Keeping Watch (31 page)

“Mister,” the creature said, “my mama says someone's gonna steal your clothes if you don't take them.”

Allen looked over at the dryer he'd been using, saw a bright flash of pink and orange tumbling around within, and finally located his own more drab possessions in a mound on one of the high folding tables. He slid the stack of papers back into their envelope and got to his feet, letting out an involuntary exclamation in the process. The chair had crippled him for life, he thought, stomping his feet to get the circulation going. “Thanks for the warning,” he told the child, who to his surprise stuck out a hand. Allen obediently shook the sticky palm, but the kid rolled his eyes and left the hand where it was. Oh. Allen dug a dollar from his pocket and gave it to the clothes guardian. This earned him another roll of the eyes, but it wasn't as if the child had actually driven off a gang of furious trouser thieves. He folded up the clean clothes and put them into the string bag, carrying them, the papers, and the diary out to the tropical swelter of the car.

On the way back to the motel, he went through a hamburger drive-in for the day's second dose of grease and sugar, and carried clothes, information, and lunch into the cool room. He paused only to hang the shirts in the closet before settling barefoot onto the bed with the file and his food spread out around him, skimming briskly through the unbound sheets.

First grade had been a hard time for Jamie O'Connell. The school itself was located two blocks from the O'Connell home (Gina had sent a computer-generated map of the area, with the addresses highlighted in yellow). The year seemed to have started out well, and Jamie's name appeared (along with about thirty others) in the cast of the Christmas play. Then over the winter break, the wing of the school in which his classroom was located caught fire. Although the damage was not extensive, portable classrooms were brought in for the next weeks. Arson was suspected, aiming possibly at the computer lab that was in that wing, but no arrests were made.

Repairs were hurried along, and in March the classes were moved back into the building, the portables taken away, a picture appeared in the local paper of the principal cutting a ribbon across the door of her freshly painted, and planted, new wing. At the end of the month, the school had its spring recess, when many of the children joined Parks and Recreation programs designed to keep them busy while their parents were at work. Jamie, although his mother was at home and available, was registered for the day camp program. On the Thursday of that week his group spent the day at the park, playing baseball and being taken for rides in the rowboats. At the end of the day, when the parents arrived to pick up their exhausted children, one of the first-grade boys was missing. After a brief search, before the police had even arrived, two of the parents found young Able Shepherd, drowned in the weeds at the lake's edge.

The grainy newsprint photograph, taken by one of the Parks and Rec employees earlier that day, showed Able standing with some friends. The child's hair was so pale blond, it looked white, and the camera had caught him laughing aloud in gap-toothed high spirits.

At his side, a contrast in color and mood, was the thin, dark, subdued child who would become
deadboy
.

Memorial service, legal proceedings, charges and countercharges against school district and Parks department, until things faded with summer vacation. The O'Connell family moved again, and in September, Jamie entered a private school just half a mile from his new home. His teacher's written evaluation from October
(How on earth had Gina gotten that!)
suggested that the boy was bright enough, but did not try hard, that he was not as sociable as she would have liked, and that occasionally he was, in her word, “inclined to be moody.”

On November sixteenth, Paula O'Connell had died in her second-floor bedroom. The flurry of official forms and newspaper articles generated to cover the event accounted for nearly half the stack of pages Gina had given him, from the initial police report to the coroner's verdict. Sifting methodically through them, Allen gradually formed a picture in his mind of how the case had progressed.

It began with a call to 911 from the O'Connell house, a child's panicky voice saying that his mother was shot and bleeding. The dispatcher tried to keep the child on the line, but the boy hung up before she could get his address from him. She identified the source of the caller's number and sent both police and ambulance to the scene. At the house, the police pounded for approximately two minutes before the door was opened, by a child with blood on his shirt and hands. The police ushered the boy out to their car, although he insisted that there was no one else in the house, and they went through the house for a possible shooter before they would allow the paramedics inside.

It was clear at a glance what had happened, equally clear that Paula O'Connell was beyond anything the paramedics could do for her. Crime-scene photographs (extremely indistinct—they'd been pixilated by a fax machine) showed a figure slumped into an overstuffed chair, a shotgun on the floor a few feet from her body. The father was in Las Vegas on business (he owned real estate there) and the housekeeper had the day off. The boy's mother usually met him at school to walk him home, but that day she had not come, so he had set off by himself, since he knew the route and there were crossing guards and lights all the way. He let himself in with the key he'd been given at the beginning of the year, went through the house looking for her, and found her. He'd gotten blood on him, he said, when he tried to shake her awake.

The medical examiner had taken some care with the investigation, since it is notoriously difficult to pull the trigger on the far end of a shotgun barrel, but the gun's position was consistent with having been placed on the floor at the victim's feet, and there was gunpowder residue all over Paula's legs and feet. They had even found a short stick that she could have used to depress the trigger; although there was no being certain, since it along with everything else was spattered with blood and it had been crushed under someone's shoe. And since the husband was away (this was confirmed by a speeding ticket he'd received, going through an infamous speed trap in Nevada at thirty over the limit) and Paula had no enemies other than the depression that had plagued her life, her death was judged suicide.

The ME's main source of discomfort, reading between the lines, was timing: Why would a woman whom everyone described as a loving mother shoot herself in the head the day before her son's birthday, and knowing that the boy himself would find her? But in the end, the investigators had decided that her timing was of a piece with picking her husband's most valuable gun in order to do the deed. Paula O'Connell had committed suicide. The only powerful act of the woman's life was the way she had left it.

Allen skipped most of the material Gina had assembled on Jamie's disappearance, having seen it before. The police, he was interested to see, had looked at Mark O'Connell as a potential suspect, but the man's alibi for that day had held. Their most active lead was a gray-haired woman in her late fifties who had been seen talking with Jamie, but since Alice was only forty-seven and had naturally brown hair, Allen did not think he needed to warn her that the police were closing in.

The final pages in Gina's masterwork concerned the plane crash, and were frustratingly sparse. A statement from the airport employee who had helped O'Connell fuel the plane, another from a flight controller, and preliminary reports on the O'Connell finances and state of mind. Too early for the police to be thinking anything in particular, Allen knew. But they'd be looking.

He wondered if O'Connell had left everything to Jamie, or if someone else was now looking at a juicy inheritance. No doubt the police would be asking the same thing.

He turned over the last page, and looked at the leather diary.

Allen did not want to read Mark O'Connell's journal of his son's life. He knew it couldn't be any worse than some of the tapes he'd watched, but the words would be before his eyes the next time he looked at Jamie, and he did not want to give O'Connell that small triumph.

However, he had to read it.

Just not in the same place where he would later try to sleep.

It was only when he saw the lake that it struck Allen: The park he'd chosen was the same site where Jamie's towheaded classmate Able Shepherd had drowned. He stood on the grass, the O'Connell journal in his hand, and thought about going elsewhere. However, the air was cooler here and smelled of lake instead of freeway, and the summer-worn lawn was a place of comforting normality, thick with beach umbrellas, Frisbee players, and toddlers. Stupid to get back in the car and fight the roads to somewhere less pleasant, just because of past associations. He found a bench in the shade, and opened the diary.

The writing was precise and controlled, changing little over the twelve years from first entry to last. Only a handful of words had been corrected or crossed out, two of those in a contrasting color of ink, which suggested that O'Connell had been in the habit of rereading his earlier entries and making small changes or clarifications.

Disappointment permeated the early pages, in O'Connell's sour assessment of his son's chances, first of mere survival, then of relative normality. He was unhappy with the boy and furious at the huge, ever-mounting bills, but he viewed his wife's part in the fiasco with a facile concern overlying a growing impatience. He couldn't understand her affection for the disgusting object in the ICU, and wanted her to get on with building up her health for another try. He'd clearly written Jamie off as a failed attempt.

But then Jamie was released to come home. O'Connell wrote:

December 19th

The hospital has decided to let us take the boy home, they think he'll live. It's hard to believe anything that feeble can even breathe on its own. Paula is dancing around in happiness, but I wouldn't be surprised if she fell apart before the baby did. She should be hospitalized herself. I don't know how I'm going to keep on working with the two of them on my hands. Great Christmas this will be.

On Jamie's third birthday, he wrote:

The boy cries all the time, and he never seems to settle to anything. His mother spoils him. She doesn't even see a problem that he's still in diapers.

When Jamie was five:

The boy is finally growing a little, so he looks less like a hairless monkey. He still clings to his mother more than is good for him, and cries when she leaves him at preschool. I take him now, whenever I can. He seems more in control of himself when she isn't around. He still wets the bed at night. At Paula's urging, I got him a dog, a dirty creature from the pound that I'm sure won't last a month before I have to take it back. But I do my best for him. He is, after all, my son.

At six:

As I expected, the dog died, although I don't suppose Jamie is to blame for anything but neglect. He let it out at night, a thing I expressly forbid, and something got to it. Paula is convinced it was one of those mountain lions they've been seeing in the hills in recent years, but I pointed out that a mountain lion would have eaten the thing whole, it was barely a mouthful. Personally, I think the mutt must have tangled with a real dog. Whatever it was, I made the boy bury it himself, to teach him what happens to a neglected animal.

And at the beginning of the new year:

I don't know what's up with the boy. Christmas vacation was one long round of crying and tantrums, and he disappeared three separate times, once for long enough that Paula wanted to call the police. I told her that we should go out driving and look for him, which was how we found him the last time, but as we were arguing about it we heard sirens. She was convinced that the boy had been hit by a car and took off running down the street, but it was only fire engines going to a fire at the school. Then she was absolutely certain that he'd somehow been inside his classroom and was burned to death, but just then I saw the boy watching the fire engines, and pointed him out to her. That was the end of his disappearing acts for that vacation.

In March:

James had a friend drown while they were on an outing today. He's terribly upset, it's hard to know what to do for him. It seems the other boy was allowed to wander off alone, and was playing at the edge of the lake when he must have slipped and hit his head, and drowned. James had been with him earlier that day, the teacher said, and seemed to have taken the death personally, as if he could have protected the boy. One of the parents who was around when they found the kid said James heard the news and kind of blurted out, “It's my fault, it's all my fault.” Fortunately, no one has taken any notice.

August:

I decided James would be old enough for hunting this year. He's older than I was when I had my first gun, and I thought maybe having some time with me would counteract his mother's influence. Seven years old and I found them baking cookies in the kitchen the other day, for Christ sake. So I bought him a .22 like the one I grew up with, to see what he made of it, and I have to admit the kid's a natural. He hit the target his third try, and can't wait to go back to the range. He'll be ready, come pheasant season. And in a year or two, maybe he'll grow enough to handle a deer rifle.

December 1, shortly after Jamie's eighth birthday:

Paula killed herself two weeks ago. I still can't believe it, can't believe that she'd do it the way she did. Pills, even a razor in the bathtub, those wouldn't have surprised me. That sounds hard, but she's been threatening to kill herself for years. I'd never have thought she would put a shotgun to her mouth. And she chose a time when nobody would be home, so James found her. Poor kid, by the time I got back from Vegas he was practically catatonic, what with the shock and the drugs they gave him. Still, he seems to be taking it okay. He doesn't want to talk about it, but I can understand that. His teacher called yesterday and asked me if I wasn't concerned that the boy seemed so cheerful about his mother's death, like she wanted him to sit in class crying or something, and I told her it was none of her business. He isn't cheerful, not really. He's just getting on with his life. Although I'll admit I'm a little surprised he isn't more down about it, he and his mother spent so much time together. I'm staying in town a while longer, but I'll have to find a babysitter for when I have to be away. Maybe some kind of a full-time housekeeper who lives nearby.