Mystic River (26 page)

She’d say, Dave, whose blood did I wash off your clothes?

Dave, she’d say, what really happened Saturday night?

You can tell me. I’m your wife. You can say anything.

That’s what she’d do. She’d talk to him. She had no reason to fear him. He was Dave. She loved him and he loved her and all of this would somehow work out. She was sure of it.

And yet she stayed there, on the far side of the Pen, dwarfed by an abandoned ironworks that had recently been purchased by a developer who supposedly planned to turn it into a parking lot if the stadium deal went through on the other side of the river. She stared across at the park where Katie Marcus had been murdered. She waited for someone to tell her how to move again.

J
IMMY SAT WITH
Bruce Reed’s son Ambrose in his father’s office, going over the details, wishing he was dealing with Bruce himself instead of this kid who looked straight out of college. You could see him playing Frisbee a lot easier than hoisting a casket, and Jimmy couldn’t imagine those smooth, unlined hands down in the embalming room, touching the dead.

He’d given Ambrose Katie’s date of birth and social security number, the kid filling it in with a gold pen on a form attached to a clipboard, and then saying in a velvet voice that was a younger version of his father’s, “Good, good. Now, Mr. Marcus, will this be a traditional Catholic ceremony? A wake, a mass?”

“Yeah.”

“I’d suggest we hold the wake on Wednesday, then.”

Jimmy nodded. “The church has already been reserved for Thursday morning at nine.”

“Nine o’clock,” the boy said, and wrote that down. “Have you thought of a time for the wake?”

Jimmy said, “We’ll do two. One between three and five. The other seven to nine.”

“Seven to nine,” the boy repeated as he wrote it down. “I see you brought photographs. Good, good.”

Jimmy looked at the stack of framed photos on his lap: Katie at her graduation. Katie and her sisters on the beach. Katie and him at the opening of Cottage Market when she was eight. Katie with Eve and Diane. Katie, Annabeth, Jimmy, Nadine, and Sara at Six Flags. Katie’s sixteenth birthday.

He put the stack on the chair beside him, felt a minor burning in his throat that went away when he swallowed.

“Have you thought about flowers?” Ambrose Reed said.

“I placed an order with Knopfler’s this afternoon,” he said.

“And the notice?”

Jimmy met the kid’s eyes for the first time. “The notice?”

“Yes,” the kid said, and looked down at his clipboard. “How the notice should read in the paper. We can take care of it if you’ll just give me the basic information on how you’d like it to read. If you’d prefer donations in lieu of flowers, things like that.”

Jimmy turned away from the kid’s comforting eyes and looked down at the floor. Below them, somewhere in the basement of this white Victorian, Katie lay in the embalming room. She’d be naked before Bruce Reed and this boy and his two brothers as they went to work on her, cleaning her, touching her up, preserving her. Their cool, manicured hands would run over her body. They’d lift parts of it. They’d take her chin between thumb and index finger and turn it. They’d run combs through her hair.

He thought of his child naked and exposed with the color drained from her flesh as she waited to be touched one last time by these strangers—with care, possibly, but a callous care, a clinical one. And then satin cushions would be
propped behind her head in the casket, and she’d be wheeled into the viewing room with a doll’s frozen face and her favorite blue dress. She’d be peered at and prayed over and commented on and grieved, and then, ultimately, she’d be entombed. She would descend into a hole dug by men who hadn’t known her either, and Jimmy could hear the dirt thudding distantly as if he were on the inside of the coffin with her.

And she would lie in the dark with the earth packed above her for six feet until it gave way to grass and open air she’d never see or feel or smell or sense. She would lie there for a thousand years, unable to hear the footfalls of the people who came to visit her headstone, unable to hear anything of the world she’d left because all that dirt was packed in between.

I’m going to kill him, Katie. Somehow, I’m going to find him before the police do, and I’m going to kill him. I’m going to put him in a hole a lot worse than the one you’re going into. I’m going to leave them nothing to embalm. Nothing to mourn. I’m going to make him vanish as if he’d never lived, as if his name and everything he was, or thinks he is right now, was just a dream that passed through someone’s mind in a blip and was forgotten before they woke up.

I’m going to find the man who put you on that table downstairs, and I’m going to erase him. And
his
loved ones—if he has any—will feel more anguish than yours do, Katie. Because they’ll never have the certainty of knowing what happened to him.

And don’t you worry whether I’m up to it, baby. Daddy’s up to it. You never knew this, but Daddy’s killed before. Daddy’s done what needed to be done. And he can do it again.

He turned back to Bruce’s son, who was still new enough at this to be unnerved by long pauses.

Jimmy said, “I’d like it to read ‘Marcus, Katherine Juanita, dearly beloved daughter of James and Marita, deceased, stepdaughter of Annabeth, and sister to Sara and Nadine…’”

S
EAN SAT
on the back porch with Annabeth Marcus as she took tiny sips from a glass of white wine and smoked her cigarettes no more than halfway before she’d extinguish them, her face lit by the exposed bulb above them. It was a strong face, never pretty probably, but always striking. She was not unused to being stared at, Sean guessed, and yet she was probably oblivious as to why she was worth the trouble. She reminded Sean a bit of Jimmy’s mother but without the air of resignation and defeat, and she reminded Sean of his own mother in her complete and effortless self-possession, reminded him of Jimmy, actually, in that way, as well. He could see Annabeth Marcus as being a fun woman, but never a frivolous one.

“So,” she said to Sean as he lit a cigarette for her, “what are you doing with your evening after you’re released from comforting me?”

“I’m not—”

She waved it away. “I appreciate it. So what’re you doing?”

“Going to see my mother.”

“Really?”

He nodded. “It’s her birthday. Go celebrate it with her and the old man.”

“Uh-huh,” she said. “And how long have you been divorced?”

“It shows?”

“You wear it like a suit.”

“Ah. Separated, actually, for a bit over a year.”

“She live here?”

“Not anymore. She travels.”

“You said that with acid. ‘Travels.’”

“Did I?” He shrugged.

She held up a hand. “I hate to keep doing this to you—getting my mind off Katie at your expense. So you don’t have to answer any of my questions. I’m just nosy, and you’re an interesting guy.”

He smiled. “No, I’m not. I’m actually very boring, Mrs. Marcus. You take away my job, and I disappear.”

“Annabeth,” she said. “Call me that, would you?”

“Sure.”

“I find it hard to believe, Trooper Devine, that you’re boring. You know what’s odd, though?”

“What’s that?”

She turned in her chair and looked at him. “You don’t strike me as the kind of guy who’d give someone phantom tickets.”

“Why’s that?”

“It seems childish,” she said. “You don’t seem like a childish man.”

Sean shrugged. In his experience, everyone was childish at one time or another. It’s what you reverted to, particularly when the shit piled up.

In more than a year, he’d never spoken to anyone about Lauren—not his parents, his few stray friends, not even the police psychologist the commander had made a brief and pointed mention of once Lauren’s moving out had become common knowledge around the barracks. But here was Annabeth, a stranger who’d suffered a loss, and he could feel her probing for his loss, needing to see it or share it or something along those lines, needing to know, Sean figured, that she wasn’t being singled out.

“My wife’s a stage manager,” he said quietly. “For road shows, you know?
Lord of the Dance
toured the country last year—my wife stage-managed. That sort of thing. She’s doing one now—
Annie Get Your Gun
, maybe. I’m not sure, to tell you the truth. Whatever they’re recycling this year. We were a weird couple. I mean, our jobs, right, how further apart can you get?”

“But you loved her,” Annabeth said.

He nodded. “Yeah. Still do.” He took a breath, leaning back in his chair and sucking it down. “So the guy I gave the tickets to, he was…” Sean’s mouth went dry and he shook his head, had the sudden urge to just get the hell off this porch and out of this house.

“He was a rival?” Annabeth said, her voice delicate.

Sean took a cigarette from the pack and lit one, nodding. “That’s a nice word for it. Yeah, we’ll say that. A rival. And my wife and I, we were going through some shit for a while. Neither of us was around much, and so on. And this, uh, rival—he moved in on her.”

“And you reacted badly,” Annabeth said. A statement, not a question.

Sean rolled his eyes in her direction. “You know anyone who reacts well?”

Annabeth gave him a hard look, one that seemed to suggest that sarcasm was below him, or maybe just something she wasn’t fan of in general.

“You still love her, though.”

“Sure. Hell, I think she still loves me.” He stubbed out his cigarette. “She calls me all the time. Calls me and doesn’t talk.”

“Wait, she—”

“I know,” he said.

“—calls you up and doesn’t say a word?”

“Yup. Been going on for about eight months now.”

Annabeth laughed. “No offense, but that’s the weirdest thing I’ve heard in a while.”

“No argument.” He watched a fly dart in and away from the bare lightbulb. “One of these days, I figure, she’s gotta talk. That’s what I’m holding out for.”

He heard his half-assed chuckle die in the night and the echo of it embarrassed him. So they sat in silence for a bit, smoking, listening to the buzz of the fly as it made its crazy darts toward the light.

“What’s her name?” Annabeth asked. “This whole time, you’ve never once said her name.”

“Lauren,” he said. “Her name’s Lauren.”

Her name hung in the air for a bit like the loose strand of a cobweb.

“And you loved her since you were kids?”

“Freshman year of college,” he said. “Yeah, I guess we were kids.”

He could remember a November rainstorm, the two of them kissing for the first time in a doorway, the feel of goose bumps on her flesh, both of them shaking.

“Maybe that’s the problem,” Annabeth said.

Sean looked at her. “That we’re not kids anymore?”

“One of you, at least,” she said.

Sean didn’t ask which one.

“Jimmy told me you said Katie was planning to elope with Brendan Harris.”

Sean nodded.

“Well, that’s just it, isn’t it?”

He turned in his chair. “What?”

She blew a stream of smoke up at the empty clotheslines. “These silly dreams you have when you’re young. I mean, what, Katie and Brendan Harris were going to make a life in
Las Vegas
? How long would that little Eden have lasted? Maybe they’d be on their second trailer park, second kid, but it would hit them sooner or later—life isn’t happily ever after and golden sunsets and shit like that. It’s work. The person you love is rarely worthy of how big your love is. Because
no one
is worthy of that and maybe no one deserves the burden of it, either. You’ll be let down. You’ll be disappointed and have your trust broken and have a lot of real sucky days. You lose more than you win. You hate the person you love as much as you love him. But, shit, you roll up your sleeves and work—at everything—because that’s what growing older is.”

“Annabeth,” Sean said, “anyone ever tell you that you’re a hard woman?”

She turned her head to him, her eyes closed, a dreamy smile on her face. “All the time.”

B
RENDAN
H
ARRIS
went into his room that night and faced the suitcase under his bed. He’d packed it tightly with shorts
and Hawaiian shirts, one sportcoat and two pairs of jeans, but no sweaters or wool pants. He’d packed what he’d expected they wore in Las Vegas, no winter clothes, because he and Katie had agreed that they never wanted to face another windchill or thermal-sock sale at Kmart or windshield crusted with ice. So when he opened the suitcase, what stared back up at him was a bright array of pastels and floral patterns, an explosion of summer.

This was who they’d planned to be. Tanned and loose, their bodies not weighted down by boots or coats or someone else’s expectations. They would have drunk drinks with goofy names from daiquiri glasses and spent afternoons in the hotel swimming pool and their skin would have smelled of sunblock and chlorine. They would have made love in a room iced by the air conditioner, yet warmed where the sun cut through the blinds, and when the night cooled everything off, they would have dressed in the better of their clothes and walked the Strip. He could see the two of them doing that as if from far away, looking down from several stories at the two lovers as they strolled through the neon wash, and those lights swept the black tar with watery reds and yellows and blues. And there they were—Brendan and Katie—walking lazily down the middle of the wide boulevard, dwarfed by the buildings, the chatter-and-ching of the casinos rattling out through the doors.

Which one you want to go to tonight, honey?

You pick.

No, you pick.

No, come on, you pick.

Okay. How about that one?

Looks good.

That one it is, then.

I love you, Brendan.

I love you, too, Katie.

And they would have walked up the carpeted stairs between the white columns and into the clamor of the smoky, clanging palace. They would have done this as man and
wife, starting their lives together, still kids really, and East Buckingham would have been a million miles behind them and receding a million more with every step they took.