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Authors: Gary Braver

BOOK: GRAY MATTER
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Kemmer made a faint shrug that said he didn’t have a clue either. If there was a screwup, Greg didn’t want to fan Dixon’s contempt of police.
From his briefcase, Greg pulled out a computer schematic of a child’s head, the holes in Grady’s skull designated as black circles. Kemmer shook his head. He hadn’t seen the drawing. Somebody in Gloucester had screwed up badly. This was not going to be easy. “Our medical examiner suspects that these are the results of some kind of neurological procedure. A brain operation.”
“Brain operation? Good heavens, no,” Winnie said. Suddenly the expression on her face turned dark with concern.
Maybe
operation
was the wrong term. “Did Grady ever have a biopsy for a lesion or tumor?”
Vern shook his head.
“Seizures? Blackouts … ?”
“Nothing like that. Hell, he never even had headaches.”
“And we got all his medical records,” Mrs. Dixon added.
“Is it possible to see them?”
Vernon looked hesitant, but Mrs. Dixon got up to get them. Vernon glowered at Greg. “Are you saying it might be some other child you found?”
“No, it’s Grady, I’m afraid. We’ve got a positive ID on the DNA and dentals.”
Was Joe Steiner wrong about the holes? That they were made by some marine organism?
Mrs. Dixon returned from the other room. “He was a very healthy boy.” She was carrying a thin folder. “You can see for yourself.” She handed it to Greg.
Inside were doctors’ reports of vaccinations, checkups, paid bills, insurance statements, and receipts for medication. It all looked unremarkable. Twice, a few years back, the boy had been to the emergency room for a split knee and removal of a fishhook in his thumb. No paperwork from any neurologist or neurosurgeon’s office.
Vernon looked at the schematic. “You’re saying these holes were in Grady’s skull?”
“Yes.”
“So how in hell did they get there?”
“That’s what I hoped you would tell me.”
Vernon gave Greg a harsh look. “I just said he never had a brain operation.”
“It’s possible we’re mistaken.”
“Now there’s a big surprise.”
Deserved!
Greg thought. “It could be some aquatic organism.” And in the
back of his mind he could hear Joe Steiner: “
The polychaete worms leave smooth cavities.
”
Greg had worked with Joe Steiner for a dozen years and never found him wrong about anything. When he didn’t know something, he’d say so. When he was uncertain, he’d go to people who weren’t. He also said he had double-checked with his people at the Crime Lab.
Or these people were holding back—but why lie about your kid’s biopsy?
Or the kid had the procedure after he was kidnapped. Christ! Nothing made sense.
“
These holes were done with very high-speed cranio-blade drills with precision guidance.”
Greg felt like a horse’s ass.
“Guess that’s not gonna help in your other case now, is it?” Vernon downed his lemonade.
“Maybe not,” Greg said.
Kemmer checked his watch. Their stay was growing cold.
“Well, I feel for the parents,” Mrs. Dixon said. “I know what they’re going through. Grady could be a handful at times. There were days when I wondered if I’d given birth to the devil himself. He could be mighty stubborn.” Her mouth quivered. “It’s just that I’d give anything to see him walk through that door again.”
She got up and went into Grady’s room and returned with a small wooden box, fashioned after a pirate’s chest. “These were some of his special things.”
While Vernon looked anxious for Greg and Kemmer to leave, Mrs. Dixon suddenly seemed compelled to tell them about Grady. “Some of it’s just his baby stuff,” she said. Inside were a baby brush and comb set, a silver rattle, a crucifix, and a little envelope. From it Mrs. Dixon removed a reddish curl of hair. “It’s from his first haircut. He had a head of ringlets, like a cherub.” Her voice broke up.
“It’s where they got the DNA stuff from,” Vernon said.
“He was such a clever little boy,” Mrs. Dixon continued, tears running down her cheeks. “He picked things up real fast. The teachers had him earmarked for the TAG program.”
“TAG program?”
“Talented and gifted. They were going to start him in the second grade.”
She put the box down and removed a sheet from a file folder included with the medical report. “In fact, he was so bored in kindergarten that his teacher said we should have him special-tested. He got a ninety-ninth percentile straight across.”
Greg looked at the score sheet. Listed in different boxes—Verbal, Analytical, Spatial, Logic, Sequencing, and so on—were numerical percentages. Each category was printed with a 99. At the bottom of the page was small print saying that the test was copyrighted by Nova Children’s Center, Inc.
Greg handed Vernon back the folder. “I know it’s in the file,” Greg said, “but if you don’t mind, I’m wondering when the last time was you saw Grady.”
“On that swing outside,” Mrs. Dixon answered. “Every day Tillie Haskell dropped him off from the school van in front. As usual, he came in and got his snack, then went outside to wait for Junie Janks to come by and play. Junie’s the boy who lives down the road. You passed their place coming in. Junie is short for
junior
—his real name’s Bernard, after his dad. About twenty minutes later, Junie shows up wondering where Grady is.” Mrs. Dixon took a deep breath.
Vernon continued for her. “The county police said not to worry, he probably just wandered into the woods. But that was pure bulltiki, because the first thing you teach your kids down here is to respect these woods. The next house on the other side is seventeen miles. I’ve lived in these parts for fortysix years, and I could still get lost a thousand yards in. It all looks the same, and we got that through his head from the day he could walk. You don’t go into the woods.
“Musta had two hundred people search for him—police, volunteer firemen, neighbors, and just about everybody at Mount Ida’s. We looked for a week. But when he didn’t show up by nightfall that first day, I knew we lost him. I knew somebody had taken him. I felt it in my bones. God only knows why.”
B
rendan was checking out the odd head scars in his bathroom mirror when it crossed his mind to kill his grandfather.
The notion just popped into his head without the slightest shock—like deciding to clip his toenails.
And it would be one-two-three easy. No fuss, no muss. No telltale fingerprints or DNA evidence to sweat. No decision about weapons or
modus operandi.
No having to bury bloody meat cleavers. No burning or cutting up the remains. No witnesses.
And no motive, unlike going back to the diner and putting a knife in Angie for publicly humiliating him. He had no motive—just curiosity. (Besides, what kid would kill his own grandfather—his last remaining relative?) And it would be the perfect murder: Just hold back on his pills and sit back and watch him gasp to death on his La-Z-Boy. That would be something. Might melt some snow.
“Hey, Brendan! Where the hell are you, boy?”
“Coming,” he shouted. Richard wanted his refill. Grandpa Richard, although he never called him grandpa. Just Richard. Grandpa was a technicality of blood.
And no blood. No red hand.
His face would scrunch up in wincing pain as the realization swelled in his chest that he was going to die from arterial occlusion. Inarticulate sounds would rise from his throat, saliva stringing from his chin onto his shirt, his
hands alternately flailing then clutching his breast, his feet kicking, his mouth shuddering, air squealing from a clenched larynx, trying to call for help, blubbering in disbelief that Brendan was sitting there transfixed in fascination just three feet away munching pretzel logs.
Maybe that would do it.
“Brendy?” he shouted from his chair downstairs in the TV room.
“In a minute!” Richard had called him that as long as he could remember, which wasn’t much. It came from Brendy Bear, as in Brendy Bear Hugs because Brendan was always hugging and kissing people, Richard claimed. He didn’t do that anymore. He hadn’t touched his grandfather in years. He hadn’t touched anybody in years. Nor did he understand the impulse. He had been misnamed.
Brendan really had nothing against Richard. In fact, he liked him the way a dog might like a devoted owner. He was a nice old man who treated him well, gave him money and, when he turned seventeen, his old Ford pickup which Richard had used for his plumbing business before retiring. Richard had taken him in when his parents died, raising him as best he could at his age. He was protective, kind, and generous with what little he had. There surely was no reason to kill him. It was purely academic. Brendan simply wondered what he’d feel—if anything. He wondered if he’d cry.
Richard had a bad heart. A couple years ago he had suffered a myocardial infarction and now suffered from ventricular tachycardia arrhythmia—rapid heartbeats. In his condition, Richard had maybe three years at best. His friends were dying off, one last week in fact—maybe his last. Brendan could tell that that bothered Richard.
“Old men know when an old man dies
.”
Yeats was right about that.
In the medicine cabinet sat a row of maybe a dozen little amber plastic pill containers. Richard Berryman.
I measure my life in Walgreen vials, he thought.
Lipitor, Enalapril, Demerol, metropolol, Pronestyl.
WARNING: This drug may impair the ability to drive or operate machinery.
WARNING: Do not use this medicine if you are pregnant, plan to become pregnant, or are breast-feeding.
WARNING: This medication may decrease your ability to be human.
Generic name:
Wintermind.
Take as directed.
One must have a mind of winter …
Not to think of any misery in the sound of the wind …
Brendan closed the medicine cabinet and left the bathroom. At the bottom of the stairs the light of the television made the foyer pulse. Brendan walked down, the lines from Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man” drowning out all the other clutter in his head.
He entered the parlor.
The old man was sprawled out in his La-Z-Boy, his wispy white hair barely covering the old pink dome, his T-shirt rumpled, his pajama bottoms half up his pathetic white sticks of legs, his bare feet knobbed on the footrest like claws. According to the old photos, he used to be a big, strapping guy.
Richard looked up, his eyes wet and yellow, like sad clams. Death would be a gift.
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
Brendan knew he should feel something for Richard. Anything. He understood the finality of his grandfather’s condition, that he could go any day now. He just wished he could feel something. Anger. Horror. Sadness. Love. He wished he could cry.
“I called it in three hours ago, so it should be ready.” Richard held up a twenty-dollar bill. “And whyn’t you pick up some mint chocolate chip while you’re at it.”
“I thought chocolate was bad for you.”
“What the hell isn’t? Here.” He flapped his hand.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
Brendan gave his head a shake to snap away the poetry jamming his mind. It was a constant distraction. White rhyming noise in turbo. At the
moment it was Wallace Stevens for some reason. In ten minutes it could be Elizabeth Barrett Browning. God! There wasn’t enough room in his head. It was like a flash plague that would strike without warning—his only defense was to build mind quarantines to box them up.
“And get some hot fudge, while you’re at it.”
He could do it with the throw pillow from the couch. Or a quick shot to the throat, snap his trachea. Snap his limbs like carrot sticks.
Not even horror, like Trisha Costello dying the other night.
Can’t even cry.
Brendan slowly crossed over to Richard and pressed his face so close to him he could smell his sourness.
The old man flinched. “What? What the hell you doing?”
“Do you kn-know anything about these scars?” He lowered his head and parted his hair.
“Jeez, I already told you I know nothing about them.”
“Use your magnifying glass.” Brendan handed it to him and bowed his head down again.
Richard peered through the glass at his scalp. “Just a few white spots. Where the hell you get them?”
“That’s what I’m asking you.”
“How would I know? Maybe your mother dropped you on your head. Probably explains things.”
“How b-badly do you want me to get your pills?” Brendan tried to put on a mean face, but he didn’t have anything inside to back it. Brendan never felt mean. He never felt much of anything. Just a flat-line awareness that something was missing.
“Here. Take these so you won’t forget.” Richard waved the empty vial. “What are you staring at me like that for?”
Brendan muttered under his breath.
“Aw jeez, Brendy, please no poetry, okay? I want to watch this show.” Then he added, “I think I liked it better when you couldn’t talk.”
Brendan looked at Richard. “W-what’s that?”
“I said would you please get me my pills.”
“N-no, about how you liked it better w-w-when I couldn’t talk.”
Richard made a sigh of exasperation. “It was just a joke.”
“Well, I missed it.”
“It’s just that you didn’t start talking until you were four or five. I don’t know. But God knows you’ve made up for it. So will you please get my pills or do I have to call 911?”
Brendan studied Richard for a few seconds then he picked the car key out of the candy bowl on the desk. Beside it sat a double frame with photographs of Brendan’s parents. They had died in a car crash on the Mass Pike outside of Worcester when he was nine. They were returning to their Wellesley home from a Christmas party. It was a night of freezing rain. But it wasn’t the ice that killed them. They were sideswiped by another vehicle on an empty stretch and driven into a concrete barrier. The impact was so great that they died instantly, said the reports. There were no witnesses to the accident, and the truck that hit them never stopped. But weeks later one whose paint matched that on his parents’ car turned up some miles away. It had been stolen. The police had no suspects, and today it remained just another cold case of hit-and-run. That’s when he was moved up here to live with Richard whose wife was still alive—Grandma Betty. She died ten months later. For the last seven years, it’d been he and Richard.
“I’ve got a question for you,” Brendan said, before he left. “Did my parents drink any kind of almond liqueur … cordial? Amaretto?”
Richard shook his head. “Jeez, you ask the damnedest questions.”
“W-when you visited them, what did they drink?”
Richard winced as if trying to squeeze up a memory. “I don’t know. They weren’t boozers, if that’s what you mean. You mother liked white wine, and your dad was a beer man. Why?”
“Did they cook with almond extract—cookies, candies, ice cream—stuff like that?”
“Are you going to get me my pills? I’m not supposed to go more than four hours, and it’s been six.”
If Richard went into cardiac arrest and died, Brendan would become a ward of the state and turned over to some foster home or orphanage. That would not be good. “I’m going,” he said. “What about you? Did you drink a-almond liqueurs or eat anything with a-almond extract?”
“You think I was some kind of boozer?”
“Did you?”
“Jesus Christ. What is it with you?” Richard looked confused and exasperated, maybe even a little frightened. “No. Scotch. I don’t think I
ever had any Almaretto or whatever. And I don’t eat nuts because they get stuck in what teeth I got left. Okay? Now get me the damn pills before I croak.”
Brendan put his backpack over his shoulder, feeling the weight of his field glasses inside. “I’ll be back.”
“Christ, and before dawn, please!” Brendan was halfway out the door when Richard called out: “Hey, Brendy, you’re a good kid.”
No,
Brendan thought.
I’m a snowman.

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