All for One (21 page)

Mary turned to him after a minute. “You stopped talking.”

“And ruin this?”

Seamlessly, the volume of the recital ebbed, the music a gentle whisper now. “There. Just pretend you’re in a movie, with atmospheric background music.”

“You give a nice apology.”

“Thank you.”

“Even with the choking.”

She concentrated on her music.

“I do have to ask you something.”

She looked to him, her head bowed gently toward the keys.

“I need your help.”

Her eyes left his, the music rising a hint.

“I’ve talked with four of the six kids whose prints were on the bat, and I’ve gotten nowhere. They’re not opening up. They’re hiding what they know. And they do know.”

Mary breathed slow and played on. “Who didn’t you talk to?”

“Mike and Elena. Their parents weren’t receptive to my...interacting with their children. Their wonderful children.”

“They are wonderful children,” Mary responded, almost snapping at Dooley. Protecting them. “They are. They’re not like that other child you caught.”

“I’m not saying they’re like Jimmy Vincent.”

She moved through the piece from memory, asking after a moment, “How did you catch him?”

“Everyone knew that Jimmy had killed those little boys,” Dooley answered reluctantly, willing to tread this ground again now if it would help. Help with Mary. “It wasn’t catching him that needed doing. We needed real evidence, the kind a court would listen to, and we had none. So, I had to get him to admit to it.”

Mary seemed to nod, though it might have been a gesture in sympathy with the music. “How did you get him to confess?”

An odd, embarrassed regret filled Dooley, as it did each time he thought of how he’d broken through Jimmy Vincent’s defenses. “I spent time with him. Talked, played games. I did all the things that no one had ever really taken the time to do with him. I became his friend. His buddy.” He straightened where he sat and folded his hands between his legs. “And he confided in me. Because I pretended I cared.” Dooley’s tone drew Mary’s eyes his way. “And I nailed him.”

Mary stopped playing, the last note lingering. “It hurt you to do that.”

“I was doing my job. I didn’t think it would be any different than nailing any other criminal.”

“But it was.”

Dooley nodded. “It was.”

Mary looked hard at him, requiring quite clearly that he return the attention. “And you want me to do the same thing to my kids.”

“You already know them,” Dooley said, pointing out the difference. There were others, but what they were did not matter. He suspected there would be an effect on her very similar, if not worse, than there had been on him.

“They trust me.”

“That’s why I’m asking.”

Mary ran one hand over the keys before her, not hard enough to elicit any sound. They were warm and wanted to be played.

“I read their school files,” Dooley told her. “I read all of the kids’ files. Everyone in your class. I read what teachers had said in previous years, and then I read what you put in there.” He tried to make eye contact, but she would not oblige. “Where other wrote observations, you shared insight.”

“That’s my job.”

“Teaching is a job. You have a gift. I saw the progress they’ve made in one year. That doesn’t happen by itself. You’ve connected with them.”

Now Mary looked at him. Her eyes glistened slightly.

“I’ve talked to people at the school. They confirm what I learned from those files. You’ve made a big difference in those kids’ lives. All of them.” He drew on what he could recall. “Joey Travers. A ‘C’ student at best through the fourth grade. Lack of ambition. One of his old teachers wrote that. You get him last year and his grades go up, he’s in the school play. This year he runs for class president and wins.”

“Joey had that in him all the time,” Mary said modestly.

“Paula Jean Allenton,” Dooley continued. “So-so grades and always in fights. She’d fight at the drop of a hat from what I read in her file. And now...”

“All right,” Mary interrupted, ending the unwanted recitation of accomplishments she knew rightly belonged with her students. “I try to be a good teacher.”

“You are a good teacher,” Dooley said. “Good teachers do what is right, Mary.”

“You’re asking me to break a trust. To use what I’ve built with them to...” She receded from the exchange and began to tap two notes slowly, again and again, creating a soft, haunting rhythm.

Dooley wanted to give her something that would make it all easy, palatable. He decided instead on the truth. “The only reason I can live with myself sometimes is because I know that by breaking through to Jimmy Vincent I gave closure to the parents of those three little boys. They had the bodies to bury. What I did let them bury their vengeance. You can give the Edmonds what they want.”

Mary scoffed breathily. “They want my skin.”

“They want to know who killed their son. You’re just a convenient substitute until they have that.”

“So I know.”

“You may not like them. You may not have liked their son. You may not like me.”

“You’re growing on me,” Mary admitted, surprising her guest.

“Help me then,” Dooley implored her, the two note, melancholy rhythm relentless. He put his hand on hers, stopping the music. “Help me put an end to this. It won’t get better with time.”

His touch was cool on her skin, the kind of cool that one cherished in the oppressive grip of a heat wave. Ice water cool. Plain but pure.

Mary slid her hand from his and stood. She backed into the corner of the room and hugged herself, reason and emotion colliding within.

They trust me.

PROTECT THEM!
The cry, the command, came again as both sound and pain in her head. A hurt that was old and familiar in a way she felt she should understand.

She looked at Dooley. Regret softened the inherent brightness in her eyes. “I’ll talk to them.”

“When?”

Mary stiffened a bit at the impatience.

“I’m sorry.”

“I’ll talk to them Monday. After school.”

Dooley nodded. “It’s the right thing.”

“I know,” Mary admitted. She wanted to hate herself, but she knew that it was the right thing.

In the blackness behind her eyes the dark voice growled low.

Dooley rose and walked around the piano until he stood beneath the arched opening to the living room. “Thank you.”

Mary sensed the finality in his appreciation. Dreaded it, actually. “You’re leaving?”

Dooley turned and walked toward the front door. “I should.”

“But the roads,” Mary warned him, his hand already on the coat closet doorknob. “They’re going to be awful. You can’t drive down the mountain in this weather.”

Dooley moved the bastard curtain aside. The night outside was white, both air and earth, but far from impenetrable. As the curtain slipped back he glimpsed the glass slivers again.

When Dooley turned back to Mary she fronted concern as best she could, but he had seen through fronts before, often on a daily basis. Usually lies lay beyond the veil. Here he saw desperation.

“What?” Mary said after his gaze grew long, penetrating.

Dooley gestured toward the curtain. “What happened to the window?”

His knowing dissolved her charade. Her eyes sought solace and considered the precise meeting of wall and ceiling, and the crown molding that racetracked the junction, artful in its being, yet beyond reach.

“Did Chuck Edmond come back?”

“I didn’t know he’d been released,” Mary said after a moment. A tremor lay under her words, like a lazy snake reluctant to strike.

“Did he break it?” Dooley pressed for specificity.

“I didn’t physically see him. But it was him.”

Dooley did not doubt that, but his belief would not be enough for either the Bartlett PD or the County Sheriff to yank Chuckie boy back into a cage. “I’ll call and have the sheriff’s department send out a car.”

“No. Please.”

“What if he comes back? He’s smashed enough things, Mary. You may be next.”

She shook her head. “I’m not going to have everyone thinking that the Edmonds have gotten to me, be it Chuck and his temper or Nate Edmond with his lawyer. A police car in front of my house for a second time in a week is too much satisfaction to give them.” She wanted to say that they should have been as energetic when she’d tried to get them to deal with their youngest when he first became a problem, but wants were wishes now, and wishes were worth little more than the breath that spoke them, or the thoughts that conjured them. “Please stay. I want to sleep tonight. I want to know I’m safe.”

Dooley slid his hands in his pockets. Chester came into the room and arched his back against Mary’s legs, his tail tracing erratic lines in the air about her knees. “It’s too bad he’s not a Doberman.”

“The couch is comfortable,” Mary said. “As comfortable as a couch can be, I suppose. Or you can have my bed and I’ll sleep out here.”

“By the window?” Dooley offered, shaking his head. He succumbed with a smile and patted the arm of the couch. “As comfortable as couches get.”

“Thank you,” she said from across the living room, her body teetering toward Dooley, verging on motion that would take her to him. Chester circled her legs like a wagon master mustering the buckboards and canvas-tops for the night. “I’ll get you a pillow and blankets.”

Dooley watched her disappear into the hall, fear her burden, hate her burden, loyalty her burden. She was cursed by what was hers, and what belonged to others. A pang tickled low in his gut when she came back into the room and handed him the bedding, her eyes thanking him again with no words to clutter the exchange. Low and almost forgotten the sensation was. He hadn’t felt that in a very long time, and when he placed it in time and place he told himself that it was not that. Wasn’t that. Was not that.

He watched her leave him and close the door to her bedroom, then stepped out of his shoes and snapped the blanket open. He twisted the lamp switch off and covered himself as he lay. Snow patted at the porch outside, falling beyond with a soft, breathy hiss, shushing the night.

Dooley listened and stared at the ceiling, his head turning toward a blade of radiance slicing into the living room as Mary’s door opened just a crack. She passed in front, then the light went off and bedsprings moaned.

He laced his fingers behind his head and closed his eyes. Chester mewed loudly a few minutes later but Dooley was fast asleep.

*  *  *

Scream. A scream? Why am I screaming?

Dooley tossed to his side, his unconscious psyche trying to make heads or tails of the little matter that he was screaming. No beast was chasing him in a dream, no free fall without a parachute was terrorizing him. Soon the unconscious surrendered to the nearly conscious, and that quickly to the drowsy, and then it became clear that there was no scream in any dream of his.

There was a scream for real. His eyes snapped open.

Mary
was screaming. Screaming bloody murder.

Dooley bolted up and instinctively grabbed his pistol. He knocked the coffee table askew as he ran for her bedroom and shoulder-blocked the door open. His free hand reached out for the wall where a light switch should be, and it was there, but the small plastic lever was already up.

“NO! NO! CAN’T! CAN’T!”

He focused on the bed, but Mary was not there. The sheets, though, were drawn haphazardly over the far side of the mattress. He abandoned the light and ran around the foot of the four-poster.

“NO! GET IT——!” Mary crouched on the floor, in a near fetal position, knees to the hardwood and her face buried in the covers. “OH GOD! CAN’T! OH! OH!”

Dooley put his weapon on the bureau and eased to the floor near her feet. “Mary. Mary.”

“OH! GOD!” She yelled, then convulsed into a bucking fit of dry heaves, her back arching like a cat, the screams now hollow nothings that spilled invisibly from her gaping mouth.

“Mary,” he said, and put a hand to the small of her back.

She rolled suddenly onto her back like a wrestler whipped around for a pin, and struck out with her feet toward Dooley.

“Mary! Mary!” He blocked the flailing legs and yelled as loud as he could, “MARY!”

Her feet stabbed a few times more at him, then pulled back, her arms wrapping her legs as she reclined, gasping, against a nightstand.

“It’s Dooley, Mary. Dooley. Okay?”

Ragged breaths were the only answer to his inquiry for a moment, then Mary whimpered, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s all right,” he said, and touched her bare foot gently. “You were having a nightmare. That’s all.”

She breathed hard and fast, orienting herself a bit more to the waking state and the man very near telling her that everything was all right.

“It was a bad dream,” Dooley repeated. “Just a dream.”

Her head moved in a slow nod, tears streaking her face, but in her startled state she was unable to remember a dream, or dreaming.

“A dream,” he said one more time, his hand rubbing circles on her foot. “You’re okay.”

“I’m okay.”

He nodded. “You’re just fine.”

Mary reached down and took her hand in his, her thumb rolling softly over his knuckles.
Just a bad dream
, she told herself, whether that had been it or not.
That’s all. A bad dream.

And what do we do with bad things?

We forget them.

“I’m okay.”

He helped her back into bed and covered her up. When he left the room she asked him to leave the door wide open. The sound of her breathing one room away lulled him, but he slept no more that night.

Seventeen

Joel Bauer arrived at the diner just after eight and found Dooley in a corner booth watching the plows scrape along Roman Boulevard.

“Hey,” Joel said in greeting. He sat and snatched up a menu from between boats of jam. “You found the place. Did you order?”

Dooley shook his head and sipped at the coffee that had been poured mere seconds after he’d arrived. “I was waiting for you. My mother raised a polite son.”

A wrinkled old waitress, thin as a wisp, quick stepped to their booth and drew an order pad from her black apron. “Morning, Joel. The usual?”