The Truth of All Things (27 page)

O
n the evening of July 14, Grey pushed through the wrought-iron gate on Danforth Street and climbed the steps to Cyrus Grey’s house. His grandfather’s middle-aged butler, Herrick, greeted him with a look of surprise before allowing himself a smile.

“Is the old man at home?” Grey asked.

“I’m afraid not.” Inside the grand entrance hall, with its electric-light chandelier hanging from the ornately paneled ceiling, the paunchy man took Grey’s stick and hat. “Would you care to wait in the living room?”

“The attic, actually.”

“Of course, sir. How foolish of me to ask.”

The pair made their way up two flights of stairs with dark handrails over gleaming white balusters, the treads laid with thick carpet. Portraits of stern-faced men and dour-looking women stared down on them from within large gilded frames.

“Tell me, Herrick, are my mother’s old boxes still up there?”

“I believe they’ve been left as they were.”

Grey took the last flight alone and stooped as he entered the cramped space. Fifteen years had passed since Grey had been in there; it was even smaller and more cluttered than he remembered it. The air was still and twenty degrees hotter than outside, so he hung his coat on a nail and loosened his tie.

The unfinished room, with its exposed wood beams, slanting walls,
and rough floorboards cluttered with boxes and junk, was the opposite of every other immaculate, manicured room in the building. It had been Grey’s boyhood sanctuary in the first unfamiliar months that he’d lived in the Grey house, the one room that felt like home. It was the only spot where he could hear raindrops on the roof above him rather than the footsteps of some servant milling about, something he’d never experienced when living among his father’s people.

Grey inched his way through the room, peeking into boxes of clothes, old place settings, and household records. The attic could never lay claim to being the heart of the house, but in a way it was the soul. The dining room and parlors held portraits and decorations meant to greet the outside world. It was the dusty corners of the attic, however, that harbored the unimportant paper records, mementos, and tokens of small moments that held meaning for only a person or two in the entire world.

After ten minutes, Grey found a box set aside after his mother’s death. There were pieces of jewelry, a few letters from friends, and several small advertisements for various stage shows, performances by his mother after she’d first left home to pursue a theatrical life. There was a picture of his father that Grey stared at for a long moment. Beside it was a pipe with a long stem of sumac and a bowl carved from a reddish soapstone. Grey slipped it into his pocket and turned his attention to some books at the bottom of the box. One well-thumbed text caught his eye and he flipped through the pages as he moved to the pale light by the window.

The voices of two boys passing in the street caused him to gaze out through the dingy glass. A faint memory of other boys came to him, accompanied by the echoes of mocked war whoops. Those boys patted their fingers against their howling lips and waved imaginary tomahawks in the air, their war dance directed toward Grey’s usual perch, high above in the window.

Grey looked at the frontispiece of the book in his hands. His name was written there in his mother’s graceful hand. Violent pencil marks had slashed through the name, and he recalled the incident with a flicker of shame at his childhood rage.

“That’s not my name!”

“It’s your new name,” his mother said. “It’s a good name. Sir Perceval.”

“A good name? You mean an English one.”

“Things change in life, you know that. This is where we live now, and we have to make do. Things will get better. Soon it will be as if you’ve been here all your life.”

He could see the sadness at the edge of her eyes, lingering there as it always did in those days, some predator just beyond the campfire, wary but desperate with hunger. “No matter what my name is, they’ll still look at me funny, like I don’t belong here. I’ll never be the same as them.”

“That’s true,” said his mother. “You will always be different. And that frightens people. But don’t let it frighten you. I don’t ever want you to be the same as all of them. But you will need to understand their ways to get along in life. It’s just something new for you to learn. Why they act the way they do and what they really mean when they speak. So study them, but that doesn’t mean you have to be like them. Who you are inside will never change, so long as you live.”

The memory faded, drummed away by a heavy tread on the attic stairs.

“Your grandfather has returned and requests your company,” Herrick said.

Grey handed the box to Herrick. “Please have this brought around to High Street.”

He started down the stairs. “By any chance, Herrick, do you recall when my mother and I first arrived here?”

“Of course, sir.” Herrick had been employed by Grey’s grandfather all his adult life, working his way up to his present position.

“I mean specifically,” Grey said. “The time of year, the circumstances?”

“It was early spring. A Sunday morning.”

“Really? A rather impressive memory, Herrick.”

“It was Easter Sunday. You were expected, and there was much discussion down below as to whether your grandfather would let the
household go off to church or whether we’d all stay and wait. In the end I stayed home, and, sure enough, you arrived while everyone else was at the service.”

“Was there much work required before our arrival?”

“A couple of days’ worth of work, I suppose.”

“Interesting. Thank you, Herrick.” Grey moved on to meet his grandfather.

Cyrus Grey sat stiffly in a tall-backed chair at the far end of the massive living room. Near him was a brick-faced fireplace topped with a broad landscape oil painting. Large Oriental rugs filled the floor between him and Grey. Tall windows with floral-printed curtains faced south, while glass-fronted bookcases lined the opposite wall. The old man checked his pocketwatch against a nearby clock, then rose in slow, wooden movements. A strip of white hair circled from one temple to the other, laying siege to Cyrus’s bald dome. Long sideburns framed a parched face that looked to have never tolerated a drop of perspiration in its eighty years of life.

“And what have I done to warrant the honor of a visit by my only grandson?”

“Just come to pay my respects.”

“To the dead, as always, not the living. Rummaging around up there, stirring up dust and memories. Find what you were looking for?”

“Yes, actually.” Grey took a seat at the grand piano.

“Damn thing’s out of tune,” said his grandfather.

Grey lifted the fallboard and let his fingers hover over the keys. They began to slide back and forth, darting here and there in a silent performance.

Cyrus Grey poured himself a glass of brandy from a crystal decanter. “The only things up there that would interest you are your mother’s old belongings and that old Indian stuff. Things from before.” He waved his arm as if dismissing some unruly child. “So it’s this business with the Indian killing that woman, isn’t it? I should have known you’d be involved. Suppose I ought to be grateful I haven’t seen your name in the local newspapers yet.”

“I didn’t realize you followed my work so closely.”

“Bah! Herrick has a most annoying habit of scouring the Boston papers. I sit for breakfast and there they are, folded out to one gruesome business or another with your name tucked away in there. I’ll never understand it. All this fascination with murder and crime. Such a morbid disposition.”

“We don’t need to dig up this subject again. It is my profession. There’s no point holding out hope that I’ll suddenly turn to medicine or the law.”

“You could have, very easily.” Cyrus’s age-dulled gaze bored into Grey, as if he were actually trying to see into his grandson’s soul. “I provided every advantage for you. You’d have a more-than-respectable practice by now, in spite of everything.”

“Everything?”

“You know what I mean.”

“I always have,” Grey said.

The old man turned away, fumbled briefly with the crystal decanter, then tipped a bit more brandy into his glass. “I can’t believe you find it so much better, what you have. A life spent among thieves and killers and policemen.” His tone revealed no more leniency toward the latter than the rest of the disreputable classes.

“It has its interesting moments.”

“Throwing away your life for the sake of interesting moments. That’s a poison in the blood you get from your mother.”

“Unlike speaking in the bluntest of terms. Which apparently skipped a generation.” Grey took a step toward the door. “I really should be off. There are matters to attend to.”

“Of course.” The old man followed toward the hall. “You could stay for dinner?”

“I have things to see to.” Grey collected his hat from a side table.

“Just one more of my dwindling hours won’t ruin you. We can talk of other things. Things that aren’t at all interesting, and you can pretend to enjoy yourself.”

Grey smirked and set his hat down again. “
Now
who’s guilty of stirring up old memories?”

T
here was a tangle of early-morning delivery wagons ahead on Commercial Street, so the driver pulled up short of the Maine Central Rail Road depot, leaving plenty of room to wheel about and head back into the heart of the city. Lean handed over his coins, then walked ahead and cut through the empty station.

On the other side, he entered into a sort of wasteland, several acres of open space crisscrossed by rails leading to the depot, the rail houses, and other branch lines heading off toward the waterfront. Much of the view of the actual water was blocked by the row of buildings comprising the International Steamship Company as well as the Portland, Bangor and Machias Steamship Company. Still, Lean took some comfort in the sight of the tall masts just to the left of the steamship buildings. Portland’s deepwater wharves began there. More than two dozen of them, some close to a thousand feet long, jutted out in a series spanning more than a mile to the east. He was glad to taste the salt on the air; it helped clear his head for what he knew was awaiting him.

He stepped across the tracks and wandered over the dirt and gravel, past sporadic outgrowths of knee-high weeds, kicking aside bits of trash as he went. It was past sunrise, but the sky held a thick cover of gray clouds, rendering the scene even bleaker. A patrolman was approaching, coming from the raised wooden trestle that connected the base of Clark Street to the bridge leading to Cape Elizabeth. They met a hundred yards shy of the overpass.

“She’s down close to the trestle. There’s a few empty rail cars there.” The patrolman pointed back in the direction he’d come.

“How’s it look?”

He shrugged. “Nothing like that last one up to the Portland Company.”

“Stabbed?” Lean asked.

“Nope. Deputy LeGage says strangled.”

Lean could tell that the patrolman was at the end of his shift and eager to be going, so he nodded and continued on. As he drew closer, Lean saw the shapes of rail cars in the shadows of the trestle with a few people milling about. Directly beyond was the gasworks, dark smoke rising from its stacks. Behind that, even greater amounts of sooty filth were spewing forth from the Portland Star Match Company and the towering stacks rising up above the five-story behemoth of the Forest City Sugar Refinery. He walked on, the last traces of sea salt drifting away from him, overpowered by the combined might of oil, phosphorous, and burned sugar.

At the first of the rail cars, he saw two patrolmen with an old sheet they would use to wrap the body and toss it into the waiting wagon. Deputy LeGage stood nearby and greeted Lean with a thin, tobacco-stained smile.

“What’s the matter, Lean, afraid you won’t get your name in the papers on this one?”

Lean moved toward the open rail car, not sparing a glance at LeGage. Four weeks had passed since Maggie Keene’s murder. Lean still had no suspect, nor any idea of where to find the man. He was beginning to fear he never would, but he mentioned none of this. He smiled and said, “Just thought I’d take a look before you got around to ignoring the last of the evidence.”

The woman was at the edge of the open rail car, her right arm dangling out from the door. A trickle of dried blood stained the corner of her mouth. Lean bent forward and saw she had bitten her own tongue. There were clear bruises on either side of her neck. Two hands, with thumbs overlapping, had crushed the windpipe. Lean studied the face, noting the differences that death produced: the waxy look of her skin and the drooping of the flesh around her jawbone. The jaundiced eyes still held a look of dull indifference, but now the fierceness had dissipated. It wasn’t that she looked peaceful, far from it. It was only that the fight had so completely and horribly gone out of Boxcar Annie’s eyes.