Virginia Lovers

by Michael Parker

  “Wouldn’t you have seen him if he was at school?”

  Cozart thought about this for a while. “Maybe, you know, in the parking lot.”

  “You don’t have any classes together?”

  “No sir. We had gym together in the ninth grade.”

  “Thanks, Cozart. You need a ride home?”

  “Nah, I reckon I’ll walk.”

  “Fine. Listen, you haven’t seen Dan tonight, have you?”

  “Dan?”

  “You know. Pete’s brother?”

  “Oh Dan. No, I haven’t seen him in—”

  “Thanks, Cozart.” Thomas didn’t have time to wait until Cozart figured out how long it had been since he’d last seen Daniel.

  He drove around for another fifteen minutes, half-heartedly checking the thin stream of cars cruising the strip from the courthouse out to the Glam-O-Rama. He was exhausted and did not think he would find either of his boys this way.

  “No luck,” he said to Caroline, who was turned toward the wall, a novel splayed open on the bed beside her, when he entered the bedroom.

  “I’m worried, Thomas. Both of them? It’s just too strange.”

  “One thing’s for sure, they’re not together. If there is a car accident—”

  “Let’s don’t talk about that now,” she said. “Shouldn’t you to call someone?”

  “Who? The police? They won’t do anything for forty-eight hours.”

  “Not even look out for the car?”

  “That they might do, but I’d rather wait awhile.”

  He was undressed now down to T-shirt and boxers.

  “You really think you can sleep?”

  “I think I’ll have to try, if I’m going to be good for anything tomorrow.”

  “I don’t know how you can sleep.”

  Thomas performed his tricks of infinite patience, swallowing hard and breathing big and counting chimpanzee seconds to five.

  “Tell you what, I’ll wait up for them on the couch.”

  He did not look at her. He grabbed his pillow and a blanket from the chest at the foot of the bed, moved to the living room, settled into the squeaky orange Naugahyde, waited for sleep.

  Which would not come. Every time he closed his eyes, the room beyond his lids flared orange with the fire of a car crash. He shuddered, twisted, cursed the sticky naugahyde. He thought of getting up for another a drink, but he knew that if he got out of bed to have a drink he would more than likely spend an hour or two with the bottle, staring out at the streetlights, cultivating the things he habitually cultivated when sitting up late with the streetlights and a bottle: his own put-uponness, the lack of spontaneity in his life, all the ways in which the world had tamped him down.

  After an hour he returned to the bedroom, trailing his blanket behind him like a toddler. Caroline was facing the wall. The light was on. She was very much awake and yet completely still except for the rise of her ribcage beneath the thin nightgown she wore.

  “I can’t sleep,” he said.

  She mumbled something. He was too tired to ask her to repeat it, and he slid over to her, took her into his arms, scrunched closer, pulled up the covers which she, without a word, shrugged off to her waist.

  Sometime in the night he heard her moving around the room. Then she was shaking him awake and it was six-thirty and she was telling him both beds were empty. He was usually at work on Friday by that time, as he always ate breakfast with the Kiwanis Club at eight. Caroline loved to tease him about his membership in various civic clubs, which he tolerated, but barely, for business purposes. Secretly he liked her teasing and usually joined in. But today, when she asked if he’d stop by the police station first thing and he mentioned sleepily that he had Kiwanis, she lost her temper.

  “Our boys are missing, Tom. Both of them. The only ones we’ve got. They didn’t come home last night, and instead of doing something about it you’re thinking of breakfast with the Kiwanis Club?”

  He wasn’t awake. The remnants of the night’s many drinks were too much with him.

  “I’ll go myself,” she said.

  “I’ll go,” he said. “You need to stay here in case they come home.”

  He was dressed and out of there in fifteen minutes, skipping his morning coffee. There was a fresh pot brewing in the backroom of the police station, and he was familiar enough with the place to help himself before he made his way to the office of Croom Beatty Trent’s longtime chief.

  “I know what you’re going to ask already, Tom, and I’ll tell you straight out. Soon as I have something worth passing along, I’ll pass it along.”

  It took Thomas a few seconds to figure out he was talking about the Pierce case.

  “I’m not here for that.”

  Croom looked up from his desk.

  “You okay? Caroline and the boys?”

  “The boys. Neither one of them came home last night.”

  Croom glanced at his watch. “Were they together?”

  “Not likely. I have to threaten them to get them to talk to each other. No, they run with different crowds.”

  “I know Pete’s crowd right well. Dan, though, I didn’t know he had a crowd.”

  “He keeps to himself.”

  Croom nodded. Thomas didn’t feel right, talking to the chief of police about what crowd his sons ran with, and the look on Croom’s face made it worse.

  “I tell you, Tom, I about got my hands full with this murder.”

  “I know. I know there’s not much you can do. But I figured you could put out the word, tell your crew to be on the lookout.”

  “That I can do. Let me get some info from you. When’d you see them last?”

  “Yesterday morning. They left for school.”

  “Together?”

  Thomas hadn’t thought to ask. It was rare that they rode together, he knew, but it sometimes happened that Pete caught a ride with his brother.

  “I don’t know. I’ll have to ask Caroline about that.”

  “It’ll help us to know. They make it to school?”

  “Don’t know that either.”

  Croom wrote something on a legal pad. He seemed to be trying to hide his irritation.

  “What kind of car?”

  “’68 Galaxy 500.”

  Croom stopped writing.

  “Not blue, is it?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Dark blue, vinyl top?”

  “You found it?”

  Croom put his pen down. “No. But I’m looking for it. We got some leads to follow on this Pierce thing. Got a neighbor of the Pierces’ putting your car there that night. He remembered it because it was parked in front of his house when he came home.”

  Thomas took a seat. He sat because he was too tired to stand and it was just now seven and he had a full day ahead of him, a busy one, a crucial day if he was going to crank the paper out by Wednesday. He sat because this situation seemed suddenly far beyond his control, growing more complicated and unbelieveable by the minute, and he felt this loss of control in the backs of his legs and in the heaviness of his head and the sag of his stomach.

  But Croom was studying him as if his sitting revealed something pertinent. A clue.

  “Goddamn, Croom. You know good and well my boys had nothing to do with this.”

  “I don’t know a damn thing, Tom. But don’t go quoting me on that in this week’s paper. I ought to know a whole lot more than I do, considering the fact that teenagers talk, they get scared and rat each other out in a heartbeat, and for some reason no one’s talking. Whoever it is killed that boy, everybody’s scared to death of him, that’s all I know.”

  “That ought to eliminate my boys.”

  “Ought to. I’m not saying they’re involved. I haven’t said anything yet. But now that I know they’ve run off somewhere—”

  “Hold on. Who said they ran off somewhere?”

  “You hold on, Tom. Settle down and let me do my work. We’ve been knowing each other going on, what, fifteen ye
ars? You’re in and out of this office twice a day sometimes. You think I’m one to jump to conclusions?”

  “I think you just did.”

  Croom sighed. “Want more coffee?”

  “Please.”

  Croom carried their cups out to the kitchen for a refill. While he was gone Thomas studied the walls of the office, the framed credentials verifying Croom’s training, the photographs of his force in their softball uniforms. He understood that Croom was a fair man—a little political when the situation required, but honest enough in the Trent definition of the word.

  “Hey, sorry, Croom,” said Thomas when Croom returned.

  “Hell, man, don’t worry about it. My boy’s grown, but he sure pulled stuff like this in his day. I know how you worry. Steve always turned up down at the boardwalk in Carolina Beach, hungover and broke, but you never know until that phone call comes. It’s right to worry, especially these days.”

  “Didn’t sleep that well last night.”

  “Imagine not.”

  “So what do we do now?”

  “I’ll put a call out, get the shift to keep a lookout for the Ford.”

  This news, though he’d come here to ask for it, unnerved Thomas.

  “You know which of them was driving that night?”

  “What night?”

  “Last Saturday,” said Croom. “Night of the murder.”

  Thomas hesitated. If either of them could show up at the wrong place at the wrong time, it would be Pete. Danny did not need protecting.

  “Danny,” he said.

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah. Pete left the house with his buddies.”

  Croom scribbled on his legal pad.

  “Which buddies we talking about?”

  “That I can’t say for sure, but I know his friend Cozart was with him.”

  “Them two are tight, are they not?”

  “Siamese twins. I feed Cozart more than his mother does.”

  “I’ll have one of the boys stop by and talk to Cozart, then.”

  “I’ve already talked to him. He doesn’t know anything. Said he hasn’t seen Pete since school.”

  “Well, I still want to talk to him. Maybe I can get something out of him about the night of the murder.”

  Croom adjusted his glasses. “You know, Tom, maybe this is as good a time as any. I’ve been meaning to talk to you about Pete.”

  “What about him?”

  “Nothing you don’t already know, probably. We believe he’s heavy into pot.”

  Heavy into pot. Croom’s slang sounded comical to Thomas, though he knew better than to smile.

  “I suspected that. Don’t know what I can do about it though.”

  Croom eased out of his chair, extracted his handkerchief, removed his glasses to clean them. Thomas had never seen the man without his glasses. His eyes were small and red and bland.

  “Say you don’t know what you can do about it?” said Croom.

  “No,” said Thomas. “If he wants to experiment some, not much I can do to stop him, is there?”

  “I believe this is a little more serious than experimenting, Tom.”

  “You believe? Or you know for a fact?”

  Thomas regretted saying this as soon as it was out of his mouth. He’d heard Croom complain before about parents whose kids were always innocent, no matter what crime they’d been caught in the act of committing.

  “Look, maybe this ain’t the time to have this talk. I’m just trying to help, though. No need to get defensive.”

  “I know. Pete’s a smart boy, but he worries the hell out of us. I know some of those boys he hangs out with don’t give a damn about anything. You know, I’ve never had a bit of trouble with his brother. I guess Pete’s hard to deal with because we’ve had no experience. I tell you though, he might smoke a little pot, drink too much now and again, but he’s not a murderer.”

  “Okay. We’ve got to check out everything we’ve got, and we ain’t got all that much. You understand how it is?”

  “Of course.”

  “Go home and get some sleep. I’ll call if we turn up something.”

  “I’ll be at the office. Call over there.”

  As Thomas stood, Croom said, “Do me a favor, Tom. I know you have to put something in this week’s paper about this thing, some kind of follow-up and all. Work with me here on what you print, okay? I’ve got Jim Pierce calling up here every hour wanting to know everything, and if you go emphasizing how little we’ve got, it’s just going to make things a whole lot worse.”

  Thomas hovered above his chair for a moment before straightening slowly and half-turning toward the door. Croom had never asked for a favor like this—he’d always accepted, if not respected, Thomas’s right to print whatever he could find. It bothered Thomas, but he felt as if some other bargain were being struck here, one that involved his family, and he promised Croom Beatty he’d work with him on this thing, whatever that meant.

  Somehow he muddled through breakfast with the Kiwanis and lunch with the Rotarians. He found it as hard to pay attention to the speakers at each meeting as he did to the day’s work, which involved mostly phone calls to various law-enforcement agencies, excepting the police department, and working on his column and the week’s editorial. As for the latter, he had planned on writing something about the Pierce murder, something sympathetic and yet pertinent about the lack of activities for area youth, which drove them to seek out unchaperoned and potentially dangerous situations. Now, in light of recent developments, he could not believe how ignorant and presumptuous this line of thinking was, and though what brought him to this knowledge was far from welcome, he was glad not to have embarrassed himself by suggesting, however rhetorically, that the Pierce boy might still be alive if the city council had budgeted for a teen center.

  Caroline called several times that day and left messages with Bea, whom Thomas had asked to hold his calls. As of three o’clock, Thomas had yet to call Caroline back. It wasn’t that he did not want to talk to her—despite their disagreements, it was impossible to stay angry at her for more than an hour. He just wasn’t sure how much to tell her about his talk with Croom. He told himself, to make it easier, that she didn’t need to know anything now that there was nothing really to report except for some rumor that the Ford was parked outside the Pierces’ house on the night of the murder. What bothered him was that Dan had said, when he told him about the murder, that he had not seen Brandon Pierce for a while and was no longer friends with him. He wasn’t one to lie, and it made no sense for him to lie about attending the party if he had nothing to lie about.

  All these thoughts distracted Thomas. He could not get any work done. He told Strickland he had a headache and went home early. The empty house was not nearly so comforting and relaxing as it had been the day before. In fact, it was eerie—the silence, the stillness, only reminded him of his sons’ absence, and rather than sit there staring out the window for the sight of their car in the drive, he took to the highways in search of them.

  The afternoon was cloudy, the countryside muted by low-hanging haze. Driving the back roads, Thomas admired the farmhouses barricaded from the expansive acreage of corn and tobacco by lines of pecan and oak trees. When he’d first moved to Trent, he’d wanted to buy one of these places in the country, but this country was lost on Caroline, who’d grown up in the high foothills of the state and was accustomed to views and rocky rivers and the brilliant autumnal foliage of the almost-Appalachians. To Caroline, Trent was dusty and tarnished; she told him once that the whole town seemed flattened by the elements. He understood this to mean the heat, the heavy wet air that held sway for six months of the year and was capable of showing up unannounced and furious even in February. They’d spent many a Christmas in shirtsleeves, slapping at bugs. She was the one who chose the house they’d lived in for the past twenty years, arguing that it was in a neighborhood with lots of kids, and boys would need to be ferried back and forth if they chose to live out of town. Sh
e said the tobacco barns, leaning and tarpapered, depressed her. She was used to real barns, the massive regal structures of dairy farmers. She was used to hills, rivers that bubbled instead of the tawny static Tar. She was used to sunsets shadowing the faint, mystical Blue Ridge.

  She won, but Thomas always worried if it was the right choice, especially for Pete. He’d grown up with the boys in the neighborhood, and they’d remained close—only Danny and a few others had dropped out of their group when they reached high school. Thomas liked to think that Pete might take school more seriously if he had fewer partners in crime. He’d always thought that raising his kids in a small town like Trent was a gift to them, for he had been raised in a town only slightly larger, an hour’s drive northeast, and it had provided him with all sorts of lessons he’d drawn on for the rest of his life. He was always willing to forget how much he’d disliked it at the time. He was always willing to take the longer retrospective view, which seemed to him what being an adult was all about. But now that his boys had disappeared, he wondered if they would not have been better off in a place that had more to offer them. They were smart kids and they needed stimulation, in school and out of it, and the local schools were far from challenging. Of course there was less competition for academic honors here; Danny was a shoo-in for valedictorian. What if he had a test today? What if there was something else he’d missed, an election? Surely the football coach would bench him for missing practice. The thought of his son slumped dolefully in his shoulder pads at the edge of the bench reminded him that he had a game to cover tonight, which in all the day’s drama he’d forgotten. He turned the car around in the driveway of a trailer park.

  Caroline’s car was in the drive. He knew he’d have to explain why he did not call her back, as well as choose what to tell her about his visit with Croom. Once inside he headed straight for the liquor cabinet, mixed a bourbon before venturing into the bedroom where she lay fully clothed across the bed.