I dialed the number.
The woman who answered had a pleasant voice, like a kindergarten teacher. When I told her who I was and what I wanted, she gave a little gasp and said, “Oh. I don’t think . . . What could we possibly tell you?”
“It shouldn’t take long,” I said. “I could be there in thirty minutes.”
Silence.
“You can call Frank Campanella at the West precinct house. He’ll vouch for me.” I gave her the number.
Another pause. Then, “All right,” she said. “This afternoon. But I’m afraid you’ll be wasting your time.”
They lived on a quiet street in Inglewood, a few blocks from the river, in a ranch-style brick house with rust-colored shutters and two front windows, each with a peaked gable above and a long white flower box below. Nice house, not too expensive, in a nice, not-too-expensive neighborhood, an oasis of middle class coziness in a part of town slowly going to seed. A basketball hoop hung from the garage door, a ragged net dangling from one side.
I thought of Chase and his father shooting hoops in the driveway and felt a pressure behind my eyes.
The yard was small, but it seemed to take a long time to cross it. The snow had melted and refrozen, and with each step, my boots crunched through an icy crust.
I hesitated on the front porch. Not too late to turn around and leave these people in peace.
Instead, I rang the bell.
No answer.
I rang again, then strolled around to the backyard, where a blocky man who looked to be in his early fifties and a woman maybe a decade younger stood feeding strips of cardboard into a bonfire. She was shivering in khakis and a forest-green sweater that looked like it wouldn’t be much use against the cold.
An overweight black lab peered out from behind the woman’s legs, tail wagging, a ribbon of drool dangling from its tongue.
The man picked up a branch and prodded at the fire. Sparks swirled up like fireflies. An ember landed on the shoulder of his jacket, and he swatted at it with a calloused hand. The woman brushed her fingertips across the spot where it had been.
I moved into their line of vision. “Doug and Hannah Eddington?”
They both looked up, her eyebrows lifting, his joining in a heavy black ‘V.’ They were a handsome couple, not beautiful, but they looked good together. Her chin-length bob was frosted with gray, and a web of fine lines etched the corners of her eyes. She had a fleshy angularity around the hips, the kind skinny women often develop as they age. Her waist was slim, her stomach small and round, like half a grapefruit.
Her husband was darkly tanned, with a square-jawed face going to jowl and a forehead creased with worry lines. The sleeves of his shirt were bunched at the elbows, revealing hairy forearms heavy with muscle.
“We’re trying to get on with things,” he said. “Yesterday, my wife laughed at a joke she heard at the Piggly Wiggly. Now here you come to pick off the scab.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, moving closer to the flames. “That’s not my intention.”
“What is your intention?”
“I don’t know. Just fishing.”
Hannah’s smile was small, half-frozen. She rubbed her upper arms with her hands and said, “It’s too cold out here for fishing. Maybe we should go inside.”
Doug gave her a long look, then sighed and turned back to the fire. Prodded the blackening cardboard. It crumbled into a maelstrom of sparks and ashes. “Just about done here, anyway.”
He walked over to a faucet at the back of the house and came back with a shiny green garden hose. Water hissed inside it as the pressure built. Then a spray of ice and water shot from the end and spewed onto the flames. When nothing was left but a steaming pile of ash, Eddington put a crimp in the hose to staunch the water flow.
“Get you something?”he said. His voice sounded strained. “Coffee? Something stronger? I’m a bourbon man, myself.”
“I’m fine. Don’t go to any trouble.”
“No trouble. Coffee’s made, bourbon’s . . . Well, that’s made too, I guess.”
“Coffee, then. Black.”
I followed them back to the house, kicked my feet against the step to knock off the snow and followed them in.
“Shoes,” Doug said, and pointed to my feet. He pulled off his muddy work boots and laid them beside Hannah’s wet sneakers on a braided rug in front of the door. I followed suit, as Hannah wiped the dog’s paws with a damp cloth.
The mudroom led to a hallway lined with photographs. A plump baby girl in a lace christening gown. Another baby, this one a boy, in a white satin suit. More pictures of the boy. Taking tentative steps with one fist clenched around his father’s finger. Splashing in a plastic swimming pool. Learning to ride a bike.
Eddington averted his eyes as he passed them, but his jaw pulsed. Hannah looked at each one as she passed, occasionally trailing her fingers along the frames.
In the kitchen, Hannah settled me into the breakfast nook and busied herself at the coffee maker. The dog, by way of greeting, shoved its nose into my crotch.
Doug padded over in his sock feet, a bourbon on the rocks in one hand. “Bo, stop that,” he said, and the dog heaved a sigh and laid its head against my knee.
“You had questions,” Hannah said to me. She brought me the coffee in a china cup so delicate I was afraid it might shatter in my hand. Her hands were trembling, and as she set the cup in front of me, some of the hot liquid sloshed into my lap.
We both gasped, for different reasons.
“I’m so sorry, Mr. McKean.” She snatched a dishtowel from the counter, started to dab at the spill, then reddened and handed me the cloth. “It’s . . . I’ve tried so hard to put it out of my mind.”
“It’s all right, Mrs. Eddington.” I dabbed at the stain on my lap, then gave up and pulled out my shirttail to hide it. “I can’t imagine how hard it must’ve been.”
Doug pulled over a chair, turned its back toward the table, and straddled it. “God grant you never find out.”
“How did it happen?”
He took a sip of his bourbon, swished it around in his mouth, and swallowed. “I wish I knew. It started with that game. At first it seemed harmless, but then he started getting more and more into it. Couldn’t—or wouldn’t—talk about anything else. Then he started hanging out with some other Goth kids, and I guess that’s how he met this Razor.”
Hannah slid into the chair across from me and set her cup on the table. “I know what you must be thinking. Where were we? Why didn’t we do something?”
“We tried,” Doug said. “We’d ground him, he’d sneak out. Take his car away, they’d pick him up, all hours of the night.”
Hannah said, “We tried to reason with him. And when that didn’t work, I begged. But it was like . . . he was under some kind of spell.”
Doug swirled the ice in his glass. “You second guess yourself. I was a Marine, for Christ’s sake. Maybe I was too hard on him. Maybe I wasn’t hard enough.”
“Hard to say,” I said. “You did your best.”
“Finally, we confronted him. Or I did. Hannah was never one for confrontations.” He gave her a tender smile and closed his hand over hers.
I nodded. Waited.
“It was a mess,” he said. “I yelled at him, he screamed at me. And finally, he said it. That he was . . . sleeping with this Razor. He wasn’t even queer. It was just . . . this Razor got him all twisted around. Talking about transcendence, and higher levels of existence. All that bullshit, but I guess it sounded good coming from him.”
“What did you do when you found out?”
“Went ballistic. Told Chase it would be a cold day in Hell before he saw this son of a bitch again. I’d’ve killed the bastard then, if I’d gotten my hands on him.” He stopped, as if suddenly remembering why I was there. “Is this where you ask me if I murdered him?”
“Did you?”
“No. But I would have that night. That was when Chase fell apart. He threatened to kill himself,
got a knife from the kitchen and tried to slash his wrists.”
I thought of Josh, wrists swathed in bandages, and said, “Hellish.”
He raked his fingers through his hair. “We took him to the hospital, got him committed. It was a short-term thing, just until he got his head together. But he wouldn’t talk to the psychiatrists. He finally said he’d go to counseling if we sent him to Alan Keating.”
“So you sent him.”
“We didn’t know what else to do. We didn’t know who Keating was. Chase just said he knew one of Keating’s other patients. Three weeks after he started therapy, we found out Alan Keating was Razor’s best buddy. We got Chase a new counselor, and a week after that, my boy was dead.”
“You blame Keating for that?”
Hannah said, “No. Yes . . . The thing is, Chase liked him. He wouldn’t have felt that way if Alan had hurt him, would he?”
I said, “Keating canceled his appointments the afternoon Razor was killed.”
Her cup clattered to the table, coffee sloshing over the rim. “You think Alan Keating . . .”
“I don’t know.”
“No. No. He’s not that kind of person.”
Doug said, “He was this Razor’s best friend. That says something about him.”
I tried to picture Doug Eddington hanging Razor from a rod, posing him on a pentagram, carving symbols into his arms. He had plenty of motive, but that didn’t mean anything. Everyone who’d known Razor had a reason to kill him.
Hannah pushed her cup away. Wordlessly, Doug picked it up and carried it to the sink.
Hannah smiled. “My knight in shining armor. Did Marta tell you how we met?”
I shook my head.
“I was fourteen. He was fresh from the war and saved me from a group of boys who were tormenting me outside the Dairy Queen. Of course, I was just a child to him, but that’s when I fell in love.” She stroked the dog’s broad head.
“It was nothing,” Doug said. He brought another bourbon to the table. “Anybody would’ve helped.”
She shook her head. “Six years later, my car broke down, right in the middle of Old Hickory Boulevard. This handsome young man stopped to help, and lo and behold, it was him.”
She pushed the dog away gently and stood up to wash her hands. Doug moved aside to give her room.
She said, “It had to be Fate, don’t you think? Or God, or whatever you believe in. Every time in my life I’ve really needed help, Doug’s been there to make things right.” She poured a dollop of pink liquid soap into her palm. “Do you believe in that, Mr. McKean?”
I thought of Maria and nodded.
“We were married eight months later.” She held her hands beneath the faucet and scrubbed them with a green mesh puff until the knuckles were red. “Marriage we were good at. It was making babies we couldn’t seem to get the hang of.”
“Don’t,” Doug said. “You don’t have to tell him this.”
She went on as if she hadn’t heard. “Two miscarriages and then a little boy. Jonathan. He was stillborn.” She wrenched the faucet handle until the stream of water slowed to a drip, then picked up the dish towel and wiped the counter clean with it. She kept rubbing, long after the surface was clean. “Then Lucinda came along. She lived for almost a year. And after that was Chase. We must have been doing something right, because we managed to keep him alive for sixteen years.”
I said, “What happened to Chase wasn’t your fault.”
“I’d like to believe that.” She folded the towel into quarters, then turned back to face me. “May I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
“They say he was . . . Razor was . . . butchered.”
“That’s enough, honey,” Doug said. “You don’t want to be thinking about that.”
He stood up. Gave me a pointed stare.
“Thanks for the coffee,” I said to Hannah. “And . . . I’m sorry for your loss.” As I followed Doug out, I glanced into the living room. Salmon-tinted walls, furniture in white and peach, glass-topped coffee table with a bowl of walnuts on it. Beside the entertainment center was a maple gun case with a four-point buck etched into the glass door.
Another hunter. I paused in the doorway and nodded toward the gun case. “You hunt, Mr. Eddington?”
“Used to. Not much time for it these days. Why?”
“You dress your own deer?” I watched his face for a reaction and got none.
“Yeah. Sure. Why?”
“Just wondered what kind of knife you use.”
“Buck Crosslock. Two blades, three functions.” He went over, opened the case, and showed me. “Three-and-a-quarter-inch drop-point blade, three-and-a-quarter-inch gutting blade with a saw on the back edge.”
“You got a tactical knife?”
“What would be the point?” He put the Crosslock back in its scabbard and closed the door. “This one does everything I need.”
That meant nothing. The Crosslock would have done the job.
We talked hunting for a while. Then I thanked him for his time, and he shook my hand and walked me to the door. “You have a good evening, Mr. McKean.”
“Jared.” I bent to put my shoes on.
“You have a good evening, Jared.” He gave me a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “But don’t come here again.”
I waited for a moment after he’d closed the door behind me. Then, suspicious bastard that I am, I went over to the ashes of Doug’s bonfire. The branch he’d used to prod the flames lay beside the soggy ashes. I picked it up and poked through the soot and ash.
The layer of ash was thin, as if he’d only recently begun to use the fire pit, but the extent of the charring on the rocks that lined the pit told a different story. The pit had been cleaned out recently. I tried to make something sinister of it, but the truth was, if you burned trash regularly, there was a good chance you cleaned out the fire pit regularly too.
I sifted some more. Found a few scraps of corrugated cardboard that had escaped the blaze. Nothing important. If you’d asked me what I hoped to find, I wouldn’t have been able to say. I liked the Eddingtons, and I think, more than anything, I was hoping to find nothing.
So it was with a mixture of relief and disappointment that nothing was exactly what I found.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Later that afternoon, I put in a call to a friend in the juvenile division. Her name was Sherilyn Cade, and though we’d only occasionally crossed paths professionally, we’d traded favors and shared a few long lunches, commiserating over my divorce and her rocky relationship with a hardware salesman named Earl. It had been two years since we’d talked, but she still recognized my voice.
“No way this is a social call,” she said. “Not after all this time. So, spit it out, honeybunch. What do you need?”
“Kid named Byron Birch. Got a juvenile record. I need to know what’s on his sheet.”
“You know that’s confidential.”
“I know. I’ll owe you, big time.”
“Big time, huh?” She made a little humming sound. Paused for a moment, thinking it over. Then, “Buy me lunch, and I’ll see what I can do.”
“You’re sure Earl won’t kick my ass?”
“Honey, Earl would marry you himself if he thought you’d buy him a cheeseburger.”
I agreed to her terms and hung up feeling restless. I thought about Byron. His dullness at the funeral, his mental lethargy. He’d been seduced by a sexual predator, come home one evening expecting to share a meal with his lover and walked into an abattoir, and now he was living with the predator’s best friend.
Kid in crisis, you damn betcha.
I called Keating’s house, but the machine picked up. I left a voice-mail message for Byron, left another message with Barnabus’s Bela Lugosi recording, and finally called Miss Aleta. An hour and forty-five minutes later, she and I were sitting at the visitor’s table again. The door swung open, and Absinthe shuffled into the training room and plopped down across the table f
rom us. One cheek was swollen, a purple bruise forming around one eye.
Miss Aleta frowned, gestured to the bruise and said, “Who hurt you?”
Absinthe brushed the cheek with her fingertips. “Some moron at supper last night. Said I was eyeing her dessert. Pumpkin pie, with that gross artificial topping. I mean, as if. It wasn’t even real pie.” Tough words, but her eyes welled, and a patchwork of red blotches bloomed on her face.
“Are you all right, child?”
“I guess. When are you getting me out of here?”
“Soon.” Miss Aleta handed Absinthe a fresh tissue and gave her a reassuring pat. “We go back to court day after tomorrow, see if we can’t put a stop to all this nonsense about adult courts and no bail.”
“I don’t see why they don’t just let me go. I took it back. I said I didn’t do it.”
“It doesn’t work that way.”
Absinthe sniffled and cut her eyes toward me. “Are you helping her get me out?”
“Looks like it,” I said. “And right now I need to know about Benjy Savales.”
She gave a little hiccup, and a bubble of snot popped out of one nostril. She clamped the tissue to her nose and honked into it. “God, I’m a mess. What’s Benjy got to do with anything?”
“Kind of suspicious, the way he disappeared, don’t you think?”
“Razor said he ran away. He and Razor had some kind of argument or something, and a few days later, Benjy just stopped coming around.”
“You never heard from him again?”
“His mother came around a few times asking about him, and so did the police. But, you know, what could we say? We didn’t know anything.”
I leaned forward and rested my forearms on the table. “Why do you think he ran away? Did Razor do something to him?”
“Who says he left because of Razor? Maybe he left because his mother was a crazy woman.” She looked down at her hands. Noticed a hangnail on one thumb and rubbed at it with the tip of a finger. “I can’t believe I confessed. Pretty stupid, huh? But I really thought I’d done it, you know? That I made it happen. But I talked to Mom last night, and she said there was no such thing as witchcraft, and since it couldn’t have really hurt him, I didn’t really do anything wrong.”
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