Bad Move (38 page)

"You're back to work?" I heard Trixie ask Sarah from across the kitchen.

She nodded. "I took a week, went back. But Zack and I, we're thinking maybe of taking a vacation."

I stopped chewing so I could hear more.

"Maybe a cottage, maybe even a week in Paris."

"That would be fabulous," Trixie said. It sure would, I thought.

Earl came up to me, kept me from hearing anything else. There was a bit of tomato sauce on the cigarette he had between his lips. "So you're sure you kept me out of it?"

"So far," I said. "What if I have to tell at some point?"

Earl shrugged. "Thing is, I'm thinking of moving on. Let the Asians get somebody else to run the house. I don't own it. I can walk away. Chances are, by the time you have to tell all, I won't be around."

I smiled. All I could think to say was "Yeah."

Angie strolled by, rubbed her hand on my shoulder. I'd noticed both the kids were more physical lately. A hug here, a pat on the back there. I touched her hair as she passed me.

Paul, his plate heaped with lasagna and two rolls, came around the corner.

"Man of the hour," Earl said.

Paul grinned. "For once, I didn't get reamed out about leaving my backpack at the top of the stairs."

Earl blew out some smoke, shoved a piece of bread into his mouth.

"You still going to help me with the yard?" Paul asked. "I want to put in some rosebushes, maybe."

"I don't know, sport," Earl said. "I don't think I'm the kind of guy your dad wants you to associate with." I had, once the dust settled, told the kids how Earl made his living.

"Jeez, Dad, they're going to legalize the stuff any day now."

I felt awkward. "I think Earl's thinking of moving on, anyway. Maybe I'll have to learn a little about yard work myself. Or you can teach me, and I'll just push the wheelbarrow around."

"You know, Dad," Paul said. "There's something I've been wanting to talk to you about."

I eyed him warily. "What?"

"The way I see it, if it hadn't been for me, you and Mom, like, you probably wouldn't be here now. So I was thinking some kind of reward was in order."

I ran my tongue around inside my cheek. "Like what?"

"I think you should let me get a tattoo."

"No way."

"Come on! Look, if that guy had -" and he paused here "- killed you and Mom, I'd have been able to go ahead and do it anyway."

"Too bad things worked out the way they did."

Now he was frustrated. He hadn't meant anything like that, and I was instantly sorry that I'd made the crack. But Earl seemed to find the exchange amusing.

Paul said, "You're screwing up my words. I guess I'm saying, I mean, couldn't I just get one? Remember I told you how people you know have them, and they're not bad people? Like my math teacher, Mr. Drennan?"

"I don't know."

"And what about Earl here? He's got one. Do you think he's a bad person?"

Earl's smile vanished. "Hey, Paul, don't go dragging me into this. This is strictly between you and your parents, okay?"

"But the thing is, you've got one, and here you are, talking to my dad and all, and I don't think he thinks any less of you because you've got one."

"Of course I don't," I said to Paul. "But Earl's an adult, and you're not."

"Just show it to him," Paul coaxed Earl.

"I don't think so, really."

To me, Paul said, "It's so cool, although I've only seen it once. Remember, Earl, we were putting in those shrubs, and you took off your shirt that one day, it was so friggin' hot?"

Now I was curious. "What is it, Earl? A naked lady, I'm guessing."

"No," said Paul. "It's way more cool than that. It's a watch."

Earl took a very long drag on his cigarette.

I said, "You might as well show me, Earl. Paul's going to hound you until you do."

Earl put his plate of lasagna down on the counter and slowly rolled up the right sleeve of his black T-shirt. He got it up above his shoulder and took his hand away.

It was a watch. But not a normal watch. It looked like a pocket watch, no strap, and it was melting, just like in that Salvador Dali painting.

He gave us a second to look at it, then rolled the sleeve back down.

"That's quite something," I said, and Earl's eyes caught mine.

Chapter
29

Sleep never came to me that night. I kept running things through my mind, bits and pieces of conversation.

How Earl claimed never to have lived downtown, that he'd come from the East Coast, or the West, I was trying to remember. But there was that night, when I'd blundered into his house and discovered his growing operation, and I'd happened to mention that this sort of thing had never happened when we'd lived in the city, on Crandall.

Earl had said something along the lines of "You lived on Crandall? Nice area. There was that little fruit market down at the end of the street."

The inconsistency hadn't meant anything to me then. But it meant a lot now. Especially knowing that Carrie Shuttleworth used to take her daughter to that fruit market.

It didn't have to mean anything, I told myself. There had to be at least a few guys in the world with tattoos of melted watches on their shoulders. Dali had pretty much made the melted watch an iconic symbol.

And the chain-smoking. Millions of people chain-smoked.

And the business about being skilled at electrical work. And the landscaping. That could all be coincidence, too.

You wouldn't hang a guy based on evidence this flimsy.

So why couldn't I sleep? Why did I have this terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach?

o o o

"You coming to bed?" Sarah said. There was nothing in her voice that said she wanted me there for any other purpose than company. These days, Sarah definitely didn't want to sleep alone.

It was after midnight; our guests had left several hours ago. Trixie, as I mentioned, had to work, and Earl left much earlier than planned. I had retired to my study, and was sitting at my desk when Sarah appeared in the door, leaning, one hand propped up against the frame. She was in a long nightshirt featuring a big picture of Snoopy in karate garb.

"Soon," I said. I had a folder in front of me, stuffed with newspaper clippings.

"Okay," she said, and turned to go.

"I heard you tell Trixie," I said, and she stopped, "that we might be going away. For a trip."

Sarah said nothing for a moment. "I guess I did."

"Were you just saying it, or would you like to go?"

She pressed her lips together, ran her hand through her hair. "I don't know. I think, sometimes, that I would. I let myself stop being mad at you for a while, and I like the idea. And then I get mad again, and stop thinking about it."

I nodded. I sat there, and she stood in the doorway, and about a minute went by.

"What if I could get our house back?" I said.

"What?"

"What if I could get our old house back? Move back into the city."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"I'm talking about moving. Back into our old neighborhood. It might, it might not be the same house. Not the exact same one. But something in that neighborhood, on Crandall, or maybe a street over. We could shop at Angelo's again, and you could get cannolis, and the kids could go back to their old school. It would be like we never lived out here at all."

Sarah bit her lip and looked away for a moment. She took a finger and wiped at the corner of one eye.

"I could call somebody, get this place assessed, put this place on the market, see what we could get for it. I mean, we'd probably have a mortgage again, it's going to cost us more to buy down there, but I could go work for a paper again. Cover city hall, take pictures, whatever."

Sarah sniffed, took a tentative step into the room, then a couple more. When she was a foot away, I leaned forward in my chair and slipped my arms around her thighs, pressed my face into her stomach. We remained that way for a while, and then I said, "I'm not sure this house is a place anymore from which to make good memories. And I know we have lots more to make."

She nodded, sniffed again, looked at the folder of newspaper clippings on my desk.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

"Just some stuff," I said. "Why don't you go to bed, and I'll be up in a bit. And in the morning, we can talk some more about what we should do."

o o o

When she left, I closed the door and returned to my desk and opened the folder. Back when I had first collected these clippings, with the idea of possibly doing a book on the case someday, I had arranged them in chronological order.

The first story, dated October 9, carried this headline: "Police Comb Neighborhood for Girl, 5."

My recollection was that this story hadn't made the front page. It had been splashed across the top of page three, six columns, with a picture of Jesse Shuttleworth. It was a blurry photo, no doubt blown up from a cheap snapshot, and the larger it got, the poorer the definition. She had curly red hair, brown eyes, a smile to melt your heart. The story rated about fifteen inches. The editors probably hadn't wanted to go crazy with it. Not yet. She would only have been missing a few hours by the time the first edition closed. She could be at a friend's, she might be lost. You didn't want to go and put it on page one, then, just as the paper hit the streets, have people hear on their car radios that she'd been found at a sleepover. So you hedged your bet, you put it on three.

The story, by Renata Sears, one of the paper's tireless police reporters, read:

The city was holding its breath last night as police combed the Dailey Gardens neighborhood in their hunt for little Jesse Shuttleworth, a 5-year-old kindergarten student who vanished from the park sometime yesterday afternoon.

Jesse's mother, Carrie Shuttleworth, 32, of Langley Ave., told police Jesse had been playing across the street from their home, in the Dailey mini-park, around 4:15 p.m. when she went missing.

The teary-eyed mother, at a hastily called news conference on her front porch last night, said Jesse had been playing on the swings, and was always good about coming straight home.

"I just want her to be okay," she said. "I'm just praying that she gets home safely."

Police refused to speculate about the nature of Jesse's disappearance, but they have set up a command post at the park, and asked neighbors with any possible information to please drop by. "At the moment, this is a missing-child case, as simple as that," said Sgt. Dominic Marchi. "We're hoping that she'll turn up any time now."

Police would not discuss a rumor of a scraggly-haired man who was seen near the park earlier in the day.

The second day, however, the Jesse Shuttleworth disappearance was the only story in the city. It took up three-quarters of the front page, with a simple two-word headline in a font size normally reserved to announce the end of the world: "Where's Jesse?" Sears was still on the story.

Her dolls are lined up along the top of her pillows, as though waiting for Jesse to come home.

Renata knew how to lay it on.

It has been more than 30 hours since little Jesse Shuttleworth went missing from a park in Dailey Gardens, and despite one of the most intensive police searches in the city's history, there's so far no sign of her.

A mother sits in anguish at the kitchen table, waiting for a call, any news, good or bad, about Jesse's whereabouts. Carrie Shuttleworth, a single mom who works by day in a laundry and at a coffee shop at night to support herself and her only daughter, says Jesse is a wonderful child, who loves Robert Munsch stories and, perhaps most wonderful of all, shuns Barney the purple dinosaur.

Neighbors have joined in the search, examining their own backyards and pools and garages. Perhaps, police say, Jesse wandered off and injured herself and no one has heard her cries for help. That's why, they say, it's so important to find her quickly.

Today, police are asking for volunteers to meet them at Dailey Park at 9 a.m. From there, they intend to have teams of people walk shoulder to shoulder through the nearby ravine looking not only for Jesse herself, but any possible clues to her disappearance.

Randy Flaherty, a father of two who lives next door to the Shuttleworths, is among those who plan to be at the park this morning to help.

"We can't imagine what might have happened. This is such a nice neighborhood, the families know each other, we all look out for each other, and we're all thinking the same thing."

Police still refuse to say whether they think Jesse's disappearance is an abduction. They've already ruled out family abduction - Jesse's father, who lives in Ohio, flew in yesterday to console his ex-wife and help in the search.

As for whether it could be an abduction by a stranger, Sgt. Dominic Marchi would only say, "We have to accept that that is a possibility. While we don't know that it is at this time, it is one of the avenues we have to explore."