In the living room, she turns the television back on and sits down once more to watch—to stare at anything. She doesn’t take in what she sees, however, for her thoughts are on the telephone. Will she hear it if it rings? Should she sleep out here, spend the night out here, to be certain she will not miss it if it rings? How can Matt hear it, she thinks, with that music playing? Does he even care? If he cared, would he sit in there or lie in there listening to music like that?
Maybe she should make some more calls, she thinks. And let Matt use the phone, too. But since that policeman told her to keep their line free and to stay alert for a call from Eric, she has stayed off the phone, and kept Matt off it, too, except when his friends have called, when she has ordered him to tell them that he cannot talk.
Going along the hallway, her thought is only to speak to Matt about anything at all that comes to mind. What she says to him, though, rapping on his door and walking in, is, “Do you have to play that so loud?”
“What?” he says, lying on his bed.
“Turn that down!” she says.
Reaching, he turns it down.
“My God, just turn it off!” she hears herself say.
“Do what?”
“I said turn it off!”
Silence follows. He has pressed a button; the music has stopped.
“Eric is missing and you’re in here listening to that?” Claire hears herself say.
Matt doesn’t say anything, nor does he look up at her.
“You’ve got to help!” she says to him.
“What’re you doing?” he says then. “You’re in there watching TV!”
“You want me to slap your face?” Claire says to him.
He looks back down.
She stands there. Then she hears herself say, against her better judgment, “Matt, there’s something I’m going to ask you. And you have to tell me the truth.”
Matt only lies there.
“Do you hear me?” she says.
“I hear you.”
“Well?”
“Well what?”
“The way you’re acting, I’m not sure you even care.”
“Care about what?”
“You know exactly what I mean.”
He lies there.
“Do you care about your brother or not?” she says.
“You don’t think I care?” he says.
“I don’t know if you do or not.”
He lies there. He makes no move, gives no sign.
“I’m going to ask you this,” she says. “Do you know anything about this, about what is going on?”
After a moment he says, “No,”
“You don’t know anything about what’s going on? Matt, I do know some things. I’m not a fool.”
He has, she sees, begun to cry. Against the hurt she feels, she hears herself say, “Matt, you have to tell me.”
“I don’t know anything,” he says, crying.
Claire stands there; her own eyes are full. “Have you and Eric been doing anything you shouldn’t have been doing?”
“No,” he cries.
“Matt, if you have, you can tell me. I don’t care what it is.”
He only lies there.
“Well?” she says.
“There’s nothing,” he cries to her, “There’s nothing.”
She stands looking at him through her own tears, All at once she believes him and trusts him again, and she doesn’t know what to say. Time, she sees again, in the space between them, keeps happening.
CHAPTER 19
THERE IS MOVEMENT. SOUND. ALL AT ONCE, SOMETHING IS happening. They are at McDonald’s. They are under the canopy, at the pick-up window. Vernon is reaching a five-dollar bill to the stainless steel window corning toward him, opening like doors to a bus; there is a McDonald’s boy in a cap leaning forward, and a sound is screaming into him—“Help me! I’m being kidnapped! I’m tied up! Help me!”
He jams the gas pedal. He loses the five-dollar bill. The boy is trying, he sees, to open the door. The car is swerving, skidding, roaring all at once against its turned wheels. He will not know for an instant that he is simultaneously pressing brake and gas pedals in his frantic attempt to gain control of the car. The car hits and jumps a McDonald’s side curb and slams as it slows down—as he sees that the boy is halfway, two-thirds out of the door, as he knows he has heard a squeal, a cry, a thunk.
Reaching, grabbing waist, pants belt with one hand, he pulls the boy back—as the car is rolling again—grips jacket and shirt to pull him in, hears another cry and sees blood blood blood, wails himself as he reaches past the boy to slam the door, wails and cries as he presses the accelerator again, as the car skids on over soggy grass, down over another curb, righting itself to a degree as it bounces onto the paved shoulder and swerves into the street lane, into the flow of traffic, and on, as he presses the gas.
He cries out, “My God!” And, “My God!”
He has to roll up his window but doesn’t know how to use his hands.
He has to shift gears, but everything seems impossible. The car is laboring madly in first gear and everything seems impossible, but then he coordinates his arms and legs enough to shift the handle to neutral, then to third . . .
He rolls up his window.
He is afraid to look. He drives on, looking only ahead. He is afraid to look. He knows the boy is lying over in the seat. He knows he is bleeding. He knows the boy is bleeding. Everything is wrong. Everything is wrong. He can only cry, bawl out tears, and cry out then, “How could you do that? How—oh God!”
He moves to roll up his window again but it is already done.
“I’m so mad at you!” he cries out.
“I’m so mad at you,” he cries.
VERNON DRIVES ON, holding the steering wheel in both hands. There has been, he knows, no response from the boy. It is a head injury, Vernon knows from when he touched the boy to pull him back into the car. It is a head injury. “My God, oh my God,” he wails to himself as he drives along.
Vernon is resting now. The boy, slumped in the seat beside him, seems to be resting, too. In the Portsmouth Hospital parking lot, Vernon has parked and turned off lights and motor—in a flock of cars, at a distance—where he can see a single red neon sign, EMERGENCY, over an entryway, but he has not left the car.
The boy’s breathing has settled—he has even spoken a few words, has mumbled oh and no—and the bleeding from the gash in his skull, above his ear on the left side, has stopped, and Vernon’s own panic has settled back down from the unmanageable pitch it had reached earlier. Using a rag from under the seat, no matter that it isn’t clean, Vernon has wiped at the boy’s neck and behind his ear, as well as the vinyl seat, and he has pressed and wiped, lightly, at the stickiness in his hair around the wound.
However settled, Vernon remains nervous and has an idea in mind that he should not allow himself to fall asleep. Driving here because of the boy’s injury, turning at several blue signs in the small city, then approaching carefully, circling at a distance as he entered a complicated patchwork of adjacent and lower and upper parking areas, he has since decided to just wait and see how things develop. Maybe it’s a minor cut, he has thought. An amount of blood, but in need, finally, of little more than a Band-Aid. Nor is anyone going to bother him here, he has thought. The other places where he stopped and spent time—dirt roads, unused parking lots, the public lot at Hampton Beach—were places where the police cruise by and look things over. Not here, he guesses. Doctors, nurses, kitchen workers, and visitors; people never stopped coming and going at a hospital day or night, and its parking lots would not be on the rounds of the police.
Time passes. Vernon cannot help relaxing more than he feels he should. There is little activity. An occasional car enters and parks and someone walks to one or another doorway to disappear into one of the window-lighted buildings; an occasional woman or pair of women in white shoes and stockings emerges, appears all at once, and reverses the sequence of car doors sla
mming, motors starting, cars pulling out and away.
Vernon watches the boy. When he speaks to him, when he says, “Do you hear me? Listen to me!” the boy gives off a moan which seems to say he is taking in words in some dreamlike way.
Leaning to look more closely at the boy, though, and seeing that his eyes remain closed even as he seems to be breathing steadily, Vernon guesses he hasn’t been heard at all. Vernon watches him. He decides he will not let himself fall asleep. Whatever it takes, and even if it isn’t his fault that the boy is hurt, he will watch over him, and if he needs help, he will carry him to the emergency room. At whatever cost, whatever risk to himself.
At the very least, he thinks, he will place him at the door, and knock or ring a bell, and go on his way.
PART THREE
POLICE WORK
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 1981
CHAPTER 1
AT MINUTES PAST FIVE A.M., DULAC TELEPHONES THE SPECIAL number at the special desk. He is standing barefoot downstairs in the kitchen, in his underwear, just as he turned his bulk from bed moments earlier. There is nothing. The officer on duty runs down seven calls that came in after the eleven o’clock news last night. Six are reported sightings of the boy, without identification or knowledge of present whereabouts, and one is a call from a man, refusing to identify himself, reporting the underground formation in the Seacoast area of a Men Who Love Boys chapter.
“Individual declined to provide any other information,” the officer says as if reading from the log.
Dulac stands there, thinking he will start the coffee perking and return upstairs to shower and dress. But on a yawn his tiredness speaks to him, and he thinks he should return to bed to see if he can sleep another hour or so and to leave behind the weariness he feels. Sitting on a wooden stool in the near darkness, as if to think, he seems only to stare at the floor.
A sadness comes up in him. Age has become a presence in his life in recent years, and sitting here, staring at the linoleum floor, he wonders if this is what life has come to. This feeling of insignificance. This feeling of small successes adding up to overall failure. It seems not to be the missing child who is on his mind even as he is thinking that this could be where children would save your life. Children and grandchildren. They have none, will never have any, and in this moment he misses that part of life. A child’s love at this time, this age in his life, would be life itself, he thinks.
To his surprise, he nearly weeps.
Life seems all at once to have handed him a massive deception, and he holds the fingers of his hand to his eyes, not to cry. What he’d like is to have some potting soil, and plants and clay pots to work with, to have something upon which to focus his attention.
He hears Beatrice and knows she is coming into the doorway. “Gil,” she says. “What is it? Are you okay?”
He is more relieved than embarrassed to be caught in this way. “I’m just sitting here,” he says.
“You are?” she says.
“Come on in,” he says.
“Is it that little boy?” she says. “Are you upset because of that little boy?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t think so. I just felt this rush, and I started to cry. Sitting here in my underwear. I think it’s old age.”
Beatrice doesn’t say anything to this; she stands there in her nightgown, what little morning light there is coming through the doorway behind and the windows beside her.
“What it is,” Dulac hears himself say then, “it’s a feeling that life hasn’t turned out the way you thought it would.” He and Beatrice seldom if ever speak so seriously, and he takes a breath and proceeds carefully. “I was thinking about that little boy. I called in but there’s nothing new. You have to wonder where he is at this time of day. I was thinking, too, wondering all at once, what I’d ever done with myself that meant anything. It came to me that if we had children, or grandchildren, and if they loved us—if I were a father and a grandfather—then I wouldn’t have been sitting here in my underwear with tears in my eyes. Is that strange or not?” he adds in a different voice.
“No, of course it’s not strange,” she says.
“I guess not,” he says. “But it seems that way. A person’s life shouldn’t be predicated simply on the basis of having children or grandchildren. Should it?”
“I don’t know, Gil.”
“Well, me neither. Are you up? I guess I’ll start the coffee and go in early.”
“I’ll do the coffee,” she says.
“I am kind of tense,” he says. “I’ve been awake since a little after four.”
“Let’s just get up,” she says.
Back upstairs in the bathroom then, where he and Beatrice circle and shift past each other at such times in a hippo and elephant ballet—using sink, steamy mirror, tub shower, and toilet—Beatrice says. “Why does it have you tense? Is it because it’s a little boy?”
“I don’t know,” Dulac says. “It has me upset, I know that.”
They seldom mention or discuss his cases. Only when they are special and in the news, like this case, and then—usually—only indirectly. It’s a habit they established years ago, when Beatrice realized that details of his work could place her in lingering states of anxiety and depression. Talk thereafter of work was usually of her job, the Con Merilees Real Estate Company where she worked at a desk, of property and prices, but mainly of the people who bought and sold. Dulac’s work, like their inability years earlier to have children, was something both present and important, but seldom mentioned.
Now Dulac says, “The idea this kid is going to be in school this morning has bothered me all along.”
“Was it your idea?” she says.
“I guess Adam started it,” Dulac says. “But I passed it on to the mother and now she and who knows who else thinks the little guy is going to come walking into school this morning.”
Beatrice, in her robe, is ready to leave the bathroom, “You don’t believe that?” she says.
“What?”
“I said, ‘You don’t believe he’ll be in school?’” she says.
“I wish I did,” he says. “In which case I wouldn’t feel so goddamn charged up. I’m so angry, I feel like hurting somebody.”
CHAPTER 2
VERNON OPENS HIS EYES, COMES OUT OF SLEEP, IN A FOUL mood. He aches in his shoulders, in his back and neck, and in his hips from sleeping under and next to steering wheel and gearshift. He is chilled, and hungry. A faint watercolor wash of daylight is in the dark sky through the windshield; he needs to stretch and he needs to urinate, and he panics for a moment, feels himself giving in to a stomach and mind seizure, a paralysis of partial loss of control, partial madness, in his inability to extricate his trapped body and trapped self from the situation he is in. “Oh God,” he cries aloud to the boy, raising no response, wanting to strike at him, disliking him for the first time. “Wake up!” he hisses at him. “Open your eyes! Why did you hurt your head! God almighty, you are ruining my life.”
There is still no response from the dim form, the boy there in the seat beside him, and Vernon wonders if he has died. He doesn’t touch him, though, as he twists around to try to extend his legs and back to relieve the cramped and trapped sensation. Nor does he strike him, as his feeling of panic gives way to mere anxiety and depression. Reaching a hand under the sleeping bag to the boy’s chest, feeling his warmth, his life, he withdraws his hand and realizes it is disappointment he is feeling that the boy is alive. Vernon’s face falls some as he sits there, as it crosses his mind that he felt love for the boy yesterday, and last night, while it is hate he feels for him this morning.
“This is your fault,” Vernon utters to him. “I hope you know that.”
To his surprise the boy makes a sound, takes in a breath at least, as if in response to being spoken to, and Vernon looks down at him. There is no other response though, and Vernon says nothing more.
Nor does Vernon urinate on the pavement outside the car, as he feels a
n urge to do. Urinating outside, even in the woods, is something he has almost never done and he restrains himself from doing so now, even as daylight is only partially covering the sky. And he thinks of the time, at summer camp, when he followed the trail through the woods at daybreak, to the bathroom-shower, and met the boy there his age and size who spoke to him of going to parties, who spoke to him of other things in life. Settled some, Vernon positions himself and starts the car’s motor. He turns on the headlights. Have to get back to normal, he says to himself. He rolls out of the parking place, heads for the exit from the lot.
He will go back to the cottage, he is telling himself. He will wait for his housemates to leave for their classes, and then he will take the boy inside and feed him and clean him up. Then, when the boy is good as new again, he will somehow return him and put an end to all this. For he must put an end to it; he has no choice. No one can live like this. He will return him to where he picked him up or return him here to the hospital.
And go on his way. Take his chances that nothing will happen. How could it, he asks himself, if the boy doesn’t even know his name? How could it?
What he has to do, he thinks, driving along, is return to normalcy. It’s Monday now; the weekend is over. Weekends are fine for passion, for new experiences. For both, he thinks. But now he has to return to his studies. For that is what he truly loves. He has to extricate himself from this situation he has gotten himself into, and he has to guard against panic to do so. He has to use judgment, he thinks. He has to return things to normal.
“The weekend is over,” he says to the form beside him. “We’re going back to the real world.”
CHAPTER 3
AT HIS DESK, AS SEVEN O’CLOCK IS APPROACHING, DULAC IS reading and studying the special log for himself and considering ongoing steps in an investigation. In an hour or so, to look around and to be there when the principal and the teachers arrive, he will drive to the boy’s Little Harbor Elementary School, to at least allow the school idea its chance, he thinks. Then he will place things in motion.
The True Detective Page 17