Fateful Mornings

by Tom Bouman

  A watch of white gold lying on a bedside table. A naked man from the back, silhouetted in a bathroom doorway, and in the foreground, the form of a woman I took to be Penny herself, stretched out on tangled sheets, also naked. The man was not Kevin and the bedroom was not the trailer’s; the furnishings were too fine, the light too soft, the bed too large and white. For good measure, Penny had taken some other images from that bedroom, including art on the walls. And then a self-­portrait of just her face, her dark hair swimming around her in a large white bathtub. Next was a series that, per the Bethlehem lab, had been sent to Penny’s phone by another device. In this series, Penny was featured first giving oral sex and, from there, other acts. We saw very little of the man in the photos, but from the hints we got he was younger than Kevin or the other figure pictured, and in an unfamiliar living room.

  “You don’t like to see that,” Ross said for something to say, closing out the last of the photographs and leaning back in his chair. “And yet.”

  “It’s a motive,” said the sheriff. “She was stepping out.”

  I drew breath to speak and stopped myself. Ross cut his eyes sharply in my direction and said what I was thinking. “Hillendale’s going to say it could easily have been one of these guys, or even yet another, with motive and opportunity. A jealous lover, whatnot. It goes both ways.”

  “Who are these guys?” the sheriff asked. “Could this one be Heffernan?” he said, pointing to the second series of photos. “We should send these up to Tioga County, see if they can match him up.”

  “Can we go back to Heffernan’s girlfriend with this?” I asked. “Talk to her again?”

  “Oof, you want to have that conversation, go ahead,” said Dally.

  “Hillendale wants a discovery conference this week, so he’s going to see these,” the district attorney said. “And I’d be interested to put them in front of Kevin, see what his reaction is. We haven’t got Buckles. So Hillendale will ask for a continuance and get it, and we’ll be running around doing his work for him. Or, I should say, you all will,” meaning me and Dally and whatever troopers we could rope in.

  We parted ways and I headed out. I patrolled a fair amount in spring and summer, usually on a wooded hill up a dirt road where it intersected with 37. Sometimes I’d leave the vehicle and find a stream to put my feet in and listen to the water click the rocks, and I’d snooze until the radio woke me up or I felt guilty enough to make myself useful. There was this one ravine, I don’t know whose land it was, but there were no houses nearby and nobody ever told me not to go there. You cut down a steep slope and you’ll find at the bottom a carpet of moss and a creek going through it. I went there and took my shoes off and was content. My cell phone chimed. It was, of course, a text from Shelly Bray, the only human being who ever texted me. Her visit to the station the other day had made me know that I should not continue with her if I valued my job and cared what people thought of me. But she had also made clear that she was not going to take my no for an answer, nor my silence. What better place for the final conversation than this neutral ground, this pretty glade? A place to say goodbye. I told her where I was.

  It wasn’t long before I heard her car pull up behind mine on the road overhead. I watched as Shelly swung herself down, tree trunk by tree trunk. She wore hiking boots, shorts, and a V-neck T-shirt. She smiled when she saw that I saw her, and though it was my instinct to discourage her, she looked happy and I liked her and was glad to see her. I smiled back and waved.

  By the creekside, she put her hands on her hips and glanced around at the fluttering sunlight through aspen leaves, the stream, my bare feet. “Make many arrests down along the creek?”

  “Creek isn’t going to police itself.”

  Somewhere nearby a robin reasoned with itself and a wood thrush sang, Frito Lay. Shelly settled down beside me, nestled in, and I felt the weight of her breasts, free beneath her shirt. “I’m glad you answered.” She kissed my neck and began to work at my belt with her hands.

  “We’ve got to talk. I’m serious.”

  “There’s time. God, you’re always thinking. Can’t you just.”

  I’ve got to tell you something. As Shelly tugged my gear and clothing away from me, I was saying to myself, Why not, why not, why not. I say that to myself. I’m a person, and we need things. Why not. And when she in three or four simple motions stood, pulled off her own clothing, enclosing herself within the forest, with me, without the flow of time, I kept thinking it, Why not, why not. We made use of the glade. And I remember the very moment that I learned what I had to tell. Shelly lay on her side on a flat, mossy rock, one leg over my shoulder, looking at my face and trailing a hand in the stream. I knew I didn’t have long. She closed her eyes and reached a hand between her legs. The feeling was life itself where we connected and there was something blameless in it, and that felt new. And suddenly I was overcome, nearly, by a new kind of guilt, or an old guilt made new again. Shelly had been no threat to my wife, my Polly. And then she was. And that was the answer why not. She arched, and I came, and we lay side by side. I couldn’t end things there.

  Back at the station, I put a call in to Francis Sleight to see what, if anything, had been done on our various cross-border matters. The lieutenant wasn’t in and I didn’t leave a message. I received an email from Lee Hillendale, saying he’d spoken with Casey Noonan and learned little more than what Noonan had told me. An LLC fronted by Andy Swales had bought out a number of his properties, including a piece of land with a new house in Airy Township, unoccupied. A search of the registry returned only the name of the company, Ton L, LLC, and a Scranton street address. None of the members were named.

  But around lunchtime I did get a visitor from upstate. A knock on the door from Penny Pellings’s uncle Ron Chase, large and sagging. He shambled in and took a chair unbidden. And though he greeted me genially, there was something aggressive in him, like he owned the place. I asked him what had brought him out all this way, having a notion of what the answer would be.

  “You know, I was just curious what’s been happening with the Penny thing, and then I thought, why not just head out there and see some of the boys from the squad?” By this I took him to mean the Wild Thyme Volunteer Fire Company. “See how everything’s getting along.” No mention of his son Bobby, who I’d seen arrested in the First Ward the other night.

  “Yeah. Well, we’ve got some active, uh, ongoing . . .” I flipped through some papers on my desk. “Anything new on your end?”

  Chase’s eyes narrowed. “You know very well.”

  “So you talked to Bobby?”

  “Yeah, I talked to him. He was behind glass on a damn phone, surrounded by all the finest niggers in town.”

  “Hey. How do you want this conversation to go?”

  “What do you want me to say? I’m his father. And I want to know what the—what’s happening.”

  “Even if I knew a thing, I couldn’t tell you.”

  “You were there.”

  I shrugged.

  “Admit it. Bobby described you exact.”

  “All right. Yeah. I didn’t know it was him at the time, but.”

  “Who was he with?”

  I tried for a mix of pity and irritation, and kept my mouth shut.

  “What was he doing? You see him do a thing wrong? I know they got him charged on, uh, drug conspiracy. But this prostitution thing, this underage girl . . .”

  I repeated my last answer.

  “Listen, I can’t talk to no Binghamton cops. They’re pissing in my face. But I think you understand. Bobby’s not one of them. He’s one of us.”

  “He is?”

  The old man cursed me and stormed out.

  CHARLES MICHAEL HEFFERNAN’S girl Vicki Jelinski lived with their children in a two-family home in Johnson City, down where the houses end, across from a concrete contracting business. Mac trucks and flatbeds in corrugated metal stables, all going to rust behind a chain-link fence. To the north, Highway 17. To the sout
h, a railroad track cut a green path through the city, same line that ran through the First Ward.

  The house itself was shingled in yellow asphalt, with some pieces missing to reveal a layer of brown beneath. I looked at the doorbell, looked at the file in my hand, which contained printouts of some of the explicit images from Penelope Pellings’s cell phone. The Tioga County coroner had matched one of the unidentified men in the photo to Heffernan’s corpse using forearm tattoos—it was him, no doubt. But his ex didn’t know anything about it, and I had been tasked with getting all I could out of her, anything useful. I had shown up during school hours, hoping to avoid any complications from kids being home. What a thing.

  I rang the bell. Vicki herself answered, unsurprised. Her hair was slicked in place with some kind of gel and dyed purple and red. She had a baby on her hip.

  “Come in,” she said. “Nothing I say’s going to be any different than what I told the other cops before. ” Her voice was deep and round and unhurried, and she spoke in a near-monotone. The baby stared at me, silent and unknowable.

  The house smelled like fried eggs and was littered with bright plastic toys. Framed photographs of four children decorated the walls and shelves, including one professional portrait showing Heffernan neatened up and in the role of father. I saw nothing that would indicate a man’s permanent presence in the home.

  Vicki laid the baby on a blanket on the floor and took a seat on the sofa, and pointed me toward a leather chair that had been scratched by a cat.

  “I don’t know his friends, I don’t know why anybody wanted to kill him, and I didn’t do it. I was working,” she said.

  “Where is it you work?”

  She named a chain restaurant on the parkway. “My ma helps with the kids,” she said. “He was good giving us money, but he’s not the home type.”

  “He has, what, two kids?”

  “Yeah. She’s his. Daniella,” she said, gazing at the infant lolling on the floor. “And a son, Colin. My other two boys are older, like eight and ten.”

  “She’s a sweetie. He get along with the other kids’ father?”

  “They don’t know each other.”

  “Would he have any other children?”

  She looked alarmed at the suggestion, but said nothing.

  “But, he saw other women, and you, you two weren’t exclusive, I’m saying.”

  “When he was around, he was with me.”

  I nodded, but didn’t understand her answer. “So Mikey, that’s what he went by, he worked in food service? That how you met?”

  “He sold drugs.”

  I laughed.

  “He’s dead, so why lie? And you got to know that about him already, being a cop. I don’t know who he did business with. I wouldn’t tell you if I did.”

  I looked down at the file on my lap, then back up at her. “I just want to understand what your relationship was. You’re not aware he saw other women?”

  “I don’t know.” I heard vulnerability.

  “The name Penelope Pellings mean anything? Penny?”

  Vicki’s eyes widened. “No,” she said.

  I didn’t believe her. I looked at the folder in my lap again. “What would it mean to you . . . what would it mean if I told you we knew he was stepping out?”

  “What would it mean?” Vicki’s voice raised in pitch and volume. “He’s them kids’ father. He’s dead. What do you want? What’s it mean to you?”

  “I want to know who killed him and why.”

  “He got killed over some whore? That what you’re trying to say?”

  “I don’t know, hon. I think maybe.”

  “He was in the business he was in.”

  “Yes.” I stood to leave, the photographs hidden in the file under my arm. “If there’s anything more I should know . . .”

  She showed me to the door. I looked up and down the street and saw, in a parked sedan, a man watching Vicki’s house. I got in my patrol truck and idled a moment, then pulled away. The sedan followed me all the way back downtown and then passed once I pulled up to the bay doors of the police station. I didn’t get a good look at the driver and he turned the corner and disappeared before I could follow.

  Since I was near enough, I stopped by Carmichael & Williams. I had no appointment and didn’t want one. It cost me nearly an hour waiting in the lobby until a secretary led me to Swales’s office. The lawyer waved me in and I shut the door and sat, and took a moment to look him over, without hostility or judgment. He was too self-contained to break the silence. His face betrayed very little, but there was something he couldn’t quite keep inside himself, some haze of rude health rising through his shirt.

  I opened the file and took out the photographs that concerned him, and set them on his desk. He didn’t look down.

  “What am I going to see there?”

  “It’s nothing you don’t know.”

  He reached out his left hand and his shirt cuff slid back to reveal a white gold watch. He took Penny’s nude self-portrait and stared at it awhile. “I’m going to miss her. She’s dead, isn’t she?”

  I said nothing.

  “So you tell me, Officer. You’re a lonely divorced guy and you had some pretty young girl cleaning your house. And for whatever reason, one morning she comes into your bed. And she does things for you . . .”

  “For whatever reason.”

  “Things that wake you up. For whatever reason. She’s not feeling loved at home—”

  “Come on, Andy.”

  “No, I mean it. That and, I don’t know, she has hopes for a bigger world. For herself. I don’t love what that maybe says about me, but that must have been . . . somewhere on her mind.”

  “And what did she get?” I said. “I mean instead. What did you give her?”

  “I know better than this.”

  “How much did you pay her, actually, to clean your house? Did you know she was an addict?”

  “This conversation is over. If you need me again, you’ll go through my lawyer.” I stood to leave. Swales pushed a long breath through flared nostrils. “Henry. Don’t pretend you don’t understand this. You do. You’re no better than anyone else, friend. And it doesn’t make you a murderer any more than it does me.” There was a knowing look in his eye, and a faint false smile that took as much out of me as it did him.

  “Don’t leave Holebrook County,” I said. “Not till this is over.”

  FREMONT LAKE is near Pinedale and Big Piney, Wyoming, where I once lived and worked and was married. It was ten, eleven miles long, narrow and deep, undeveloped at the shore, other than campsites where people sought seclusion or a place to go wild. Six hundred feet deep toward the middle. I fished my share of trout out of there. We had a canoe.

  We were all trained and certified rescue divers, us in the Big Piney department, and some firefighters and EMTs too. Trained and certified, but never had to use the training because there were experts around. Back home in Wild Thyme, I was going to have my chance.

  Nine a.m., when the sun rose and skimmed across the surface of Maiden’s Grove, I was pulling on a wet suit alongside a beefy ex-Marine named Matty Lehl. Matty was an assistant chief in the Wild Thyme Volunteer Fire Company, a grumpy cuss full of procedures. Anyone could see he lived for mornings like this. Me, I did not. Death and rot didn’t bother me on land, not even the smell of it that much—it was easy enough to fool myself that I was separate from it long enough to get the work done. The landlocked dead caught up with me only after, and not to horrify, but to connect, it seemed. On the other hand, I felt no safe distance from the drowned. They come apart with no mercy and spread death everywhere, death out of proportion, coating you with it inside and out.

  I set my mask atop my head and tossed borrowed fins into the county’s inflatable dinghy, which Deputy Jackson manned. Matty joined us, Jackson tugged the outboard to life, and we cruised into the lake. The boat rode low in the water, weighed down with tanks and grappling hooks and all. Matty lounged at the bow.

/>   “State police didn’t want to send a team? Lake this size, a few pair of us, we’d finish in a day. This could take through tomorrow.” It was clear he hoped it would.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Well, we didn’t ask. I don’t think she’s down there.”

  “That won’t make the dive go any faster. You think the boy did it, the O’Keeffe boy?”

  I didn’t answer. On the south shore, Rhonda Prosser stood watching through field glasses. I wondered if we’d have a TV crew joining us before we were done.

  “Well, if she’s down there, and she moved, she’d have moved toward the outlet to January Creek.” Matty inclined his head toward the southeastern corner of the lake. “You want to start there, sweep up to the north, and back around, or what?”

  “You’re the boss.”

  “My view is, what is the middle, about seventy-five feet deep? Let’s not get down that far unless we have to. If she drowned, she’d likely be toward the edge anyway.”

  Privately I felt that if she were anywhere below us, she’d be wrapped in a chain and sunk deep, eyes open, waiting. But we did it Matty’s way, chugging over to the outlet and falling backward into the shallows. Once our splashes had calmed, I was drawn into the weird tapping silence of diving. We moved to within three feet of shore, a plain of mud and rock. Sunnies darted out of my path. January Creek’s pull was gentle, and we lolled northwest against it. No matter how clean Maiden’s Grove was supposed to be, our flashlight beams caught tires maybe every sixty feet. We yanked them loose, and anything else man-made we saw, billowing sediment into the water all around us. The work was slow and cold, punctuated only by fallen trees rising out of the gloom. Toward the center of the lake, starweed grew in fine green tendons, mixed with pondweed of red and purple. Seen from the surface the underwater jungle had always brought home a feeling of not knowing what lay beneath and not wanting to find out. But I could get used to them underwater, a curtain from the shallows and a dense forest up close. When I swam too near they swayed and clung to my fins.