All Our Yesterdays

by Robert B. Parker

  “You didn’t want to listen to what she’d say about what you did,” Conn said gently.

  Then he was quiet and there was no sound in the room but the boy’s hard crying. Conn waited, sitting perfectly still on the desk. The boy cried.

  “I feel bad for you,” Conn said after a while. “You go along and everything is fine and then something happens. You didn’t plan it. You didn’t mean it. You didn’t really want it to happen. But it happens. Homicide in the commission of a felony. Murder one. Eighteen years old, and you’ll be put to death before you’re nineteen.”

  The boy was rocking now. Hunched and crying, hands still locked between his knees, he bent far forward and back, and forward and back.

  “Wasn’t what you had planned,” Conn said. “Was it?”

  “I didn’t mean to,” the boy gasped.

  “I know you didn’t,” Conn said. “None of us mean to. But it happens, and we’re stuck with it. How many little girls you molested?”

  The boy shook his head.

  Conn was patient. “Now don’t bullshit me, Tom. I can’t help you if you bullshit me.”

  The boy, still rocking, nodded his head.

  “So how many?” Conn said.

  “There were three others,” the boy said. His voice was clogged and he spoke very fast. “That’s all. Just three. I never hurt them.”

  “Good,” Conn said. “You know their names?”

  The boy shook his head.

  “They know you?” Conn said.

  “No.”

  Conn clasped his hands behind his head, and smiled.

  “How nice,” he said.

  There was something in Conn’s voice that the boy heard. He raised his head and looked at him.

  “You got a place?” Conn said.

  The boy nodded.

  “Where?”

  “Weston.”

  “You kill her there?”

  “Yes.” The boy’s voice was thick with crying, and barely audible.

  “Let’s go take a look,” Conn said.

  “Now?”

  “Yeah, now. You’re in the machine now, kid, and the machine doesn’t care about you.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You got one chance, Tom,” Conn said.

  The boy stared at him.

  “Maybe I can fix it.”

  The boy waited.

  “We’ll need to talk with your mother.”

  “No.”

  “You’ve forfeited the right to say yes or no, Tom. Get used to it.”

  “You can fix it?”

  Conn smiled at him. A light in the darkness.

  “You can?”

  “Maybe,” Conn said. “First we’ll look at your place. Then I’ll talk with your mother.”

  Conn

  In the center of Weston, invisible from the street, accessible through a locked gate, at the end of a narrow dirt driveway hidden by foliage, balanced beneath overarching trees, on the edge of a thin brook that ran on down through town and emptied into the Charles River, the ornate little house was as singular and alone as if it had been clapped together in the wilderness. Wisteria coiled unchecked over much of the house. There was a cupola on the roof, and a tiny siege tower at the southeast corner. The windows were bright with colored glass, and the wooden bridge over the brook was elaborately scrolled.

  Conn parked in front of the overgrown porch.

  “Who’s this belong to?” Conn said.

  “My dad,” the boy said. On the ride from Boston, the boy had begun to attach. He had stopped crying. Conn was his only hope, his savior. He put all his confidence in Conn.

  “He never uses it?” Conn said.

  “No. He foreclosed it during the Depression and couldn’t sell it, so he kept it. Then, when I got my license, my mom suggested I could use it as kind of a clubhouse. Place to keep my stuff.”

  The boy unlocked the front door, and they went in. The big living room was dominated at the far end by a floor-to-ceiling fieldstone fireplace. There was an overstuffed chair and a huge sofa, organized around the fireplace. There were half a dozen huge stuffed animals posed around the room. The floor was littered with fashion magazines and comic books. There was a half-empty bag of potato chips on the coffee table. On the fireplace mantel were two empty Coke bottles, and a half-wrapped Sky Bar. A Daisy Red Ryder model air rifle stood in a corner, near the fireplace. In a bookshelf built in beneath the front window were a collection of boys’ books by Joseph Altsheler and Albert Payson Terhune and John Tunis.

  “You kill her here?” Conn said.

  The boy nodded earnestly.

  “Where’d you get the gun?”

  “It’s my father’s.”

  “What did you do with it afterwards?”

  “I put it back.”

  “Clean it?”

  “I don’t know how.”

  “If you don’t clean it after you use it you’ll eventually pit the barrel.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  Conn didn’t say anything. The room was quiet. It had a closed-up, unoccupied smell, made thicker by the dampness of the stream that ran close to the foundation.

  “You know why you killed her?”

  “No.”

  Conn nodded slowly, his eyes ranging over the silly room, a child’s idea of a hunting lodge.

  “What was the teddy bear for?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why’d you take her underpants?”

  “I don’t know.” The boy was beginning to resent all these questions.

  “Why’d you take her to the church?”

  “I couldn’t leave her here,” the boy said with a faint hint of exasperation. These things are self-evident, his tone said.

  “Why didn’t you just dump her on the side of the road?” Conn said.

  “I don’t know.”

  Conn put his hands into his back pockets and stood looking at the smallish blond boy. He had barely any beard.

  “No. Of course you don’t,” Conn said.

  Conn

  The Winslows lived in a big brick town house behind a black wrought-iron fence on Beacon Hill, set back from Mt. Vernon Street by a brick courtyard. Conn took a business card from his pocket.

  “Give this to your mother, and tell her I’ll see her alone,” Conn said.

  “What if she’s not home?” her son said. His voice was thin and full of tremolo.

  “I’ll wait,” Conn said.

  A black maid let them in and showed Conn into the front room. It had floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over the courtyard to the street. There was a green marble fireplace with an ornate walnut mantel. There were books on the shelves and leather chairs. A walnut inlaid radio and record console stood against the far wall.

  While he waited, Conn stood with his hands in his pockets looking out the window. The house seemed to hum with silence. Outside the window a middle-aged couple walked ordinarily by on Mt. Vernon Street. When he had first come to Boston he had looked up Thomas Winslow in the phone book. There were seven of them. He didn’t know the middle initial. And he had closed the phone book and put it away, the way a recovering alcoholic might put the unopened bottle back in the drawer. Now, standing in her front room, he felt as if the bottom had fallen out of his soul and all of him was in danger of draining away. The magnolia trees in the courtyard had begun to bud up, but it was much too early in April for them to do more than that. They wouldn’t be showy until summer. By August they’d be nondescript. She would take a little while. She would have to deal with the shock of his name. He doubted the kid would tell her what he’d done, but here was a cop wanted to talk to her about him and that would distract her.

  Conn knew he looked much the same as he had twenty-six years ago in Merrion Square. He hadn’t gained weight. His hair was graying, but his face was unlined. He knew she wouldn’t appear until she had arranged herself. He waited. He wondered how he would feel if someone brought Gus home to him this way. He shook his head in
the empty room. He knew that he would feel very little. He was a good kid, too bad he couldn’t matter more. Too bad anything couldn’t matter more. Too bad the possibility of anything mattering had been harrowed from his soul by Hadley Winslow.

  He heard the door open behind him.

  He took in a long breath as if to fill his descending emptiness with air.

  He turned.

  Beautiful.

  She was in white. Her hair was blonder than he remembered, almost platinum, and pulled back from her face. Her eyes were very big, her mouth was wide. Time had marked her, without diminishing her. There were tiny crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes, and a barely visible hint of amusement around the corners of her mouth. She closed the door behind her and stood where she had entered. She held his card in her hand.

  They stared at each other.

  She said, “Hello.”

  “Hello.”

  “It is you,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said. “That Conn Sheridan.”

  “It’s a long time.”

  “Twenty-six years.”

  “I don’t know how I feel,” Hadley said.

  Conn waited.

  “You’re a policeman now,” she said.

  Conn nodded.

  “You’re here about my son.”

  “Yes.”

  She walked across the room as if it were about to buckle. She sat on the arm of one of the big leather chairs. She gestured toward the leather couch.

  “Will you sit down?” she said.

  “No,” Conn said.

  “Why are you here?” she said.

  “What did your son tell you?”

  “He said there was a policeman who wanted to talk to me alone.”

  Her lower lip was still soft looking. Her breasts seemed as firm as they had been before he went to prison. The line of her thigh, as she sat on the arm of the chair, was as graceful and firm as it had been before he expunged it from his memory in Kilmainham Jail.

  “He’s killed a little girl,” Conn said quietly.

  Hadley shook her head.

  Conn waited, his hands still in his pockets.

  “No,” she said.

  Conn was still.

  “He could not,” Hadley said. “He didn’t. No. He would not do that.”

  Conn waited.

  Hadley stood suddenly, and seemed for a moment to lose her balance. She put a hand on the chair back to steady herself; then she walked to the fireplace and put both hands on the high mantel and leaned her forehead against it and stared into the cold opening.

  Conn took Maureen Burns’s underpants from his coat pocket and unfolded them and put them on the coffee table in front of the couch.

  “She had been sexually assaulted. Her underpants were missing. I found them under the mattress in your son’s room at the college.”

  “That proves nothing,” Hadley said. Her gaze still fixed on the clean, empty firebox.

  “He confessed,” Conn said.

  “No,” she said. She turned from the mantel to stare at Conn. “I will not let you do this. I swear to God I will not let you.”

  She put a hand on the mantel and steadied herself. Then suddenly her legs seemed to give out and she sank to her knees on the thick Persian rug. She made no sound. But tears formed in her eyes and rolled down her cheeks.

  Conn waited. She cried silently. Then she looked at him.

  “Will you help me?” she said.

  Conn walked across the room and helped her to stand. He took her arm as they walked to a chair. He helped her to sit. Then, with his foot, he hooked a green leather hassock over in front of the chair and sat on it facing her. “Probably,” he said.

  Conn

  “This can’t be a complete surprise,” Conn said.

  “How can you possibly say that?”

  “I been a cop most of the time since I saw you last,” Conn said. “Guy does something like this, he’s been off center for a long time.”

  “My son is a fine young man,” Hadley said.

  “Except that he shot a female child after he fucked her.”

  Hadley leaned back a little and pressed her arms down firmly on the arms of the chair. Her face was pale and she was breathing audibly through her nose.

  “Is this your revenge?” she said. “After twenty-six years to get your revenge on me through my son?”

  Conn didn’t speak. He sat silently on the hassock, his forearms on his thighs, his hands clasped loosely in front of him. He looked steadily at Hadley. He felt as if everything were unspooling very slowly, as if he and Hadley were suspended somehow in a viscous crystalline fluid. Tears came slowly to Hadley’s eyes and began again to move quietly down her face. She leaned forward and put her hand on both of his.

  “Conn,” she said, “you have to help me.”

  He nodded.

  “You’re right, of course,” she said. She seemed to have wrenched herself back into control. “Even as a boy he had an unhealthy interest in little girls. His father caught him playing doctor once, and was livid. I think if I hadn’t intervened he might have beaten him severely.”

  Conn nodded, his eyes on her face.

  “That why you got him the clubhouse in Weston?”

  “Anything,” Hadley said. “Anything to distract him. It was a constant fear. He didn’t like other little boys. He liked to play with little girls and we never dared leave them alone.”

  “When was the first one?” Conn said.

  “He was ten,” Hadley said. “With a three-year-old girl.”

  “Parents know?”

  Hadley shook her head.

  “I don’t know if she ever told them anything. We never heard from them. She was the daughter of a Charles Street shopkeeper. I don’t think she even knew Tommy’s name.”

  “How’d your husband feel about that?” Conn said.

  “I never told him,” Hadley said. “There were other times. I always managed to cover up.”

  “Ever talk to a doctor?”

  “I couldn’t tell anyone,” Hadley said.

  Conn felt the weight of her hand on his, felt the force of her eyes, smelled her perfume, looked at the curve of her thigh beneath the sheer white dress. Hadley’s voice dropped slightly. It was husky, almost hoarse.

  “I’ve lived with this alone,” she said. “Until now.”

  “So your husband doesn’t know?”

  “No.”

  “So nobody knows but you, me, and the kid?”

  “I had to protect him,” Hadley said.

  “From his father?”

  “From everyone,” Hadley said.

  “And how will you protect him from me?”

  Hadley didn’t speak for a moment. Her eyes were on Conn’s face, moving, examining him as if looking for an opening. She took her hand from on top of his and leaned back in her chair and folded her hands in her lap.

  “I will find a way,” she said.

  Conn stood and walked to the window and stood looking out with his hands in his hip pockets.

  “So how come you turned me in?” he said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Twenty-six years ago,” Conn said, looking out the window at the placid life moving by on Mt. Vernon Street. “How come you turned me in to the British?”

  “Oh, God.”

  Conn kept his face to the window.

  “I was twenty,” she said. “I had done what I was supposed to do two years earlier. I married the man I was supposed to marry. Older than I was, solid, stable, successful. Old money, good family. I was a virgin.”

  “So was Maureen Burns,” Conn said.

  “Who … oh … the little girl?”

  “Un-huh.”

  Hadley steadied herself in her chair. Conn’s back was very straight as he stared out the window.

  “My wedding night,” Hadley said, “was not the stuff of dreams. Thomas is a forceful man, but not”—she paused, looking for words—“Thomas is not a passionate man.”

>   “And he didn’t grow more passionate with time,” Conn said.

  “No.”

  “So you rounded up a few passionate Irishmen to fill the void.”

  “Not a few,” Hadley said. “You.”

  The sun had moved westward as the afternoon progressed, and now, as Hadley looked at him, he was a dark outline against the bright window. He turned slowly and faced her. His hands in his hip pockets caused his coat to pull back. His revolver showed at his belt.

  “But it got out of hand,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “You were after a little poon tang, I was after forever.”

  “There’s no need to be coarse, Conn. You meant a great deal to me. I would have been your mistress all our lives had you let me.”

  “But you wouldn’t leave your husband.”

  “I couldn’t. I wasn’t bred to dash round the world with a—a gunman. Look at you, you’re still a gunman.”

  “So you couldn’t tell me that instead of calling the peelers?”

  “I did tell you that, Conn. I told you that in the park, by the canal. You wouldn’t hear me.”

  Conn nodded slowly. He had no need to think back. He had lived that time in the continuing present since it happened.

  “And you wouldn’t go away. When I looked out and saw you there, in front of my home, in Merrion Square, my heart nearly stopped. If my husband had ever seen you …”

  “Thomas is a dangerous man, is he?”

  “Rigid, Conn. And harsh. He thinks things are all certain. It would have ruined everything if he’d seen you. You were so fierce. I had to make you leave. I was never prepared for the intensity. You wouldn’t leave. I didn’t know what else to do.”

  “Did you know they were going to hang me?”

  “I didn’t know what would happen. I couldn’t think about it. Conn, I was twenty.”

  “And your kid’s eighteen and a pervert,” Conn said.

  Hadley put her face in her hands.

  “You better think about it,” Conn said.

  Conn

  “So who was my replacement?” Conn said.

  “Replacement? I”—She shook her head. The declining sun had now edged into the room and it made her hair seem bright—“I couldn’t. Not after you. There’s never been anyone after you.”