Gary had moved out of the house upon at last acquiring a girlfriend, and to Michael’s ear his father sounded lonely. He thought of inviting him overseas to visit, but his schedule was uncertain, it was hard to block time out, he wasn’t sure there would be room in his flat – and when each of these excuses looked thin, he decided that it would be an awkward, possibly unpleasant experience for them both.
And then, returning in January from a small job in Dorset (it lasted less than a week in fact, since it was almost immediately clear the bridge in question was beyond repair) he found an old-fashioned air letter waiting for him, addressed in a slightly shaky hand it took him seconds to recognize as his father’s.
Dear Michael,
Letters are unfashionable these days, but I’m of a generation who call long distance only in emergencies and this email business is beyond me.
All is well here, though we had a heavy winter and the snow stayed on the ground past Easter. The windows need attention and a lick of paint or two on the shutters is probably in order, but otherwise the house is in pretty good shape with less obvious signs of decrepitude than you might find in me.
I saw Nancy Sheringham last week in town to visit her best friend and she sent you all the best. There’s been a lot of rain lately so she is optimistic about the season. I am going to Fell’s for supper tonight as the Doctor caught a large Chinook in the Pere Marquette which he plans to barbecue. The water in the lake is very high – so high the Fells have had to sandbag the area around the A-Frame. The scholarship they set up in Ricky’s memory is going to a nice girl whose folks live in one of the new houses out on Park Street by the iron bridge. She’s planning to go to MSU.
It was nice of you to phone at Christmas and I was glad to hear that work continues to go so well. Thank you also for the recent postcard – I’m glad you’re able to do jobs nearby. Actually, I hope very much that at some point you will be able to stop travelling altogether (except for fun) and settle down a bit. Obviously only if you want to – so I suppose I am saying that I hope some day you’ll want to settle down.
I know in my own case having a family completely changed my life. It let me start afresh (which I needed to do) and brought me great happiness. When your mother died, even in the worst moments I had people other than myself to worry about and take care of. That is the danger of living on your own, I suppose – that after a time you not only don’t care, you can’t.
Not that I always feel I provided enough caring to either you or your brother. Actually, maybe with Gary I cared for him too well – he’s had so much trouble making a go of life by himself. With you, on the other hand, after your mother died you could have used more caring, of that I’m sure. Old Marilyn could not have been enough, kind to you though she was. I thought she and Alvin could help you in ways I couldn’t, but this may just be a backwards-looking excuse for not doing enough. I hope not.
Well, enough of this old man’s musings, which you should know come only with a father’s pride and love. It would be nice to see you this side of a blue moon.
Your Pop
Michael was unsettled by this letter, and touched, for it was more revealing than anything his father had communicated before. But it also raised questions which only his father could answer. Who was Nancy Sheringham’s best friend, a position always occupied in the past by Cassie? Why had his father needed to ‘start afresh’? And why was his father suddenly talking about what happened after Michael’s mother died?
He decided he should reply, and thought at first he would phone his father, then reinstitute contact on a more frequent basis. Then he changed his mind – he knew his father disliked the phone – and decided instead to write him back, perhaps initiate a regular pattern of correspondence. But he changed his mind again, deciding that vicarious communication wasn’t good enough. When the next jobs – a short one in Ireland, then a longer one at Jock’s behest on the west coast of Scotland – were finished, he decided he would go home for a while. Home? Well, it was close as anything else he had at the moment.
And he would have gone, too, flown to his hometown of Stillriver and seen his father if, on that misty morning as he wiped rain from his face and peered at the beam encasing above his head, while the local kid steadied the rowboat as best he could, his mobile phone had not rung. And he’d exclaimed Christ, wishing he had turned the phone off as he fumbled with the flap of his oilskin and retrieved the plastic instrument from deep beneath his fisherman’s sweater, and then said, ‘Hello.’ Then ‘Hello?’ more loudly as he struggled to hear over the slapping waves against the side of the boat, until the faraway voice broke through and he did hear – heard with unmistakable clarity that his father had been murdered the day before in his bed.
Seven
1
‘I KNEW WE’D have to talk about it sometime,’ said Cassie.
Michael had left a message for Maguire to call him, then gone spontaneously with Cassie and
the kids to the beach to take advantage of this late day of full summer – blue, cloudless sky, the temperature in the low 80s, a breeze off the lake meaning it was tolerable on the shore, though outright hot in the Back Country, where people would be wiping off sweat and fanning themselves.
They had walked down from the house, Jack still young enough to be excited, Sally pleased in her owlish, undemonstrative way. At the Dairy Queen Michael had paused, but Cassie shook her head no – later on. Barefoot, they found the black macadam of the street sticky as fudge and too hot for walking, and moved with their towels and Jack’s array of toys along the sandy sidewalk, past the cottages of Beach Road until they reached the State Park. On the beach itself, the countless mini-moguls of soft, white sand were also too scorching to stand on, so they ran hot-footed down to the shore, twisting among the families, couples, bikinied girls and teenage boys who had staked out positions with towels.
They walked north a few hundred yards on the cooler, wet sand of the shoreline, their feet splashing through the low incoming surf, past the boundary of the park to the point where the dunes and beach grass began and the sandy beach narrowed. Above the dunes and away from the lake, the first houses sat on a ridge of sand, shaded by stands of pine and birch. Less private than their South Beach counterparts a mile south across the channel, they had the same stunning views of the lake and of the setting sun each evening, though the advantage of being closer to town was debatable.
They picked a spot and put their towels down on the rockless beach near an accumulation of driftwood. Michael took off his shirt and tried to suck in his stomach until Cassie tickled him and his new paunch ballooned. ‘I’m fighting fit,’ he said. ‘I just don’t look it.’
‘I’m no spring chicken myself,’ she said, but in fact she had kept her figure, the only sign of ageing a slight thickening in her thighs and a group of veins, bunched like grapes, on the back of one calf. Of course she was changed, he realized, even from the woman he’d known six years before, much less the half-girl, half-woman of their early romance. But he liked the changes, the evidence of age and wear and a life hard-lived.
Am I getting old and soppy? he wondered, until Jack interrupted his musing by splashing water his way. In the manner of small boys, he couldn’t stop, and was soon kicking water at Sally, despite his sister’s telling him not to. When she took revenge by splashing him back, more effectively than he could manage, his mood soured, then turned visibly murderous. He scooped a handful of wet sand and threw it straight into his sister’s face. Sally burst into tears and Jack reached for more, readying to throw it just as Michael reached out and held him by the arm.
The little boy turned in furious astonishment, trying to twist out of Michael’s grip. He was surprisingly strong. ‘Let me go! Let me go!’ he shouted.
‘Drop the sand, Jack,’ he said, trying to keep his voice calm. Cassie stood some distance behind, looking worried.
The boy was still enraged, still struggling. ‘Let me go. You’re not my daddy.’
Michael held Jack away from him, not loosening his grip, then leaned down to speak. ‘I know I’m not your daddy. And you’re not my son. But that doesn’t mean you can throw sand at people.’
The boy’s anger was subsiding enough for him to think about this. Michael took a chance and let him go. Jack clenched his fistful of sand, hesitated for a moment, then turned and hurled it out in a fine brown spray over the water.
‘Thank you,’ said Michael.
The boy looked at him suspiciously. ‘Do you know my daddy?’ he asked.
Michael looked again at Cassie, now close enough to hear this. Her face looked pained and tense. ‘I used to,’ he said.
‘I don’t,’ said Jack, and suddenly ran out into the water. Michael watched him go, then turned to Cassie. ‘I’m sorry, I wasn’t trying to hurt him. Or play Daddy.’
‘That’s all right. He needs somebody to tell him. I mean, somebody male.’
‘Does he remember Ronald?’
She dug a toe in the firmer, moist sand of the shoreline. ‘He says he does, but he was only three when they put Ronald inside. I think he wants to remember him.’
‘He’s got his father’s temper, anyway.’
‘Don’t say that!’ she snapped. Then said more calmly, ‘I told you he was never violent to me.’
‘You did.’ He remembered their first conversation in the hotel in Austin. ‘I didn’t know whether to believe you.’
‘It was true all right – then. But that changed.’
‘When?’
‘After I stopped seeing you.’ That new, bitter laugh. ‘And after the DNA test, which said Jack was his. Doesn’t make much sense, does it?’
‘Did he hurt you?’
‘Not half so much as he scared me.’ There were tears on her cheeks, which she tried to wipe casually away. He resisted the temptation to take her hand. ‘The worst thing was,’ she said, looking out to where Jack was now chasing Sally in the shallows, ‘she saw a couple of times.’
‘Who, Sally? Saw him hurting you?’
She nodded, seemed to hesitate, then said slowly, ‘When the police came and told me they’d arrested Ronald, told me that he’d killed someone with his fists – a driver he got into an argument with – my very first thought wasn’t how terrible. Or the poor victim and his family. Or even, what am I going to do with a husband in jail and two kids to support? No, my first thought was thank God. Because now he couldn’t kill me. That’s how scared I was.’ Tears were running freely down her face, and this time he took her hand. Sally, by the first sandbar, saw this, but then shyly looked away.
‘When did you decide to leave Texas?’
‘After I went and saw him in prison. It was a four-hundred-mile drive. I told him I’d wait for him and be there when he got out – he’ll get paroled if he doesn’t kill somebody while he’s inside. But he told me not to bother. He said it was over between us, said I shouldn’t wait for him. So I didn’t. I went to see him one last time and told him I was coming back here, coming home.’
‘And what did he say?’
‘He said that was fine, and that I shouldn’t worry about him.’
This sounded so unlike the Ronald Michael had known that he looked hard at Cassie, who determinedly kept her gaze fixed on her children playing in the water. ‘Is that all he said?’ She was biting her lower lip with her front teeth, and still crying. ‘Cassie?’ he added softly.
When she nodded, looking very wobbly, he decided not to press the point. ‘Nancy said he got ten years. Is that right?’
‘No. He got six.’
‘And he’s been in for three?’
‘Yep.’
‘So when’s the soonest he can get out?’ He was thinking hard, making calculations and plans – where could they go? Ealing wasn’t very likely, was it? Still, they had some time.
Cassie said, ‘He had his first parole hearing in early May.’
‘He did?’ He asked more sharply than he wanted to.
‘He got turned down.’
‘How do you know?’
‘He called me. He didn’t seem surprised.’
‘Well, that’s good to know. When’s the next one?’
‘Next May. But he’s not very optimistic.’
‘You can relax. Even if he gets out then, which I doubt, he’ll have his own life to worry about. He’s not going to bother you, not if he’s said that you shouldn’t worry about him.’
She didn’t look reassured at all. She shook her head, but now she turned to face him, and although there were still tears in her eyes there was something composed and sad in her expression. ‘He said he wanted me to start a new life and he wouldn’t bother me, unless . . .’
‘Unless what?’
‘I started seeing you again.’ She sighed. ‘I know I should have told you right away. But it was so nice to see you, and I was worried it would scare you off.’
‘Don’t worry, Cassie. He’ll be on parole – he’s not going to want
to go back to jail.’
But the haunting look in her eyes remained. ‘Cassie,’ he said, ‘you’ve got to tell me exactly what he said. I need to know.’
‘I told you what he said.’
‘Tell me all of it, Cassie. Go on. I know you.’
She nodded, sighed again, but this time with resignation. ‘He said,’ and she spoke in a low, flat voice, ‘if you start seeing Wolf again, this time I’ll finish the job. I’m not having him raise my son.’
He was so astonished he could not bring himself to speak, and he could sense that he was at least a little scared. It had been so long since he’d felt that fear that it took a moment before he recognized the signs: his heart began to go thump thump thump and his breathing turned shallow and fast, and he felt what seemed to be his blood racing around his arms and hands. He thought, with a kind of astonished appreciation of the situation, Someone’s killed Pop and left a swastika on the wall, and now this son of a bitch wants to kill me. ‘So,’ he said, in an immoderately loud voice that caught the two kids’ attention right away, ‘Who wants an ice-cream cone?’
Stillriver Page 36
