All the Things You Are (29 page)

‘It's either that or we go home, Barbara,' Donna says, and after a spasm of eye-rolling, Barbara concedes.

‘All right,
fine.
'

There has already been sulking because the walk along the lakeside splashed mud all over the girls' Ugg boots, and while Irene didn't seem to mind, Barbara was outraged, as if muddy boots were yet another infernal adult scheme to thwart her. Donna is amused to note that they are both now armed with heavy sticks which they found on the walk and refuse to relinquish:

Irene: They'd be good for beating away werewolves, or zombies.

Barbara: Or boys.

The houses in Ripley Fields are mostly basic ranches and split-levels, peppered with a scattering of larger dwellings: Neo-Tudor, Neo-Colonial, Neo-Victorian. ‘A great place to raise the kids' is what everyone says, and Donna has to agree: tonight, the wide tree-lined streets of the estate are swarming with pint-sized witches and wizards, goblins and ghosts and ghouls, some bustling around like Barbara, some hanging back like Irene, their parents either shadowing them like a security detail or hanging back to give them a taste of freedom. There are only about a thousand people in the entire village, so as aloof as Donna has always tried to hold herself, she is inevitably waylaid by this gallery owner or that hairdresser, keen to know who the vampire and the kitty-kat are.

‘My nieces,' Donna says, dodging the invitation to explain any further, the girls an excuse to smile and nod and move on. She is spooked a little, by the wolf sighting earlier, by the crackle of fireworks and the piercing squeals of so many jubilant children, high on the prospect of gorging themselves on unfeasible portions of candy. Mostly though, she's spooked by the news item she saw before they left the house, while the girls pulled their costumes on and jabbered about Halloween, the news item featuring the dead man in Danny and Claire's backyard, the dead
dog
,
the Be On The Lookout Alert for Danny, the mention of the girls. Donna called Danny's number immediately and shouted at his voicemail, tried Claire but couldn't reach her, then had to make a quick decision on whether to rescind trick or treating on security grounds, and found she simply couldn't.

But she is walking slow and watchful, and if Irene hadn't insisted, she'd be on the girls anyway, like a whatdoyoucallit, helicopter mom. On the plus side, it's Cambridge, where the local paper is full of school sports reports and chamber of commerce press releases and sponsored columns from the local dentist and veterinary surgeon and the murder of that real estate agent a few years back was a total one-off.
It's a great place to raise your kids
, Donna actually mouths to herself. On the minus side, so is fucking Madison, so what the hell is a dead body doing in the backyard on Arboretum Avenue?
Oh my God, little brother, what have you got yourself into?

Yes, Donna is walking slow and watchful, her hands in the pockets of her Patagonia fleece, her glossy red clutch with her glossy black Glock within reach of her left hand, and she clocks each parent with interest: one of the barmen at Andrew's Bar, the guy from the motor shop, Patricia and Pam from The Gingerbread House. There are some she doesn't recognize, the bunch of teenage guys who look like they're looking for trouble but wouldn't know what to do with it if they found it, or the sexy redhead with the guy in the Badgers hat, who are probably on their way home from work and could care less if it's Halloween or not. Not everyone has kids, after all.

Donna's favorite moment of the evening so far:

A huge, gloomy Neo-Tudor other kids have avoided. Barbara, either oblivious, or reckless, possibly (usually) both, forges ahead, Irene, glancing over her shoulder at Donna, follows. The big old door opens, and a grumpy old guy (there's always one) appears.

‘What are you supposed to be?' he barks at Barbara.

‘Vampire,' she says in a low voice, poor Babs knocked off course, suddenly deflated, cowed by the old buzzard, Donna wants to march up and smash his mean old face in.

‘What's that? Can't hear ya.'

‘
Vampire!
' Barbara yells, irritation conquering her fears.
Good girl yourself, a Brogan through and through
, Donna grins.

‘All right then,' the grumpy old guy (GOG) grunts, and tips a bunch of candy into Barbara's skull and crossbones tote bag. He turns to Irene, and immediately starts to shake his head.

‘Oh no,' he says. ‘No, you're not even wearing a Halloween costume.'

‘Yes, I am,' says Irene firmly, who is reluctant to get involved, but committed once she is.

‘You're wearing cat's ears and a little mask and a fur suit and a tail,' the GOG snarls.

‘That's 'cause I'm a kitty-kat,' trills Irene.

The GOG, who Donna is beginning to find kind of funny in a weird way, folds his arms above his huge belly and shakes his bearded head.

‘Kitty-kats are not Halloween critters,' he says, like it's the verdict in a trial, and Donna nearly giggles.

‘Hey!' says Barbara, outraged on her sister's behalf.

‘It's OK,' Irene says. ‘Kitty-kats are too. In ancient Egypt, a Roman soldier killed a cat, and the people of the Nile were furious and killed him, because they saw in the cat the Goddess Bast, who is goddess of the moon. And the goddess of the moon is also the goddess of Halloween. And that's why I'm a kitty-kat.'

The GOG is momentarily silenced by this.

‘So? Trick or Treat? Where's her
stuff
?' Barbara says, and the GOG shrugs and tips candy into Irene's tote.

‘Hey,' he says, as the girls are turning to go. ‘Was any of that true?'

‘Some of it,' Irene says.

‘Which bits?'

‘You wouldn't understand,' Barbara says.

‘It's stuff only we know about,' Irene says.

‘You? Who are you?' the GOG says.

Barbara has almost caught up to Donna now. She waits for Irene and then turns back to the GOG, framed in the gloom of his doorway.

‘Who are we?' Barbara says, as a rocket whooshes through the sky overhead, red sparks trailing in its wake, and Irene turns to her sister, on point.

‘Who are we? We're the Brogan sisters.'

A
t the Brogan house on Arboretum Avenue, no one is sure what to do about the dead dog, and it falls to Detective Nora Fox to make a decision. It is the last thing to be settled before the crime scene is released. The body still lacks formal identification, but by a process of elimination, it is almost certainly that of Ralph Cowley – Ken Fowler didn't get to talk to him, but there is a Dave Ricks Graphic Design consultancy on West Wacker in Chicago, and the receptionist told him Mr Ricks was unavailable because he was in a meeting, not because he was dead. The medical examiner has done his work, and the body has been removed, and the police photographers and technical specialists have taken their shots and collected their samples. Fragments of police tape litter the trampled lawn as Officer Colby and Nora Fox stand in the dark above the exhumed body of the grotesquely mutilated dog.

‘We can't just leave it here,' Colby says.

‘Him,' Nora says. ‘Mr Smith was his name.'

Her tone is harsher than she intends, anger at the savage who did this seeping into it, and Colby winces slightly, as if he has been rebuked.

‘We're not going to bury him again either,' she says. ‘If there's … it's for the family to decide. If there's anything in the garage … canvas tarpaulin, or a tent or something? And then they can bury him, as a family, when the whole thing …'

Nora lets her voice trail off. It's understood that the whole thing could end in a number of ways, most of them excluding a scenario in which the reunited Brogan family congregate together in the backyard for the burial of their pet. Colby nods quietly and immediately heads for the garage.

Nora looks back to the turreted Queen Anne cottage in the woods that is the Brogan house, and wonders if they were tempting fate, living out here like this, then briskly dismisses the superstitious nature of the thought, and sets her mind to run over what has happened since she left Monroe High School library.

Firstly, Danny Brogan's traveling companion, Jeff Torrance, was shot dead earlier in the afternoon outside a Ruby Tuesday's chain restaurant in Rockford, Illinois. Ken Fowler had already got plates from the DMV for a red 1976 Ford Mustang registered to Jefferson Torrance, Spring Harbor, Madison WI, and added it to the BOLO alert when it emerged that Danny Brogan had taken off in it. An eye witness saw Danny hovering over the body, hands and face covered in blood. Initially the Rockford Police assumed that Brogan had shot Torrance, but once the forensic pathologist from the University of Illinois showed up, his preliminary findings made it clear that, from the nature of the impact wound and the angle of entry, the shot had been fired from some considerable distance. Nonetheless, Brogan was still being pursued, and now the highway patrol had a vehicle to watch out for.

Secondly, Nora has called Cass Epstein at the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families. Nora and Cass are members of the same book group, and when the book of the month was
Conspiracy of Silence
by Martha Powers, with its themes of adoption, the discussion had quickly moved, as book group discussions will, from the book to the issues themselves: what rights do the birth parents, the foster parents and the adopted children have, and who takes precedence? Nora knows she can get access to information based on a warrant or if she can demonstrate it's a vital part of her investigation. She doesn't have the former, and doesn't know yet if the latter applies. But it's Halloween tonight, the Bradberry fire was on Halloween thirty-five years ago, and Nora doesn't think much of detectives who think having a bad feeling means anything, but … she has a bad feeling. So she calls Cass and asks her if she can identify the surviving Bradberry child, the three-year-old girl who got away. She tells Cass it may form the background to an investigation she's conducting, and it might be very helpful, and two people are dead already, so time is a factor. She oscillates between calm, because Cass is highly resistant to bullying, and a bit of, well, bullying. And Cass says the office is nearly closed, and she will have to weigh Nora's application on its merits, and she may not hear back from her until tomorrow, and Happy Halloween! So much for the book club network.

Officer Colby returns with an old plaid suitcase that doesn't lock properly and is covered with mold.

‘It's so cold in that garage, the body's not likely to decompose,' he says, and Nora nods, and Colby gingerly scoops up Mr Smith's body and drops it in the case, and folds the lid over and carries it across to the garage. When he comes back, Nora tells him he can leave. She stays, staring at the house, and pacing the backyard, opening the rear gate that gives out to the Arboretum and walking the earth that has been turned, a Maglite the size of a ballpoint pen guiding her eye. She always does this, like a criminal herself, returning to the scene of the crime just to see if there's anything they've missed. And there is always something. It takes her half an hour, rustling leaves with her feet like a dog, or a child, crunching dead apples into mulch, until she spots something glittering in the forest scurf. She takes tweezers from her bag and picks it up and inspects it. It's a small oval medal, silver in shade but not silver, probably nickel, with a cross and an M on one side and an engraving of the Blessed Virgin Mary on the other, and the words around the engraving, in tiny print:
O Mary conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee.

A Miraculous Medal, she recognizes it immediately: Gary was Catholic and used to wear one, got a kind of illicit thrill from wearing it when they had sex that Nora eventually began to find creepy. But then, Nora never believed in God. Her parents were all, ‘We don't want to impose anything on you. When you're old enough, you can figure it out for yourself.' Nora often wonders if this was the right approach, or if faith is only something you have if you contract it as a child. Not that she necessarily misses it, or at least, not day to day, but she does sometimes envy people who believe, even when it lapses. There's something there they can go back to, and often, when the going gets tough, they do. And she doesn't actually think her parents, who were self-absorbed flakes who divorced when she was ten so they could make two other self-absorbed flakes' lives a misery, had any real intellectual rigor to their non-faith-based method of parenting. She reckons they were just too lazy to get out of bed on a Sunday morning.

She stares at the medal. Maybe there are prints on it, she thinks, popping it into one of the self-sealing evidence bags she's never without. Maybe it just narrows the suspect range down to Catholics. Or maybe it was Ralph Cowley's.

O Mary conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee.

Her phone vibrates. She has a new text message.

Info on your desk dropped it in as I was passing hope it helps Cass x

1976

W
hat happened was Danny was Fire, Dave was Famine, Ralph was Pestilence and Gene was Plague. The lawn was ablaze, and the boys could not be contained; their prank had worked to spectacular effect. They were whooping and roaring with glee now, dancing, literally dancing, between the skulls and the spiders, daring each other to run
through
the flames. Their faces were hidden by their masks, but they caught each other's eyes, and their eyes too were aflame, with mischief, with malice. Each of them noticed the two Bradberry kids in the window, staring out, their faces wide-eyed with fear. Each of them pretended he couldn't see them. ‘Get the fire bottles,' someone said, and though they had all agreed that they probably wouldn't need to use them, in the moment, everyone wanted to add to the blaze.