Trouble in Mind: The Collected Stories, Volume 3

by Jeffery Deaver

  The grunt, the groan, the splash.

  Thinking suddenly of his mother.

  Then, naturally, of his father, whose ghost seemed to be inescapable on this trip. A loner in school, skinny, Ransom was picked on a lot. He asked his father to teach him how to fight but the man scoffed. “Fighting’s for fools. Don’t ever get into a fight. You fight, I’ll whip you.”

  “Why not?” young Ransom had asked, a bit confused about the apparent contradiction—and at the man’s vehemence (he never spanked the boys).

  But his father had offered a cool look that meant the conversation was over and made another phone call, lighting a cigarette. Ransom didn’t get it at the time but he later decided that the reason he couldn’t teach him self-defense was that he was all bluster. A coward.

  And just like with schooling, Ransom made sure he didn’t follow his father’s path in this area either; his training in the army saw to that.

  “You all right?” Annie asked.

  “Fine.” She’d be thinking he was tense about the real-life confrontation with the punk, not the remembered one with Stan.

  She laughed. “I thought you were going to deck him.” She squeezed his arm. “With those muscles you could have.”

  “We’ll let somebody else teach him a lesson…Forgive me for not defending your honor.”

  “He called you a slut, too,” Annie reminded.

  Ransom frowned broadly. “Hey, that’s right. And you didn’t defend mine. I guess we’re even.”

  Another husky laugh.

  They arrived at her apartment.

  She unlocked the front gate. He turned to her.

  “So, is it good night?” Annie asked. Confident, prepared for rejection, prepared for the opposite.

  Ransom read the signs. “No, it’s not good night,” he said firmly.

  He had learned over the years—and not, of course, from his father—that indecision was usually a bad idea.

  * * *

  AT 2 A.M., RANSOM FELLS lay in Annie’s bed, staring at the ceiling.

  Then at her curled body, hair hovering stiffly around her angelic, pretty face, marred only by lipstick he himself had skewed. Her breathing was low and, even as she slept, seemed sultry.

  For his part, though, Ransom was anything but peaceful. His jaw was tight. He was awash in that feeling yet again: the darkness, the bad, the guilt.

  Not remorse for sleeping with her, of course. The evening had been completely mutual. He’d enjoyed her company and she his, he could tell, and the sex was pretty damn good, too. No, Ransom’s heart was foundering because he knew very well it was going to end, and he knew how, too: thanks to him. Just like with Karen six months ago and Julia a few months before that.

  Ransom still carried the glum residue of how those times—and plenty of others—ended, just as he would carry around the burden of his anticipated behavior with Annie.

  Why couldn’t he just feel good about meeting her?

  He couldn’t quite say why exactly, but, given his frame of mind, given this perverse sentimental journey, Ransom chose to blame his father. The man’s distance, the failure to give his son guidance, to be a role model…that led to the conundrum: desperation to connect with these women, guilt when it was over.

  Sometimes you just can’t win.

  A reluctant smile crossed his face. You come back to a place where for the first fourteen years of your life all you were aware of was your father’s absence even though you were living in his house. Now, the man is dead and gone and yet he’s everywhere.

  Troubled thoughts finally gave way to sleep, though naturally it came packed with an anthology of troubled dreams.

  * * *

  IN THE MORNING, Ransom came out of Annie’s bathroom, dressed, and he found her sitting up, smiling at him, the sheets ganging around her like an entourage.

  Her look was pleasant and casual. And she asked, with no apparent agenda, if he wanted coffee and something to eat or had to be going. There was none of the edginess or downright bizarre behavior of some women at this stage of the liaison (like the one who had him listen to her entire playlist of Deer Tick, or the woman who got up at five to make him biscuits from scratch because he’d casually mentioned the night before at dinner that his grandmother made her own).

  He told Annie he had a meeting but afterward he didn’t necessarily have to scoot out of town too fast. Why didn’t they talk later?

  Her eyes narrowed.

  Had he done something wrong?

  She asked, “Did you actually say ‘scoot’?”

  His brow furrowed, too. “Can that just be our secret?”

  “Deal.”

  She eased forward, wrapping the sheet around her, and kissed him. He gave her his phone number and then he was heading back to the Shady Grove.

  As it turned out, though, his plans altered. He got a message that John Hardwick would not be back into town until late that afternoon.

  Irritated at the delay, Ransom Fells considered these unexpected free hours. And suddenly he decided on bald impulse to do something inconceivable.

  He’d go visit his childhood home.

  * * *

  POPULATION 14,000.

  The color of the timid sign welcoming drivers to Marshall was green, not white, which it had been when the Fells were living here but Ransom believed the number on it was the same. Could this be true, the town had not shrunk or grown in twenty years? Or had the city elders not bothered to transpose census data?

  Marshall was a town that tended to ask, Why bother?

  While Chesterton lived in the shadows of U.S. Steel, Marshall didn’t even have the shabby grandeur of industry as a jewel in the crown. No looming cooling towers, no massive concrete blockhouses of refineries or smelters or assembly plants, no sweeping rusty vistas of marshaling yards (the name came from a minor nineteenth-century explorer, not railroad tracks), no faded, graffiti’d signs from the past century proclaiming its position in the economic spine of the nation.

  Chesterton Makes, the Country Takes.

  Even though the paraphrased words were stolen from Trenton, New Jersey, at least Chesterton could make the claim in honesty.

  Not so, Marshall. Here were trash yards, smoldering tire dumps, service stations unspruced by national franchises, shopping centers surrounded by crumbling asphalt parking lots, anchored by small grocery stores not Targets or Walmarts. Pawn shops aplenty. The downtown featured mom-and-pop storefronts veiled with sun-blocking sheets of orange vinyl, shading products like office supplies, tube TVs and girdles. The movie theater, in which Ransom had spent a lot of his youth, usually alone, was closed. What was left of the poster on the front was nearly impossible to make out, but Ransom believed it depicted a young Warren Beatty.

  The land was largely flat, both in geometry and color, and the billboards and roadside signs were bleached and crackled like Chinese pottery. The only bright hues came from death—the exiting leaves of maple and oak trees.

  Ransom’s palms actually began to sweat when he turned the Camry off Center Street and approached his old neighborhood. Heart stuttering faster. He thought of his days in Iraq. He thought about the rifles, pistols, explosives he was comfortable with. I’m a fucking veteran of combat, Ransom reflected angrily, and my hands are shaking like a kid’s.

  Then he was unexpectedly passing the two-story, pale green colonial and had to brake fast. The trees—and there were a lot of them—had grown significantly in the twenty years since he’d been away (no Dutch elm here), so he hadn’t recognized the place. Though he supposed the truth was that he simply had chained out so many memories of his birthplace that he couldn’t really recall what it looked like.

  He backed up, pulled to the curb and parked. The house was set back about thirty feet from the street across a leaf-strewn grass yard. The residences in this block dated to the 1930s and though the neighborhood would qualify as a subdivision or development, the structures were not made from cookie cutters. Each was significantly different. Th
e Fells family home had a number of distinctive elements, including one that Ransom now recalled very well: a small round window, pied by perpendicular strips of wood—like a telescopic gun sight.

  An unwanted memory from earlier returned: His father going hunting. Alone. Stan had told his son, “Pretty dangerous, guns. When you’re older.”

  Even though Jimmy and Todd and even Ellen went hunting with their fathers all the time.

  Oh, and, by the way, older never made it onto the schedule.

  How dangerous would a hunting expedition have been anyway? Stan never came back with a deer or pheasant; he couldn’t have fired more than a dozen shots.

  Ransom continued to examine the house, which was smaller than he remembered, though he knew that always happened when seeing something—or someone—from the past that you’ve been thinking about for some time.

  He noted the sliver of kitchen window. He remembered Stan sitting at the uneven Formica table before he left for work, always wearing the same: boots, jeans and a blue denim shirt over his wife-beater T-shirt (description only; like the boys, their mother never received more than a gruff glance or sharp word from Stan). He would sip coffee and read, never making conversation. Occasionally stepping into the den and closing the door after him to make or take a call. Ransom and his brother left for school with Stan still sitting at the table over his book or magazine and coffee.

  Ransom was startled by his buzzing phone. It was Annie. He let it go to voice mail then turned his attention back to the side yard where he and his brother played.

  Back to the front porch, where his mother would sit outside with a glass of wine disguised as juice in a red plastic cup. A big cup.

  Back to the lawn he would mow every Saturday for the allowance that he was never given but had to earn.

  Waiting, waiting, waiting to feel something.

  But no.

  Numb.

  Then a curtain moved, yellow and brown.

  The time was 10 a.m., a little after, and the owner—wife, probably—or a cleaning lady might be wondering what a sedan was doing parked in front of the house, with the driver in sunglasses on an overcast day no less. Not smart. Ransom slipped the Toyota into gear and rolled up the street, turning at the corner. He stopped at an intersection and pulled out his cell phone, did some research, made a few calls. Five minutes later he continued on, toward downtown Marshall.

  * * *

  THE IRONWORKS TAVERN was still in existence, about a mile from the house. It was on the edge of downtown, beside a river the color of dried mustard, and near what had been an unenclosed train station, where commuters would board one of the infrequent trains to Gary or to change to a different line for Chicago.

  Ransom’s father never took the train but he came to the Ironworks frequently, after he got home from work and wolfed down supper, often standing in the fluorescent-lit kitchen, and then changed into a clean shirt and headed to the Ironworks.

  Ransom now parked on the diagonal in front of the tavern, twenty empty spaces surrounding an occupied three. Inside, the large room was similar to what he recalled from the one or two times he’d been here with his mother, looking for Stan when they “happened” to be shopping nearby (though there was an IGA that was closer to home). The place would have been painted, of course, and the sports posters were of mostly existing teams. Jägermeister was for sale, as was Red Bull, according to the promotional signage. And, heaven help us, Hefeweizen was on tap. Stan, a beer drinker exclusively, wouldn’t have approved.

  Ransom was amused that breakfast was being served, which also would have been unheard of twenty or thirty years ago. Four saggy people at three tables forked eggs, sausage and bacon into their mouths. Cigarette packs bulged in several shirt pockets. Ransom bet that at least one or two were wondering what the consequences would be if they lit up after they finished.

  Ransom picked a shaky stool at the bar and told the elderly man behind it he’d like a coffee. The stooped guy gave Ransom a careful scan. “Just regular,” Ransom told him, eyeing a steaming glass pot. Behind the bar was an espresso machine but it looked like it had never been used. He didn’t like fancy drinks anyway.

  “Yessir.”

  “You’re Bud Upshaw?” Ransom asked when the man brought a mug and two Mini-Moo’s creamers. An old-fashioned sugar shaker eased forward as cautiously as the man’s eyes. “Yessir,” he repeated. He was about seventy-five, with a face aggressively wrinkled. His complexion was an odd shade—not tan, not ethnic, but some curious tone of dark. Ransom thought of the unfortunate river out back. He was sinewy and where his hair had been now clustered a dozen age spots.

  Ransom hadn’t wanted to waste the time of coming to this part of town if the Ironworks wasn’t here any longer or if there was no one on staff from twenty years ago. His call earlier had been to the Shady Grove, where the desk clerk told him that the Ironworks was still a “Marshall landmark” and Upshaw, the owner for three decades, was still “chief cook and bottle washer,” which happened to be one of Stan’s favorite expressions.

  The man was definitely uncomfortable and at first Ransom thought it was because he was dressed in a business suit and tie and had a lawyer look about him. Reason enough to be cautious in Marshall, where credit problems carried off as much peace of mind as lung cancer did lives. But, no, it was Ransom’s face that drew most of Upshaw’s attention.

  “You know me?”

  Ransom might have seen a much younger version of the man but couldn’t recall. He said, “I don’t. My father might have. My family used to live here years ago. I’m in the area on business and thought I’d stop by.”

  “Father…” Upshaw was whispering. And some troubled thought was clearly volleying around in his mind. Then: “When was it? That you lived here?”

  “Oh, I left over twenty years ago. I was a kid.” Finally he couldn’t let it go any longer: “Something wrong?”

  “Nosir. How’d you know my name? Just curious.”

  “Fellow at the Shady Grove. Clerk.”

  “Sure, sure, sure.” Though this didn’t make Upshaw feel any better. He scanned the breakfasters uneasily and scribbled out a check for one table, then scurried to deliver it.

  Then, returning to his roost behind the bar, Upshaw froze. The old man whispered, “Stan Fells.”

  “That’s right. I’m Ransom, his son.”

  “Uh-huh. Sure. Uh-huh.” His eyes scanned the room and it seemed to Ransom that he was looking for help.

  “There a problem?”

  “I…No.”

  Though there was. Clearly. And this intrigued Ransom a great deal.

  Upshaw aggressively dunked a dishcloth and wrung it out several times. Dunked again. He continued, “So. Your dad in the area? You going to meet him here, by any chance?”

  “My father? Oh, he died nine years ago.”

  “He died, what happened?” the man asked. Not an unusual question, under the circumstances, but the speedy velocity of the words was curious.

  “Car crash. Sorry to have to tell you.”

  Only Upshaw himself didn’t seem troubled about the news. In fact, he looked positively relieved.

  Upshaw nodded thoughtfully and ignored another man waving for a check. “So, dead. He was the last.”

  “The last?”

  “Of the Round Table.” He gestured to a dim corner, where a booth—which was square—now sat. “Stan, Murphy, Shep, Mr. Kale. The regulars.” He fell silent as the diner approached with some irritation. He now paid, leaving coins for a tip. Upshaw didn’t pay any attention.

  “Car crash. Round here?”

  Stan had skidded off the road into a river in Michigan, returning from a trip to Detroit. He told Upshaw this.

  “Detroit,” the man whispered, as if this, too, was significant.

  Intrigue hummed at a higher pitch in Ransom Fells’s heart.

  The dishrag went for another swim and wringing and Upshaw mopped a part of the scabby bar that needed varnish, not soapy water. The
man’s face revealed an odd milkshake of emotions: He was wary of Ransom, he was curious, he was relieved. It didn’t make any sense. And the mystery continued as Upshaw asked, “Your father ever mention me or the place?”

  “What?” Ransom asked, amused. “He died nearly ten years ago.”

  “Just wondering.”

  “And I didn’t talk to him for a few years before that.”

  “Oh. That must’ve been tough.”

  Not really. Ransom was silent.

  Upshaw looked up, caught the gray eyes and then down again at dishwater that was pretty much the same shade. “Means you didn’t much happen to cross paths with any of the other boys he worked with?”

  This was laughable. “No, I didn’t know anybody at the company.”

  “Company?”

  “Bud, what’s this all about?”

  “Oh, nothing, sir. Just curious. You were talking about old times and I was thinking the same. Walk down memory lane,” he said with a big phony smile on his face. “So.”

  But Ransom wasn’t going to put up with any crap. He was enduring this hard pilgrimage to find out about his father, and this man obviously knew something. He fired a glance the man’s way and touched his arm, gentle but insistent. “Tell me what’s going on.”

  Though Ransom believed he had a pretty good idea and it made perfect sense.

  A woman.

  Stan had been having an affair and Upshaw knew about it. Dad had probably brought the slut here dozens of times. Maybe the bar owner was worried about shattering Ransom’s memories of his dad. But to judge from the wariness in his face, he guessed that it was more likely his father had threatened him to shut up about it.

  Ransom understood something else; he guessed his mother knew, too. There had to be some reason she graduated from beer to wine to vodka.

  “Really, please, sir.” Voice quivering.

  “You don’t tell me, I’ll just go through my father’s address book from back then and start calling people. They’ll give me some answers.” There was no address book—Ransom hadn’t inherited anything but a few thousand from an insurance policy—but for his job he’d learned to bluff. He was good at it. But he hadn’t meant his words as a threat, simply a prod to get the man to spill.