by Joe Flanagan
“’Cause kids make fun of me.”
“These kids?”
“At my other school they did. I just like to be with my Dad.”
“Why did they make fun of you?”
“I don’t understand stuff. I make mistakes.”
“Well, that says more about them than it does about you.” Father Boyle watched the boy’s uncomprehending face. “Mike, these boys who make fun of you, they make mistakes, too. Everybody makes mistakes. Grown-ups make mistakes. Trust me.”
Father Boyle was aware of the boy’s eyes on him and feigned a casual air. He brushed something off a trouser leg, adjusted the band on his wristwatch. Mike reached into his pocket, took out several small strips of torn white cotton, and laid them out carefully on the table.
“What’s this, now?” Father Boyle asked.
“My clothes.”
“Clothes?”
“Yeah. I wash them in my washing machine. I have a jar and a pencil and a round thing from a Tonka truck wheel and I made a washing machine. I put the clothes in and I wash them.”
Father Boyle took one of the tiny strips in his fingers. “Very nice. You must be using a good detergent.”
“Tide. Gets whites whiter.”
Father Boyle laughed. “That must be a clever thing, your little washing machine.”
“It’s a secret. I don’t tell anybody.”
“I understand.” Father Boyle thought about the trip he was about to make to the outer Cape when he was supposed to be at St. George’s in Fall River, about the USGS map he had stolen from the library.
Mike carefully gathered up the cloth strips and put them in his pocket. He was shut down and fidgety now, his mind somewhere else.
“The kids here are not going to make fun of you,” Father Boyle said. “You’re going to be O.K. here. We’re glad you’ve come to be with us.”
It was clear that Mike had crossed into some territory where Father Boyle could not follow. The priest got up from the bench. “See you next time, then. Thank you for showing me the laundry.”
He was up on the flagstone porch with one hand on the door when he heard the boy say in a small voice, “It’s O.K.”
Over the years, Warren had developed a ritual of stopping at a package store on Saturday afternoons and buying a pint of whiskey. He kept it in its brown paper bag on the kitchen counter until Mike went to sleep at around nine thirty in the evening. Even then, he didn’t open it. He wanted to, but he denied himself, sitting at the kitchen table with the radio monitor on, reading the paper, paying bills, or doing something else to occupy his time. A call could come over the radio, an incident that might require his presence, but that was not why he left the bottle untouched. Warren felt the keen desire for the whiskey and sat at the round Formica table in a contest with it, and this was important. He usually went over the checkbook and redid the sums in the register. He wrote the balance in big numbers on a notepad. It had been steady at about four hundred dollars for a few months.
When he was finished going over his checking account, he went into the kitchen and removed a small, thin book from its place between the refrigerator and the breadbox. Back in April, they had arrested a couple for possession of heroin. They had been staying in a run-down vacation cottage in a copse of pines on the edge of town. The book was lying on a table and he happened to pick it up. It was a collection of poems, or at least what he believed were poems, by writers he had never heard of. He had some dim recollection of a few poems from his high school years, and these didn’t look much like what he recalled.
It seemed a curious choice for the wan pair, who looked far too old to be involved with heroin and who seemed sadly resigned to the fact that they would be locked up for a long time. Warren had felt compelled to confiscate the book. He wondered if it somehow defined the couple or the circles in which they traveled, which made the little volume stranger still.
He opened the book to the place he had marked with an extinguished match.
We’ve been waiting for you
Since Morning, Jack
Why were you so long
Dallying in the sooty room?
This transcendental Brilliance
Is the better part
(Of Nothingness I sing)
He didn’t know what any of it meant but it was absorbing in its way, like some weird kind of music. He would discover some passage that caught his eye and he would go back and read it again, asking himself why. Why this part here? It was negative, so much of it, and un-American. But there was some kind of authority in it, a persistent note of sad truth that spoke to him in a way that he was at an absolute loss to describe. He wondered what Jane would make of it.
Jane, he suddenly declared to himself, was thirty-two years old. She was ten years younger than him. Was that a great distance? A great distance for what, inquired the chaste inner voice that monitored his sentiments regarding Jane Myrna, the same voice that persuaded him not to pull Jane’s record when he was at the registry of motor vehicles checking on a suspicious car that had been spotted around local motels. He had wanted to verify her date of birth. She looked a good deal younger than thirty-two.
At quarter to twelve, he put ice in a tumbler and poured the whiskey. The smell reached his nostrils from the countertop, burning, rich, and smoky. He pulled one of the armchairs up in front of the television and set his drink on an end table. There wasn’t much on at this time of night. Most of the channels had gone to blank screens. Sometimes he could pick up Edward R. Murrow’s documentary series, See It Now, and sometimes he could catch The Honeymooners.
As he changed the channels, he caught a glimpse of an actor in a commercial who resembled Joseph Leapley, the man they had found beaten and handcuffed a few nights ago. Warren had gone to see him at the hospital just the day before and was astonished by his resolve. Leapley gave no response to his questions, either looking up at the ceiling or closing his eyes for long periods of time as if waiting for Warren to tire of it and go away. One side of his face was covered with a gauze pad. He had two black eyes and moleskin bandages along one arm. “Is there anything you want to tell me, Mr. Leapley?” Warren asked.
Leapley did not respond.
“Who was driving the Buick?”
It was an interesting case: Felony assault and God only knew what else connected to it. He wondered what secret Leapley was hiding and wished they had more time to put into it but they were on the Lefgren murder full-out and had nothing to spare.
Warren found an obscure station out of Boston that was showing a late movie. On the screen was an establishing shot of a secret experimental laboratory in the desert outside Los Angeles. MPs at the gate in phony Hollywood uniforms. A B actor in a lab coat was having a woodenly earnest discussion with an Air Force general about radioactive isotopes, five-hundred-year half-lives, and arachnids.
Every corner of the house, if he allowed himself to think of it in a certain way, was a nest of sorrows. Sitting alone, late at night, with a fair alcohol high, had for a long time been a bad combination of circumstances for him. But at some point—he didn’t know how long after Ava had gone—he realized he could live in the house as if it were a different place. He figured it was due to staying busy with Little Mike and his job. Getting appointed acting chief was a reward in ways he hadn’t expected. The department occupied his mind nearly all the time, and he was so busy with Mike and babysitters and domestic chores that he could live in a house full of ghosts and not even see them.
There was a commercial for Burma Shave and he cocked his head a little at the ditty they sang, the men’s and women’s voices together. Warren had the windows open. The neighborhood was quiet but for the occasional car rolling down Bearse’s Way. Mike was fast asleep in his room. If he looked out the window at a certain angle, he could see the end of Henry Sherman’s house, where a window was illuminated by the electronic glow
of a television set. Outside the window was an overgrown blackberry bush, whose unruly mass was bathed in the pale outer space light. Now it vanished, as the scene on Sherman’s television set changed and the light dimmed. When the scene changed again, the foliage was visible once more in the bluish light, and the bush seemed to have lifted its heavy mass, reared itself up in a sluggish display of ill intent. Warren wondered if Sherman was watching the same thing on television.
At the far end of the kitchen he could see moonlight underneath the door to the back hall, which was little more than a utility space built on to the side of the house. When he and Ava first moved in, she suggested building shelves in there, making the most of the little house with a cheeriness that was typical of her at that time. She stocked up on extra things at bargain prices and stacked them in the back hall. She grew vegetables in the yard and canned them, neat rows of tomatoes, beans, and beets with labels bearing her handwriting. He remembered the cranberry sauce and the grape jam in jars with slabs of melted wax forming their lids. This was the danger he faced. The moonlight under the door. The jars of fruit with wax tops. On television a woman in a tight white blouse was following the professor around the laboratory, pleading, concerned. There were going to be giant spiders whether she liked it or not, Warren thought.
15
When the mackerel hit the water, it sent a thin slick of oil across the surface, silvery violet and rose and colors in the cool spectrum, made more visible by the low, overcast sky that was reflected on the creek. A bird concealed in the coarse-looking bushes that grew on the other side let out a long, ugly rasp like a cicada, or a small windup toy releasing its tension through a set of tiny gears. It stopped and delivered a series of three short rasps, then began its long sound again.
The fish sank to the bottom of the creek, where it was visible as a shadow on the bottom. The length of hemp twine that was tied through its mouth and gill led up out of the water and into the hands of a young boy, who stood with an older companion. The older boy sat on an overturned shellfish bucket and held a long-handled net across his knees.
The creek was about twenty feet across and wound through a tall grass marsh. Not far from where the boys stood, a road passed over, beneath which was a concrete culvert with a pair of holes that allowed the water to flow into a much larger marsh on the other side of the road.
The boys watched. Eventually, they saw something move across the bottom in the direction of the fish. “Crab,” the younger boy said. The creature grabbed the mackerel with its claws and began tearing at it.
“What’s that?” said the older boy, looking up the creek to their right. Something was approaching, floating on the water. The object had caught a clump of seaweed and was pushing it through the water as it made its slow passage toward them. There was something inexorable in its approach, as though its appearance had nothing to do with chance or tide. Its procession down the creek had an aspect of ritual, like it had been intended to reach the boys on a still summer morning. With the few strands of seaweed that hung off of it as though it been garlanded with tasteful restraint, and the flies that accompanied it like a choreographed escort, there was almost something festive about it.
They soon understood that the shape coming toward them was that of a boy, about their age, facedown, one arm bent at a ninety-degree angle and floating off to the side and its fist clenched. His legs were bent, the soles of his feet wrinkled and white, faced up to the sky. He was naked except for a pair of briefs that encircled his thighs just above the knee. The face was down but turned a bit toward them so that they could see the corner of one eye and one side of the mouth, which made a half-formed grimace. The face looked wise and adult in some kind of horrible way. Look at me now, it seemed to say. My mother will wonder what has become of me.
The boys flew into motion, leaving their net and bucket where they lay. They had to scramble up a steep dirt incline to get on the road, and as they climbed over the wooden guardrail, they saw that the dead boy had reached the culvert and was butting up against the concrete directly beneath them. Then the body dipped a couple of times, tilting its head downward as if it were trying to dive down through the hole. The boys were a good way up the road, yelling at the fronts of houses, when the upper half of the body went completely under and entered the hole, the bare soles of the feet raised upward, and, without a sound, disappeared into the culvert.
The press conference was held at the National Guard armory in Hyannis. Elliott Yost stood before the microphones, sweating in a khaki suit. Dale Stasiak stood next to him with his head tilted back a little, looking out over the crowd of newsmen and spectators. A cumulus cloud of cigarette smoke hung just beneath the fluorescent lights in the ceiling. Media from all over New England were there, including several television stations, whose cameras were now rolling. The twin circles of the reel housings on top of the cameras were visible like islands in a sea of heads.
Elliott Yost introduced himself, then Dale Stasiak, who was standing to his right, then Warren, and the police officials from the other Cape jurisdictions who were standing in a group behind him. He announced that he was speaking on behalf of the Commonwealth Attorney’s Office and the Massachusetts state police, which was heading the investigation. At this point, he said, they were of the opinion that the three child killings on Cape Cod were the work of one person or group of persons. He stated that two of the victims had been sexually assaulted, but only did so because this was common knowledge by now. Little, it seemed to Elliott, hadn’t been leaked to the public.
Elliott described the three murders and the state of the investigation so far, which was a delicate thing, because there wasn’t very much to say. They had no suspects and precious little physical evidence. The investigation at this point consisted of canvassing, records checks, phone calls, and endless interviews, the desperate groping in the dark that was the hallmark of a stalled case. Giving the false impression of progress to an audience that recognized the tactic had him laboring, but Elliott proved adept enough, even if he hunched in on himself a little more than usual and his delivery suggested a grudging participation in the event.
Elliott had met with Lieutenant Warren and his two detectives the day before to let them know the case was now the exclusive domain of the state police. Governor Furcolo had moved state troopers from other parts of the state to work under Stasiak and they now had the resources they needed.
The meeting quickly degenerated into shouting. Yes, he admitted, he was asking them to give the Lefgren case to the state police, files, interview records, and all. He told them they would provide critical support to Captain Stasiak, though in truth, they would likely be used to do footwork and go on long-odds fishing expeditions.
Elliott clammed up and looked down at the dais when the first shouted questioning began. Stasiak leaned in front of the district attorney and spoke into the microphone. “One at a time,” he said, and looked at them in a way that could have been threatening but perhaps was just cold and appraising, they weren’t sure. They quieted just to look at him and see if he would say anything else, so compelling was his presence.
Reporters ran through the gamut of questions about the killings, then a few versions of the same questions phrased differently. Once the reporters had exhausted their attempts, they turned to the safety of the community and how the public was reacting. Stasiak said that a meeting for Barnstable residents was scheduled in the armory for that evening, which would be followed by similar meetings in other Cape towns. Police would be on hand to answer questions and discuss ways of making sure children were safe. When the press conference appeared to be winding down, a short man to the right of the stage raised his hand and called out, “Captain Stasiak.” He wore a winter tweed jacket and kept a bowler on his head even though the temperature inside the armory was uncomfortable even for those in shirtsleeves.
“Over there,” Stasiak said, and pointed to the man.
“Yeah. Fred
Sibley, Boston Globe. What do you say to allegations that you have mistreated the families of the victims?”
The place grew quiet and everyone strained to see who had asked the question. Elliott began to speak, visibly angered, but Stasiak headed him off. “I’ll answer him,” he said, and stepped in front of the microphone.
“Are you referring to me?” Stasiak asked. “And it’s Sibley?”
“Fred Sibley. Yes, sir. Boston Globe.”
“And you’re referring to me, allegations made against me.”
“You and your officers, yes, sir.”
The television cameras, which had been trained on Elliott and the others on the stage, were now being turned to pick up Sibley. Stasiak said, “There have been no allegations against me or my department, Mr. Sibley. I believe you are misinformed.”
“The parents of the first victim, Mr. and Mrs. Gilbride, complained to the board of selectmen about the way they were detained and interrogated. I believe District Attorney Yost was apprised of this.”
Elliott moved back to the microphone. “That is simply not true,” he said. “I would like very much to know where this information comes from.”
Sibley continued as if Elliott hadn’t spoken. “The Lefgrens also say they were subjected to a hostile interrogation. They claim they were treated as suspects in the death of their own child.” Sibley stood looking back at Stasiak and Elliott with an expectant look on his face, an expression that was nearly a grin. With his hat tilted back on his head and a pen poised above his notepad, he looked like he was enjoying himself a great deal, oblivious to the stares of the police officers in the room.
Stasiak took the space in front of the microphone, displacing Elliott off to the side. Someone in the crowd yelled, “Get him out of here.” From the back, by the entrance doors: “Go back to Boston!”
Stasiak said to the crowd, “This is a hard thing. Most of us will never know what it’s like to lose a child. I don’t begrudge the Lefgrens or the Gilbrides anything they might be feeling at this point. Now, some of you know me and you know where I come from. I’m not delicate about what I do. I’ll get the job done, and whoever committed these killings better know that.”