Idyll Hands

by Stephanie Gayle

1610 HOURS

  Chief was worried about me, but he should’ve worried about Dave. Not that he knew my brother Dave would accompany me to visit Kevin McGee. Since Chief had told me about Kevin, and since I’d promised I wouldn’t beat the stuffing out of him, I hadn’t spoken a word on the subject to him.

  I’d told Dave and Bobby, but not Carol and not Mom. In case things went south or in case it turned out Kevin had never so much as looked at Susan. The only news I wanted to give Mom and Carol was good news, and we didn’t have good news. Not yet.

  Dave thrummed his fingers against the steering wheel. “I thought he got off shift at four.” His car’s clock showed it was 4:14 p.m.

  “He’s probably dicking around. He’ll be out soon. That’s his car.” I pointed to the red Ford we’d parked near. “He isn’t going anywhere without it.”

  We watched tourists explore the USS Constitution.

  “You go there on a field trip?” Dave asked.

  “Only about ten times. ‘Old Ironsides,’ the oldest commissioned naval vessel still afloat.”

  “You paid attention,” Dave said.

  “Speaking of.” I nudged him with my elbow. “Ten o’clock. That’s him, that’s Kevin.” I wouldn’t have recognized him from memory. He was unremarkable. Brown hair going gray and slightly stooped shoulders. But I’d looked him up. Seen a semi-recent picture. He waved to a guard as he walked to his car.

  “Let’s go,” I said. “Remember. Calm and friendly.”

  We stepped out of the car. The heat punched us in the solar plexus. Kevin was reaching for his keys when I cried, “Kevin? Is that you?” He looked up. Frowned. Not able to place me. “It’s me, Michael Finnegan, from Wood Street.”

  He dropped the keys, and Dave scooped them up before he could. “Hiya, Kevin. I’m Dave, Mikey’s older brother. You remember me? We played ball back in the day.”

  Kevin shifted back a step, looking around. “Sorry, fellas. My mind ain’t what it used to be.” He laughed, a weak laugh. “Wood Street, Yeah. I used to play over there, with my cousin.”

  “Your cousin Jack,” I said. “Jack McGee.”

  “That’s right. What brings you guys to the yard?”

  “Doing a little sightseeing,” Dave said. “Visiting old haunts. Hey, we were just gonna grab a drink over at the Tavern. You should come with.”

  “Aw, I don’t know. I got to get home. My kid’s got a game tonight.”

  “Baseball?” I asked. He said “yeah,” and I said, “Terrific. Just one drink. Won’t take long.”

  Dave had his keys. He made no move to give them back to Kevin. “Drive with us,” he said. “Then we can take you back to the car.” Dave opened his driver’s door and hopped in.

  “I really think I ought to go home.”

  “Come on, Kevin,” I called. “Tick tock!” I got inside and closed my door. It was a good ten degrees cooler inside.

  He stood outside, weighing his choices. Go back in and ask his work buddies for help? And tell them what? Some guys from the old neighborhood wanted to meet him for a drink? No. He reached that conclusion and opened the door behind me. “Just one drink, yeah?”

  “Of course. We don’t party like we used to, do we, Dave?”

  “Can’t. Once you hit thirty, your liver takes notice of you, yeah?” Dave drove, one hand on the wheel. The radio blasted “Mambo No. 5.” I sang along for a bit. “You like this song?” I asked Kevin.

  “Not really.”

  “Aw, come on,” I said, turning up the volume. “Ladies love it! It’s got all their names in it.”

  “Hey, you missed the turn,” Kevin said. He tapped on the window.

  “What’s that?” I called over the loud music.

  “The Tavern’s back that way. Now you’re going to have to double back.”

  “Nah,” Dave said. “I know a shortcut.”

  Kevin looked out the window, trying to determine our route. When he decided we weren’t going to the Tavern, he yanked on the door handle. It didn’t open. “Childproof locks,” Dave said. “When you’ve got kids, you’ll do anything to keep ’em safe, am I right?”

  We parked under Route 93, not far from the Sand and Gravel Lot. We turned in our seats to regard our guest. “What do you want?” Kevin asked. He was sweaty. Odd, given that we were running the air-conditioning full blast.

  “We want to talk about the old days,” Dave said. He looked ahead, at the gravel and dirt. A broken bottle glinted on the ground.

  “And ask why you knocked up our baby sister,” I added.

  “I didn’t,” he said. “I never.”

  “Kevin, lies aren’t going to save you. They’re going to piss us off. You don’t want that.”

  “Look, I don’t know nothing about your sister Susan.”

  “You used a double negative. And we didn’t say which sister we were talking about.”

  That threw him. Dummy. “Come on, Carol was married with a young kid. I guessed that you meant Susan.”

  “Right. The two guys you couldn’t place earlier. You recall both their sisters’ names easily. Interesting. Did you tell her to have an abortion cuz you were afraid of your in-laws?” I cracked my knuckles. Gah. They didn’t crack easily, not anymore.

  “You know who my wife’s uncle is?” he said. “He ran the family. He had guys whacked for cutting him off in traffic after church.”

  “So, you figure if he finds out you’re cheating on his niece with a teenager, he might get upset?” Dave asked.

  “I didn’t say I—”

  “She gave the baby up for adoption,” I said. “But you knew that. Did you know they can run DNA tests? I don’t even need your DNA. I can get some from your mom.”

  Kevin leaned forward. Put his hand on Dave’s headrest. “Hey, don’t you bring my mother into this. She’s suffered enough.”

  “Don’t you talk to us about suffering!” Dave screamed, whipping his head around. “Twenty-seven years we’ve waited. Twenty-seven years we searched, and all this time you knew, you son of a bitch.” His fist shot out and grabbed Kevin’s shirt by the collar. Kevin pulled back, trying to escape.

  “Tell us where she is,” I said.

  “I don’t know!” He struggled while Dave pulled him forward. I opened the glove box. Inside lay my gun. Kevin saw it.

  “No, no, no.”

  “Tell us where she is,” I said. My right hand reached for the gun.

  “I don’t know.”

  “We should get him out of the car,” I said. “I don’t want to stain your seats.”

  Dave said, “Good idea. Bloodstains are a bitch to get out.”

  I opened my door, gun in hand, and Kevin yelled, “Miller’s River!”

  I paused. “Miller’s River?” It wasn’t a river, not exactly.

  “That’s what he told me. I didn’t do it. I didn’t put her there.”

  “Who did?”

  “Jack.”

  Dave pulled Kevin forward, and I said, “No,” and put my hand over Dave’s. “Jack cleaned up your mess, huh?” I asked Kevin. Dave released him, and he fell back against the seat, as if he were boneless.

  His voice was low and shaky. “I didn’t mean to kill her. I really, really didn’t. I picked her up from the hospital, after she had the baby. She was going to go home. Everything was fine. It would’ve been fine, but she was angry. Said she hadn’t wanted to give up the baby once she held him. She was going to tell her parents, about us, about where she’d been. She wanted to look into getting the baby back, getting custody. If my wife’s uncle found out, my life wasn’t worth a nickel, and neither was hers.”

  “And then?” I asked.

  “I hit her.”

  I shot a glance at Dave. He looked like he was going to lose it. “Breathe,” I told him.

  “You hit her,” Dave said. A vein in his neck pulsed red.

  “We were outside. We’d driven to the park. I’d brought her food, and she was eating it. When I hit her, I think a piece of the sandwich lodged i
n her throat. Her face turned red.”

  “She choked to death?” I asked.

  “I hit her on the back, but nothing happened. And then she stopped. Her eyes were open, and she didn’t blink. I called her name. But she didn’t respond.”

  Of all the terrible scenarios I had imagined, of all the awful ways I imagined her lost to us, I had never pictured it so ordinary, so pointless. Choking to death on a sandwich.

  “You told Jack?” I asked.

  “I put her in the car. I couldn’t have someone find her. I drove the car to Jack’s and told him what happened. He was pissed. Said I’d get us all killed with my blubbering. Told me he’d take care of her and to keep my mouth shut.”

  “He buried her by Miller’s River,” Dave said. It was a ten-minute walk from our home, maybe five minutes from where we were parked right now. We sat with this knowledge until Kevin asked, “What are you going to do to me?”

  “Why Susan?” I asked.

  “She used to visit the monument all the time. She was nice. She asked questions, and she cared about my answers. She thought I was handsome.”

  “She was a child,” I said. “You’re going to walk into the police station and confess.”

  “What? No! My kids, my wife.”

  “You’d rather wind up in the police morgue with a bullet hole between your eyes?” I asked. “You have one chance. You confess now to dating our sister, to getting her pregnant, to killing her.”

  “I didn’t mean to!”

  “Shut up,” Dave said. Kevin stopped talking.

  I closed my eyes and said, “You do this, and I won’t recommend that you be incarcerated at Norfolk.”

  “That’s where Mack is! You can’t! He’d have me killed within a minute. I’m better off outside.”

  “Are you?” Dave asked. “I understand your wife’s brother, Paul, he’s out now, yeah? How’s he feel about his younger sister?”

  “For that matter, how do we feel about ours?” I asked. I picked up the gun.

  “This is blackmail,” Kevin said. “You’re entrapping me.”

  “You want to get out of the car? I’ll warn you. My gun skills aren’t what they used to be. I’ll probably wing you before I get a kill shot. You’ll probably suffer more than you’d like.”

  His teeth chattered. “If I confess, they won’t put me in Norfolk?”

  “That will be my recommendation,” I said.

  “How you gonna recommend anything? You’re not BPD anymore, right?”

  “You haven’t been paying attention, Kevin. I came back a year ago. I been trailing you for ages, dum-dum. I know how you like your coffee. Iced, one sugar. We know your kids’ names and where they go to school. Your son’s no math whiz. Maybe you ought to get him a tutor.”

  “Enough! I’ll go.”

  The car smelled of flop sweat. My own torso was wet, and the adrenaline was making my hands shake. I put the gun back in the glove box.

  Dave started the car. “We’ll be watching you. Don’t think about running or going out a back exit of the station. You won’t be free for two minutes before the lights go out, permanently.”

  At the station, we dropped him off. I followed him inside and waited until a policeman fetched him. “See you later,” I called to the cop. Kevin didn’t see the cop’s look of confusion, didn’t understand that we didn’t know each other. He’d fallen for my act.

  Back in the car with Dave, I waited.

  “You believe him?” he asked. “That she choked?”

  “It’s so stupid, it’s hard to believe he’d make it up.”

  “I can’t believe it,” he said. “She wanted the baby.”

  “Yeah. Susan always was stubborn about keeping her stuff.”

  “Remember that time Bobby took Mr. Growls and hid him, and Susan crumbled Ex-Lax atop his ice cream and he ate it?”

  I laughed. “He shat everywhere.”

  “Including your bed.” I groaned.

  “He did.”

  “Oh God, that was classic.”

  I don’t know when the laughter turned to tears. But it took some time before it stopped, and even then we knew it was only the eye of the storm.

  CHIEF THOMAS LYNCH

  THURSDAY, JULY 8, 1999

  1900 HOURS

  Lewis and I sat at a table in Suds, beers before us. We hadn’t taken a sip. “They’ve got permission to excavate tomorrow,” he said.

  “Do you think they’ll find her?” I asked. Susan Finnegan had been underground for twenty-seven years. According to Finny, the ground where she was buried was a filled-in marshland. They had no precise area to search, just a rough idea based on Jack McGee’s description.

  “I’m surprised Jack McGee talked,” Lew said.

  “Mrs. Finnegan paid him a visit,” I said. “Think she played the Catholic guilt card. And he’s dying. I don’t think he has a year left in him. If they prosecute, he’ll never see prison. He hasn’t got enough time left.”

  “Catholic guilt that powerful?”

  “You’ve no idea. Any idea when Finny will be back?”

  “He didn’t say. He’s hoping they’ll recover the body and have a service, but even if they don’t, they’ll have a memorial. Now that they know for sure what happened.”

  We both drank. “Part of me wishes I’d never stuck my nose in,” I said.

  Lewis made a face. “But you helped find her … or who killed her.”

  “I don’t know. They’d resigned themselves to not knowing. Me poking around? It made it clear she led a double life and lied to them. Before, they had their image of her. We’ve torn it to shreds.”

  “And you found them a family member they didn’t know they had.”

  The baby, given up for adoption. Finny was making moves to discover his identity and to reach out to the boy, if he was willing, to let him know he had family interested in him, in knowing him.

  “And now some guy who’s twenty-six is going to find out he has another family, that he was given up for adoption?” I shook my head.

  “You assume he doesn’t know. Plenty of parents tell their kids they’re adopted. It’s not so taboo nowadays.”

  “Yeah, but he was adopted in 1973, when people didn’t discuss it.”

  “You’re determined to feel bad about this, aren’t you?” he asked.

  His question threw me. Was I set on a course for guilt? After all, I hadn’t altered what had happened. I’d helped bring it to light, and I wasn’t the person responsible.

  “I don’t know.” I drank my beer and watched a group of young men at two tables near the bar. They were loud with their laughter and drink.

  “They’re fine,” Lewis said. “Just having a good time.”

  “You were watching them too,” I pointed out.

  “Habit.”

  “Ditto.”

  Donna came by and said, “How’s the head?”

  “Great, thanks.”

  “Is Matty gone?” she asked.

  “I don’t think you’ll be seeing much of him.”

  She pouted and stomped away.

  Lewis stared at his beer intently. “She was asking about Matthew Cisco?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You broke up?”

  “You’re kidding, right? Everyone knows. I’m surprised they didn’t run updates in the paper.”

  “I don’t pay attention to your love life.”

  I drank a healthy swallow, and said, “That makes you the only one, then. Everyone is super interested in what their gay chief will do next.”

  “Like how?”

  “Let’s see. The other day a woman I don’t know approached me in the grocery and asked if I thought her outfit was too color-coordinated. Apparently, as a gay man, I’m an authority on the subject.”

  “Please tell me you didn’t tell her she looked less than perfect. No, wait,” he leaned forward. “No signs of bruising. You didn’t. Smart guy.”

  “I told her she looked great. Now I’m terrified she’
ll lie in wait for me by the deli counter, looking for fashion advice.”

  “Go to a different grocery,” he said.

  “Are you kidding me? I’ve finally taught the deli guys how to slice my cold cuts. I’m invested.”

  Donna came over and served my beer, if slamming a glass atop a table could be described as “serving.” She put a hand to her hip and said, “The annual baseball tournament is this weekend. I can’t wait.”

  “Yeah?” Lewis asked. “Gonna come cheer us on?”

  Donna gave him a look filled with pity. “You guys are gonna get slaughtered. Have you seen Dave Jacobson, their new guy? He played in the minor leagues for a year.”

  Lewis sighed. “Well then, I guess we know how Saturday will go.”

  Donna said, “We sure do.”

  DETECTIVE MICHAEL FINNEGAN

  FRIDAY, JULY 9, 1999

  1340 HOURS

  We were gathered at the kitchen table, the same table we’d sat at so many years ago to discuss how to find Susan. Now we had gathered to discuss what to do about her death. “There’s no body,” Carol said, for the seventieth time.

  “They’re looking,” I said. “But that’s not an easy area to search, and they may not find her.”

  “You said that already,” Bobby said. I wanted to smack him. It felt like we’d all regressed, back in time. Bobby was annoying me and Carol was playing big, bossy sister.

  “Any update on Kevin?” Dave asked.

  “They’re holding him. That’s all I know.”

  “They won’t try him if they don’t find her body,” Bobby said. As if he knew a damn thing about policing and prosecuting. “Where does that leave us?”

  “Waiting,” Carol said. “Like before.”

  “Not like before,” Ma cut in. “Before, we didn’t know what had happened to her. Now, we know.” She clutched a handkerchief, but her eyes were dry. Possibly because she’d cried every bit of water out of herself over the past few days. “We’ll have a service.”

  Chastised, we murmured that it was a good idea.

  “But should we wait, to hear if they find her?” Bobby asked. We all turned on him, united in finding a target. “What?” he said. “I’m just asking! I mean, it would stink to have a memorial and then find her body.”