‘Were you the one who talked to Oweny and Joey Tuna?’
The enormity of the question nearly floored Dempsey. He couldn’t even begin to conceive of how Ryan had found the balls to ask it. Ryan was asking him if he had ratted them out to Oweny and Joey. And if he said ‘Yes’, what then? Was Ryan going to pull out a gun and kill him? What was the kid thinking?
But Dempsey knew what Ryan was thinking. He knew because he was under the same pressures, and had made the same connections. By killing Joey, Tommy had killed them all. None of them would be allowed to walk away if they stuck together, but one of them might live a little longer if he sold them out to Oweny and the rest. All it would take was a phone call, and when the time came, and the motel doors were kicked in, and the guns roared and the blood flowed, they might remember that you were the guy who gave up Tommy Morris, and maybe they would stick to the deal they had promised you.
Maybe.
‘No, Frankie, I never talked to them. My mother’s gone, but I swear it on my father’s life, and on my own. I never gave them anything.’
Ryan looked deep into his eyes, then turned away again.
‘I believe you,’ he said. ‘I’d know if you were lying.’
Dempsey realized that he had been holding his glass too tightly, ready to use it on Ryan if it seemed that his fears were about to get the better of him.
‘I had to ask,’ said Ryan. Even though he thought Dempsey was an animal, Ryan knew that he represented the best hope of survival for Tommy and himself, because the men who were coming for them would be worse even than Dempsey. What mattered was only that Dempsey was sound.
‘Finish your drink,’ said Dempsey, and the two men sat together in silence until the lights dimmed, and the bar emptied, and the bartender disappeared, and there was only themselves and Lowell George singing ‘Willin’,’ all of them out on the road late, all of them waiting for a sign to move on.
The traffic was sparse when at last they left the bar. They paid it no heed, and so neither of them noticed the car parked in the shadows across the street, or the occupants of the vehicle: a couple in their twenties, the horse-faced woman in the driver’s seat no longer frightened and weeping as she had seemed in the Wanderer, her male companion beside her dressed in khakis and a polo shirt, not a single hair on his head out of place, each of them expressionlessly watching the progress of the two men.
23
R
andall woke again to the silence of the house. He was worried. He didn’t understand. The girl had still not returned. Where was she? He listened, half expecting to hear the sound of the television from downstairs. She wasn’t supposed to watch it after ten p.m., but sometimes she did, and unless he was in a bad mood he would not fight her over it. But there was no noise, only the sound of his own breathing in the room.
There were times when he would play music late at night: Schumann, Tchaikovsky, Chopin. He had a collection of vinyl, and a good record player. He believed that classical music in particular sounded better on vinyl: warmer, more human. He had always wanted to be a pianist, but the handful of lessons he had taken since his release had revealed to him his singular lack of talent and application. He could have persisted, he supposed, but to what end? He could never approach even an iota of the genius of Ashkenazy or Zimerman, the great interpreter of Chopin, better even than Rubinstein. So he contented himself with admiring the greatness of others, and the girl was permitted to listen too, if she chose. Mostly, though, she tended to slip away. She resented his indulgences, resented anything that gave him peace or pleasure. Yet he forgave her her moods, because she was at once so young and so old.
Where was she? He wanted to know. This was not how it was supposed to end between them.
The girl had first appeared to him as he sat in one of the holding cells at the station house. They had isolated him from the other prisoners for his own security. The next day he was to be transported to juvie, and would remain there until his trial. Bail would not be applied for. The nature of the crime forbade it, but it was felt that the boys would probably be safer away from their homes anyway. Although Selina Day’s killers had not been identified, even the birds in the trees called their names. One of Selina’s aunts was interviewed on television, and said that she could find no forgiveness in her heart for those who had taken her niece from the world, children though they were themselves. When asked if she spoke for all of Selina’s family, she replied tartly that she spoke for ‘all good people.’
Selina’s mother made no comment on the apprehension of her daughter’s killers. It would not bring her little girl back, and the ages of the boys involved had only added to the horror of what had been done. The media was discouraged from approaching her as the black community closed protectively around the Day family, and thus there were no cameras to witness a woman of middle age approach the Day house and knock on the door; nor were there microphones to pick up her words as she introduced herself as the mother of William Lagenheimer. No reporter waited, pen in hand, to record his impressions of the scene as Selina Day’s mother reached out to the older woman and slowly, softly embraced her, children now lost to both, the pair united in grief.
After the initial shock of discovery and confession, the boy had accepted his situation with equanimity, even stoicism. Later, the psychologists and the social workers would express surprise at that fact, and would make assumptions about his character based on it, but they were wrong in all that they thought. Just as he would later feel no sadness at coming to terms with his limitations as a pianist, and would refuse to rail at the Fates for not gifting him the talents that he desired, so too he found a strength within himself following the girl’s death. Regret, he now knew, was a useless emotion, the poor cousin of guilt. As a boy, he would not have been able to couch his view in those terms, yet he had instinctively understood it to be true. If he was sorry for what they had done to the girl, it was only because of all that had resulted from it.
The cell was very warm, and the bed was hard. A drunk nearby had shouted at him until one of the policemen told him to shut up. The policeman had then checked on the boy. They had taken away his shoelaces and his belt. He didn’t know why, not then. The policeman asked the boy if he was okay, and he replied that, yes, he was. He requested some water, and it was brought to him in a paper cup. After that he was left alone, and the cells stayed quiet.
He had been trying to sleep, his head turned to the wall, when he smelled her. He knew it was she because something of her odor was still with him. He’d tried washing it from his hands, but it had lingered: cheap drugstore perfume, sickly and cloying. It had prevented him from eating the prison food, because that smelled of her too. With her dying, she had polluted him.
Now the smell was stronger, more pungent, and he felt a hand upon his back, pushing at him, demanding his attention. He didn’t want to look, though. To look would be to acknowledge the reality of her presence, to give her power over him, and he didn’t want that, so he closed his eyes tightly and pretended to be asleep, hoping she would go away.
But she didn’t. Instead, her fingers probed at him. She touched his eyes, and his ears, then stroked his cheek before forcing his lips apart. He tried to keep his teeth together, but his gorge was rising and he gagged. Now her hand was deep in his mouth, her fingertips on his tongue. He bit down on them, but the grip on his tongue grew stronger, and he was choking on his own vomit and the sweet-sour stink of her. With one hand buried in his hair, and the other holding his tongue, she made him face her, made him look upon what they had wrought.
She never spoke. She could not, for during the assault she had bitten off most of her own tongue.
He stared into her eyes, and she entered him, just as her attackers had once hoped to enter her. In that moment he was lost to her. She released her hold upon him, and kissed him, and he tasted the blood. A great lethargy came over him, and he fell into a deep sleep. When he woke she was gone, but she returned that night, and the next, and every night after. His only respite from her was during the hearing itself, and he came to welcome the tedium of it, the arguments and counterarguments, the testimony of experts, the milk and sandwiches and cookies that they gave him for lunch. His only wish was that his parents had not been there. They gave him no comfort, for he felt their shame at what their son had become.
In the evenings he would be returned to his new cell at juvie. They were called ‘rooms,’ but it was still a cell. A room you could leave when you chose to do so; a cell you could not. Sometimes, she would already be waiting for him there. He would smell her as he approached the cell, and his footsteps would slow, forcing the guard to steer him on, one hand on his arm, the other at his back. At other times, she would come only when dark had fallen, and he would wonder where she had been. They would not let him speak to his co-accused, so he could not ask him if the girl appeared to him as well, if she divided her time between them like a sluttish girlfriend who could not decide her favorite among her suitors. But, no, how could she be with them both? She spent every night with him. Whenever he woke, she was there. She was always there.
When he was almost eighteen they moved him to another facility, and she followed him. For a time, they made him share a cell, but that arrangement didn’t last long. His cellmate was older than him by ten years and smelled of sour milk. One of his eyes was smaller than the other, and his eyelashes were crusted with hardened mucus. He had twisted fingernails. They reminded the boy of thorns. He did not speak, not ever. Nor, it seemed, did he sleep, for as the boy tossed and turned he could see the silhouette of his cellmate’s head hanging over the edge of the bunk above, watching him.
On the third night, as he lay sleeping, the boy was attacked. He knew what the older man wanted, and tried to fight him off. Eventually his screams brought a guard, and the next day he was moved to another cell in a different wing while his cellmate went to solitary confinement. The girl consoled the boy. She held him in the dark. Nobody was supposed to hurt him.
Nobody, except her.
Three days later, his tormentor committed suicide in solitary by opening an artery in his left arm, tearing apart his flesh with a rusty nail in order to let the blood flow.
The girl had smelled different that night when she came to the boy.
She had smelled of sour milk.
He never mentioned her to the psychiatrists or the guards or to anyone else. She was not to be spoken of. He was hers, and she was his. He feared her, but he thought that he might almost have loved her too.
Now, years later, in another room, in another state, he wished for her to come, to confirm that it was over at last. As if she had responded to his wish, he suddenly smelled her scent. He rolled over in bed and caught sight of her, squatting in the shadows, watching him. The shock of it caused him to cry out. She rarely did that these days. If she entered his room at night she would crawl in beside him, working her way up under the covers from the base of the bed; or, if she was in a temper, she would pull the bedclothes from him or scratch at the window with her fingernails, preventing him from sleeping. Otherwise, she kept to her own places, and the basement in particular.
But she’d been different since the detective came to visit, and he felt certain that her absence was linked to him. Then again, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d entertained someone in the house. Randall’s behavior did not strike anyone in Pastor’s Bay as odd. The farther north one traveled in the state, the more likely one was to encounter families or individuals who didn’t want to be disturbed, who liked to keep themselves to themselves. Maine was a state of scattered houses, scattered towns, scattered people. If you wanted folk living so close they could hear you scratch, there were big cities that would suit you better. If you wanted to scratch in peace, then Maine was the place. Even his local clients rarely ventured beyond the hall when they stopped by to drop off papers or clear up some item of business. Out of politeness he would usually offer coffee, or ask them to take a seat, but they rarely took up the invitation, and when they did the girl showed little interest in them. In her way, she was as solitary a soul as he was. They were twin dark stars, bound together by the gravitational pull of the past.
Nevertheless, Randall was not a hermit. He attended meetings of the town council, and took care of its accounts gratis. He assisted at charity events, went out with his shovel in winter to clear paths for the older folk, and had even, very briefly, dated a divorcée who moved to Pastor’s Bay from Quebec to paint landscapes, and who volunteered at the library. Their halting relationship had occasioned some gossip in the town, not least because it had generally been assumed that Randall Haight was gay. The fact that he wasn’t disappointed those who thought that having a gay accountant, even a closeted one, added some much needed color to the social makeup of Pastor’s Bay, and strenuous efforts were made to find someone else who might be gay in order to make up for the perceived imbalance.
The relationship hadn’t ended badly as such. There had been no big argument, no accusations of one party misleading the other. Randall had simply stopped calling, and then had left town for a couple of weeks in his car without informing the woman of where he was going, or when he might be back. By the time he returned the woman had packed up her belongings and was preparing to move away, having decided that she could paint just as well in a place where there were more than two bars, and more than two eligible men. She had liked Randall, though. She told her friends that she couldn’t understand why he’d suddenly gone cold on her.