All For One

by Ryne Douglas Pearson

  Dooley scanned more of the photos. “Is this your father?”

  “Yeah. That was taken a few months before he died.”

  “He looks young.”

  Her mother might as well have made the observation, considering how expertly the obvious question it posed was left unspoken. “He was killed in an accident. A truck hit his pickup.”

  Dooley nodded sympathetically at her, the gesture trailing off as he turned back to the display of moments passed. “This is you again.”

  Mary smiled mildly at the picture of her at nine, kneeling on the ground next to a big black dog whose mouth hung open like a lazy steamshovel. The mutt’s pink tongue lolled loose out one side. “That was my dog, Champ.”

  Again Dooley noticed the obvious. “He’s smiling more than you.”

  This time Mary felt the poke of his words, not just an innocent wondering. She was starting to remind herself that this man was a policeman, that his nature was to probe, and that some of that learned instinct was bound to spill over into the general habits of his everyday conversations, but she never got far enough into that silent reassurance of self for it to take hold. Her rational self got no more than three words out before something happened that sucked all her consciousness to one point. One tiny spot inside her head where a brightness welled, a soothing glow that grew as she somehow watched it, saw it, saw it inside her head as if her eyes had turned halfway around to look that way. And as she watched it she was vaguely aware of someone saying something. Dooley. Dooley was saying something. Something about how he had a dog when he was a boy, and that Mugsy was his name, and that Mugsy had been like a best friend...

  And the brightness flared.

  ...the best kind of best friend...

  Flared hot and white now, no longer soothing, no longer a pleasing glow, but hot and hurtful.

  ...because...

  And so intense, so magnetic that it was impossible to not look at it.

  ...he...

  So intense that when it suddenly dissolved to nothingness the void it left inside her head was darker than black, deeper than forever.

  She stared into the void and saw its nothingness.

  “...would always eat whatever I hated to eat.” Dooley smiled fondly at the image of Mary hugging her big black dog, seeing a version of his own past in it. “I’d just hold it in my hand under the table and, a few big slobbers later, boom, it’d be gone. And my mom was never the wiser.”

  Dooley’s head bobbed pleasantly at the photo for a few quiet seconds. A few very quiet seconds. He suddenly felt that he was alone. Actually alone.

  His head turned toward Mary. She was there, right next to him, as still as stone, her eyes fixed motionless on the photo of she and her dog.

  “Mary?”

  Her stillness melted and she looked to him. She smiled. “Would you like to sit down?”

  In her question Dooley heard a statement: I don’t want to look at these anymore. That was fine. He could understand. The past could be pleasant, or it could be painful. Pictures were snippets of the past. How could he know what memories they held for her? Sure, pop is in all the pictures up to this one, then he’s not there anymore, and someone isn’t smiling anymore either. He wondered if that was how the Edmonds’ family pictures would look from now on.

  “Sure,” Dooley said, and chose the couch by the window, sitting at its center. Mary half curled into a chair angled opposite it.

  “No girl has passed me a note since junior high,” Dooley said, starting the conversation again. “If you knew my car was there, you knew I was there. Why didn’t you just find me?”

  “I was embarrassed.”

  “About?”

  “Telling you that I...was sorry.”

  “Was sorry?”

  “Am. Am sorry. About the way I talked to you. Treated you.”

  “Oh.”

  YOU’VE GOT TO PROTECT THEM! something (someone?) screamed at her from the void, open and black behind her eyes. Screamed like thunder rushing at her.

  Mary blinked for a somewhat long second and the screaming stopped. “You were invading my...territory, for lack of a better word, and I resented it. I put you on the spot. I snapped at you. And, I’m very sorry.”

  Dooley accepted her apology silently. This seemed hard for her.

  Mary glanced briefly off to the kitchen. “It’s late. You’ve probably eaten.”

  “Not even a cookie,” Dooley admitted willingly.

  “Will you stay for dinner? It will make me feel better.”

  “You never have people over for dinner,” Dooley reminded Mary, dredging her own proclamation.

  “Be my first.”

  “I’ve never been anyone’s first,” he said.

  Mary simpered and got up, walking into the hall. “Do you like cats?”

  “Is that what you’re making?”

  “No, it’s what I’m about to let out of the bedroom.”

  Dooley spread his arms on the sofa back, fingers touching the curtains. “I have no problem with cats.”

  Hinges squeaked, and a candy-corn colored blur of fur raced out of the hall ahead of Mary. She went to the kitchen. The furball skidded to a stop across the hardwood under the piano and looked at Dooley for a few seconds, then lifted one paw to its mouth and started licking.

  “Tell me you like fried chicken,” Mary said from the kitchen.

  “I like fried chicken,” Dooley obliged, his gaze wandering about the rooms he could see. The house was small, as was his, and decorated simply but pleasingly. The furniture seemed to sit in just the right place, and everything visible complimented those things relative to it in a way that one’s eyes could pass over the decor without abrupt transitions.

  All except for the curtains directly behind, Dooley realized. They matched none of the other window treatments, all of which were identical to one and other, and seemed far too coarse an error to have been chosen on purpose. He pinched the material for a better feel, and in doing so pulled the hem slightly away from the window, exposing the inside sill.

  Shards of broken glass littered the narrow ledge.

  Dooley took a piece of the glass in hand and rolled it between his fingers.

  “I made green beans,” Mary said from the kitchen. “Are those okay with you?”

  “Fine,” Dooley answered. He dropped the fragment back on the sill and stared at the wall of pictures, picking out all that he thought were of Mary. Only in one did she smile truly. It was a group shot with her class at Windhaven.

  * * *

  They ate on the floor between the piano and the living room, the cat eyeing them jealously from a safe distance.

  Mary sat cross-legged, nibbling at a golden leg. “How is it?”

  “Very good,” Dooley answered quite honestly, reclining against the wall. “Mom’s recipe, right?”

  Mary grinned. “Right.”

  “My theory is that mothers steal their recipes off store-bought stuff and pass them off as their own,” Dooley explained. “So Betty Crocker is really the greatest cook ever because every mom in America is passing off her stuff as their own.”

  “Does your mother know that you’re on to her?”

  Dooley picked the white meat from a breast and shook his head. “I don’t think she did.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Like you’re supposed to know,” Dooley said.

  Move on. Move on. Forget the bad. For—

  PROTECT THEM!

  Mary coughed suddenly, violently.

  “Are you all right?” Dooley asked, putting his food aside.

  She nodded and jumped to her feet, hands over her mouth, and ran across the living room and down the hallway. A light glowed into the corridor from an unseen space, and water began to run.

  Dooley came to his feet. “Mary?”

  After a few seconds the rush of water stopped, a faucet squealing as it spun. “I’m okay.”

  “Are you sure?”

  The light dissolved, leaving the
hallway nearly black. Mary emerged from this darkness, her face pale, arms held low across her stomach. “Something went down wrong.”

  “You look sick.”

  “It’s like getting socked in the gut,” Mary said. “When you can’t get your breath. My stomach feels like it’s in my throat right now.” She walked back to the makeshift dining area and took her plate from the floor. It trembled ever so slightly in her hand. “I can’t eat anymore. Please finish.”

  Dooley stabbed the green beans a few times with his fork, but his interest was not with them. He watched Mary go to the kitchen, dump her plate into the sink, and turn on the water. The garbage disposal burped and forced her dinner down the drain.

  “You shouldn’t put bones down there,” Dooley said when Mary came back in. She walked past him and sat at the piano.

  “You sound like a plumber,” she commented. A hard, calming swallow followed.

  Dooley put his plate on top of a chest-high bookcase filled with volumes of bound sheet music. He kept the half empty glass of water in hand. “I worked as a plumber during college.”

  She nodded and looked down to the keys. “Do you mind if I play. It settles me.”

  “Can I talk while you play?”

  A few notes wafted up from the piano. “Sure.”

  Her hands hovered over the keys, fingers drawing music from the instrument with delicate strokes. Dooley stepped close, appreciating the melody, the execution. “That’s pretty.”

  Mary worked up through scale, her hands flying from the keyboard with a flourish. “I’m just fooling around.”

  “This relaxes you...”

  “It does,” Mary said, tickling the keys with one hand and patting the bench with the other. She scooted to one side and said, “Join me.”

  Dooley came around the piano and squeezed next to Mary. He looked to her, the woman who just a couple minutes earlier had been highly indisposed, her complexion wanting color. Now... “Can you bottle this? You’d never have to teach again.”

  Both hands now eased into a tune, soothing, a bit sad. “That would be terrible.”

  “You like your job.”

  “I love my job. This...” She leaned in toward the piano. “...is my refuge. Teaching is my life.”

  “When I was a kid, I wanted to be a fisherman,” Dooley volunteered.

  “I always wanted to be a teacher. From the time I was eight, that’s what I was going to be.”

  “Really? That soon? You never wavered? Never wanted to be a doctor, or a princess?”

  She shook her head. “I wanted to be a teacher, the kind of teacher that children could think about years later and smile. Did you ever have a teacher that just made you feel special? Capable?”

  “I did,” Dooley answered. Mr. Candlebridge it had been. His twelfth grade wrestling coach, a man who had talked him out of joining the Marines— Your head is already too flat without that damn haircut they’ll give you, Ashe —and into accepting the athletic scholarship offered him by a university back east. Yeah, he could think of Mr. Candlebridge and...

  “You’re smiling,” Mary said.

  Dooley blinked free of the remembrance. “I had some good teachers.”

  “I did too. I also had some bad ones. You learn the most from them, in a way.”

  “How not to do things,” Dooley said.

  Mary nodded and closed her eyes. Her fingers licked gracefully at the keys with a subdued vigor, each stroke a dammed reservoir of want, a desire to strike at the keys and make music that would raise the ceiling and bring all who might hear to their feet. Not in applause, but simply to hear. To be heard was a precious thing.

  Dooley listened to Mary play, saying nothing, just enjoying what there was to hear and see, watching her hands float gracefully, tenderly along the keys, choosing which ones to touch through memory, or instinct, or some magic he knew he would never understand. He savored the interlude with reverence.

  Mary turned to him after a minute. “You stopped talking.”

  “And ruin this?”

  Seamlessly, the volume of the recital ebbed, the music a gentle whisper now. “There. Just pretend you’re in a movie, with atmospheric background music.”

  “You give a nice apology.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Even with the choking.”

  She concentrated on her music.

  “I do have to ask you something.”

  She looked to him, her head bowed gently toward the keys.

  “I need your help.”

  Her eyes left his, the music rising a hint.

  “I’ve talked with four of the six kids whose prints were on the bat, and I’ve gotten nowhere. They’re not opening up. They’re hiding what they know. And they do know.”

  Mary breathed slow and played on. “Who didn’t you talk to?”

  “Mike and Elena. Their parents weren’t receptive to my...interacting with their children. Their wonderful children.”

  “They are wonderful children,” Mary responded, almost snapping at Dooley. Protecting them. “They are. They’re not like that other child you caught.”

  “I’m not saying they’re like Jimmy Vincent.”

  She moved through the piece from memory, asking after a moment, “How did you catch him?”

  “Everyone knew that Jimmy had killed those little boys,” Dooley answered reluctantly, willing to tread this ground again now if it would help. Help with Mary. “It wasn’t catching him that needed doing. We needed real evidence, the kind a court would listen to, and we had none. So, I had to get him to admit to it.”

  Mary seemed to nod, though it might have been a gesture in sympathy with the music. “How did you get him to confess?”

  An odd, embarrassed regret filled Dooley, as it did each time he thought of how he’d broken through Jimmy Vincent’s defenses. “I spent time with him. Talked, played games. I did all the things that no one had ever really taken the time to do with him. I became his friend. His buddy.” He straightened where he sat and folded his hands between his legs. “And he confided in me. Because I pretended I cared.” Dooley’s tone drew Mary’s eyes his way. “And I nailed him.”

  Mary stopped playing, the last note lingering. “It hurt you to do that.”

  “I was doing my job. I didn’t think it would be any different than nailing any other criminal.”

  “But it was.”

  Dooley nodded. “It was.”

  Mary looked hard at him, requiring quite clearly that he return the attention. “And you want me to do the same thing to my kids.”

  “You already know them,” Dooley said, pointing out the difference. There were others, but what they were did not matter. He suspected there would be an effect on her very similar, if not worse, than there had been on him.

  “They trust me.”

  “That’s why I’m asking.”

  Mary ran one hand over the keys before her, not hard enough to elicit any sound. They were warm and wanted to be played.

  “I read their school files,” Dooley told her. “I read all of the kids’ files. Everyone in your class. I read what teachers had said in previous years, and then I read what you put in there.” He tried to make eye contact, but she would not oblige. “Where other wrote observations, you shared insight.”

  “That’s my job.”

  “Teaching is a job. You have a gift. I saw the progress they’ve made in one year. That doesn’t happen by itself. You’ve connected with them.”

  Now Mary looked at him. Her eyes glistened slightly.

  “I’ve talked to people at the school. They confirm what I learned from those files. You’ve made a big difference in those kids’ lives. All of them.” He drew on what he could recall. “Joey Travers. A ‘C’ student at best through the fourth grade. Lack of ambition. One of his old teachers wrote that. You get him last year and his grades go up, he’s in the school play. This year he runs for class president and wins.”

  “Joey had that in him all the time,” Mary said m
odestly.

  “Paula Jean Allenton,” Dooley continued. “So-so grades and always in fights. She’d fight at the drop of a hat from what I read in her file. And now...”

  “All right,” Mary interrupted, ending the unwanted recitation of accomplishments she knew rightly belonged with her students. “I try to be a good teacher.”

  “You are a good teacher,” Dooley said. “Good teachers do what is right, Mary.”

  “You’re asking me to break a trust. To use what I’ve built with them to...” She receded from the exchange and began to tap two notes slowly, again and again, creating a soft, haunting rhythm.

  Dooley wanted to give her something that would make it all easy, palatable. He decided instead on the truth. “The only reason I can live with myself sometimes is because I know that by breaking through to Jimmy Vincent I gave closure to the parents of those three little boys. They had the bodies to bury. What I did let them bury their vengeance. You can give the Edmonds what they want.”

  Mary scoffed breathily. “They want my skin.”

  “They want to know who killed their son. You’re just a convenient substitute until they have that.”

  “So I know.”

  “You may not like them. You may not have liked their son. You may not like me.”

  “You’re growing on me,” Mary admitted, surprising her guest.

  “Help me then,” Dooley implored her, the two note, melancholy rhythm relentless. He put his hand on hers, stopping the music. “Help me put an end to this. It won’t get better with time.”

  His touch was cool on her skin, the kind of cool that one cherished in the oppressive grip of a heat wave. Ice water cool. Plain but pure.

  Mary slid her hand from his and stood. She backed into the corner of the room and hugged herself, reason and emotion colliding within.

  They trust me.

  PROTECT THEM! The cry, the command, came again as both sound and pain in her head. A hurt that was old and familiar in a way she felt she should understand.

  She looked at Dooley. Regret softened the inherent brightness in her eyes. “I’ll talk to them.”

  “When?”

  Mary stiffened a bit at the impatience.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’ll talk to them Monday. After school.”

  Dooley nodded. “It’s the right thing.”