by John Lutz
Pearl had to admit there was something about this that amused her, Lauri inexpertly tailing her and not noticing Wormy inexpertly tailing her. A procession of incompetents.
When the time was right, Pearl would tell Quinn about this and he’d find it immensely amusing. They’d share a big laugh.
When the time was right.
That night Pearl lay in bed unable to sleep, listening to the window air conditioner humming away in its mechanical battle with the heat. Its low monotone was punctuated by night sounds of the city, muted and diminished in number by the late hour.
Rather, the early hour. Pearl knew it would start to get light outside pretty soon. The dark between the blind slats would become gray, then the gray at the edges of the windows would brighten, and warm sunlight would find its way inside. Pearl, who felt as if she’d had two minutes of sleep though she’d gone to bed at eleven o’clock, would have to get up, shower, and dress.
She wanted to remain comfortably in bed. She asked herself why it was necessary to struggle upright, trudge into the bathroom, and stand nude under running water. Why did people do that? How did that kind of thing ever get started?
Surely there must be a better way.
She rolled onto her stomach, punched her pillow with gusto, and tried to enjoy what little time she had left in bed, but her head began to pound.
She knew what might really have disturbed her sleep. It was the way Ella Oaklie had thought she recognized Jeb when he walked into the Pepper Tree.
Ella had seemed so sure Jeb was the man she’d met with Marilyn Nelson not long before Marilyn’s death. And Pearl didn’t agree with Jeb that he had the type of face that would cause him often to be mistaken for someone else. Of course, that could be because of the way she felt about him.
Might Jeb actually be the man Ella had met? Jeb using the name Joe Grant?
Pearl punched her pillow again and told herself she was being too cynical. That was why she’d quit the department and become a guard in a quiet, efficient bank where everyone was polite and almost everything worth stealing was locked away in a vault with walls three feet thick. Banks were orderly islands of calm.
Not like the outside mad world where people died horrible deaths for no apparent reason, where questions evoked more questions instead of answers, where a teenage kid followed a burnt-out cop on a dangerous job and was in turn followed by a human worm.
Where a killer might change identities as easily and consciencelessly as if he were changing clothes.
Pearl decided it was time to turn off her mind and turn on the shower. As she climbed out of bed and padded barefoot toward the apartment’s tiny bathroom, she wondered if it actually was possible to be too cynical.
She told herself the answer had to be yes. That Jeb Jones and Joe Grant were simply two different people.
The answer had to be yes.
41
Bocanne, Florida, 1980
Myrna sat in the worn gray vinyl recliner and watched her flickering TV screen. Television wasn’t much in the isolated shack. The blues on the screen were greens, and the fleshtones so yellow it appeared that everyone was jaundiced. Myrna didn’t have cable, being so far from town, and she couldn’t afford one of those new revolving dishes. The beat-up antenna on the house’s roof had been struck by lightning and hadn’t worked worth a damn since. Sam used to climb up there and adjust the thing toward the signal, but now Sam was gone.
He was sure as hell gone.
And so was Sherman.
Myrna set her beer can on the floor, then got up from the recliner and took a few bent-over steps so she could change the channel and pick up local news.
The truth was, she didn’t much care about the quality of the picture. What interested her was information. The TV was at least good enough to receive local channels, and since Sherman had disappeared, Myrna always watched the noon and nightly news.
It had been almost a month now since she’d pursued her son through the swamp, sending piercing spotlight beams into the blackness, calling for him to return, knowing he could hear her or at least hear the rumbling and rattling of the old pickup truck.
But he hadn’t replied. When she’d turned off the truck’s engine from time to time to listen, her calls were met only with the teeming, vibrant indifference of the swamp. It had been infuriating, almost like an insult.
Sherman had surprised her. He’d been raised at the edge of the swamp and knew what it was, how it could kill. Of course, he also knew what might happen if he returned home. But boys that age didn’t think logically. Even after she’d given up and returned to the house, she’d waited and waited, thinking he’d stomp up onto the porch and open the door tired and hungry and hopeless, needing his mother.
Sherman had surprised her, all right. It had been almost a month since he’d run away. He must be dead. He’d chosen his own eventual but certain death in the swamp rather than at her hands.
That puzzled Myrna. Sherman must have thought there was some slight chance that he might talk her out of it, that she’d show him some mercy. After all, she was his mother. Yet he’d faced up to reality.
Still, he was a boy.
With a man’s balls, she thought, not without some motherly pride, as she sat sipping beer and waiting for a commercial to end.
Myrna was human, and Sherman was her son. But if time didn’t heal, it at least produced a scab. She went days now without thinking about Sherman. There were some bad ways to die in the dark waters of the swamp, and for a long while after his flight her sleep had been interrupted by dreams. But Myrna was a hard and practical woman. That was what the world required of her. She slept well enough, and thought less and less about Sherman as the weeks passed. It wasn’t as if she’d had a choice. She told herself that often. She hadn’t made the goddamned rules. The world had. Men had.
She settled down into her recliner with a beer to watch the television noon news out of Tampa, as she did every day. It had become so routine she’d almost forgotten why.
“Following up on an earlier story…” said the voice from the TV.
One of the regular anchors, a made-up, jaundiced blonde with too much hair and lipstick, was back. “…the child who’s come to be known only as the Swamp Boy still hasn’t been identified. He was found wandering the road in Harrison County yesterday, his leg injured, apparently by an animal, judging by the bite marks. He was carrying no identification and still hasn’t spoken. Doctors say that other than the leg injury he’s physically healthy but in a state of shock. They’re hoping that someday soon he’ll be able to say his name and tell us who he is”—the anchorwoman put on a serious pout and leaned toward the camera—“and what happened to him.”
A photo of the Swamp Boy appeared on the screen. Sherman. Hair long and tangled, face gaunt, eyes wild—but Sherman.
Myrna put her beer can down on the floor and sat back in the recliner, closing her eyes and digging her fingertips into the warm vinyl arms. She couldn’t look at the TV screen.
Harrison County. Twenty miles away. My God! He survived somehow, lived somehow on his own in the swamp. All that time…
He doesn’t know his name. Doesn’t remember.
But he will. The doctors will give him drugs. Hypnotize him. He’ll remember. He’ll talk.
Myrna felt a sudden panic and stood up from the chair.
Then she took a deep breath, waited for her heartbeat to slow, and retrieved her beer and finished it in a series of gulps. She hadn’t thought this day would come, but at the same time she’d been waiting for it. It was a miracle that anyone, let alone a nine-year-old boy, could survive the night in the deep swamp, but miracles seemed to attach themselves to Sherman. Sam Pickens used to talk about how odd Sherman was, and how smart. How very smart.
He’ll know. He’ll remember. He’ll talk.
Myrna knew what she had to do. She turned off the TV, went directly into the bedroom, and began to pack.
By the time people learned from the photograph wh
o Sherman was and the authorities came to see Myrna, they found only the empty shack. It was assumed something bad had happened to her, that she’d been killed or had become lost and died in the swamp. It wasn’t unusual for dead bodies never to be recovered from the swamp’s dark landscape. She became simply another brief story, another unsolved mystery. Not the first to live on the edge of the vast darkness and one day disappear into it.
Over the coming years, from her anonymity and place of safety, she would read and hear about how the Swamp Boy was identified and had finally talked. But his story about how he’d wandered away from home on his own to go fishing and gotten lost wasn’t at all what had happened. Myrna didn’t know if Sherman couldn’t remember the truth, or had chosen to lie. The mind could blank out certain horrors, but Sherman could be devious.
As his biological mother, she admitted to a certain satisfaction as she read from time to time about how intelligent he was, how, as a ward of the state, he’d been tested and found to have an amazingly high IQ. He was given favoritism, scholarship opportunities, as he was shuffled through a series of institutions and foster homes. Sherman made the most of those opportunities.
Myrna knew that by now he might remember at least something about the time before the swamp, yet he must not have spoken of it, or surely it would have been on the news. She could understand why he would remain silent, considering how people’s view of him would change if he revealed his part in what had happened; the boarders who’d disappeared, and whose Social Security checks had continued to be collected and cashed. He’d been a child and wouldn’t be in any legal jeopardy, but still, people would have and share their thoughts.
At times Myrna had her own thoughts about Sherman and smiled with motherly pride. Her son. So smart.
Smart enough not to talk.
42
New York, the present
“This has to stop,” Pearl told Lauri.
“You saw me?” Lauri’s eyes widened in surprise. “How?”
They were in the Hungry U, where Pearl had stopped in to talk to Lauri as she waited tables. It was five o’clock, still early for the dinner crowd, and the lunchtime diners were long gone. Pearl and Lauri were alone in the restaurant except for a touristy-looking couple at a corner table, and whoever was in the kitchen or out by the register. Something in the kitchen was giving off a peculiar but not unpleasant scent, a mingling of sage and cinnamon.
Pearl had ordered only a diet Coke, which she sipped slowly as she carefully formulated her words. She released her plastic straw from between her lips, noticing that it was now lipstick stained. “It doesn’t work to follow someone on the other side of the street unless you know what you’re doing. It doesn’t work to stand around outside someplace like you’re haunting it unless you’re careful to stay out of sight. And it especially doesn’t work if you try to sneak inside without being seen so you can use the restroom.”
Standing over Pearl, still holding her serving tray in one hand, other hand on hip, Lauri said, “What do you do if you’re tailing someone and you have to pee?”
“If you actually become a cop, you’ll go to the Academy and they’ll tell you.”
Pearl watched as the touristy couple beckoned Lauri over and asked for their check. Lauri smilingly presented it, then carried it and a credit card through the door to the restaurant’s entrance area and register.
By the time she came back, returned the card and check to the couple, and walked back to where Pearl was sitting, Pearl had drunk half her Coke. Despite the early hour and having only three customers, there was soft background music in the restaurant. It didn’t sound very Pakistani, but how would Pearl know? It bothered her that she’d probably have a hard time getting the nagging little melody that persisted between the overwrought drum solos and the unintelligible singer out of her brain. It sounded vaguely familiar, but it was that kind of melody.
Lauri returned to Pearl’s table and stood hipshot, still holding the round serving tray—which Pearl was beginning to figure out was a prop to make her feel more like a professional food server—in her previous spot. The curtain-filtered light from a nearby window made her look even younger and yet somehow even more like Quinn.
“Want a refill?”
“I’m good,” Pearl assured her.
“You haven’t told Dad, have you?”
“That you’re still tailing me? No. But I want it to stop, Lauri. I mean actually stop. Or I will tell him.”
Lauri flashed her father’s stubborn, defiant expression for a second, then shrugged and nodded. “Okay. If you say stop, I’ll stop.”
“Your solemn word?”
“I promise you’ll never spot me following you again.”
Which wasn’t exactly the promise Pearl was requesting.
More of Quinn’s bullshit. Was it genetic?
“Lauri—” But something had popped into Pearl’s mind. “Now I’ve got it.”
“What?”
“That tune. I thought I might have heard it before.”
Lauri grinned proudly. “That’s right. You heard it here. That’s The Defendants’ CD of Lost in Bonkers.”
“They actually sell their music?”
“Not yet, but they will. That’s just a demo CD they made at the drummer’s brother’s apartment studio. Wormy’s shopping it around. Well, looking for an agent to shop it around, actually.”
“Speaking of Wormy,” Pearl said, “do you realize he’s following you following me?”
Lauri appeared temporarily confused. Then her face flushed with anger.
It was anger she didn’t express in words; she knew what Pearl would say.
“Wormy? Why’s he following me?” Lauri admirably kept her voice calm.
“I don’t know for sure,” Pearl said. “He might think you’re seeing someone else. Or he might be afraid for you. The little—he probably loves you and feels protective. Men are like that.” Even worms.
“He’s a musician, not a fighter,” Lauri said.
Thinking Lauri had that right except for the musician part, Pearl finished her Coke, which was now diluted by melted ice. “I’m not saying he’s a skilled bodyguard, only that he’s been following you. I saw him outside the Pepper Tree the other day, trying to be invisible in a doorway across the street.”
Lauri couldn’t help looking miffed. Pearl figured if Wormy were around he might be beaned with the serving tray, the way Lauri’s knuckles were so white on the hand that gripped it.
She stared at a point just above Pearl’s head, the way Quinn did when he was angry, as if there were a message written in the air confirming his righteous rage. “I’ll put a goddamned stop to that!”
Pearl left enough money on the table to cover the drink and tip and stood up. “You do that, Lauri. You talk to Wormy the way I talked to you. Of course, if you stop following me around, there won’t be a problem.”
“There won’t be a problem,” Lauri said, scooping up the money.
Not “I’ll stop following you.”
Genetic, Peal thought again, as she walked from the restaurant, not realizing she was moving to the infectious beat of Lost in Bonkers.
Celandra jogged in place until the traffic signal changed at West Eighty-ninth Street, then crossed the intersection and continued jogging south on Broadway. Heads male and female turned to glance at the tall, graceful woman with the long brown hair, dressed in red shorts that fit her loosely but were nonetheless revealing, and a gray sleeveless T-shirt with a sports bra beneath. When it came to nullifying curves, the sports bra did about as well as the overmatched baggy shorts.
Most New York joggers favored the park or more sparsely traveled side streets, but Celandra loved running down Broadway, taking in the sights and sounds and smells of the city as she worked up a sweat and began breathing hard. She tried to jog every other night, and to push herself. It was good exercise not only for her appearance, but for her endurance in dance numbers. She’d take more dance lessons when she could afford it
, but for now her running would have to do.
In the West Sixties she began to tire, and to feel the stitches of pain in her ribs and the burning in her thighs.
Had enough…Time to turn around.
She drew admiring stares and a man’s offer to run with her as she jogged in place again and waited for a traffic-locked furniture van to move so she could cross the street. Trying not to breathe the van’s noxious exhaust fumes too deeply, she began the return run toward her apartment.
She was spent a block from home and began to walk, her shirt plastered to her by perspiration, her head bowed, her hands on her hips; still drawing stares, a marathoner and wet T-shirt contest winner.
By the time she reached her building, her breathing had evened out but was still labored. The burning sensation in her thighs was gone. Her legs felt heavy, tired, good. She smiled. It had been a productive workout. Someday all her hard work would pay big career dividends. She truly believed she’d make it as a major actress. Had anyone ever made it without believing?
She wiped her forearm across her sweaty brow and drew deep, steadying breaths as she waited for the elevator. The ancient brass arrow above the door trembled and hesitated as if struggling against gravity as it dropped from 3 to 2 to 1, and the elevator’s steel door scraped and slid open.
A sixtyish, red-haired woman Celandra knew only as Mrs. Altmont stepped from the elevator with her tiny Yorkie, Edgemore, on a leash. Mrs. Altmont lived down the hall from Celandra and had the tight, stiff stare of too much cosmetic surgery. Her lean features seemed out of sync with her pudgy body. She’d once told Celandra she’d named Edgemore after her former husband. Celandra assumed Edgemore, the husband, might still be paying off the surgery.