Had they ever felt loved? Ever felt truly wanted? Or had misery been their only constant?
“Oh God,” Jayme whispered, and lowered her head, placed her hands atop the map, and spread her fingers to cover the names and numbers one through seven. “Give them comfort,” she whispered, “please. Please give them peace.”
SIXTY-SEVEN
When she emerged from the bedroom carrying the map by a corner, finger and thumb tips only, as if the paper itself were imbued with all the sadness she wished to shed, DeMarco was lying awake on the sofa, the late afternoon sun slanting in through the window as he stared at the ceiling. He turned his head at her approach, saw the redness of her eyes, and sat up.
She handed him the map. “I don’t think I’m emotionally equipped for something like this.”
He took the map from her hand, laid it atop the coffee table, and folded it closed. “It’s hard, isn’t it?” he said.
She sat close beside him and took his hand in hers. “I grew up without ever thinking about girls like this. It makes me feel so ashamed. They would be close to my own age now.”
“I’ve thought of that too,” he said. “Sometimes I look at you and wonder what they would look like now.”
She leaned against him, turned her face into his shoulder. “That doesn’t make me feel any better. In fact, it makes me feel guilty.”
He stroked her hair. “Maybe that’s how we all should feel. Not enough of us do.”
She cried softly a while longer, her hand against the side of his neck. He had shaved that morning but the stubble was palpable again, like the finest of sandpaper, a feeling that gave her comfort somehow, the warmth of his flesh, the movement in his throat when he swallowed.
She said, “So what do we do now, boss?”
He said, “We do what nobody else has done. We find Virgil Helm.”
She sniffed and nodded, did not want to release him yet. “Any ideas where to start looking?”
“I know exactly where to look,” he told her. “Everywhere nobody else has.”
SIXTY-EIGHT
For the next fifteen minutes he filled her in on his conversation with Warner and discussed what was known about Virgil Helm. All of Helm’s known associates, which were few, had been questioned multiple times by both the sheriff’s office and the state police, all to no avail. He had been a ghost even before arriving in Aberdeen, allegedly a vet with no records or traceable history, a man who sometimes displayed difficulties in breathing and moving about, an introvert who kept to himself.
“What about Richie?” DeMarco asked, and felt a stiffness return to Jayme’s body. “He’s a good twenty years younger than Helm would be now, so he maybe never knew him. But he’s of the right social class, if you know what I mean. He might know somebody who knows somebody.”
“Somebody the police never questioned,” Jayme said.
“Exactly.”
She hesitated before she spoke. “Are you sure you’d be comfortable talking to him?” she asked. “Or having me talk to him?”
“I’m good,” he told her. “Really.”
She smiled and squeezed his hand. “You know you have nothing to worry about, right?”
“It’s not worth talking about. The past is past.”
The past is never past, she thought. Every second of their pasts lay gathered inside them. Every incident of their pasts had constructed their present, every cell interlocking, layer upon layer. The past is omnipresent.
She moved away from him slightly and turned to look out the window. As always during the day, there were a couple of butterflies visible, one at her grandmother’s summersweet bush and another in the neighboring yard. She found herself more than a bit startled by the brightness of the flowers, the radiance of the sunshine. She said, “Do you know how a caterpillar changes into a butterfly?”
“I always figured they go into their cocoons like Superman in a phone booth. He comes out wearing a cape and blue tights, they come out wearing wings.”
She smiled. “Close, but not quite. The caterpillar digests itself.”
“Excuse me?”
“It excretes an enzyme that reduces the entire caterpillar to a soup. Only a few cells survive. Those cells start building and growing and duplicating. And the result is a butterfly.”
“It’s amazing,” he said. “What made you think of that?”
“Death,” she answered. “Those poor girls.”
Now he turned too and gazed out the window. “It’s funny,” he told her, “but that’s how I like to think of them too. As seven perfect butterflies. What could be better than that?”
SIXTY-NINE
After dinner at the kitchen table—leftover lasagna and a salad of romaine, radishes, sweet peppers, and cherry tomatoes from somebody’s garden—they decided on a walk through town to make up for some of the jogging they had missed in the previous three days. It wasn’t long before music could be heard wafting through the neighborhood, a female’s voice singing, a guitar, piano, and drums filling in, then a brief saxophone solo.
“Oh my gosh,” she said, “I forgot—it’s Friday! Concerts in the park!”
“Just like back home,” he said.
“Yes, but we’ve never gone to them. Why haven’t we ever gone?”
“We’ll go to this one.”
“My misanthrope doesn’t mind?”
“If I’m not mistaken, that’s ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ I hear.”
“There’s ice cream too,” she teased. “And homemade pie.”
“Lead the way,” he said.
Soon they were walking hand in hand down Main Street, past small shops and stores and offices, being drawn by the music into a park of at least two well-groomed acres. Soft yellow and white lights were strung from the fringes of a half-dozen canvas canopies, beneath which local residents, mostly middle-aged women, sold slices of pie wrapped in cellophane, blocks of homemade fudge, bottled water, and cans of soda. A carnival wagon was doing a brisk business selling sno-cones and cotton candy. At the volunteer firemen’s kiosk, two men served up hot dogs and sloppy joes. On a raised bandstand, five musicians and a female singer in a blue, sequined dress serenaded an audience of two hundred seated in lawn chairs or on blankets with standards from the forties and fifties.
“It’s like walking back in time,” DeMarco said. Everyone they passed stared at the couple; most nodded and smiled. DeMarco recognized several of the faces from Jayme’s grandmother’s funeral.
“Here comes the pie,” Jayme said. “What will it be?”
An eight-foot table was crowded with pies of every berry, fruit, and pudding variety.
“No contest,” DeMarco answered. “Pecan pie with two scoops of vanilla.”
“Apple à la mode for me,” Jayme said. “I’m an all-American girl.”
As a smiling woman unwrapped their orders and dug into a container of ice cream, a man’s voice, loud and brusque and angry, drew their attention to the carnival wagon. The man, maybe five and a half feet tall in thick-heeled boots, with a thick mop of black hair combed over his forehead, stood berating two girls, one approximately ten, the other a couple of years younger. The man’s face and muscular arms were deeply tanned, his nose wide and flat, his squat neck stretched tight, an artery bulging as he shouted at the girls.
Both girls stood rigid but for their sobbing and trembling. A woman DeMarco presumed to be the girls’ mother stood head down behind the girls but did nothing to comfort them or curtail the man’s verbal assault.
DeMarco turned to the lady holding out his pie. “You mind keeping that on ice for a minute?” he said, then crossed to the shouting man.
When he laid a hand on the man’s shoulder, the shouting abruptly stopped. Startled, the man turned to look up at DeMarco, who was standing very close now, so close that DeMarco could see the man’s unnaturally low hairline an
d the differences in color and texture where the toupee gave way to lightly graying, less dense hair. “Could I have a word with you, friend?” DeMarco said.
He gave the man no chance to refuse, but took him lightly by the arm and escorted him out onto the sidewalk, where both turned their backs to the attentive crowd. On the bandstand the sequined woman kept singing “Green Eyes.”
DeMarco said, “I couldn’t help notice what a beautiful family you have there. Your wife and daughters, I assume. You’re a lucky man.”
The man’s face made a slow change from tight-lipped anger to a sycophantic grin. “They’re a handful though. Was I a little too loud back there? Sorry about that. I was just trying to make myself heard above the music.”
“Sure,” DeMarco said. “The music is loud. Thing is…they’re still just children, you know. Humiliating them like that, it’s just not appropriate behavior. Public or private.”
“Ah, they know it’s all bark. You’ve got to get their attention sometimes, am I right? You’re not from around here, are you? I don’t think I recognize you.”
DeMarco smiled and leaned a bit closer. “There’s this term called child abuse you should become familiar with, my friend. Those of us in law enforcement don’t look kindly on it.”
The man’s large eyes came open wider. Before he could ask the question DeMarco knew was coming, DeMarco gave his shoulder a firm squeeze. “Sergeant Ryan DeMarco, State Police. Enjoy the concert. And allow your family to do the same.”
He turned and left the man behind on the sidewalk, Jayme still talking quietly to the woman and her children. The girls would not meet her eyes, but looked only at their mother, all as cowed as before. DeMarco returned to the pie table and dug into his pocket for a five-dollar bill.
Jayme joined him there a few moments later. They carried their plates and plastic spoons to a small parcel of grass at the back of the crowd. They sat cross-legged to eat their pie. “Sort of takes the edge off my appetite,” he told her.
She spooned a bit of ice cream into her mouth, let it melt away, and swallowed. “You know why he was screaming at them?”
“I didn’t ask,” DeMarco said.
“Because they wanted separate sno-cones. He told them they were greedy and fat and had to share one.”
“Lots of calories in ice,” DeMarco said. He scanned the crowd for another look at the girls. “Fat?” he said. “Stand them side by side, they’re not as fat as his head.”
“Take a breath, baby.”
“How about that hairpiece?” DeMarco said. “Looks like a hairy cow patty.”
Jayme smiled and waited for the rest.
“I bet he’s had that nose flattened a dozen times. I wanted so badly to just punch him in the face.”
She patted his leg twice.
“Pygmy Neanderthal,” he muttered, then shook his head from side to side.
Thirty seconds later he inhaled slowly, a long, deep breath, then exhaled through his mouth.
DeMarco blinked twice, trying to get his focus back. “Sorry if I embarrassed you,” he said.
“You don’t embarrass me. A part of me wishes you could turn your radar off once in a while, but the other part… God, baby. Why do people have to be so cruel?”
He nodded. “Those seven girls are starting to haunt me too.”
She sighed. “Let’s just listen to the music, okay? This is the kind of stuff you old folks like, isn’t it?”
He smiled. “My mother did.”
The look in his eyes then, so distant and melancholic, made something catch in her throat.
“Eat your pie,” she told him. “The ice cream’s melting.”
SEVENTY
Over the summer after ninth grade, Ryan shot up to a full six feet. Earlier that year, on a chilly night in April when the temperature dropped to nearly freezing, his father had been found dead in the gravel parking lot of a raucous shot-and-beer bar, a small-caliber bullet near his heart. He was found with his zipper down, penis still out. The blood trail indicated he had stood up against the rear of the building to urinate, then had turned when the shooter approached, and was shot point-blank. He then crawled to the side of the building, a distance of fifteen feet or so, where he subsequently expired. The shooter was never identified.
Ryan could not help but see a connection between his growth spurt and his father’s death, as if the weight of his father’s presence always pressing down on him had finally been lifted. That summer Ryan took a job laying asphalt driveways with a crew of mostly hungover middle-aged men who moved through the day as if their bodies were made of the same slowly hardening tar as the product they spread. His job was to carry what needed carried and to shovel what needed shoveled. Each day as his jeans grew shorter, his T-shirts got tighter, his muscles growing hard and strong.
As the youngest and lowest paid member of the crew he brought home more money each week than his father ever had, and he filled the refrigerator and cupboards of their trailer with food and treats he and his mother had long been deprived. He tried to get his mother to quit smoking and to take better care of herself, but her only concession to that campaign was to not smoke in the trailer when he was there, and, when he was, to stand on the front step with the door open at her back and blow the smoke out across the scraggly yard as if the smoke was all he objected to.
He imagined if she were younger she would be transformed too by his father’s absence, made happy again, a woman who sang along with the radio, and who after a glass or two of wine would pull her son into the narrow space available and dance with him, but instead, she adopted a lost and frightened look in her eyes as if the light had turned green but she had forgotten how to drive. She spent more and more evenings drinking with Paul, whose voice could sometimes be heard screaming through the thin walls of his trailer, but who, when Ryan banged on the door to check on his mother, always laughed and said he was screaming at the television.
On Ryan’s first day of his sophomore year he witnessed an older boy in the hallway yanking on a girl’s arm to drag her away from a group of friends, and when she squealed in pain and started crying, Ryan, without knowing he would do it and even surprised as it was happening, seized the boy by his own arm and twisted it behind his back and flung him crashing against the painted cement block wall.
When the boy got up barreling head down in a murderous rage, Ryan stepped to the side and clubbed his back with fist and forearm, then yanked him to his feet and slapped him hard six or seven times until the boy was bloody-nosed and blubbering just as Ryan had when he was a child.
Minutes later Ryan sat in the principal’s office getting alternately chewed out and threatened by the chubby balding principal who stood behind his desk with the phone at his ear, waiting to inform Ryan’s mother that her son was being suspended and, pending school board review, possibly expelled and maybe even arrested. But the phone kept ringing unanswered and eventually the vice principal came down the hall and peered in through the plate-glass window and stared at Ryan briefly before coming inside and telling him, Stand up here a minute.
The vice principal, who was also the football coach, measured his height against Ryan’s and to his delight found himself coming up two inches short. What have they been feeding you all summer? he asked, and before Ryan could say he’d been feeding himself, the vice principal turned to the principal and said, So what’s the verdict here? To which the principal said, Two weeks minimum and maybe the entire year unless you have a better idea. To which the vice principal turned grinning to Ryan and said, I need a fullback. How do you feel about banging into other big fellas for the next four months? Ryan looked at the principal, who was still scowling and listening to the phone ring, and Ryan said, I guess I could learn to enjoy it.
SEVENTY-ONE
They spent a little over an hour listening to music in the Aberdeen park, but although DeMarco found himself enjoying not on
ly the amateur band, but also the Mayberry ambiance of oldsters in the audience singing along, mothers and fathers holding sleeping babies, little ones running laughing between the lawn chairs, his mind kept returning to the seven sets of remains wrapped in their plastic sheeting and duct tape cocoons. The skeletons had all been reassembled on a laboratory table years ago, dental records and DNA matched to family members, the remains reverently returned to families he hoped had accorded them their due respect, yet their story was unfinished. The writing of that ending had now fallen to him and Jayme.
For the last thirty minutes they had been sitting on the grass, no longer watching the band but gazing into the darkening sky or following the winking light of a firefly. Now he ran his hand down her arm, and she, smiling, turned her palm up to receive his, fingers slipping between fingers. He wondered how such a simple gesture could send so much information from one body to another, what kind of chemical and electromagnetic magic could transform mere touch into comfort, love, longing, and gratitude.
He leaned close to her and whispered, “Ready to go?”
“If you are,” she said.
He gathered up their empty paper plates and spoons. They stood and made their way around the periphery of the crowd. At the nearest receptacle he deposited the trash. Across the street, in a bank’s drive-through, Richie was leaning against the side of an ATM, talking to another man. DeMarco watched him take a drag on a joint then pass it to his friend.
“That’s Richie over there,” DeMarco said. “Mind if we say hello?”
She followed his gaze, then gripped his hand tight and stopped walking, bringing him to a halt. “Don’t start this again,” she said.
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