Casserole Diplomacy and Other Stories

by Various

  “Tell me you’ll help.”

  She blinked wetness from her eyes and realized it was tears. “What do you want me to do?”

  Bailor picked her up at eight, two jumbo coffees steaming on the dashboard. He looked her over critically as she got in the car, and said, “That’s the best you could do?”

  She did up her seat belt as he pulled away from the curb. “What did you expect, Dior?”

  Dress up, he’d said. Wear something professional. The “best she could do” was a second-hand pair of wool pants and a black turtleneck.

  “What’s it matter what I look like anyway? You get me a job interview with your boss?”

  He shot her a look over his coffee cup. “You need something of the kids’, right? To do your thing? So I called the parents, told them I’m bringing over a criminal psychologist, a whaddyacallit, a victim profiler. They watch TV, they think every police department’s like the FBI.” He gave her another look. “Maybe they’ll think you’re a child genius. You look about sixteen.”

  Emily said nothing, drank her coffee. She could blame the caffeine for sweaty palms and a jumpy heart, but not for the gut-deep certainty that she was doing absolutely the wrong thing. She was no psychic. She’d just stumbled into a few months of hell, stumbled on through into prison, and now she’d stumbled out again and what was she doing, courting a return?

  She swallowed the same mouthful of coffee twice and said, “This is nuts, Bailor, you know that, right?”

  He emptied his cup and tossed it over his shoulder into the back seat. “You backing out on me, Lake?”

  Yes. She couldn’t say it. “No.”

  They were driving the road that wound uphill into the Glens. Old-fashioned frame houses, trees lining the streets.

  He said, “Don’t say anything, okay? Just look intelligent and let me do the talking.”

  Yeah, right. Intelligent. She’d be lucky if she could manage sane. “Can I ask you something?”

  He grunted.

  “If this works . . . I mean it isn’t going to, you know that. But if it does . . .”

  “What?”

  “You going to charge me with accessory again?”

  The car came to a stop. Bailor set the brake and turned off the engine. Then he said, “Nobody’s going to know about this, Lake. Got it? If you get anything I’ll call it an anonymous tip.”

  She rolled her head on the headrest and looked at him. He was scowling out the windshield. He looked tired and angry, which was okay, but he didn’t look scared. It wasn’t fair. She wanted him to be scared, as scared as she was.

  He undid his seatbelt, opened the door. “Okay?”

  She put her half-full coffee cup on the floor. Undid her belt. Got out of the car.

  “These are the Levesques,” Bailor told her going up the front walk. “Their kid was the second one taken. An only son.” That was all he had time to say before the front door opened. The Levesques must have been watching for them.

  A tall thin man and his small plump wife. Emily found it impossible to meet their eyes, and she never did get a clear picture of their faces. Mr. Levesque’s hand was as damp and cold as Emily’s, his wife’s voice jerky as she offered them tea. Bailor said something soothing, Emily hardly heard what. She felt like an imposter. Nothing new there, it was how she’d felt since she’d gotten out. But this was worse, because the Levesques, blinded by their hope, couldn’t see her for what she was.

  Bailor herded her up the stairs, leaving the kid’s parents to wait below. The boy’s bedroom was at the end of the hall, door sealed with a yellow strip of tape. Bailor pulled the tape to dangle down one jamb and opened the door.

  Just a kid’s room. A twin bed with a blue quilt, a kid-sized table under a window. Plastic soldiers and a poster of Ken Griffey Jr., a baseball glove propped proudly on the bedside table. There was also a nightlight there shaped like a baseball, milky plastic that would shed just enough light to keep the corners empty. A good idea, Emily thought. I should get one of those.

  Bailor cleared his throat. “So, you, uh, getting anything?”

  Emily jammed her hands in her pockets and scowled at him. “Yeah,” she said. “You want a cigarette, don’t you?”

  He scowled back. “I’ll wait outside,” he said, and stepped into the hall. Just before he shut the door he said, “By the way, in case you’re interested, the kid’s name is Ben.”

  She stood for a minute, hands in her pockets, listening to the Saturday morning quiet. Someone down the block was mowing their lawn, probably for the first time that season. They should fertilize, after.

  Emily shook her head, went and sat down on the bed. You need something of the kids’, right? To do your thing? Jesus, Bailor, how the hell would I know? I never “did” anything. They just came. She shuddered, now, remembering. She picked up Ben’s baseball glove and put it on. It fit her well; his dad must have got a size he could grow into. She worked at the leather of the webbing, softening it, while she looked around. There was a picture on the table by the window, a skinny black-haired boy wearing his baseball cap backwards, Griffey-style.

  A floorboard squeaked, paused, squeaked again. Bailor was pacing, impatient, wanting a cigarette. Some psychic, Emily told herself. What ex-smoker doesn’t want a cigarette? She pulled off the glove and propped it back in place. The lawn mower had stopped. She got up and went to the door.

  She was wrong, he wasn’t pacing, just rocking on his heels. “So?” he said.

  She shrugged, hoping he wouldn’t see her relief.

  He swore under his breath and stomped off down the hall to the stairs. “I’ll let you know as soon as we have anything,” he said to the parents as they opened the door. They didn’t say anything to Emily, but she could feel the weight of their eyes. That terrible hope. Something she’d discovered: the dead don’t hope for anything.

  The next stop was the other side of the Glens, the ritzier part with newer houses and a view of downtown. Bailor said, “We think he targets the classic middle-class suburban families.” He made them sound like a sub-group of criminals. “The Karsovs are professionals, she’s an architect, he’s a vice-president of something.” He glanced at Emily. “This kind of thing can tear a family apart.”

  “I know.”

  “Yeah, I guess you saw enough of that on the street.”

  She clenched her teeth, hating how much he knew about her: the foster homes, the runaway years. They had used that at her trial, proof she had to be dysfunctional, that she could know any number of murderers.

  The Karsovs’ house was a big stucco affair, set behind a three-car garage, and a lawn like a fairway. The doorbell bing-bonged, starting a blur of movement behind the oval of frosted glass.

  “What’s his name?” Emily asked.

  “Andrew Dean,” Bailor said. “Andy.”

  The door opened, revealing a woman with curly gray hair, too old to be the mother. She ushered them into the foyer at the same time another woman came down the curving stairs, talking even before she’d reached the bottom.

  “My mother came down to sit with me, Greg had to go in to work, some things just won’t get done without him, can I offer you some coffee? We made cinnamon rolls this morning, they’re Andy’s favourite.” And she started to cry.

  Her mother said, “I think the detectives probably just want to see the room, Glory.”

  “Of course,” Mrs. Karsov said. She didn’t seem to notice the tears. “I’ll show you the way—”

  “I know where it is, Mrs. Karsov,” Bailor said gruffly. “We’ll just take a look and get out of your hair.”

  The two women stood at the bottom of the stairs watching them climb.

  Bailor pulled off the tape as before and opened the door.

  A big room, a lot bigger than Ben’s. A wall of plastic baskets full of toys, a futon with a Batman quilt tucked tidily under the pillows. The ceiling was painted as a blue sky with clouds. There was a picture in this room, too, a school photo that showed a round
freckled face under ginger hair, a grin that threatened mischief.

  Bailor lingered in the doorway. “We thought maybe the perp knows the families, or at least the kids, because of the names. Andy, Ben, like he was doing them in alphabetical order. And they’re only sons. But we haven’t found anything else they have in common, except they both slept with nightlights on. Maybe he’s a nightlight salesman. You know how many places there are to buy nightlights in the city? Forty-eight that we know of so far.” He sounded discouraged, his voice rasping in his throat. “Goddamn it, I hate this case.”

  Emily looked at him. “You got kids, Bailor?”

  He glowered at the floor between her feet. “Jeff. He had leukemia. He was ten.”

  She stared at him a moment, then looked away out the window. “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah.” He cleared his throat. “Just do what you do,” he said, and slammed the door shut.

  The house was too new for the floorboards to squeak. She went over to the bed and sat. The room was empty. Nothing to say Andrew Dean wouldn’t come through the door the next minute, kick off his shoes, and grab the half-constructed spaceship in the corner. Relief poured through her, and a tide of guilt. Too bad she couldn’t help. Too bad for those poor little boys suffering god only knew what horrors, too bad for their parents, too bad for Bailor. But okay for Emily, who had enough nightmares already. And she’d tried, right? She’d done her best. What else could she do?

  To put off facing Bailor, she lay down on the bed. The clouds on the ceiling were blurred around the edges; someone had done something clever with a sponge. They probably glowed in the glimmer of the nightlight, like real clouds did, just before the moon rose. Nice, Emily thought. When she’d scraped together the cash for a deposit on her own apartment, maybe she’d paint her bedroom ceiling like that. Something to gaze at when she woke up sick, cold and shaking.

  She rolled over onto her side, and there he was. Andy’s ghost with his half-made spaceship in the corner.

  He had freckles all down his shoulders and arms, the contrast like a tan against the white of his narrow chest. His face was solemn, a little bewildered, as if he didn’t quite know why he was there. His belly button stuck out like the navel on a navel orange. He bore no wounds, as the women had, and none of their anger. Maybe he was still so young he didn’t know he should be angry.

  And yet, meeting the dead boy’s eyes, Emily caught a glimpse of the darkness behind them. The darkness, the filth, the pain and fear, the moment of his death—just a glimpse, but it tore open the scars where her heart used to be. She rolled off the bed and stood.

  “All right,” she said. “All right.”

  Bailor knew when he saw her face. “Jesus,” he said.

  “Come on,” she said.

  He didn’t ask. Just took the stairs at a run. In the car he said, “Where?”

  She looked around. Andy was behind them, standing in the street, waiting. “Back that way.”

  He pulled out from the curb with a yelp of tires, spun the car around with a jerk that spilled the coffee at Emily’s feet. She barely noticed. “Go,” she said.

  He went.

  Andy led them, showing her the turns to take, out of the city, across the river and into the farmland beyond. Fields of black furrows ready for planting, trees, farmhouses, tractor repair shops.

  “What is it?” Bailor asked her. “What do you see?”

  The naked boy always ahead of them, standing still.

  She shook her head. “Just drive.”

  There were lakes out this way, too, most of them ponds that watered cattle and fields. But a few were left half-wild, surrounded by cottages and trees, rowboats on sagging docks. Andy led them down a road that skirted one of these, Pickcreek Lake, and to the mouth of a driveway.

  “Here,” Emily said.

  Bailor drove past the driveway, parked just down the road. He turned off the engine, pulled a cell phone out of his jacket pocket, looked at it, put it back.

  “Stay put,” he said as he opened the door. “I’ll be right back.”

  “Wait a minute!” She climbed out too, slithering on the edge of the ditch. “Bailor—”

  “Just wait here. I can’t keep you out of this if you come around and mess up the crime scene.”

  “But . . .”

  But what? He was already gone, jumping the ditch to disappear among the trees.

  Emily slammed her door, the sound a shock in the rural silence. Andy stood with his back to her across the ditch. His shoulder blades sharp as incipient wings under the frail, freckled skin.

  “Shit,” Emily said.

  Andy looked back at her, his death in his eyes. She jumped the ditch and followed him through the woods.

  The house at the end of the driveway sat in a small gravel clearing, a tiny sagging house full of an inhabited silence, windows curtained and dark. No sign of Bailor. Andy disappeared.

  Mouth dry with fear, Emily snuck through the trees, around the house toward the lake. She was a city person, the wet mat of leaves felt treacherous under her boots. Behind the house, the lake, a gray oval of water fringed by trees. A couple of wooden docks poked out into the water, but the houses they belonged to were hidden.

  There was a dock here as well, a long crooked affair of weathered planks and old tires reaching across the marshy ground between the yard and the lake. Andy stood among straw-coloured reeds, looking at his feet that made no dents in the saturated ground. That’s where he was, Emily realized, shivering with cold. She’d forgotten her jacket.

  So she’d found Andy. Where was Ben?

  Terrified of the house’s blank windows she crept around the back of the garden shed, heart in her mouth. Still no sign of Bailor. Staring around her at the trees, the lake, she leaned against the shed. It was prefabricated out of corrugated metal, cold under her shoulder, its paint white and new. New. An old house with no garden and a brand new garden shed? Her heart lurched back into her chest and started to pound.

  The shed had a door at either end. She had seen without really seeing that the doors facing the house were open, showing the line of rakes and shovels, the rideable mower in the center of the floor. A mower for a gravel yard.

  Goddamn it, where was Bailor? Emily leaned against the door and almost fell when it slid quietly open on oiled tracks. The floor was rough cement. Pale light poured through the shed: tools, mower, garden chairs. No boy.

  But he had to be here. Why else the shed full of useless tools? Emily walked over to the mower, careless of being seen, and then froze. Her foot coming down had made a hollow thump. She looked down. At first it just looked like the same concrete as the rest of the floor, but then she saw the grain, and realized it was plywood painted gray. She dropped to her knees and looked again. Hinges and, under the mower, a padlock through a hasp.

  “Hey!”

  The shout stopped her heart. She looked up to see the man standing at the back door of the house. He was in a sweatshirt and jeans, half his jaw white with shaving cream, a razor in his hand. He had pale hair in a crew cut, pale eyes that looked lashless and raw. Fear in his face that mounted into fury.

  “Hey! Get away from there!” He started down the stairs. “That’s private property!”

  Emily threw herself at the mower. It started, sweet and quick, the rattle of its engine loud in the metal shed. She drove it forward onto the gravel, left it running as she scrambled off again. He was at the other door of the shed, still shouting, the neck of his shirt white with shaving cream.

  “Get out of here!” he shouted. “Get out before I call the police!”

  “I am the police.”

  Bailor, his footsteps covered by the noise of the mower. The blond man spun, whole body braced with shock.

  Bailor’s problem. Emily snatched a rake off the wall, jammed the end of the handle through the padlock hasp and heaved. Muscles honed over weeks of digging strained until they burned. The hasp didn’t budge. She wedged the rake handle further through the hasp and h
eaved again, using her legs and back as well as her arms. There was shouting behind her, a scuffle half drowned by the mower’s faltering engine. The rake handle digging into her collarbone, blood pounding in her temples, sweat stinging in her eyes.

  A high shout, “No!” The crack of breaking wood.

  The hasp came loose.

  She threw the rake aside, hauled up the trap door. Blackness down below, a reek of sewer and mud. Bailor was at her side, panting.

  “No ladder,” she said.

  “Here.” There was one in the corner, aluminum, new. He dropped it into the pit.

  The mower stuttered and died. Silence.

  “Ben?” Emily kneeled at the edge of the hole. “Ben?”

  And from below, a tiny voice. “No.”

  Bailor was already on the ladder, climbing down.

  A skinny little kid, black with filth and bruises. Eyes clenched shut against the light of day. It was Ben. He’d denied his presence there, not his name. That one No was all he’d say. But he was alive.

  Emily pulled off her shirt and wiped him clean while he crouched, shivering, on the floor of the shed. She shivered too, in her undershirt. Bailor handed her his jacket. For the first time she saw his gun, black and snub in its holster on his belt. She wrapped Ben in the jacket and then wrapped her arms around him too, looking over his head toward the house. In the space between shed and steps lay the blond man. He was on his back, arms flung wide, legs twisted. The front of his sweatshirt was dark with blood.

  The crack that she’d thought was the plywood breaking.

  He wasn’t dead. As she stared, his hand weakly moved toward the hole in his chest. Ben shivered steadily in her arms.

  “Jesus, Bailor,” she said.

  He looked down at her. “Yeah,” he said. “The paperwork’s gonna be hell.”

  They carried the boy to Bailor’s car and laid him curled in the back seat, then stood together on the side of the road, waiting for his backup and the ambulance to arrive. Emily shivering in her white undershirt.