In the Night Season (19 page)

“I just have a couple more questions,” Shaw said. “I’m sorry. What time do you usually get home from work?”

“Six.”

“And last evening, what time did you get home?”

“I don’t know—I didn’t really look. Sometime after. Not long after.” She wiped her eyes with trembling fingers.

“And you don’t recall seeing anything out of the ordinary—a car you’re not used to seeing in the neighborhood, or somebody walking along the road. Anything like that?”

“No.”

“And Mr. Bishop never mentioned anything to you.”

“No, that’s right. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to—” She appeared about to sob again.

Shaw pressed on. “Jason left with his grandfather on—what, Wednesday?”

She said, “Yes. Mr. Shawn, please.”

He said, “Forgive me—it’s Shaw.”

“Mr. Shaw—I’m—I’m sick—I’m upset—I don’t have any idea.”

“I apologize. I wish I didn’t have to be this much trouble. Do you mind if I come back? Say, in a few days? I’d really like to ask Jason a few questions—just about his friends, other boys he knows who might’ve had reason to be over there last night. I promise I’ll be careful about it. Do you mind?”

“That would be fine. I—I hope you—I’ve got so much to do.” She stopped herself.

“Yes?”

“Nothing,” she said.

“Well, again, I’m sorry for troubling you,” Shaw told her.

“I’ll call you?” she said.

Shaw gave her a card. “If you think of anything, don’t hesitate. Anytime, okay?”

“Yes—anytime.”

“I’m sorry again,” he said. “I’ll check back with you in a day or two, see how you’re doing. Would that be all right?”

“Yes,” she said. And then she repeated it. “Yes.”

“I wish I didn’t have to be the one bringing you this news,” he told her, as the door closed. He turned and walked back to the car, where Bell had gone. Bell had already started it and was sitting behind the wheel, waiting for him.

“Did you hear all that?” he asked, arranging himself in the passenger seat.

“Most of it.”

Bell had backed to the end of the driveway and then pulled them away from the house in the direction of Steel Run Creek.

“I don’t think she’s telling the whole truth.”

“Neither me,” Bell said.

“Why the hell would she lie?”

“Think her boy’s involved?”

Shaw said, “The boy’s off with his grandfather. Left two days ago. According to her.”

“I’d bet it’ll check out, too. She did register fear, to me, Phil. I don’t think she’s telling the truth about the circulars. I bet she’s heard from the Virginia Front, and she’s scared quiet.”

“Let’s check the wires—see what’s out there. If there’s been anything—”

“She did look pretty sick,” Bell said.

“Well,” said Shaw. “I would be, too.”

S
HE CLOSED THE DOOR AND FELT
that she might pass out. Leaning against it, the cold wood on her cheek, she heard Travis Buford Lawrence Baker sigh behind her, a sound of frustration. “I thought you were going to ask him in, for Christ’s sake.”

She said nothing.

“Think he believed you about the grandfather?”

“I don’t know. How would I know that?”

“Yeah, well. It doesn’t matter.” He took her by the upper arm and walked her into the hall, where the phone was. “Call your folks.”

“What?”

“Do it.” He held the handset toward her.

She punched the number, or tried to. Twice she got it wrong and had to start over. She pushed the buttons, heard the tones change. It rang for a long time on the other end. Her mother answered. There was something in her voice. “Nora, honey—oh, baby. Are you all right?”

“Mama?”

“There’s a man here, Nora.”

She said, “Oh, no.”

“Honey, are you all right?”

She looked at Travis, who took the handset from her and spoke into it. “Please put your new friend on the line.”

Nora sank against the wall, while he talked to the man on the other end. “Make sure she’s the one that answers any calls. And she says the old man’s out here—he took the kid on a road trip south. Make sure she keeps to that. You got it? Repeat it back to me. Just do it, Bozo.”

Nora put her hands to her face and shivered.

“Okay.” Travis went on speaking into the phone. “There’s been a little complication. No. Nope. Just take my word for it. Maybe Reuther’ll be calling you. Stay put. Just stay put. Well, it’s gonna be a little longer. Just make sure the old man doesn’t answer the phone.” He hung up. He was standing over her. “I gotta give it to Reuther, you know. Reuther’s thorough. And it’s a good thing, too.”

“You’re not going to let us go,” she said into her hands.

“Hell, we might fall in love and get married. I’d take better care of you than Jack did.”

“Stop it,” she said, through the swollen pain in her throat.

“Come on,” he said. “Up.” He took hold of her arm.

She pulled loose, then got to her feet, facing him.

“You know how long it’s gonna take them to decide to come back here?” he said.

“Look,” she said. Jack didn’t tell me anything.” She moved from the door, taking the robe off and dropping it over the back of a chair. The robe had been Travis’s idea. He had decided that faking friendship was too risky, would only be a last resort.

“Maybe something’ll come back to you,” he said.

“How many of you—” She halted.

He smiled. “The faster we find it, the faster everybody gets their life back.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“You ain’t got any choice about it.”

She walked away from him toward the living room, where the paintings on the wall depicted people in silent civilized relation to each other, talking in a sunny garden, or walking on a bridge over a
shimmering blue river, or negotiating the colorful crowds of others in a city street. The trappings of an orderly life.

“What about Jack’s office?” Travis said.

“That’s what we were looking through down in the basement.”

“That was his office?”

She went to the little space between the dining room and the living room and began rifling through the drawers of the bureau there. For a time Jack had kept his computer on top of it; there had been a tray with disks in it and a box full of computer paper routed into the printer.

“I bet they’re here somewhere,” Travis said.

“Well, if I had some fucking idea what they looked like—”

“Boxes—big ones, wrapped with tape. Suitcase-sized, you know? You remember, like people lug to the airport. About that size. Bigger, actually. Like a—like a trunk. And light. You’d almost think they were empty.”

“He never brought anything like that into the house. I was a housewife. I was here, and I’d have known it.”

“Then he’s got a storage slip, or a contract for bulk storage, or a ticket with numbers on it. Something.”

She looked through the drawers. There was a small plastic bag with Jack’s old army insignia in it, his name tag. She hadn’t really had the strength to go through some of his things, had left much of it essentially in place, including the clothes on the other side of her closet in the bedroom. Travis remarked on this as they pulled all of it out and looked for papers in the pockets of trousers and suit coats. They searched all the closets in all the rooms; they went up into the attic and pushed the boxes around, opening them one by one. Nora combed through the debris of her twelve-plus years of marriage. There were old clothes, old photographs, old letters—all of the ones Jack had written when he was stationed in Japan, all of hers to him. She had been someone else entirely back then: so much a child, still clinging to the world her parents had given her to believe in. The world they had once inhabited, all so distant now. She felt something like pity for the girl who had written these letters and then sprayed them with her perfume to send to her young man
across the sea. Absurdly, she had a brief vivid memory of a light blue checked dress she had worn in those day. Jack had said it made her look like a Victorian doll.

Across the attic, Travis held up a picture. “I’m in this picture.” Delighted, he held it toward her. It was a group photo, perhaps fifty men in three long rows. “I’m the third one from the right in the second row,” he said. He flipped it toward her. She picked it up and glanced at it. Jack was circled on the far left, in the third row. She looked at his young face.

“Handsome devil, ain’t I?”

She put the picture down.

“The first row, third guy over from the right—that’s Rickerts.”

She looked at the picture again. A boy’s face, blond hair, an uneven, ironic smile, small ears flat against the sides of the head, which gave the whole face an oddly Asian cast.

“Young studs,” Travis said.

“Is he the one you talked to—”

“Our man in Seattle.” He smiled.

She looked at the face. It looked so ordinary.

“Sexy guys, huh.”

She didn’t respond to this. “We’re running out of time,” she told him.

“You’re a handsome woman.” He had paused. His face gleamed with sweat, and there was a slackness to his scarred mouth that caused her middle to clench. She thought of the brutal groping of his brother the night before and almost gagged.

“You know it?”

She said, “They’re going to come back.”

“That’d be too bad,” he said. But he made no move toward her.

They worked silently for a time, emptying boxes of clothing and old papers—tax returns from ten years ago, canceled checks going back to the first year of her marriage.

“Look at the checks—the dates on them. You have to pay for bulk storage. Look for receipts, too, or a safety deposit key.”

“They wouldn’t fit in a safety deposit box.”

“The contract for bulk storage would.”

“That’s ridiculous,” she said. “Why would he do that? And besides, if that’s the case, no one can get into it but Jack. You can’t get them if he put them in storage.”

“Wanna bet?” He smiled, but it was an automatic expression, involving only his mouth. “Why’d you keep all this shit?” he went on. “Jesus. I thought we’d get the damn things and be out of here.”

She looked at him. “Doesn’t it ever—”

“What?”

“Never mind.”

“No,” he said. “Talk.”

“Your brother killed a man. There’s police all over the county. They’re bound to be on the lookout for strangers.”

“Hey, I ain’t no stranger.” He winked. “I’m your husband’s old army buddy, and I got the picture to prove it. I’m helping you through the bad time. I’m somebody for you to lean on.”

She could not return his look. The air had gone bad here; it was harder to breathe. The dust rose into the dimness. The smell of mildew and naphtha choked her. She pulled another box out and opened it, bringing out old toys of Jason’s—airplane models and paint sets, a small clay sculpture he did in the first grade.

“We got to keep moving,” Travis said.

She caught herself thinking what sort of trap this was: talking to him created a familiarity she needed in order to seek deliverance from him, but it was also the thing that encouraged him.

And how he repelled her, with his barrel chest and heavy arms, his dirty fingernails—that dull green gaze.

“Like I said before, you know how many unsolved crimes they have in this country?”

She chose to ignore this, too.

“Hey,” he said. “I’m talking to you.”

“There’s nothing here,” she said.

“A key. A receipt. Something that he might’ve written on that tells where he put the damn cartons. Or the cartons themselves. We have to comb the place. Answer the question.”

“I don’t know how many unsolved crimes there are.”

“A lot.” He laughed.

She opened another box. Manila folders. Papers that belonged to Jack, from his days in high school. There were photographs, too, of Jack and his father standing in the sun and shade at the edge of a calm green lake or river, and of Jack in a basketball uniform.

“What’s that?” he said.

“Nothing.”

“Let me see it.”

She hesitated, then reached over and let him have the basketball one.

He stared at it. “I played ball.”

She moved the box aside and reached into the cobwebbed space of the angle of the roof for another.

“I did. I was good, too. I haven’t always been a bad guy.”

“I don’t know what you expect me to say.”

“Once,” he said, “in Chicago, I saved a man’s life. He keeled over at the table next to mine in a restaurant, and I did that maneuver—can’t remember the name—and a piece of steak as big as a pack of cigarettes came out of his mouth.”

She waited for him to go on.

“You believe that?”

She sighed. “I don’t know.”

“I did. I come from good people, really. We went to church every Sunday. Ate together and prayed together. Mom and Dad, and Sis, and Nathaniel, and Mary Sue and John-boy. Dad was a radiologist. We lived up on a mountain. It was the Depression and I was lonely.”

She opened the box. Clothes.

“You believe that about the guy in Chicago?”

“I guess,” she said.

“Actually, the guy had a heart attack and died. But the steak did come out of his mouth. You believe that?”

“Please,” she said.

“What happened was we all thought he was having a heart attack. It was my father. I was fifteen years old and I tried to pick him up and the piece of steak came out. I did the whole thing by accident. Didn’t even know about the maneuver thing. You believe that?” he said.

“Okay,” she told him.

“You believe it about my family?”

“I believe you,” she said.

“It’s all a lie. Mom hated us. Dad was a durn little club-footed gap-toothed murderer.”

She reached for a cedar chest in among the other boxes.

“You believe that?”

She said. “We’re supposed to be looking for something.”

“You can’t talk while you look?”

“I don’t even know what I’m looking for.”

“There,” he said, indicating the cedar chest. “Like that. That size, with a lot of masking tape around it.”

For a few moments there was just the sound of their hurrying to open the chest. She said under her breath, “This isn’t it.” But she so hoped it was; a part of her mind convinced her it might be.

The chest was full of clothes from Jack’s army days.

They spent another hour rummaging among the boxes.

“Hey,” he said. “I shouldn’t have said that about my dad, earlier. He was an air force guy. Colonel. We traveled a lot. Went to a lot of different schools. That’s why I joined the army. Bags wasn’t even in high school yet.”

“Why’re you telling me this?” she said, hoping that he might reveal something useful, yet fearing that he would take it the wrong way.

“Telling you how it was,” he said.

She did not reply.

“The trick is to guess how much of it—or if any of it—is true.”

She had opened a cardboard box and found some of Jason’s baby clothes and toys, and a tied stack of cards—his birth announcements. She felt a tearing, deep down. “There’s nothing up here,” she told him. “What you’re after just isn’t here.”

He pulled another box out of the space between the eaves and the boards he was kneeling on and tore at its taped flaps. “Hey.”

She saw him lift out a tin canister. He pulled at the lid. It came off and spilled tobacco all over the front of him.

“Shit.”

“My husband smoked a pipe the first year we were married,” she said.

“He must have got a contract or a ticket of some kind. Goddam, what did he do with them?”

“They’re not here,” she told him. “And if he put them in a bank, there’s not going to be a way to get them out because I didn’t know about it and I won’t be on the contract.”

He went at the search in a kind of furious panic now, tearing at boxes and dumping them out. Then he lifted the boards up and pulled at the insulation. She did so at her end, too, pulling it up along the whole length of the attic. They found nothing. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “What the hell.”

When they had torn the insulation up, they stood and ripped it out of the sides of the wall, along the curve of the roof.

“We’re wasting our time,” she said.

He snapped his fingers. “Your boy slipped away from me last night in this damn passageway from the bathroom. Come on.” He reached for her wrist, but she pulled back.

“I’m right behind you.”

He said angrily: “You first.”

She descended the attic steps and went down to the little bathroom under the stairs. Here was the hamper moved aside, the vent pulled out. She thought of Jason climbing in there to escape and wanted to turn and strike at Travis. She managed to resist the impulse, understanding that while she had no control over him or this situation, she must try to exercise the most rigid control over herself.

“Can you get in there?” he asked.

His closeness worried her. She steeled herself, then stepped into the room and knelt to look into the vent. “No way. I don’t know how
he
got in here.”