How It Happened

by Michael Koryta

He expected insistence that she’d given him the gospel truth. Instead, she looked down and said, “He’ll still be out, then? If I get parole, Mathias will be out?”

  “Of course he will,” Barrett said. “You think I can arrest him based on a jailhouse confession that requires me to explain how two bodies disappeared with no physical evidence?”

  There was a strange, heavy pulse in the center of Kimberly’s throat, and she swallowed hard and wet her lips.

  “I don’t want parole then,” she whispered.

  “What?”

  “He knows I talked by now. If he’s still out…then I don’t want to be.”

  A few silent seconds passed. Kimberly’s throat pulsed again; she swallowed again; the shaking intensified.

  She’s putting on a show, he thought, and then his practiced approach left him and he fell back on a technique he’d always advocated against—he threatened.

  “I don’t need the theatrics, Kimberly. You’re a bad poker player. And you’re going to make a mistake once you’re out. So what I’m going to do after I leave this room? I’m going to meet with the prosecutor and the judge and have them kick you loose. You can go back home, go back to your drinking and drugging, and we’ll wait until your next mistake. Then you and I can try this again.”

  Kimberly Crepeaux looked at Barrett with tears in her eyes and said, “You can’t just take me out of jail. That’s not how it works.”

  “It works however I want it to when there’s a double murder to solve. I’ll see that you’re sent home by tomorrow. Then you and Mathias can get together and work on your story, polish up the lies.”

  Kimberly’s throat pulsed once more as she stared at him. Then she doubled over in the red plastic chair and vomited onto the tile floor.

  Barrett scrambled to his feet, stunned. Kimberly gagged and shook her head to cast loose a string of spit that dangled from her lip. Barrett knelt and put a hand on her small, heaving back.

  “Just tell me the truth,” he said. “Do that, and I can help you.”

  “I already did.” Kimberly Crepeaux gasped, her head bowed over the pool of vomit on the tile. “I told you just how it happened.”

  7

  He came out of the jail running hot, his thoughts torn between the expression of anguished honesty on Kimberly’s face and the memory of the empty-handed divers returning to the surface. When he reached his car he stood with his palm on the door and tried to use the touch of the metal to ground himself. Slow down, Barrett. Breathe. People screw up when they rush. There’s no pressure on you. You’re the one who applies pressure; you don’t feel it.

  He could steady himself quickly. It was his father’s skill, finding emotional calm in a raging current, and it was an ability that drove Barrett’s grandfather crazy, because all he knew was the current.

  My blood got up was how Ray Barrett explained his rages, as if the total loss of self-control was natural, something like fluctuating cholesterol, common and understood.

  Glenn Barrett had taught his son to pause and imagine his anger as a book, to turn each moment that infuriated him into a page and then imagine turning those pages slowly, reviewing each one, before shutting the book and shelving it.

  Now Barrett took a moment with each page. His blood was up, and that would not do for his next stop.

  It was time to see Mathias Burke.

  Mathias had been only ten when Barrett met him. Barrett was fourteen, up for one of his summer stretches in Port Hope, and he’d spent most of it fishing for mackerel off the pier in the boatyard or holed up in the tiny public library burning through its John D. MacDonald and Dean Koontz collections. Anyplace other than the dingy apartment above his grandfather’s bar was just fine.

  Mathias was around often, but he didn’t attract Rob’s attention because of the age gap between them. He wasn’t a source of friendship or competition, of threat or envy, the only issues that mattered in the Lord of the Flies existence of adolescent males. He was, however, a curiosity—he was a young boy, small for his age, but always working. He mowed lawns, weeded flower gardens, washed windows. He advertised these services, and he’d even rigged an old wagon into a sort of flatbed trailer so he could tow his push mower behind his bike.

  It was the wagon-trailer that caught Ray Barrett’s eye and thus led to the first meeting between Rob and Mathias.

  “Look at that damn kid,” Ray had said one hot July afternoon when there wasn’t enough of a breeze to push the mosquitoes back; he’d enlisted Rob’s help in filling and lighting the citronella torches that lined the small balcony off the apartment above the bar. Down below, Mathias was unloading a bulky mower in the yard of Tom Gleason, a dentist from Massachusetts who came up to Port Hope on weekends and for summer holidays. If the trailing cloud of mosquitoes bothered Mathias, he gave no indication of it.

  “His father’s a worthless shit pile who spends more money in my bar than on his family, but that kid…” Ray indicated Mathias with a tip of his beer bottle. “He’s rigged up a damned trailer for his push mower, you see that? That kid is going to make something of himself. He already works harder than most men these days. Tom Gleason should be cutting his own grass, the lazy prick.”

  By then, Rob knew where this was going to go—a scathing critique of first his father, then himself.

  Ray surprised him, though; he skipped the typical rant about his soft professor son and even softer grandson and instead said, “You’re going down to help him, Robby.”

  “He won’t want to split that money,” Rob said.

  Ray turned and glowered. “I say anything about taking his money? I said you’re going to help him. That’s all.”

  And so down they’d gone to the tumbledown shed where Ray kept an ancient mower, and although it crossed Rob’s mind that Ray didn’t bother to cut his own grass but somehow managed to scorn others who made the same choice, he knew better than to point it out. Instead, he’d stayed quiet, his face flushed with anger and embarrassment as he pushed the old Toro down to Mathias Burke with his grandfather trailing behind, a fresh beer in hand.

  “Mathias, this is Robby, my grandson,” Ray bellowed. “He’s gonna give you a hand because he needs to learn about an honest day’s damn work. Don’t pay him a cent, you hear me? Just show him what it’s like to have to get off your ass once in a while.”

  The little boy with the dark eyes and sunburned skin watched Ray Barrett with none of the fear that large men in bars showed him.

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Barrett. I don’t need any help, though.”

  “I know you don’t. He does.” Ray extended a five-dollar bill to Mathias. “Here’s for putting up with him.”

  Mathias shook his head. “I’ve already been paid for this lawn, sir,” he said, and a look of admiration passed over Ray’s face, a look he usually reserved for linebackers or boxers.

  “That,” he told Rob, “is what you need to learn.”

  He pocketed the five-dollar bill, and Rob was interested to see the scrawny boy’s eyes narrow, as if he’d just learned something important but not surprising about Ray.

  Ray left them, swatting and cursing at the mosquitoes as he wandered off, and without so much as a glance at Rob, Mathias Burke fired up his mower and got back to his work, his thin shoulders straining as he pushed the mower. Rob was furious at the indignity of it all—being in Port Hope with his grandfather was bad enough, but now he was working in the heat for free alongside a kid who wasn’t even in fifth grade yet—and in his anger, he pushed his mower too fast, and the dull blades cut uneven swaths through the thick grass. Up the street, a couple of girls closer to his age were working at a lemonade stand in front of the Methodist church; he could hear them laughing and wondered if it was at him.

  He mowed and cursed his father silently for sending him up here, cursed his grandfather for continuing to exist, cursed the mosquitoes that feasted on his skin. He was lost in self-righteous fury when Tom Gleason came out of the house and shouted at him.

  “Turn th
e damn mower around. You’re gonna bust up my car! Look at this!”

  Rob had been cutting with the mower’s discharge facing the driveway. The door panels of the shiny Cadillac with Massachusetts plates were coated with grass.

  “If there are scratches in my paint, I’m going to find both of your families,” Tom snapped, running a hand over the doors.

  When Mathias Burke said, “I’ll wash it for you,” it surprised Rob as much as it did Tom Gleason.

  “I’ll wash down the whole side,” Mathias said. He’d shut off his own mower and walked up to join them. “It’ll look perfect. I promise, sir.”

  Tom Gleason blinked at him. “Okay, but if it’s banged up, I’m calling your dad down here.”

  “It’ll look perfect,” Mathias repeated.

  Tom Gleason grunted and went back inside the house, and Rob turned to Mathias.

  “Sorry,” he said, and he truly was. The smaller boy ignored him, though. He crossed the yard, found a hose coiled up alongside Tom Gleason’s house, turned the water on, dragged the hose back over, and sprayed down the side of the car. Rob ran back to his grandfather’s shed and found a rag and an old bottle of Turtle Wax. He rubbed the wax on after Mathias had rinsed the grass off, and then the Cadillac was gleaming again.

  That was when Mathias spoke to Rob for the first time.

  “Watch the house and tell me if he comes out.”

  “What?”

  “Just watch for me, okay?” Mathias slipped a Leatherman multitool out of his pocket. He tested the driver’s door, found it unlocked, and popped the trunk release. Then he closed the door, went around the back of the car, and leaned in the trunk.

  “What’re you doing?” Rob said.

  Mathias didn’t answer. He had peeled the fabric backing away from the rear of the trunk and was using the screwdriver on the Leatherman. He moved quickly from the left side of the trunk to the right, head bowed and small hands working nimbly, and Rob realized he was loosening the taillights, and he began to grin.

  “Hey,” he said, “that’s great. Maybe he’ll get pulled over and get a ticket, the jerk.”

  Mathias closed the trunk and said, “Just keep your mouth shut about this, pussy.”

  Rob stared at him. The scrawny kid barely came up to his collarbone.

  “What did you call me?”

  “A pussy,” Mathias said calmly in a soft, high voice that was still untouched by puberty. “Keep your mouth shut, and keep out of my way. I don’t care what your drunk grandfather has to say about it, but you stay away from me, pussy.”

  Rob was initially more shocked than angry, but that changed fast. “Call me that again and I’ll break your nose.”

  For the first and only time that day, Mathias Burke smiled.

  “That wouldn’t end well for you,” he said.

  Rob glared down at him and realized that Mathias wasn’t wrong. It would go very badly for Rob if he hit this little kid. Word would get back to his grandfather, and there wouldn’t be a belt buckle in Texas big enough for Ray Barrett to use on Rob’s ass when he learned his grandson had hit a boy half his size. Rob was grudgingly impressed—this kid knew exactly what he could get away with, and why.

  Mathias looked away from him, back to Tom Gleason’s yard, and his eyes seemed to go both distant and thoughtful, the sort of expression Rob was used to seeing on his father’s face when he was sketching out an upcoming lecture or reading a book.

  “He put the dog inside,” Mathias said. “Because he knew I was mowing, he put the dog up. That would have been the way to burn his ass, though. His wife loves that dog. Probably more than she loves him.”

  Tom Gleason’s wife had a tiny, fluffy white dog that emitted endless shrill barks that tunneled right into your brain. The dog was often outside, clipped to a lead on a tether, where it would run in hysterical circles, yipping, yipping, yipping.

  “What are you talking about? What would burn his ass?” Rob asked, a little uneasy, because there was something about the kid’s thoughtful expression that seemed beyond his years but not in a good way.

  “I’m not talking to you. Get out of here before I tell your drunk grandpa that you’re costing me money.”

  Hit him, Rob thought. You’re going to get your ass knocked around for something this weekend anyhow, you just don’t know what yet, so at least earn it.

  But he didn’t hit him. He told himself—and Mathias—that he was holding back because of the age difference, the size difference, that he wasn’t going to stoop to picking fights with a little kid.

  In reality, though, he did not like that kid’s eyes.

  That night, Tom Gleason put the little dog out again, and it ran and barked and ran and barked, and Ray Barrett cursed it and cursed Tom. The next morning, things were quiet, and then the afternoon and evening were quiet. It wasn’t until the following day that Barbara Gleason showed up at the bar, teary-eyed, asking if anyone had seen little Pippa, who had somehow gotten off her tether and disappeared.

  Rob didn’t say anything then, but he couldn’t get Mathias out of his mind.

  That would have been the way to burn his ass, though. His wife loves that dog. Probably more than she loves him.

  In the afternoon, Rob went over to the Gleasons’ and asked if they had a photograph of the dog.

  “I thought I could put up some flyers,” he said.

  Barbara Gleason thanked him and gave him a photo, and he walked up to the post office, which was the only place he knew in Port Hope with a copy machine, and paid for fifty copies. He put them up around the village, stapling them to telephone poles and trees, and he saved five. Those he took to the Burke house.

  Mathias came outside when he saw him. Rob was stapling one of the posters right to their mailbox. Mathias walked up and studied it and didn’t say anything. His expression was flat, his eyes empty.

  “Did you take their dog?” Rob asked.

  “Of course not.”

  “I think you did.”

  “That’s crazy,” Mathias said, but there was a little light in his eyes, almost the expression of someone who was telling a joke and hadn’t gotten to the punch line. “I love those people. They love me. I do a good job for them, and they pay me well. Why would I do anything to them? The only one he yelled at that day was you. If anybody did anything to that dog, I’d start by asking you. But I won’t snitch on you. Keep looking. If you find it, you’ll be a hero.”

  He went back inside then. Rob stood and stared after him and then he stapled another flyer to the front door and went home.

  The Gleasons stayed in Port Hope all week, walking the streets and shouting the dog’s name and asking the neighbors to call, please call, if they saw Pippa. But nobody called about Pippa. If anyone ever saw the dog again, Rob wasn’t aware of it.

  It was twenty years after that incident that Rob heard Mathias’s name in connection with a crime again, but when he did, he was prepared to give Kimberly Crepeaux more credibility than most people would.

  He had no doubt at all that Mathias was, as everyone said, ambitious. He wondered a great deal about the source of the ambition, though, and about the quiet darkness that seemed threaded through him.

  While the divers searched the pond, Mathias had been under surveillance, and he was working on a house in Rockland when Barrett came for him.

  “We making an arrest?” the deputy from the surveillance detail asked Barrett eagerly when Barrett came up to his car. He was a jacked-up young kid who looked like he lived in the weight room.

  “Not yet,” Barrett said.

  “Nothing happening at the pond? I kept waiting, but I—”

  “Put your window up, all right? You’re parked too damn close to the house.”

  “He hasn’t so much as looked outside.”

  “Let’s not encourage it,” Barrett said, and then he left the deputy and walked up the street.

  Mathias was working on a house overlooking the harbor that was probably a hundred and fifty years old and
had once been a grand, three-story Colonial but now had the bearing of a strong man plagued by chronic pain—standing tall, but not easily, and not for long. Barrett could see Mathias through the front window. He was installing scaffolding along one massive wall of cracked plaster, and the floors were covered with paint-stained drop cloths. He looked up when Barrett rapped his knuckles on the glass, and he showed neither concern nor anger, just held up one finger indicating he’d be a moment. He finished tightening a bolt, set the ratchet down, dusted his hands off on his jeans, and then walked calmly to the door.

  “Special Agent Barrett,” he said. “Always a nice surprise, man. Special surprise.”

  He was a few inches shorter than Barrett’s six one and probably weighed twenty pounds less, but he had the whipcord strength that came with a life of labor. His father had been a bigger man, but most of his size had been beer weight.

  “Sorry to interrupt you, Mathias,” Barrett said, “but I’ve got a new question.”

  Mathias smiled broadly. “Always one more. You need to work on your memory, Special Agent. Seems like you’re always forgetting questions.”

  There were two Mathias Burke personalities, and he could switch between them easily. He was bright, well-spoken, and charming. He was also hard and intimidating when he wished to be. There were guys who acted hard around police because they didn’t want to seem scared, and then there were the rare guys who genuinely weren’t scared. Mathias Burke’s confidence wasn’t a facade.

  “Was Cass ever behind the wheel of your truck when you went to the pond?” Barrett asked.

  There was no reason to ask this question other than to test the response. Mathias was by now well aware that Barrett was pursuing leads about him and the two women. He wouldn’t have known about the confession yet, though, and Barrett badly wanted to see his reaction to the information about the pond.

  Mathias didn’t lose his smile. He leaned on the door frame, regarded Barrett with amusement, and then said, “Her head was. I do recall that. Behind the wheel, under the wheel, however you want to look at it. For maybe five, ten minutes? Hell, I’d been drinking, so probably fifteen. You know how that goes, man.” He winked.