by Chaz McGee
He laughed again as he left the room. Her eyes followed him with a love I envied. If anyone had ever felt that way about me, I could no longer remember it.
This time, the man returned with two plates and they sat side by side on their bed together, watching the shadows grow on the lawn outside their windows. They ate in silence, content in each other’s company. The room felt filled with safety and love.
I understood then how it was that she could continue, that she could bring a child into this world, when she still bore the scars of what a terrible place it could be.
I fell in love with her a little that evening as I watched how she surrendered to her love for her husband. He returned that love and I was reminded, for the millionth time since my death, of how poorly I had measured up in that department when I was alive, of what a wretched father and husband I had once been.
Being reminded of my failures is sometimes more than I can take. I left before dark, but in the end, I could not stay away.
I returned in the morning in time to see Arcelia stepping from the kitchen door, a piece of toast still in hand as she struggled with a pocketbook, a tote bag of fresh vegetables and a comically large ring of keys. When she drove away in her old Volvo, I rode shotgun and enjoyed the cool morning breeze alongside of her. She headed back toward town to the elementary school where she worked, parked in the lot set aside for teachers and trundled slowly toward the entrance, her pregnancy slowing her down. The janitor hurried out the door and took her packages from her, ignoring her protests as he gallantly led her inside. Children and their parents began arriving soon after. As they were delivered to Arcelia, their cries of delight told me that the children still adored their Seely.
Arcelia ruled her classroom the way she did the playground: with gentle admonitions, warning glances and frequent smiles. The children gravitated toward her as if she were a beacon and absently wrapped their arms around her legs for comfort.
I had not been so clueless as a father that I did not remember school typically ended in mid-June. The school year was winding down. I knew there were only a few days left to watch her at work and so I decided to return the next day and spend another pleasant morning watching the children barrel about in their sturdy bodies, testing the boundaries of their world. But when the next morning dawned, I was distracted by a family of rabbits exploring the clover in a nearby park. After that, I followed a pack of feral dogs to see where they went during the day (deep into the park bushes to sleep). By the time I reached the elementary school that day, it was already mid morning. Arcelia had not yet arrived. Parents stood in annoyed clusters, looking at their watches, anxious about being late to work. The children were less concerned. Any extra time to swing or slide was fine with them. The principal was the only one who looked anxious. He was a tubby man with close-cropped gray hair and kept offering his opinion that Arcelia must have gone into labor early; there was no other explanation for her tardiness. She had never been so much as a minute late before.
A substitute teacher finally arrived and the remaining parents fled, leaving the principal to deal with where his teacher was and why. He handed over the care of the children to the substitute and returned to his office. I followed and watched as he searched through his emergency contact files until he found the one for Arcelia. Improbably, her last name was Gallagher and her husband’s name was Daniel. He did not answer his phone. The principal’s agitation was growing and I wondered at his anxiousness. She was only three hours late at that point, but I saw fear in the way he dialed number after number looking for her.
He spoke briefly to someone on the other end of his last phone call without success, then hung up and stared at the wall across the room. A woman poked her head in the doorway and asked, ‘Any word?’
The principal shook his head. ‘A neighbor said he would try to find her husband. He thinks he may be in the fields.’
‘I called the hospital,’ the woman said. ‘She’s not there.’
The principal and his secretary exchanged a glance I could not understand. A silence filled the room. ‘Perhaps she had car trouble?’ the man suggested.
His secretary nodded, acknowledging the possibility. She did not look convinced.
‘If we don’t hear from her soon, I’m calling the police,’ the principal decided, sounding like he was trying to find the courage to do so. ‘You never know.’
The woman’s hand flew to her mouth, as if she were trying to suppress her opinion. She did not want to agree with whatever it was the principal was thinking, but they knew more than I did. That much was obvious. They were both deeply afraid.
THREE
The principal was a plump little man with soft round hands that looked like a woman’s. He sat at his desk, unable to move, unable to act. Occasionally, his secretary would look in on him, then close the door, leaving him to his indecision. If he dithered this much about every matter, the school was in trouble. Once or twice, he started to reach for the phone but held back.
I could not understand what had him so worried. As lunchtime came and went, he still did not move. He went back to work on other papers of inconsequential nature. It was not until early afternoon that he phoned the police.
Two cops I did not know arrived quickly. The school was served by a new substation I had never visited. One cop was young, skinny and white. His partner was an older Hispanic man putting on weight in his middle age. Both seemed bored with their assignment, especially since the principal did not help his case. Whatever was bothering him, he was having trouble spitting it out to the cops.
His secretary, who had been listening in at the door, finally took matters into her own hands. She entered the room and interrupted her boss’s utterly baffling attempts at explaining what he feared.
‘Sir,’ she said to the principal, ‘I apologize for interrupting, but the other teachers and I have discussed the situation and I feel perhaps I could add some information here.’
The two cops looked as if she had about thirty seconds before they shut their notebooks and left. So far, they had learned nothing from the principal to make them the least bit concerned about the teacher who had failed to show that morning.
‘We have long noticed that Arcelia was afraid of something,’ the secretary explained. She patted her hair anxiously. ‘There were times when it seemed as if she was in physical pain, as if it was difficult for her to move. We thought she was suffering from some illness, but then one of the teachers suggested that maybe she was being, well, abused.’ She exchanged a glance with the principal, who had flushed red at the idea. ‘She hasn’t been married long. I think maybe two years or so. She’s been working here for a year now and, to be fair, she’s never said a word about her husband being abusive in any way. But once we started watching her more closely, it did become obvious. Arcelia was afraid of someone and she was often in physical pain.’
‘Now, now, Mrs Trafton, everything you say is simply hearsay,’ the principal said. ‘There is no proof that her husband is doing anything to her.’ He looked up anxiously at the police. ‘I have been through this before,’ he sputtered. ‘I lost the best teacher I ever had due to unfounded accusations. It was awful. I simply cannot let that happen to another person.’
Mrs Trafton wasn’t buying it. ‘The police need to know,’ she said firmly. She faced the two beat cops and took a deep breath. ‘Arcelia is married to the mayor’s son.’
The youngest cop dropped his notebook and his partner looked at him in disgust.
‘Are you telling me that the missing teacher is married to Mayor Gallagher’s son?’ the older cop asked. He turned to the principal in exasperation. ‘Couldn’t you have told us that right away? Don’t you think that was important?’
The principal looked stricken, but no one was paying attention to him any more. The news that the missing teacher was married to an important man’s son took precedence.
That was my town for you. There were the men who were elected and served in obvious seats of
power. And then there were the men who knew better than to run for office, who understood they could hold power longer if they simply controlled those who did. Mayor Gallagher was the latest in a long line of local leaders controlled by men in my town who, I suspected, live here so that they can launder money for even scarier men who lived a few states north. No one who wanted to keep their job ever voiced this theory out loud. But when I was alive, everyone on the force had understood that if certain cases involved certain men, you didn’t look into them with the kind of obsessiveness that had gotten you your detective badge. Of course, doing a half-assed job had come naturally to me and my partner. We had been given more than our share of the hands-off cases simply because assigning them to us was extra insurance that they would never be solved.
How had a loud, aggressive man like Mayor Gallagher fathered the lanky, quiet farmer I had seen a few nights before tenderly serving his pregnant wife dinner in bed?
‘This is above my pay grade,’ the older cop decided. He shut his notebook and stored it in his breast pocket. ‘You should have called this in sooner.’
The principal looked ashamed. Mrs Trafton looked grim. ‘We didn’t want to think the worst. There isn’t a teacher more loved by her students,’ she said. ‘They are all so excited about the baby.’
The cops looked startled. ‘She’s pregnant?’ the younger one stammered.
The principal and his secretary nodded in unison.
‘Don’t move,’ the older one warned them. ‘We’re going to call this in and I can guarantee you they are going to send someone with a gold shield down to question you. And don’t warn the husband.’
Neither the principal nor his secretary admitted that they had already tried to contact her husband – and that he could not be found.
There are at least eight senior detectives in my town, men who have served for decades and would understand the minefield this case represented. But I knew that our commander, a natural-born politician named Gonzales, would not send any of them. A missing pregnant schoolteacher married to the mayor’s son? Gonzales would be intent on presenting a façade of professional independence while simultaneously doing god-knows-what maneuverings behind the scenes. There was only one person he would trust with a case this tricky – Maggie, my replacement on the force. Sure, she came with a partner Gonzales absolutely loathed, but Maggie Gunn had turned Adrian Calvano into a pretty decent detective. At least if she kept a close eye on him.
Sure enough, they arrived within the hour: Maggie, with her square muscled body and plain face made beautiful by her insanely good health, and Adrian Calvano, with his lanky frame, expensive suits and maddeningly thick black hair. He drove me nuts, but apparently Maggie saw something genuinely worthwhile in him and I trusted her judgment.
Maggie and Calvano questioned the principal and his secretary about the missing teacher’s reliability, her past record of absences, any rumors they had heard about her marriage and what they knew about her husband. Eventually they came to the same conclusion I had come to – that Arcelia Gallagher was a very private woman, who had not disclosed a single personal detail about herself to any of her co-workers. All anyone really knew was that she was married to Danny Gallagher, the mayor’s only son, and that she lived on a farm outside of town, where her husband worked long hours to grow organic produce that he sold to local restaurants. Arcelia had helped him in the fields after school until she had grown too pregnant to be much use. Other than that, no one knew where Arcelia had been born, how she had met and married her husband, if she had any other family, where she went on her vacations or, indeed, where she went during the summer when school was out for three months. All anyone really knew about her was that she was very sweet-natured and the children loved her.
Maggie and Calvano looked grim – they had learned little of use.
‘She goes to St Raphael’s,’ the secretary offered meekly. ‘I noticed her saying the rosary last Wednesday and I asked her if she was Catholic. She told me she was and that she went to St Raphael’s.’
‘No kidding?’ Calvano said. ‘I went there as a kid. I was an altar boy. I still go there now and then.’
No one in the room seemed impressed.
‘Good,’ Maggie told him. ‘You can go talk to the priest there while I go talk to her husband.’
‘No way,’ Calvano protested. ‘For all we know, he’s the reason she never showed up for work. I’m not letting you go out there alone.’
Maggie looked insulted. The principal looked like he might have a stroke. The secretary looked relieved.
‘Seriously?’ Maggie asked her partner. ‘Did you seriously just say that?’
‘I mean it,’ Calvano said. ‘I know Danny Gallagher. He lived in my neighborhood when we were kids. He’s bad news. He always had a temper and people don’t change that much.’
I found that hard to believe about Danny Gallagher. I had watched him in the privacy of his own home, a place where people are always themselves. He had seemed to be a content and gentle man. Calvano was just being an ass. He did that quite well.
‘If you know him, then you are not going out there to question him, either,’ Maggie decided. ‘The last thing we need is for someone to claim favoritism.’
‘No one has to come out to question me,’ a voice said quietly from the doorway.
I was as startled as everyone else to see Danny Gallagher standing at the edge of the room, staring down at his muddy work boots. ‘What’s this about? Where is my wife? She should have been home an hour ago. She’s not answering her phone.’
When they told him his wife had not shown up for school that day, he collapsed. All six foot three of him froze in what I was pretty sure was pure terror, then he slid slowly to the floor and put his face in his hands. A shocked silence filled the room.
Maggie was the first to break it. ‘What is it?’ she asked him. ‘What do you think has happened to your wife?’
‘They’ve got her,’ he whispered. ‘She always said they’d come for her.’
Maggie and Calvano looked grim at this news. They knew that no one was that good an actor. Chances were good that Arcelia Gallagher was in real trouble.
As if he could read their minds, the husband let out a sound that stopped just short of a scream. I could feel him fading into the darkness. As the others watched in disbelief, he gave himself up to his fear and slipped to the floor unconscious.
Maggie and Calvano stared at him, unsure of what to think.
Once again, it was the school secretary who finally acted.
‘For God sakes,’ she commanded the principal. ‘Call an ambulance.’
FOUR
I had been a professional disaster when I was alive and a detective on the force. I had bungled nearly every case, seldom finishing an assignment and pretty much living in the bottom of a bottle. Having a partner just like me had not helped. We had gone down in a blaze of infamous glory. But even on my worst days, those days when I was still drunk from the night before and smelled like the bottom of a bar’s bathroom floor, I still had the wherewithal to be terrified of Commander Gonzales.
He was the perfect police commander. Tall, urbane, impeccably dressed and of Latino heritage – which was no small advantage when our little Delaware town was rapidly filling up with immigrants in search a better life for their families. Many of them had drifted down our way after trying New York and finding it too large for their tastes. Enough of them were voters that the traditional Irish and Italian power brokers in town had anointed Gonzales as their golden boy.
In truth, Gonzales had as little in common with the Mexican and Central American newcomers as I did. He shared their skin color, but that was it. Rumor had it that his grandfather had owned most of some Mexican state once upon a time. Certainly, he lived in the wealthiest neighborhood in town and knew how to move among the most powerful circles. He also knew when to deliver a favor.
He had scared the crap out of me. Anger fueled him and he needed someone to blame whene
ver things did not go as he planned. He liked to choose a whipping boy and go after him unmercifully until the poor bastard crumpled.
Right now, it was Adrian Calvano who was feeling his wrath. I hated feeling sorry for Calvano. He annoyed me to no end. But there you have it – I could not help but empathize with him. Gonzales was staring at him with utter contempt, his eyes flickering over every inch of Calvano’s frame as if he were seeking a soft spot so he could go in for the kill. I had been shredded by Gonzales on many occasions and I knew how it felt. I did not wish that on anyone, not even Adrian Calvano.
‘Where did you take him?’ Gonzales was asking in disbelief.
‘The hospital,’ Calvano said defensively. ‘What else were we supposed to do? The guy totally collapsed. He was in a catatonic state. The principal called the ambulance before we could stop him and then, well . . .’
‘Things got out of control?’ Gonzales suggested sarcastically.
Maggie took over. ‘Sir,’ she said. ‘I don’t know if the husband is faking it. But I do know that we were not going to get anything out of him at the scene.’
Gonzales stared at them both. I was impressed at how unflappable Maggie seemed. She was his favorite on the force, in no small part because Gonzales had known her since she was a little girl and her father had once been his mentor. As such, Maggie was not used to his disapproval. She was feeling it now, but she was taking it well.
‘If the press gets wind of this situation,’ Gonzales warned them, ‘this town is going to turn into a circus. Again. I won’t have it. The two of you are on this case until it is over and I don’t want you to so much as eat lunch until you find out where Arcelia Gallagher is and if someone took her.’
‘And if it turns out it’s her husband?’ Maggie asked. ‘Which we all know is the most likely answer?’
Gonzales knew she was really asking what the hell they were supposed to do if it turned out that the son of the mayor, Gonzales’s biggest political backer, had killed his wife.
