Darkness peering (5 page)

"Daddy?" She stirred in the sheets.

"What is it, sweetheart?"

"Is the retarded girl in heaven now?"

He sat on the edge of her bed, careful not to squash her feet. On her
bedside table was a box of shells from their most recent trip to the
seashore, a butterfly barrette, a Mickey Mouse key chain. "Yes," he
said, "I think she is."

"Daddy?"

"What, Pickle?"

"Tell me again how you get into heaven?"

He sighed, feeling the birdlike throb of her breath against his arm.
"A long time ago, the Greeks believed that after you died, your soul
went to heaven. And the gods put your heart on a big scale-your heart
on one side of the scale, and a feather on the other side."

"What's the feather for?"

She already knew, but he told her anyway. "It's the symbol for truth.
If your heart is full of lies and meanness and cruelty, it'll be much
heavier than the feather and you'll get thrown back down to earth
because you're not ready yet. But if your heart is as light as the
feather ... if it's empty of lies, and full of goodness and truth, then
the gods will open the gates and you can waltz right in."

She wrinkled her nose. "Was the retarded girl's heart as light as a
feather?"

"I think so, yes."

"How about mine, Daddy?"

Nalen kissed her cheek. "Don't worry, sweetheart. Yours is light as a
huckleberry."

Nalen stripped in the dark, crawled between the pretzel-smelling sheets
and drew Faye close. They lay for a while like that before she spoke,
her voice scratchy with sleep. "Let's not fight."

"No, I don't want to fight anymore."

She was warm and tensile in his arms, moonlight from the window washing
over the strange planes of her face. "Nalen?"

"Hi."

"I had this dream you drove off a cliff and died."

The room was so quiet, the clock sounded like a bass drum. "It's all
right," he said, "We're gonna be fine."

"Are we?" Her exhausted eyes were on him. "Really?"

"Yeah."

"So what happened tonight?"

"Nothing much."

"Any suspects?"

"Not yet."

"Oh God, I feel sick." She rolled away from him and he lightly ran his
hand along her bumpy spine, muscles bunching beneath her musk-smelling
skin. "I almost called the precinct," she admitted.

"Sorry. I forgot. We were swamped."

"I hate you."

Very gently, he stroked the nape of her neck. "No, you don't."

"Yes, I do. I hate you."

"Faye ..." he said, drawing out her name until it sounded like a
prayer.

"You never listen."

"I'm listening now."

"No." She twisted around to face him, her worry and frustration
palpable. "You keep shutting me out. You shut us all out, Nalen."

"No, I don't."

"Yes, you do. You don't realize it, but you do. There are days ...
whole days where you'll say maybe two words. I don't understand
you."

He knew what she was talking about. She was talking about

his black moods. Whenever a black mood hit, he'd go for a walk in the
woods or else down to the basement where he could be alone. Down in
the basement, he'd sit in the semidark and think about the past. His
mind whirred like a movie projector as he relived long-ago times with
his brothers and mother and father. Mostly his father. Good of' Pop,
with his adrenaline-loaded sweat and his stinky boozy breath, cleaning
his service revolver at the kitchen table. "You ready?" he'd ask.
Nalen wouldn't blink as Sheldon Storrow slid a single bullet into the
chamber, spun it and held the gun to his son's temple.

"You ready?"

Nalen would squirm like a pinned insect as Pop waited an eternal,
gut-churning beat, Nalen's eyes swelling shut, his brain collapsing in
fear ... and then click. That particular flavor of hell. He'd piss
his pants and get a lungful of cheap-bee rand-good jukebox breath, and
Pop would lean back laughing. "What'd I tell ya, son? You were born
with a horseshoe up your ass."

Now Nalen took a deep breath. "I'm sorry, Faye," he said, coming up
for air. "I don't mean to shut you out."

Her face crimped, and she stroked his cheek with her curled index
finger. "I hate him for what he did to you."

"Pop? He had a rough life."

"Achh. See that?" She glowered. "Always leaping to his defense. This
man who beat his wife and kids. And we're still suffering the
aftereffects, me and the children. I'm glad the bastard's dead."

"You don't mean that."

"Yes, I do."

Something inside the house creaked, and he bolted upright, reaching for
his service revolver and listening for the sound of footsteps or the
creak of a door--but there was only silence. It was okay. They were
safe. For now.

She was lying there, watching him, disgust stamped on her lace. "You
always expect the worst."

"No, I don't."

"It's like we're all biding our time until the sky comes crashing down
around our heads."

He tried to laugh it off, but secretly he knew she was right. He was a
pessimist's pessimist. He tucked his revolver back in the drawer of
the bedside table and settled down beside her. Her breath smelled
sweet-and-sour and her eyes glinted with Faye's own patented brand of
fury. "I don't always live my life that way."

Her voice was small. "You need counseling."

"We're not having this discussion."

"Why can't you just acknowledge something's seriously wrong, Nalen?"
Her rage flared. "We do not have the perfect marriage, you are not the
perfect father, our children are suffering ..."

"What time did Billy get home last night?" he asked, stopping her in
mid-sentence. She looked at him with wary eyes.

"About six-thirty. Why?"

"Six-thirty?"

She sharpened her focus. "Why?"

"Did he go out later on?"

"He drove over to Gillian's around eight. Why?"

"When did he get back from Gillian's?"

"Where are you going with this, Nalen?"

"Nowhere. Just curious."

She stared at him. "He went out at eight o'clock and came back at
ten-thirty, just like I asked him to."

Nalen chewed on his lower lip.

"What's so important?"

"I didn't say it was."

"Is Billy in trouble?" He wouldn't answer, and she grabbed his ears
and twisted. "Tell me."

"Ow." His face grew hot. His ears stung, and he pried her hands off
him. "It's probably nothing."

"Probably?"

His blood was thrumming through his veins and he was reminded of
long-ago days early in their marriage when their lovemaking had been
full of passion, passion verging on violence-not truly, not really--but
something close to wrestling and a heated exchange of words, a torrent
of emotions, the pivotal one being jealousy. Crazy jealousy. He
remembered once inside their little apartment, the neighbors had called
the cops and they'd had to explain that, no, Officer--sheepish and half
naked--no, they'd just been dancing. And giggled about it later. And
jokes down at the precinct.

And once Faye had been so furious, so raging lunatic jealous, she'd
locked herself in the bathroom and threatened to slit her wrists. He'd
been talking to another woman where they were supposed to meet for
dinner, a little Italian place off Tremont Street, and she'd entered
the restaurant looking like a million bucks, a real knockout; but when
she saw him with the woman (who'd come up to him because he was in
uniform, they were all over the place, those cop groupies), Faye spun
around on her heels and stormed out, and he'd chased her down the
sidewalk and all the way home, she crying bitterly, her betrayed face
and she'd locked herself in the bathroom and he'd had to kick the door
in, and she'd stood there with a razor blade poised above her wrist ...
and he'd cried with her. The two of them holding each other on the
cold tiled floor, him pledging his eternal love. And only later, much
later, had she confessed that she'd only been pretending to slit her
wrists, that she had in fact sustained that pose during the time it'd
taken him to kick the door down ... Now Nalen was kissing her, his
strong arms tentacled around her as she struggled against his weight.

"I'm still angry," she said as he rocked them off balance.

"I'm sorry, Faye. Don't hate me, Faye."

And finally her muscles relaxed, giving in, and he knew she would never
stop resenting him, never stop feeling trapped, and that this--his
burning hunger and her bitter resistance--was the sum total of their
lives together.

FIVE PAST MIDNIGHT THE FOLLOWING SATURDAY, NALEN

rubbed his face hard. "Okay, people," he said, exhaustion slurring his
speech, "what've we got?"

They were seated around the conference table--Nalen and McKissack,
Detective Sergeant Guy Fletcher, dispatcher Phillip Reingold, and
Detectives Hughie Boudreau and Irving Nussbaum. A squat black bookcase
crammed with mug shot binders leaned crookedly against the wall to
their left, and a mini-fridge used for bag lunches hummed industriously
to their right. The empty terrarium on top of the refrigerator had
once housed a live tarantula until somebody'd sprayed it with a lethal
dose of Windex; now there was nothing inside but a rubber octopus
floating on a sea of rubber bands everybody took turns shooting into
it. The carpet was a dingy, coffee-stained maroon.

"Anybody else want a cup?" Hughie helped himself to coffee from the
machine, stirred in three heaping tablespoons of powdered nondairy
creamer and sat back down.

"Okay." Nalen's stomach cramped at the thought of all that powdered
creamer. "What've we got, people? What, what, what?"

"No abduction site," McKissack began. "No weapon. No eyewitnesses. No
physical evidence." He rocked back smugly in his chair and chewed on a
toothpick, since Nalen didn't allow smoking inside the station.
McKissack claimed he needed to keep his mouth moving no matter
what--pencil, chewing gum, finger. Claimed he had an oral fixation.
"Oh, and did I mention ... no suspects?"

"Well, gee whiz ... thanks for nothing, Lieutenant," Nalen a a

said, refusing to let his best detective's hard-bitten cynicism get
the better of him. "Now let's see what we do have." He flipped open
the case file. "We picked up some fibers on the victim's clothes.
Dark green, synthetic. Ten percent wool, sixty percent rayon, thirty
percent nylon."

"Wow, that eliminates one percent of the population," McKis sack said
with snide glee.

Nalen bristled to life. "What d'you want, McKissack? You want my
fucking job? Here, take my fucking hat."

McKissack threw up his hands. "I don't want your job, Chief. They
aren't paying you enough."

Nalen couldn't help smiling. That broke the tension.

"The sooner we wrap things up," he said, "the sooner we can all go
home."

"She disappeared sometime shortly after school let out on Tuesday,"
Hughie Boudreau began. Stress had painted violet circles underneath
his eyes. "The medical examiner's best guess for time of death is
somewhere between five-thirty and six-thirty P.M. No later than
six-thirty. That leaves four hours, give or take, still unaccounted
for."

"There's our window," Nalen said. "Two-thirty to six-thirty P.M."

"It's like she disappeared off the face of the earth," Guy Fletcher
said. At six-foot-four, Fletcher was 220 pounds of ripped muscle and
Algonquin heritage inside an old biker jacket. "Nobody saw
anything."

"These retarded kids are apparently highly ritualized in their
behavior," Irving Nussbaum interrupted. Nussbaum sometimes joked he
was the only Jew in Maine. Squat and balding, he'd gravitated here
from New York City after having burnt out on big city violence, just
like Nalen. "Mom and Pop say Melissa was committed to her routine.
Every morning when she brushed her teeth, she always touched the
bathroom faucet twice before turning it on. She squeezed the
toothpaste out carefully onto her toothbrush, then rolled up the bottom
just like her daddy taught

her to. In a similar vein, she had a specific route home she rarely
deviated from."

"What I wanna know is," McKissack said, "what's a kid like that doing
in high school?"

"It's called main streaming Nalen said. "Go on, Irving."

"Trinka Parsons says every weekday at about quarter to three, Melissa
walks past her house."

"Every day at two-forty P.M.," Hughie corrected him, "the Parsons' dog
runs up to Melissa, and Melissa plays with her for a minute or two,
then waves bye-bye to Trinka. Then she's on her way."

"She always exits the northern-facing doors at school, then heads south
on Bellamy, right onto Addams, left on Crowing Heights, left on
Spencer." Nussbaum scratched his chin. "Not once did she deviate from
this route."

"Trinka Parsons thought Melissa was out sick on Tuesday," Hughie said,
"because the dog kept wagging its tail and gazing longingly up the
street, but Melissa never showed."

"The Parsons live on Crowing Heights, so that narrows it down to
somewhere between Bellamy and Addams."

"What about the partial?" McKissack asked, propping his feet on the
table. Nalen didn't mind people propping their feet on the conference
table after midnight; it was the territorial way McKissack did it that
bothered him. As if he owned the place.

"It's pretty nondescript." Nalen pinched the bridge of his nose,
trying to squeeze more information out of his brain. "No tread, size
nine or nine and a half..."

"Not a terribly big guy. That fits with the fact that the body was
dragged rather than carried down to the pond," McKissack said.

"Nobody at school saw anything unusual." Hughie leafed through a stack
of interview forms. "It's perplexing."

"It's like she was invisible," Fletcher said again, and Nalen detected
the angry residue in his voice. "Nobody noticed her when she was
there. Nobody noticed her when she was gone."