It was a while before Huston spoke again. His voice was muted and reached DeMarco as if from another room, a whispering through thin walls. “I came up here to jump,” he said.
DeMarco told him, “I know you did.”
“Claire and the kids and I came here once. Long, long time ago. Before Davy was born. Tommy was only six, I think. I had to hold Alyssa the whole time, she wouldn’t let me put her down.”
“You must have a lot of fine memories. I envy you that.”
What DeMarco wanted was to stand and join Huston at the rail. He wanted to see the lights across the lake. He wanted to see through the long miles of darkness. He said, “How did you get here, Thomas? You’re a long way from home.”
Huston did not answer, and after a while, DeMarco told himself, You’re going to have to get up now. You’re going to have to try to go to him before he climbs over that rail. But before he could make himself move, Huston spoke, and DeMarco decided to stay where he was for a while longer.
Huston said, “‘I was a child and she was a child, in this kingdom by the sea. But we loved with a love that was more than love…’”
DeMarco supplied the finish. “Just you and your Annabel Lee.”
A few seconds later, Huston said, “Writers.”
“What about them, Thomas?”
“We’re all such romantics.”
“I’m not sure I know what you mean by that.”
“We love our misery. Until it gets to be too much to bear.”
DeMarco sat very still and thought about that for a while. He was sitting with his head against the rounded wall and he had to fight the urge to close his eyes. His eyes were heavy with exhaustion and the left eye was watering profusely in the chilly air. The line of moisture down his cheek was cold on his skin, but the scar at the corner of his eye stung and throbbed with his pulse. He thought it remarkable all the things he could feel when he sat motionless in the darkness without a drink in his hand, all the things he could smell and taste and hear and remember. He did not understand what he was feeling for Huston at that moment—it seemed a peculiar emotion to feel for another man. He wondered how long he might have to sit motionless in darkness before he could understand such a thing.
After a while, he thought about Nathan and Danni sitting by their phones, waiting for Thomas to call again. He thought about the calls he was expecting. As quietly as he could, he eased the cell phone from his pocket. He held it below the top step so that its light would not startle Huston. Then he depressed the button and saw that he had two voice messages. He tapped the Select button and raised the phone to his ear.
The first message was from a sergeant from the Erie barracks. His men’s search of Whispers had turned up nothing that might help DeMarco track down Bonnie. The upper floor was an unfinished attic space, bare but for an overflowing ashtray, a cardboard box full of empty beer bottles and fast food wrappers, and a faux leather swivel chair set between two one-way mirrors, one looking down into the barroom, the other into the stage room. “It’s a pretty standard security setup,” the sergeant said. “Places like this are usually run on the cheap. Anyway, we took in all the bottles and other items. Get back to me when you can and let me know if you want any of it sent to the lab or not.”
The second voice message was from Trooper Morgan. He said the reports had come back on the beer bottles from Bonnie’s apartment. The second set of prints had matched those of an individual in the NCIC database, a man named Inman, a name DeMarco recognized. Trooper Morgan wanted to know if a BOLO alert should be issued for the man as “a person of interest.” DeMarco typed a quick text to Trooper Morgan. BOLO immediately.
DeMarco quietly laid the phone facedown on the step. He let out a long slow breath.
“Thomas,” he said, and was a little surprised by the plaintiveness in his voice, “can you tell me what happened that night?”
Fifty-One
After the dinner of Cornish game hens, after Thomas and Claire had cleaned up the dining room and kitchen and set the dishwasher to humming, after the Monopoly board had been reset for four players, everyone but little Ryan took a turn rolling the dice for the honor of picking that night’s movie. Alyssa won with a pair of sixes and chose Once in a Lifetime. As per family rules, Thomas Jr. exercised his one-time veto option and forced Alyssa to pick again. Her next choice, The Princess Bride, went unopposed. Swordplay and fighting for Thomas Jr., romance for Alyssa, a mix of goofy and sophisticated humor for the adults. The Monopoly game progressed in halting fashion, interrupted frequently with comments such as “Hold on a minute. I want to watch this scene.”
Throughout the evening, the baby moved from one lap to another, played alone for a while with his Barnyard See’n Say, and finally fell asleep snuggled against Thomas Jr. A part of Thomas Huston Sr. watched and absorbed every move and word and laugh from his family, felt keenly every moment of their typical Saturday night together because he knew how transitory it was. All too soon, he knew, Thomas Jr. would be spending his Saturday nights elsewhere, first just hanging out with a small group of friends, then with that one special girl. Alyssa would not be far behind. Then there would be just three of them to share a quiet evening, and in the blink of an eye, only two.
In bed that night, just after midnight, with Claire nestled against him with her head on his chest, her hair still damp and scented by a mango-infused shampoo, Thomas spoke of the ache of wistfulness he felt, and she comforted him as she always did. She said, “Things change but we’ll always be a family, baby.” She said, “Someday we’ll have a house full of grandkids.” She said, “Baby, make love to me again. I can never get enough of you.”
Later, he listened to her hair dryer in the bathroom, then she came back to him and quickly fell asleep in his arms. He waited another half hour or so before slipping out of bed. He had some lines he wanted to get down before the night spirited them away, a few words for his protagonist, some lines of description for his Annabel, lines that had appeared out of the ether while watching Claire undress. Plus, he was concerned about the garbage. He had forgotten to check to see if Tommy had carried the garbage outside after dinner as asked. Sometimes the boy got distracted during his chores and left them unfinished, and now Thomas could not rest with wondering if the plastic bag full of chicken bones and skin had been left somewhere between the kitchen and the garbage cans outside the garage. If so, the bag would leak and Thomas would find it in the morning, probably torn open with its contents dragged all over his and his neighbor’s yards.
He slid out of bed and, well aware that his restlessness went deeper than the chicken bones, deep enough to keep him awake awhile longer, deep enough to require a slow walk through the neighborhood, he gathered his clothes off the floor, where he had left them in a pile, then dressed in the hallway, took his shoes out of the downstairs closet, and slipped them on, and quietly made his way into the kitchen. No bag of chicken bones there. The battery-operated clock on the wall, the one Claire had purchased online with Bienvenue au café Huston written in red script across the face, ticked off the seconds. The dishwasher was silent now. Thomas opened the door and laid it open so the dishes would be dry by morning.
Then he crossed to the door that opened into the garage, unlocked it, reached around the jamb, and switched on the garage light. The bag of chicken bones was sitting on the roof of the car. Tommy liked to climb into Claire’s silver Altima and pretend he was driving. He would work a make-believe gearshift through its five gears, braking and downshifting, mashing down the accelerator on straightaways. He had probably completed several laps around Daytona’s brickyard before bringing himself and the car back to the garage. Through it all, four Cornish game hen carcasses had ridden on the roof.
Thomas Huston smiled to himself as he retrieved the plastic bag, opened the side door of the garage, and went out into the darkness. A pair of twenty-gallon plastic garbage containers stood against the gar
age wall. He opened the nearest one, placed the bag inside, then snapped the lid on tightly, so a marauding raccoon could not pry it off. Then he came back to the front corner of the garage and stood looking at the sky. The night was clear, cool but not cold, still in the high forties though many of the leaves on the four maples in the front yard were already down. He smelled winter coming, and the nameless ache began in him again, that strange longing he often felt when alone, especially at night, that desire for something he could not articulate or identify. Sometimes it came over him so forcefully that he felt like weeping, and occasionally did. Sometimes it helped to walk.
He went out to the sidewalk and turned to the right. He would go only as far as the end of the street, three blocks to the intersection with Redfern, then turn back again. He had left the garage door standing open, the garage light on, and if he stayed away too long, the garage would fill with moths.
He had been thinking about Poe a lot lately. Two years before that, it had been Steinbeck. And before that, Faulkner. A trinity of troubled men. He felt a kinship with all of them, felt he understood their misery. Lately he had been thinking about Poe’s “imp of perversity,” that compulsion toward contrariness that always had Poe shooting off his mouth when he should have bitten his tongue, his inability to keep from criticizing his colleagues. Huston, by comparison, was a master of restraint. His anger simmered well beneath the surface, visible only to himself. He had learned that trick from his father, whom most people had considered the most congenial of men, always smiling, always nodding in agreement. Not until Thomas’s mother and father were gone did it occur to Thomas that there was more to his father than had met the eye.
At the intersection with Redfern, Thomas Huston paused for a while. There was no traffic in the development at that hour. The houses were dark. No dogs barked, no alley cats prowled the shadows. All quiet on the suburban front.
By the time he returned to his garage, he had finished crafting several sentences for the novel. The first two would introduce the scene in which his protagonist first succumbed to his desire. He knew what he had to do. His heart knew what was necessary and right, but he could not make his body move away from her, could not summon the strength to resist what he would have to live with forever and which would give him no peace. The other sentences were about Annabel by way of Claire, about his protagonist’s desire by way of Huston’s own.
In the garage he closed and locked the door and crossed toward the kitchen. He thought he detected a faint odor of cigarette smoke. Maybe a neighbor had stepped outside for a midnight smoke. Surely Tommy hadn’t sneaked a quick one earlier in the evening? Huston paused for an instant and sniffed the air. Was it really cigarette smoke he smelled? Maybe the odor had come from the bag of chicken bones. Maybe he was just imagining things.
He locked the inside garage door behind himself and crossed toward his study. He knew what he had to do, he thought, and repeated the sentences again, working on the cadence, the pauses, getting them just right. Sometimes a comma made all the difference.
He sat at his desk and laid his journal open and wrote down the sentences. A few more sentences followed. He worked on each one in his head until it sounded just right, then he wrote it down. She is a dark-haired woman, green eyed and dusky with secrets. Maybe twenty minutes passed, not long, certainly no more than thirty. A creak of footsteps upstairs. Tommy taking a leak probably. Maybe sneaking in some time on his laptop. Huston read over what he had written, was pleased with the sound of it. Then he closed up the journal and returned it to the bookshelf.
Suddenly the scent of cigarette smoke intruded again, this time he was sure of it. He had never smoked, always abhorred the stupidity of the habit, its selfishness and self-destructiveness, and his sensitivity to its stink had always been keen. But he felt no anger, only sadness, because now he would have to go upstairs and catch Tommy in the act and read him the riot act. The boy would be embarrassed. Maybe he would cry. And Thomas Huston’s only desire was to fill his house with happiness. Disciplining his children was a duty he accepted but never enjoyed.
Just outside Huston’s office, a man he had never before seen was waiting in the unlit foyer at the bottom of the stairs. The man stepped into the doorway before Huston reached it, a big man, not as tall as Huston but broad shouldered, thick necked. His head was shaved and gleaming with perspiration. The scent of cigarette smoke clung to his tight black T-shirt and jeans.
Huston gave a small start of surprise at the sight of him, an involuntary chuff of air, a barely audible “unh.” It was as if all the rest of the house went dark around him but the man remained clearly illuminated in the light from the office. In that first instant Huston took in everything about the man, the broad, round face and gray eyes that seemed too small for his head, the black nylon batting gloves, the black enameled pistol in his right hand, the chef’s knife in his left. That’s my chef’s knife, Huston thought, and was suddenly disoriented by his recognition of the knife, the dreamlike incongruities of stranger, knife, gun, my home. For several moments, all he could understand, all that registered on him, was the soreness of every breath, the sudden heavy hurt in his gut. It was not fear that paralyzed him but this sudden interjection of the inexplicable, and in the dark congestion of his mind, he could think only of his mother and father.
“Back up,” the man told him.
Huston only stood there. He tried to swallow but could not. The smell of stale smoke was nauseating.
The man raised the pistol. Huston stepped back.
“Keep going. Back further.”
Three halting steps. The movement broke something loose in Huston’s chest and he sucked in three desperate breaths. The man was fully inside the room now, and now the room felt tight to Huston, a carpeted cage. “Who are you?” he said.
“I’m the man whose baby you killed.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“Don’t fuck with me, man. You know what I’m talking about. You took her to Cleveland and you killed my fucking baby.”
In a distant part of his brain, Huston thought Bonnie, he thought the abortion pill, he thought of the long night in the motel room while she waited for the cramping and the flow of blood to begin. He thought of the silence as they drove back to Pennsylvania Friday morning. Yet even those thoughts would not cohere to explain that pistol, that knife, this man whose presence choked like a hand around his throat.
From that point on, the night warped into a gelatinous blur for Huston. He was not sure how long it lasted. Maybe an hour, maybe more. The knife pressed into his hand. The horrific choice. Your baby for mine. Either that or your whole fucking family. Every last fucking one of you.
He remembered leaning over little Davy’s crib. The soft sibilance of breath. The sweet, powdery smell. Then the tears and the terrible ache that mushroomed through his every cell. Now, the man whispered from the doorway. Or else I start shooting.
The baby looked to Huston like a small, pale fish underwater. Asleep at the bottom of an ocean of tears. The first push of the blade was too tentative and off the mark. The second was an act of mercy. It carried all the terrible weight of a father’s inestimable love.
Fifty-Two
Huston was bent double now and sobbing convulsively, hands to his face, his back bucking hard against the lighthouse rail. DeMarco climbed to his feet an inch at a time, closed the distance between them. He laid a hand on Huston’s back, felt the searing heat between his shoulder blades, felt the chill of lake air on his face. He stood like that without moving, staring into the long darkness. The broken necklace of lights in the distance blurred. They seemed to float and wobble, yanked back and forth in a current of grief.
Then DeMarco too bent forward, his forehead against the other man’s back.
• • •
After a while, Huston eased himself to his knees. Then fell sideways onto a hip and elbow. Then, after several minut
es, he pushed himself into a sitting position, knees raised, arms crossed atop his knees, chin on his chest. DeMarco turned his back to the lake. He wanted to sit too but remained standing, knew he had to begin.
“How long before you found the rest of them?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“But after a while. When you realized he wasn’t there anymore. Wasn’t standing behind you outside Davy’s room.”
“He wasn’t anywhere,” Huston said.
“So you went into the other bedrooms then.”
Huston said nothing. His head moved twice, nodded against his arms.
“And you have no idea who this man was?”
“Bonnie. That’s all I know.”
DeMarco wondered how much he should tell him now. Should he get him down and into the car first? Or would the information help to accomplish that?
Huston said, “I went to see her last night. To ask her. But he was there. He came outside and I saw him.”
“You were there?” DeMarco said.
“That’s when I knew she wouldn’t help. I saw you there too.”
“Why didn’t you call me? Right from the beginning, you should have called me.”
“You’re my friend. And a policeman. You’d be torn apart over what to do. What I wanted to do.”
DeMarco was silent for a few moments. Then said, “The man’s name is Carl Inman. Calls himself Tex now. He was the bouncer at Whispers but kept himself out of sight most times. He was released from prison three months ago, has a long list of offenses, most of them involving violence. He did a four-year stretch this last time. I remember him from a dozen or so years back when I first met Bonnie. He’s changed a lot since I saw him back then. My guess is he’s been on a steady diet of steroids.”
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