by Harry Dolan
The dead bolt surrenders and he’s in. He pushes the door shut behind him.
Easy. The hardest part was the wait.
He and Nick Ensen touched down in Houston around ten o’clock this morning, rented a car, and drove to Sean’s neighborhood. Jimmy parked a few blocks away, left Nick in the car, and went on foot to scope out Sean’s house. He spotted two police cars on the block, one marked and one unmarked.
Not so bad, he thought. He was afraid there might be reporters camped out on the lawn.
Jimmy walked back to the rental car and drove aimlessly for a while. He decided he needed someplace with a television: a hotel room or a bar or a diner. He settled for a diner with flat screens on every wall, two of them tuned to football games, the other two to cable news.
Nick sat across from him in a booth, eating french fries and sipping Coke through a straw. He had his phone out and his earbuds in. He’d been like that on the plane too. Listening to music.
An encouraging sign, Jimmy thought. The kid could entertain himself.
Jimmy drank coffee and watched the news. The story was still largely focused on Henry Keen. Reporters had interviewed his neighbors and tracked down some of the people he worked with at a printing plant where he was a press operator. They had found his sister, too, but she didn’t want to talk. CNN had tape of her walking away from a camera crew with her head bowed. She looked as if she wanted to cry.
“She needs to wise up,” Jimmy said.
He was talking to himself, but Nick plucked an earbud from his ear to listen.
“The shooter’s sister,” Jimmy said. “She should make a statement through a lawyer. Or better yet, find some uncle or cousin who likes to talk and make him the family spokesman. Have him read a statement in front of the cameras. ‘We’re shocked and saddened and praying for the victims.’ There are rituals that have to be observed. Otherwise the newspeople will keep hounding her.”
Nick nodded and went back to his music, and Jimmy flagged a waitress and got her to refill his coffee. Later on they ordered dinner—the kid had a cheeseburger and another order of french fries—and when it started to get dark they headed out. Jimmy let the kid drive the rental car, and when they cruised past Sean’s house the police cars were gone.
They went around the block to a parallel street, and Jimmy had Nick park and told him to stay alert. On foot, Jimmy cut through someone’s yard and came at Sean’s house from the back.
Now he has worked the locks and he’s inside. The place seems familiar, though he’s never been here. Jimmy has known Sean since they were kids. Sean was his brother Cole’s best friend. He was a near-constant presence in the Harper house; he and his mother lived down the block. Sean’s father had never been around, and his mother drank, so the Harpers took responsibility for much of his care and feeding. Jimmy’s mother bought Sean’s school clothes. Jimmy’s father fixed up a bike for him to ride. And when Sean’s mother drove her Ford Focus into a tree one night in August when Sean was thirteen, he didn’t go to relatives. He came to live with the Harpers.
They set up a place for him in a corner of the basement. Just a narrow bed and an old dresser. Jimmy can picture it: Sean’s meager possessions lined up on top of that dresser, his clothes folded in the drawers, his bed made every morning. The compulsive neatness of it—striving to put things in order.
This house outside Houston is the same. Jimmy flicks on a small flashlight and makes his way through the rooms. He sees Sean everywhere: in the sparse furnishings, in the way a sofa and an armchair align at a perfect ninety-degree angle. In the strict organization: everything in its place.
Jimmy is looking for pictures and papers, and he’s disappointed. There are framed photographs on the walls, but none of them show people. There’s no address book left behind, no cards or letters, nothing to indicate what friends Sean might have made in his new city. And nothing to suggest where he might be now.
There are clothes in the closet that make it plain Sean was living here with a woman. It could be Molly: the sizes and styles seem right. But even that isn’t a sure thing.
It’s frustrating, but more or less what Jimmy expected. He never hoped to find easy answers.
He lingers in the house longer than he needs to. Outside, it starts to rain. He sits in Sean’s kitchen and watches the drops collect on a window, sees them trail down the surface of the glass.
When he leaves, he’s tempted to feel regret, but he tells himself the visit was necessary, even if it came to nothing. He engages the spring lock and steps out into the rain and pulls the door shut. He doesn’t bother about the dead bolt.
There are lights on in the house next door. Jimmy didn’t pay them much attention before. But as he descends the wooden steps he realizes there’s someone sitting over there—a woman in a wicker chair under the eaves of the back porch.
She sits up a little straighter; her chin rises. It’s plain: she sees him.
There’s only one thing to do when you’re caught red-handed: play it cool. Jimmy waves at her. Walks toward her.
As he gets closer to the light of the porch, the woman looks confused. He flashes her a smile.
Jimmy Harper is six feet tall and broad shouldered. He has a bruiser’s build that he inherited from his father. But while his father put on weight as he aged, Jimmy has kept himself fit. While his father’s hair thinned, Jimmy’s has stayed thick and wavy.
When he smiles, he has dimples in his cheeks. He has straight white teeth from two years of orthodontia. He’s a handsome rogue—a charmer, as his mother would say.
Carla Whyte sees him smile, and though he’s a stranger, she’s charmed.
When he’s close, she calls out: “I thought you were someone else.”
“And who would that be?” he says.
“Someone who was here before. A policeman.”
Jimmy makes the smile bigger. “I’m not a policeman.”
“Who are you?”
“An old friend of Sean’s.”
He doesn’t step onto the porch. He stands in the rain. That’s part of the charm.
“Did Sean give you a key?” she asks him.
He could lie, or he could tell the truth.
“No,” he says.
“But you were in the house just now.”
He spreads his arms. “I have a way with locks.”
He puts some mischief in the words, and they work the way he intended them to.
The woman laughs.
“You’re a reporter, aren’t you?” she says.
“I’m a locksmith.”
“There was a reporter here this afternoon. He tried to bribe me.”
“What for?” Jimmy asks.
“To let him in that house. I own it. I don’t know what he hoped to find there. I didn’t let him in.”
“As well you shouldn’t.”
“I don’t approve of reporters.”
“I don’t either. They’re scoundrels. I wouldn’t help one if I found him wounded by the wayside.”
Another laugh. Jimmy puts one foot on the lowest step of the porch. The woman beckons him up.
It’s only courtesy, letting a stranger come in from the rain.
There’s a second wicker chair. She waves him into it. There’s a small table with a bottle of wine, about half full. Only one wineglass and nothing in it but the dregs. She has a glow about her. She’s tipsy.
It’s one reason she’s not afraid of him.
There’s another: her keys are on the table, and there’s a canister of pepper mace attached to her key ring. A sad necessity for a woman living alone. She reaches for the keys and moves them to her lap, out of his reach.
Jimmy shows no interest in the move. “What’s your name?” he says.
“Carla.”
“I’m John. John Donne.”
“Like the poet.”
“He was a preacher too.”
“You’re not a preacher.”
“No. Not me.”
“You’re a f
riend of Sean’s,” she says. “Did you think he’d be at home?”
“I had nowhere else to look for him.” Jimmy says. “I saw this business on the news and thought he might need help. It can knock you back on your heels, having to shoot somebody. So I drove in.”
“From where?”
“From Lubbock.”
“That’s a long drive.”
“Sean’s a good friend. Molly too.”
He’s taking a risk, because the woman living with Sean might not be Molly, or if she is, she might be using a different first name. But the risk pays off.
“You know Molly?” Carla says.
“If you know Sean, you know Molly. They’re a pair. Like salt and pepper. Like sugar and spice. Like biscuits and gravy—”
“Like frick and frack,” she says. “Like dogs and cats. You like to talk, don’t you?”
“That I do.”
“Unlike Sean.”
“Yes. He’s a quiet one, isn’t he? A hard nut to crack. But you and Molly, you must be fast friends.”
“Why do you say that?”
“The two of you living so close together. And both of you with a fondness for red wine.”
She smiles, and Jimmy knows he’s hit the mark.
“I’ll tell you the truth,” he says. “I don’t know Molly well. But Sean I’ve known since we were kids. Our families lived on the same street. Here’s what I can say for him, for what he was like back then. There was a dog on our street, an old, ragged thing with one eye. It didn’t belong to anybody, but people would feed it. Sean always made sure it had water. Good cold water in a metal bowl, fresh every day.
“One afternoon in the summer, he saw that bowl tipped over. He went looking for the dog. And he found it. Tied with a length of clothesline to a telephone pole by a vacant lot. There were three boys around it with sticks in their hands, and they would dance in and crack those sticks over the dog’s back and dance away again so they were out of reach. They didn’t need to bother: there was no fight in that dog. It didn’t try to bite them. It only suffered and whined.
“Sean ran up to those boys and tried to grab a stick away from one of them, but they were bigger than he was. They laughed at him and pushed him down. He had nothing to defend himself with but a jackknife with a two-inch folding blade. I don’t know how far he could have gotten with it, but he never tried to cut them. He stayed down on the ground and sawed through the clothesline. The boys kicked at him, but he managed to get the dog loose.”
Jimmy pauses, and Carla says, “What happened then?”
“The dog ran, and Sean was left there with those three boys and their sticks. One of them knocked the knife away, and they did what boys like that do. Someone was going to get a beating. Sean or the dog. They didn’t care.”
The rain has tapered off to a patter. Random drops fall from the eaves, twinkling in the light that comes out to the porch from the kitchen. Carla adds wine to her glass and sips from it and watches Jimmy. The same light glints in her green eyes.
“You can tell a story,” she says. “I’ll give you that.”
Jimmy grins.
She looks at her glass and remembers her manners.
“Are you thirsty?” she asks.
“I could stand a drink,” Jimmy says.
She sets her glass aside, rises, and says, “Wait here.” Then she’s moving past him. The keys that were in her lap go into a pocket of the sweater she’s wearing. The sweater covers a flowered dress that shows off her legs. Jimmy admires them as she goes by. She opens the screen door and slips into the house.
She returns with another glass and fills it and tops off her own, emptying the bottle. Jimmy takes the new glass and raises it to her in a silent toast. Both of them drink.
Then they’re shy with each other, strangers who have run out of conversation. They tend to their glasses and look out at the rain. It’s awkward, but Jimmy doesn’t mind awkwardness. It can work for him, he thinks. All he needs is to be patient. She may have something to tell him, but he won’t get it if he asks for it. He has to wait and let her be the one to talk.
She does. “In vino veritas,” she says.
He gives her a quizzical look.
“We’re drinking wine,” she says. “So you have to tell the truth. Can we agree on that?”
He nods. “We can.”
She stretches out her legs, crosses them at the ankles.
“You swear to me you’re not a reporter?” she says.
“I swear.”
“What do you do?”
“I own an auto repair shop.”
“You fix cars?”
“Sometimes.”
“Let me see your hand.”
She wants the right one. He shifts the wineglass to his left and lets her have it. She examines his palm, touches the calluses. Turns his hand over and rubs her thumb over the scars on his knuckles.
He passes muster. She lets the hand go.
“You’re really Sean’s friend?” she asks.
“I’ve known him longer than anyone left on earth.”
“Then you shouldn’t have to look for him, should you?” she says. “He would come to you, if he wanted your help.”
“I don’t know what he’d do,” Jimmy says. “It’s been years since I’ve seen him.”
Carla holds her glass by the stem, rolling it between her fingers. “You’re hoping I can tell you where he is.”
“Yes.”
“I can’t. I don’t know where he is.”
“But you know something,” Jimmy says.
She doesn’t deny it. He watches her playing with the glass.
“The way I see it,” she says, “you should want what Sean wants, if you’re his friend.”
“Sure.”
“If he wanted to talk to the police or to reporters or to anybody, he would talk to them. If he wanted to be found, he would let them find him. Don’t you think?”
“Absolutely.”
“So it’s not for us to second-guess him. Right?”
“I see what you mean.”
She leans toward him, her green eyes looking eager. “But I’m right. Aren’t I right? If we’re Sean’s friends, then we should respect his wishes. I shouldn’t tell you what I know, just like I didn’t tell the police. And you shouldn’t want me to tell you. We should just drink to Sean and wish him well.”
She’s happy with her little speech. She drinks, and Jimmy does too. The rain patters on the roof. An easy time passes. No words. The two of them looking out at the dark lawn.
Jimmy says, “You didn’t tell the police.”
She’s somewhere else, in her own thoughts. She turns to him, looking serious.
“Hmm?”
“There’s something you know,” Jimmy says. “But you didn’t tell the police.”
She smiles a little and shakes her head, as if he’s being naughty. “You won’t get it out of me,” she says. “I’m determined.”
“But there’s something. But not about Sean. You don’t know where he is.”
She gives him a sly look over the rim of her glass. “Not him. Her. Molly. But that’s all you get. I’m not telling you any more. You might as well give up. I’m stubborn.”
“What if I’m stubborn too?”
Her smile grows wider. “I bet you are. But let’s be nice. No more prying. You can have one more glass of wine. And then off with you.”
She reaches for the bottle. Remembers it’s empty. She plants her feet and rises from her chair. Rests a hand on his shoulder as she passes him. “I’ll be right back,” she says.
Then she’s through the screen door and into the kitchen. Jimmy Harper watches her go, and he’s pleased. He thinks he can get what he needs from her if he plays it right.
He gets up, draws open the screen door, and passes in. Carla is standing at the kitchen counter with her back to him. She’s got a corkscrew; she’s opening a fresh bottle of wine.
She hears the door, and his footsteps on the kit
chen tile. She glances back at him.
“I didn’t say you could come in.”
The words are playful. She’s not afraid of him. She’s not alarmed.
“You didn’t say I should stay out,” he offers.
It makes her laugh. She’s back to twisting the corkscrew.
He likes the shape of her, the way the sweater drapes down from her shoulders, the look of her bare calves.
He crosses the room until he’s standing behind her, close enough to touch. He lays his right hand on her hip.
“Well, I don’t know about that,” she says.
Her voice is smooth and low. Flirty.
He takes in some of the details of the room: white cupboards, black tiles on the wall above the sink. There’s a plaque above a window that reads: THIS IS WHERE YOU ARE NOW.
He puts his other hand on her other hip.
“I definitely don’t know about that,” she says.
But she leans back against him, the wine bottle forgotten.
His hands move up to her waist. He takes in the smell of her hair. Strawberries.
She tips her head back on his shoulder and it’s an offer. He accepts: kisses the side of her neck. She turns until they’re facing, and then her mouth is on his, her lips parting, her tongue sliding over his teeth.
Jimmy pulls the sweater off her shoulders and she gets her arms out of the sleeves and tosses it away. Then the two of them are tangled together: he can feel her fingers at the back of his neck, twisting into his hair. He moves his hands down her body over the dress, and lower, until they’re under the dress and moving back up again. Her body is warm and firm.
He can feel her pressing against him, her arms around him and one leg, too, trying to encircle him. His hands find her panties, silk and lace, and he hears her gasp as he tugs them down. He lifts her up in one smooth motion and sits her on the counter. The dress is up around her waist now and her legs are parted.
He steps back to look at her. Because he’s human, and whatever else he’s doing here, she’s an attractive woman. He wants to see her. As he looks her over, his fingers are working the buckle of his belt. It’s a mistake. He’s moving too fast.
“Whoa. Easy,” she says. And slides down from the counter.
