Fateful Mornings

by Tom Bouman

  Sometimes I find it is best to be still.

  “Anyway,” said Ed, “she’ll keep the boys coming to work on time.”

  ONE MORNING: a lone sunbeam on Kevin O’Keeffe’s ass. I had been making the occasional drive to Airy Township to look in on the Buckles place, to no avail, the cottage had remained abandoned, but as I pulled up this time, an eggplant-colored car was parked in the driveway and a woman answered the door. She appeared fortyish, with frizzed, graying hair and the yellow skin of a longtime smoker. Before I could reach the porch, she called out to me.

  “He’s up to Grace Services. Getting back on the job.”

  “Oh? I didn’t know he’d quit.” I left a silence for her to fill, but something shifted and she became wary. I introduced myself. “What’s your name?”

  “Hope Martinek.”

  “I don’t know you, where you from?”

  “Beaver.”

  “May I come in?”

  “He’s up to Grace.”

  “Good, we’ve been looking for him.”

  “I know it. He’s had some family issues. In Beaver. So, yeah, he ain’t been here.”

  “Family issues?”

  “Look, my worker said I was fine to come out here. The court signed off. I been clean for a month now. What do you want?”

  “Tell him from me he needs to come in. Tell him no jail time if he comes in and tells us what he needs to. But if I have to use the warrant, no guarantees. The window is closing.”

  “I’ll tell him. Whatever that means.”

  I raced over to Grace headquarters, but of course he’d left by then. I called over to the sheriff’s department to let them know to be on the lookout.

  After my shift was done, I headed over to the Brennans to put in my time with Ed. I didn’t see Liz. Ed rattled away in customary high spirits until night fell on our work and I drove home, my arms coated with sawdust, a bottle of beer between my thighs. I would have preferred a quiet evening with the fiddle and a book. But Shelly Bray’s wagon was in my driveway and she waited for me on the porch, looking puffy and tear-streaked.

  “He knows.” She burst into angry sobs. “I don’t know if he’s been looking at my phone, it’s not like I give him the chance, I delete everything, I told nobody. Nobody, Henry.”

  “Come inside.”

  “He’s going to take the kids.”

  “Come on in.”

  I gave her a scotch with ice—it was the only hard liquor I kept in the house—and we sat at my kitchen table. It was difficult watching her cry. I put a hand on her shoulder, bare but for the strap of a tank top, and despite myself I felt desire for her. She froze at the gesture, and I took my hand away.

  “He’d been saying things, little harmless things. Then Steve Milgraham would be over for a beer or whatever, and he’d—Steve would . . . talk about you.”

  “And say what? I’ve heard it all.”

  “The smug shitheel . . . it was so small I can’t even tell you. They have their little jokes between them. Waiting for me to crack.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Oh, yes, I do. Because then . . .” She broke down again, and I had to wait. “Josh has this other friend up here, some long-lost guy from high school. I don’t know how, because—­anyway, Andy Swales is his name. And he all but told me everyone knew. And, ugh, he put his hands on me.”

  “Okay.” I stood.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Out.”

  “Oh, no. No. That’s not what I want. Henry, please.”

  I stopped and choked out, “What did he do?”

  Shelly took a deep breath. “It wasn’t like he groped me. It was like a caress? On the small of my back? And he said something like if I ever get bored, he works from home Fridays, come over to the lake. ‘But you don’t get bored, do you?’ It was clear what he meant, I can’t say exactly why.”

  “Okay.” I sat back down. The remark Andy had made to me at his office was now clear: he knew. And probably Josh knew, but I could not be certain of that, because what kind of man would tell his friends that his wife was running around? Maybe Swales had passed our cars together on the side of the road, or seen something in Shelly she hadn’t meant to betray. Maybe he was bluffing. Whatever the case, I now felt as trapped as ever a person can be and, despite myself, angry. At myself and at her. “I’ve been saying, all this time.”

  “I know. I just love my kids, and . . .”

  “Easy.”

  “I don’t want to choose, every time I think of their faces . . .” She trailed off in weeping, then drew herself up. “Jesus Christ, I get so mad.”

  We both knew that didn’t say it. Anger hides pain. So does lust, love, and getting high. But only for so long.

  “See you, Henry.”

  And I thought that she meant it. I thought we both did.

  NEXT AFTERNOON, Sage Buckles walked into the Holebrook County Sheriff’s Department and identified himself. The receptionist had trouble understanding him; he spoke through an obstruction inside his head that muffled and rerouted sound through his nose. I learned that it was an untreated cleft palate that you couldn’t see from looking at his face, except maybe for a quality of pinchedness between crooked nose and mouth, a lack of upper lip.

  Later that day in the sheriff’s private office, I reflected upon the odd face before me, wondering whether the blow that had broken the nose had also cleft Buckles’s palate, or whether the problem had been with him since birth. I wouldn’t have wanted to go up against the man who dealt that blow; Buckles was an ox, but more: he reminded me of the time I saw a leopard sleeping at the zoo. Because of his trouble speaking and because of a strong odor of sweat, I caught on slower to the fact that he may have been drunk. Certainly he was operating in a state of permanent befuddlement I’d seen in longtime drug users before: craftiness without logic, talk veering out into the world in repetitions, contradictions, and leaps.

  District Attorney Ross was in the middle of explaining for the fourth time that total immunity was off the table, and didn’t Buckles want a lawyer?

  “I haven’t done nothing to require that type of service.”

  “Then why do you want immunity?”

  “You tell me.”

  “As I may have mentioned,” Sheriff Dally said, “Kevin O’Keeffe has named you in a burglary up at Maiden’s Grove Lake. We could just charge you.”

  Buckles’s nose whistled. “I don’t know who Kevin O’Keeffe is, but I’ll knock his head off for him.”

  “Oh, Jesus Christ,” Ross said.

  The DA got up and gestured for Dally to follow him, and the two left to discuss matters. I considered leaving the room myself, but sensed Buckles looking at me from his chair, waiting for something.

  “You’re the one who came to see Hope,” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  “You wouldn’t have never brought me in. Not on your own.” He waited for me to respond. I didn’t see the use. His smile was almost tender, and it, more than his strength or his ruined face, told me I was in a room with a dangerous person. “I told them, and I’ll tell you. I’m not going to prison, over what? Somebody said I did something.”

  “Yeah, you did something and a girl went missing. Same night, same place.”

  “So now I done every damn thing you can’t figure out?”

  “Account for your time that night. People are telling me all kinds of things. Not you, though. You haven’t said shit.”

  “Who’s telling things?”

  “How’d you get to Maiden’s Grove on the night of May seventeenth?”

  “Who says I did?”

  Ross and Dally reentered the room. “I’ll tell you what,” said Dally. “You plead to the burglary and tell us under oath, in detail, about that night—specific times, places, items, and so on. We can’t give immunity but we can keep you out of prison. Depending on your health, the judge may require some drug and alcohol.”

  “Don’t need it.”

 
“We’ll see. And you need to make restitution to Ms. Prosser.”

  Buckles opened his hands.

  Ross said, “That’s, you need to pay her back.”

  “With money? What if I return the shit?”

  A head-slapping conversation ensued where DA Ross tried to get Buckles to understand his need for counsel; he would not be able to enter a plea without a lawyer present. Nobody in the room trusted Buckles to waive counsel knowingly or intelligently; without counsel, he could walk it back on appeal. “I said it all just now,” Buckles maintained. Finally, Ross waved his hands in dismissal and told him that he’d have the court appoint him a lawyer to move him through the process.

  “There you go,” Buckles said. “Thank you, sir. I ain’t made of gold.”

  I followed Buckles out to his car, where Hope Martinek was waiting in the passenger seat, sweating with the windows down.

  Before getting behind the wheel, Buckles faced me. “What now? Ain’t we said all that needs to be said? I’ll be here on the day.”

  “I’m just curious,” I said. “May seventeenth, then it’s midnight, so the eighteenth, Kevin said he had to drive you home.”

  “That guy talks too fuckin much.”

  “Yeah. So we know how you got home. How’d you get to Maiden’s Grove in the first place?”

  “I drove my car,” he said. “A car is an invention that runs on gas that takes you here to there? And then Dopey Hopey wasn’t feeling good, so she went home. Right, hon?”

  Hope looked miserable; she didn’t deny it.

  “You didn’t have a good time?” I asked her.

  “I didn’t know nobody,” she said.

  SAY YOU ARE a poor man facing a year in prison for burglary. A year in state, followed by six months of probation and out­patient alcohol monitoring. That’s the arrangement we came to for Kevin O’Keeffe, all parties, including Rhonda Prosser, whom we were required to consult as the victim. She was cool with it. Hillendale was able to keep DA Ross from bringing either murder. There wasn’t enough there, not yet. Between Kevin’s claims of innocence to all but the burglary, the witnesses putting him elsewhere at key times, the phone calls suggesting he had no knowledge of Penny’s whereabouts and believed her alive at the time he’d called, the other parties with motive and opportunity, the missing truck, no weapon—the outcome of a trial would be uncertain, and Ross knew it. By not attaching jeopardy to the murder charges, Ross could revive them at any time the evidence allowed. Whether Kevin would eventually have to answer, we’d see.

  From a law enforcement perspective, it suited us to keep the sentence light. If Kevin did kill Penny, what good would it do to keep him away for a small-time house burglary? Out, he would have to face his act, and maybe lead us to her in time. It gave Ross a headache. He would be up for reelection, and I suspect he would have preferred a murder conviction or at least a showy trial. It was only fair to him that Kev should get some time in state for the break-in. The judge had fifteen years on the bench and was likely to stand uncontested until retirement age. He tended to sentence right down the middle of the guidelines. We—Dally and Hillendale, mostly—were able to convince him that the lighter sentence was not only practical, it was fair and modern.

  So say that’s your situation: a year in prison. Your belongings don’t merely drift off in the same way yours or mine would in ordinary life. The things of a poor man are carried away by a strong wind.

  The sky was gray and smudged with charcoal clouds hanging low. Up at the trailer by Maiden’s Grove, I watched as folks picked over appliances and furniture while Kevin O’Keeffe’s brother collected what cash he could for them—soggy bills and in some cases handfuls of quarters, destined for Kevin’s lawyer, I supposed. And all the while, Rianne Pellings defended ­Penny’s things against the scavengers, boxing them up with slow, sad attention, as if the objects were themselves pieces of her sister, as if all together they were her, or all that remained.

  At the county lockup that morning, Kevin had requested that I salvage a book for him. It was actually Penny’s, a kind of diary glued into another book’s binding and hidden in plain sight by the bed. I had been taken aback, and then angry, that he’d kept it from us.

  “There’s nothing in it,” he’d assured me. “Trust me, I looked. It’s just art, writing, and that. It’s private. It’s the one thing I want.”

  At the trailer that afternoon, I’d waited until a moment when Rianne was in the yard, walking armfuls toward her car, and headed in. By Penny’s side of the bed, there had been a stack of about a hundred books, mostly fiction, many of them long fantasy novels with wild cover art, some nineteenth century poetry books too, Wordsworth and Keats, I remember. I don’t know what was to be learned from her tastes other than she was or had been a fan of escapist stories. The book pile had been disarranged by several searches of the room. I found the one I needed, a leather volume claiming to be Bullfinch’s Mythology. A glance inside revealed blank pages darkened by handwritten verse, what looked like diary entries, and pencil sketches.

  The diary remained on my passenger seat for much of the afternoon as, parked behind a closed-down miniature golf business, I lay in wait of speeding cars. Back at my desk, I placed the book in front of me and stared at it. There would be no easy way for the diary to make the journey into county lockup, let alone from there to SCI Dallas (Pennsylvania, not Texas). The question was, would I lock it away out of deference and superstition and honor, or would I read it for the sweep of Penny’s life leading to the disappearance? Of course I would read it. Maybe a name or a place would stand out. But as the day dragged on, duty interfered over and over again. Folks needed help stamping out a brush fire, and I was able to show up and do what little I could before the squad sent out a truck. I also responded to a mini-B&E. A window open and only a jar of change missing. I was on the scene about three minutes before a neighbor marched her son over to return the silver and apologize.

  AT HOME in my armchair with a growler of the local IPA, I opened the book I came to think of as Pellings’s Mythology. The first pages were pencil sketches of a triangle of lake at Maiden’s Grove seen from the hills. I didn’t remember the exact view, and wondered whether it was done from the trailer’s roof or from imagination, or a combination. There wasn’t much to feel at first—the work of an untrained artist, and something fragile in the little piece of lake nested into the land. The drawings evolved. Different vantage points, different subjects. Kevin O’Keeffe’s truck overgrown with grapevine. A tattooed barroom patron leaning back and puking laughter from a mouth three times too big. A man’s figure from behind, a shaded-in haze for a head, folds sagging off the torso. A man’s mouth and chin only, too close. But always a return to the lake. Penny began to introduce seams of color into her work, thin lines of green running through the woods, dots of crimson. On one page, she’d sewed silver thread over the surface of Maiden’s Grove.

  One page was left blank except for three words, center. “Tonight’s the night.”

  Song lyrics followed, whether hers or someone else’s, I couldn’t say. I didn’t recognize them.

  About a quarter of the way into the book, a woman’s figure appeared. In the first drawing, she hung over the surface of Maiden’s Grove. The law of gravity would suggest she was diving in from a height, from the middle of the air. But something about the image suggested floating. She had no face. In the next, she had disappeared into the lake without a splash, leaving only one foot and ankle above water. Why did I know it was the lady’s, I don’t know, something about it.

  When writing at length first appeared, smeared by palms and erased words, scarred by cross-outs, it was of a piece with the images and fragments that had come before. The entries spanned several pages, or trailed off after a few sentences. A lot of it repeated itself or simply wasn’t clear. The words themselves weren’t enough to tell the story, and neither were the pictures. But you put everything together like a dream, and there’s something there. If I were to tell you,
I’d tell you like this:

  It begins with Anna, a young woman creeping through the woods, pursued. The moon was high and nearly full, and she couldn’t risk stepping into the light. But staying in the dark of the forest too long would be dangerous. Soon she came to a lake ringed by tall, soft grass in a rising wind. Beyond, a lantern shone in the window of her father’s house up in the hills. The fastest way to get home would be to swim across the lake. Of the three possibilities—a sprint around the moonlit shore, a slower creep through trees beyond, or a straight shot across the water—she didn’t know which would allow her to live. She stood frozen at the water’s edge. It wasn’t so much fear of the creatures she couldn’t see in the lake, but of the vast, unknown depth below her, or was it, in the end, above her? She had a vision of herself on the surface, a crawling shadow surrounded by moonlight. A vision from a great distance.

  She pulled off her boots and flung them away, then waded in. At first the water tugged at her dress, seeming to drag her back the way she’d come. She swam as silent as she was able, listening, keeping her arms and legs below the surface. The sound of the stone hitting the water and the pain between her shoulder blades arrived both at once. She cried out and choked on a mouthful of water. Black against the moon’s lilting reflection, her head was breaking the surface in a clear line. He would be able to find her again and again. She dove.

  Instantly she was as free as if floating through the air. But there was something else, a current going through her, something more than the lull from her father’s moonshine, but less than the nights in bed when she’d put a hand between her legs and brought herself. She now remembered the threat above water only at a distance. Part of her knew she shouldn’t want the feeling, but it was too good to give up.

  Another stone shot past her into the depths, trailing air. She followed it with her eyes. There was light below, or above.

  The next morning, an angler found a dark-haired stranger drowned at the edge of the lake, facedown, arms floating in the water, his legs hooking him to shore. Nobody in town knew him. A newspaper item describing his person went unanswered, and though it was odd to have found a small pair of boots not far from the body, the sheriff had him buried in a potter’s field and closed the matter.