‘I sometimes lose myself in the view, too,’ Doreen Johnson says. ‘Here’s the 1982 Yearbook you asked for.’
‘Thank you,’ Nora says.
They have the library to themselves, apart from four Chinese students poring over complicated math problems. ‘Halloween,’ Doreen Johnson had said with a shrug, and Nora had nodded in response: no further explanation necessary. Nora indicates that she’s going to sit at a desk and peruse the book; Doreen Johnson looks like she’s about to speak, then turns and goes back to her desk by the door.
The first thing Nora establishes is that whoever the dead man is, he wasn’t Gene Peterson: the photo Claire Taylor gave her and the photo of Peterson in the yearbook don’t resemble each other in the slightest. Peterson at eighteen is fair and square jawed, a jock type. Where does he see himself in five years? ‘Achieving one goal, only to set another: the only place success comes before work is in the dictionary.’ She rolls her eyes and sighs. Not only in Wisconsin; the jocks in her high school were big on Vince Lombardi quotes too – or at least the ones their coach drummed into them. There were 479 students in Peterson’s graduation class, 243 of them boys, and the only other one she can definitely rule out is Danny Brogan. The photograph she’s trying to match is one of the dead man as a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old; he has a mullet and an optimistic smear of moustache. At least, Claire Taylor told her it was the dead man. But if she lied about it being Gene Peterson in the first place … well, here we go with some of that glamorous police work.
She looks up at the sound of Doreen Johnson seeing the Chinese students out. With the tiny, elegant frame of a dancer, she is wearing a blue floral pinafore over a gray long-sleeve t-shirt and gray leggings, and flat-soled black wing tips on her feet; her unruly, undyed, salt and pepper hair is barely contained in a loose ponytail; her skin is tan; her blue eyes radiate curiosity and intelligence; she wears blue gemstones in her ears and at her throat. Doreen checks her watch, takes a bunch of keys from her pinafore pocket and turns one in the library door, then, smiling, crosses the floor towards her. Aging hippies in Madison aren’t always this friendly towards the police.
‘Just so you know, Ms Johnson, detaining a police officer in a high-school library in the conduct of her duty is a serious crime.’
‘You’ll never take me alive, copper. And it’s Doreen, please.’
Doreen Johnson pulls a chair around and sits beside Nora Fox, maybe a little closer than personal-space guidelines would warrant.
‘I just thought it would be better if we weren’t disturbed,’ she says.
Reflexively, Nora’s eyes flicker towards the librarian’s ring finger: no metal, but a white line where a ring once was. Back to her face, where her eyes are dancing with cloak-and-dagger excitement.
‘What’s on your mind, Ms— Doreen?’
‘I taught those guys in middle school. Before I became librarian here, I used to teach at Jefferson. Junior high, as it was back then.’
‘You did? What do you mean, “those guys?”’
‘They were, not exactly a gang, they weren’t tough like that, but they were inseparable. The Four Horsemen. Gene Peterson, Dave Ricks, Danny Brogan and Ralph Cowley. I saw it on the news at lunchtime. It looked like Dave Ricks to me. Is he dead? Did Danny Brogan do it? Of those guys, he’d have been the last one I’d have picked.’
Nora looks at Doreen, makes a calculation based on character arithmetic, and decides to trust her. She shows her the photograph.
‘We’re having trouble identifying the body. There was no ID. Mrs Brogan appeared to think it was Gene Peterson, but …’
‘No. It’s Dave Ricks. Unless it’s … no, I’m pretty sure it’s Dave Ricks. Danny and Dave, it was like they were joined at the hip.’
Nora turns to Dave Ricks’ graduation page and compares the photograph. There’s the mullet, but all the kids had them back then. No moustache. Same shape of face, high cheekbones, aquiline nose. The mouth looks mean, the lips thinner. Maybe that’s what the moustache was for. The eyes are piercing, intense. In five years time?
If you have nothing within you, you’ll have nowhere to go.
Deep.
Nora looks at Doreen, raises an eyebrow.
‘What do you think, Doreen?’
‘The resemblance is very close.’
‘But? You started to say, “Unless it’s …” Unless it’s who?’
‘Dave and Ralph looked weirdly alike. Not identical, not up close, anyway, but they were two guys everyone used to get confused. One could fill in for the other. And did sometimes. Take a look at Ralph. Ralph Cowley.’
Nora turns to Ralph Cowley’s page, and is immediately startled by the resemblance. It’s not like they’re twins, more like … like when you look at the photo of some rock band for the first time, and the singer and the gutar player seem identical, like constant proximity has rubbed off. The mullet, the cheekbones, the piercing gaze. Ralph has the smeary moustache, but the lips look fuller. And there’s something, she’s not sure, softer, around the eyes and the mouth. Softer, or is it weaker? The boy in the photograph is smiling, as Ralph is; Dave is giving it mean and moody, a rebel with too many causes.
‘Oh my,’ Doreen says. ‘It’s impossible to say.’
‘We have people who can make a more informed judgment,’ Nora says. ‘Analyzing the photographs for points of comparison …’
‘No doubt. It’s just personally so frustrating not to be able to tell them apart.’
Doreen Johnson bites her lip, and her eyes seem damp all of a sudden.
‘Why would you expect yourself to? You taught them, what, junior high, thirty years ago, more. Why would you expect to remember?’
‘I remember those boys. They were the first class I ever had. They stood out; they had something about them. A kind of … glamour is overstating it, but they had charisma. They held themselves apart. And of course, there was something so troubled about Danny Brogan in particular. Maybe there was something … off about all of them. And then the Bradberry fire came, and none of them was ever the same again.’
The Bradberry fire. After a fortnight in Madison, she pulled clippings and microfiche files on the Bradberry fire. Eleven kids and their parents, all wiped out. A Molotov cocktail the likely cause, but much reluctance to call it arson. A Halloween prank that got out of hand, a tragic accident. No one ever found the kids that set it. Everyone mentioned it, no one wanted to talk about it. It was the city’s secret shame, the mad first wife in the attic. The Bradberrys had been burnt to death, and everyone was shocked, but no one, Don Burns, her sergeant, had told her, drunk one Friday night, ‘Kiddo, no one was really sorry.’ The Bradberry kids were too wild, and had bullied too many other kids; the parents were drunk and probably abusive. It was a terrible thing, no doubt, and you wouldn’t find anyone saying they were glad – or at least, not out loud – but in a lot of families, there was a kid getting up and going to school relieved he wouldn’t have to face a Bradberry that day.
‘What are you saying? That they had something to do with what happened?’ Nora says.
‘Well, Danny Brogan was being bullied by Jackie Bradberry, backed up by his brothers. And in a way, it was my fault. I thought … stupidly … that the problem with Jackie Bradberry could be solved. That you could solve people’s problems by intervening. I put Jackie and Danny together. And they simply did not hit it off. The scale of the neglect inflicted on those Bradberry children was so great. It was hard to comprehend their father had been a physician: there were no books in the house, no conversation – it was an indictment of our child protective services that they were kept with their parents. But the attitude at Jefferson was, the Bradberrys are always with us, just got to deal with them. I was a young teacher, full of idealism, I wasn’t going to stand for that. I put the boys together. And then Dave Ricks’s mother, who was on the school’s board of governors, made her own intervention, and got Danny back sitting with Dave. And Danny’s relief at being back with his own peopl
e dented Jackie Bradberry’s feelings. And the bullying began after that. So in a way, my well-meaning, blundering attempt to help caused all the trouble. The road to Hell …’
‘What do you mean, they were never the same after the fire?’
‘I guess, they were relieved. Jackie’s brothers broke Gene Peterson’s arm, and the other guys knew what was happening to Danny, but they were too frightened to do anything about it. And the school … I had already done enough. What else could I do? Tell Jackie to stop? I did, several times. He near as well laughed in my face. It was a different time. To be a snitch was the worst thing. I tried to get Danny to tell, but Danny … Danny Brogan had been so browbeaten, and beaten, by his father, he was like a dog who always feared the worst. The other guys, his friends – well, Ralph and Gene anyway, they kind of bullied Danny too. It was like, he always had to amuse them, to entertain them, to smuggle free Cokes out of his dad’s bar for them. And maybe that was his impulse, that he didn’t deserve love, so he had to work hard for it, he had to work at pleasing other people and that was clearly going to be difficult since he couldn’t please his old man. But it soon became a pattern with the guys, an MO. And in a way, when the Bradberry thing began, you could see them thinking, it would be Danny. Not, he had it coming, but … he had the mark upon him, you know what I mean? And maybe that’s why I chose him too, for my little experiment: because I knew he’d try to please me.
‘So they were relieved, but they were guilty about feeling relief after a family of thirteen burns to death. And guilty, too, about how they hadn’t stepped in to help their buddy. Their Musketeers, all-for-one-and-one-for-all aura had gone. They were still inseparable, but there was something forced about it, like they’d all had to grow up too fast. Like it wasn’t their friendship that bound them together, but their guilt.’
‘Gene Peterson stepped in.’
‘That’s true. Gene was the class hero. I still have dreams in which I say something noble, or help an old person across the road, and Gene is there, and gives me a nod of approval. It’s ludicrous, the guy runs a sportswear brand in Chicago, he’s not in the desert helping the starving. But you just wanted him to think well of you. Flipside was he withheld that with people, with Danny. A little cruelty there, maybe, or simply pulling rank.’
‘And the other guys? Dave?’
‘Dave Ricks was a straight-A student, he could draw, he played guitar and piano, he had … I guess he had an artistic sensibility. He and Danny were like brothers, they finished each other’s sentences, always joking and wisecracking. If anything, Dave was needier than Danny in the friendship. When I moved Danny to sit with Jackie Bradberry, Dave was distraught, he came up and told me, “We’ve always sat together. We sit together.” And then he got his mom to fix things. Dave was … kind of vain? He was much better looking than Ralph, even though they looked so similar. If that makes sense.
‘And Ralph was a nice kid, you know, Mr Go-Along-to- Get-Along.’
‘I thought that was Danny’s role.’
‘No, Danny felt he had to sing for his supper. Ralph was just an easy-going guy. Head always stuck in a book, like he was hiding behind it. Did enough to get by, not enough to get noticed. He tucked in behind Gene, like Gene’s right-hand man. As long as he was onside with Gene, he was happy.’
‘And you followed their progress?’
‘Dave became a commercial artist, I think, runs a graphic design studio in Chicago. Far as I know, Ralph teaches high-school English. One of the best ways to hide in plain sight.’
‘The consensus seems to be that the Bradberry fire was probably an accident, but that it was caused by a Halloween prank that got out of control. Did it ever occur to you that Danny and his friends were responsible?’
Nora sees Doreen Johnson redden, senses her bridle, keeps going so she can’t interrupt.
‘Maybe they had good reason, after all they’d taken. And who would begrudge them? It wasn’t their fault it got out of control. And you said yourself, in the aftermath of the fire, it wasn’t friendship that bound them together, it was guilt.’
Nora stops, waits for Doreen to defend her former charges, her first class. But Doreen is silent. Fireworks crackle and swoosh outside, and she looks towards the window.
‘Did it ever occur to me? Two-and-a-half years of middle school to go, and I don’t think one of those boys looked me in the eye during all that time. Even if they had just wished for it, they must have wished so hard, they ended up feeling the guilt as if they had set the fire in reality.’
Rockets cascade across the sky, leaving a trail of stars falling past the window.
‘What if they did do it, and now one of them is threatening to tell, to confess?’ Nora says.
‘And that’s a motive for Danny Brogan to murder one of his friends?’
‘It could be.’
‘Detective, do you think Danny Brogan is a murderer?’
‘I’m not in a position to judge his character. The evidence, certainly the circumstantial evidence, points in that direction.’
‘Well. I’m not in a position to judge his character either. He was fourteen the last time I saw him, and eleven the last time I knew him. But from what I knew back then, he was the last, he and Ralph, the last of those boys who could conceivably have done such a thing.’
Nora sits for a while, listening to the ticking of the library clock and the occasional snap and starburst of Halloween outside. And then something occurs to her. ‘Did anyone survive?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘The Bradberry fire. Thirteen died. But I seem to remember … weren’t there survivors? A couple of brothers?’
‘They had already left home. One was in juvie in Racine, for sexual assault, I think. Don’t know what he did when he got out. And the other was some kind of criminal too, loansharking, drug dealing, in Chicago, petty stuff. People felt it was being judgmental to describe them accurately, as the lowlifes they were. So they just didn’t mention them at all. The press too.’
‘They change their names?’
‘Wouldn’t you?’
‘They must have inherited the house, or the insurance settlement, right?’
‘I guess.’
Nora scribbles it all into her notebook.
‘And there was one Bradberry who survived the fire.’
‘A little girl, right?’
‘That’s right. No one wanted to talk about her, either, for altogether more exalted reasons: so that she could have a chance in life. So that she could escape her past. Escape her destiny. But maybe she doesn’t want to. Maybe she wants to revisit it all. Maybe she wants revenge on the guys she thinks killed her family.’
I Couldn’t Sleep a Wink Last Night
Danny is with Dave Ricks in his office at the top of the restored grain warehouse and store on West Wacker Drive that houses Dave’s design agency, Dare To Dream. Three of the office walls are glass and look down and out across a large, vaulted room divided into, not cubicles so much as loose corrals, where about thirty people work at screens, desks, easels and whiteboards. None of the workers, men and women in roughly equal number, are dressed for a conventional office, yet, despite their apparently casual clothes, their khakis and jeans, their smocks and scarves and boots, they look simultaneously kitted out for work and adhering to a definite dress code, even if it is one only they fully understand. Danny is pleased by this insight. When Dave started, back in the eighties, he was bunkered in a windowless stone silo in the basement, or dungeon, and he designed posters and handbills for local businesses and rock bands, so at least Danny understood what he was doing. Now the agency has expanded to take over the entire building, and it encompasses everything from website design to corporate branding to ‘creative solutions’ to multi-platform consultancy to something called ‘synergistic spatializing,’ Danny is less sure what is actually going on. Of course, it’s been a while since he visited, a long while since he even saw Dave Ricks – is it five or six years since Dave was last in Ma
dison?
‘Just under five,’ Dave says. ‘My mom’s funeral.’
Having greeted each other with a loose, awkward embrace, as men must these days, they part, and Danny nods, arranging his face in a slow wince so as to convey his apologies for having forgotten Dave’s mother’s funeral. He has no great recollection of the day, the last time all the guys met together, except that each of them went to great lengths to avoid mention of the Bradberry fire, or at least, that’s how Danny saw it, or sees it now. He takes Dave in, the contrast between the Dave he carries around in his head and Dave in real life. In truth, Dave has aged well, hair still dark, forehead relatively unlined, body the same shape, a few pounds under, if anything; Dave and Danny both, well weathered, guys. Not like Ralph, Jesus. Ralph looked like someone had set about him with a foot pump and then a blow torch, so bloated and scalded and frizzed had he become.
Danny and Dave forever, that was how it went from the first time they met, on their first day of school; they sat beside each other for the next fourteen years. And then they didn’t really see each other much any more. That was how it had gone with all the guys, but with Dave, it was weird that they hadn’t kept up. Or was it? Sometimes Danny reckoned they were more like brothers than friends. Nothing needed to be said; it was understood that they got along. But maybe there was nothing there, deep down. When Dave went off to school in Chicago, that was it, end of story. Sure, Dave had called a bunch of times, they had met once or twice, but it felt like the train had moved on. Not unusual. Just one of those things.
Good to see him, though.
Danny and Dave today.
‘Ralph Cowley,’ Danny says – blurts, in fact.
Dave’s eyes do nothing, and Danny wonders if he heard him, if his words are actually audible. A little nod from Dave suggests they are. ‘Ralph Cowley,’ Danny repeats, before coming to a stop again, caught between recounting the story of his visit and announcing the fact of his death.
All the Things You Are Page 20