“You walk alone through here?” Dooley asked as he matched the proud little girl’s pace, bending every so often to avoid the rough, dreary limbs grabbing at his face. “No one else lives over here?”
PJ forced her lips together and kicked at the crackling brown leaves with each step.
“Am I bothering you now?” Dooley inquired.
“Yes you are,” PJ allowed herself to answer. No more, though. She would say no more, just like Joey said. If you said nothing, then you’d say nothing wrong.
Dooley walked wordlessly for a moment then said, “If you’re afraid to talk to me...”
Afraid? Afraid! PJ looked to the detective as she walked, Joey’s cautionary words swatted from her thoughts. Inside she boiled, the old little girl she’d been percolating to the surface of a glassy lake suddenly stirred to froth. “I’m not afraid of you.” Her eyes considered him sideways, up and down disdainfully. “Why would I be afraid of you?”
“You’re tough,” Dooley observed with a smile. “When I was a kid there were girls like you who could beat up on us guys. We called them tomboys back then.”
Her heart thudded through her thin coat, beating bass tones into her math and science books. One hand, her right, the one she could land a good roundhouse with, curled slowly into a stiff, knot-like fist and held that clench.
“I am not a tom-boy,” PJ insisted, forcing the words out slow, putting the rage she could have used to yell into defining each syllable.
“You’ve had your share of fights, though,” Dooley reminded her.
PJ’s chin settled a bit toward her chest. She took several breaths as she walked, remembering the old PJ. The hard, mean look Miss Austin had shown her in the mirror. Hateful eyes, hateful mouth, hateful everything. So much hate that she started to fear that the reflection that had even frightened her might soon carve itself permanently to her face. She didn’t want to look like that. More than anything she wanted to look like everyone else. Like a kid who didn’t live in a crappy old apartment by the railroad tracks. Like someone who didn’t hate their life.
Because she couldn’t give her stupid life a knuckle sandwich any more than she could wrestle the wind.
Cookies, she thought. Just like Miss Austin had taught her. Breathe, and picture your favorite cookies. See them. Smell them. Think of the taste. Think of double chocolate chip with raisins, and pecan peanut butter, and oatmeal Oreo, and— the fist she’d made eased out of its squeeze —snickerdoodles with cinnamon sprinkles.
“I’m not like that anymore,” PJ said quite calmly, a dazzling white plate of almond fudge royales a vision in her head.
“Fighting isn’t the way?”
Peanut butter M&M double deluxe. “Not for me.”
“So what made you fight...back when you were like that?”
Ahead a block-jawed mongrel walked onto the path and stared at the humans approaching. The animal panted, frosty breath billowing, teeth bared without menace. To PJ it looked like the dog was pleased with itself, or was mocking with its approximation of a smile.
Like Joey’s admonition, the cookie visions fled when the calmed lake came to a simmer once again. PJ paused just long enough to pick up and heave a dirt clod at the animal. The projectile landed short and dissolved into a dusty burst that startled the dog and sent it scampering away toward the rail yard beyond where she lived. Even the stupid animal knew its place.
Poor mutt, Dooley thought, then said, “You didn’t answer my question.”
“About what made me fight?” PJ shook her head. She was losing this round to herself. ‘You’re your own worst enemy,’ Miss Austin had told her the same day she’d made her look at her angry mug in the mirror. Back then it had seemed just like something a teacher would say. Now PJ knew how true it was. “I don’t want to tell you that.”
“Why not, PJ?”
“Because I don’t want to.”
Fair enough. “How about Guy? Do you want to talk about him?”
“You obviously do,” PJ sassed back. Her mother would have slapped her if she were there. Chocolate chip... Chocolate chip...
“Tell me about him.”
If you can’t keep your mouth shut, then don’t lie, PJ told herself. If you can’t tell the truth when he asks something, don’t answer. “I didn’t really know him.”
“Not many people seemed to like him,” Dooley said. “Did you?”
Like him?
Oh, hate might not be good for her countenance, but it still lived. Somewhere deep inside it lived. It lived among the...
“Did you, PJ?”
...memories. Buying milk and bread and a package of bacon. Running an errand for her mom. Such a simple thing, and such a strange way for hate to be born.
“He wasn’t my friend.”
...memories.
She puts the bacon in the small hand basket last and is third in the express line at Murphy’s Market. Two people she sometimes sees at the neighborhood store are ahead of her. They never speak. Today is no different.
But she hears a voice. Someone calls her name. Her full name. Calls it out loud.
Oh, Paula Jean! Paula Jean!
“Was he your enemy?”
It is the new boy in class. The big one with the dark eyes. She doesn’t like his eyes. He approaches formally, hands behind his back, and peers into the basket.
Bacon, and milk, and bread. He aims those dark eyes at her. They burn like dead stars. Can you buy bacon with food stamps?
“He just wasn’t my friend.”
One thin hand reaches into the basket and lifts the bacon out. Guy smells it. His nose crinkles up before he puts it back.
You buy the really cheap stuff. Someday you should try the good stuff.
She squeezes both hands on the basket’s edge and moves up in line, second now. The older woman ahead has only a bunch of bananas.
“Any reason?”
Guy smiles at her. His straight teeth gleam. He leans close to her ear.
Poverty is nothing to be ashamed of, he whispers. His breath is hot, but goose bumps rise on her neck as if an icy hand had just brushed it. He smiles. She can’t see this, but she knows. She knows. Unless you’re poor.
The bananas are paid for and PJ moves up. Guy slides by, rubbing close against her back and bottom, one hand feeling the clasp of her training bra through her shirt, and leaves the store. The checker takes the basket as PJ watches the new boy disappear across the parking lot. The chill on her neck cascades over the rest of her body now. Cold hate dances beneath her heart.
The total is twenty four eighty, the checker says.
PJ, puzzled, checks the bright green number on the register. It says $24.80.
For bacon, milk, and bread?
The checker points to a small vial of spice, the plastic seal around its cap peeled back. That’s saffron, dearie. It’s expensive stuff. Eighteen ninety-nine for that little thing alone.
It...it’s not mine.
Well, it’s in your basket and it’s been opened, so it’s yours now.
She stares fretfully at the item, then at the door. Guy is long gone. I’ve only got twenty dollars in stamps.
The checker takes what PJ is showing her and pushes the bacon and milk and bread aside. This’ll pay for the saffron, and that’s it.
A box boy comes for the bacon and milk and bread, and takes the items back for restocking.
It was supposed to be their Sunday breakfast.
“PJ?”
She swallowed hard and sniffled. “I don’t want to talk about him anymore.”
Dooley took a closer look at her face. “Are you crying?”
“I don’t cry,” she answered.
“Those are tears.”
“No they’re not.”
“They look like tears.”
PJ drew the back of sleeve across her face and shot misty eyed daggers at the detective. “They’re not tears, I told you.”
The pear trees swayed acutely as a wall of cold air rolled throug
h the orchard. Leaves skittered across the path, swarming around the trunks and scratching at Dooley’s ankles. A muted roar descended from the clouds veiling Cougar Mountain.
Dooley stopped and said, “PJ.”
She kept walking.
“PJ, stop.”
Now she did, but kept her back to him.
“Why are you afraid of talking? About Guy? About yourself?”
She turned toward him. Her cheeks were pink beneath reddened eyes.
“What is so terrible that you can’t talk about it?”
PJ studied the detective, the man who wanted to know, the man so eager to know. To know more. Because there was a power in knowing. Guy had understood that in his own way, she remembered all too well.
And this man, too, understood. Somehow he knew where the buttons were, and how to push them.
“Were you a bully?” PJ asked, the question coming from a place inside she hadn’t known existed. An almost adult place, where the first sprigs of what she would one day be were sprouting.
“What do you mean?”
“When you were our age. Were you a bully?”
Dooley shook his head. “No.”
“You could have fooled me,” she said coldly. Then she turned and walked on. Far ahead she could see the mongrel bouncing along, leading the way.
Thirteen
The car Jack Prentiss had been expecting pulled into a customer space at Jet Motors, rain leaping off its gleaming body. He stood just inside the only open bay and worked his hands on a rag. They weren’t particularly dirty.
Dooley left his umbrella in the Blazer and came around the front. With each step closer he learned a little more about the man waiting for him. His nose was cranked unnaturally to the right, but his hair was neat and short. He stood straight and tall, with shoulders so square a carpenter’s level could be calibrated upon them. The muscles of his face showed easily beneath the skin, like hills gently rising over millennia, pushed upward by some unstoppable, primal force.
His eyes were blue and friendly, but when Dooley reached the open bay Jack Prentiss did not offer his hand.
“Mr. Prentiss?”
“Jack,” Michael’s father said, glancing down at the name sewn onto his work jacket.
“Detective Bauer paged me. He said you needed to talk to me.”
Traffic whizzed by on Roman Boulevard, a cyclical wet hum rising and falling behind Dooley as each vehicle passed, and the bright lamps that lit Jet Motor’s lot of second-hand transportation sizzled in the dampness. Jack Prentiss motioned his visitor into the bay, away from the chafing noise.
Dooley ducked beneath the rear of a gorgeous ‘67 Vette that sat on the bay’s lift. A shop light was hooked to a piece of the right front suspension, just above a wheeled tray of silvery tools.
Jack Prentiss put the rag on the open drawer of a tool chest and crossed his arms. “I’ll make this short; I want you to stay away from my son.”
Word traveled fast, Dooley realized. Maybe he should have simply staked out a chair in some out of the way school office and called them in, one by one. Just like in the movies, maybe with a bare bulb fixture hanging low over a lonely table. Very noire.
And he would have gotten predictable results, just as Bartlett’s finest had.
“I talked to your—”
“My wife thought you were just going to talk to our boy,” Jack Prentiss interrupted. This was his business, his property, and he was speaking his piece. “What my son told me you did with his friends was not what I’d call ‘talk’. What the hell are you up to?” A sneer punctuated his question, and also signaled that Dooley might as well not bother with an answer. “These are children, mister.”
“A little thing called a murder happened,” Dooley said.
“That’s your problem.”
“It could be yours.”
Jack Prentiss reached up and patted the side of his pride and joy. “I restored this from junk, mister. Weekends, nights. A few dollars here and there. This is four years of work. I love this thing. It’s my baby. But Michael is my son, and I love him more than any words I’ve ever known could explain. More than I thought I could love something.” His fingers caressed the sheen. “Someday this will be his. Do you understand me? I do what I do because of him, whether it’s working on this, or just working to put food on the table. If I didn’t, I’d be a piss poor excuse for a father.”
“Is right and wrong figured somewhere in there?” Dooley inquired.
“Don’t preach to me. Michael is a good kid.”
An excessive, measured nod moved Dooley’s head. “Your kid’s a good kid, the kid who’s dead was a good kid. Everybody’s got wonderful kids in this town. Let me preach this to you, Jack: kids can be good, and they can also be good actors.”
Jack Prentiss leveled a fisted finger at Dooley. “You stay the hell away from my son. You hear me?”
Dooley glanced away for a second and sucked a breath. “I hear you, Jack.”
“Good.”
“Say hi to slugger for me,” Dooley said as he turned away and walked out into the rain.
“You stay away from my son!” Jack Prentiss shouted. “You hear me? Stay away from him!”
Dooley waved acknowledgment without looking back and climbed into his Blazer. He pulled out into traffic on Roman and gave the steering wheel a good thump with the side of his fist.
* * *
King County ended and Kitsap County began halfway across Puget Sound. The ferry Pemberton lumbered over the invisible, watery demarcation for the sixth time that day, heading west this time into a constant, icy blow. The lights of Kingston twinkled in the clear distance.
At the blunted prow, Dooley Ashe leaned on the slick wood railing and stared at the water.
He should have been tired, but he wasn’t. Jack Prentiss and his combination of machismo and denial could have dragged him down, but it hadn’t. An energy tingled over his skin. One foot tapped at the deck.
It was the familiarity, he knew. The roll of the broad vessel on the swells, the scent of the sea. The deep, dark sea.
His gloved hands kneaded together as he remembered how it felt. Just...thinking about it. Leaping over the bow rail into the parting waters. That had been his first plan. Not the bloody mess that had been the reality. No, just a leap into the cold sea and the vision of the ferry motoring away, leaving him to be numbed into submission.
Swallowed quietly, privately by the waters.
He remembered it so clearly as he stood there now, alive and ambivalent. There was no longer a temptation to take that leap. There was, though, a curiosity. A wonder at what it would have been like when all was done and the night became eternal.
Like it was for Jimmy Vincent’s tiny victims. Like it was for Guy Edmond.
The dead were lucky in some respects, but Dooley suspected that they were a fairly angry bunch, especially those cheated out of life by another. And he wondered if the ones who’d cheated themselves were as angry, and if they were, at who.
A hellish eternity, he imagined it would be.
He lifted his gaze toward the sky. Stars winked at him through breaks in the clouds.
* * *
The slumbering tabby lifted its head and stared at the front window. A shadow floated across the sheer curtains.
Chester rose to his feet and strutted into the bedroom of his master, leaping onto her bed and eyeing the door through which he’d come. Mary stirred, a hand reaching automatically to the ball of fur purring by her leg.
“Hey, Chester,” she said sleepily. “What’s up?”
The creaking board on her front porch answered the question in a way Chester could not.
Mary’s eyes waked and rolled slowly toward her bedroom door. Through it she could see through the hallway at an angle, and past it the living room, and at the far side of that the outlines of the window mullions silhouetted on the curtains. She sat up easily, slid her legs over the side of the bed, and gathered Chester onto her lap. Her hand stro
ked his side again and again as she forced the sleep from her mind and listened.
She heard the distant, metallic timpani of a train chugging over Cougar Pass. And the hoot of a barn owl high in a pine behind her house. And a hint of the wind scouring the driveway with autumn’s harvest, the verdant foliage dried and pulverized, swept in piece and part into mounds that would disappear with a shift of the fickle breeze.
She heard all these things, and mingled with them the squeak of weathered planks beyond the front door. Tuning to that and filtering the rest, she noted a cadence to the sound, a step. Feet testing the wood. Someone walking. Pacing.
Right outside her front door.
Mary moved her hand from Chester’s prickly coat and to her nightstand drawer, pulling it quietly open. A shiny, hammerless revolver lay on top of the bible her parents had given her as a young girl. She took the gun in hand and stood, keeping Chester close against her chest.
Three steps took her almost into the hall, but she paused just short of the doorway as a grainy shadow crossed outside the front window. She pointed the revolver at the window and stepped into the hall. The weapon trembled slightly with her hand. She entered the living room, eyes as wide as the barn owl restless in the pine, heart racing like the locomotive cresting Cougar Pass.
Another few steps toward the window. Silence and solitude beyond it now. Not a creak, not a shadow. She stopped before the bolt of glowing linen, wanting to see through it, wanting to confirm the suspicion that had already given feature and name to the maker of the shadow.
She wanted to see. She was afraid to look.
One of her feet began to move, and Chester’s ears went rigid and swiveled toward the window. A deep, resonant mewing churned in his body. Mary felt the rumble and looked at him.
The feline’s eyes bugged, and the window shattered inward a split second later. Mary turned away, covering Chester and huddling low against the wall as shards of the window shredded the curtain and rained upon the furniture and floor. Something thudded hard against the coffee table and skidded into the kitchen.
Footsteps scampered across the rain-soaked lawn, a car door slammed, an engine roared to life. Tires spun on the wet road, then made traction and screamed as the unseen car raced away.
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