Winter and Night (31 page)

"Because from what I hear the whole varsity and half the JV uses them."

"That's crap."

"I don't think so. Unless there's something in the water in Warrenstown that grows huge mutant teenage boys."

Morgan shrugged.

"You want to get to practice?"

The familiar arrogance that had begun to fill Morgan drained away like water. "Man, I don't know what you're talking about. I don't touch that shit."

"Dammit, Morgan!" He pulled back, startled by my shout. "I didn't ask if you used them. I asked where a kid in Warrenstown could get them. Answer me!"

"Man," he said, looking automatically to Lydia, his voice back to pleading. When dad's on your case, you can try mom, if you happen to live in one of those families where that works. He found no help, shook his head. "I don't fucking know."

"You're lying."

"Bullshit."

"Goddammit! I—"

"Bill," said Lydia calmly, "cool down. Morgan?" The car keys jingled in her hand as she slipped her hands in her pockets. She smiled, her sunglasses hiding her eyes. "Morgan, I'm not sure you understand how serious this is. Tory Wesley's dead and Gary Russell's disappeared and Detective Sullivan is quite concerned." At Sullivan's name Morgan's eyes narrowed, as though he saw more trouble coming his way. "I know you want to get to practice and we'd like to help you out. Maybe it's true you don't know where the steroids are coming from, but I still think you can help us. Will you try?"

Warily, Morgan said, "I don't know anything."

"Well, let's see. We heard that Tory Wesley was dealing acid and other drugs. She's dead, so you don't have to worry about whatever you say about her. We'd just like you to confirm what we've heard."

The street was totally still, not even a breeze to disturb the perfect composition of blue sky, green lawns, red and orange and wine-colored leaves. Morgan swallowed, glanced at me. I must not have looked as though I'd cooled down, because he answered Lydia's question.

"I guess so. I mean, I heard that."

"You heard that. Fine. Now, what did you hear about Tory Wesley's party on Saturday?"

"I don't know. Just that there was gonna be one."

"That's all?"

"Yeah."

"We heard," Lydia said, "that she was going to have ecstasy there."

Morgan didn't answer. Lydia said nothing more, just drew her hand from her pocket with the car keys in it. She glanced at her watch, letting the car keys jingle, and gave Morgan her little smile.

"Fuck!" Morgan burst out. "Yeah, fuck it, she was supposed to have ecstasy. Some of the guys said. They were, like, into it."

"Where was she getting it?"

"I don't know. I don't fucking know! Come on, you guys." His voice took on a whining note as he looked from one of us to the other. I wondered if that worked at home.

"The same place she got her other drugs?" Lydia asked.

"No."

"How do you know?"

"Well, if she could have, she would have before, wouldn't she?" Morgan said. "I mean, the guys, some of them, they were saying a long time they wanted it."

"Maybe she could have," I said, "but she was afraid of what would happen if she did."

"What do you mean?"

"We heard that some of her friends were worried about Tory. They were afraid it was dangerous to deal drugs to guys like you."

"I told you, I don't—"

"Of course not, Morgan. It's the other jocks I mean. Some of them are dangerous, aren't they?"

"Don't be stupid. The guys just wanted to, like, party."

"Some of Tory's friends—"

"Bullshit, some of her friends. You mean that freak Paul Niebuhr, right? He's the only one. He says all kinds of bullshit."

"It's bullshit?"

"From that little prick? He was all over her to quit dealing acid. Said she'd get mixed up with the wrong people and get in trouble. Like the people he hangs out with are so cool." Scorn filled Morgan's voice, and I thought of Kate Minor, who considered Paul a friend. "Randy had to talk to him," Paul added.

Lydia said, "That talk, that was when he locked Paul in a locker?"

"Shit, no, that was last year. Paul's just so annoying, you know? With that fucking skateboard, all his shit. Jesus, what a twerp—"

"I see," I said. "So to prove Paul's wrong about the jocks being dangerous, Randy locks Paul in a locker?"

"I told you, that was last year."

"And this year? The jocks have new ways to deal with annoying kids this year? Like beating them up in parking lots?"

"Shit, no, man. Nobody'd do that."

"Someone did. Was it Randy?"

"Shit, no," he repeated. "And he didn't touch The Prickless Wonder, either. You know, Paul. Randy's not that way." I thought about the Randy I'd seen at Hamlin's, reserved my judgment on what way he was. But Morgan, next year's star, was intent now on clearing the senior star's name. "He just kind of said to leave Tory alone. Just to, like, let her do whatever she wanted."

"Sell whatever drugs, you mean?"

"Just to leave her alone."

"And what happened?" Lydia asked.

Morgan shrugged.

"Paul left her alone?"

For the first time that afternoon I saw Morgan's sneer. "He stopped telling her what to do. But he didn't leave her alone."

"What does that mean?" said Lydia.

"That night she had that party? He was there the whole time."

"Paul Niebuhr was at the party?"

"At the party? No fucking way. He was outside."

"Outside?"

"In his car. Just sat there, all fucking night."

"Paul went camping, at Bear Mountain," I said. "He left Friday, right after school."

"Bullshit. Who said that?" Morgan asked.

"His mother."

"His mother?" Morgan rolled his eyes. "His mother doesn't know shit. She's, like, some hippie or something." His face took on an unfocused look, and in a slow, soft voice he breathed, "I like to give my children space." Back to normal: "Did she tell you that?"

"Yes, she did."

"Yeah, well, what that means, she gives them a few bucks, tells them to go down to the Tastee-Freez for supper, because she's, like, meditating or some shit. The woman is way lame. She's clueless."

"Paul told you this?"

"Paul? I don't, like, hang out with Paul. But you can see it, man. I mean, the guy is, like, a total loser. After the locker thing, I heard his mom told him he must have been, like, putting out negative energy, or otherwise no one would've gotten so pissed at him. His own mom? I mean, what kind of shit is that?"

"Good point," I said. "On the other hand, I'll bet he never gets grounded."

* * *

Morgan turned down Lydia's offer of a ride to school with, "You're shitting me, right?" She and I stood and watched him jog along the sidewalk, disappear around the corner with a quick glance back as though he was worried we were going to drive over the grass and scoop him up again.

"Next time," Lydia said, "I want to be the bad cop."

"And I'd be the good cop? Who'd believe that?"

"You always say that."

"It's always true."

She sighed. "Did you notice the change in him when he started telling us about Paul Niebuhr?" Lydia asked. "He became positively talkative."

"Steering us away from his friends. Did you believe him?"

"Fifty-fifty."

"Which fifty?"

"I think he knows where the steroids are coming from. But if Gary isn't taking them or dealing them, we probably don't care."

"And the other fifty?"

She turned to me. "I think Paul Niebuhr was in town Saturday night."

"Watching Tory Wesley's house," I said.

"Until all the other kids left."

"Your thought is…?"

"Well, Kate said they were friends, and that he was worried about what would happen when the jocks found out she couldn't get the ecstasy."

"So he was watching over her to make sure she was all right?"

"Could be."

"But she wasn't all right," I said, "If he found her, why didn't he tell anyone?"

We looked at each other, the afternoon silent around us.

I said, "If he was here Saturday night, then his mother was either lying to me, or she's as clueless as Morgan says."

"And you're thinking we ought to go find out."

I was thinking exactly that. Lydia started up the car and we drove the well-kept streets of Warrenstown once more.

Twenty

Paul Niebuhr's family lived near my sister, beyond the other end of the development of mirror-image houses in their gently rolling landscape. At the far edge of the subdivision, on the side where Helen lived, maples, oaks, and birches in their autumn colors showed you what the woods had been like that had stood there until the houses came. On this side, beyond the new ring road we drove along, the softer contours of the treeless land and the muted golds and browns of the wild grasses said that this place had once been farms. The farmers had retreated now, leaving the squash and corn fields unturned, unplanted, waiting for bulldozers, concrete, and sod.

In the sameness of these houses and the careful distances between them the Niebuhr's house was a surprise. We found it on the wrong side of the ring road, across from the development, the only house there. Set back on a little rise, with two ancient apple trees in front, it was brick, small-windowed, old: one of the original farmhouses, its porch shadowed and wide, though from it the only view now, repeated, was the lawns and driveways and tasteful gray houses of the neighbors.

A rainbow-striped windsock billowed in the breeze as Lydia pulled in and parked behind a Volvo with a few years on it. We climbed the scuffed porch steps. The front door, like the wood trim at the windows, needed a coat of paint. I pressed a rusted doorbell sandwiched between a SAVE THE WHALES sticker and one with the universal cross-out symbol over the cinch-waisted tower of a nuclear power plant.

Grasses rustled and the breeze brought the smell of damp earth as Lydia and I stood waiting on the porch. The door was answered by a woman of medium height, barefooted and heavy in the hips under her ankle-length cotton skirt. Her hair was doeskin-brown on its way to gray and hung long down her back. She looked from Lydia to me with a serene smile. "Yes?"

"Mrs. Niebuhr?" I asked.

"Cooper-Niebuhr," she corrected me gently. "Niebuhr is my husband's name. Marriage should be a synergy, my husband and I believe, not a case of one person losing her identity." Her voice, as on the phone on Wednesday, was unhurried, Mrs. Cooper-Niebuhr willing to give each element of her thinking the time required for its expression. She waited a moment; then, almost as an afterthought, she added, "Did you want something?"

"I'm Bill Smith. This is Lydia Chin, my partner. I called two days ago asking to speak to Paul. About Gary Russell?"

At first her look was pleasant but blank. Then she said, "Oh, yes, the missing boy. Paul's not back yet. He comes back Sunday. He's camping. I think I told you?"

"You did. Right now it's really Paul I'd like to talk to you about. Can we come in?"

"About Paul? Is everything all right?"

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

She hesitated, then opened the door and stood aside. "Would you please take off your shoes?" Lydia slipped off her shoes, I untied my boots, and we entered the Cooper-Niebuhrs' house in our socks.

Paul Niebuhr's mother showed us to a living room of mismatched wooden furniture scattered with Kente cloth pillows, draped with Navajo blankets, presided over by a Bedouin camel saddlebag on one wall and a Mexican striped serape nailed to another. The floor was bare except for scattered crayons and childish drawings, some completed, some just begun. In a few places crayon lines continued past the edges of the paper onto the floorboards, joining up with older crayon lines in more faded colors.

"Janis, if you're finished with a project, it's appropriate to leave the area as you found it," Mrs. Cooper-Niebuhr called into the general atmosphere. She seemed to expect no answer and when none came she smiled at us. "My youngest daughter," she said. "She's very creative." She stepped over the crayons and sat on a leather ottoman. From the drawings it looked like little Janis was about four. Some parents would have taken a moment to check and see where she was and what she was up to, but Mrs. Cooper-Niebuhr clasped her hands around her knees and looked peacefully at Lydia and me. "What's this about?"

"When did Paul leave?" I asked, sitting with Lydia on a futon-frame sofa covered loosely with an India-print bedspread. The sofa was already occupied by an enormous orange cat, who opened one baleful eye, shifted grudgingly a quarter of an inch, and went back to sleep. "For Bear Mountain."

"Friday, right after school. Didn't I tell you that before? I'm sorry."

"Yes, you did. But one of the other boys said he saw Paul in Warrenstown Saturday night."

"I don't see how that can be. He left on Friday."

"Could he have come back, just for a while?"

"Why?" she asked, as though the question could not really have an answer. "He went camping. To meditate, in the woods. It would interfere with the process of his meditation to come back to town."

"You know," I said, "that a girl in Warrenstown died at a party on Saturday night?"

Paul's mother smoothed her skirt. "Yes, I heard. It's difficult sometimes."

"Difficult?"

"The wheel of fate. To understand how it turns. Nothing happens without a reason, of course. But I do feel the pain of her parents."

I opened my mouth to ask another question, but before I could, Lydia, nodding gravely, said, "Difficult to understand. But important to accept, whatever your karma brings you."

"Yes, well," Mrs. Cooper-Niebuhr replied, "that's the challenge of life, isn't it?"

The two of them sat there smiling gently at each other like junior members of some holy sect willing to help each other to enlightenment in any way they could. I wondered how badly my karma would be affected if I lit up a cigarette.

Lydia's face grew solemn. "Mrs. Cooper-Niebuhr—"

"Phoenix. Please call me Phoenix. It's the name I've chosen. Titles put such distance between us."