Winter and Night (29 page)

"Now, too, from what I hear. Tell me about them."

"They were, I guess you'd call them late bloomers. Skinny, small, couldn't dance. Still thought girls were icky. You know the type."

"I hear Warrenstown jocks are hard on that type, these days."

"I suppose we were, too, I'm sorry to say. Aren't all kids hard on kids who're different? What did you want to know about Nicky?"

"Do you know where I could find him now?"

"Nicky? Not a chance. I heard he joined the army instead of going to college, but that was so ridiculous I figured it must be a joke."

"Ridiculous why?"

"We didn't call him Nicky the Nerd for nothing."

I asked Stacie's father not to tell anyone aside from Sullivan, if he asked, what I'd wanted to know, and then I spoke to Stacie again, told her the same thing.

"You find Gary yet?" she asked.

"If I had, you think I'd still be on this case?"

"You mean you wouldn't be trying to figure out what happened to me?"

"You? You're a reporter. Lower than the dust."

"Just wait until I'm on the Times and you call up wanting something."

"Stacie," I said, "you know I'll never rest until I have the guy who attacked you on his face in the mud, trussed up like a hog."

"When you do," she said, "call me before you do anything else. So I can send a photographer from the Gazette."

I called Vélez. "Oh, shit," he groaned when he heard it was me.

"Come on, Luigi, you know you don't mean that."

"Why not? Don't you got something else you need done yesterday?"

"Yes."

"Like I said: Oh, shit."

"Two kids who were teenagers in Warrenstown twenty-three years ago. I need to know where they are now."

"Ay, Dios mio. I'm working here, man."

"Put it aside. This is more important."

"You wouldn't say that if you was my other client."

"I sure as hell wouldn't. Bethany Victor and Nick Dalton."

"You know anything about these people besides their names?"

"Not much."

He sighed. "Give me what you got."

I did: their names again, the crime, the year it happened. "A guy I talked to said he'd heard Nick Dalton joined the army out of high school," I said. "But he thought it probably wasn't true."

"Why not?"

"Because," I said, "Dalton was skinny like you."

It took Vélez an hour and forty-five minutes to get back to me. I spent that time at the piano. Sometimes, when I'm working a case, stuck on something, practicing helps. The work on a piece keeps everything else away, keeps me from running all my questions around and around on worn tracks, digging ruts so deep I can't see over them. When I'm done and I step back into the solid world, out of a world where nothing lasts long, where everything starts to vanish the second it's born and memory is never complete, I sometimes find even hard facts that haven't changed look startlingly, jarringly different.

There was no way I could play anything right now, not a piece of real music, not something that required focus, concentration, understanding. But I could do technical work, practice scales, finger positioning, go for speed or fluid movement or variations in tone. I did that waiting for Vélez and when he called I jumped, annoyed at first the way I always am when something interrupts my practicing. For a second I was angry with myself for leaving the phone turned on, and then I remembered why I had.

"Smith."

"Yeah, yeah. I'm gonna give you what I got now, because you're in a hurry. You want more, I can keep going," Vélez said.

"Thanks, Luigi. Shoot."

"The girl, she was easy. Married and divorced three times, lives up in Mountain Glen now, name of Beth Adams."

"Adams is her third husband's name?"

"Second. I guess she liked him best."

"Where's Mountain Glen?"

"Small town in the mountains. Near the border."

To Vélez, the only border that counted was New York's; every place else might as well be labeled, HERE THERE BE TYGERS.

"In New Jersey?"

"I didn't say that?"

"No, but I guessed. Address? Phone?"

He gave them to me.

"And the guy?" I asked. "Nick Dalton?"

"Different thing, chico. This guy, he's gone."

"What do you mean? He's dead?"

"Dead, you got a death certificate, maybe insurance, something."

"Not if someone stuffs him in the landfill."

"Yeah, but you get whacked, you got loose ends. You don't make your car payments, they repo your car. Evict you from your place if you don't pay your rent, shit like that. That shit, I can find it."

"And I guess you didn't?"

"This Dalton guy, he got no loose ends. No car, no rent. Check it out: Guy has three bank accounts, closes them all, cancels his credit cards, same day. Day after he got out of the army."

"He did join up?"

"Like you said. Served three years, honorable discharge. Then he disappears. Discharge papers got no address on them. Passport and social security number never used again."

"Could he be in prison?"

"They send you away, you keep your social security number."

"What the hell does this mean, Luigi?"

"It means, chico," he said patiently, "this Nick Dalton guy, he wanted to be somebody else."

I told him to keep looking, get back to me with whatever he found.

Then I called Lydia.

"Hey," I said.

"Hey."

"I have a hangover."

"I didn't ask."

"You were about to."

"I wasn't, but thanks for filling me in."

"Got a minute?"

"Sure."

"I talked to Sullivan this morning. About the old case." I told Lydia what Sullivan had said, and what he hadn't. I told her about Stacie Phillips's father, and my conversation with Vélez.

"Wow," she said. "All I've done so far today is the laundry."

"That may prove more productive, in the end."

"What are you going to do?"

"I think I'm going to drive out to Mountain Glen."

"You want me to come?"

I stopped to light a cigarette. "You think there's any more you can learn in Warrenstown?"

"Like what?"

"Tory Wesley was dealing drugs," I said, "and Gary used to date her."

"You want to know if he was dealing drugs, too?"

"Or the other way: Maybe he stopped seeing her because she was dealing. He started out being friends with that kid Paul Niebuhr, too, and dropped him after school started. Be interesting to know why."

"Well, I probably could dig up some more if I went back to Warrenstown."

"Then I'd rather you did. And something else: Do you think you could go see the Wesleys?"

"Tory's parents? They're back?"

"Yesterday morning, on the redeye, according to Sullivan."

"God," she said. "I hate those interviews."

"I know. You want me to do it?"

"No, because I also hate the kind of interviews where you're on one side of the bars and I'm on the other."

"Come on, now. That hardly ever happens."

"Well, I get the feeling if you go back to Warrenstown right now, it's a real possibility. No, I'll go."

"Thanks. But I want to bounce a question off you first."

"Go on."

"What was my brother-in-law up to?"

"Scott?"

Her voice had taken on a strange tone and I added quickly, "Not last night. Back then."

"Oh," she said, shifting gears. "You mean, saying he thought he'd seen Al Macpherson arguing with the girl, then changing his story?"

"Was he trying to set Macpherson up? And then he chickened out?"

"And if so, why?"

"Why try, or why chicken out?"

"Both. And I have a question, too," she said.

"Okay."

"Stacie Phillips's father, according to you, said Jared and his friend Nicky were late bloomers. I think the phrase you used was, 'thought girls were icky.' "

"What about it?"

"Teenage boys who think girls are icky don't usually stalk them. Or rape them," Lydia said.

We talked awhile longer, set up our plans for the day. Neither of us said anything about what I'd told her last night and I hung up feeling as though I'd been holding my breath without knowing it.

* * *

I walked down to the lot, picked up the car. It was another bright day, yesterday's heavy clouds forced away by the wind. I went out the tunnel again, drove without music, without much focused thought on anything beyond the cars around me and the turns I needed to take.

Mountain Glen was about an hour and a half into New Jersey. It lay on the southern fringe of the Catskills, north of the rolling suburban prettiness of Warrenstown and Greenmeadow and the ugly strip roads that connected them. As I got near, the hills grew steeper, less tame. Scarlet, rust, and orange splashed their sides. Here and there yellow birch leaves still glowed against white bark, set off by moss green stands of pine that seemed permanently in shadow. Yesterday's heavy clouds had delivered rain, up here, and the hollows on the shoulder of the road held puddles that reflected the colors in the hills. Whole stretches of road went by without buildings, without people. The village of Mountain Glen itself was almost not there, a post office fiction to gather together a collection of houses, cabins, shacks, and trailers strung loosely along wandering roads and give them something to belong to.

The address Vélez had given me for Beth Adams turned out to be a wooden structure somewhere between a cabin and a shack, set in a spongy field half a mile past anything that could be called town. I turned in, parked behind a rust-pocked Olds Cutlass that was probably as surprised as anyone every time it found itself running. Mud clutched at my shoes as I walked to the porch, and the steps creaked as I climbed them, to remind me they could collapse whenever they wanted to so I should consider myself warned. There was a doorbell and I pressed it, but I heard no sound and nothing happened. I pressed it one more time, then knocked hard on the door. Immediately from inside I heard a dog scrabbling and barking, but nothing else. I lifted my hand to knock again harder. Before I could, the door opened and a woman's bleary face appeared. She blinked against the daylight and flinched from my upraised arm.

"Beth Adams?" I pulled my arm down. The dog, a small scruffy one, yapped and jumped, but stayed behind her.

She blinked again. "Who're you?" Her voice was deep and scratchy. She told the dog to shush, and he did, stood behind her growling.

"My name is Bill Smith. Can I ask you a few questions?"

She stared at me as though she wasn't sure she understood the request. Her graying blond hair was curly and disheveled, caught roughly with a red plastic clip where it would otherwise have fallen in her eyes. She wore khakis and a white cotton sweater and she didn't wear them well. The sweater was coffee-stained, loose threads hanging at the sleeves and hem; the worn pants were a size too small, pulling across her dense legs and belly as though the thickness of her body was something she hadn't noticed.

"What do you want?"

"Just a few questions. It won't take long."

She started to close the door on me. "Don't like questions."

I held the door. "Please."

She didn't try to push back. "What do you want?" she asked again.

I said quietly, "I want to talk to you about what happened in Warrenstown, years ago."

"No!" She shouted loudly, shoved the door toward me. The dog started yapping again. She caught me off guard; I barely managed to wedge my foot in. "No," she said again, still pushing at the door, but not with any strength, as though she knew it was useless. "I told him I don't remember. I told him to leave me alone."

"Told who?"

"Al. I told him to leave me alone."

"In Warrenstown, when you were a kid?"

Her face changed; she gave me a triumphant sneer that reminded me of Morgan Reed's. "In Warrenstown. No, dummy. Here, last night."

"Al Macpherson was here last night?"

"Go away."

"What did he want?"

The sneer again. "He wanted to help me. Al's going to help me, hoorah, hoorah."

"Help you with what?"

She turned from the door, left it open as she walked back into the house. "Fuck it," she said. "Want a beer?"

I wiped my feet on a worn mat, followed Beth Adams and the dog through a dank hall to a sticky-floored kitchen. I took the can of Bud she handed me, and then followed again into a living room sloppy with old magazines and TV Guides. The dog sniffed at me, wagged his tail tentatively, skittered away when I bent to pet him. The cloud of dust I raised when I sat on the broken-down couch danced in the sunlight.

Beth Adams sat on an equally decrepit chair which was set up, I saw, directly facing a large-screen TV. Half a dozen empties stood on the table beside her. As soon as she sat, the dog jumped into her lap. The room smelled of stale beer, damp dog, and neglect. "Who the hell are you?" she asked again, without hostility, looking at the beer she was popping open, not at me.

"Bill Smith."

"You from Warrenstown? Do I know you?"

"No. Did Al Macpherson come here last night?"

"And you're here now. My, my."

"What did he want to help you with?"

"Al wants to make sure," she slurped foam off the top of the can, "Al wants to make sure everything's all right with me. Al's a big lawyer now."

She stopped, waited, so I said, "I know. Macpherson Peters Ennis and Arkin."

That seemed to prove my credentials. "Al says maybe I could get money from Jared… from Jared's parents…" She trailed off.

"That's why he came?"

She narrowed her eyes at me. I popped the top on my beer, too, took a swig. I hadn't eaten, just had a lot of coffee, but this was clearly a requirement of conversation here. Beth Adams smirked, drank again, went on. "He said, if I could remember what happened, maybe we could sue. He sues people now, Al. That's what he does."

"What did you say?"

"I told him, I don't remember. I never remembered. People kept asking me and I never remembered. But I remembered something."

"What's that?"

Big smile. "I remembered I don't like Al. He was a big football hero and I didn't like him anyway. All the girls liked him but I didn't."