Measure of Darkness

by Chris Jordan

  “To the old man,” Taylor says. “May he rest in peace.”

  “Amen to that.”

  They sit down to play poker, and not another word is said about his late father. But inside, behind his bad boy smile, Gatling is very pleased by the news. Randall Shane, the so-called hero, is down for a count of murder in the first degree, a charge long overdue.

  Good.

  Chapter Nine

  What the Cat Lady Said

  There’s nothing very grand about the neighborhood where Professor Keener lived and died. The modest two-story house is one of a hundred similar wood-framed dwellings situated along this particular stretch of Putnam Avenue, some with actual white picket fences, in the area dubbed “Cambridgeport” because the Charles River winds around it like a dirty shawl. Keener’s place, built narrow and deep to fit the lot, appears to date from the 1940s, but it could easily be considerably older, having been renovated a few times along the way. Asphalt shingle siding removed, clapboards repaired and painted. Inside, carpets and linoleum have been taken up to expose the original hard-pine floors, a few interior walls taken down to open up the downstairs—I can see that much by peering through the windows from the narrow, slightly sagging front porch.

  The front door has been sealed with yellow crime tape, but it doesn’t matter. It’s not like I’d attempt a break-in in broad daylight, or at any time, for that matter. The place has been thoroughly searched by professionals, and if there’s any evidence that Professor Keener had a son, surely it exists in the minds of neighbors, colleagues, friends. Memories can’t be so easily erased. Anyhow, that was my argument to boss lady, who normally doesn’t approve of me playing investigator, as she calls it. The homes on this block are close together, barely room to park a vehicle between them, and my plan is to prowl around the porch playing looky-loo until someone in the neighborhood responds, if only to tell me to mind my own business.

  As it happens the watchful neighbor is a retired school bus driver, Toni Jo Nadeau, recently widowed, and she couldn’t be nicer. Pleasantly pear-shaped in velour loungewear, big hair and with the keen eyes of a nosey parker—in other words, exactly the person I was hoping to find.

  “Excuse me,” she begins, having come out to her own little porch, right next door. “Are you looking for the professor?”

  “Oh dear,” I say, clutching my handbag, acting a bit frazzled, which isn’t difficult. “No, no, I know he’s gone. Murdered, I should say, but that’s such an ugly word. Awful! No, I’m looking for his son? His five-year-old boy?”

  Mrs. Nadeau gives me the once-over, decides I’m okay and introduces herself, including the part about her late husband. Then she glances up and down the street, as if to check if we’re being observed. “You mean the Chinese kid? Come around the back,” she says, gesturing down the narrow driveway. “My cats own the front rooms, we can talk in the kitchen.”

  Unlike some of the other homes in the neighborhood, Toni Jo’s house has not been upgraded in the last few decades, and the kitchen still has the feel—and smell—of a place where cooking happens. Most recently, roast lamb with a few cloves of fresh garlic, if my nose hasn’t failed me. She urges me to have a seat at her little counter, offers coffee, which I decline, having already topped up on caffeine, courtesy of Mrs. Beasley. “I’m good, thank you. Alice Crane,” I say, offering my hand. “I work in the physics department. As a secretary slash office manager, I wouldn’t know an electron if it bit me on the ankle! This is so nice of you. I’m at my wit’s end. Did you say Chinese boy? I’ve been so worried.”

  “Oh yeah?” she says cautiously, attempting to suss me out.

  “Couldn’t sleep a wink last night, worrying about that poor little guy.”

  “Wait,” she says, her eyes hooding slightly. “You know the kid?”

  “No, no,” I say, shaking my head and keeping up the frazzled bit. “Never met him myself, and nobody in the department seems to know where he is, or who has legal custody. But everybody says Joe had a little boy, so he must be somewhere, mustn’t he?”

  “Everybody, huh?”

  “You know how it is. People talk.”

  “And they say the kid is Professor Keener’s son, do they?”

  It’s easy enough to look befuddled. “Do I have it wrong? Oh dear, maybe I’m worried about nothing. But you said—what was it you said?”

  “Haven’t yet,” she says, going all cagey. “Joe, is that what his friends called him? Really? He was always Professor Keener to me. Very formal man, very private about himself. First time I went over there and introduced myself he looked at the ground and said, ‘Professor Keener,’ and that’s how it stayed. It fit him, too. He was the perfect neighbor, really. Anyhow, he used to have a little kid that came around on a regular basis, but that stopped a couple of years ago. Not every day, but like on weekends. A toddler, couldn’t have been more than three years old, the last time I noticed. Played in the backyard a few times, but mostly they kept him inside.”

  “They?” I ask, genuinely surprised.

  “The Chinese lady I assumed to be his wife. Or ex-wife, or whatever. She was always here with the boy and she was obviously his mother. She’s a real beauty, an exotic type, wears those formal Chinese dresses, doesn’t speak a word of English. At least not to me.”

  “But you haven’t seen her or the boy for the last two years?”

  “Something like that. At first I thought maybe she was just a friend of his. They didn’t look like a couple, if you know what I mean. Not even a divorced couple. But one day one of my ninjas got out.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “My kitty cats. Ninjas, I call ’em. I’m owned by four cats, shelter cats, and they like to hide under the furniture, whack your ankles as you go by. Anyhow, Jeepers got out and bolted over to Professor Keener’s yard, and the little boy was sitting in the sandbox, playing with a scoop, and wouldn’t you know, Jeepers was interested in the sandbox, or that’s what I thought. I go running out, afraid the kid might get scratched, but the cat was sitting there, perfectly well behaved, letting the little boy pet her. Very cute, I wish I’d had my camera. The professor came out at the same time, and I retrieved Jeepers and he retrieved the boy, and we had ourselves a little conversation. Which is all you ever got with the professor. I said, what an adorable child, I can see he takes after his father, and he smiled and said, ‘He’s my keyboard kid,’ and that was all. Not another word. I mean, what does that mean, ‘keyboard kid’? I asked, but the conversation was obviously over. He never even told me the boy’s name.”

  “But you took him to mean the boy was his son.”

  “Absolutely. You could tell, the way he was holding him, the pride in his eyes. He actually looked me in the eye that one time, just for a second, and I could tell how much he loved the boy. And close-up like that you could see the resemblance, I wasn’t kidding about that.”

  “You haven’t seen the child in at least two years. Did you ever ask Professor Keener where his son was? Why he didn’t come around anymore? What happened to the boy’s mother? Anything like that?”

  Mrs. Nadeau shakes her head, gives me a flinty, dismissive look, almost scornful. “Who are you really?” she wants to know. “If you worked with Professor Keener, you’d know what he was like. You’d know not to ask him personal questions like that. What are you, some kind of reporter?”

  Boss lady always says that when you’re engaged on a case, it’s best to season your prevarication with just enough truth to make it edible—and be ready to alter the recipe on the fly. “Not a reporter, no, absolutely not,” I say, backpedaling in place. “And to be totally truthful with you—I’m so sorry I fibbed—I never actually worked in the physics department and I never met Professor Keener personally. But before he died, before he got killed, Keener hired a friend of mine to help him find his missing five-year-old son. It was my friend—he’s a former FBI agent who specializes in child recovery—it was my friend who found the body, okay? And my friend who is now a suspect
in the murder.”

  To my surprise, Toni Jo Nadeau grins at me. “This is a much better story, sugar,” she says, eyes bright with interest. “Some of it might even be true.”

  “Please don’t tell the police. They’ll think I’m meddling.”

  “Describe this ‘friend’ of yours and I’ll think about it.”

  “You want to know what he looks like?”

  She shakes her head. “I know what he looks like. I want to know if you know what he looks like.”

  “You know… Oh, I get it. You happened to notice when he visited Professor Keener, is that it?”

  “I’m waiting, sugar.”

  “Okay, what he looks like. Here goes. Well, for starters, he’s a hunk, big and lean and tall. Way over six foot—I mean, I barely come up to his shoulders, you know? Soulful eyes. And a cute little salt-and-pepper chin beard.”

  Mrs. Nadeau nods along with the description. “You had me at hunk, sugar. That’s our boy. I saw him ringing the bell over there last week and my first thought, I wish he was ringing the bell over here, you know what I mean? No offense, but your man is tasty.”

  As you may have noticed, I’m rarely at a loss for words, but that pretty much stops my tongue. Mrs. Nadeau notices my discomfort and reaches out to pat my hand. “Wispy little thing like you, I’m guessing he really is just a friend. Don’t look so worried, these things take time.”

  Wispy? I’m wearing what I call my librarian glasses, Target clothing and a cloth handbag, going for the non-threatening mousy look. But wispy? Really?

  “Man like that, he’d want a woman with some meat on her bones,” Mrs. Nadeau says. “Somebody with a little bounce in her jounce. But he may come around. You just hang in there.”

  When my power of speech finally resumes, I say, “Yesterday morning, when it happened, did you notice anything wrong?”

  Mrs. Nadeau explains that because of her allergies—she’s allergic to cats, why is that no surprise?—she takes an antihistamine before bed and sleeps, in her words, like a dead dodo bird. Therefore she has no awareness of what happened in the early hours, or who might have murdered Joseph Keener.

  “The sirens woke me. That’s the first I knew something was wrong. The cops wouldn’t tell me what happened, but when I saw that body bag coming out I knew it was bad. The worst. The poor, poor man. I wonder who’ll get the house.”

  On my way out the narrow driveway, I stop to take a gander at the dead man’s backyard. And there, partially obscured by fallen leaves, is a child’s sandbox, covered with a plastic turtle lid. Looks like it hasn’t been used in a while, but that fits with what the cat lady said, and as far as I’m concerned proves beyond doubt that a child once played here.

  A little boy, missing.

  Chapter Ten

  Promises to Keep

  Kidder loops the big brass padlock over his index finger and shows it to the woman he thinks of as New Mommy.

  “You’ll be safe,” he says in his teasing, wheedling way. “It’s a finished basement with a kitchenette, full bath, a nice pool table and a big-screen TV. Plenty of room for the kid’s keyboard. It’s not like you’ll be locked up in a dungeon.”

  “The basement is fine, but why do we have to be locked in?” she says. Seated on a divan, the little brat clinging to her side.

  “Because your boyfriend said so, that’s why.”

  “He’s not my boyfriend.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  “Shane saved my life once. I owe him.”

  “That’s sweet. Down you go.”

  The boy has tucked his head into her hip, averting his face. She strokes his hair, tries to calm him, but the kid picks up on her nervous tension and avoids making eye contact with Kidder. Nothing new there, the brat has never liked him.

  “I need to speak to Shane,” the woman pleads. “I want Shane to tell me why we have to be locked into the basement whenever you go out. It’s not like I’m going to run away.”

  “I told you, it’s for your own protection. You and the kid. I’m a bodyguard, I’m guarding, and that’s really all you need to know. Those were his instructions and I intend to follow them to the letter.”

  “This isn’t right,” she mutters.

  Kidder squats so that he’s at eye level. His predatory grin has all the warmth and welcome of a chilled ice pick. “This is not a topic for discussion,” he says softly. “The word comes down from the big guy, we obey. End of story.”

  “But why—”

  Kidder puts a finger on her mouth, feels her trembling inside. “Sssh,” he says. “You’re going to play in the basement for a while, isn’t that right? You and the kid will be nice and cozy, safe as churches. I’ll be back this evening, we’ll have pizza, maybe watch a movie.”

  The touch of his fingertip is like a button shutting off her resistance. Less than a minute later he snaps the padlock on the hardened steel door of the secure room in the cottage basement, heads for his vehicle and is soon exiting the gated estate. A few miles west of the rocky coastline, this scenic road will intersect a major highway. Until then he makes sure to keep just below the speed limit. It would be very awkward if one of the local cops pulls him over, wants to see what he has defrosting in the trunk.

  Yikes.

  Kidder feels content with his purpose—this new, last-minute assignment is going to be fun. Challenging but fun. He glances at Google Maps in his lap and thinks happy thoughts.

  Chapter Eleven

  Where It Gets Complicated

  I return to the residence walking on air.

  Alice Crane, Super Investigator, able to successfully interrogate reluctant neighbors, discover leaf-obscured sandboxes and enter tall buildings in a single bound. Okay, the neighbor wasn’t exactly reluctant, but still, it was my idea and I came away with an eyewitness account that proves beyond doubt, to me at least, that Joseph Keener was the father of a small child. Considering the circumstance, I shouldn’t feel this happy—a kid is missing, what is there to be happy about?—but the success of the mission makes me want to punch the air and shout yes! just like they do in the movies, only Mrs. Beasley might see me and throw a stale muffin at my head. Not that her baked items ever last long enough to go stale, but you get the idea.

  Be cool, girl. Like it’s all in a day’s work.

  Right, right, let me give it a try. Trying, trying. Nope, never happen. I’ll never be cool. Not unless cool involves shouting, “I did it! I did it!” while bounding up the stairs to the command center.

  Only to find the big room hushed and empty.

  For one horrible moment I imagine that the mysterious assault team returned in my absence, abducting everyone but me. And then light footsteps come padding along the hallway carpet and boss lady pokes her head inside the door.

  “You screamed?” she says, and beckons me to follow.

  She and Teddy have been hunkered down at his main computer terminal, all agog over some new spy program developed by our young software genius.

  “It’s so simple that it’s almost beautiful,” boss lady enthuses, acting very much like a proud mother. “And it’s functioning perfectly.”

  “Simple also means limited,” he reminds her. “We can look but not touch.”

  “It’s a kind of invisible, undetectable window into their system,” Naomi explains, attempting to share. “Planted by Jack’s operative at Keener’s company, Quanta Gate.”

  “More like a reflection of a window,” Teddy corrects. He manages to look embarrassed and pleased at the same time. Then, as if to deflect attention away from his faux-hawked self, he goes, “Alice? Um, what happened out there?”

  “Oh, nothing much. Just proved that the dead professor had a kid, that’s all. With a mysterious Chinese lady.”

  That finally gets their attention.

  “Details,” boss lady demands.

  “I should save it for the next case briefing.”

  “Don’t be cute,” she says, giving me The Squint. The Squint means we’
ve had our fun but joke-time is over, wisecracks are no longer appreciated. It’s boss lady turning off the friendly switch and getting serious and making you serious, too. And so I give her the play-by-play, including the demon cats and the sandbox, and Professor Keener calling the child his “keyboard kid.”

  “Odd that he would call him that,” she says. “I wonder what it means, exactly. It must mean something.”

  Riffing, I say, “Maybe if you’re a weird genius that’s a term of endearment. Anyhow, the point is, whatever their names are, the mother and child used to visit frequently, but the visits stopped two years ago. Haven’t been seen since, at least by the neighbor. They stopped coming around. Does that mean the mother broke up with the professor, possibly returned to China?”

  “I suppose anything is possible at this point. Whoever this woman is, Keener kept her off the grid. Randall Shane never mentioned anything about the mother being Chinese.”

  “He didn’t have time to mention much of anything before the windows got kicked in.”

  “Good point. Give Jack and Dane a call, let them know about the boy.”

  “Will do.”

  Boss lady nods, frowning to herself. “I’d love to know what the ‘keyboard kid’ reference means. We’ll try Googling the phrase, but off the top of your head, what first comes to mind when you hear the word keyboard?”

  I shrug. “Computers, I guess. And pianos.”

  “Pianos?”

  “Pianos have keyboards.”

  “Right! Of course they do. Hmm. Interesting.”

  Without formally ending the conversation—a habit she has when distracted—Naomi wanders away, looking even more thoughtful than usual, which is sort of like saying a saint looks even more religious when the halo blinks on.

  Chapter Twelve

  Waves of Water, Waves of Light