by Tom Bouman
Penny didn’t use the phone much. In the previous month, she had only called her sister Rianne twice, and not within two weeks of the date. There were a few everyday texts to and from Kevin all throughout the month. Cousin Bobby got a call a few days before, but had not answered. There were, however, some strongly suggestive calls made and received on the night she disappeared, and after. At 12:37 a.m. she’d called Kevin, but either she’d hung up before he could answer or he’d chosen not to take the call. Then, at 2:18 a.m., Kevin called her phone, but left no message. That morning at 9:44 a.m., the same. At noon, you could hear Kevin deliver a raspy plea for her to call him back. He left a similar message at 5:54 p.m., and then in the evening messages from Penny’s stepmother, father, sister, and cousin Bobby arrived, each expressing their own style of worry, each with a hint of defeat in their voices. At 10:03 that night, Kevin sobbed into the phone. “I miss you,” he choked out, and the message ended. A smattering of calls came in over the next day. One that stood out because of who it was from: Andy Swales, checking in from a Pennsylvania cell number. The call would have been placed shortly after we’d met to discuss what he’d heard the night of her disappearance.
We all sat in the district attorney’s office listening to tinny voices out of the phone’s speaker, and we understood. She wasn’t with some long-lost aunt, she wasn’t shacked up somewhere in town, she had not wandered away to take stock of her life. Whatever I did now, it’d be too little, too late. Ross replayed Kevin’s message several times.
“What’s he sorry about?” he asked the room. He played it again.
Dally turned to me, impatient with the DA. “Henry, where are we on Kev’s truck? Any sign of the weapon?”
“Been busy, Sheriff.”
“Yeah,” said Ross, “Tioga County called. They want us to charge O’Keeffe and wash their hands of Heffernan. I told them we’re investigating on a couple fronts and to hold tight.”
“Binghamton PD has been over to Heffernan’s last known,” said Dally. “Some shack in Johnson City with an old girlfriend and a couple kids there, not all his, I gather. She hadn’t seen him in a few weeks, but that’s not unusual. Said he’d called and talked to his boys, would have been five days ago. She claimed not to know Penny Pellings. Or Kevin.”
Ross played Kevin’s message once more. “This would be a lot easier with a body,” he said.
“It’s been done,” said the sheriff.
“If we take O’Keeffe’s calls at face value . . .” Ross said.
“Why should we?” said the sheriff. “Here’s the story we tell. He killed her, carted her off in his car. Truck. Then he decided, hey, maybe I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in prison, sober and apart from my daughter, what do I do? I lose the body, lose the vehicle, scrub the place down. Then woe is me. I wait a little while, I get worried. I call. I make some noise here in town, and hey, something happens I don’t expect and somebody else is dead. So all the time I had to craft Penny’s disappearance is gone. What do I do? I go to the police and muddy the waters best I can. O’Keeffe’s no genius but you don’t have to be smart to do what he did. Just motivated.”
Ross nodded. “Or maybe he did her and Heffernan together, a crime of passion. Found them in town, and bang bang.”
“So wait,” I said, my brain grinding. “So, why does Heffernan end up in the river, but not Penny?”
“There’s a lot we don’t know,” said Dally. “Maybe she did.”
“It’s loose yet,” Ross said. “But the bloody phone, though. That should put the fear of god in him. I’d do a Murder One complaint for Penny and let’s see where we get. No bail, and we have an extra two weeks to find something to help us with Heffernan. We’ll get him for one or the other if it comes to it. I bet he’ll plead.” The district attorney swiveled left and right in his desk chair. “So write me the complaint for Pellings, but keep it vague. The cell is ‘blood evidence found at the home.’ Hit the domestic this past winter, bring in Swales’s account of ongoing whatnot, and inconsistent statements from the suspect, too. I’ll bring it to Magistrate Heyne, and let’s try to get him locked up this afternoon.”
Because I could approach Kev without provoking flight, it fell to me to execute the warrant. I drove to Ed’s work site in Bradford County and parked near the workers’ cars lined up in the yard, minus Kevin’s truck, of course. Cock-rock guitar sailed into the air, competing with hammer blows and the creaks and snaps of ancient iron brads pried from wood. By now the roof had been entirely removed, exposing a rib cage of rafters meeting over a trio of bents. Most of the rafters would be trash, but many of the bigger bones looked worthy. After marking Kev’s giant hat up near where two rafters met, I picked through the briars surrounding the structure and swung up the frame to the broad top plate where Ed stood peering at a joint. Clenched in his teeth was a smoldering pipe of tobacco and weed.
“Anything good?” I said.
“Passable. Passable,” Ed said, handing me the pipe, which I declined. “You here to take Kev again? Don’t be too long, now.”
“About that.”
“Oh.” Ed searched my face for answers and I tried to give him none.
“Penny?”
“I can’t say.”
“Did he?”
“He’ll need a lawyer. Can you call him down?”
We lowered ourselves to the dirt floor. During the couple minutes I had been on site, the crew had slackened. All except Kevin, who worked at his perch with a concentration approaching fury. First Ed called to him, then I did. He slumped in place, dangled for a moment with one hand clinging to a rafter, feet on the beam’s edge, body hanging over empty space. Then he came to himself and climbed down. I took no chances with a man who was breathing what might be his last free air. I handcuffed him. As I helped him into the patrol truck, the crew stopped work entirely, offering no encouragement to anyone.
We coasted east to Fitzmorris with the windows down. As we picked up speed on 189, Kevin finally spoke, so low I almost missed it. “Where’d you find her?”
JEREMIAH HEYNE was magistrate for the district including Wild Thyme Township. He was older, with a red face, a sweep of gray hair, and a pinkie ring. Not a talkative man in private life, the few times he had communicated with me in the past, it was mainly through winks. As a judge, Heyne had the reputation of a maverick or a menace or both, depending who you asked. His sense of justice was highly individual, and he was rumored to wear a buck knife under his robe.
Fitzmorris’s magistrate court was never very grand, its ceiling low, its walls covered with corporate art, and its chairs looking like they’d been filched from a church basement. Behind the bench, a picture window looked out into trees, good for bird-watching while waiting for the magistrate to get around to your case. I sat behind DA Ross, who had spread out on the prosecution-side table. He’d asked me to come, in large part, because with Heyne presiding one never knew what to expect. It was supposed to be a preliminary arraignment, the first step, where Kev would be told of the charges against him. Typically I wouldn’t be called to testify until down the line, but since Kevin already had counsel present the DA worried that Heyne might try to get everything done in one fell swoop.
Across from Ross at the defendant’s table sat Lee Hillendale, one of only two or three Holebrook County lawyers specializing in criminal defense. Hillendale was stocky, wore beautiful suits, and a lawyerly scent of gin followed him wherever he went. Good for Kev, I thought, but didn’t know how he was going to swing the fee. I’d known the lawyer for the couple years I’d worked in the county. He’d been impossible to avoid, and though he regularly put my dick in the dirt on summary hearings, there was nothing personal between us. He and his wife were friendly with Ed and Liz, and I even liked him despite his troubling sympathy for lowlifes. The first time we went head-to-head was a defiant trespass I’d brought on behalf of a little old lady in Wild Thyme, named Lynn Lawrence, against one James Magro, who had repeatedly and, yes, defiantly hunted h
er land despite NO TRESPASSING signs and vigorous shooings from the porch. Against some blurry pictures of a man who was probably Magro in the middle of a forest that could have been anywhere, Hillendale had shown Lynn a topo map of her land and the parcels surrounding it, and she’d sat there on the stand mute and embarrassed, unable to give the specific locations in the photos. Then the lawyer showed some exhibits where Lynn’s signs were actually on someone else’s parcel. It was a cheap tactic, and I said so after the hearing, after Magro had sped off acquitted and I’d bundled Lynn into her ancient Pontiac.
“I know,” Hillendale had said, contrite. “But that’s the system we have. I don’t know why I keep taking these cases; I should just start a port-a-john business instead.”
A couple months later I’d helped repossess one of Magro’s trucks for nonpayment of Hillendale’s fee. Glad to do it. Anyway, as far as I knew, that was the kind of case that Hillendale customarily tried in the courtrooms of Holebrook County. How he’d do on a Murder One, we’d see.
Sheriff’s Deputy Jackson brought Kevin into the courtroom, cuffed, still in his work clothes. He met nobody’s eye and sat with his head bowed. Magistrate Heyne swept in and we all rose without any bailiff telling us. Heyne clicked the gavel and, after peering at the complaint, commenced the proceeding.
“Commonwealth versus Kevin O’Keeffe. Mr. O’Keeffe, I’m Magistrate Jeremiah Heyne. You call me ‘Judge.’ I’m going to read these charges. Don’t interrupt. Mr. O’Keeffe?” Kevin looked up. “Don’t interrupt. If you have any questions, wait.” Heyne continued. “You’re being charged by Holebrook County Sheriff’s with the criminal homicide of one Penelope Pellings of 1183B Dunleary Road, Wild Thyme Township, and obstruction of justice. Specifically murder of the first degree, that you had a violent dispute with, and did intentionally kill Miss Pellings on May eighteenth at approximately twelve-thirty a.m. Obstruction of justice, that you concealed or destroyed evidence of the crime, to wit, Miss Pellings’s body. Do you understand these charges?”
Kevin was shaking his head. “No.”
Heyne raised his eyes to the ceiling. “What are your questions, then?”
“So you found her?”
“Kevin,” said Hillendale, gently.
“Yes, I understand. Judge.”
“Dandy. Sir, I’m going to set a preliminary hearing for you on, let’s see, June third at three o’clock p.m. Given the murder charge, there’ll be no bail, and you are remanded to county lockup.”
As Kevin returned to his cell, and Lee Hillendale walked down Main to his storefront office, flapping his suit coat open and shut in the heat, I stood on the steps of the courthouse with DA Ross and Sheriff Dally.
“Now we hope he pleas,” said Dally.
“If he did it, he will,” said Ross. “He’ll crack if he did it. Anyways, you two, we have about two weeks until prelim. Get out there, get what you can on him.”
AS I PULLED INTO the township building, the rear end of Shelly Bray’s station wagon caught my eye from around the far corner, nearest my office. I parked and took a deep breath, and waited, and approached. You asked for it, dum-dum, I told myself.
Shelly waited with one leg over the other, stretched out the driver’s-side door. She wore gym clothes and had her hair pulled back. When I walked up, she smiled and stood.
“I’ve been busy,” I explained.
“Oh, yeah?” She shooed me toward the office door, which I unlocked. She carried my boots in a paper bag.
Inside, the scent of her sweat collected around us, and my breath got short.
She turned and fumbled with the doorknob. “How the . . . how the hell do you lock this thing?”
“This has to be it,” I said. “This is the last time.”
“Lighten up,” she said.
A COUPLE DAYS earlier I had called Kevin O’Keeffe’s mother to ask if she’d seen him or his pickup lately. She’d said no, she hadn’t seen him in nearly a month. Since the truck still hadn’t turned up, I drove to Sayre to see for myself. Yvonne O’Keeffe lived in a trailer park on the west side of town. I drove up and down the rows of single-wides, but there was no yellow truck and no place to hide one. My own truck rattled from where a heat shield bolt had rusted through over the winter. It was something I needed to fix if ever I wanted to be the least bit stealthy again, and probably a clamp or a bit of wire would do. As I passed, cats bolted from various perches in the courtyard to hide under mobile homes. Three boys in a yard several trailers to my right were contemplating bicycles that had been stood upside down on handlebars and seats—practicing the ritual of caring for their vehicles. In not so many years, their knowing nods would be directed at secondhand ATVs, then maybe an old Hyundai with aftermarket headlights, a shitheap to be proud of because it was yours. I waved and called hello to them, and they froze, then scattered. It was a school day.
As I pulled up to Yvonne’s place, a young man with a buzz cut, a gold chain, and no shirt waited for me on the porch steps.
“She’s not here,” he called to me. “She’s working over to the Pilot’s. Off 17.”
“That’s okay,” I said, stepping out of the truck and walking to him. “Who’re you?”
“Brian O’Keeffe.” He stood and revealed a tattoo of an anchor and DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR on his narrow chest.
“Navy?”
“USS Theodore Roosevelt, in the Gulf the past two years. Bosun’s mate.”
“Good for you.”
“Yeah, well.” He lowered his voice. “You here about my brother? I don’t know a thing about it.”
“No?”
“Except he never did that shit. You should let him out of jail. Do your job and find his girl.” This was said with no real hostility, just weariness. “Or maybe you shouldn’t find her, I don’t know.”
“It’s not in him?”
“Oh, fuck, no. Man, listen, he’s my older brother. So why was I toe-to-toe with kids his age at school? Why was it me getting popped at home for looking dad in the eye? While he was in the bunk with headphones on, going to bed hungry? He ain’t a fighter. And now he’s finding out what that gets him.” He drained the last inch of his beer.
“You know Penny at all?”
“Little bit. Not much. They got together when I was overseas.”
“Any problems there?”
“What isn’t a problem with them two? Kev don’t tell me. I’m saying, he doesn’t tell me much.”
“You spend time with them?”
“No. I stopped by the once, hey, I’m home. He was, you know, ‘We’re trying to get the baby back,’ so on. He can’t face Ma, she died of shame, so he’s telling me this and that, they’re turning it around, so I’ll tell Ma. She—Penny—spent most of the time in the bedroom, waiting for me to leave, I guess.”
“Okay.” I cast my eye about the park once more. “So you grew up here, this where you and Kevin grew up?”
“Nah, this is where mom finally moved out to. Dad lived up to Waverly, but not for some time now. He’s in Texas.”
I gave him my phone number. “Kevin’s truck came up missing.”
Brian shrugged and looked blank.
“I don’t know what I’d do if it was my brother,” I said. “I might help him and not ask too many questions.”
“I get what you’re saying,” Brian said. “No, if he wants to pretend the world is something else, that’s his business.”
“All right. Tell your mom hello.”
“She don’t know you.” Again, the sailor said this without hostility, just a fact that he was too tired not to say.
NO TRUCK, no body, no weapon. I had been keeping myself opinion-free as to Kevin’s guilt, so as not to be disappointed. But I thought about it during yet another search of the land surrounding the trailer. Men like him use their vulnerability where another man might use charm or force. You pull someone in, you destroy them a little bit at a time, unaware even, maybe, that you’re doing it, until you are revealed and they belong to you. Destroy
ed and killed are two different things, though. Afterward I parked my truck within sight of the trailer and Andy Swales’s great stone home, where the falling sun shone magenta off a visible edge of the lake. As evening fell I listened for vibrations and continued reading my Antietam book. When the shadows began to stretch and change with the sunset, I took another turn around the property to see if anything else caught my eye, but nothing did and I went home.
MONDAY MORNING, after another slink through the woods in search of my tom, I headed to Fitzmorris to coordinate with the sheriff. He’d been deflecting his counterparts in Tioga County who were wondering where we were on Heffernan. I had little to add. Dally was also trying to push Penny’s cell phone onto some kind of mythical fast track at the Bethlehem laboratory, arguing that a life was potentially still in the balance. They’d said sure, they’d see. We stood leaning on the counter in the front of the station drinking coffee and contemplating, when Deputy Jackson rushed in.
“We need a doctor.” We followed him back to lockup. Kevin sat on the floor of his cell near the toilet; his face was placid, white, and sweat-drenched.
“Everything is all right,” he told us, as if he believed it. “You . . . step aside from . . . the way you see, step into a new channel, and they show you the way. They’re not monsters. But they’re not your friends, no. No. They’re not . . . they are you.” He looked at me. “You were right. They are you yourself. You tell yourself how to get to the place. You have to tell yourself if you don’t have help. How else can you do it?” He smiled, and then bucked backward, clocked his head against the floor, and seized.
Jackson and I held him to his bunk and I forced my wallet in between his teeth, while Dally called out an ambulance.
THAT NIGHT I sat out in the middle of the field by a fire pit I made, lacquered in bug spray and listening to the logs snap. I’d cooked a little venison steak on the camp spider, new potatoes wrapped in foil, and had a handful of the first greens of the season. I’d also smoked a small bowlful of weed. Every now and then I had to put my individuality into perspective, which is to say, I wasn’t one, or didn’t want to be. A self—a person—could hurt or kill another or disappear forever. If I wasn’t a self, then I was everything around me, and the selves who were no longer with me were with me once again. I had brought the fiddle, but it suited me to just gaze up at the galaxy and wait for shooting stars. The stars mixed with the fireflies in the tall grass, and with the high calls of peepers in the ravine, and with the bonfire’s smoke and glowing embers curling up into the air, and I belonged in the world. Having the thought brought me out of it again.