Virginia Lovers (12 page)

The usual suspects lined the bar: Albert Minnich, who was making a killing selling Toyotas, suddenly popular after the oil crises of ’73; Haywood Herring, whose family-owned poultry-processing business was dominating the coastal plain. These men held court here nightly, and though Thomas did not feel comfortable around them, and found himself on the other side of the fence politically, he had a couple of Scotch and sodas with them anyway, answered their questions about the Pierce boy, which was all anyone was talking about.

“Kind of a sissy, wasn’t he?” said Minnich.

“What difference does that make?” said Thomas. He spoke before he thought, and later, he wondered if he wasn’t looking for an argument. It had never
not
happened—usually he wasn’t around for five minutes before someone started in on the coloreds receiving special treatment—and maybe he subconsciously needed an altercation to tire him out before he got home. He did not want to fight with Caroline, but after their phone call he was in a raw mood, and Minnich and Herring were as good a target as any.

“I’m not saying it makes a difference, Thomas. Just pointing out a fact.”

“Seems likely him being that way had something another to do with him getting killed,” said Herring.

“How’s that?” You mean he died because he was different, he wanted to say, but held his tongue.

“Maybe he flirted with the wrong person.”

“Just because he’s effeminate doesn’t mean he’s homosexual.”

Herring and Minnich traded looks suggesting that Thomas knew a little too much about the subject. Thomas felt defeated, angry that he had even spoken up. He sucked the rest of his drink down and said good-night.

Caroline’s car was the only one in the driveway, and it was past eleven now. He was barely inside when she called out from the kitchen.

“What should we do?”

At least let me in the door,
he thought. Stopping by the club had not worked—the conversation had incited instead of numbed his anger, and he did not want to take his anger out on Caroline. Years of experience told him that this was exactly what would happen.

“Where’ve you been?” she said when he did not answer.

“At the office.” He tried not to sound defensive, but it annoyed him: he was not the one who was missing. She was treating him like an eighteen-year-old, as she wanted him to treat Danny.

“Thomas.”

He walked straight to the cabinet above the oven where the liquor was kept, poured himself a scotch, splashed in a little tap, asked if she wanted one too.

“No,” she said. “I don’t think a drink will help.”

“Whereever the boys are, they’re probably having one.”

“Which is exactly why you shouldn’t, if
they
are. You might need to go pick them up if anything’s happened.”

“They’re late, Caroline. That’s all. Hell, Pete’s always late. I say be home by nine on a weeknight, he rolls in at eleven. I push it back to ten, he slides in at twelve. We’ve got another hour at least before we call out the National Guard.”

“You’re not making this any easier. Besides, it’s not Pete I’m worried about.”

There were times in an argument with Caroline when she unwittingly gave him something he might use against her. This always made Thomas feel queasy, for he knew he would not be able to resist using it. He felt that way now as he pointed out how an hour earlier she had asked him to treat them both like an eighteen-year-olds.

She stared at him without speaking for far too long.

“I’ll be in the bedroom reading,” she said.

“And I’m supposed to wait up for them?”

“You really think you could go to sleep?”

“I don’t know what else I could do.”

“You could get in the car and go find them.”

“This town is small, but it’s not that small.”

“The least you could do is drive out to the high school. Maybe Dan left the car there and went somewhere with one of his friends.”

“And that would make it easier for you to sleep? What difference does it make if he’s driving or not?”

“Quite a lot, Thomas. He’s still a kid, and if he’s drinking—”

“He’s not drinking.”

“How do you know?”

“I just know. Look, I’ll get in the car as soon as I finish this drink and go try and find Pete. I have a few ideas about where he might be. Maybe he knows something about his brother.”

“You really think that’s likely?”

“Didn’t you just ask me to go looking for them? I’m going, okay?”

Alone, he guzzled his drink, rattling the ice, furious at himself for losing out to anger again. His eyes wet and heavy he realized how much he’d had to drink and how much he wanted yet another drink. He grabbed his keys and a fresh cigar and headed out.

At the seedy Laundromat where Pete and his friends hung out he spoke to a few kids who said they hadn’t seen his son all day. He asked for Cozart, who he was told was around somewhere, and after fifteen minutes of waiting awhile a boy from the neighborhood went from car to car in search of him, Cozart appeared in the parking lot. His posture was ridiculously straight— the word
overcorrected
came to mind—and when he reached the car the proof was everywhere, in his eyes, his sweet beery breath, the slow careful way he stamped out his words to keep from running them together.

“Seen Pete?”

“No sir. Not tonight.”

“How about earlier?”

“Nope. Sorry. Want me to tell him you’re looking for him if I do?”

“You can tell me the truth, Cozart. I’m not going to do anything to him, it’s not like you can get him in any trouble for telling me where he is.”

“Okay,” said Cozart. He fell silent.

“Well?”

“I don’t know where he’s at, Mr. Edgecombe.”

“You haven’t seen him since school?”

“I didn’t see him there either.”

“He wasn’t at school today?”

“I didn’t say that,” said Cozart. Thomas doubted whether Cozart knew
what
he’d said. Talking to him when he wasn’t high was hard enough. He wasn’t sure when he’d heard Cozart finish a sentence. Caroline had a way with him, but her way seemed conducted in fragments and non sequiturs, a shorthand devised to match his own. “Pidgin Cozart,” Thomas called it. He’d never been able to decipher it and wasn’t sure he wanted to take the time to learn.

“Wouldn’t you have seen him if he was at school?”

Cozart thought about this for a while. “Maybe, you know, in the parking lot.”

“You don’t have any classes together?”

“No sir. We had gym together in the ninth grade.”

“Thanks, Cozart. You need a ride home?”

“Nah, I reckon I’ll walk.”

“Fine. Listen, you haven’t seen Dan tonight, have you?”

“Dan?”

“You know. Pete’s brother?”

“Oh Dan. No, I haven’t seen him in—”

“Thanks, Cozart.” Thomas didn’t have time to wait until Cozart figured out how long it had been since he’d last seen Daniel.

He drove around for another fifteen minutes, half-heartedly checking the thin stream of cars cruising the strip from the courthouse out to the Glam-O-Rama. He was exhausted and did not think he would find either of his boys this way.

“No luck,” he said to Caroline, who was turned toward the wall, a novel splayed open on the bed beside her, when he entered the bedroom.

“I’m worried, Thomas. Both of them? It’s just too strange.”

“One thing’s for sure, they’re not together. If there is a car accident—”

“Let’s don’t talk about that now,” she said. “Shouldn’t you to call someone?”

“Who? The police? They won’t do anything for forty-eight hours.”

“Not even look out for the car?”

“
That
they might do, but I’d rather wait awhile.”

He was undressed now down to T-shirt and boxers.

“You really think you can sleep?”

“I think I’ll have to try, if I’m going to be good for anything tomorrow.”

“I don’t know how you can sleep.”

Thomas performed his tricks of infinite patience, swallowing hard and breathing big and counting chimpanzee seconds to five.

“Tell you what, I’ll wait up for them on the couch.”

He did not look at her. He grabbed his pillow and a blanket from the chest at the foot of the bed, moved to the living room, settled into the squeaky orange Naugahyde, waited for sleep.

Which would not come. Every time he closed his eyes, the room beyond his lids flared orange with the fire of a car crash. He shuddered, twisted, cursed the sticky naugahyde. He thought of getting up for another a drink, but he knew that if he got out of bed to have a drink he would more than likely spend an hour or two with the bottle, staring out at the streetlights, cultivating the things he habitually cultivated when sitting up late with the streetlights and a bottle: his own put-uponness, the lack of spontaneity in his life, all the ways in which the world had tamped him down.

After an hour he returned to the bedroom, trailing his blanket behind him like a toddler. Caroline was facing the wall. The light was on. She was very much awake and yet completely still except for the rise of her ribcage beneath the thin nightgown she wore.

“I can’t sleep,” he said.

She mumbled something. He was too tired to ask her to repeat it, and he slid over to her, took her into his arms, scrunched closer, pulled up the covers which she, without a word, shrugged off to her waist.

Sometime in the night he heard her moving around the room. Then she was shaking him awake and it was six-thirty and she was telling him both beds were empty. He was usually at work on Friday by that time, as he always ate breakfast with the Kiwanis Club at eight. Caroline loved to tease him about his membership in various civic clubs, which he tolerated, but barely, for business purposes. Secretly he liked her teasing and usually joined in. But today, when she asked if he’d stop by the police station first thing and he mentioned sleepily that he had Kiwanis, she lost her temper.

“Our boys are missing, Tom. Both of them. The only ones we’ve got. They didn’t come home last night, and instead of doing something about it you’re thinking of breakfast with the Kiwanis Club?”

He wasn’t awake. The remnants of the night’s many drinks were too much with him.

“I’ll go myself,” she said.

“I’ll go,” he said. “You need to stay here in case they come home.”

He was dressed and out of there in fifteen minutes, skipping his morning coffee. There was a fresh pot brewing in the backroom of the police station, and he was familiar enough with the place to help himself before he made his way to the office of Croom Beatty Trent’s longtime chief.

“I know what you’re going to ask already, Tom, and I’ll tell you straight out. Soon as I have something worth passing along, I’ll pass it along.”

It took Thomas a few seconds to figure out he was talking about the Pierce case.

“I’m not here for that.”

Croom looked up from his desk.

“You okay? Caroline and the boys?”

“The boys. Neither one of them came home last night.”

Croom glanced at his watch. “Were they together?”

“Not likely. I have to threaten them to get them to talk to each other. No, they run with different crowds.”

“I know Pete’s crowd right well. Dan, though, I didn’t know he had a crowd.”

“He keeps to himself.”

Croom nodded. Thomas didn’t feel right, talking to the chief of police about what crowd his sons ran with, and the look on Croom’s face made it worse.

“I tell you, Tom, I about got my hands full with this murder.”

“I know. I know there’s not much you can do. But I figured you could put out the word, tell your crew to be on the lookout.”

“That I can do. Let me get some info from you. When’d you see them last?”

“Yesterday morning. They left for school.”

“Together?”

Thomas hadn’t thought to ask. It was rare that they rode together, he knew, but it sometimes happened that Pete caught a ride with his brother.

“I don’t know. I’ll have to ask Caroline about that.”

“It’ll help us to know. They make it to school?”

“Don’t know that either.”

Croom wrote something on a legal pad. He seemed to be trying to hide his irritation.

“What kind of car?”

“’68 Galaxy 500.”

Croom stopped writing.

“Not blue, is it?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Dark blue, vinyl top?”

“You found it?”

Croom put his pen down. “No. But I’m looking for it. We got some leads to follow on this Pierce thing. Got a neighbor of the Pierces’ putting your car there that night. He remembered it because it was parked in front of his house when he came home.”

Thomas took a seat. He sat because he was too tired to stand and it was just now seven and he had a full day ahead of him, a busy one, a crucial day if he was going to crank the paper out by Wednesday. He sat because this situation seemed suddenly far beyond his control, growing more complicated and unbelieveable by the minute, and he felt this loss of control in the backs of his legs and in the heaviness of his head and the sag of his stomach.

But Croom was studying him as if his sitting revealed something pertinent. A clue.

“Goddamn, Croom. You know good and well my boys had nothing to do with this.”

“I don’t know a damn thing, Tom. But don’t go quoting me on that in this week’s paper. I ought to know a whole lot more than I do, considering the fact that teenagers talk, they get scared and rat each other out in a heartbeat, and for some reason no one’s talking. Whoever it is killed that boy, everybody’s scared to death of him, that’s all I know.”

“That ought to eliminate my boys.”

“Ought to. I’m not saying they’re involved. I haven’t said anything yet. But now that I know they’ve run off somewhere—”

“Hold on. Who said they ran off somewhere?”

“You hold on, Tom. Settle down and let me do my work. We’ve been knowing each other going on, what, fifteen years? You’re in and out of this office twice a day sometimes. You think I’m one to jump to conclusions?”

“I think you just did.”

Croom sighed. “Want more coffee?”

“Please.”

Croom carried their cups out to the kitchen for a refill. While he was gone Thomas studied the walls of the office, the framed credentials verifying Croom’s training, the photographs of his force in their softball uniforms. He understood that Croom was a fair man—a little political when the situation required, but honest enough in the Trent definition of the word.