When All Light Fails

by Randall Silvis

  “For a poem about ordinary things,” he said, a note to himself, “things I like. In fact that should be the title of the poem. ‘I Like.’ And then it will go something like, I don’t know, ‘little white churches with music playing inside.’ Then maybe, what? ‘Puffy white clouds in a blue summer sky.’” He walked slowly and let the images come to him freely, some he could see and some that arose in his memory…

  “Cows in the pasture and horses on the run…a big dog sleeping in a small patch of sun.” Soon the poem itself seemed to take over, pulling distant images and sensations from his subconsciousness: “a violin crying and a saxophone wailing…a pretty girl laughing and a big ship sailing…a long gravel driveway with grass growing between the rocks…a wooden swing on the porch and a lakeshore without docks.”

  He paused. Lifted his eyes to the far blue horizon. “The wind in my face and rain on the roof…kindness and tenderness, affection and truth…an early morning mist and an early morning dew and the early morning sunshine when I’m waking up with you. You in my arms and me slipping inside…and your happy sleepy murmurs on our slow sleepy ride.”

  His thoughts stopped coming then and he stopped talking and stood there in the middle of the field with the phone to his lips. The poem was over. The mood and the inspiration had slipped away, no more phrases sliding through his mind like something playful and warm, something like happiness as a syrup spreading through him. And then it was all gone and there was only him and the field and the stubble and the sun, and his car a good fifty yards away. How had he walked that far without even noticing it?

  He looked around. Good, nobody watching. Nobody wondering what he was doing out there. He shut off the voice recorder and pocketed his phone and walked back to the car with long, purposeful strides. But he kept a small secret smile to himself. That a poem, even a mediocre one, had come so effortlessly from inside that thick skull of his…it was a wonderment. Or had it come from outside of his brain, outside of his being? It seemed to have written itself. Had used him as its instrument. We wrote a poem, he told himself, still marveling. Right out of the blue. How weird is that?

  Seventy

  Laying another log on the fire of failure

  There is a significant difference between feeling like a failure and admitting failure. The first can be a driving force; the second is the relinquishment of all effort, and therefore all hope. DeMarco understood this in his bones but had never articulated it to himself or anybody else. It had taken Thomas Huston to put it into words for him.

  They had been sitting on lawn chairs in Huston’s backyard, the summer before Huston’s death, and only a few weeks after first meeting each other. The congested baby, David Ryan Huston—not named after DeMarco but a coincidence DeMarco had enjoyed—finally asleep on his father’s chest, his cherubic face turned toward DeMarco. The men had been talking sotto voce so as not to awaken the cherub from its stertorous breathing, discussing Tom’s writing and how difficult it was to carry a novel around in one’s head for a year or more.

  “I never think I’m going to pull it off,” Huston had said. “Every morning when I sit down to write, I think, you can’t do this, it isn’t working. It’s not until the final third or so, after a couple hundred pages or more, that I realize I am going to do it. I know where I’m going now. Is that how it is with you too, Sergeant? When you’re working on a case, I mean?”

  “We don’t get many big cases around here,” DeMarco had replied. “Certainly not ones that take a year or more to solve.”

  “But in a condensed version? Days instead of months?”

  “Sure,” DeMarco said. “I’m always afraid that I’m going to drop the ball.”

  Huston smiled. Kissed his baby’s head. “I think it’s a good thing, don’t you? The fear of failure? It’s what keeps you going, doesn’t it? It feeds the fire.”

  “That’s probably so.”

  “Because you know, don’t you? That you’re never going to give up until you succeed. You are never going to admit defeat.”

  Their friendship had been too brief. Yet even in its brevity it had left an indelible impression on DeMarco. Things Huston had said were always coming back to him, and he sometimes dreamed of him, sometimes felt his presence near. And now, the morning after Flores’s encounter with Benny Szabo, he thought he could feel Tom watching him from a corner of the living room, smiling that small knowing smile he seemed to wear so easily and naturally.

  Or maybe DeMarco felt that way only because it was Sunday again, and soon he and Jayme would make their weekly trip to the cemetery. Sundays always felt different to DeMarco. He had buried a lot of people. Or had caused them to be buried. Sundays used to fill him with a heaviness, a dark foreboding. But since the NDE he had not felt that way, but lighter, still a bit melancholy but absent the sense of dread.

  Then, too, this morning had brought a surprise from FedEx, and one that further lightened his mood even as it deepened the bittersweet undertone, adding both a dash of the sweet and a pinch of the sad. An advanced reading copy of the collection of Tom’s thoughts and observations that DeMarco and Jayme had helped to curate. He was pleased with the cover, a deep royal blue, no images, only the words in white cursive, all small caps except in Tom’s name, a nontitular title, from the notebooks of Thomas Huston. The words looked like clouds across an evening sky, like very carefully crafted sky writing.

  Tom would like this, DeMarco thought. He sat holding the book and looking at it and at Tom’s photo on the back cover for a long time. But he would not open the book until Jayme came downstairs. And maybe that night they would read the book together, the same way they had read the loose pages months earlier. Reading each other into sleep.

  He wondered if the poem he had written yesterday had been from Tom. That would explain the ease with which it had come to him. As if Tom had looked into DeMarco’s heart and saw all the things he enjoyed. All the simple things he loved.

  The previous night, in bed, DeMarco had played his phone recording for Jayme. Tears had come to her eyes. She said, “I love it, baby. I really do. But it took you long enough to get to me, didn’t it? Not until the last two lines.”

  “Everything else is prelude to you,” he told her. “The one thing I love most.”

  “Nice save.” She kissed his cheek. His nose. His lips. “Will you type it up and print it out for me? Or better yet write it out by hand?”

  “Of course. Whenever I have time I’ll sit and polish it up some first.”

  “Don’t you dare change a word of it,” she’d said.

  And now, another day. Another in the long procession of days. And how are you going to make use of this day? he asked himself. He could dig around for the name of the bartender at the Marigold, maybe catch her off guard with a visit at home. But she hadn’t seemed the type to be caught off guard. She was the type to clam up when pressed. Maybe she had recognized him. Maybe sniffed the cop on him. In any case she wasn’t about to ruin her business by getting known as a blabbermouth. His best bet was to leave her on the back burner for a while.

  He laid the book on the coffee table. “Fact one,” he said out loud, because speaking his thoughts was nearly as helpful as writing them down, an aid to his memory, “we know that Benny Szabo was in Michigan the day and evening prior to Emma’s death. Fact two, we know that he attacked Dani and made off with her car. We know that the car hasn’t been located and Szabo hasn’t been caught, but there’s a warrant out for him, and Troop D and all neighboring counties have been alerted. We know he won’t go back to Eugene’s place. We know that his mother’s dead and there’s no sign of his father, no info on him since long before Benny’s mother died. Carmichael and the guys are working on that, better than Jayme and I can. So fact three…what the heck is fact three?”

  “Fact three,” Jayme said as she came down the stairs with Hero trotting behind her, “even though you left a lot of facts unnumbered
, is Morrison and his pals.”

  DeMarco picked up the book and held it up for her to see as she approached.

  She took it from him and read the cover. “Already?” she asked.

  “It’s called an ARC. An advance reader’s copy. They send them out to reviewers a few months before publication.” He pointed to the brown padded envelope that still lay on the foyer floor. “It came with a letter from the editor.”

  She opened the book’s cover. Turned two pages. Read for a moment. “He mentioned us in the foreword!”

  “That was nice of him,” DeMarco said.

  She flipped another page. “‘Introduction by Sergeant Ryan DeMarco’!”

  “Really?” he said. “He actually used it? I hope he fixed my grammar.”

  “You didn’t read it yet?”

  “I thought we might read it together tonight. We have other fish to fry today.”

  She closed the book. “And how I do want to see them fried,” she said. “Incinerated, in fact.”

  “Any ideas?”

  She laid the book on the coffee table again. “We need to see if we can tie Szabo to Morrison somehow.”

  “Yep,” he said. “And I repeat: any ideas?”

  “Did Morrison officiate at his trial?”

  “Nope. Anyway not the one in which I was involved. But Benny was arrested more than once.”

  She crossed her arms. Stared out the window at his back. “What about the rental car? The Nissan Rogue? Did the boys have any luck identifying who paid for it?”

  “The credit card was stolen.”

  “When did you find that out?”

  “This morning. While you were in the shower.”

  “Why wasn’t it reported stolen?”

  “The owner is ninety-two years old. Lives in New Philadelphia, Ohio. According to Carmichael, the old guy said he hadn’t used the card in a couple of years. Didn’t even know it was missing until the police questioned him.”

  “Does he have some relationship to Benny Szabo? Or to Morrison?”

  “Not that he can recall.”

  “Who talked to him?” she asked.

  “Bowen contacted the New Philly police. The old guy goes to the park every day it doesn’t rain. Noonish. It didn’t rain the day before or the day of Emma’s death.”

  “So Benny Szabo did what? Just drove around until he found an easy mark?”

  “That’s a bit of a stretch, isn’t it?”

  “In other words, somebody knew the old guy’s routine. And passed that information on to Benny Szabo.”

  “According to the officer who talked to the old guy, he’s very friendly. Always picks up a half dozen doughnuts on his way to the park and shares them with anybody who comes along.”

  “Does he recall talking to anybody who fits Szabo’s description?”

  “He does not. But admits that he might have and just can’t remember.”

  “It had to have been either Szabo or Morrison or one of his pals. We need to find out who those guys are.”

  “Let us not forget,” DeMarco said, “that no record exists of Benny Szabo’s physical whereabouts from the day of his release from prison until he showed up on the surveillance camera in Big Rapids. He provided an address but it’s a small apartment with hardly any furniture in it. He might have been living there for a while or he might not have.”

  “What about checking in with his parole agent?”

  “He never missed an appointment. But most of them were by phone. He wasn’t supposed to be traveling out of state without permission, but he wasn’t considered violent, not a danger to himself or others, so he just wasn’t monitored all that closely.”

  “Son of a bitch!” she said.

  DeMarco chuckled a little. Stood and stretched his back. The arrival of Huston’s posthumous book had put him in a sanguine mood. He and Jayme were not yet at the point in their case where they could see an ending, they still had many pages to turn, but they were moving forward, if only a page at a time.

  “My suggestion,” he told her, “is that we find a pressure point and see if we can make it squeal.”

  “The only pressure point we have access to is on Morrison.”

  “Then what do you say we pay another friendly visit to His Honor?”

  “Oh, goody!” she said, and clapped her hands together so loudly that Hero started barking.

  Seventy-One

  With the dead in their merriment

  First they went to the cemetery. For DeMarco the routine was no longer what it appeared to be on the surface, not what it had originally been for him and later for Jayme. Not a shared communion of grief. For him, at least, it had become something far less heavy. A recharge of his energies. A remembrance and silent expression of gratitude for the time he and his son had shared. And would always share. The alchemical love that would always remain alive inside his heart.

  The day was overcast, the sky low but with a muted silvery glow above the trees. The air smelled of mowed grass. He noticed on their walk from the car that there were many more people out this morning, fixing up their loved ones’ graves, clearing away the litter of winter, planting daffodil and crocus bulbs, bunches of pansies and mums and geraniums. Bits of conversation floated across the grounds from other grave sites but he did his best to ignore them. And also ignored the sense of amusement that made his mouth want to turn up at the corner. This maudlin little play, he thought. If only everybody knew. A part of him still longed to be with the dead, as lively and full and unfettered as he now knew the dead to be. It’s the living who should be mourned, he thought.

  As usual, he and Jayme picked at a few weeds, brushed away brown leaves and bits of dirt clinging to the granite. They talked very little and kept their thoughts to themselves. He knew that she was still grieving and would probably not understand or appreciate that all but a small shadow of his grief was gone now. It had been replaced with gratitude. He hoped that Jayme would eventually come to that change as well, but he had had several months with his son whereas she had only the sensation of their daughter, the knowledge of her presence.

  He hoped that maybe Emma would join them too, but he did not feel her presence that day. No caress of his cheek. That’s okay, he told her. You have better things to do.

  Only on their way back to the car a half hour later did he realize that he had not once fingered the silver locket he always carried in his pocket, the shiny container with a snip of his son’s fine hair inside. Had not cupped it tight while chanting his tiresome mantra of I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Now he slipped a hand into his pocket, found the trinket and held it for a moment between finger and thumb, its surface cool against his skin. And told his son, with a smile, Love you, my boy.

  In the car, Jayme did not speak during the fifteen-minute ride to Morrison’s house. DeMarco made no attempt to engage her in conversation. He guessed that the grief she had carried to and from the graves would, in Morrison’s presence, blossom into anger. He could only hope that it would not get the better of her. For her sake as well as Morrison’s.

  Seventy-Two

  The following statement is true The previous statement is false

  Jayme could smell barbecue the moment they entered the little community where Morrison lived. At nearly every house they passed, a resident or two was visible outside. Yards were being mowed, beds of charcoal briquettes burning, mulch beds being raked, miniature dachshunds and borzois and cockapoos and a teacup pomsky being walked. “The rich are out in numbers,” she said, and immediately regretted the sneer in her voice. She could have been one of those residents, had been raised in affluence. But since then she had learned something about money. In both dearth and abundance, it could bring out the worst in people. Because the worst is always there, always waiting for an excuse to send out its tendrils.

  Outside Morrison’s house she smelled mea
t sizzling on a grill. Music drifted from somewhere behind the house. She and DeMarco stood at the corner of the house and listened. “‘Don’t Stop Believin’?” she said. “I don’t see Morrison as a Journey kind of guy.”

  DeMarco shook his head. “There’s a woman singing along. Badly. He has company.”

  “Great!” Jayme said, and started briskly toward the sound. “I love a good party.”

  The woman was turned sideways to them when they came around the corner of the house. Of average height, blond and pretty, dressed in a blue denim jacket over a V-neck white T-shirt, black yoga pants and leather flip-flops. A necklace with a large turquoise pendant around her neck, a tennis bracelet weighty with colorful balls and bangles around one wrist. Late thirties, Jayme guessed. Everything but the flip-flops and jewelry seemed to have been applied with a spray gun. With a Corona in her left hand, she sang along with the music while using a long fork to turn brats and burgers and rings of kielbasa atop the grill. Three patio tables atop the brick patio were already laid with red disposable plates and clear plastic tableware and colorful plastic glasses.

  Jayme stood there smiling, DeMarco half a step behind off her right shoulder, until the song ended. Then she said, “Hey there.”

  “Hi!” the woman sang before she was even turned their way. Then her brilliant smile dimmed. “Oh. Hi. I don’t think I’ve met you folks yet.”

  Jayme moved forward, and DeMarco with her. “We’re not here for the party,” Jayme said. “Is the judge around?”

  “Oh!” the woman said, and flashed her expensive smile again. “I thought you were with the Spring Crawl.”

  “Spring is crawling?” Jayme asked happily, and DeMarco suppressed a wince.

  “It’s an annual thing around here. The whole community just goes from house to house, eating and drinking and, you know, welcoming spring. It can get pretty crazy by the time the fireworks go off.”