by Tom Bouman
I apologized for bothering him at work, but he dismissed it. “They’ll wonder what you’re here for, and I’ll let them. So,” he said. “So, Kevin O’Keeffe.”
“And Penny Pellings.”
“What can you tell me?” he said.
“You probably know more than I do.”
He shook his head, all innocence.
“Three nights ago,” I said. “Any memories, impressions?”
He paused a suitable interval for recollection. “There was something, yeah. It was around twelve-thirty, I remember because it woke me and I looked at the clock right then.”
“Twelve-thirty, you sure?”
“Sure,” Swales said. Then he hesitated. “More like twelve-forty? I thought it was the two of them. I have to say, I heard them fighting more often than I liked. Quarreling, I should say. It’s quiet, so you hear everything. This was a bit more rough, but it stopped, and I went to sleep. Only now . . .”
“Rough.”
“Usually it was just raised voices. This time, I don’t know, doors slamming, something maybe broke. It’s hard to sort out. I was just waking up.”
“Was there anything else different about this time?” I asked.
Swales thought about it. “This time I only heard her voice.”
“You’re sure it was her?”
“Not one hundred percent, I mean, who else could it be?”
“Did she sound angry? Frightened?”
“I don’t know,” Swales said, his face turning pink. “I’m trying to remember now. It can be hard to tell what’s going on.”
“She might have been angry or frightened.”
“Yes.”
“People use your land to get to the lake. Could it have been one of them?”
“Oh, yeah,” Swales said with a wave of his hand. “Maybe. People take the trail down, you know that. If it ever gets to be a problem, well, it hasn’t been a problem. They should be able to use the lake. Kev keeps the deadbeats away.”
I doubted that Kevin did any such thing. “Yeah what is the, ah, nature of your relationship with them two? It seems, I don’t know, odd that they’d be living there. With you. What I mean is, your house gives a certain impression. Yet here’s this trailer.”
“I do like it quiet. Maybe I should have just asked them to leave, kept the trailer nice to rent for long weekends, or, I don’t know. Got rid of it altogether. It’s where I lived when the house was being built. Roughing it. Kevin was working on the house, on Milgraham’s crew back then—I’m sure you know him—and we’d have a few beers some evenings. A great time, when that place was getting built. Never felt so free. When construction was done, O’Keeffe offered his services as a handyman, caretaker, what have you. I’m not always there, so it’s good to have someone with an eye on the place. Then they ran into trouble. What am I going to do, make it worse? Even if I wanted to, I can’t put them out now. I want a better life for them, for the baby.”
“Did you know Penny too, before they moved in?”
His eyes shifted away from mine and back. “A bit. I’d met her. Good kid. Serious.”
“Kevin comes home when, that night?”
Swales peered at the ceiling and thought. “I remember hearing him a couple hours after Penny, and thinking, Not again, you two. Yeah, definitely around then, I remember being angry because it was the second time that night.”
“And what was O’Keeffe doing at that point?”
“Crashing around in the woods, yelling for her. At that point I got out of bed and went to talk to him.”
“And what’d you say?”
“I asked him if he’d been hitting the bottle. And he said Penny was gone, and I told him to go to bed, she’d be back.”
“And what’d he say to that?”
“That I didn’t understand.” The lawyer looked pained. “I’m not sure I took him seriously. In my mind, no question she’d just taken off. And anyway,” Swales continued, “pretty soon after that, Kev got quiet.” He looked out the window, then turned to me. “So she’s . . . something happened, then.”
“We don’t know. Any regular visitors?”
“The people that go down to the lake, but I don’t really know any of them. No, not that I could say for sure. I wish I’d called you that night.”
“Any reason you didn’t?” I asked.
Swales’s face burned, and he covered it with his hands, dropped them, looked away. “Why should I feel guilty? But I do. He was over the top. He drank. They argued, so why shouldn’t she just disappear? I was angry too, being dragged out of bed.”
“And you live alone?”
“I’m divorced. Got stuck in a rut down in Scranton, saw this as an opportunity. Professionally. A new place, but I have a connection to it.”
“Anyone with you that night?”
“No.”
“I hate to pry—”
“Then don’t. Sorry, I don’t mean to be short. I was alone that night.”
I let it be. “You have a key to the trailer, right, Andy?”
“Of course I do. I think I still do.”
“And you haven’t been in there since . . .”
“No. No reason to.”
“Does Kevin have a key to your house?”
“Yes.”
“Penny?”
“Yes. She cleans once a week. It’s just me in there, but I don’t like scrubbing toilets. Anyway, they need the money more than I do.”
“You keep guns?”
“I have a .22 pistol and a .30-06 for bears. They’re locked in a closet and only I have a key. Listen, how serious is this? Any developments, you . . .”
“I will, I will. By the way, you hear anything about an altercation down at the Royal Lodges in Fitzmorris two nights ago?”
“Sir, you overestimate me.”
“But you are part owner.”
“Yes,” he said warily.
“You know this guy?” I handed him the photo of Heffernan.
“No. I don’t know much about that property, other than it isn’t doing what we thought.”
“And ‘we’ is . . .”
“‘We’ is a private company buying and selling real estate. You understand that the business is the business, and I’m limited in my ability to discuss it.”
“Well, then,” I said, “can you maybe tell me how it is you find new tenants? How’d this guy come to live there?”
“If he lived there, it’s news to me,” the lawyer said. “Casey Noonan must have . . . I don’t know. We had an ad out in the paper for a while.”
“Okay,” I said, “we’ll leave that. About Penny, you may be seeing more of me than usual by the lake, at least for a few days.”
“You can have the run of it,” he said. “Not my house, but outside, the trailer and so forth. Until we get this figured out. Tell Kev I’m thinking of him.”
I left the office, got in my truck, and headed south to Pennsylvania. Over the course of several years in Wild Thyme the DA and I had intervened with two couples where, in my view, the woman was in danger of winding up dead. In one case, the boyfriend spent some time in prison, the judge issued a protective order, and the guy never came back. In the other, Ross had arranged a suspended sentence, the husband was able to keep earning for the family, bound by the knowledge that any misstep could land him in jail. Kevin and Penny had not given me the same helpless, dangerous feeling as either of those couples. Even if they had, it’d have been tough to keep an eye on them all the time, set back into the woods as far as they were. I found it hard to believe that Kevin would be hiding something so ugly. No, I didn’t see it that way, but I’d been wrong before.
In an actual police department, a missing persons investigation proceeds on a couple tiers. First the patrolmen will run down family, friends, coworkers, and so on. If any of them offend the nostrils, detectives will step in. Being a department of one, I did it all. On my way back to Wild Thyme, I took a detour into Airy Township. It took me forty minutes to get
to the place, a gingerbread cottage halfway down a wooded valley road. I recognized the home because the entire yard had been devoted to flowers. By this time of spring, the daffodils had given way to a crowd of white tulips and purple phlox low to the ground. I have a soft spot for anyone who works so hard on a flower garden; you can’t eat what you grow, you just make yourself and everyone else happy by it. My wife was that way when she lived.
I knocked at the front door and waited, but nobody came. From the rear of the house I heard the rhythmic shush of a blade sliding into earth. I followed it and found an older woman in a floppy hat, her back to me. With a short-handled shovel she was digging into a patch of earth covered in black plastic sheeting and bordered by loose bricks. Beside her were several tomato plants ready to go in.
I called out hello. She was startled, then mildly puzzled, but pulled off a glove, shook my hand, and introduced herself as Jillian Pellings. I guessed her age at around fifty. “Reese is in town, at the gym.”
“Your husband?”
“Yes,” she said, warily. “Swimming laps. What’s wrong? He’s okay?”
“I work out of Wild Thyme. I’m here because Kevin O’Keeffe—”
“Oh, boy. Yes, he called.”
“He’s concerned about Penny. She . . . he’s under the impression she’s missing, so I’m wondering . . .”
“I haven’t seen her in, oh, at least a month.”
“Heard from her? Are you close?”
“We used to be. I’m her stepmother, you see, I have been since she was eight. Listen, you better come over and sit down a minute if you have questions.”
Jillian led me to a broad slab of stone pushing out from the hillside and shaded by several oak trees. Around us, hosta, geranium, and a haze of lamium gave the impression of flowers sneaking from the yard to a dance in the woods. We sat on rickety teak chairs and she removed her hat and fanned herself with it.
“I’ve always liked your garden. Passing by.”
“Oh, thank you. We get strangers stopping. Sometimes they’ll get out and give themselves a tour.”
“So today’s no different.”
She smiled. “It’s fine, Officer.”
“Henry. So, I’m sorry. You and Penny used to be close, and . . .”
Jillian knitted her brow. “When first I met her and her sister, they were sweet kids with a tough row to hoe. An alcoholic mother. On pills, too. Abby was her name, Abby Chase Pellings? After the divorce she went back to Abby Chase? Does that name mean anything to you?” It did, but I could not recall why, so I nodded and she continued. “As a child you need to count on your parents to be there for the little things and the big. Maybe especially the little things. The other kids at school, around here, they noticed the difference, they had to. Penny adored her mother, my god, why wouldn’t she, the woman was just like a teenager. Abby hung around for a while after Reese sobered up and divorced her. There was this time—you know how kids have birthday parties at school, the parents bring something in for the class?”
I nodded.
“Well, when Penny was turning ten, Abby insisted that she’d take care of it. And she was in bad shape then, but she made these cupcakes and the kids got sick. Like, to the emergency room. Nobody ever figured out what it was, but some kind of taint was suspected, some . . . taint? Penny was heartbroken. She couldn’t go back to school for weeks, she was so ashamed. To think about it now . . . Abby was on her way out by then. After that, she was more or less gone for years. So anyway, long story short, I was there for Penny and her sister, big and small. And we were close.” Jillian shook her head as if angry with herself about something. “Listen, Penny had some hard things in her life, and obviously it just got harder in high school. There got to be a point where I couldn’t help. It wasn’t just the staying out, it wasn’t just the boys. There was just a, a break in her life, and after that, she didn’t think someone like me could understand.”
“What about her father, would he know where she is?”
“I wish Reese had done more for her. So does he. We asked to take Eolande, but we’re older now, and on a budget. Mostly CPS felt that giving Eolande to us would be the same as giving her back to Penny and Kev, that we couldn’t be tough with them. That’s probably right. It’s more painful with Eo raised by a stranger, more of a prod to clean up and get her back. And I believe Sarah loves her and can do for her until then.”
“Sarah Cavanagh, the foster mom?”
“Right,” she said. “Reese wouldn’t know any more than I would. Penny tended bar in Binghamton for a while, a place off Main Street called Stingy Jack’s? She got fired from there.”
I wrote the name down. “Any particular friends you know of? Might she be with her mother now?”
Jillian looked sharply at me. “That’s not funny.” My bafflement must have showed, and she softened. “I thought you knew? Abby was killed eight years ago. Found, oh, she was found under a tarp by the train tracks downtown. In Binghamton. She’d been stabbed. Maybe it was drug-related, or maybe something to do with a—a man. She’d had some arrests by then. They never found the killer.”
Open murders in the region are scarce enough that as a cop I should have known. But eight years ago I was in Wyoming living a different life, one that like Abby Chase’s got cut short. Or I suppose I was more like Penny, with the flow of my life dammed and redirected by the death of another. Anyways, Jillian gave me names and addresses for Penny’s sister and a cousin, Bobby, from the mother’s side.
I left the house and its flower garden with a slightly better idea of where Penelope Pellings might have gone, and of who she was. I put in a call to the sheriff’s department and got Deputy Jackson, and filled him in on anything I considered useful. He knew of Abby Chase’s murder but had not made the connection between her and Penelope Pellings, which made me feel slightly less like a chump.
I drove ahead of a cloud of dust on Owens Road to see Sarah Cavanagh. Her family owned a small patch of land next to a onetime farm that had been leased and drilled for gas. In the front yard of a yellow ranch house, two boys, maybe eight and ten, were walloping each other with homemade toy axes wrapped in duct tape. Sarah, a steely woman nearly six feet tall with a mistrustful way, emerged from the house carrying baby Eo. “Boys,” she called over her shoulder. She beckoned me inside.
Eolande O’Keeffe had grown a haze of blond hair since last I’d seen her. She was still not as pudgy as I’d like, but I knew very little of babies. As Sarah Cavanagh and I talked, she held Eo in her lap, and the girl struggled to free herself. Eventually Sarah let her slip to the floor, where she dragged herself under the kitchen table like a commando.
“She’s a few steps behind,” said Sarah. “My boys were walking at one, before one. She’s had a catheter procedure for her stenosis, they’re keeping an eye on that. But she’s a happy kiddo, aren’t you, girl?”
“How often do you see the mother?”
“A couple hours every other weekend. They don’t often miss it, even with the CPS woman hovering. Kev will bring Eo, like, a bouquet of wildflowers. An interesting stick. A CD he likes. Donuts. Have you educated yourself about your daughter’s health conditions? Did you stick with the courses? No, you did not.”
“And Penny?”
“She’s an odd one. Standoffish, even with her own kid. I don’t doubt she loves her, but. The problem ain’t getting them to show up.” Sarah ducked under the table to retrieve the child. “I haven’t wanted to say, because at some point it’s like a dog pile on them, but she’s been in my house.”
“Pardon?”
“This was back maybe two months? We had a thaw. I woke up because I heard something, Eolande sounded different, I mean, she’s fussy, a bad sleeper, so it’s unusual for her to be awake but not yelling her little head off, right, kid? I went to her room, she wasn’t in her crib, and I freaked. I ran downstairs, and there she was in the middle of the floor, like, what? Mud everywhere. As soon as it got light, I put Eolande in the car seat
and charged over to their place, ready to raise hell. Kev wouldn’t let me see Penny, she’s sick, he said, he doesn’t know what she did but she won’t do it again. He begs, says it’ll be the end. I say maybe it should be. But I’m a softy.”
“You think they could ever care for her?”
“Not a chance,” she said. “This baby girl’s stuck with me, right, hon?”
I called Eolande’s caseworker in Fitzmorris, Cassidy Reynolds, and within the bounds of confidentiality she had much the same assessment of Penny and Kevin—sweet, helpless, a little deluded about what Eolande would need. She’d had no sense of a relapsing addiction or violence in the home. What did anyone know?
I HAD AN INVITATION to join Ed and Liz and their two kids for supper. The Brennans’ gentleman farm had a view south to the next ridge, where the sun bounced off a barn’s metal roof, the bright spot like a leaping fish stuck in time. Liz liked to watch birds, and I found her on the porch behind a pair of binoculars, watching a few white-breasted nuthatches hop around on their ancient Harrison apple tree. The kids raced around the yard. I slipped inside, found a beer, and joined Liz. Flitting about high in their Douglas fir was a cedar waxwing, which she pointed out to me. I love a cedar waxwing. So perfect and aloof, on its own business.
“So,” she said, giving me a glance from over top of her binoculars, “Ed says you hauled Kevin away from the site.”
“I can’t talk about it.”
“Oh, come on.” She set the binoculars down. “I’m sick not knowing.”
“I don’t know either. I don’t think he hurt Penny. But Lizzy,” I said, “he may not be who we thought he was.”
“Clearly.” She raised the binoculars, but the bird had flown. “We don’t owe this guy. He works for Ed, that’s it. A lot of people do. And he shows up on our doorstep, of all places.”