by A J Grayson
But logic has no answers to sell a belly, and it’s in my belly that I feel this … conviction. This is the spot to be. So I’m here, and I have three nights on my hotel booking. Michael was understanding at the shop (‘You’ve never asked for vacation days before, ever, Dylan. Of course you can go’), and it’s not as if I have any other pressing engagements. Maybe the trek out of the city will do me some good.
This drink in my hand isn’t going to help with that, of course. Jack Daniel’s. God, it’s foul stuff, but the closest place to my hotel to get an evening meal is a bar, and this seems like the kind of thing you should order in a bar in a town like this. It’s certainly not the place to order a velvety Pinot with a touch of vanilla on the nose, though I can’t imagine I’d order that even if I could. I’m not sure what I’d rather be drinking, really, but God knows it isn’t this. The things we do in the name of conformity.
In the evening hours after my nap and before this drink, I drove around the town. Orientated myself. Kind of quaint, really, Redding. And just at the spot where the pin had fallen on the map, I’d found Mo’s Market. Not listed online, but still a reality. Closed, of course. It was 7.26 p.m. when I pulled up to its corner, and it isn’t a large-scale supermarket sort of place, or posh Whole Foods organo-fest. It looks like a little mom-and-pop, wire mesh over the windows to protect the Half Buck Chuck inside, presumably from small-town teenagers for whom it’s just as desirable a contraband as any other booze. I’ll go by again tomorrow morning when it opens. Maybe someone inside will know something. Maybe I’ll meet Mo, whom I imagine to be a rather gruff, maybe even a bit burly fellow. Strikes me this is how the owners of shops like that probably look. A little overweight, friendly enough, good-spirited, with a short-barrelled shotgun behind the counter ‘just in case’.
My Jack is gone. It’s the second one, and I’m surprised I’ve managed them both. I’d have thought the taste of cask-distilled paint thinner would have stopped me hours ago.
The glass seems so tiny in my hand, shimmering in the heavy light over the bar counter. My hands themselves look tired. Older than they should. My head is starting to hurt. My arm is throbbing. I am wondering why I’m really here.
It’s not that I’ve forgotten about the blood. I couldn’t, even if I wanted to – and I do desperately want to. The blood I found on my arm. Lord, I want to forget about that, to insist it never happened.
There is the real possibility that it didn’t. That it was just a dream or hallucination. Those can be as vivid as what I remember, I’m sure that’s true. But I’ve never had one before, so it’s hard to convince myself that’s what it was.
I must have blacked out just after the … I’m resigned to calling it the ‘vision’. The last thing I remember was the blood that appeared beneath my finger marks on my sleeve, dripping down from my cuff. Things got hazy, fast. Then there wasn’t anything. My next memory is of waking up, face down on my keyboard, my fingers still perched near the keys.
There was no blood on the keyboard, of course, though I remembered seeing it drip out of my cuff onto it. Nothing on my sleeve, either. I all but tore off my shirt to see beneath, but my arm was fine. No wound, no cut. Nothing. Just the fuzz that’s been there for decades – not quite smooth, not quite hairy.
It took a cup of coffee to bring me back to normalcy, to shake away the terrible feelings of what I forced myself, immediately, to write off as a dream. Too much concern over the boy, starting to infect my thoughts once I’d gone drowsy. Or maybe I’d simply pulled a Dickens, taking in late-night food and suffering the after-effects of a spot of bad mustard or a bit of sausage. Have to watch out for that.
But there was something crusted, crimson, beneath my fingernails. That was very real, even after I woke up. I noticed it in the kitchen as I boiled the kettle and screwed open the lid to my tired jar of Nescafé. Rusty, crumbling, beneath the nails of both hands.
A shower and three rounds of soap did away with it, but I don’t want to pretend it didn’t freak me out a little. A vision of blood, then no blood, then blood caked beneath my fingernails. That’s not … usual. Of course, what was under my nails may well not have been blood. I’d been in the park, I’d been digging in the dirt and manhandling sticks. It was the remnants of mud, almost certainly. Mud I’d seen beneath my nails in an evening of too much emotion and strain. Mud that my mind translated into blood, which reminded me of the boy, which …
That’s the explanation I’ve come to, anyway. By the time I returned to my computer to finish typing in my address so that Google could spit out a travel route to Redding, it had become a firm resolution. It’s the only sensible explanation. And I’m sticking to it.
20
Thursday
It’s morning. I woke early today, made myself two cups of Hotel Room Coffee and had a shower, then drove towards the middle of town to find a Starbucks and a real coffee. Not the Beanery in Inner Sunset, mind, but it did the trick. Genuine caffeine, priced highly enough to make it feel gourmet.
My only agenda item this morning is to return to Mo’s. The sign behind the wire mesh in the window said the shop opens at 7.00 a.m., and I intend to be there as ‘Closed’ is flipped over to ‘Open’.
I remember the route back to the intersection of Victor and Hartnell clearly enough that I don’t need to reenter the address in my phone and chart the route via GPS. There aren’t that many streets around, and my memory isn’t yet that bad.
I know I’m going to discover something with Mo. Assuming he’s there, of course. But even if he isn’t, I’m absolutely certain that this isn’t a dead end. It’s nice to begin a day with that level of conviction, with the surety that mysteries are going to be solved and fog is going to drift away into clarity.
Mo was not what I imagined. I think my vision of mom-and-pop shop owners has been too strongly influenced by East Coast television crime dramas. I had in mind that Mo’s surname would be ‘Marconi’ or ‘Gianelli’, or something similarly ethnic that would accompany a pot belly and gruff-but-friendly bulk. It turns out that the Mo of Mo’s Market is in fact Mo Bates, whose family is from no more exotic a locale than Fresno, and that definitely doesn’t count.
I was at the door of the shop at 7.00 a.m., as planned, and the only segment of my encounter that went according to the stereotype in my mind was the hand that appeared behind the wire mesh to flip over the ‘Closed’ sign and proceed to unlock the three bolts on the heavy, glass door.
The hand was a woman’s, and that startled me more than it should. I was expecting to see Mo – but maybe I shouldn’t have been. Why would the owner be the one unlocking the shop? That’s work for the grunt labourers. I unlock the shop back in San Francisco almost every day.
‘Good morning,’ the woman said as she pulled open the door. ‘Bright and early today, are we?’
She spoke with the kind of automatic pleasantness that suggested we were long and fast friends. In appearance she resembled Betty Crocker, only with more grey in her hair and no apron. I seriously doubted she had a knack for making cakes. She was wearing blue jeans – an almost universal custom in this town – and a felt shirt with a patch over the breast pocket that read ‘Mo’.
‘You’re Mo?’ I asked. The atmosphere was already friendly, I didn’t feel the need to casually banter up to my question. And I was surprised, and wanted an explanation. Maybe Mo was short for Maureen, or Molly.
‘No, hon,’ she answered with a laugh. ‘That’d be my husband. But as I’ve got older, I’ve filled out to his size. Can’t say I’m going to win any beauty pageants, but it saves on the clothing budget.’ She laughed heartily at her own joke. ‘My name’s Susan.’
‘Hello Susan,’ I answered. ‘I’m Dylan. Just visiting the area.’
‘Here on business?’
‘No,’ I hesitated as I answered, wondering for a moment what sort of business drew people to Redding. ‘A personal reason, really. I’m trying to find someone.’
‘Well we’re not a one-stoplight s
ort of town, but we’re not a big city either. Can’t say I know everybody, but Mo and I have been here more ’n forty years, so maybe I can help.’ She strutted back to the counter and took up what I presumed to be a familiar perch on a torn, upholstered stool behind the till. ‘Who is it you’re lookin’ for?’
It was there that the conversation had become difficult. I needed to let her know I was looking for a boy, but the fact that I wouldn’t be able to provide a name, any personal details or a relationship – essentially my only pieces of information were an ‘about this height’ and a guessed age – would strike anyone as odd. It had certainly done so with the police officer back in San Francisco. And I thought mentioning that I’d tracked this place down via a receipt would make matters sound even more suspicious. I needed to walk a careful line.
‘I’m actually looking for a family I got to know a little a while back,’ I answered, trying to keep my voice relaxed, informal. ‘I met them on a trip up here with some friends, maybe a year ago, to go hunting.’ Now that sounded like something people came to Redding to do. ‘We ran into them in a restaurant – one of those accidental encounters. I know they told me their names, but I didn’t really take note at the time. Wasn’t sure I’d ever be back. But they were such nice people, and now that I’m up here again, well, I was hoping I might be able to track them down and say hello.’
Susan reflected on my words for a few moments and I wondered whether she was going to buy my story. It sounded plausible enough to me, but isn’t that how liars generally get caught out? Lies always sound convincing to the people telling them.
‘Well, that ain’t a lot to go on,’ Susan finally answered. I could feel my muscles relax. She was at least contemplating my request. ‘What sort of family?’
‘Just a small one,’ I answered. ‘Mother and father, I’d guess just on the older side of middle aged.’ That was all a lie. I knew nothing about any parents. ‘And they had a little boy. About this high.’ I made the appropriate gesture. ‘I’d guess maybe he was four or five. Cute kid. Looked like Dennis the Menace in his overalls.’
I’d gotten in the pertinent details. Lord help me if the kid was from a single-parent family.
Susan mused on the description. Then, in a great, heaving yell: ‘Maury, get yourself down here! Customer’s got a question!’
My nerves were already going, so the sudden shout caused me to leap back a little, and Susan answered the jump with a smile. ‘He’s a lazy bastard, but he’s got a better memory than me. You just hold on a minute, son. He’ll be right down.’
Not long later, Mo had appeared. ‘Mo Bates,’ he said, extending an open hand and shaking firmly when I met it with mine. A callused grip. He was in his late fifties or early sixties, I would say. Not bulky, with a slight stoop. He looked as if he’d just woken up, but there was also something about his face, his attire, his body language – something that suggested he always looked like this, even when he’d been awake for hours.
Mo, it turned out, was as friendly as Susan, and I repeated my story to him without any additional embellishments. Too many lies only muddle the stew: a lesson learned by anyone who’s ever watched an episode of Law and Order. I was determined to keep my story simple.
‘Can’t really say I can be of much help,’ Mo finally answered. ‘We came up here from Fresno after we was married, Susan and me, and that was a lifetime ago. Lots of families since then. I can’t think of one with us now with a kid like you mentioned. Doesn’t mean they aren’t out there, just they’re not ringing any bells.’
‘Maybe they come by sometimes, to shop?’ I asked. I was feeling too much disappointment, as if my only lead was slipping away from me. I needed Mo and Susan to have some sort of information I could use. ‘Maybe the father comes by to, I don’t know, get the kid a juice box?’
‘We sell those all the time,’ Susan answered. She seemed pleased to be responding for her husband. ‘Usually to the kids themselves. Most parents don’t like that they’re almost solid sugar.’
‘And no boy like the one I’ve mentioned might have bought one?’ I realized, even as I asked, that this was a very specific question; more specific than a general memory of an encounter from a year ago should warrant. But I had to ask it.
‘Like I say, nothin’ rings no bells,’ Mo answered. ‘Sorry. There’s lots of families here.’
I struggled for anything else I could ask, but there really wasn’t anything. Short of producing the receipt from my pocket and saying, ‘I want the kid who purchased this, who wears overalls and whom I have seen every day in a park in San Francisco for a year and a half, whom I don’t otherwise know.’ And that would have certainly called forth the shotgun from behind the counter – the one part of the stereotype of the shop that I’m still convinced is probably true.
I lingered a few minutes, pretending to peruse the store while I tried to dream up another approach, but when none came I bought a packet of sunflower seeds and a Diet Pepsi, thanked Mo and Susan, and left.
21
Taped Recording Cassette #033A
Interviewer: P. Lavrentis
Joseph’s voice does not emerge at any point from either side of cassette #033. It is the only one in the archival drawer marked with his case number on which he doesn’t speak.
Unlike most of the cassettes, the B-side of #033A is in fact entirely blank. Only the front has been used, and that only for Pauline Lavrentis’s personal notes.
A five-second pause precedes her first comments.
‘I’ve been unable to convince Joseph to speak with me again since our last encounter more than two weeks ago. He had to be sedated at the end of that session. The guards were good about that. Two of them were in the interview room before he could do more than toss the table against the wall. His cuffed hands kept him from doing any real damage, but the pattern of increasing aggression is something we’ve all had to take note of.
‘I’m not sure if it’s the sedatives or the content of our discussion that has had him in silence for the past weeks. I’m told he’s not giving the silent treatment just to me. The cell block guard hasn’t heard so much as a word from him, and Valdez has allowed me to speak to the inmates on either side of his cell as well as those across the corridor. None of them can recollect him talking – even to himself – since our last session.
‘This may be a positive development. The confrontation of our last conversation was necessary. It’s time Joseph is brought to a place where he can directly face what he’s done, without any of the gloss he normally superimposes on it. His silence may simply be a retreat into real recognition and an inability to process the truth. Given my discussions with him thus far, this is likely to be a stubborn, combative process. But I think we can make progress. He hasn’t wholly walled off his emotions. He obviously feels guilt, just not yet for the right things.’
A six-second pause. Within those seconds, Pauline relives all the emotions, all the analytical thoughts, that had whirled through her head as she’d made this recording. It had been a period of crux in her interactions with Joseph: the escalating introspection, leading to that confrontation with the one fact he didn’t want to admit. And now the crux had been reached, every word, every gesture to follow would impact what direction things went next.
They could go everywhere. They could go nowhere. She would do everything in her power to see that it was the former, but ultimately as much was in Joseph’s hands as in hers. It was a strange partnership, a delicate dance – in which the steps had to be taken together, by two dancers who had never met before being thrust together on the floor of this strange ballroom.
‘The warden has assured me that next week we’ll have a session together.’ Her voice suddenly re-emerges from the cassette. ‘That Joseph will be compelled to come, if he doesn’t volunteer.’
Another pause, three seconds.
‘Perhaps that will be enough time to help him remember.’
22
Thursday
My complete
lack of success at the Market has left me stranded in Redding with nothing else to go on. It’s starting to become clear that coming here was a fool’s errand – but then, of course, I think I’ve known that from the beginning.
I still have two more nights on my hotel booking, though (they make the rates cheaper online if you book multiple nights at a go; a sneaky trap I should have been the wiser to), and I have no pressing need to return to the city. So I’ve been driving somewhat aimlessly through the middle of town, criss-crossing streets on both sides of the interstate. Seeing if anything of interest may crop up. So far, the most intriguing thing has been a billboard that reads, in ten-foot-high font, ‘You missed the olive store! Five exits back on I-5.’ They must be damned good olives if they expect anyone to turn around and drive five exits back on the freeway to buy them.
But I haven’t wholly abandoned the raison d’être of my visit, and my downtown trek is revealing in its own right. The longer I’m in the middle of the town, the less likely it seems I’m going to find anything useful here. I begin to analyse this in rational terms. What do I know about the boy? Admittedly, not much; but what I do know possesses certain characteristics. Overalls, dirty clothes, tousled hair. Plays with sticks. Fine, these are not one-of-a-kind attributes, any of them, but they do coalesce around a certain type of locale. An outside-of-town locale. Even in a small place like Redding, those are the traits of a boy who doesn’t live in the middle of the shopping or restaurant plots, or even on the blocks of neighbourhood houses that surround them. Those are on-the-outskirts-of-town attributes. Or even out-of-town, out-in-the-country, though I hope it’s not one of those. Out in the country opens up an impossibly vast landscape. But the outskirts of town is different. Redding is of a size that easily allows the possibility of driving around its outskirts, and with two days to do it I can take my time. Be thorough.