Gypsy Sins

by John Lawrence Reynolds

  McGuire told him.

  “Then whoever this small-town cop interviewed was seventeen years old at the time. You find somebody born on March 10th, 1946, and you’ve got yourself Tate’s alibi. ’Course what that tells you is somethin’ else, right? But that’s the way I see it.” He paused, waiting for a reply. “Joseph?”

  McGuire grunted, performing mathematics in his head, adding and subtracting months, recalling dates, finally burrowing through his memory to dredge up a name spoken in haste, in passing.

  And then it happened. Clean and quick, like billiard balls kissing, one off the other, each rolling away into distant pockets. He watched it all fall into place and he knew. He knew.

  McGuire said goodbye to Ollie, hung up the telephone and snatched the house key from the mantel. He would be needing it after all.

  “Was there anything in particular you were looking for?”

  The librarian stood over McGuire, her hands clasped across an ample stomach barely contained within her shapeless brown dress. Her smile revealed wide gaps between her teeth.

  It was her third visit to the table where McGuire sat in the Hyannis Public Library, flipping through a year’s edition of the Hyannis Herald. Her insistence on being helpful was infuriating, but McGuire looked up from the stack of copies dated October 1983 and smiled back at her. “Family information,” he said. “Tracing my roots.”

  Her hands caressed each other as though comforting themselves and she craned her neck to peer over his shoulder, noting as she had on previous visits that McGuire was reading the death listings. “If I can be of help . . .” she began again, and McGuire nodded.

  “You’ll be the first one I call,” he said, slapping the page aside.

  He found what he was looking for three issues later. He raised the yellowing newspaper page close to his eyes, studying each word like a jeweler assessing precious stones for flaws, for clarity, for value.

  ELWOOD, David Raymond—Suddenly on October 23 at his home on Oak Knoll Drive, our beloved Davey, only son of Mr. and Mrs. William Elwood, in his nineteenth year. Davey was a recent graduate of Hyannis District High School and a winner of the Cyril Hampshire Memorial Award for music excellence. Services will be private. Those wishing to honor Davey’s memory are requested to make contributions in his name to the charity of their choice.

  McGuire stacked the newspapers in a loose bundle and set off for the librarian’s desk. “Where’s Oak Knoll Drive?” he asked.

  The woman looked up from a stack of lined cards she had been sorting in her lap. “Found what you were looking for?” she said pleasantly.

  “I will have when you tell me where Oak Knoll Drive is,” he said.

  Her face fell and her eyes shifted from his. “Most of our patrons, especially those from out of town, are a little more considerate toward the effort we put into our service here,” she said.

  “How many of them were looking for somebody who tried to blow their fucking head off?” McGuire said.

  “I beg your pardon?” The librarian’s eyes snapped back to lock onto McGuire’s.

  “Tell me where Oak Knoll Drive is,” McGuire said sweetly, “and I’ll take my colourful Anglo-Saxon words out of here and leave you and Jane Austen alone.”

  The woman lifted her chin, revealing several others which had been hidden beneath it. “Three streets west,” she said, raising a flabby arm which ended in a tiny plump hand, the index finger extended. “That way.”

  He stopped at a telephone booth where the directory confirmed that a C. Elwood resided at 3465 Oak Knoll Drive. For a moment he considered driving the few blocks along Main Street but decided to walk instead, giving him time to weave a lie that might lead him to the truth.

  Oak Knoll Drive wound south from Main Street toward the harbour. The gently curving street was lined with large frame houses set well back from the road amid lawns whose pristine and uniform texture told of exquisite care and substantial investment.

  Which made number 3465, in the second block of Oak Knoll Drive, especially conspicuous.

  The graceful lines of the house were still evident beneath its neglect. The large single dormer on the second floor featured an attractive hexagonal window flanked by multi-paned windows with louvered shutters. The dormer was centered above a heavy oak door crowned by a Christopher Wren-inspired pediment; the door was reached from the fieldstone walk by three wide steps curved to provide access from the front and sides. Massive chimneys at either end of the house revealed the presence of two fireplaces on each of the floors. A summer kitchen extended to the rear, into a garden thick with lilacs and overgrown currant bushes.

  Cora Godwin might have said the house had “honest pretensions.” It exhibited many details common among houses of much more elegant proportions, but executed them with restraint and elegance, more in homage than in imitation.

  The white paint was gray and peeling, like dead sunburnt skin. One of the gray second story shutters sagged, its rusted hinge tracing a curved gouge in the siding where it swung freely in the wind. The shrubs were wild and untended and the shingles were lifting here and there from the roof as though pushed upwards from some parasitic life growing within. One window had been shattered and repaired with a rough-cut square of cardboard.

  If a house can express pride, McGuire thought as he paused in front of 3465 Oak Knoll Drive, it can suggest other emotions as well. This one, he decided as he waited for his nerve to well up within him, says defeat.

  He mounted the steps leading to the front door. The first groaned in protest at his weight, but it held and when he reached the entrance he pressed the doorbell, noting the pitted surface of the heavy brass hardware.

  He heard nothing from within so he pressed the bell again and again until, realizing it was out of order, he knocked heavily on the oak door.

  Two young boys rode down Oak Knoll Drive behind him on their bicycles, shouting in mock anger at each other. As the sound of their voices faded away somewhere in the direction of Main Street, McGuire heard purposeful footsteps stride toward the door from inside the house. He stepped back and drew in a breath as the door opened just wide enough to reveal a middle-aged woman.

  “Yes?”

  Her voice was firm and strong, as strong as the face of its owner, framed in waves of white hair and set behind rimless glasses. As tall as McGuire, she wore a well-tailored print dress and, in spite of her white hair, the texture of her skin and the alertness in her eyes were those of a woman close to McGuire’s age.

  “Mrs. Elwood?” McGuire said.

  “Yes?” The identical tone, the same inflection.

  “My name is McGuire and I, uh . . .” He cleared his throat, convinced as always when he lied that the other person was aware of his deceit. But he pressed on. “I believe my son was a friend of your son. You do have a son named David, don’t you?”

  McGuire’s twenty years as a Boston cop, ten of them as a homicide detective, had steeled him against any fear of words and emotions. Other people’s words of anger and repudiation. Other people’s emotions of hostility and crushing sorrow. Was it worth the truth to draw painful memories from this woman? Yes. Sometimes the truth is worth anyone’s pain, he assured himself.

  “What was your son’s name?” the woman demanded. She looked neither hurt nor unbelieving, so McGuire continued his pretense.

  “Bobby,” he said. “Bobby McGuire. He and David were in, I believe Bobby said, second grade together. Would you recall your son mentioning his name?”

  “No, I do not,” the woman said. Her gaze was fixed, her voice steady. “And why would your son want to know about Davey?”

  “Well, he lives on the West Coast now,” McGuire said. “Near San Diego. And he said if I was ever on the Cape again to stop by and ask how his buddy was.”

  “Davey is dead.” She might have said her refrigerator was broken.

  “I’
m sorry to hear that,” McGuire said. “May I ask how it happened?”

  “He shot himself. It wasn’t an accident. He took his father’s gun down to the cellar behind the furnace. Instead of going to school he waited until we left the house one morning and he shot himself in the head. My husband and I found him two days later, after looking all over the Cape. We never thought to look for him in our own home.”

  McGuire closed his eyes and nodded, sharing her sorrow, wanting to express his regret.

  “And two months later my husband did precisely the same thing,” the woman went on. “Took the gun and went to where Davey killed himself and committed suicide the same way. Both my men did that to me. They killed themselves and left their bodies for me to find. I tell myself they must have hated me terribly to do that. Hated me terribly. To this day I don’t understand why.”

  McGuire expected her to weep but instead of tears a challenge rose in her cool blue eyes. It was her strength, her determination to accept and deal with the most grinding tragedies a woman can encounter, that encouraged McGuire to continue with his lie.

  “My son was adopted,” McGuire said. “And he and your son had an immediate bond because apparently your son, David, was adopted too. Is that right?”

  She remained staring at him for a moment. Then, her eyes shooting past him to the deserted street beyond, she said in a cold and more distant voice, “Step inside for a moment.”

  She served tea from a silver-plated pot into flower-patterned cups and saucers. Classical music played softly from somewhere deep in the house. A canary fluttered and chirped without joy in a wire cage set near a window overlooking the untended garden.

  It was a sad room in a dim, lonely house. Each item in the room, from the overstuffed sofa and matching chairs to the heavy oak buffet and trestle table and the dull brass floor lamp, seemed to be weighted down, fastened in place, incapable of movement. Dark draperies concealed most of the windows, their fabric as murky as the framed landscape reproductions hanging on the walls.

  After pouring the tea, she sat back in the chair facing McGuire and studied him for a moment before speaking. “My name is Rebecca Elwood,” she said. “No one has mentioned my son or my husband to me for years.” Her nose was small and straight; set above a firm but delicate chin, it gave her a patrician air. “The people in this town, the few friends and relatives I still have, they all perform exceedingly intricate choreography to avoid discussing what happened to Davey and his father. And I resent that. Because, Mr. McGuire, nothing can change what occurred back then. And nothing can change the effect it had on me. The permanent effect. Do you know what that was?”

  McGuire sat watching her, his legs crossed casually, the tea cup in his hand.

  “It gave me a backbone I didn’t have before,” she said. As if to demonstrate, she sat more erect, her knees and ankles touching. A prim pose. “It was very clear that I would be either destroyed by those events or made stronger. And I refused to be destroyed. So I became strong. I deserve no credit for that. I simply had no choice in the matter. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” McGuire said.

  “Good.” She set her hands on the arms of the chair. “But no one I know, you see, permits me to demonstrate this strength. When I attempt to talk about Davey and his father, they smile and try to change the subject. It makes them uncomfortable to talk about my tragedy. And it makes me angry that they try to avoid it. Because I can never avoid it. For the rest of my life. It is like living with an ox, some great beast of an ox, that’s tethered to your own body, you see. Whenever I turn, wherever I turn, it’s there, staring back at me. Massive and unavoidable. Challenging me to ignore it. I have learned to live with it. I can learn to live with anything.”

  McGuire nodded.

  Her hands still on the arms of the chair, she leaned forward as though preparing to lunge at McGuire. When she spoke, her voice came from deep in her throat and for the first time it wavered, not in sorrow but in near-raw hostility. “So you tell me now, Mr. McGuire, just what it is you’re here to talk to me about. The truth this time. Don’t you dare try to convince me it has something to do with your son and mine. Because that is a despicable lie.”

  McGuire exhaled, permitted himself a wry smile and set the teacup on the table. “I apologize, Mrs. Elwood,” he said. “I underestimated your strength.”

  She grunted in satisfaction and straightened her back again, pulling her feet under the chair. “Why does the death of my son interest you?”

  “It’s part of a puzzle,” McGuire answered. “It concerns the murder of a woman almost thirty years ago. And an attempt on my life last week.” He reached his right hand up to stroke his left shoulder. “Someone shot me. They tried to kill me. While I was recovering in hospital, the same person set fire to a fine old home I had just inherited.”

  “How did you acquire such a dangerous enemy?” She smiled slightly as though amused by McGuire’s dilemma.

  “I don’t know.”

  “And you think my son was involved? Mr. McGuire, he wasn’t even born thirty years ago. And he has been gone almost ten years now.”

  “It’s not the circumstances of your son’s death that concern me, Mrs. Elwood.” McGuire breathed deeply. “It’s the circumstances of his birth.”

  Her face hardened noticeably and she lifted her chin.

  “He was adopted, wasn’t he?” McGuire said.

  A blink, and her thin chest rose and fell. “Yes, he was,” she answered defiantly. “You knew that when you arrived here uninvited. But you knew little else. Davey and the son you mentioned, whom I suspect is fictitious, could never have discussed adoption. Because Davey did not learn we were not his biological parents until he was almost eighteen years old. We told him, my husband and I, in a fit of . . .” She shrugged and looked away, and the first crack appeared in her veneer of strength and determination. But no sorrow creased her face and no tears welled in her eyes. “I don’t know, honesty, openness, whatever damn fool thing you want to call it.” She tilted her head to stare down at the worn mushroom-coloured carpet. “There are times when it’s better to avoid the truth. But then I’ve just contradicted myself, haven’t I? Anyway, it was a damn fool thing to do. He became depressed, changed. He would disappear for days and keep to himself. He was never the same after that.”

  McGuire stood up. “You’re a very brave woman,” he said gently. “I apologize again for disturbing you. I want you to know I admire your strength.”

  He meant it as an offering, a bestowal of respect, in exchange for the inconvenience he had caused, his intrusion into her sad life. But instead of expressing thanks and appreciation, she began to burn with fury at him.

  “You admire my strength?” she demanded. Her eyes narrowed and her fists clenched in her lap like small granite boulders, their surface traced with taut sinews. “My strength? What in heaven’s name do you know about my strength? You just met me. You didn’t know my husband. You certainly didn’t know Davey. And you have no idea of the life we had here once in this house, with my husband and our son, our chosen son, our gifted son.” One of the hands opened and her arm extended to encompass the room. “Look around, Mr. McGuire or whatever your name is. Do you see any photographs of my son? Or my husband? Anywhere?”

  McGuire held his hands palms up as though to fend her off, and now she was standing as well, both arms flailing in front of her.

  “Do you? Do you see any photographs? Any citations for my husband and all the work he did for service clubs in this town? Or Davey’s athletic awards, his school merit badges? No, you don’t. Because they’re not here. They were destroyed. By me. Gone, all of them.” The cords standing out on her neck, the face that had been in repose now contorted in anger, the hands shaking with rage.

  “That helped you, didn’t it?” McGuire said calmly, standing his ground against her onslaught of words.

  “Yes, it helped me.
” She dropped her hands and began nodding her head up and down in short, quick motions. From its cage near the window the canary chirped once. “I refused to live in the past. They were here and they are gone. Both of them. Their deaths were like . . . like thunderstorms. You hear them, you are fascinated by them, they impress you with their power and then they pass, and when the sun returns it’s unnecessary to discuss them again. There are other days ahead, other storms.”

  McGuire nodded and turned to the door. “I appreciate your time,” he said without conviction. “Thank you again—”

  “I never visit his grave,” she interrupted. “Davey’s, I mean.” She waved a hand, dismissing a thought. “His father, he was cremated. My decision, I have no idea where his ashes are. Since his father died, I have never visited Davey’s grave. That’s how I cope. They lived, they died, they’re gone. The acceptance of it all, that’s my strength.”

  McGuire was in the hall, his hand on the knob of the door. “Goodbye, Mrs. Elwood,” he said, looking back into the living room and across the table, still set with its silver tea service, at the woman who remained standing, her eyes burning across the distance into his.

  “Whoever you are, you are a son of a bitch,” she said coldly. “A vile son of a bitch.”

  She continued to curse him, still dry-eyed, still standing in the saddest room of her sad and empty house, while he closed the heavy door behind him and stepped down to the uneven flagstone walk.

  His pace was slow and unsteady as he returned to the library parking lot where he sat behind the wheel of his rented car for several minutes, staring ahead at nothing, his hands gripping the top of the steering wheel and his tongue moistening his bottom lip, preparing to drop another step or two into a portable hell he was finding himself enclosed within.

  Preparing to take others with him in his descent.