by Bill Cameron
The girls stopped playing with their cereal and looked at Eager. He rolled his eyes. Charm didn’t seem to notice. She left her cup on the table. Ten minutes later, Eager was out the door and skating down to Hawthorne to scare up some spending money. Beg, borrow, or steal, only there’d be no borrowing and little enough begging. The girls were on their own, digging holes in the yard or setting fires or whatever it was they did all day.
The last thing he expected was to see the big man from the porch again, this time in the auto repair parking lot next to the coffee shop, with his hand clasped around some woman’s throat.
November 11
Disturbance At Area Clinic
MERRILL, OR: County police were called in to help control a disturbance at the Upper Basin Center for Cognitive Medicine outside Merrill last night. Staff at the private clinic report a female visitor became agitated with a patient. When asked to calm down, she responded with verbal abuse and threats of violence toward staff members. The woman fled before police could arrive, but in the ensuing confusion a number of patients left the facility.
County sheriffs are currently searching for the missing patients, who suffer from a variety of cognitive impairments. Deputy Raelene Suggins of the Klamath County Sheriff’s Office asks area residents to report anyone seen wandering or suffering apparent disorientation or confusion.
November 19 — 8:20 am
Roaming Eye Rolls
I’m not part of this. This electronic buzz, this steadfast authority. Cops move from here to there in the street out front of my house, pre-programmed automatons following invisible tracks. Some enter Mitch’s; others come out. A few stand at the crowd control barricades, shaking their heads and repeating the phrase, “We’ll have this cleared up as soon as we can, sir and/or ma’am.” Others work the street, knocking on doors or interviewing neighbors. On his porch, the EMTs crawl over Mitch like ants scaling a picnic lunch. Everyone has a job. Each knows exactly what to do.
I have no idea what’s going on anymore.
A typical November drizzle falls, too thin to send gathered onlookers looking for umbrellas. I feel it in my shoes. I ask a few people about Eager, but no one has seen him. The EMTs are focused on Mitch and don’t have time for me. I’m only allowed inside the barricade out of deference to my status as a former one-of-us—a pity lay. Or maybe it’s the fact they still have command of my house. I’m talking to one of my neighbors, a woman with two daughters in pre-school, when Mitch goes into cardiac arrest.
“What an awful thing.” She’s watching the EMTs. Her name is Helen, and this is the most we’ve spoken since she and her husband moved in three years before. “Right here on our street.”
It can happen anywhere, I tell her. “A street full of manicured lawns and well-maintained minivans sure as hell didn’t stop Mitch from going off the rails, did it?” She looks troubled, mutters about her daughters stuck inside with her mother. They need to get going. Everyone is late for everything: work, day care, bridge club. Helen flinches when, up the street, a television news van backs up under a birch tree and catches a branch with a satellite dish raised up on its telescopic armature. The branch snaps with a sound like a gunshot. Helen trots toward her house, hands gripping her upper arms, cotton-swathed thighs swishing. No doubt I’ll see a For Sale sign in her yard in the next couple of weeks, she and her husband convinced life is more certain out in Forest Grove or Happy Valley.
I move back to my front lawn. The EMTs have got Mitch on an IV now, oxygen mask over his nose and mouth. His face is bone white and the way his head flops side-to-side makes me wonder if I’ll ever see him again. A hand grasps my elbow. I turn and there’s Susan, my former partner in Homicide. Lieutenant Mulvaney now. She’s running the investigative side of this circus, coordinating with tactical from my living room. I’ve known Susan for a long time.
“Skin, do you have a cigarette?”
“You’re smoking again?”
She squeezes her lips together. “If I was smoking again don’t you think I’d have my own cigarettes?”
“I dunno. Maybe you’ve become a mooch in your old age.”
“Do you have a cigarette or not?”
“I quit.”
Susan is tall and slender, with dusty blond hair wrapped up in a loose bun under her hat. She’s in uniform this morning, a look I’m not used to. Her green eyes appear dull in the watery light, and her hair sports more grey than I remember. She breathes through her nose. There was a time when I could read her every expression, but things have changed between us. “You’re sticking with it then.”
“Sometimes it’s easy, sometimes not so much. You know how it is.”
“I had Eric and Leah to keep me honest.”
I’m not sure if she’s tossing a jab my way or not—she knows enough of my own disastrous romantic history to be aware of my shortage of anyone to keep me honest. But with Susan it isn’t always easy to tell, especially since I retired and she got her promotion. Like a marriage falling apart, the collapse of our partnership had been driven by both bitterness and regret. To say our relationship is amicable these days is perhaps overstating the case. But at the same time, I’d still like to believe I can trust her when my nuts are in a vice.
“How long has it been?”
“A year and a half.”
She nods. “That long.” The skin under her eyes is dark. I can tell she has something else on her mind, but I’m not sure if she’s come out here to share with me or is taking a break from all the clanking brass furrowing their brows in my living room. I myself had fled at least two captains and a commander, and hell, even the Man herself, Chief Rosie Sizer, who solemnly shook my hand, thanked me, and apologized for my trouble before handing me off to some spit-polished sergeant who wanted to know where he could plug in a tangle of cell phone chargers. I can’t blame Susan for slipping away. She’s been juggling a lot all morning, and I almost feel bad about adding to her troubles.
“So. Who you got looking for Eager?”
Her posture goes taut. “Eager Gillespie? Why should I have anyone looking for him?”
“You didn’t see it? When Mitch got the shot off?”
“What are you saying?”
“Eager took the bullet in the eye.”
She doesn’t answer right away. “No one informed me.” I can tell she’s not pleased, but her only outward concession to an emotional response is to blink a couple of times. “Where is he now?”
I turn over my hands. “That’s what I’d like to know. The paramedics checked him out, but he got pissy the way he does and they turned their attention to Mitch. Next thing I know, he’s outa here. No one knows where.”
“You must not have seen it right.” I’m sure that’s what she’d prefer. If he wasn’t shot, he’s not her problem. She also won’t have to deal with the fact she wasn’t informed of another victim of this morning’s fiasco.
“I was looking right at him when the gun went off, Susan.”
Her tongue probes the inside of her cheek. She’s staring across the street at Mitch’s porch, but I don’t think she sees anything. “Maybe he’s all right.”
“Has Eager ever been all right?”
She drops her gaze and tilts her head, conceding the point. We encountered Eager the first time together after he was discovered at the scene of a homicide. Young woman shot to death, murder weapon never recovered. Eager the only witness—a useless witness, as it happened.
“I don’t know what to tell you, Skin.”
“Don’t you think it’s interesting he was here this morning?”
“I don’t know. Should it be interesting?”
“Well, we’re a short stroll from the scene of an unsolved murder he was part of and now he appears again the morning a straight goes Virginia Tech on his own family. I find that interesting.”
“You think Eager has something to do with this?”
“I think it’s pretty damn convenient he happened to show up this morning. Here.”
“Hmmm.” She’s wishing my interest in Eager would burn off like the morning fog. All Eager can do at this point is make her life more difficult, particularly if Mitch’s errant bullet is in back of his eyeball. “Skin, here’s the thing: Luellen Bronstein and the kid, Mitch Bronstein’s son?”
“What about them?”
“What do you know about them?”
“Only what anyone knows about his neighbors. They’ve only lived here a few years.” Susan cocks her head at me. For some people, that’s enough time to get written into the will.
“You’ve never talked to her?”
“Luellen? Sure. Mostly to say hi, lousy weather we’re having. Why?”
“What do you know about the kids?”
“Their names.”
“Jason and Danny.”
“Right.” I’m being more reticent than necessary, but I’m annoyed Susan isn’t concerned about Eager. I don’t want to tell her I’ve watched the little one for Luellen more times than I can count. Good boy, calls me Mister Skin. Beyond that, I know Jase has been in and out of trouble ever since his mother left Mitch when the kid was fourteen. But I also know if I tell Susan all this she’ll want to interrogate me, and I have no interest in becoming a part of her investigation.
I’ve also never been able to match Susan’s patience. “Jase is from Mitch’s first marriage.”
“He doesn’t get along with Luellen. I could see it in their body language.”
“Near as I can tell, Jase doesn’t like anyone.”
“This morning when the first patrol cars responded to the 9-1-1, they caught him running one direction, Luellen another. When we talked to them, she was upset, anxious. Like you’d expect. He acted like we were keeping him from something more important.”
I turn my hands over. “Susan, he wouldn’t piss on you if you were fire.”
“How about Danny?”
“What about him? He’s four years old.” I study her face, but as usual she’s a stone. “Susan, what’s this about?”
“The Bronsteins were married three years ago. According to one of his colleagues at work they only met a few months before they were married.”
“Okay. Danny isn’t his kid. So what?”
“Danny wasn’t there this morning.”
“Damn good thing too.”
“At least, that’s what she told us. ‘He’s with his grandfather now.’” She pulled at her lower lip. “Now. Don’t you think that’s an odd way to put it?”
Susan doesn’t talk just to hear the sound of her own voice. I know from long experience she’s trying to fit the pieces together, looking for what connects to what. Mitch, Danny and his grandfather, the .22, the blood in the kitchen, the bullet hole in the wall. I’d be doing the same thing if I was still on the job. And, in a way, maybe I am. But I have my own interest.
“Have they recovered the bullet?” I’d rather Susan answer my questions than the other way around.
“From the kitchen wall?” She nods, pensive. “There was tissue and blood present. Justin Marcille says it’s most likely .357 or .38, but he won’t know for sure until he gets it processed.”
“It went through somebody.”
Another nod.
“And definitely not from Mitch’s gun.”
“Not the one he had on him, no.”
“And you don’t believe any of that shit Mitch jabbered at the EMTs.”
“We’ll check it out.”
“What does Luellen have to say?”
Her lips squeeze together again and she raises her hand to her face. It shakes a little as she rubs one eye. Susan isn’t easily troubled, and I feel a chill run through me. Or maybe it’s the rain dribbling down inside my collar.
“Luellen and Jason are gone.”
“What do you mean? Gone where?”
“I left them in my car to catch their breath while I talked to Bronstein’s boss. They’d had a rough morning, you know?” She’s breathing through her nose again. “The officer I asked to keep an eye on them got distracted by an argument, one of your neighbors unhappy his car was inside the perimeter. When the officer got back to my car, they were gone. No one saw them leave.”
She’s losing witnesses left and right. “Whose blood is it? In the kitchen.”
“We’re pretty sure it’s not Bronstein’s. His wounds all appear to be from the exchange on the porch, and the trail goes out the back door, not toward the front of the house. It’s definitely not Luellen or Jason’s. They were both uninjured.”
Who does that leave? Susan doesn’t ask and I don’t answer, but we’re both thinking the same thing. Someone else was there. Grandpa maybe. Packing heat, whoever it was. But who got shot, and who did the shooting? Neither of us want to contemplate little Danny in that kitchen.
“Susan.” I’m trying to duck the obvious. “This isn’t the first time Eager’s appeared at a scene involving a missing gun.”
“Okay.” But then she shakes her head. “It’s not his blood either. I don’t know why he was here this morning, but a teenager making an appearance in his old neighborhood is hardly cause for a press conference.”
“He’s supposed to be in Spokane with his mother.”
“So now we’re surprised Eager Gillespie isn’t where he’s supposed to be?” She gives me a sad little smile. “Skin, I know you like him. A lot of us like him. But that doesn’t change the fact he’s a poster child for mandatory minimum sentencing. I don’t have time to deal with him and all his crap right now.”
I feel a tickle in my throat, the beginning of a cigarette craving. Thanks, Susan, for waking that up again. This would be the time to tell her about Eager’s tag appearing on Mitch’s door a few months back, but instead I shake my head and turn away. “Sorry for troubling you.” I try to keep the edge out of my voice, but don’t think I pull it off. I’m fuming, because I hate the feeling that a year into retirement, I rate no better than some guy down on Pioneer Courthouse Square selling Scientology or 9/11 conspiracies.
“Skin, wait.” She grabs my forearm before I can walk off. “Listen, if he’s hurt, he’ll turn up in an ER sooner or later. I’ll put the word out, make sure I’m flagged. Okay?”
“Sure. Fine.”
“I’ve got to go. We’ll be out of your place soon.” She lets go of my arm, turns toward the house.
“Susan, do me one favor at least.” She looks back at me. “Check the bullet from the kitchen against the one they pulled out of that girl.”
“Skin—”
“Just do it. Might get a surprise.”
She heads back up my walk. Sun breaks through from the east, but the rain is still falling. I glance around. The chaos continues. So many vehicles are idling, cop cars, news vans, I feel light-headed from the exhaust. Reporters hound my neighbors, some on camera, some on tape. I can hear the voices but can’t make out the words. Uniforms are talking to others, making notes. Detectives will do more detailed interviews later. Thankfully not me.
I decide it’s time to get the hell out of there. Come back when things are back to normal. But before I can lift a foot, I catch sight of a figure standing at the barricade. For a second I think it’s Eager. But only for a second, because the size and shape of their frames are the only things this fellow and Eager have in common. I almost turn away, thinking about coffee, but then I give him another look. Something about him. He’s short, half past five, and narrow at the waist but thick at the neck and forearms, dressed in what appear to be dusty scrubs under a denim jacket. His head is wrapped in dirty white cloth, a scarf of some kind, an imperfect turban. He stares at Mitch and Luellen’s house, watches as Mitch is attended by the EMTs. When they hoist Mitch onto the gurney, he turns my way, and for a moment our eyes meet—his are dark and round and unfocused, and one, the left, rolls loose and independent of the other.
I don’t interest him, though, and after only a brief pause his head keeps turning and rising until it stops, abruptly fixed. I follow his gaze up and over my shoulder
to the summit of Mount Tabor behind me. When I look back, he’s still staring. Then, arms stiff at his sides, his hands flex open and his roaming eye rolls into place. Flex, fists, flex, fists. I can almost see the recognition in his face. But of what, I wonder. I know what I think of whenever I look that direction. Three years before, we found Eager Gillespie up there on the summit weeping beside the body of a dead young woman.
I blink, and the man is gone.
Years Long Gone
Thinking the Devil’s Thoughts
Ellie was born on a simmering June night, an event she’d recall years later with almost as much clarity as supper the day before. It didn’t occur to her there was anything odd about such a memory. She remembered the sound of her mother’s cries, and strange lateral motions and choking pressure. The first piercing sensation of light. “I’m glad I don’t have to go through that again,” she mused one morning over scrambled eggs and sliced tomatoes. Age nine. Ellie’s mother, a hard-eyed woman with forearms like canned hams, asked what possessed her little Lizzie to say such a thing. Unconscious of the sharp edge to her mother’s voice, Ellie described the pain of being turned in the womb, her sudden awareness of cold and moisture, of being smothered by her birth caul. Her mother flinched at mention of the caul and started clearing the breakfast dishes, her movements brisk.
“What’s the matter, Mommy?” Her father and brothers were already up and out, her sister still in bed. Ellie didn’t often get to be alone with her mother.
“Finish your eggs.” Spoken to the window over the kitchen sink.
“I didn’t think I was alone in there, but I guess I musta been, huh?”
Her mother turned and slapped her, a blow so powerful it spun Ellie around in her chair. She held onto her tears, but ran from the kitchen and never mentioned the memory to her mother again. The only other people she ever told were Stuart and Luellen. The admission to Stuart came in a moment of foolish weakness after Rob, her oldest brother, revealed during her mother’s funeral reception that Ellie had had a twin. It was a boy, half-developed and stillborn, buried as Aiden Kern in the children’s plot behind the adult graves. Ellie had seen the stone, but it included no dates and for her it had always been just one among many. The Kerns had been in Givern Valley for a long time, longer even than the Spanekers.