Voices in the Dark (9 page)

He wiped his chin. “Did you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“Then why are you so quiet? What the hell’s the matter now?”

“Nothing,” she said but knew what he was accusing her of. Perhaps it was always there in her eyes, ingrained in her face, the intractable grief she was no longer allowed to express. Whenever she tried, he raised a hand to ward off the words. If she persisted, he turned his back on her. In her heart she knew he had never forgiven her for having had an impaired child.

He finished eating, quaffed what remained of his juice, and was ready for coffee. She poured. Glancing at his watch, he said, “Maybe you’d better wake ’em.”

The boys were his defense, the proof of his pudding. Their IQ’s nearly rivaled his while hers was average. Fay’s had been pitiful.

“So what are you waiting for?” he said.

Their bedrooms were in the west wing, a hike to get there, a dreaded chore to wake them. As babies they had been piglets and as burgeoning children whiners and tyrants. Now, as adolescents, eighteen months separating them in age, they were more so. She rapped on the door of her younger son and opened it without looking in, for it was always suspect what either might be up to. “Time to get up,” she said and briskly stepped away. When she repeated the performance with her elder son, he challenged her.

“Who says?”

“Your father.”

God forgive her, but she would have sacrificed the two of them for the return of her daughter.

An hour later, she ushered Harley Bodine into the foyer and tried to convey in her manner the sympathy she felt due him, for undoubtedly his loss was no less than hers. It struck her as strange that he carried no briefcase from which to pluck facts and figures for Gunner’s consumption, though neither, she recalled, had had one yesterday.

“This way,” she said.

Halfway to Gunner’s study, he touched her arm. “Beverly.”

“Yes, Harley?”

He had stopped; his posture was wooden. “I know now what you’ve gone through.”

“Yes, I’m sure you do.” Out of habit she viewed him with reserve, though one could not distrust everybody. “Harley, do you have a cigarette?”

He glanced toward the study. “Yes,” he said and sneaked her one.

It was their first shared secret.

• • •

Sergeant Avery brought Dudley his breakfast from the Blue Bonnet: coffee with extra packets of sugar and two bran muffins with extra pats of butter. Pulling up a small table close to his cot, Dudley said, “This may be my last meal here, Eugene.”

“I thought I told you to call me Sergeant.”

“I feel we’re friends now,” Dudley said, buttering a muffin with a plastic knife that had come wrapped in a napkin. “I don’t mind sharing one.”

“They’re both yours, you can thank Meg O’Brien. Her treat, not mine.” Sergeant Avery left the cell but soon returned with underwear and socks. The undershirt was V-neck, the shorts boxer, and the socks argyle. “Compliments of the chief.”

Careful of crumbs, Dudley wiped his mouth and fingers and inspected the goods. “They’re not new.”

“Just make sure you wear ’em. Chief doesn’t want you leaving here indecent.”

Twenty minutes later, Meg O’Brien, who occasionally cut the chief’s hair, seated Dudley in the metal chair, draped a towel over his shoulders, and began snipping with thin scissors. “It’s like I’m going to be executed,” he said in a cheerful air of martyrdom. “I think I’d like bangs.”

“Be happy with what you get,” she said and gave his head the same attention she’d have given the chief’s. When she finished, she handed him a mirror.

“It’s lovely,” he said, lying only a little. His eyes filled.

“What’s the matter? It’s not that bad, is it?”

“I miss my mother.”

“Yes, Dudley, I miss mine too.”

His final visitor was Reverend Stottle, who came bearing another orange and a medicinal vial the reverend claimed was a sure-fire physic guaranteed by Mrs. Stottle. Obligingly Dudley took some on a plastic spoon, made a face, and said, “I’ll be leaving soon.”

“Do you have anything to confide?”

“No,” Dudley said, peeling the orange. He gave the reverend half. “But I have a question. Should we, any of us, be afraid of death?”

“No, indeed. I believe at a preordained time the soul flees the body like a tainted breeze, and death purifies it for the light beyond.”

“Cleans us all up.”

“There you have it. God looks after his own.”

“And our souls are immortal.”

“That’s what they tell me.”

Approaching footsteps sounded in the passage. Dudley sat quite still on the cot, eyes flickering, as if looking at himself in some inner mirror. “They’re coming for me,” he said.

May Hutchins and Fred Fossey arrived minutes apart at the library and sat at the same table but not directly across from each other, a ruse that didn’t fool Holly Pride standing on heels higher than usual behind the checkout desk.

May opened a copy of
Mirabella
and flipped a page. Fossey, who had scarcely spoken since sitting down, leafed deeper into
Newsweek.

“What’s the matter, Fred? You got a hair across your ass?”

He looked up slowly, his face rumpled. The left lapel of his ill-fitting sports jacket bore a flag pin and a VFW button, backups to his title of veterans affairs officer. “It wasn’t right what you did,” he said in a low rasp.

May almost laughed. “What did I do?”

“Bad enough you fed that freak in your gazebo, you had to go visit him in jail.”

“You mean Dudley?”

He skewered her with a look. “How would I know his name? What I’m saying is you should’ve shown more sense.”

“He’s one of God’s creatures.”

“He’s a pervert.”

“You’re not my husband, Fred.” She turned a glossy page and skimmed an advertisement promising feminine comfort from an intimate product with the scent of flowers. Nearly inaudibly, she added, “You’re not even my lover.”

He tucked in his chin, burying the loose knot of his tie.

Closing her magazine, she said, “I’m leaving.”

“Please, don’t.” His head jerked. “I didn’t mean anything.”

“Roland doesn’t talk to me that way. What gave you the right?”

“May, I’m sorry.” He hesitated. “You know how I feel about you.”

“You look ridiculous. You’re red.”

“Can’t help it.”

Staring at him critically, she could not determine which was the plus half in the vague disparity between the two sides of his face. Though the shine had worn away, he still had a full head of hair. That was a plus. And, unlike Roland, he did not carry in his pocket a little coin purse, the kind you pinch open.

“Say something, May. You know I put you on a pedestal.”

“I don’t belong there,” she said with perverse satisfaction. At age ten, she had shown an older boy her bum for a quarter, and for another quarter had let him run a finger along the crack. Good God, she had been only a child, but what could she have been thinking of! A whore at ten, if only that one time.

“Guess what,” Fossey said sheepishly. “This is our first fight.”

“Yes,” she said, unready to forgive him. She scraped her chair back and returned
Mirabella
to the rack. Passing the desk, she nodded to Holly while gazing pointedly at the peaks in the younger woman’s blouse. Outside, Ben Foxx was staring up at the war memorial, though he knew all the names by heart and all the families. He turned with a smile as she approached.

“Good thing I don’t run a gossip column,” he said.

“Go to hell, Ben.”

His face fell. “I was only joking, May.”

She strode onto the sidewalk. She passed the Blue Bonnet and approached the town hall, indecision slowing her stride only for a moment. She went around to the side and entered the police station.

Sergeant Avery looked up in surprise. Meg O’Brien was on the phone and gave her only a glance. She swept past them both.

“Where are you going?” Sergeant Avery called out.

“To see that poor man.”

“He’s not there. Chief let him go.”

She stopped in her tracks. “Good,” she said. “You could tell just looking at him he was no criminal, just a lost soul. Where is he now?”

“Chief’s running him out of town.”

May shivered in protest. It was as if Dudley had come to her out of the air, a bird from a tree, to sing in her ear, a serenade of sadness and loss, a hymn to her — and now they were driving him away.

Meg O’Brien put the phone down and went to her, slinging an arm around her. “What’s the matter, May? Why are you crying?”

• • •

“You’ve been smoking,” Gunner said as he showed his lawyer into his study and shut the door. “I can smell it on you.”

Harley Bodine made no defense. The movements in his face were uneasy, wary, as if only black threads held his mind together. Weariness clung to him.

“And you’re wearing the same suit you had on yesterday. That’s not like you.” Paul Gunner stood near a round table occupied by two sets of toy soldiers, the plastic figures from Gunner’s childhood and the lead from his father’s. They faced each other on a field of green felt, the plastic pitted against the lead, the battle stillborn. “Which war do you think was more barbaric, Bodine? The Kaiser’s or Hitler’s?”

“I’m not interested in military history.”

“Nor I. I’m pleased only by the toys.” Gunner billowed toward a club chair and overfed it with his bulk. “What’s your blood, Bodine? Who are your people?”

He remembered a grandfather who had worn work shirts buttoned at the neck and had spent days on an assembly line and evenings in a union hall. The strongest memory of his father was that he had smoked Raleigh cigarettes, saved the redeemable coupon slivered inside the cellophane of each pack, and promised him a bicycle as soon as enough coupons were amassed. The bicycle, he remembered, was the toy he never got.

“Don’t you know?” Gunner asked. “Or do you choose not to?”

“They’re not me.” He spoke with his body thrown forward, waiting for permission to sit, which finally came with a nod.

“Nothing was handed to you, right? You rose on your own. Brains got the scholarships and put you through Harvard.”

“I also waited on tables.”

“I wondered whether you’d tell me that.” Gunner saturated him with a look. “Uptight about it, aren’t you?”

“Not at all.”

“My great-grandfather earned his living killing cattle with a sledgehammer. People said with that swing of his he was to slaughtering what Babe Ruth was to baseball. Do you believe that, Bodine?”

“I have no reason to doubt it.”

“My father had his brawn and got his brains from the other side of the family. I always thought he was durable as iron, but a heart nobody knew was bad took him. He had all the right genes, but you never know, do you?”

Bodine had come to talk, but instead he listened, his face now adhering to a fake composure emptied of meaning. He felt that recent events had been taken from a dream and made real. Without thinking, he said, “Don’t you ever get depressed, Paul?”

“I’m too smart for that, and you should be too busy. You’re spending too much time out of Boston. Get back to your office. Operating at high pressure, isn’t that your strength?”

It had been, but now he saw it as horrendous tedium for which he no longer had the will. “I’ve had bad dreams.”

“Time shuts up everything,” Gunner said with impatience.

“I thought I could handle it.”

“You telling me you can’t?” The voice had a crust. “What
are
you telling me?”

He was telling too much, but Gunner was the only one in whom he could confide, though he expected no sympathy, none whatsoever. He watched Gunner’s hand chop the air.

“You make a decision, you live by it. You’re not sleeping well, take a pill. That doesn’t work, take the whole bottle. Then you have no worries.”

“I’d never do that,” he said and felt the cramp worsen, like punishment.

“Then take some advice. Don’t complain — who cares?”

He managed a smile. “My mother used to say that. She was an amateur singer. The songs she sang the most were from musicals.”

“I don’t want to hear about your mother,” Gunner said and heaved himself to his feet. For moments his breath came out poorly. “Now get out of here, I’ve got things to do.”

Bodine gripped the armrests with an effort that produced nothing. “I can’t get up.”

“Then sit there till you can,” Gunner said and left the study.

• • •

“I don’t like none of it,” Soldier said, holding the large sketch pad at arm’s length. “And I’m big, but not that big.”

In her latest likeness of him, Mary Williams had over-endowed him, and she had garbled his muscles, cluttering them into miscalculations of the body. Besides that, she had narrowed his shaved head, scratched menace into his eyes, and thrust savagery into his posture.

“It’s not me,” he said angrily, as if she had turned him into pornography.

“Yes, it is, but something’s missing.” She took the pad from his hands and set it aside. “That’s why I should meet your friend. I need to see what kind of woman would live with you.”

“She doesn’t know me any better than you do.”

“Maybe nobody knows you, Soldier. Would that please you?”

“I know myself. That’s good enough.” He rubbed a bare shoulder, near the strap of his tank top. Just under his chin the skin was the color of common clay, and the rest was red. A sweat band broke the endless sheen of his forehead. “I ask nothing of anybody. That’s been a rule.”

“Thank God for rules,” she said and watched him paw idly through canvases stacked with their faces to the wall. “I’d rather you not do that.”

Before she could stop him, he lifted a canvas from the stack, extended it, and sought perspective by poising it this way and that. “What the hell is this? I don’t get it.”

It was an abstract convulsion of acrylic colors, mostly red flaring into shocking pinks, garish yellows, and burning blues. Mary had the dismal feeling that something bad was going to happen, but nothing did. Her voice was sharp. “Don’t look at a painting, Soldier. Look into it!”

Squinting, he pulled a face. “I still don’t get it.”