Black House (24 page)

“Huh?” Ronnie says. T.J. drops his chin and crosses his arms on the top of his head, as if to ward off a blow. “Tyler went somewheres,” Ronnie says. “We didn’t look for him, we went to the park. To trade the Magic cards.”

“I see,” Jack says. “Ronnie, thank you. You have been very helpful. I’d like you to go outside and stay with Ebbie and Officer Dulac while I have a short conversation with T.J. It shouldn’t take more than five minutes, if that.”

“I can go?” At Jack’s nod, Ronnie moves hesitantly out of his chair. When he reaches the door, T.J. emits a whimper. Then Ronnie is gone, and T.J. jerks backward into his chair and tries to become as small as possible while staring at Jack with eyes that have become shiny, flat, and perfectly round.

“T.J.,” Jack says, “you have nothing to worry about, I promise you.” Now that he is alone with the boy who had declared his guilt by falling asleep in the interrogation room, Jack Sawyer wants above all to absolve him of that guilt. He knows T.J.’s secret, and the secret is nothing; it is useless. “No matter what you tell me, I’m not going to arrest you. That’s a promise, too. You’re not in any trouble, son. In fact, I’m glad you and your friends could come down here and help us straighten things out.”

He goes on in this vein for another three or four minutes, in the course of which T. J. Renniker, formerly condemned to death by firing squad, gradually comprehends that his pardon has come through and his release from what his buddy Ronnie would call vurance dile is imminent. A little color returns to his face. He returns to his former size, and his eyes lose their horror-stricken glaze.

“Tell me what Ebbie did,” Jack says. “Just between you and me. I won’t tell him anything. Honest. I won’t rat you out.”

“He wanted Ty to buy more Magic cards,” T.J. says, feeling his way through unknown territory. “If Ty was there, he woulda. Ebbie can get kind of mean. So . . . so he told me, go downstreet and get the slowpoke, or I’ll give you an Indian burn.”

“You got on your bike and rode back down Chase Street.”

“Uh-huh. I looked, but I didn’t see Ty anywheres. I thought I
would,
you know? Because where else could he be?”

“And . . . ?” Jack reels in the answer he knows is coming by winding his hand through the air.

“And I still didn’t see him. And I got to Queen Street, where the old folks’ home is, with the big hedge out front. And, um, I saw his bike there. On the sidewalk in front of the hedge. His sneaker was there, too. And some leaves off the hedge.”

There it is, the worthless secret. Maybe not entirely worthless: it gives them a pretty accurate fix on the time of the boy’s disappearance: 8:15, say, or 8:20. The bike lay on the sidewalk next to the sneaker for something like four hours before Danny Tcheda spotted them. Maxton’s takes up just about all the land on that section of Queen Street, and no one was showing up for the Strawberry Fest until noon.

T.J. describes being afraid—if the Fisherman pulled Ty into that hedge, maybe he’d come back for more! In answer to Jack’s final question, the boy says, “Ebbie told us to say Ty rode away from in front of the Allsorts, so people wouldn’t, like, blame us. In case he was killed. Ty isn’t really killed, is he? Kids like
Ty
don’t get killed.”

“I hope not,” Jack says.

“Me, too.” T.J. snuffles and wipes his nose on his arm.

“Let’s get you on your way home,” Jack says, leaving his chair.

T.J. stands up and begins to move along the side of the table. “Oh! I just remembered!”

“What?”

“I saw feathers on the sidewalk.”

The floor beneath Jack’s feet seems to roll left, then right, like the deck of a ship. He steadies himself by grasping the back of a chair. “Really.” He takes care to compose himself before turning to the boy. “What do you mean, feathers?”

“Black ones. Big. They looked like they came off a crow. One was next to the bike, and the other was
in
the sneaker.”

“That’s funny,” says Jack, buying time until he ceases to reverberate from the unexpected appearance of feathers in his conversation with T. J. Renniker. That he should respond at all is ridiculous; that he should have felt, even for a second, that he was likely to faint is grotesque. T.J.’s feathers were real crow feathers on a real sidewalk. His were dream feathers, feathers from unreal robins, illusory as everything else in a dream. Jack tells himself a number of helpful things like this, and soon he does feel normal once again, but we should be aware that, for the rest of the night and much of the next day, the word
feathers
floats, surrounded by an aura as charged as an electrical storm, beneath and through his thoughts, now and then surfacing with the sizzling crackle of a lightning bolt.

“It’s weird,” T.J. says. “Like, how did a feather get in his
sneaker
?”

“Maybe the wind blew it there,” Jack says, conveniently ignoring the nonexistence of wind this day. Reassured by the stability of the floor, he waves T.J. into the hallway, then follows him out.

Ebbie Wexler pushes himself off the wall and stamps up alongside Bobby Dulac. Still in character, Bobby might have been carved from a block of marble. Ronnie Metzger sidles away. “We can send these boys home,” Jack says. “They’ve done their duty.”

“T.J., what did you say?” Ebbie asks, glowering.

“He made it clear that you know nothing about your friend’s disappearance,” Jack says.

Ebbie relaxes, though not without distributing scowls all around. The final and most malignant scowl is for Jack, who raises his eyebrows. “I didn’t cry,” Ebbie says. “I was scared, but I didn’t cry.”

“You were scared, all right,” Jack says. “Next time, don’t lie to me. You had your chance to help the police, and you blew it.”

Ebbie struggles with this notion and succeeds, at least partially, in absorbing it. “Okay, but I wasn’t really flippin’ at you. It was the stupid music.”

“I hated it, too. The guy who was with me insisted on playing it. You know who he was?”

In the face of Ebbie’s suspicious glower, Jack says, “George Rathbun.”

It is like saying “Superman,” or “Arnold Schwarzenegger”; Ebbie’s suspicion evaporates, and his face transforms. Innocent wonder fills his small, close-set eyes. “You know George Rathbun?”

“He’s one of my best friends,” Jack says, not adding that most of his other best friends are, in a sense, also George Rathbun.

“Cool,” Ebbie says.

In the background, T.J. and Ronnie echo,
“Cool.”

“George
is
pretty cool,” Jack says. “I’ll tell him you said that. Let’s go downstairs and get you kids on your bikes.”

Still wrapped in the glory of having gazed upon the great, the
tremendous
George Rathbun, the boys mount their bicycles, pedal away down Sumner Street, and swerve off onto Second. Bobby Dulac says, “That was a good trick, what you said about George Rathbun. Sent them away happy.”

“It wasn’t a trick.”

So startled that he jostles back into the station house side by side with Jack, Bobby says, “George Rathbun is a friend of yours?”

“Yep,” Jack says. “And sometimes, he can be a real pain in the ass.”

Dale and Fred Marshall look up as Jack enters the office, Dale with a cautious expectancy, Fred Marshall with what Jack sees, heartbreakingly, as hope.

“Well?” Dale says.

(
feathers)

“You were right, they were hiding something, but it isn’t much.”

Fred Marshall slumps against the back of his chair, letting some of his belief in a future hope leak out of him like air from a punctured tire.

“Not long after they got to the 7-Eleven, the Wexler boy sent T.J. down the street to look for your son,” Jack says. “When T.J. got to Queen Street, he saw the bike and the sneaker lying on the sidewalk. Of course, they all thought of the Fisherman. Ebbie Wexler figured they might get blamed for leaving him behind, and he came up with the story you heard—that Tyler left them, instead of the other way around.”

“If you saw all four boys around ten past eight, that means Tyler disappeared only a few minutes later. What does this guy do, lurk in hedges?”

“Maybe he does exactly that,” Jack says. “Did you have people check out that hedge?”

(
feathers)

“The staties went over it, through it, and under it. Leaves and dirt, that’s what they came up with.”

As if driving a spike with his hand, Fred Marshall bangs his fist down onto the desk. “My son was gone for four hours before anyone noticed his bike. Now it’s almost seven-thirty! He’s been missing for most of the day! I shouldn’t be sitting here, I should be driving around, looking for him.”

“Everybody is looking for your son, Fred,” Dale says. “My guys, the staties, even the FBI.”

“I have no faith in them,” Fred says. “They haven’t found Irma Freneau, have they? Why should they find my son? As far as I can see, I’ve got one chance here.” When he looks at Jack, emotion turns his eyes into lamps. “That chance is you, Lieutenant. Will you help me?”

Jack’s third and most troubling thought, withheld until now and purely that of an experienced policeman, causes him to say, “I’d like to talk to your wife. If you’re planning on visiting her tomorrow, would you mind if I came along?”

Dale blinks and says, “Maybe we should talk about this.”

“Do you think it would do some good?”

“It might,” Jack says.

“Seeing you might do
her
some good, anyhow,” Fred says. “Don’t you live in Norway Valley? That’s on the way to Arden. I can pick you up about nine.”

“Jack,” Dale says.

“See you at nine,” Jack says, ignoring the signals of mingled distress and anger emanating from his friend, also the little voice that whispers (
feather
).

“Amazing,” says Henry Leyden. “I don’t know whether to thank you or congratulate you. Both, I suppose. It’s too late in the game to make ‘bitchrod,’ like me, but I think you could have a shot at ‘dope.’ ”

“Don’t lose your head. The only reason I went down there was to keep the boy’s father from coming to my house.”

“That wasn’t the only reason.”

“You’re right. I was feeling sort of edgy and hemmed in. I felt like getting out, changing the scenery.”

“But there was also
another
reason.”

“Henry, you are hip-deep in pigshit, do you know that? You want to think I acted out of civic duty, or honor, or compassion, or altruism, or something, but I didn’t. I don’t like having to say this, but I’m a lot less good-hearted and responsible than you think I am.”

“ ‘Hip-deep in pigshit’? Man, you are absolutely on the money. I have been hip-deep in pigshit, not to mention chest-deep and even
chin-
deep in pigshit, most of my life.”

“Nice of you to admit it.”

“However, you misunderstand me. You’re right, I do think you are a good, decent person. I don’t just think it, I know it. You’re modest, you’re compassionate, you’re honorable, you’re responsible—no matter what you think of yourself right now. But that wasn’t what I was talking about.”

“What
did
you mean, then?”

“The other reason you decided to go to the police station is connected to this problem, this concern, whatever it is, that’s been bugging you for the past couple of weeks. It’s like you’ve been walking around under a shadow.”

“Huh,” Jack said.

“This problem, this
secret
of yours, takes up half your attention, so you’re only half present; the rest of you is somewhere else. Sweetie, don’t you think I can tell when you’re worried and preoccupied? I might be blind, but I can see.”

“Okay. Let’s suppose that something has been on my mind lately. What could that have to do with going to the station house?”

“There are two possibilities. Either you were going off to confront it, or you were fleeing from it.”

Jack does not speak.

“All of which suggests that this problem has to do with your life as a policeman. It could be some old case coming back to haunt you. Maybe a psychotic thug you put in jail was released and is threatening to kill you. Or, hell, I’m completely full of shit and you found out you have liver cancer and a life expectancy of three months.”

“I don’t have cancer, at least as far as I know, and no ex-con wants to kill me. All of my old cases, most of them, anyway, are safely asleep in the records warehouse of the LAPD. Of course, something has been bothering me lately, and I should have expected you to see that. But I didn’t want to, I don’t know, burden you with it until I managed to figure it out for myself.”

“Tell me one thing, will you? Were you going toward it, or running away?”

“There’s no answer to that question.”

“We shall see. Isn’t the food ready by now? I’m starving, literally
starving.
You cook too slow. I would have been done ten minutes ago.”

“Hold your horses,” Jack says. “Coming right up. The problem is this crazy kitchen of yours.”

“Most rational kitchen in America. Maybe in the world.”

After ducking out of the police station quickly enough to avoid a useless conversation with Dale, Jack had yielded to impulse and called Henry with the offer of making dinner for both of them. A couple of good steaks, a nice bottle of wine, grilled mushrooms, a big salad. He could pick up everything they needed in French Landing. Jack had cooked for Henry on three or four previous occasions, and Henry had prepared one stupendously bizarre dinner for Jack. (The housekeeper had taken all the herbs and spices off their rack to wash it, and she had put everything back in the wrong place.) What was he doing in French Landing? He’d explain that when he got there. At eight-thirty he had pulled up before Henry’s roomy white farmhouse, greeted Henry, and carried the groceries and his copy of
Bleak House
into the kitchen. He had tossed the book to the far end of the table, opened the wine, poured a glass for his host and one for himself, and started cooking. He’d had to spend several minutes reacquainting himself with the eccentricities of Henry’s kitchen, in which objects were not located by kind—pans with pans, knives with knives, pots with pots—but according to what sort of meal required their usage. If Henry wanted to whip up a grilled trout and some new potatoes, he had only to open the proper cabinet to find all the necessary utensils. These were arranged in four basic groups (meat, fish, poultry, and vegetables), with many subgroups and subsubgroups within each category. The filing system confounded Jack, who often had to peer into several widely separated realms before coming upon the frying pan or spatula he was looking for. As Jack chopped, wandered the shelves, and cooked, Henry had laid the table in the kitchen with plates and silverware and sat down to quiz his troubled friend.