No Unturned Stone

by David James Warren

Samson Mulligan stands in the door frame wearing a pair of jeans and an oxford, the sleeves rolled up like he’s ready to rumble.

  Perfect. Sams is a real estate investor, but before that, he ran a construction company and has the abs and biceps to prove it. Golden brown hair, blue eyes and a charmer, even now, Sams is single, although I wouldn’t be surprised to find a Miss Someone at the gig.

  Usually, Sams and I get along. He’s Eve’s closest brother, so we have some history, back in the day when Eve and I were off and on. Let’s remember the idiot part, so I don’t blame him. Much. But we threw down once, early in the game, right after Danny’s death, which was more about Sams’ frustration than anger, but I have an extensive memory. It’s an asset in my long game as a detective. Not so much when it comes to family.

  Still, I get how the accumulative roil of helplessness might make a person do something crazy.

  I take a breath.

  So does he. “Eve said you were sitting out there.”

  She did? I shrug.

  “She told me to come out here and…well, if you’re drunk, buddy, you’re not coming in.”

  Drunk? “Not even an Irish coffee.” I hold up my hands. “Z, Y, X and W. V, U, T—”

  “Get inside.” Sams holds the door open, his mouth a tight line, and I can’t tell if he’s hiding a smile.

  “Thanks.” I stop at the top steps, however, and lower my voice. “How is she?”

  Sams frowns, as if the question throws him. “How are you?”

  Me? Confused. Angry. “Sorry,” I say.

  “Good. No trouble tonight, okay?”

  “Scouts honor.”

  “You were never a scout, Rem.” But he lets his smile surface and for a moment I feel normal.

  I give a quick glance around. I’ve always loved the Mulligan house. It faces the lake with a wide bank of windows, through a massive great room added on when Elizabeth Mulligan took a sledge to the wall in her kitchen. A former farmhouse from the early 1900s, it creaks and whines like an old man in winter when the wind off the lake harasses it, but with its vintage oak trees and heirloom Hosta-lined stone walk, the place nets easily in the seven digits. Bets, as Danny called her, is holding onto her family’s inheritance with an iron grip, despite Sams’ urging to sell and buy a nice condo in Excelsior.

  I am not looking forward to the rumble her passing will cause in the family.

  She’s the iron will, the gale wind, the plumb line, and the voice of truth that holds this family together after the tragedy that landed on them nearly twenty years ago. She’s also the one I need to convince that I’m not the guy—not really—who needs a breathalyzer before entering the Mulligan house of refuge.

  I can’t imagine what would make me turn into the kind of man I have always despised except…again, maybe Burke is wise to keep that file from me.

  Maybe.

  Chips and dip, fruit plates, vegetable platters, and a tray of Bets’ homemade brownies line the giant island that separates the kitchen from the great room. The room is filled with faces I recognize and a few guys raise their hands to me. Among them are the rookies, as if coming is a rite of passage.

  They’ll hear about Investigator Danny Mulligan who brought down a Brotherhood drug lord, saved a little girl in a fire before the FD arrived, tracked down the toddler son of a state senator in a cornfield, and apprehended a mall shooter before he could finish the havoc he’d come to wreak.

  Danny was a hero, and I very much wanted him to like me. But I was a little too brash to realize that before he passed and I’m not sure we got that far.

  I regret that.

  “You made it.” Burke hands me a beer but I shake my head and reach for a Diet Coke. He looks impressed and sets the bottle back into ice. He nods toward the television and I see my mug on the news, Eve standing behind me. She’s watching me with an enigmatic look I can’t place.

  “Think she’s serious about those divorce papers?” I don’t know why I’m asking Burke, but maybe he’s got insider information on this woman I suddenly don’t know.

  “She’s left them three times since…well, since …” Burke swallows. “So yeah, I think she’s serious.”

  “I need to know why.”

  “My guess is that she’s tired of waiting. She needs to start over.”

  Then tonight’s the night, because I’ve never been more serious about restarting my life.

  Although, my plans include a different kind of restart. As soon as I get my hands on Ashley’s file tomorrow, I’m chronothizing (my word, but remember, I’m also a novelist and we make up words) my way to a new reality.

  Right now, however, I’m going to repair some bridges so that should things go south, I have something to come back to.

  I wander over to a side table, heavy with framed pictures of the family. Asher is grinning, wearing a stocking hat over his long reddish brown 90’s hair, gesturing a hang ten into the camera. In another, Danny is holding a walleye on a stringer, one arm around an annoyed teenage Samson. In a smaller snap, Lucas and Jake sit on a picnic table eating watermelon.

  My gaze, however, fixes on the one of Eve sitting in one of the backyard Adirondack chairs, on her dad’s lap. She has her arms looped around his neck, and looks about fourteen, all long auburn hair, gangly legs and buck teeth.

  My heart nearly explodes. I’m not sure how I’m going to return home tonight to my barren house, memories lurking in every corner.

  The picture is in my hand, my thumb running down Eve’s countenance when I feel a grip on my arm.

  It’s Bets and I’m caught, frozen. “Rem.”

  I put the picture down. “Bets. I…” And I’m not sure what to say. She’s wearing a sleeveless top and a pair of white jeans, her bobbed blonde hair tucked behind her ears and a simple gold chain at her neck. She hasn’t taken her wedding ring off since the day Danny died, and I get it.

  I stare at her, I can’t help it. Eve is my heart and soul. I probably always knew that, despite the denial in my youth and I wish I’d been an honest man from the beginning. But I’m here now and as God is my witness, I’m not going to give her a reason to leave me the second time around.

  I put all that in my eyes as I fail to find words.

  “I’m glad you’re here, Rem. Eve is outside.” Bets gestures past me, to where the twilight has draped the night in hues of deep purple. Eve is an outline on the family picnic table. Bets squeezes my arm. “Danny liked you.”

  I think that’s a lie, but I’m not man enough to argue with Bets.

  I pick up another soda on the way out.

  The air is warm and rich with the ebullience of summer as it lifts off the lake. It stirs memories of skinny dipping, sailing and all the early days with Eve, when fun and games were the only items on the agenda.

  I stop at the table.

  Eve has changed into a pair of jeans and a white tee shirt, her auburn hair loosened and wild in spirals around her face. I mentally twirl my finger through one of those corkscrews, but hold myself back.

  My Eve wouldn’t mind, and this one so resembles the woman I know that for a moment I believe in fresh starts and happy endings.

  Then she looks over at me. Weariness is etched in the lines around her eyes. She’s been crying, and she plays with the tiny heart charm on her gold necklace, the one her father gave her for her sixteenth birthday.

  I did this. Art is right—something I did derailed us into this terrible vortex of grief. Right now, I should be tucking my daughter into her bed, singing her a terrible version of You are My Sunshine.

  But this is the reality I’m in, and I’m going to leave it better than I found it. So, “Can I join you?” I hold out the soda.

  Eve wipes her cheeks and nods, the sadness in her eyes so deep it punches a hole through me.

  I slide up beside her. She smells vaguely of the perfume I tried to ignore today. Now, I let it sift into my pores, let it devour me.

  “Pretty sunset.” I’m referring to the last simmer of mage
nta along the lip of the lake.

  “Mmmhmm.” She opens the can.

  “Good turnout.” I inwardly groan. I’m a writer. I can do better than this. We’ve been married for nearly ten years. I know Eve. I know how she thinks, and how to make this better, so, “The point of reopening cold cases is to use new technology to solve old crimes. The only reason we couldn’t nail Danny and Asher’s killers is that we never got a good look at them. They drove by too fast to see the footage in the convenience store camera. But maybe we pull the tapes, digitize them, slow them down, let the computer fill in the variables…?”

  She doesn’t respond for a full ten seconds. Finally she takes a sip of the Diet Coke then says, “The only reason we didn’t get them is because they weren’t the ones who pulled the trigger.” She gives me a quick glance. “The real murderer is Hassan Abdilhali, head of the Brotherhood, but no one will give him up.”

  Hassan now runs one of the biggest Somali gangs in the city while under the disguise as a legitimate businessman who owns a string of laundromats. He sits on the council board of an outlying northern suburb.

  “There are men serving nickels and dimes right now, that were members of the Brotherhood in ‘97. How many wood panel station wagons could there be in 1997? I could take another crack at them—”

  Her hand slips onto my wrist. It’s warm and firm and she squeezes. “There’s nothing we can do about it, Rem. Some things we just need to learn to accept.”

  I don’t want to ask, but does that include the destruction of our marriage?

  Staring out at the lake, I fall to quiet. The dark waves ripple against the sandy beach, make a thumping noise against an overturned canoe.

  “Ash loved the lake,” I say, not sure why, but I’m caught in a memory. “Remember that time she raced down the dock without stopping and flew right into the water? She dropped like a rock—”

  “She was two. If you hadn’t been there to grab her…” Eve looks over at me and she’s wearing a ghost of a smile. I want to reach up and wipe away the glistening on her cheek.

  “She wasn’t the least scared of water, not even after that. Last summer, she swam all the way out to the floating dock—”

  I feel her body go stiff. “What?” Her breathing catches.

  I pull in my own quick breath. “I mean, the last summer, she was…um…” And there’s no getting out of this because I don’t remember Ashley’s last summer.

  She’s still alive, to me.

  “Are you okay?” Eve frowns and I draw in another breath.

  Maybe there’s room for a sliver of truth. “No. I’m not okay. I keep having these…” and I don’t want to freak her out, so, “visions that Ash is still alive. She’s happy and seven years old and just had a birthday party in our back yard.” And I want her to believe me, to just somehow reach into my brain and see the reality that we just had—maybe can have again if I do this right. “She got ponies and a castle, and more of those stupid stuffed animals, and I spent the entire weekend building her a swing set…”

  Her eyes are filling again.

  “And I finally found Gomer...”

  She wears a sad look. “Rem. You know…you know visions are just visions, right?” It’s like she’s talking to a child. To Ashley, telling her that there are no monsters under her bed.

  But there are monsters, the kind that will slink out after I go home and find me, remind me that if I can’t figure this out, then this is the world I’ll have to live in. “I know. It’s just…it feels like it could be real.”

  She presses her hand to my cheek. “No amount of drinking is going to make that happen.”

  Wow. I must have really taken a dive. “The drinking is over.”

  She draws in a breath. Drops her hand.

  Good bet is I’ve said that before. “I promise, Eve. I’m not the man who finished off that bottle of Macallans in the recent past. I’m different. Really. I’m…I’m me.”

  She closes her eyes, as if my words pain her. “You have no idea how much I want to believe that, Rem.”

  “Then—”

  “It’s too late.” She opens her eyes. “I didn’t just lose Ashley when she died you know. I lost you too. Your obsession with finding the guy … then your drinking …”

  She trails off, the pain in her eyes searing into my heart.

  I stare at her, seeing, for the first time, how we got here. I’ve never been good at letting go, at living with questions and helplessness. The search for questions about my missing brother is why I became a detective.

  Another tear escapes and she catches it with her hand. “I have no hope left, Rem. I have to move on.”

  Move…on? “With Silas?”

  At my statement, a horror enters her eyes, and I’m so relieved, I barely hear her when she says, “With my life. The one without Ashley.”

  Ah, that kind of moving on.

  “The one without you.” It comes out in a whisper.

  Anyone else feel the sucking chest wound? I even make a sound, deep inside. My voice betrays it. “You don’t have to move on from me,” I say. “Please, Eve.”

  Her countenance falls and for a second, I think she’ll change her mind. There’s something desperate in the gaze that roams my face. I know this look.

  “Eve.” I lean toward her reaching up to touch her cheek. “I love you. We have been through so much together. We can get through this.”

  She closes her eyes again, and for a moment leans into my hand. Sighs. Then, “Rem, it hurts too much to love you.”

  I stiffen even as she pulls away.

  “And I think that’s the point, isn’t it? I can’t keep living in grief. My father. Asher. Our daughter. And now you. I can’t watch you spiral out and destroy yourself. I can’t come home again to find you in the bathroom, overdosed. It nearly killed me the first time. I can’t…I just… Let’s not hurt each other anymore, okay?”

  I did what?

  She gets off the table. “I should probably give this back to you.” Reaching into the darkness, she grabs a file off the table. It’s brown and worn, a rubber band around the contents to keep them from spilling out. It was sitting behind her, on the other side of the table. I look at it and make out Booker’s handwriting.

  Right. The Mulligan file. When she picked it up, I haven’t a clue, but I nod slowly. Tuck it under my arm.

  She sighs. “Sign the papers, Rem. Let’s get this done, for all our sakes.”

  She walks away, back to the house, into the darkness.

  And I let her go.

  Because tomorrow, I get my family back.

  5

  It’s not the scream that wakes me. Because, in my dream, I’m expecting it.

  In fact, it’s not a dream, it’s a memory. I can smell fresh cut lawn, hear the sprinkler from Russell’s house next door. Inside, Eve is fixing dinner, and she’s turned up my Bon Jovi album, singing along to Runaway…

  I’m pushing Ashley on her new swing set. Her legs are out, and her braids are flying and she’s laughing, screaming, glancing over her shoulder at me, her daddy.

  My chest is full. Especially when Eve walks out onto the deck carrying a plate of meat for the now smoking grill. It’s a blue-skied day and the heady redolence of the burgers snapping and browning draws me over. I circle my arms around Eve’s waist, lean in and press my lips to her neck, her skin tasting of salt and a hint of today’s soap. I’m suddenly ravenous, but she hums, then pushes me away, grinning at me over her shoulder, just like Ash did, only not quite. There’s a twinkle in Eve’s eyes and she winks because it’s Saturday night and my world is perfect.

  “Rem!”

  I turn, looking for the voice, then round back to Eve who has left me for the kitchen.

  I follow her inside, but she’s not there. “Eve?”

  “Rembrandt!”

  My head pounds. “Eve?” I walk through our family room, past the wrapped canvas pictures we took at the beach, the long sectional where Ash and I watch Dora and up th
e stairs to our bedroom.

  But it’s empty too.

  “Rembrandt, are you here?”

  I head back downstairs and to my office. It’s exactly how I left it—leather chair, rows and rows of novels on a bookcase behind the desk. My novel, The Last Year, in hardcover, on my desk, as if it might give me inspiration.

  Eve says she fell in love with me through that book, written my rookie year as an investigator. It hit the NYT Bestseller list, and bought me my Porsche, and a few other toys. I thought I was going to be the next Mickey Spillane. I had no idea what a fluke it was until I attempted novel number two.

  I might be a one-hit wonder. But Eve doesn’t care, and that’s why I’m searching the house for her. Why I’m ignoring the voice…the voice…

  The pounding.

  I open my eyes, and stare at the ceiling. I’m fully clothed, having dropped onto my sectional last night, one of my mother’s knitted afghans over me. I couldn’t bear to sleep in the bed Eve and I shared—and will again, I’m determined.

  Wow, I miss them.

  The voice comes again … from outside the front door. “Rem, I’m going to call 9-1-1!”

  I untangle myself and roll to my feet, still clearing my head, gulping past the thrum of my heart.

  I see a figure through the glass and open the door to find my neighbor, Gia. She’s wearing a tank top, short shorts and holds her baby on her hip. She’s curvy and young and there are sirens sounding in my head, although I’m not sure why.

  “Finally,” she says. “I was getting worried.

  “Sorry. I was sleeping.” Dreaming, actually, and I’m not a little irked that she woke me up. I glance past her. Must be around six a.m.—the sun is barely up. Which now has me awake. “What’s going on?”

  “It’s…” And now I realize she’s been crying, her eyes reddened. Her baby—I think it’s a boy, dark curly hair, big brown eyes—stares at me, his thumb jammed full hilt into his mouth. “Alex. Again.”

  Alex. The last thing I remember about her husband Alex is the fight he and Gia got into a few weeks ago. Eve and I watched, and I debated crossing the street to intervene. But domestic squabbles are exactly how many cops get shot, so I stayed put and made sure nobody threw anything like chairs or fists.