Fateful Mornings

by Tom Bouman

  “Rianne . . . I took her car back, Penny’s car. It was over to her place, but she can’t have it. It’s in my name, man. I can show you the title. I still have a key. You got my truck, so I have to live out of that car. I mean, my ma’s place in Sayre’s where I live, but. Somebody at the tavern must’ve called somebody, and next thing you know.”

  “Been drinking?”

  “Don’t anymore.” Bandaged, he turned the rearview mirror back to me, and I saw headlights floating in the distance behind us.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said. It occurred to me I wasn’t in my patrol truck.

  The lights lurched forward, and a truck swung alongside me. I stepped on the gas and pulled ahead. We made a right at Walker Lake. When I went around bends and the cars were out of sight, I floored it for a few seconds here and there, creating distance where I could.

  “Soon as we pull up to the station, you get out and head to the door,” I said. “Don’t look, don’t talk. Just get inside.”

  We bounced over a gravel yard and pulled up sidelong to my station, next to the garages. The truck roared up behind, then parked at the edge of the empty fairgrounds across the road. I backed around the hood of my vehicle, shotgun hanging by my leg, unlocked the door, and we were inside. I left the light off. Then I opened my locker, pulled out my belt, and buckled it on. The weight of the .40 was a comfort. I caught O’Keeffe staring at it.

  I led him behind my desk and told him to stay down. Outside, the shadow of a man passed in front of the headlights, which were pointed at my station. Then the lights went dark, the engine silent. I got on the phone to the county dispatcher and requested a second pair of hands. He told me there weren’t any state police in the area but he’d try to find someone. I sat where I could see out the window. Kevin craned his neck.

  “Settle down,” I said. “We might be here awhile.”

  O’Keeffe tried to make himself comfortable on the cement floor. I listened for voices across the road, and sat for a while and thought. With my eye pressed to a scope, I peered out the window. One man, as far as I could tell.

  I called the county, and the dispatcher placed me on hold for about five minutes while he tried to raise Sheriff Dally. When he came back on the line, he was abject.

  “Henry, sheriff says he’s sorry, he can’t send any of his people. He says to sit tight, call PSP, and don’t bring him anybody new down to the lockup tonight.”

  “They’re full? What the hell happened, a riot?”

  “I’m telling you what he told me. You want me to call PSP?”

  “So they can get here even slower than the county?”

  At long last I secured the gun locker, told O’Keeffe to stay where he was, and stepped to the door.

  “I’ll go with you,” he said. “Give me a gun. It don’t have to be loaded.”

  “Just stay where you are.”

  Beyond the yellow floodlights of the township building, a ridge swept up to a horizon crowned by stars. Down in the real world, as I stepped outside with the shotgun over my shoulder, the man across the road raised his hand.

  “Evening!”

  “You,” I said. “Step across the road.”

  The figure moved slowly—very slowly. I recognized the man’s ruined gait; it was Ron Chase, Bobby’s father. “Woah, Officer,” he said. “You got the wrong idea.” He had his hands in the pockets of his windbreaker. “I just want a word with your pal.” He peered over my shoulder to the station’s closed door.

  I cleared my throat. “Go home.” I raised my voice. “Any harm to O’Keeffe, you look at him wrong, anything, you’re getting a visit from me. I’ll make you pay and it’ll hurt. If you test me now, I’ll cuff you right here and bring you in.”

  Chase stepped closer and lowered his voice to a murmur. “You sure about that?”

  I let the shotgun fall off my shoulder and into my hands. “On the ground with your hands behind your head.”

  Ron smiled. “No.”

  From around the bend, I heard a car approaching, and saw the trees light up blue. Wild Thyme 5, our ambulance, came to a halt in the middle of the road. John Kozlowski, township mechanic and a stalwart rescue squad member, stepped out of the driver’s-side door and walked up to us. He was a hulking, shambling, drinking man, and everyone I knew liked him. He met my eyes and showed me he understood there was something wrong.

  “Why, Ron,” he said. “You here about Bobby already? You’re in luck, we got him right back there in the unit. Kelly McCann is back with him, he’s awake, but he had his bell rung for him. Go see him and tell him what year it is.”

  Ron grimaced, looked away down the road, turned, and walked to the ambulance.

  When he was out of sight, Kozlowski leaned in and spoke low. “We found this in his sock.” He handed me a small bag of white powder. “He should probably spend a night in the hospital. What do you want us to do with him?”

  “These guys,” I said. “Shit. I still have O’Keeffe in the station. What’s your view on giving young Bobby a pass this time?”

  Kozlowski shrugged. “You tell me. I just hauls ’em.”

  In the end, Kozlowski, McCann, and I got Ron to agree to take his son to a hospital of their choosing over the border. I told Ron to have Bobby come see me as soon as he was able about the way he’d carried on. The old man nodded his head and didn’t speak a word. By the time I unlocked the station door, Kevin O’Keeffe was gone. I trotted out to the wooded hill behind the township building, drove to the tavern only to find Penny’s car gone too, recognized my situation for what it was, and headed home.

  JULIE AND I walked through waist-high daisies on the hill behind Walker Lake. Ed had begun dropping materials off at the site of Willard Meagher’s studio, and the mason was pouring a concrete foundation and basement, which would be disguised on the exterior by a layer of blue shale pulled from the surrounding woods. It was our job that day to find the stone.

  “When we were kids, we mapped this whole hill out,” Julie said, pushing aside a branch and stepping onto an ATV trail. “We’d be looking for treasure, fairies, rocks with holes in them. We each had kingdoms. Creeks, foundations, boulders—they all got names. One time we were panning for gold in a stream, and we pulled out all these shards of pottery, like dozens. White with blue flowers. But our big thing was finding tree stands in the woods. Nobody used them in summertime. First Georgia and me, and then Georgia was chasing boys around the lake, and then Dee followed me everywhere. We never had a TV in the cottage, so at night we read a lot, or looked at stars.” She stopped to catch her breath. “They were good summers. I’d stay in the cottage year-round if they’d let me. Here,” she said, stepping off the trail, through a patch of ferns, and onto a mossy patch. Beyond, the land we stood on fell away and revealed itself as a stone outcropping. In the dell below us, great slabs of rock rose out of the ground. “We called this place the Pitfalls.”

  We sifted through layers of dead leaves. Several troughs at right angles showed the area had been quarried in the past, probably for the Loinsigh farm just north of the lake, since subdivided and built over. The shale that remained would do for the mason. As the shadows stretched away into twilight, we exposed what we could.

  Julie yelped; I startled, and followed her gaze to the lip of the quarry. There stood Alan Stiobhard above us, a statue in full camo and thick eyeglasses. A braid in his beard suggested the presence of a woman in his life. As far as I could tell, he was unarmed; if he’d wanted to hurt either of us, he already would’ve. He doffed his hat to Julie.

  “Henry,” he said, “been wanting to catch up.”

  Later that night Alan drove up to Aunt Medbh’s, bringing his customary gift of a gutted perch on a line. We sat on my porch where a couple punk sticks burned, and pink hairy moths with yellow spots circled an oil lamp.

  “If it’s about the reward,” I said, “I’ve done all I can for now.”

  “It is about the money, in a way. Here it’s been some months. He’s been on the news, t
hen off it again. He is who you were looking for? Who killed that cop up north?”

  “Between us, yes.”

  “And the ten thousand was to come from New York State?”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s got to be a reason the matter isn’t closed,” Alan said. “I hear they’re going to haul him back to Holebrook County before they’re done.”

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  Alan declined to answer. “If he’s coming back here, we’d rather have your help than the money. Help it not get out of hand.”

  “Alan, you know me. I’m lazy. I never want anything to get out of hand.”

  He smiled. “Try to find out what you can,” he said. “Maybe give us some notice, if it’s no trouble. You got the map to work from if it comes to it.”

  A FEW DAYS LATER Sheriff Dally knocked on my station door and let himself in. Under his arm was an accordion case file. He sat, and I asked him what brought him around.

  “I had a meeting across the border. Binghamton, Elmira, Schuyler County, New York State.”

  “Ah.”

  “You got a choice,” the sheriff said. “We could use you. You know the area, you can work quietly.”

  “However I can help,” I said.

  “All right, then,” Dally said, placing the file on my desk. “Put this in your locker when you’re done looking through it. And don’t talk to anybody. He’s coming.”

  THE PRISONER wore a white T-shirt and a pair of gray sweats. Shackled hand and foot and flanked by sheriff’s deputies, he shuffled out of the Holebrook County Courthouse’s back door. Sleight and I waited in the belly of a Black Maria with New York plates, an unmarked van belonging to Binghamton. A vehicle like that will typically have no windows in back for obvious reasons, but for what we were doing, the prisoner needed to see around him, so the van had windows, but tinted. The guards handed Coleman Tod up, set him on a bench in front of me, ran his chain through a ring in the floor, reattached it, and slammed the door shut. Tod twisted his neck to look behind him, and a faint smile lit his face when he saw me. He turned his gaze to the window.

  It was my first time in his presence since the night of his capture. I’d seen photographs and videos of his interviews with Sleight and others, read transcripts and reports. Whatever was in the file. The details of his supposed killings remained murky, contained by a computer screen, limited to talk or a list of evidence found with a body. I was glad of that. What I found out was that even with all he had done to escape the everyday world, he could not escape himself. In captivity, his wants and needs had boiled down to a new pair of sneakers he wasn’t going to get, a cigarette, more time in the yard, a pack of Ho Hos from the vending machine.

  Detective Larkins from Binghamton Special Investigations was in the driver’s seat. In front of us, Sheriff Dally idled in the county’s unmarked radio car, ready to lead us on a tour of the county, one dirt road at a time. ID Services would follow behind in a black SUV. In the past few days, we had pored over maps and made some guesses as to where Tod had been. Based on hints and recollections from his interviews, he was drawn to abandoned structures, man-made hollows, power line cuts: places where his tracks could blend into others’. But he had been careful not to give us enough. Larkins flashed her headlights, and Dally pulled out with the easy slowness of a veteran lawman. We hit the road and I watched the pleasure on Tod’s face as we moved through the open fields.

  Two days previous I’d met with the Sheriff, DA Ross, and Lieutenant Sleight to discuss the new VIP guest in the Holebrook County lockup.

  “It’s not just victims we’re looking for,” Sleight had said. “He stashed money, tools, and weapons as he went along, so he could disappear if he needed to. Knives, a thousand or so in twenties, MREs. Anytime we can find something to confirm what he tells us, it’s something we can use. It’ll buy us more time in the field.”

  “You find any guns out there?” I asked.

  “Not yet,” said Sleight. “But we haven’t ruled it out, just like we haven’t ruled out traps, bombs, and the like. He’s never mentioned an accomplice, but he’d have no reason to. Bodies, weapons, materials, trace evidence of anyone other than Tod or his victims. That’s what we’re out there for. But we’ve got to take every precaution.

  “He’s more than what he seems, but less than what he wants us to believe,” Sleight continued. “He doesn’t want to go up to Dannemora, but he doesn’t want to work with us, either. Just when we were about to send him up and wash our hands, he led us to a body in the basement of a half-burned house south of Elmira. A woman’s. We think he may have done a rape-murder in Binghamton too, a prostitute. He won’t admit to that one. He’s been protective of his family. That’s the one thing that got him to talk, to cooperate to the extent he has. I threaten to go to his mother—she’s in a psych ward. His brother. He doesn’t want that.”

  “You ask him about Penny?” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said, “but sideways. At a slant. You can’t say the wrong thing to this guy,” Sleight told me. “And anything could be the wrong thing. Best not to draw his attention. You’re here because you know the county. But I know him. Listen, don’t talk. We don’t need you giving him any kind of a cat’s paw. If he addresses you, keep it civil. A wrong word from you or anyone and this whole deal is trashed.”

  We fetched up by a swamp that fed into January Creek near the New York border. There was a natural shoulder and a trail worn down to the inlet, littered with beer cans and overhung with trees. The water was black and alive with bullfrogs. Though it was only noon, mosquitoes rose in clouds and worked us.

  “Here we are,” said Sleight. “What can you tell us? Where do we start?”

  “All good things in all good time,” said Tod. He leaned his body back to take in the blue sky where a hole in the forest let its light in. “You should look around. I can’t be sure anymore.”

  “Well, if you’re not sure—”

  “Look around. You’re the professionals.” He inched his way to my side, put his back to a tree trunk, slid down it, sat, and closed his eyes. The sun crawled west.

  The ID guys found nothing but a child’s sneaker; it was enough. At the end of the day, Tod returned to his cell at the far end of the Holebrook County lockup and I drove home. Walking to the door, I heard Julie plunking on a ukulele in the backyard. I thought of her out there, sunny and free. I stepped inside and undressed and washed my face, and searched my eyes for secrets.

  The next few days, Tod put his feet up in Fitzmorris while ID Services took their tweezers and baggies to the swamp. I stood sentry on and off. We were in a quiet pocket of the township, and the team worked unnoticed, far as I could tell. Nobody came down the trail. Still, I walked the land searching for signs, finding none.

  AFTER THE NIGHT at the High-Thyme Tavern, Kevin O’Keeffe sank out of view. I called his mother, who said he was in and out of her place, and that his parole officer was also calling, and threatened an ankle bracelet if he didn’t check in within the next two days. Thinking I could keep him on the map, I decided to pull out the file I’d made for him, where I had collected names, addresses, last known addresses, arrest records, and so on for many of the folks who had come into the burglary or Penny’s disappearance. It was not where I’d left it. Then I looked where Penny’s file was: no. I had a half memory of taking them home, but couldn’t be sure.

  One early evening, after a day of standing sentry near the swamp, I showed up at Ed’s shop. Ed was in the cab of his skid steer, tumbling twenty-foot beams from his forks onto risers. You could hardly hear them thunk down over the roar and rattle of the vehicle’s engine. These timbers had been buried in the depths of Ed’s yard for a few years; weeds had sprouted from some of them.

  Off to the side, a gas-powered pressure washer idled. Who was there but Kevin O’Keeffe, standing beside the machine, cradling the spray gun in his arms. The nozzle leaked a rainbow mist into the air. His jeans were soaked to the thigh. I pointed at him and
called, “Don’t go anywhere until we talk.” He stared at me without hostility or life before turning to his task. The bruise on his face had flattened and turned yellow. With a blade of pressurized water, he stripped a green scrim of fungus off of the nearest timber, turning the surface silver-black again.

  Ed left the machine and stalked inside, and I found him sitting at what passed for his desk, peering into a handwritten ledger, which he snapped shut when I arrived. “I think I saved our asses,” he said, “but we’re going to have to blur over some of the history. There’s another barn out in Susquehanna, built much later, the twenties, a real heap, but it could be they recycled some older material to make it. If we can pull enough out of there, we just might make the date,” he said. “Whatever’s going on with you and the Meagher girl, can I count on you to just not volunteer anything too damning? Nothing she doesn’t notice herself?”

  “You know me.”

  “So it’s for real, you two,” he said.

  I shrugged.

  “You son of a bitch,” he said with a brave smile. “You keep it close to the vest. I had hoped against hope that you’d rise to the occasion.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Sure, sure.”

  Out by the lumber pile, I found Kevin facing the woods, his eyes closed.

  “What are you up to out here?” I asked.

  “Listening.”

  “Good place for it?”

  “It was.”

  Kevin in daylight, after his stretch in Mahanoy: distilled, burned away to stone, to iron. Even without the wound surrounding his eye, his face would’ve been different.

  “You talk to your PO, you good?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He ask you about the shiner?”

  “Yeah. He don’t need to know it all.”

  “Be careful,” I said. “You could end up back where you were.”

  “Then I’ll just come back here again.”

  “Kev,” I said, searching for words. “Your place is gone. Start over.”