by Jodi Compton
Immediately inside the back door was the inventory room, wooden shelves piled with cardboard boxes. There was no motion in my line of sight, no human forms. To my left I saw an open door. A bathroom, with a few cases of inventory piled up even in there, next to the dirty toilet and towel dispenser. A smell of cigarette smoke hung in the air. Otherwise empty. All this took only a second to register.
Before I even got into the salesroom, I smelled it. Not blood, but the barroom smell of spilled liquor, sweet and corrupt.
It was all in the salesroom: fallen shelves, broken bottles, disaster. A millimeter of liquid spread along the pale linoleum floor, glimmering in the light from the fluorescent fixtures overhead. The creeping spill was still moving, heading toward my feet even as I stood looking at it. Within the nearly colorless spill were rust-colored rivulets of blood.
I followed these rivulets up to their source, turned reflexively away, made myself look again.
He was young and male and white. Beyond that I didn’t know. He’d been wearing a nylon stocking over his head as a mask, and now it had turned into a thin sack of blood and brain matter. There was nothing in the sack that could be called facial features. His handgun, a.38, was on the floor at his side.
I turned to follow what logically was the course of the gunshot. It seemed to have come from the counter, which made sense if the owner had shot him. The owner was nowhere to be seen, but the counter was waist high. It wasn’t hard to piece together.
For good measure, I spoke again as I approached the counter. “I’m a Sheriff’s detective,” I repeated, circling the far end of the barrier. “I’m coming around the counter now. If you’re hiding down there with your weapon, please let go of it now. It’s all over.”
The owner lay on the floor before a wall of pint and ounce bottles, not moving, eyes closed. His clothes were sodden, but not with blood. With alcohol. Shattered glass lay all around him, and what little blood trickled from his superficial cuts obviously came from the bottles that had shattered. His chest rose and fell serenely as a sleeper’s, fallen shotgun near his side.
He was balding, with light-brown Mediterranean skin. He looked a little like Paul, the frugal john, whom I vaguely remembered meeting about a hundred years ago. Here a third smell competed with the blood and alcohol. It was urine, from the stain on the front of the shopkeeper’s cheap trousers.
Handgun versus shotgun. The young robber had probably pulled his piece at a decent shooting distance for a weapon like that, two feet away, on the other side of the cash register. The store owner had probably played along until he could reach down on a pretext and pull out his shotgun. When he had, the boy had been startled into the wrong reaction. He’d stumbled backward first, to get away, then remembered to fire his own gun. But by then it was too late. He was too far back, and too rattled, to hit the owner. The slug had hit the wall of short bottles, which had shattered. The store owner, having been fired upon, pulled his own trigger, to deadly effect. Maybe more than once, judging by the mayhem he’d turned his store into. Then, seeing the results of his own work- the kid’s head seeming to explode red behind the thin nylon- he’d fainted, losing control of his bladder on the way down.
The shopkeeper was fine; the robber was dead. The only thing for me to do was to not disturb the scene any more than I already had. I needed to go back outside and tell Lockhart everything was all right.
That was when I saw the leg.
It protruded from behind the end of the second aisle. The foot ended in a sandal, and the toenails were colored a deep scarlet, too smoothly and regularly for the color to be blood. These toenails were painted. But the little octopus arm of red that was inching slowly from behind the endcap… that was definitely blood. It seemed the shopkeeper had gotten off more than one shot before making his swan dive.
Coming around the counter, I went to the end of the aisle and got the full view. Ghislaine Morris lay on her back, eyes closed, one leg folded up and backward at the knee. The blood that was spreading from her body came from her chest.
Lisette had said that Ghislaine had loaned Marc her car so he could go to parties he didn’t even take her to. Now he’d borrowed her car again, the blue one in the alley, and taken her to a shootout. A ragged hole at the center of the bloodstain on Ghislaine’s chest bubbled noisily, and the surrounding material fluttered wetly. A sucking chest wound; they’ll get you pretty quickly. I still hadn’t heard sirens in the distance.
Ghislaine had set herself on this course. She’d had more choice than she’d given Cicero.
No sir, I told an imaginary future inquisitor. I didn’t see her. I was attending to the owner of the liquor store. I had no idea that there was a third victim.
Ghislaine’s wound bubbled again. Her mouth was turning blue around the lips. She wouldn’t make it to the ambulance.
Yes sir, I imagined saying. It’s just a terrible tragedy.
But all along I knew I couldn’t do it. “Goddammit, Cicero,” I said aloud, and then I ran behind the counter for a plastic bag to seal the wound with.
I’d gotten the lung reinflated as best I could when a pair of hands pulled my shoulders back. I looked up and saw the fine, calm features of Nate Shigawa.
“We’ll take it from here, Detective Pribek,” he said.
Glad that he remembered me, I nodded and got up, out of his way. And since I was in motion, I just kept moving back, toward the storeroom. His partner, Schiller, was attending to the store owner. Everything was under control.
I walked away, out the back door, and found myself standing alongside Ghislaine’s car. This time I noticed something I hadn’t before. A child’s safety seat, in the back. I bent and looked through the window. Surely not.
But Shadrick was inside, his small head nodded forward. He’d slept through the whole thing.
The back door was unlocked, and Shadrick wakened as I opened it. He was silent as I unhooked the restraining straps and lifted him from the car seat.
With Shad in my arms, I walked around to the front of the store, and once again I was in the middle of the whole 911 circus. A radio coughed and crackled, and emergency lights flickered off the pavement and the front wall of the liquor store. Emergency workers trotted past, doing their jobs, but no one seemed to need me. No one was looking at me, in fact. Except for one person, standing at the very edge of the scene, inventorying me in a way that was familiar from my prostitution detail, long ago. Gray Diaz.
He was slightly rumpled, in shirtsleeves, and there were deep lines underneath his eyes. He looked tired, I thought, like he’d been working too hard. He didn’t have a warrant in his hand, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t gotten one.
“Detective Pribek,” Diaz said, meeting me halfway. “I heard I might be able to find you here.” He looked more closely at me. “What happened to your face?” he asked.
“I fell,” I said. “At the scene of a structure fire.” Now he’d get on with it.
“I just came around to say goodbye,” Diaz said. “I’m going back to Blue Earth.”
“You are?” I said.
“My investigation here is over,” Diaz said. “The Stewart case will remain open, officially, but inactive.”
He looked around at the other officers, our peers, none of whom seemed to be paying any attention to us. Then he turned back to me.
“I know you killed Royce Stewart, Sarah, I just can’t prove it,” Diaz said levelly. “I guess you thought a life like Stewart’s didn’t matter, and in terms of the system, it seems you were right.”
He did not wait for me to respond, nor did he say anything else. That was his leavetaking.
Shadrick chose that moment to put both his soft, slightly cool hands on my face, turning my attention from Diaz’s departing figure. Shad looked into my face, as if to receive instruction or counsel.
“Don’t look at me, kid,” I said.
37
When you’re sleeping well, the trapdoor at the bottom of your mind opens and you have deep, strange dreams: psyc
hodramas full of symbolic imagery that you rarely remember on waking, and when you do, you tell a friend, Last night I had the weirdest dream. It’s when you’re restless and not sleeping well that you dream close to the surface of your mind, more like thinking in your sleep than dreaming.
In other words, the details of the dream that follows were just speculation, nothing more.
I was back in the courtroom. Hugh Hennessy was on trial, but this time I wasn’t the prosecutor. I was just observing, or that’s what I thought, until Kilander laid his hand on my shoulder.
Hugh can’t speak for himself, he said. Any judge would throw this case out so hard it’d bounce.
You said that already.
But they’ve found someone to speak for him, Kilander said. They want you to do it.
I said, I can’t do that.
Don’t keep the judge waiting, Kilander said.
Empathetic thinking is an important skill for a detective. No matter how much you might dislike a suspect, it’s useful to adopt his viewpoint, understand his motives. I kept this in mind as I settled myself behind the stand.
Whenever you’re ready, the judge said.
I leaned forward and spoke for Hugh. I know how bad it looks, I said.
A little louder, Ms. Pribek, the judge said.
I know how bad it looks, I repeated. But normally my desk was locked. And normally the kids didn’t even go in there; I didn’t keep anything in my study to attract them, no toys or candy. I kept the pistols there because there was no furniture in our bedroom that locked. My desk did. The guns would be just down the hall if I needed them. I kept the pistols loaded because the lake area wasn’t as built up back then as it is now. It was pretty isolated, and I wanted to protect Lis and the kids from break-ins. I don’t know why I forgot to lock the desk that one time. I just did.
How could it happen that the one time I forgot, Aidan went in there and found the gun? And he didn’t just shoot into the air, or his foot, but his chest. His chest!
I wasn’t afraid to call the paramedics and have the shooting on record; that’s not why I drove Aidan to the hospital myself. I know that’s what it looked like, but it’s not. I was afraid to wait for the ambulance. I grabbed him in my arms and ran for the garage. If there had been any speed traps on the road, the police would have had to chase me all the way to the hospital, because I wouldn’t have stopped. I wanted so badly to save him. But no one chased me, no cops saw me. I got all the way to the hospital, and still no one seemed to notice my arrival. And then I looked back at Aidan, and he wasn’t breathing. He was blue. And I knew he was gone.
I sat there in the car and cried, and still no one came over. When I was done crying, I thought about bringing the ER staff over to the car, getting them to take Aidan’s body, but then I didn’t want them to take him away from me and put him in the morgue. So I started the car up again and just drove home. I don’t know what I was thinking. I guess I wasn’t thinking at all.
When I got home, Lis was sleeping with Marli in the bed, and I didn’t wake them. When the sun came up, the morning was so beautiful, and I decided to bury Aidan under the magnolia tree. Lots of old American families have gravesites on their property. It’s a tradition. So I buried Aidan under the tree, and I said a prayer.
Marli woke up and I told her Mother was sick, and Aidan had gone away for a while. She said, “He’s coming back, isn’t he?” and I couldn’t bear to say no, and so I said something like “Everything’s going to be fine.” Later, I took Lis down to the little grave. I told her this was better than sending Aidan to the hands of some funeral home to be embalmed and sewn up. This way, he’d always be with us. She cried and nodded. After that she was catatonic, almost. She didn’t call anyone. Not a friend, not her sister.
That’s what started me thinking. There were so many coincidences here, that no one saw Aidan in my car at the hospital, that no one had found out yet what had happened… It was almost like it was fate. Maybe there was some way I could cover for Aidan shooting himself. Maybe I could put it off on hunters. What good would it do for Aidan’s death to be splashed all over the papers? For people to point fingers at me and Elisabeth? They would have blamed her, too. What if some social worker called us unfit? What if they took Marli and Liam, too? It would have destroyed Lis. I mean, she was pregnant with Colm then, too. She was so fragile.
That’s when I remembered Brigitte and her little boy, Jacob. It was impossible but perfect. Jacob was almost exactly the same age as the twins. And they were both still so young, there was time. They could both forget the past. Jacob, in time, could be Aidan.
When I told Lis, she got hysterical, called me sick. But I weathered it. I told her that nothing would bring Aidan back, but explained all the reasons. I pointed out what Lis had told me: that since the death of her boyfriend, Brigitte had been a basket case. She was drunk a lot, stoned a lot, and she’d let her son lose his finger to that vicious dog. Jacob was better off with us. I said we could give Jacob a wonderful life here, and we’d never, ever forget Aidan, we could visit his grave every day.
Brigitte was easy. She knew she was a bad mother and that her sister would be good to Jacob. A big check was all it took to push her over the edge. And once she’d cashed the check, she couldn’t go to the authorities. She was implicated.
The day we got Jacob home, too, that was a disaster. I’d told Marli, “Aidan was bitten by a dog and went away to get better,” and she’d believed it. But when I brought Jacob in, she took one look at him and started to cry. She knew he wasn’t Aidan, and I was telling her he was, and she was so confused that it frightened her. I said, “Marli, he looks different, but he’s Aidan, he’s really Aidan inside.” But she kept crying and saying, “I want Aidan, I want Aidan.” And Lis was so fragile then, she sat down in the rocking chair and wept, too. Marli was in the corner, crying, and Lis was in the chair, crying, and Jacob was standing in the middle of the room like he wanted to cry, too. I thought, You’re the monster here, Hugh. How’d that happen? All I ever wanted was to be a good husband and father and now I was a goddamn monster and I couldn’t understand how the hell it had all happened.
Then Jacob looked around and saw Lis. She looked a bit like her sister, Gitte, more beautiful of course, but he saw the resemblance. He went over to her and said, “Why are you crying?” and got up in the chair with her, and she let him. Then Marli saw that her mother wasn’t afraid of the new Aidan, so she went over and climbed up with them. There they all were, all three of them. Looking at them, I thought, Things are going to be okay. I would have liked to have been part of their embrace, but that rocking chair was filled to capacity. I stood apart from them and thought, You’re the odd man out now, Hugh. I can live with that. I probably deserve it. As long as Lis is happy.
But of course, things didn’t work out that way. Marli and the kid became fast friends, and in six months I’d swear they didn’t remember that Jacob Candeleur ever existed. But I couldn’t forget, of course. I drank too much and got an ulcer and waited for something to go wrong. Lis loved that boy like he was her own, but she also took to spending time at Aidan’s grave, and I realized what a lousy idea it was to bury him where she’d always be reminded of how he died. I wanted to move, but I was too afraid. What if the new owners tore up the new carpeting in the study and found the huge bloodstain in the floorboards? What if they dug under the magnolia tree and found Aidan’s bones? What about the goddamned BMW? We were stuck here, with reminders of it at every turn.
But we couldn’t grieve openly for Aidan, and I think that’s what killed Lis in the end. Then she was gone, and I came home from the funeral and realized that my wife, who I’d loved more than anyone, was gone, and instead I had her sister’s illegitimate kid in my house. He was crying under that goddamn magnolia, right on Aidan’s grave, and I went out and hit him for the first time. It wasn’t the last time, but who cared anymore? I was the monster, I’d known that years ago.
I started fantasizing that I could erase h
is memory of being Aidan Hennessy as easily as I’d once erased his memory of being Jacob Candeleur. It took me way too long to realize that I could do the next best thing: send him back to Brigitte. When I called to suggest that, she was all for it. And I liked having him gone so much that when Brigitte died, I found an old friend who’d take him.
Marlinchen didn’t understand, and I hated to hurt her. Once, I nearly told her the whole story. I took her down to Aidan’s gravesite, but when I was there I lost my nerve, and I only told her about missing her mother and how we’d once pledged our undying love there.
I wanted to tell her. She’s so much like her mother, and for so long I’ve wanted to tell somebody about this and have them say, “I understand.” That’s all. “I understand.”
Now I know that’ll never happen. I’ve paid and paid and paid for my mistake, and I don’t know that it’ll ever end. I succeeded in erasing Marlinchen’s memory and I succeeded in erasing Jacob’s. I can’t erase the one memory I most want to: mine.
Epilogue
The first headlines about Hugh Hennessy were restrained and respectful: NOTED WRITER PERISHES IN HOUSE FIRE. The media was respectful in their coverage of the funeral, where in the front row of the cathedral, Hugh’s four children all wept, their arms around each other, even Colm unashamed of his tears.
But after the burial, questions began to swirl, about why Hugh’s stroke wasn’t reported, about the identity of the young man who’d died earlier the same day and who’d been identified as Aidan Hennessy on his death certificate. Reporters began to probe, and in time the whole story came out. The media was banned from the Hennessy property on the day that Hennepin County technicians dug under the magnolia tree, but reporters congregated at the end of the long peninsula driveway, and their lenses captured the images as the techs brought up the bones of a very small child with ten fingers and a shattered sternum.
The Hennessy children refused all comment, with Campion acting as a family spokesman, however terse. I called Marlinchen several times in those stressful first weeks. She assured me everything was under control, and I believed her, mostly because although she sounded sober and occasionally tired, her voice lacked that sharp, tense note that I remembered from the worst of times. The continued presence of J. D. Campion might have something to do with that, I thought. He apparently had no plans to leave the Cities, and I was glad. He wasn’t the guardian that Family Services would have chosen for the Hennessys, but he was perhaps uniquely suited to this brainy, idiosyncratic little family.