The Hollow Girl (31 page)

“That is the building in which Kaufman’s body was found,” the anchorman continued. “We are expecting a statement from the FBI within several minutes. Garden City, as some of you will remember, was a locale hit very hard during the 9/11 attacks ….”

I stopped paying attention as I slipped into my coat. I looked at my watch: 8:43
P.M.

As I drove, I thought I might just have to give God another chance. Without the storm, I would have been in Vermont. I would already have had dinner with Sarah and Paul and the baby. I would have helped give Ruben a bath. By now, Paul and I would be sitting around, sharing a glass of good red wine as Sarah put Ruben to bed. As we sat, I would be telling Paul stories of how his biological father, Rico Tripoli, and I used to get up to all sorts of mischief when we were in uniform together at the Six-O Precinct in Coney Island. He would be happy and sad at tales of the father he never knew, as I would be happy and sad for having known his father too well. Being human was about functioning in the face of wild contradictions. In spite of Rico having betrayed me several times in ways that might have gotten me killed, I missed him terribly—more and more as I got older. I had once been closer to him than to Aaron. Rico and I had shared things as cops and men that could not be taken back or away by all the betrayal in the world.

But there had been a storm. There
was
a storm. I wasn’t in Vermont, sitting around the fire with my son-in-law, drinking wine and bullshitting about how Rico and I had done this and that. Though I
was
missing Rico as I drove. It was easy for me to picture Rico—not the desiccated Rico who fairly drank himself to death after prison, but the Rico with the wavy black hair and twinkle in his eye—sitting in the front passenger seat next to me, laughing at me for being such a stubborn bastard. Then again, Rico always settled for the easy way, the path of least resistance, the crumbs instead of the cookie.

According to the GPS, my estimated travel time between the hotel and Farmington Falls—the town where the Johns family estate was located, according to the newspaper—was about twenty minutes. But given the road conditions and the rate at which the snow was coming down, it had taken me almost an hour. Then it took an additional few minutes to get the address out of the guy at the local gas station.

“Sure I know the Johns House,” he said. “Everybody in town knows the Johns House.”

The Johns House was the biggest Victorian in a town full of big old Victorians. There was a fancy wooden For Sale sign with engraved gold lettering posted by the stone and wrought-iron gate. The grand and fussy old lady was surrounded by a classic New England stone wall. Seeing the house they had lived in made it easy for me to picture the Johns as something out of Henry James or Poe. In spite of their fatal connection to the Hollow Girl, their lives and tragedies certainly seemed cut from the cloth of a long-ago era.

Just before I got out of Aaron’s car, my phone buzzed in my pocket. It was Nancy Lustig. I wasn’t mad at her for how she’d treated me. On the other hand, whatever magic there had been between us for all those years, a magic that had been enhanced in the dark of her bedroom, was gone, irretrievably gone. That was all right, I thought. Mayflies live for a few hours. Tortoises and lobsters live for hundreds of years, but in the grand scheme of things it’s not about how long, but how well. At least, that’s what I used to tell myself during chemo.

“Yeah,” I whispered.

“Did you hear?”

“I heard. Listen to me, Nancy. Tell Griggs I’m at the Johns’s old house in Farmington Falls. He’ll know what to do. Thanks again.”

I clicked off and shut off the phone. Didn’t want it buzzing at the wrong moment.

Outside the car, there was that eerie quiet of falling snow. The wind whipped up and then fell back into a harmony of silence with the snow and the dark. I expected that it never got too loud in Farmington Falls to begin with. A diffuse pinkish light, the source of which I could not divine, fell across the blanket of snow that already covered the ground. I eased the car door closed behind me, checked my watch, and took in what I could from where I had parked. I’d made sure to drive past the house and not stop directly in front of it. The Johns’s house was on a low hill with old trees placed strategically about the property to provide shade and privacy. Not quite buried in the silence, I could just about make out the snow-muffled trickle of running water from the wide stream that ran through the area. I had crossed over a quaint wooden bridge that spanned the stream a block east of the Johns’s house. And there were suddenly other noises emerging from the pinkish dark: the putter and hum of a generator.

I did not look for lights in the upper floors of the house, as I was confident where this last act of the drama was meant to be played out. I needed to find the basement door, and quickly. As I hurried through the snow, I heard the ticking in my head that had played during last evening’s Hollow Girl post. I was lucky that the snow that had fallen over the early sleet was powdery and did not crunch under my weight. On the other hand, it got pretty treacherous when my shoes hit the slick layer of ice beneath the fluff and I fell on my face.

“Fuck!” I whispered as I reached the padlocked steel bulkhead doors leading directly into the basement. At one time, these doors would have been made from wood. Now there was no hope of me gaining access this way. I had been pretty stealthy in my approach, fearing that Burton Johns would rather hang Siobhan than be stopped, even if it meant adjusting his timetable. When I heard the wail of sirens in the distance, it seemed to me that continued stealth was moot. I found the back door, put my elbow through the glass à la Mike Bursaw, and broke into the house. I switched my cell phone back on and used it as a flashlight.

I heard feet—no, paws—scratching on the wooden floor. I pulled my gun down, but something knocked my cell away. A sharp, searing pain shot up my left arm. I was down, a thick-bodied dog, a Rottweiler, trying to tear my wrist off my arm and my arm off my body. Drool dripped down onto my face from the dog’s mouth as he shook his head side to side, my wrist in his jaws. I fought hard not to panic, no mean feat in the midst of the most primal of experiences. I suppose I could have just shot him in the side and been done with it, but I had seen too much innocent blood spilled in my life. So instead I put my gun to the dog’s left hind quarter and fired. It yelped in pain and let go of my wrist. I scrambled to my feet, banged around in the dark as I lumbered away. Behind me, the dog struggled to get to its feet and chase after me, but couldn’t manage it.

I found what I thought must be the basement door. Locked. I checked my watch. It was 10:13. If Johns hadn’t already hanged the Hollow Girl and left her dangling at the end of the rope for the audience to see, he would soon enough. I didn’t bother shouldering the door. I shot holes in the lock and the hinges, using all my remaining ammo to do so. Then I shouldered the door. It gave way more easily than I’d anticipated, and I toppled headfirst down a long flight of wooden stairs. It was a miracle I didn’t snap my neck along the way. I lay breathless and stunned in a twisted heap of myself at the basement landing.

Siobhan’s bound body was now propped up on the plywood and concrete block platform. She was on her knees, the noose around her neck, straining against her windpipe. She seemed to be unconscious. There was a camera on a tripod placed about ten feet in front of her, and Burton Wentworth Johns was standing just behind the camera. When I could breathe again, I gagged at the ammonia stink of urine and nauseating sewer pipe odor of old feces. As I forced myself to my feet, Johns calmly stepped away from the camera, walked over to the platform and kicked the concrete blocks out from beneath it. Siobhan’s body unfolded like an Olympic diver’s falling into the pool below, but she never quite made it to the water.

Johns had miscalculated. He hadn’t anticipated that the makeshift gallows he’d built would create a pile of debris beneath Siobhan, preventing her falling with enough momentum to snap her neck. Her feet caught on the pile. I ran to her, wrapping my arms around her bound body, lifting her up, holding her as best I could. A fresh kind of pain rudely introduced itself to me, a pain so burning hot and powerful that it knocked me sideways and filled my body with fire. It happened so fast that I only heard the shot in retrospect. But I knew I could not let the Hollow Girl go. I had let too many people down in my life, their names and faces scrolling by in an instant. Then there was more pain. More noise. There was lots of noise, a world full of thunder and flame. Then darkness as quiet and profound as snowfall.

When I opened my eyes, the pain had me wishing for that profound darkness. I was getting jolted pretty good. There was a mask over my face. I was cold and wet and on fire. I saw tubes and plastic bags. My head fell to my left. There was a woman next to me. There was a mask on her face, too. There were plastic tubes sticking out of her arm. There were blurry men between us talking real loud and too fast, saying things I couldn’t understand. Numbers. I remember they were speaking numbers.

* * *

Sarah was sitting next to me, asleep in a chair. The lighting in the room was dim, but I knew my daughter. I had watched her being born, her red curls preceding her into the world. It was still a feeling unmatched in my life, the moment of my daughter’s birth. I knew I was in a hospital, knew it before I had even opened my eyes. Hospitals have that smell. I wanted to stop smelling it as soon as I could. Then I never wanted to smell it again.

* * *

The room was full of people, most of whom I was thrilled to see. Sarah, Paul, and Ruben were there. Aaron and Cindy, too. My little sister Miriam was there. Klaus. Fuqua. Bursaw. Marina Conseco and Carmella.
What?
Ferguson May, Rico and Katy. Bobby Friedman and Mr. Roth.
No, no. Wait.
Ferguson May, the Plato of the Six-O, had been stabbed through the eye during a domestic dispute thirty years ago.
And wait
,
these others
… I squeezed my eyes shut and made the dream go away. When I opened my eyes, I was alone. I stared up at the ceiling for the rest of the night and was happy to hear the whirring and beeping of machines.

* * *

The next time I opened my eyes, a doctor was standing over me. Dr. Whitaker, he said his name was.

“You’re a lucky man, Mr. Prager.”

Why do doctors always say that? If I was a lucky man, I wouldn’t have gotten shot or had stomach cancer in the first place.

“You were shot through your left shoulder. The wound was a through and through that missed your heart by about this much.” He held his index finger and thumb two inches apart. “The other shot is the one that did more damage, I’m afraid. It hit your right kidney and that slowed the bullet up so that it decided to plow around inside you. We’ve sewn you up pretty well, and we think we’ll be able to save your kidney, but you have to take it easy. We’ve kept you pretty drugged up to this point, but now you have to begin your recovery in earnest. I’ll be in to see you tomorrow.” He shook my hand. “I’ve never saved a hero’s life before.”

“I’m nobody’s hero, Doc. No such thing as a hero.”

“There’s someone here to see you who might disagree.”

When he left the room, a woman walked in past him. I hardly recognized her without her ropes and with her eyes open. We didn’t really talk. What was there to say? She just wanted to hold my hand, and I let her.

Brooklyn would live only in my memory now that Sarah had sold my condo in Sheepshead Bay and I had settled into my life as grandpa in semi-residence in Vermont. I would go back—had gone back—but it was different. Although it had taken almost two-thirds of a century to do it, I’d finally cut the umbilical cord that had kept me tied to Coney Island.

A wise man once said that a place, anyplace, stops existing once you’ve left it. He was wise, but wrong. Brooklyn would live inside me. I would be able to breathe in the salt smell of the ocean breezes that blew along the boardwalk until I shut my eyes for the last time. And carried on those breezes would be the coconut scent of summer girls covered in suntan lotion, and the raw perfume of boiling oil from Nathan’s. I would hear the
thud, thud, thud, thud
of bicycle tires and
clickety-clack
of women’s sandals on the weathered planks of the old boardwalk. The shrieks and screams of kids on the Cyclone would always ring in my ears. Some of those shrieks were mine. On quiet days in my new house I could call up the sound of balls bouncing off the concrete walls at the West 5th Street handball courts. I would be able to taste the oniony potato knishes from Hirsch’s. And the fireworks … there would always be fireworks on Tuesday nights on the boardwalk in my mind.

It had taken months for me to recover from the gunshots, but it was cake compared to the cancer. The dog I’d shot recovered in less time. I was glad of that, and that I’d chosen not to just kill him. Burton Wentworth Johns had not recovered from his wounds, which was just as well. According to papers they found after the shootout, Johns hadn’t intended to live much longer anyway. I’d been right about him, just not right enough. He was guilt-stricken over his sister’s suicide because he had been a driving force behind it. It came out that he had sexually abused Emma one way or another since they were eight years old. Love, I thought, had as many ugly permutations as beautiful ones. No wonder Emma could relate to the Hollow Girl.

As I suspected, Johns had slipped back into the United States from Mexico through Arizona. Johns had been willing to go further than I’d imagined in order to avenge Emma. Not only had he enlisted Millicent McCumber and Anthony Rizzo’s help, but he’d also been wise enough to use Robert Allen Kaufman as a kind of insurance policy, a hedge in case the wheels started to come off the original plan. Kaufman, so blinded by his own hate and thirst for revenge, had no idea what Johns ultimately had in mind. It had been Burton Johns himself who’d called in the anonymous tip to the FBI about Kaufman. And when they checked Kaufman out, the FBI found everything Johns had left for them to find. But the real genius of the plan was how he had lured Siobhan Bracken so willingly into it.