The Ferryman (29 page)

“Hey,” he said, voice low.

The two men, probably lawyers or politicians, considering the neighborhood, feigned surprise as they looked up. One was bony-thin, the other a ruddy, jowled, thick-bodied man.

Kindzierski hung his badge out. “Clear out.”

The big man, clearly the more senior of the two considering his bluster, sat up a bit straighter. “Excuse me, Detective, but we're about to have lunch. I'm not sure what right you think you have to—”

“Don't fuck with me. I'm not in the mood,” Kindzierski snapped, loud enough to draw attention. Loud enough to make the politician blush. “You want lunch, go somewhere else or find yourself a goddamn table.”

The men both gawked at Kindzierski as if the cop had dropped his pants. Then the bony one began to stand up. The other clapped a hand on his shoulder and kept him seated.

“We're fine just where we are, Detective. I'd be careful how I proceeded from here if I were you.”

Kindzierski turned his back on the two men, his jaw tight with anger.Without looking at them again, he spoke just loudly enough for them to hear.

“In five seconds, if those two eavesdropping assholes are still there, I'm going to make an arrest for interfering with an officer in the course of an investigation,” he said. “If I have to go, we can pick this conversation up again later. Now, I'm gonna count.You let me know if they're still there when I'm done.”

The big man's jowls shook and his ruddy complexion darkened further. “Listen here, you little prick. This isn't even your jurisdiction. I saw your ID. There's nothing you can—”

“One,” Kindzierski interrupted, his back still toward them. “Two. Three. Four ...”

Enraged, the one with the jowls caved. He stood up, muttering obscenities under his breath, and Bony followed him as they made their way to an available table, drinks in hand.

“They're gone,” David said quietly.

“Good,” Kindzierski said.

Janine and Larry exchanged an anxious glance, but David smiled. He liked the cop a hell of a lot more, all of a sudden. There were secrets to be kept, and that had created within him a kind of adversarial attitude toward Kindzierski. Now that disappeared. He was almost tempted to let the man in on the truth. But Kindzierski wasn't his friend and he wasn't a theologian like Father Charles. There was nothing David could tell him that the detective would find even remotely believable.

Before David could speak, Kindzierski cleared his throat and sat up a little straighter.

“One last thing,” the detective said. “Mr. Vale tells me that the two of you spent the night at a hotel. That's why you, Mr. Bairstow, weren't home when your place was trashed. Not to pry into your personal lives, but you both live alone. If you wanted some time to yourselves, why would that require a hotel room?”

David blinked, speechless a moment. The question threw him off. At the bar, Larry Vale blushed deeply and studiously avoided looking at his stepdaughter. Janine was flustered, completely caught off guard. Her reaction was sure to raise Kindzierski's suspicions, take up more time, and David felt it was far more important that they get to their meeting with Father Charles.

“Tell him, Janine,” he said.

Kindzierski raised a curious eyebrow. Larry stared at Janine. Her mouth was open in an almost comical expression as she gazed at David in confusion.

“Tell him about the stalker.”

“You have a stalker?” Kindzierski asked. “And you didn't think to mention this to me before? Why am I not buying that?”

Janine shrugged slowly, at a loss.

David fumbled to cover for them. “He's not a stalker, necessarily. Just this creepy guy who's been hanging around near her place lately. Probably nothing. Certainly not the guy who ran me off the road, and he doesn't match your description of the man who ... who killed Spencer. Could just be some homeless guy, but she saw him in the yard last night and just wanted to stay somewhere other than home.”

Kindzierski frowned, suspicious. “Why not your place, then?”

Janine jumped in then, and David was glad. It seemed awkward for him to speak for her.

“If he really is stalking me, I was afraid he might already know where David was. I just wanted one night in a place where no one could find me,” she said.

“That's why you called me so late about going to the hotel,” Larry Vale put in. “Why didn't you say something?”

The slick ad executive's voice was usually commanding, arrogant. Today he just seemed lost in his fear for his wife.

“You had enough on your mind, Larry,” Janine said gently. She laid a hand on his arm to comfort him.

“But this ‘stalker,' he hasn't done anything to threaten you in any way?”

Janine hesitated. Then she shook her head. “No. He's just ... creepy.”

Kindzierski seemed even more frustrated now. “I'm still getting the feeling there's something you two aren't saying. I mean ... I just can't believe with all these ‘coincidences,' it didn't occur to you that you should mention this guy to me right off. Whatever you may think, he could be the source of all your problems. You're upset enough to spend the night in a hotel, but you say nothing to me about it. What am I missing?”

“I'm sorry, Detective Kindzierski,” Janine said, her voice shaking. “I guess we're just not thinking very clearly.”

Kindzierski sighed and shook his head. He studied them both for a few moments as if waiting for one of them to say more. Then he shrugged.

“All right, look, there isn't a lot I can do about him right now. If he doesn't match the description of either suspect and he hasn't actually done anything, the best I can say is that I can have a patrol car swing by Miss Hartschorn's apartment hourly. If you see the guy again, call me immediately. Even if he hasn't directly threatened you, I can bring him in for questioning about all of this. If I could catch him on your property, that would be even better. At least that would give me enough to hold him on.

“I just need a description.”

As they rode the T back to Medford, Janine sat silently beside David, her hand gripping his, and they both stared straight ahead at some curious bit of nothing in the distance. There were not very many people on the train at that time, mostly college students, but Janine did not want even to whisper to David with others so close. She was reminded of the two men who had been listening to Detective Kindzierski in the restaurant and she held David's hand more tightly and waited as though she were holding her breath.

They got off the train at Davis Square Station and went up the escalator, still in silence. A guy with a boyish face and innocent blue eyes played acoustic guitar and sang high-pitched folk blues like he really meant it. Janine watched him recede as the escalator drew her up and away, and she wished she had stopped to throw a dollar in his guitar case, just to let him know that someone heard him.

There was a bank of phones upstairs in the station. A couple of kids who probably shouldn't have been out of school just yet skateboarded past the glass-and-steel doors. Janine and David went to the phones. He picked one up and began to dial, then hung up and glanced at her.

“We blew that, didn't we?” he asked.

Janine stared at him a moment, then nodded. “Big-time. There's no way that he doesn't think we're hiding something. But what else were we supposed to say?”

“I should've just kept lying, but he already knew there were holes in what we were telling him,” David said.

“There's nothing we can do about it now,” Janine told him. “And it isn't like the cops can help us.”

David took a long breath, then picked up the phone again. He fished in his pocket for some coins, slid them in, and dialed Father Charles at his office at St. Matt's. Janine listened as he spoke to the priest. Since David had not gone in to teach that day—though the vandalism to his house was a solid excuse—he did not want to be seen in the halls of St. Matthew's.

Just a few moments later, David hung up.

“He wants us to meet him at the rectory.”

“Now?” Janine asked.

“I think now would be good, don't you?”

It took them only a few minutes to drive from Davis Square to St. Matthew's. When they rang the bell at the rectory, the door opened quickly, as though the priest had been waiting just inside for them. Father Charles greeted them with a tumbler of Crown Royal in one hand and a cigar in the other. Black pants and a black sweater were Hugh Charles's idea of dressing down, but he still looked like a priest.

The woman who worked in the rectory office was on the phone as they walked by, and did not even glance up. Father Charles led them to a study on the second floor with a quartet of old leather chairs around a small round table. An enormous masonry fireplace took up one side of the room, but it was dark and dormant that day.

The priest offered them both a drink, but they declined. Thereafter, he did not touch his own drink, and even put out his cigar.

At first, Janine was hesitant to relate the events of the previous night. David, however, had already broken the ice with Father Charles about the bizarre nature of their recent experiences, and he was quick to describe what had happened at his house. She had been caught up in her own fear, in the numbing chill that went through her when she thought about Charon, or about her mother's disappearance. Now, though, Janine truly saw David's fear for the first time.

When he spoke, she reached out to hold his hand.

Listening to him broke down her own reluctance, and she finally opened up to the priest. She left out much of the sexual context of her dreams, but aside from that, she was even more open with him than she had been with David.

Like a confessional,
she thought.

Yet she did not feel the sense of judgment with Father Charles that she would have felt in confession. It amazed her how open he was.The words
insane
and
lunatic
had been swirling around in her mind for a while, but with Father Charles, a man she respected as both intelligent and logical, she was able to push doubts about her mental condition aside for the first time.

She told him about her dreams, about the things she had seen and heard that she had at first thought she had imagined. She told him about seeing Charon that day on the riverbank, at the spot where David had been forced off the road. Together, Janine and David told him about her mother's disappearance and their meeting with Detective Kindzierski. Father Charles listened with very little comment save a gentle prodding for further detail, until they both had sort of run out of steam.

“And you
gave
him a description?” Father Charles asked, aghast, when she revealed the end of their conversation with the detective.

Janine shrugged. “Not an exact description. Not the way I just described him to you.”

At length, when Janine was all talked out and she sat back in the leather chair, the priest reached for his whiskey and took a slow, contemplative sip, watching her over the rim of the glass.

Then he sat forward, his eyes upon her as though David were not even in the room. Janine shifted a bit, suddenly uncomfortable under that intense gaze. His eyes were kind, set in a wide, friendly face. Yet they sparkled with a kind of exhilaration. He took another small sip of his drink, then set it aside.

“I think we should take a ride,” Father Charles said lightly, as though nothing they had told him was at all out of the ordinary. “There's someone I want you both to meet. I'm sorry to say that you may have to tell those stories all over again.”

“Who are we going to see?” Janine asked, mystified.

“An old teacher of mine, actually,” Father Charles replied.

“The one you told me about,” David said quickly. “From the seminary.”

“Indeed,” the priest said.“Father Cornelius Jessup. Since David first talked to me about the things that were happening to him, I've had several conversations with Father Jessup. He'll be very interested to meet you.”

Once again, a kind of impatient silence descended upon them. Father Charles attempted to distract them both with talk of the day-to-day goings-on at both St. Matt's and Medford High, but to Janine that entire part of her life, the real world, seemed to exist in some far-off land now.

The tires thrummed on the road, bumped through potholes as they drove out to Route 16 and followed it all the way into Everett. David was behind the wheel and he kept the window open to give them fresh air, but it could not wash away that feeling of unreality.

It was Father Charles's fault, actually. She had expected him to require more convincing, if he were able to be convinced at all. At the very least, she had thought he would interrogate them a little more, try to find holes in their stories. But he had not done that.

He had not done that, and the only thing Janine could think was that perhaps that was because he
believed
them. Somehow, that made the fugue she was in so much worse. For if he believed them, it might all be true, and if it were, what did that say about everything she had believed about the world her entire life?

“Here,” Father Charles told David. “Turn in here.You can park in back.”

Janine glanced up as they pulled into a long drive that led into the rear lot of a large, faded brick building. It was a retirement home for priests in the archdiocese of Boston, and the first thing she saw when she caught sight of it was that it wasn't worthy. With all that priests did to serve their communities, it seemed unfair to her that they should be tucked away in a crumbling neighborhood with graffiti on the walls, in a building that might have been a jail once upon a time.