Little Children (9 page)

“Crime and Punishment?”
Sarah huffed, struggling to keep pace. “That’s pretty highbrow for a book group.”

“Not for us.” Jean pressed the weights straight out from her chest. “We only read the classics. Last month we did
Sister Carrie.
”

“Good for you,” said Sarah. “Some mothers from the playground tried to get me to join a group last year, but all they ever read were those Oprah novels.”

“We’re schoolteachers,” said Jean, as if that accounted for the difference.

“I went to one meeting, and half the women hadn’t even done the reading. They just wanted to sit around and talk about their kids. I mean, I went to graduate school. Don’t call it a book group if you’re not gonna talk about books.”

“We have some very stimulating discussions,” said Jean. “You should come next month. We’re doing
Madame Bovary.
You could be my little sister.”

“Little sister?”

“We’re trying to get younger women involved. We call them our little sisters.” She waved her hand, as if it wasn’t worth discussing. “I’d love it if you’d be my guest.”

“I’ll think about it,” Sarah said, groaning inwardly. The last thing she wanted was to spend a night talking about Flaubert with a bunch of retired schoolteachers. “I’m sure I have a slightly different critical perspective from the rest of you.”

“That’s the whole point,” said Jean. “We could use some fresh blood.”

They did their usual three-mile loop, through the park and around the new developments, Jean pumping iron and talking about the book group the whole time. She described the other members in unnecessary detail, sketching in their educational and family backgrounds, and making sure not to neglect their charming personality quirks. Bridget spoke three languages and had traveled
everywhere
. Alice, attractive but very demanding, was working on hubby number three. Regina’s son—he was always a high achiever—was CFO of a Fortune 500 company. Josephine was funny and very opinionated, but her memory wasn’t what it used to be. Laurel only attended during summer and fall. The rest of the year she was a golf widow in Boca.

“I tried to get Tim to take up golf,” she said, as they turned back onto their street, “but he wouldn’t do it. He’s too busy sitting around the house all day letting his brain turn to mush. It’s hard to believe, but twenty years ago, he was considered to be a charming and intelligent man.”

Once Jean got started on the subject of her husband, it was hard to get her to stop. A lot of their walks ended with Sarah inviting Jean inside for a glass of ice water, then having to listen like a therapist to an hour’s worth of complaints about Tim’s failure to cope with retirement. That night, though, Sarah was saved from this ordeal by a surprising development: Theresa from the playground was sitting on her front stoop, obviously waiting to speak to her.

“You’ll have to excuse me,” said Sarah. “I think I have a visitor.”

Sarah hadn’t seen any of the other mothers since the day she kissed Todd. She’d gone back to the Rayburn School playground the following morning, and for the next two mornings after that, but each time the regulars were absent, the picnic table empty and reproachful. They couldn’t have made themselves clearer if they’d sent her a registered letter.

She didn’t care about Mary Ann or Cheryl; she was happier with them out of her life. But she missed Theresa—they’d always had a special connection—and had been thinking about giving her a call and trying to explain herself. And now here she was, her very presence a kind of implied forgiveness. Sarah felt her face breaking into a helpless grin as she headed up the front walk.

“Wow,” she said. “Look who’s here.”

“I hope you don’t mind,” said Theresa. “Your husband said you’d be back any minute.”

“It’s good to see you. Can I make you a cup of tea or something?”

Theresa shook her head. “I can only stay a minute. I just wanted to warn you. You know that guy, the pervert? He’s been riding his bike near the playground, checking out the kids.”

“Oh God,” said Sarah. “Do the police know?”

“Nothing they can do. He’s not breaking any laws.” She laughed bitterly. “I guess they’re waiting for him to kill someone. I just thought you should know. I think we all need to be extra careful.”

“Thanks. That’s nice of you.” Sarah hesitated for a moment. “You sure you don’t want some tea?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Come on, just for a minute?”

Theresa stood up. “I’m sorry, Sarah. I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

“I didn’t mean to kiss him,” Sarah blurted out. “I don’t even know how it happened.”

Theresa shrugged, as if all that were ancient history.

“I better get home,” she said, patting Sarah gently on the arm as she passed. “Mike’s gonna worry.”

After she left, Sarah sat on the porch for a while, watching the lightning bugs rise from the lawn and feeling like a fool. She’d thought that Theresa had come to apologize, or to laugh with Sarah about what a bitch Mary Ann could be. She’d thought that they were going to make up, drink some tea, figure out a way to be friends again. But she’d just come to tell her about a pervert on a bicycle.

She wished she’d thought to bum a cigarette when she had the chance, because right now there was nothing left to do but get up and go inside to Richard, and she wasn’t quite ready for that yet. She still hadn’t forgiven him for the way he’d treated her when he finally came down from his office. He just walked into the living room, with his shirt untucked and that glazed expression he got when he spent too much time on the computer, and told her she could go for her walk. He was looking right at her as he said it, but it was as if he didn’t even see her, as if she weren’t actually standing two feet in front of him in a red bikini that fit her like a dream.

LARRY’S FLYERS DID THEIR JOB. WITHIN WEEKS, RONALD JAMES
McGorvey’s presence in Bellington had become the focus of a civic uproar. Numerous articles on the subject appeared in the local and regional papers; there was even a brief segment on
Eyewitness News
about “grassroots resistance to sex offenders in an otherwise sleepy suburban community.”

The more Todd learned about McGorvey from these reports, the more he came to understand and share Larry’s anger. McGorvey had been arrested three times for exposing himself to a minor, and once for indecent sexual assault (this charge had been dropped for an unspecified reason). But the really troubling part of the story was the crime he hadn’t been arrested for.

Holly Colapinto was a nine-year-old girl from Green Valley who’d disappeared while walking home from school on a spring day in 1995. What happened to her was a matter of pure conjecture. No one saw her getting into a car or talking to anyone. Her body had not been found. She had, as the journalists liked to put it, “simply vanished.”

The custodian at her school, Ronald James McGorvey, was quickly identified as the prime suspect on a tip from Holly’s mother. Mrs. Colapinto said that the girl had complained to her several times about “the creepy way” the janitor looked at her. She said he also had a habit of barging into the Girls’ Room, supposedly to mop the floor or replenish the paper towels, while Holly was going to the bathroom. Mrs. Colapinto reported her concerns to the school authorities, who said they’d issued a stern warning to McGorvey to be more careful.

Investigators who questioned the custodian said he had no alibi for the time of the girl’s disappearance. He lived alone and called in sick to work that day. He claimed to have been napping in his apartment all afternoon, but no witnesses could vouch for his whereabouts until the following morning, when he arrived for work at Blessed Redeemer Elementary School at the usual time.

McGorvey steadfastly insisted on his innocence. He cooperated with the police, and later with the FBI, submitting to repeated interrogations without a lawyer present, and even taking a lie detector test, the results of which were described by a law enforcement source as “ambiguous.” But in the end, there was nothing anybody could do: Without a body there wasn’t a crime, technically speaking, just an unsolved missing persons case. Eventually the story ran out of steam and faded from view.

But people in Green Valley never stopped believing that McGorvey was guilty of murder, and they set out to make life as unpleasant for him as possible. The sources interviewed for this chapter of the saga failed to provide much in the way of concrete details.

“It wasn’t one big thing,” a man explained. “It was more like lots of little things. To remind him that he wasn’t welcome here.”

“People called him on the phone and told him what they thought of him,” a woman remembered.

“I don’t think anyone out-and-out threatened him,” said the police chief. “At least not to my knowledge.”

Within six months of Holly’s disappearance, McGorvey quit his job at the elementary school and moved back to Bellington to live with his mother. Two years later, he was arrested for the Girl Scout incident, and sentenced to three years in state prison. And now he was back.

As a result of all the attention, the mayor of Bellington called for an emergency town meeting. It was a bigger deal than Todd realized; the streets leading to the school were as packed with parents that warm summer evening as they were with schoolchildren on a September morning.

Larry had explicitly requested that Todd wear his Guardian T-shirt and shorts to the meeting—it was practice night anyway—so he wasn’t too surprised to find his teammates gathered outside the main entrance, all of them dressed exactly as he was. He was a little surprised, though, when Larry had them march into the auditorium in single file, and then lined them up in the orchestra pit, all eight of them evenly spaced from one end of the stage to the other, like Secret Service men protecting the president. Larry instructed them to cross their arms in front of their chests, and not to smile, even in the unlikely event that someone said something funny.

Todd was stationed off to the far right, between Tony Correnti and DeWayne Rogers, both of whom had adopted wide-legged stances and expressions that somehow combined alertness and serenity. He tried to follow their lead, but it wasn’t easy. He was plagued by the self-consciousness of the impostor, an adult playing dress-up.

In the past couple of weeks, Todd’s membership in the Guardians had solidified into an established fact, though he still didn’t feel like he’d earned the full trust of his teammates. He’d gone to two more practices and both had been grueling affairs—lots of drills and conditioning work, followed by a ferocious intrasquad scrimmage. When practice was over, though, no one except Larry patted him on the back or suggested going out for a beer. The most he got from the other guys was a polite nod or a grudging wave. They were cops, and he wasn’t; it was as simple as that.

Todd leaned toward DeWayne, whom he considered a potential ally. “Why are we up here?” he whispered.

DeWayne shrugged, like he didn’t know and didn’t care.

“Gotta be somewhere,” he replied.

The auditorium was packed—Todd recognized a lot of faces from the various playgrounds he and Aaron had visited over the past year and a half—and there seemed to be a general sentiment among the crowd that you weren’t doing your duty as a citizen and parent if you didn’t stand up to express your strenuous disapproval of sex offenders and demand to know what the town was going to do to ensure the safety of Bellington’s children and prevent any further erosion of property values.

“Maybe you should put up a new sign,” one angry man suggested to enthusiastic applause. “Entering Bellington. A Pervert-Friendly Town!”

The officials on stage—the mayor, the chief of police, and the school psychologist—kept patiently dispensing the same advice over and over. We can protect our children by making sure we know exactly where they are and who they’re with at every moment in the day. Don’t send a young child to the store, or even down the street to a neighbor’s house, without an escort. But take these precautions calmly, without creating an atmosphere of panic. Childhood should be a time of innocence, not anxiety. For its part, the police department was stepping up its surveillance of parks and playgrounds, and closely monitoring McGorvey’s activities.

After about a half hour of this, Todd’s mind started to wander. He found himself thinking about Kathy and her strangely muted reaction to the news—he felt the time had come to tell her the truth—that he was going to football practice after the town meeting.

“Football practice?” she said. “What are you talking about?”

“The Guardians.” He pointed to his T-shirt, which Larry had dropped off that afternoon. “I’m the new quarterback. That’s why I’ve been staying out so late on Thursday night.”

“I thought you joined that parents’ committee.”

“I did. It’s the same guys. We’re a sort of watchdog group slash football team. I guess I should have explained it a little more clearly.”

Kathy didn’t get upset. She just nodded for a little longer than necessary, as if he’d confirmed something that she’d been wondering about.

“I need something…
physical
in my life right now,” he continued, in response to a question she hadn’t asked. “I’ve been feeling kinda depressed.”

“Fine,” she said. “Whatever.”

Maybe she’s just tired
, he thought. She’d been working late at the VA Hospital, interviewing elderly survivors of the brutal island-hopping campaign in the Pacific, and she’d been deeply affected by their stories. What these stories
were,
Todd had no idea, because she didn’t talk to him about it. These days she hardly talked to him about anything except Aaron. Aaron and the bar exam.

They were heading for trouble, Todd understood that, driving toward a high cliff at very low speed in a car with no brakes. Kathy seemed to have developed the idea that everything would be fine once Todd passed the bar exam. He would get high-paying work as an associate at a big firm in a major city; they would finally be able to buy a house. She would finish up her documentary, then take some time off to be with Aaron. After a while, they could start thinking about getting pregnant again.

It was a pleasant scenario, except for the fact that it relied so explicitly and relentlessly on Todd’s passing the bar exam. It wasn’t that he
couldn’t
pass the test. He’d made it through law school, hadn’t he? It was just that he was having a little trouble concentrating these days.

Maybe I could be a cop,
he thought, casting a sidelong glance at DeWayne. There was something tangible and exciting about the job that appealed to him, chasing crooks and tackling them in the middle of a busy street.
Or maybe a fireman
. That would be cool. What an adrenaline rush it would be, charging into a burning building, or climbing down a ladder with a baby in your arms. But why hadn’t he thought of it a long time ago? Why had it ever seemed like a good idea to put on a suit every morning and spend his day researching copyrights or figuring out ways to exploit loopholes in the tax code? What kind of life was that for a grown man?

He thought about Sarah, too, but only fleetingly, just long enough to note her absence when he saw her three friends from the playground moving down the center aisle of the auditorium in triangular formation, the spandex queen leading the way, her two side-kicks following at a respectful distance.

Almost a month had passed since the kiss at the playground, and it no longer occupied such a central place in his mental universe. He still kept an eye out for Sarah at the pool and the supermarket, but he did so more out of habit than urgency, and without any real expectation of seeing her again. When he remembered her at this remove, it was with a hopeless but still somehow pleasant twinge of melancholy, as if she were someone he’d known briefly a long time ago—a one-night stand from college, say—who’d drifted in and out of his life in the natural course of events, without saying good-bye or making an insincere promise to keep in touch.

Which is probably why it took him so long to recognize her when she poked her head into the auditorium midway through the meeting. He registered a new arrival, but only in the most general way: a break in the monotony, a youngish, semiattractive woman lingering in the doorway, studying the scene with an uncertain expression, as if she’d wandered in by mistake.

When he finally realized who she was—it hit him when she stepped into the room, something familiar in her walk, or maybe just the proportions of her body—it was with the inevitable sense of letdown you feel seeing someone in the flesh after spending a little too much time visualizing them in your head. Mainly, he decided later, it was her clothes that threw him off. She was dressed all wrong. At the playground she’d been girlish and sloppy in her clamdiggers and ratty T-shirt, her hair frizzing crazily, like she’d jammed her finger in a light socket before leaving the house. And now here she was, all put together like a grown woman on a date, long black skirt, tight white top, hair pulled back, and maybe—he couldn’t quite tell from this distance—even some lipstick.

There were some seats open in the first few rows, but she either didn’t see them or didn’t want to call attention to herself by walking down the center aisle in the middle of the meeting, so she settled for standing room along the back wall, where a handful of latecomers had established a kind of mirror image to the Guardians. She looked at the stage for a few seconds, then whispered something to the man standing next to her. He answered; she nodded and shifted her gaze back to the front.

He felt a palpable connection when their eyes met, a sensation somewhere between jolt and thrill, and she must have felt it, too, because her body suddenly recoiled, almost as if a pair of invisible hands had shoved her against the wall. And then she gave him this look, this wounded, searching
Where-the-hell-have-you-been?
look. Todd felt a momentary surge of guilt, as if their separation the past few weeks had been all his fault, as if he’d known where to find her and had deliberately avoided going there. The only answer he could give her was a small, apologetic shrug, though he had no idea what he was apologizing for.

The spandex queen rose to speak just then. She, too, was dressed for a night out, in black tights and an oversize silk shirt. Her posture was ramrod straight, but her public voice seemed incongruously sweet, cleansed of the harsh note of command she often struck at the playground.

“My name is Mary Ann Moser,” she said, reading off an index card. “What I’d like to know is whether anyone in city hall is looking into specific legal strategies for forcing Mr. McGorvey out of Bellington. For example, couldn’t the building inspector find some code violations and condemn his house? Couldn’t the town find a way to seize the property through eminent domain?” She hesitated, and Todd could see her trying unsuccessfully to suppress a smile. “If not, couldn’t we just run him out on a rail?”

The crowd erupted in rowdy applause, to Mary Ann Moser’s obvious gratification. Todd turned back to Sarah, with an expression of eye-rolling disdain he hoped would mirror her own, only to discover that she had vanished, her body replaced by a highly charged patch of empty space on the wall. His eyes darted to the door, just in time to see it clicking shut.

He hesitated only a second before deciding to pursue her. He didn’t want to go another month without seeing her again, without being able to ask her why she’d looked at him with such anguish, as if he’d done something to hurt her. He thought he could slip quietly out the side door without calling too much attention to himself, but he’d only gone a step or two in that direction when Tony Correnti grabbed him from behind by the collar of his T-shirt, the way a parent might restrain a child who’s about to run into a busy street.

“Hey,” Correnti whispered. “Whaddaya doing? You can’t leave now.”