Safe Houses

by Dan Fesperman

  Neither the boy nor his parents had been drinking in the hours beforehand. Toxicology tests weren’t yet complete, but none of the three had a history of drug use, and Willard had been reasonably lucid, all things considered, at the time of his arrest. Both deaths were almost certainly instantaneous. Estimated time: Between 4 and 4:30 a.m.

  Based on the blood trail, Willard had dropped the gun on the bedroom floor and proceeded immediately out of the house, pausing only to pick up a spray can of tractor paint, which he’d apparently set by the front door before the shooting.

  As for motive, the family’s oft-interviewed friends and neighbors offered no plausible theories, despite the best efforts of the reporters who saturated the town. (Henry himself turned away six of them, and for three days they went door-to-door with the fervor of Jehovah’s Witnesses.)

  The townspeople’s accounts were almost identical in tone and content. In the weeks leading up to the event, Willard had exhibited no apparent anger, no violent tendencies, no signs of mental illness. He was just “slow,” everyone said. Slow and sweet and impressionable, with a special fondness for fried chicken, cotton candy, fireworks, and marching bands. And although he went hunting with his father every deer season, no one could remember the last time he’d bagged one—or, indeed, if he’d ever even hit one.

  A few people raised a history of bullying as a possible instigator, although everyone said the problem had mostly disappeared years ago, when his contemporaries went off to jobs or to college. And by then Willard had grown large enough to make picking a fight with him seem like a bad idea.

  There was no suggestion of parental abuse. His father, Tarrant, sixty-three, was known as a hard worker and devoted parent, and was well thought of in the community. His mother, Helen, fifty-nine, although a bit chilly and aloof, had always been fiercely protective of his interests. No one had ever heard her raise her voice to him. In fact, people said, as if suddenly awakening to the realization, for years no one seemed to have heard her say much of anything to anybody. In a way, she had become as much of a closed book as her son. Those who thought about it the longest dated her withdrawal to the year the Shoats’ daughter, Anna, went off to college—six or seven years ago, they guessed, before inevitably realizing on second thought that it had been more like a dozen, a calculation that left everyone shaking their heads at the fleeting nature of time. Anna, who now lived in Baltimore, wasn’t quoted anywhere. Apparently she’d gone into seclusion, and wasn’t expected in town until the day of the funeral.

  Deprived of any obvious answers, some of the more pious citizens of Poston finally concluded that the Shoats’ failure to find a church home must have contributed to their downfall. A boy of unshakable faith, they said, never would have done such a thing. That body of opinion, quoted most prominently on Fox, provided Henry with a welcome moment of comic relief. Typical, he mused, and yet another reason he wouldn’t be sticking around Poston any longer than he had to.

  Yet, he, too, believed there had to be more to the story, if only because his most recent employments had taught him that, even for the simple-minded, motive is often buried deep within a welter of complexity. And as he searched for answers from his amateur’s perch, the one aspect of the murders that he kept returning to was the same one that had captured the public’s imagination: Willard’s half-mile walk to the edge of town. Henry was so haunted by the image of the boy’s lonely, purposeful stroll that he decided late one night—or, rather, very early one morning—to retrace Willard’s steps, if only to share in the sensory cues that the young man must have worn like a second garment as he strolled out to correct the town’s population total, as single-minded as a census taker.

  Henry began at the head of the Shoats’ driveway, where the front flap of their empty mailbox hung open like the tongue of an exhausted dog. The neighboring houses were dark. No one stirred. It was that hour before dawn when shooting stars still tumble dimly across the sky, farm ponds smoke with morning mist, and the acrid smell of skunk floats across fields of corn and soybeans. Crickets and tree frogs offered the night’s final chorus. Soon the songbirds would begin to stir. Henry was barefoot, just as Willard had been. The pavement was still warm from the previous day, but its roughness soon forced him onto the grassy shoulder, cool with dew.

  He inhaled the scent of the dying night—pine resin and moist earth, that slight essence of skunk—and as he proceeded he pictured Willard just ahead, rumpled and blood-spattered, and gripping a can of paint. He imagined the boy passing these silent houses, the hems of his denim overalls rasping in the wet grass.

  Henry rounded the curve of Willow Street and turned onto Highway 53, the narrow slab faintly aglow in the last wash of moonlight. Off in the distance, the red lights of a radio tower flashed like a homing beacon.

  The boy’s weight, girth, and sedentary lifestyle must have made his breathing labored by this point, Henry thought, as he passed the Basnight place on his left, a brick rancher with a triple garage and a satellite dish sprouting on the lawn like a giant mushroom. On the pavement just ahead was a blackened splotch of road kill—a flattened squirrel, crusty enough to flip with a spatula.

  Next Henry overtook the playground, where it seemed every kid in town had laughed at Willard as the oaf who couldn’t read, couldn’t add, couldn’t do much of anything but shake his head and say “I dunno” whenever anyone asked him a question. Finally, breaking free of the houses, he reached the welcome brigade of signs from the Ruritans, the Civitans, the First Baptist Church, the Farm Bureau, and the VFD, their rusting posts twined with trumpet vine.

  Then, just beyond, the Poston sign, where Willard had stopped to complete the task at hand.

  Why?

  Henry considered the question yet again, but had no answer. The walk, for all its heightened awareness, had tuned him to a blank signal, a hiss of dead air.

  Willard had then walked home, straight back the way he’d come. Two hours later the paperboy had found him, curled up and snoring on the concrete deck of the Shoats’ front porch. Seeing that the door was ajar, and noticing enough blood to make him uneasy, the paperboy had promptly swerved his bicycle around to pedal straight to the office of the town cop, who arrived with gun drawn to find Willard still asleep and the house already abuzz with flies.

  It took only two days for a Maryland state highway crew to replace the sign, which must have set some sort of record for bureaucratic efficiency. But in a macabre twist the boys from the DOT went with Willard’s revised total of 921. They toted away the old sign for evidence, and within hours of its departure the story began making the rounds that Willard had actually painted the number in blood.

  Henry returned to his house feeling more foolish than enlightened. He climbed into bed as the birds began to chirp, and the last thing he heard as he fell asleep was the slap of the newspaper on the porch—same paperboy, same bicycle. When he finally awoke to retrieve the copy, the funeral procession was passing down Highway 53 with its sad assortment of vehicles: two hearses, a courtesy limo, three cars of friends and family, five TV vans.

  A story on the front page told him over a late breakfast that the service was closed to the public. Accompanying it was the first photo he’d seen of Willard’s sister, Anna. Her face surprised him. Compared to the rest of the family, she looked cosmopolitan and aware, seemingly the product of a wider world. The set of her jaw lent her a certain fierceness, yet there was also a touch of the demure. Henry’s most recent boss would have described it as the kind of face juries loved—guileless and open, the very picture of honesty and sincerity.

  She was thirty, the second-in-command of some do-gooder outfit that lobbied on behalf of children and the poor, which made Henry wonder what her relationship with her brother had been like. Had she taken the job out of sympathy with his plight, or out of guilt for leaving him behind?

  A gloomy choice.

  After a dinner of takeout fried
chicken—Willard’s favorite, it belatedly occurred to him—Henry swore off any further coverage. He shut down his laptop and flipped on the television to watch a baseball game. It would soon be time to leave Poston, anyway.

  In the fourth inning he opened a bottle of rye whiskey he had vowed to ration until October. By the ninth he had downed more than half. He switched off the game just as a pop-up settled into the shortstop’s glove for the final out. Then he shut his eyes and dreamed of Willard on his nocturnal walk, alone yet not alone, stepping resolutely while some presence loomed just behind him in the roadside shadows, watchful and knowing.

  6

  Next thing Henry knew, someone was hammering at the screen door, every blow striking at his temples. He rose groggily. Rubbing a hand through his hair, he wondered if he’d imagined the noise. The bottle of rye was still open on the floor, and its fumes almost made him wretch. He was screwing the cap back on when the knocking resumed.

  “Coming!”

  Shouting made his forehead throb. No sign of the dog, and the bowl was still full. The clock on the cable box said it was 10:24 a.m.

  Henry opened the door to be greeted by the face of Anna Shoat, as if she’d stepped straight off the pages of his newspaper. The photo’s harsh caption flashed instantly to mind: Anna Shoat, who has refused to comment.

  “Are you Henry Mattick?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Anna Shoat. I’m the—”

  “I know who you are.”

  “Of course.” She nodded, resigned to her notoriety. He looked up and down the street, to see who else might be out there to witness her arrival on his doorstep.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “They’re all gone.”

  “Who?”

  “The reporters, the cameras. First day I’ve been left in peace since it happened. May I come in?”

  “Sure.”

  He stepped back to allow entry, feeling callous and impolite. As she stepped inside he hazily realized that she, too, had been a part of his overnight dreams, although his only clear memory was that she had moved just as she was moving now—with a brisk, nimble assurance.

  Turning to follow her, he saw with fresh eyes the forlorn nature of his lodgings. The only seating was a sagging gray couch and a green corduroy easy chair. There was a scuffed coffee table, a wall-mounted television with wires dangling from the back. He’d hammered together a set of bookshelves out of unfinished pine, large enough to hold a three-month supply of reading. The ceiling had cobwebs in every corner, same as when he’d moved in, and the dingy off-white of the bare walls was a perfect match for the thin beige carpet, which was so new that it still smelled like chemicals. Make a place bleak enough and no one will want to visit. That had seemed like a pretty good plan until now. He could have used some help from Scooter, if only to demonstrate that, yes, he did have a warm and fuzzy side.

  “It’s just temporary,” he said of the house, but her eyes showed only exhaustion as she settled into the green chair. Henry took the couch.

  “Can I get you something? Coffee, maybe?”

  She shook her head.

  “I hear you’re some kind of investigator?” she said.

  “Was. And not really.”

  Now where had she learned that? Probably from Stu Wilgus, a nosy retired lawyer from Baltimore. Henry had let himself be drawn into conversation with the man a few weeks ago in the checkout line of the general store—yes, they still called it that in Poston. Henry had sensed even then that he was revealing too much.

  “Was. Okay. But supposedly you’re looking for work?”

  “I’m between jobs, but that’s by choice.”

  “Oh.”

  She nodded and put her hands on her knees, like she was on the verge of leaving. Then she sighed and sagged into the chair.

  “I ask because I’m looking for somebody who…” She paused, searching for the words. “Somebody who can help me understand this. You know, at first they wouldn’t even let me see him. Can you believe that?”

  “Willard, you mean? Your brother?”

  She looked up abruptly, eyes shining with gratitude.

  “Thank you for calling him that. My brother. The whole damn week no one else has done that. Not even the pastor. ‘What shall we say at the service about Willard?’ The police, too. ‘What are your wishes for a lawyer for Willard?’ Never once ‘your brother.’ Like we’re no longer related. I’m not even convinced he did it.” She thrust out a hand, as if to halt that train of thought. “Check that. Of course he did it. That’s indisputable. But not of his own mind. He couldn’t have. That’s why I’m here. I need someone to help me figure out why, and I’ll pay for your services.”

  “I think what you need is a doctor. A psychiatrist, maybe, to examine him.”

  “If I thought that was the answer, I’d do it in a heartbeat. But I don’t think he’s reachable that way. I’m not sure he ever has been. And after this? A closed book. Right now I’m only interested in what I can do, and my best hope is to figure out what he was up to in the days before it happened. Learn where he was, who he saw. Retrace his steps to find the trigger, the thing that set him off.”

  “The cops were no help?”

  “What do you think? And, really, why should they care? Their only job is to figure out who did it, and Willard definitely did it.”

  “What about a PI?”

  “A friend gave me a name in Baltimore. I called but he said he’d be wasting my money. When he told me his rates, I agreed. The travel expenses alone would wipe me out. So, to be blunt, that’s another reason I’m here. I’m thinking you might be cheap, or at least affordable. You won’t have to travel, for starters. I can pay seventy-five a day, plus mileage, for up to a month. I know it’s peanuts, but if you’re not making anything right now, well…”

  “Money’s not the issue.”

  She nodded, like it was the answer she’d expected. Then she exhaled loudly, seeming a little less burdened after unloading her sales pitch. It occurred to him that she hadn’t had anyone to talk to since arriving in Poston. Mom and Dad were gone, her friends were in the city. She hadn’t seen the neighbors in ages, and that left only cops, newshounds, the pastor for a church she hadn’t attended in years, the creepy funeral director, maybe an estate lawyer. By default, Henry Mattick had become her sounding board.

  Henry felt almost honored. It helped that his throbbing hangover was beginning to fade. But, for reasons of his own, he knew he wasn’t the right choice, and he wanted to find a gentle way to tell her as much.

  “I’m really not a professional.”

  “Still, it was the U.S. Attorney’s office in Baltimore, right? Isn’t that where you were working before?”

  “Stu Wilgus must have told you that.”

  “He was at the funeral. One of the few who had the guts to come.”

  Or the curiosity, Henry thought but didn’t say.

  “Well, like I told Wilgus, I wasn’t even full-time. A contract job, then I was out on my ass.”

  “Before that you worked for some congressional committee, right?”

  “Right.” He wasn’t happy she knew all this, and he must have let it show.

  “Sorry. I looked you up online.”

  “Must have looked pretty hard. Look, the gig with DOJ, mostly what I did was watch a lot of investigators do their work, but I’ve never been trained as one myself.” Not exactly true, so he hedged. “Or not really. It’s like the old ad, ‘Hi, I’m not a doctor but I played one on TV.’ ”

  “Fine, then we’ll make it fifty a day.”

  “Well, let’s not get carried away.” This finally coaxed a fleeting smile out of her. “Seriously, I’d help if I could, but I doubt there’s a single thing I could find out that you couldn’t find out on your own. Chances are your brother just snapped. I’m not saying that to discou
rage you, I’m saying it because I wouldn’t even know where to begin.”

  “With his hunting, that’s one place.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She leaned forward, renewing her pitch.

  “Last time I talked to Dad, maybe a month ago, he said Willard had started hunting on his own. It made Dad a little nervous, but he figured maybe it was good for him, a sign of independence. I asked where he went, how he got there. Dad didn’t have the slightest, which to me was kind of alarming. He never once came back with anything, but there were always a few rounds missing. And the other thing was, Dad never heard any shots. So he wasn’t hunting our land.”

  “Maybe he was just walking a long way.”

  “Dad figured he was meeting somebody with a car.”

  “Did he ask?”

  “Yes. Willard said no, but he wouldn’t look Dad in the eye, and that wasn’t like him.”

  “Who were his friends?”

  “None. He’s never had any. That’s one reason Dad didn’t push it. If he finally had a friend, why spoil it?”

  “Unless he was walking the whole way.”

  “Willard didn’t like long walks. Besides, our property’s only forty acres, and the woods run out at Hallam Road. He would’ve crossed into someone else’s land inside fifteen, twenty minutes.”

  Henry locked on to that image: Willard emerging from a stand of pines onto a gravel lane, his breathing labored, boots caked with mud and wet leaves. The thought took him back to the edge of town, where he again saw Willard with his spray can, raised on his tiptoes to log the new total. He looked up to see Anna staring at him, awaiting a response.

  “Let’s say he did go off with somebody else,” Henry said. “Even then, unless somebody saw them, or knows who it was, it’s just another dead end.”

  “So we ask around until we find somebody who saw them. Then we’re one step closer to finding out who put the idea in his head, or confused him enough to do what he did.”