Fateful Mornings

by Tom Bouman

  “No.”

  “You’d be saving your own life,” the sheriff concluded.

  O’Keeffe said nothing and gazed up through the basement window. He couldn’t have seen but a line of grass, sky, a couple tree branches. He settled in to the nothing.

  Kevin O’Keeffe, no more than a gentle good-timer. I’d first met him one morning a few years ago, back when I was moonlighting construction for Ed. I was pulling into a site in south Susquehanna County, and there was Kevin, long-haired, pretending to make love to the rear bumper of his yellow truck. He was a young man then, actually young. Not now, whatever his age was, couldn’t be twenty-five. What did he know, and what did he do, who was he? Perhaps he was just finding out.

  “So, one last time. You get home,” I said. “And Penelope’s not there. Is that unusual?”

  “Not . . . no. She went out sometimes.”

  “Where?”

  Nothing.

  “So you get home, was her car there? She has a car?”

  “Yes. Yes.”

  “But the place was a mess,” I said. “Was that unusual?”

  “No, man, like I said, the doors—”

  “So what on earth—”

  “There was hair.” His voice lifted.

  “Hair,” I said.

  “Her hair, on the floor. I didn’t find it until the next afternoon. It was bloody. Jesus.”

  “How much blood?”

  “There was enough,” he said. “At first I thought . . . it wasn’t real. I’d been seeing things. Getting confused? Anyways, this shit was real.”

  Sheriff Dally gave the signal and we both stepped outside. “He say anything like that to you before now?”

  “First I heard of any blood.”

  The sheriff stepped into his office to hear Patrolman Hanluain’s report on area hospitals: still no gunshot wounds. He also had a brief phone conversation with the district attorney and checked in with the Marine Corps vet we used as a search-and-rescue diver. I stood guard outside the conference room door. Dally reappeared and we went back in.

  Kevin sighed and said, “I’m not saying anything by this. Not a damn thing. But if you get out to my place, by the time you get there and let me know—you let me know you’ve seen it—I might remember something about last night.”

  AFTER A HALF-HOUR drive that took fourteen minutes, I was standing in front of Kevin and Penelope’s trailer. Four massive oaks framed the place. The trees had begun to leaf, and the canopy blotted out most of the sun, but let coins of daylight through to shudder on the lawn. White lattice had once covered the space between the trailer’s floor and the ground, but had been torn partly free; my flashlight caught nothing out of place under there, some beer cans scattered across hard-packed dirt. Two towels served as curtains to the bedroom; the other windows were covered by gappy venetian blinds. Behind several acres of woods to the right, the landowner’s stone house loomed. I scraped my boot tread with a small screwdriver, pulled on some rubber gloves, and stepped inside the trailer.

  The place had been scrubbed clean. Or I should say, I saw no blood spatters, no broken plates or furniture, no sign of struggle. Stacks of magazines and books strewn around, sure, dirty dishes in the sink, a thick coat of dust and dead cluster flies atop every high-up surface. But the floor was spotless. I did catch an odd, overwhelming scent of metal and smoke mixed.

  The accordion door separating the living room and kitchen was in rough shape, but intact. Same with the door between the kitchen and bedroom. A bedsheet, pilled and yellowed, was stretched over three corners of their mattress. There were small piles of books on both sides of the bed. In one corner, untouched, was a crib with a mobile hanging over it, a mobile of winged fairies. The door to the bathroom was intact too, the one that was supposed to be kicked to pieces. It wasn’t particularly new or old, just a cheap door. I opened and shut it. It worked fine, minus a little upward tug to get it to sit in the frame.

  I lowered myself to the bedroom floor, put an eye along it. No blood. I noticed the dried lines of a recent mopping and the smell of bleach. I sifted through some dust bunnies in the corner, but found nothing like the bloody hair Kevin described. The kitchen floor had been wiped clean too. It took me twice around the linoleum pattern before I found it: a drop of dried blood smaller than a shirt button near the refrigerator. It wasn’t fresh, but it was something. Elongated, not the sun shape of a vertical drop. With my knife, I cut around it and baggied the piece of linoleum. It took a third trip around to find a small shard of china that had apparently slid to the wall and come to rest between it and the edge of the linoleum.

  The sponge mop they had in the corner was dry and curling away from its metal mount. There were the usual sprays and powders under the sink.

  Outside, I scuffed at the lawn between the trailer and the driveway, in which was parked a rusted compact I took to be Penny’s. In the woods, I took two loops around the trailer, stepping over fallen logs and pushing aside low branches covered in buds about to burst open. Swales’s land was so steep and uneven that, apparently, the Irish dairy farmers and tanners who had settled Wild Thyme never bothered to clear it for pasture, or maybe only cleared it once, long ago, and gave up. Every now and then there was a shallow rocky pit, now covered in a thick parchment of dead leaves, where long ago someone had hauled out shale for a wall or foundation. I walked to and fro from Swales’s, looking for any kind of path, finding none.

  After placing a seal on the door, I walked up to Swales’s massive front entrance and knocked, then rang the bell. Nobody answered, so I wandered around back to the kitchen door. I wanted to knock and talk, do a little peeping in the windows, maybe. The lights were off, the kitchen tidy and without ornament.

  The path down to the lake was well trod and strewn with beer cans. I pulled on gloves and bagged every piece of trash and cigarette butt I saw. The sun rippled bright gold across the lake from the east, cutting through mist and warming me inside and out. In the small clearing, ashes drifted in a fire ring; I went through them with a stick, found broken pieces of a liquor bottle. On the way back up, I scanned the forest floor, side to side, one step per second.

  I called Dally and briefed him. He handed the phone over to Kevin. “I’m here,” I said.

  “What do you see?”

  “Nothing. Nothing unusual.”

  “What? No, I mean, how do I know you’re there?”

  “Let’s see,” I said, scanning the trailer’s exterior. “There’s like a blue-green tie-dyed towel on the second window to the right of the door.”

  “How could you not see?”

  “Kev. I’m here, but I can’t see what I can’t see.”

  “All right. The Royal Lodges, up to Pine Street. Middle building, top floor.”

  ON PINE STREET, three shotgun apartment houses were stuck in the back teeth of Fitzmorris, home to some of the lowest of the community. The Royal Lodges. Not all bad people but very poor people, folks whose next step down the ladder would be a long-term motel stay, and then who knows. On the unmowed courtyard between two of the buildings, bright yellow plastic toys lay strewn, along with fast-food litter and some empties. The main hallway door was unlocked and I stepped inside to a fume of dog and dog shit. As I placed my feet on the carpeting, one after the other, I could almost see the fug rising up to meet me. Behind a wall on the first floor, two dogs bellowed.

  The buildings were three stories tall and the apartment I sought was on the third floor. With each story the odor fell away and quiet settled into the building. Apartment 3A’s door stood open about six inches, so I went in. What I found there was, again, nothing. Linoleum flooring, recently cleaned, peeling up in corners. No furniture, no mystery medicine behind the bathroom mirror, no hair in the drains, no bags of trash, no nothing. There was a back door that led to a balcony and an exterior staircase. A tall oak tree had laid a limb across the balcony’s railing.

  I knocked on the neighboring apartment’s door, no answer. Nor did anybody appear to be h
ome on the second floor. By the time I got to ground level, a man was waiting for me in the hall. He was about fifty, fat as a tomato, greasy as a pig on a spit. He had a ponytail. “I saw your truck,” he said. “You’re too late.”

  We introduced ourselves; his name was Shepcott, a precision machinist currently between jobs. “So about last night,” I said.

  “Last night, and every other night before that for a damn month. People stomping up and down the stairs, jigaboo music, real unfriendly kids. They usually don’t play with me, they have that much sense. There was a fight last night, in the middle of the night, now, and before long up comes a white van. And they’re up there throwing furniture and shit off the back stair. I come out to say what the fuck, and this kid, he couldn’t have been twenty, takes his hand and pushes me right in my face. Right back into my apartment there. They’re stomping up and down stairs, but damn if I can find my piece before they’re gone. Everything up there, gone.”

  “Yeah,” I said, processing. “Yeah. You get any names?”

  “Nah. The one who was there most was just an ordinary kid, you know, but dressed for the ghetto. Tattoos up his arms. Nobody got any mail or nothing.”

  “You complain ever? Call the sheriff’s, or, who’s the landlord, Casey Noonan?” Noonan was a retired lawyer who owned the bulk of the rental properties in Fitzmorris.

  “I tried calling Noonan. You know, what the fuck, who’d you let in here? I know everyone in this town, I don’t know that guy up on three. What does he tell me? He don’t even own the building anymore. Some group bought it last year. So I said, who’ve I been paying rent to for the past year, then? Says this company whatever, they kept him on as a property manager. He ain’t been doing much managing other than taking my rent every month, cash. Other people moved out. The Covilles, nice people, they moved. Chris Parsons, he moved in with his brother’s family, that ain’t going too well.”

  “Last night,” I said, shaking my head to clear the clutter.

  “Yeah, there was a fight.”

  “What’d you see, you hear anything unusual, like a gunshot? Any women?”

  “You know, might could be,” he said. “Somebody shot?”

  “Just asking.”

  “You don’t think gunshot, you think a door slamming, whatever. I mostly just hear footsteps, footsteps on the stairs all hours. Last night, could be. Could very well be. I would say so, yeah. As to women? I don’t particularly notice. Whoever does go up there, they don’t never stay long. But you’ll know why that is.”

  “Why?”

  “They’re selling shit up there. Ain’t you the cop?”

  I gave Shepcott my number and walked out.

  “WELP,” I SAID to Dally, leaning against the wall of his office while the sheriff finished a sandwich in four bites. “Something happened.”

  “Hell,” he said.

  I told him about the two places I’d seen, both scoured, neither right.

  “So O’Keeffe is lying, or he’s only telling part of it. Or he doesn’t even know what he knows.”

  “Do an alert on the girl?”

  “Yeah, get me a description and we’ll send it out. I’ll call New York and have them do one. Release something to the news stations too,” he said. “We got any kind of name for the tenant?”

  I shrugged. “I’ll talk to Noonan, see what we can find out about the new owners.”

  I set a pen and pad down in front of Kevin where he sat at the table, and told him to work on Penny’s measurements and distinguishing marks. Five-one, a hundred and ten pounds, brown hair brown eyes, and a fairy tattoo on the inside right ankle. Or was it the left? He had a picture on his phone that I had him email to me.

  “You saw my place,” he said.

  “Yup.”

  “Royal Lodges, too.”

  “Yup.”

  “Well? I’ve been sitting here.”

  “You got a name on the occupant down to the Lodges?”

  “Uh, no, he went by Mikey, I think. You find anything?”

  “How did Penny know him?”

  “I don’t know, town. Work.” By this, I assumed Kevin meant Binghamton, New York, just north of the border. “She worked a couple bars, he did too. He moved out here, I don’t know, a couple months ago. Hung out a bit here and there.”

  “What do you think of him?”

  “Ah, he’s a prick. Drives a little lime-green car, neon-pink lights that shine on the ground? Not someone who likes a small town. I guess he and Penny had that in common. Everywhere he went, someplace better to be. Plus he dressed like an idiot, like, football jerseys, big jeans.” Kevin tapped his fingers. “I need a beer. Something.”

  I left the interview room and found Deputy Jackson at a computer, scrolling through a data table.

  “Green car,” I said. “Green car, pink lights, aftermarket lights around the undercarriage, you see that around town? Driver name of Mikey?”

  “Seen it. Wondered. Now I know.”

  “Last name?”

  Jackson shrugged.

  Sheriff Dally came out of the office. “Henry,” he said, “follow me. Ben, make sure Mr. O’Keeffe has everything he needs?”

  “I’ll keep an eye on him,” said the deputy.

  The sheriff and I took the two flights of stairs to District Attorney Ross’s wood-paneled office. Ross, that retiring balding burgher of Fitzmorris, held open the door and waved us in. He was tall and bespectacled and dressed in a yellow polo shirt, probably for a late afternoon on the golf course. We sat in leather chairs and Dally filled the county lawyer in on the events of the morning. Ross listened, betraying nothing.

  “Do you need anything from me?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Dally. “I was going to ask you the same thing.”

  “We’d never get what you’ve got past prelim, let alone make it out at trial. If these people are dead, we need bodies. It can be done without, but with no weapon, no witnesses, no reason to kill this girl . . . What’s the history, there’s something, right?”

  Ross didn’t handle the baby Eolande case; it had been a part-time assistant DA. “They had a baby,” I said.

  “Oh,” said Ross, catching on. “The bottle?”

  Eolande had been born small, with a struggling heart. They’d taken her away after blood work showed buprenorphine in her system. Penny had a prescription to help her kick some opioid or other, and the thinking was she’d laced Eolande’s formula to get her to sleep. Child Protective Services had removed the baby and handed her over to an older single mother, also living in Wild Thyme. Penny had since cleaned up and seen her mistake, so could they give her baby back? Doctors thought that Eolande’s intellect would be slow to develop and that she’d have special needs. Before she could return to her parents, there were classes to take and habits to master.

  “Is it worth it to us to keep Kevin?” Dally thought aloud. “Wear him down?”

  “He doesn’t even know what he did,” said Ross. “We don’t know what happened, we’re hitchhiking under the big top here. Find us some evidence.”

  “It’d help us more with him out in the world,” I said. “He’s lost his truck. That’s got to mean something. Find the truck, and . . .”

  “Yeah. The gun. Maybe even the girl, or something. And we’ll keep an eye on him, see where he leads us.”

  “Right,” said Ross. “Let’s not take this one out of the oven too soon.”

  Dally turned to me. “You busy?”

  I LED KEVIN out into the afternoon sun. “That’s it?” he said. “That’s all you need?”

  “We got alerts out here and in New York.”

  “What happened with Mikey?”

  “Jesus Christ, Kevin, you probably missed. Count your blessings. Let’s go find your truck.”

  We did not find the truck. In my vehicle, we covered the ridge where the Brennans lived, the Royal Lodges and their surroundings, and all points in between. It was evening by the time we bumped up the driveway to Kevin’s
trailer. I parked on the edge of the overgrown yard.

  “Listen,” I said, “I don’t know how you lose a whole yellow truck. There was nobody with you last night?”

  “No. You know,” he said, “if Penny was a kid, or like a citizen, the whole state would be out looking for her by now. But she’s not a kid, she’s just a girl without no money. She still needs your help. She deserves it. And you won’t give it. You guys are some fucking cops, man.”

  “We got alerts out, Kevin.”

  “You can’t just leave me here where it happened.”

  “Get some sleep. You’ll feel better.”

  “Sleep?” Kevin gestured to the car in the driveway. “Look, where was she supposed to go without her car?” It was a good point. I walked with him to the trailer’s front door, where he stood shaking his head. “Never seen the floors this clean before. Whoever did this, he took her. You find something of his, you can find her too.”

  “Kev,” I said, not very patiently.

  “You wait. Okay, you fuckin . . . you wait right there.” He disappeared inside. I heard him rummaging, and then silence. “Henry! In here, you got to see this!”

  I followed his voice to the bedroom, where he stood rooted.

  “Henry,” he said. “This ain’t my door. This ain’t my bathroom door, man.”

  I looked at the cheap composite hanging on its hinges, your typical hollow crap.

  “Penny, she painted ours. She painted a scene on it, the lake, the hills, for the baby. She was a good artist, man. Come on, you got to see.”

  “Kevin.”

  “Come on.”

  “Kevin, you could’ve replaced this anytime. I don’t know if it means anything.” But to look in his eyes gave me an odd feeling.

  “Jesus Christ.” He yanked the false door open, went into the bathroom, stood on the toilet, and popped up a tile. He reemerged holding a black glasses case, which he held out to me.

  I took it and flipped the clamshell open.

  “She’d never go anywhere without that. First time I found one, I took it away, broke it. The next time, she fought me. Scratched me up. Time after that, she said she’d go out and get what she needed from someone else, and I didn’t like the sound of that. I didn’t want her sharing.”