by Jodi Compton
“I don’t think Aidan would do that,” she said. “Besides, he won’t be hard to identify. You really can’t miss the hand,” she said.
“No, I suppose not,” I said. “How’d that happen, anyway?”
“A dog,” Marlinchen said. “He was bitten.”
“Ouch,” I said. “How old was he?”
“Three, maybe four,” Marlinchen said. “I really don’t remember it, except he was in the hospital a long time, and when they brought him back, I was scared of him, because of his hand. I started crying, and wouldn’t play with him.”
“Really?” I said. But maybe it wasn’t so strange, that a little girl would be so rattled by her brother’s frightening injury. “Tell me something else: How did you find out Aidan had run away from the farm in Georgia?”
Marlinchen nodded. “Oh, that. E-mail,” she said. “After Dad had his stroke, for a few days I spent a lot of time in here, looking through all his papers and financial records and so on. I read his e-mails on the computer, and at the bottom of the list were the old ones. You know, the ones you don’t delete?”
“You have his password?”
“No, the password automatically comes up when he logs in, as asterisks, you know?”
I nodded.
“So I just had to hit Return.” Marlinchen untucked a leg that had been crossed under her other thigh. “I wasn’t reading all the messages, but this one said, ‘Re: Aidan,’ so it caught my eye. I opened it and I saw Pete’s message to my dad, and under that, my dad’s original message to him.”
A farmer with e-mail? Well, why not?
“The messages were both about Aidan having run away. I guess there was a miscommunication about who’d report it to the police. I was afraid that neither one had, so I called Deputy Fredericks in Georgia.”
According to what Fredericks had told me, the communication between Pete Benjamin and Hugh Hennessy had been quite clear: that Hugh would deal with Aidan’s having bolted from the farm. But I didn’t want to get into that issue at the moment. I said, “Marlinchen, Deputy Fredericks told me that Aidan had run away to Minnesota once before.”
Marlinchen nodded.
“Your father sent him back, is that right?” I asked.
She nodded again, looking down at the floor.
“Did anything in particular cause Aidan to run away?” I asked.
She shook her head.
“Are you sure?” I pressed her.
“He was homesick. He came here and Dad sent him back. That’s all.” She chewed her lower lip. “Detective Pribek, what I said earlier, about not knowing anything about Aidan’s day-to-day life, or hearing from him… I know it might sound strange, that Aidan was sent away, and we’ve had so little contact with him, but after Mother died… it changes so many things in the dynamics of a family. It’s hard for people to understand, and I don’t think I explain it very well.”
“It’s not so hard to understand as you might think,” I said. “My mother died when I was young, and later my father sent me to Minnesota at 13, to live with a great-aunt I’d never even met before. It sounds severe, but in the end it was for the best.”
“Then you understand,” Marlinchen said, her voice almost relieved. “I knew there was a reason why I felt like you could help.”
“I’m not in a position to do that much,” I cautioned her. “I’m just going to do some things over the phone and on the computer that’ll go faster for me than they would for you. I can’t travel to Illinois or Georgia.”
“I know,” Marlinchen said quickly. “Anything you can do, I appreciate.”
“Then,” I said, “I need to talk to your brothers.”
***
It was Colm who’d been watching TV in the family room earlier; when I returned he was still there, lounging on the couch in T-shirt and sweatpants.
“Hey,” he said, not making eye contact.
The big TV screen showed an outdoor gun range with a glimpse of East Coast greenery in the background. Young men and women in blue shirts rolled to their feet, raised weapons, and fired rapidly at the black outlines of targets.
“It’s a special about Quantico,” Colm said. “That’s where they train FBI agents.”
“I know,” I said, watching. For a moment it transfixed me, all the youth and righteousness and promise that the trainees seemed to embody, standing on a vista where the best of their professional lives was just about to open up before them, and my heart felt briefly leaden at the sight.
Then I shook my head, clearing away the reverie, and said to Colm, “Maybe you could turn off the TV for a couple of minutes. I just need to ask you a few questions about your brother.”
Colm rolled off the couch to switch off the television, and I took a seat, flipping open my notebook. “When was the last time you had contact with Aidan?” I asked.
“When he left,” Colm said, taking a seat at the other end of the couch.
“Nothing since? Letters, phone calls?”
Colm shook his head, chewed at the corner of a fingernail.
“Based on what you know about him, can you guess at where he might have gone when he ran away?”
Colm shook his head again.
“Can you tell me anything about why it was Aidan who was sent away?” I asked. “As opposed to both the twins, or one of the younger kids.”
Colm shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“You can’t speculate at all?”
“I was nine,” he said. “Nobody told me anything.”
“Thanks,” I said, flipping the notebook closed.
“That’s it?” Colm said, startled.
“That’s it,” I affirmed, getting up.
“You didn’t even write anything down,” Colm said.
“I don’t usually write down things like ‘I don’t know’ and ‘I was nine,’ ” I said.
Colm looked a little sheepish.
“There’s not a lot you can tell me if you haven’t seen or heard from him,” I explained.
He turned the television back on. The agents-in-training were now learning to break down and clean their guns. I wondered if the field of law enforcement held an appeal for Colm Hennessy, like it did for many boys his age.
“They do really good weapons training at Quantico,” I offered.
Colm’s light-blue eyes flicked to me again. “What kind of gun do you use?”
“A.40 caliber Smith & Wesson.”
“Isn’t that a lot of gun for a woman to handle?” Colm asked.
“Excuse me?” I said, though I’d heard him clearly.
He shrugged. “It’s a big gun.”
It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him that I’d been the second-best shooter in my Sheriff’s academy class, but it was probably beneath the dignity of a county detective to get into a verbal pissing match with a boy half her age. So I bit my tongue and asked, “Are you interested in shooting?”
“Not really,” Colm said. “Dad hates guns. He won’t have one in the house, not even for hunting.” He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. I’m more into close-quarters fighting.”
“With what,” I asked, “a television remote?” Something in his dismissive tone had pushed me over the edge.
Colm really looked at me for the first time, as if he’d been bitten by something that he didn’t think had a mouth. His lips tightened with embarrassment, and finally he said, “No, I have a heavy bag. And weights, out in the far garage.”
***
Upstairs, I found Liam Hennessy at the computer in his father’s study. There, he told me essentially the same thing Colm had, just in more words. Liam, too, hadn’t heard from or written to Aidan since his older brother left for Illinois, and he too felt that Aidan had been sent away from home only because their father was struggling to raise five kids.
“It seems odd to me, though,” I said, “that Aidan didn’t come home for summers, or on holidays.”
Liam looked at the computer screen, blue light reflecting off his glasses, as t
hough the answer could be found there. “Summer is an important time on a farm,” he said, “so it’s unlikely that Pete could have spared him then. As for holidays, I guess Dad felt that Aidan really needed to settle in at Pete’s, and think of that as his home.”
“For five years? That’s an awful long ban on visits home.”
Liam nodded slowly. It was clear he was uncomfortable. “I wish I could tell you more,” he said, “but I was young at the time. No one really explained it to me.”
“Okay,” I said. “If you think of anything else…”
“I’ll let you know,” he said hastily.
I got to my feet. Liam had lifted his long-fingered hands back to the keyboard, as if eager to escape again into whatever he’d been writing when I interrupted him, and I realized for the first time that it might not be homework that absorbed him. Liam, Marlinchen had said, was the aspiring writer among the kids.
On the way out, I paused at the doorway. “What happened to your carpet here?” The edge, where it met the carpeting of the hall, was rough-edged and fraying, as if the person who’d laid it had hacked it off carelessly with a utility knife.
“Dad happened to it,” Liam said, a flicker of amusement on his face. “He put down the carpet in here himself. It’s like that all around the edges. We’re used to it.”
It was true; the whole perimeter of the room looked the same as the doorway, rough-edged.
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” I said, “but was your father drinking when he was on this home-improvement kick?”
It wasn’t as light a question as my tone implied. Whenever there’s trouble in a family, it’s good to know which way the alcohol is flowing, if at all.
Liam smiled, untroubled by my inquiry. “I wouldn’t know,” he said. “I mean, Dad put down the carpet a long time ago, before my time. But I do know that he never drank much, and he quit a few years back. Just for general health reasons. It was never a problem.”
***
Marlinchen walked me out to my car, after I’d finished. “Were the boys helpful?” she asked.
“Yes, they were,” I said. The truth was that they hadn’t said anything useful, but neither had they seemed deliberately obstructionist. I’d spoken to Donal last, just to be thorough, but he scarcely remembered his older brother, and I’d only spent about three minutes with him.
A white cat emerged from the grass and went to Marlinchen, winding a figure eight around her ankles, pushing its trapezoidal head against Marlinchen’s shins.
“Friend of yours?” I said.
“Snowball,” she affirmed. “Our cat. I hardly ever see her in the daytime anymore. She gets around.” She sat on her heels to run one hand over the cat’s arched spine, then straightened.
“Well, she’s got plenty of room for that,” I said, looking around. The Hennessys and their neighbors had lots of open space between lots.
I also noticed again the freestanding outbuilding that I’d taken for a nineteenth-century carriage house; it was what Colm must have meant by “the far garage,” where he had his exercise equipment. Closer to Marlinchen and me was the lone tree on the bank of the lake. In this area, sugar maples were everywhere, as were smaller spruces and hardy little pines. Lilacs seemed to be the flowering tree of choice; some were still in bloom. This tree was none of them. It was obviously ornamental, deliberately planted in its solitary spot. I didn’t think I’d ever seen one like it before, though its few flowers, cream-colored and orchidaceous, were vaguely familiar.
“What kind of tree is that?” I asked.
“It’s a magnolia,” Marlinchen said.
“Really? I didn’t know they’d grow this far north,” I commented.
Marlinchen’s face was turned from me, looking toward the tree. “It was here when a real-estate agent showed our parents this place. It’s what convinced my mother that this house was The One.” I could hear a smile in Marlinchen’s voice. “She and Dad met in Georgia. She thought it was fate.”
11
Young. I was young. I was too young to remember much of anything.
That was the refrain I was getting from the Hennessy children, and to be fair, it was probably true. I was overdue for an adult perspective on the Hennessy situation, and with Hugh incapacitated and his wife dead, there wasn’t one.
Hugh Hennessy, though, wasn’t just any citizen. He was a successful writer. At least some of the details of his life must have been chronicled, and would be available to me. For that, I needed the University of Minnesota library.
I started with a Web search on Hugh’s name. It told me that he had written three books, with more than a few years between publication of each. All three were considered to be largely semiautobiographical. The first, Twilight, was an indictment of his parents’ slowly withering marriage in suburban Atlanta. The second, The Channel, was a story about his ancestors in New Orleans, named for the Irish Channel section of that city. The Channel was the book that had sounded vaguely familiar to me when Marlinchen had mentioned it, and now I understood why; it had been his most popular work, praised by many critics as warm without being sentimental, unflinching about American prejudice without resorting to self-pity.
Hennessy’s third book, A Rainbow at Night, was widely perceived as a fictionalization of the Hennessy marriage, which had ended with the death of Hennessy’s wife at age 31. The title came from the protagonist’s thought, verbalized close to the end of the book, that he had once had “a dream of love that was beautiful but ultimately impossible, like a rainbow at night.”
A photo surfaced among the reviews that the Web search turned up. In it I saw a younger incarnation of the invalid I’d seen sleeping at Park Christian Hospital. He was a slight man with thin sandy hair and eyes that looked a pale blue, and his expression was, if not pinched, not quite at ease. His publisher’s Web site also posted his author bio, clearly from the back of Rainbow.
With his first novel, Twilight, published at age 25, Hugh Hennessy told America a cautionary tale about the perils of assimilation and upward mobility set in his own suburban Atlanta. His follow-up novel, The Channel, about his Irish forebears, was both praised by critics and beloved by millions of readers, and adapted into a major motion picture. Hennessy has been a guest professor and writer-in-residence at several American colleges. He lives with his four children in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
I was wrong, though, in expecting to find interviews with Hennessy among the search results. A common phrase in news stories and reviews was something like: “Hennessy, who prefers to let his writing speak for itself…” Here and there was a reference to “a 1987 interview,” or “a 1989 interview.” Hugh had given his last interview, as far as I could tell, in 1990. There were, however, references to longer magazine profiles, and these I found in the stacks.
The longest piece, “A Rainbow in Shadow,” was written for The New York Times Magazine by a former Pioneer Press reporter named Patrick Healy, to coincide with the publication of A Rainbow at Night. I started with his work, and followed up with two other pieces that had run in national magazines.
This is the story that emerged.
Hugh Hennessy was born in 1962, into a comfortable Atlanta suburb. His father was a cardiac surgeon who’d played football in college and had hunted and fished regularly in later life. His mother never worked outside the home. If it was a bad marriage, as Hugh was later to imply in Twilight, it wasn’t the sort of bad marriage that brought cops to the front doorstep. Neither was Hugh troubled as an adolescent, at least in any way that police and available academic records showed. Hugh excelled at all his studies. While his slight stature kept him off the football team, he’d been an aggressive wrestler, posting a good record in his weight class.
Emory University granted Hugh a partial academic scholarship, despite his parents’ comfortable finances. It was at Emory that Hugh Hennessy met the two people who would be his most constant companions. One was J. D. Campion, a part-Lakota literature student from South Dakota. The o
ther was a beautiful German-born folklore and anthropology major, Elisabeth Hannelore Baumann.
The three were inseparable during their first two years at school. After that, Campion and Hennessy dropped out, much to the displeasure of Hennessy’s parents. J. D. and Hugh planned to travel America, like young literary lions of an earlier generation had done.
Literally on the eve of their departure, Hennessy married Elisabeth Baumann. Both were 19, and their haste gave rise to rumors of a pregnancy, but those whisperings eventually proved unfounded. Apparently, the wedding had its roots in an urgency that was emotional, not biological. She stayed in school, a simple silver ring on her finger, her stomach flat. Hennessy embarked on a journey of self-discovery in sweat with Campion.
They refined taconite on the Range. They harvested hard red winter wheat in South Dakota. They worked in the shipyards of Duluth, once an outlaw border town. They traveled south to see the New Orleans where Hennessy’s great-grandparents had arrived in America, and stayed to work on the docks and be arrested in a brawl that cleared out a working-class bar there. They were either gathering fodder for their future writings, if you wanted to be charitable, or creating a legend, if you wanted to be cynical.
The New Orleans mug shots ran along with Healy’s story. Campion, dark and thin, was appropriately resigned and surly in his, but Hennessy was smiling.
Smiling. I couldn’t figure that out for a minute, but then I realized: well-bred, middle-class Hugh Hennessy had been told all his life to smile when he was having his picture taken. For his booking photo, he did it automatically.
Somewhere in that interim period, Hennessy began work on Twilight, the fictionalization of his parents’ middle-class life in Atlanta. In time, he felt strongly enough about its potential that he’d come home to Atlanta to ready it for publication. Elisabeth, who had finished her degree, supported her husband as he finished his novel at white heat, sending it off to agents at age 24. In due time, Twilight was purchased, published, and hailed as a singular achievement.