If the shadow moved this way the alcove would be obvious and open. Just then several lights on the first floor of Bobby Doyle’s house blazed on followed by three bright spotlights that illuminated his yard. “Stay still, Kathy,” it was Alice Doyle still on the phone, voice quiet and whispery. “Bobby’s on his way. Just stay where you are. Don’t say anything”
The shadow paused and she saw its head swivel and look out through the second floor stair windows at the sudden burst of light from next door. It was a strange movement—the body poised and still with only the head moving in a slow half circle, like a snake surveying the grass.
Bobby came bursting out of his front door, flashlight in hand. Katherine lunged forward through the alcove, wrenched open the door, and stepped out onto the porch. “Bobby, I’m up here,” she called. He shone his flashlight up and on her. Bobby had a key to the house, given him for the purpose of keeping an eye on the place when she and Blake were away.
“Stay there,” he called. “I’m coming in.”
Katherine looked back to the interior of the house. The shadow had turned toward the sound of her voice. She watched it take two or three quick steps toward the alcove, but then it paused for what seemed an eternity, but was only a second or two, and then it turned and began a hasty descent down the stairs. She heard footsteps racing out toward the kitchen and then the back door wrenched open, even as Bobby Doyle fit the key into the front door.
* * *
PART VI: The Face at the Window
Chapter 19
In an old gray colonial house on Belton Common in central-western Massachusetts, Lester Carlson moved slowly and methodically from room to room, throwing on lights and rearranging books. It was late afternoon in May and long shadows darkened the interior of the house like a stage in a drafty old theater an hour before the performance.
He paused to look out the side window. A large black hearse parked in the circular driveway of the funeral home next door sat empty. Four young men in the dress blue uniforms of the United States Marines were trundling a casket from the hearse into the funeral home. A dozen other people milled about waiting for a prayer and remembrance service to begin. Lester Carlson sighed. Kevin Flanagan, dead in Vietnam 25 years ago; his remains only now brought back to his home town of Belton, would be remembered with a few prayers from strangers who had never known him.
Lester Carlson gritted his teeth and softly, under his breath, muttered two words.
“Fucking Vietnam.”
Vietnam never went away. Failure was like that. It lingered like the taste and presence of a bad meal, roiling in your stomach hours after consumption. Put it behind you, his daughter and others urged. But it wasn’t that simple. In Washington, at the Memorial just yesterday he had encountered a veteran with a story and a bad conscience. And there were lots others like him, still trying to forget--out there all alone even if they were with somebody—trying to forget.
“Just say you are sorry, Dad,” Maria urged him. And that was good and he was going to do that. He was going to make a public apology for his role in Vietnam. But that wasn’t going to make all the memories go away.
Lester Carlson stepped back from the window and continued his tour of the house. He lived alone now, and had since the death of his wife. Emily and Lester Carlson had been married 42 years before death intervened in the relationship, and now, even though he still missed her fiercely, he found that living alone suited both his mood and lifestyle.
Of course, he loved it when Maria came to visit and stayed for several nights, but that was a special treat that was becoming less frequent. Maria was a singer and her musical career was thriving. She was gone for much of the year. Eventually, he’d hire a live-in gardener and cook to help care for the house and property, but for now he enjoyed being alone. After a lifetime of meetings and deadlines and pressures, he found the solitude of retirement soothing in the same way he imagined a monk found the silence of a monastery healing.
Solitude was not loneliness. Wanting, needing, and searching for human companionship, and not finding it—that was loneliness. Solitude was much different. Solitude was a choice one made to be by oneself; to enjoy one’s own company in preference to the impingements of others whose scattershot needs, moods, and preferences mixed and muddied the clarity of daily living.
When he retired from the State Department and became an ambassador-at-large--an eminence grise sent out to exercise unspecified powers of diplomacy in the world’s hot spots, places and situations where younger men, hampered by ego, ambition, and aggressive patriotism, were ineffective--he came to realize a single positive from his Vietnam experience. He was immune to worrying about failure. He had already ridden the wind and been tossed by the storm. There was nothing else out there to fear. He had been inoculated against the worry that a decision forced upon him could add or subtract from his career. He had no career.
And so in retirement he began looking around for a quiet place, and finally settled on his old family home in Belton, where many years ago he had first met and courted Emily in the old gray house he now occupied alone. The town had changed, of course, but he liked it. It was quiet and rural yet within 10 or 15 miles of the five-college area so named for the presence of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst College, Hampshire College, Smith College, and Mt. Holyoke College. A nice blend of country living leavened with academia.
Today he was getting organized. He worked his way from the first floor of the house up to the second floor. The movers had barely finished unpacking his boxes. He had moved a week ago and then returned to Washington for several days. Just this morning he had flown back to Massachusetts and then driven to Belton. Maria had stayed behind in Washington to rehearse for an upcoming concert.
The conversation--you couldn’t really call it a confrontation--with the motorcycle riding veteran at the Vietnam Memorial had been unsettling, and he wondered now how many more such encounters would be part of his penance once he went public with his apology for his role in Vietnam--the war everybody wanted to forget.
* * *
Chapter 20
Lester Carlson scooped up a floral dust cover from a gray easy-chair and tossed it aside. He opened a kitchen closet and poked his head inside. Nothing here. He moved from room to room, starting in the kitchen of the old gray house on Belton Common, methodically checking the furniture and closets of every room. He sipped from a glass full of Chivas Regal scotch and ice. He swirled the ice in the glass before each sip. The house was silent except for the sound of an occasional car driving by the Town Common outside and the brushing of tree branches against the slate roof.
He walked through the three bedrooms and one bathroom on the second floor and paused before a large wooden door near the front of the house. The door, painted a deep blue, led up to the third floor, the attic. After a long sip of scotch, he unbolted the door and groped along the wall until he found the light switch. The stairs were long and narrow and made of wide oak planks that creaked with age. This part of the house dated back almost 200 years. Additions and modifications had altered other parts of the old house, but this section was original. Lester Carlson climbed the narrow stairs, holding onto the wooden railing, which rattled and shook in his hand.
The attic was empty except for a few cardboard boxes, an unstrung tennis racket, and two yellowed bicycle posters. He had asked his real estate agent to be sure the various tenants who had lived in this house over the past 25 years left nothing. The other two floors had been completely free of junk and furniture when the movers had arrived with his possessions earlier in the week. But as usual a few things got overlooked. It always happened, he thought. Nobody ever does a really thorough job, anymore.
Anymore? He chuckled out loud.
OK. Anymore was not the right word. Practically nobody ever does a good job, ever! How’s that for a plain statement!
What a cynic. That’s what Maria would say to him.
“Dad,” she’d say. “You are one big ocean of d
oubt.” And she’d be right.
He opened one of the boxes. It was less than a quarter full with cheap beaded trinkets and a bicycle seat. Bicycling had been Emily’s favorite hobby. She had owned a red, 18-speed Univega touring bike and was always after him to join her on her jaunts.
Once he had biked with her along the Potomac and then up to Mount Vernon. It had been a tough two-hour trek along a paved bike path, but he felt wonderful afterwards. That bike trip had been the exception though. Usually he had been too busy and she bicycled alone or prevailed on Maria to join her. Lester Carlson bit his lower lip at the memory. There was always something around to remind him of Emily.
He opened the other box. There was a woman’s pink sweater, several pairs of cut-off jeans, a scattering of old postcards never used, and a magazine. He turned the magazine over to examine the cover. He could never pass a magazine by without at least checking the cover.
Lester Carlson bent forward and peered at the magazine cover. A close-up of a face--eyes steady and looking straight into the camera with a cool detachment--over the forehead of the black and white photo, the banner of Life in square white letters inside a red box and beside that the headline: “The Faces of the American Dead in Vietnam One Weeks Toll.” In the lower right hand corner of the magazine the date: June 27, 1969.
Lester Carlson sucked in air and felt for an instant the room swaying under his feet. He let the magazine fall back into the box, its pages billowing out and wrinkling over each other. It was the famous Life magazine that displayed on its cover the passport photo of a dead American soldier, and carried inside a 12-page cover story that consisted of the names and photos of most of the 242 Americans killed in Vietnam during the week of May 28- June 3, 1969. Perhaps the most dramatic piece of journalism from that terrible, sad war.
Its impact had been devastating. He remembered it well.
Sitting alone in his clean, bright office on a Friday afternoon as Washington emptied for the weekend; watching from his spotless office window the traffic snarling and drivers jockeying for position on the roads around the Pentagon. People in a hurry to get home and start their weekend--barbecues; Little League tryouts; dance lessons; a visit to Gram. For some of those families out there beyond his window, honking and gesticulating in their cars like getting through the next red light was the most important thing in the world, the weekend wasn’t ever going to be the same again. Ever, meaning forever for the families of those 242 dead soldiers.
Somewhere out there in the land, official cars from the various branches of the military were stopping in front of homes and grim officers in full dress were ringing the front door bell. Those inside knew what was coming before they answered the door. Some refused to answer the door holding onto the moment—the moment before they got the news. Their weekends, their work weeks, their days, their nights, their every moment were all about to change, splashed with a deep gray stain of sadness that would never go away.
That long afternoon in Washington, he had flipped through the pages of the magazine and seen face after face and paused for an instant on each page and murmured “bless you all,” the only thing he could think to say for the American dead.
He knew immediately that something had changed. Life had brought the war home to America, brought it home with its stark photos of the body count from one single not particularly dramatic week in a war that he was partially in charge of. These were real people dying over there--boys from your state, your town, your university. Their baseball gloves left in the hall closet. Their pictures from the senior prom smiling down from the mantle. All of those familiar mementoes turned into instant relics in the moment it took to open the front door and see the officer and chaplain standing there mouthing the words: “We regret to inform you....”
And now 25 years later, he stood in his retirement home, far away from that Friday afternoon in Washington and looked at a magazine cover that had helped shape his life. The peace movement had grown stronger from that day on; his own role less certain; the nation more embittered.
He bent and closed the boxes and stood upright, breathing deeply, puffing his cheeks with air and then expelling it. A set of piss poor bad coincidences here--first an encounter at the Vietnam Memorial with the very soldier who had once tried to report a massacre--a massacre that his friend had died in. And now next door, the remains of that same soldier missing-in-action for almost 25 years coming home here to Belton. And finally this--an old magazine cover to remind him of the dead from that war, and to remind him also of the most painful failure in his own life, and really his only failure ever—Vietnam. It just wouldn’t go away.
Lester Carlson stood lost in thought for a moment before remembering his original impulse in coming to the attic. From the window up here, looking northeast, you could see Quabbin Reservoir. He looked for the light switch and found it near the stairs. He flipped it off and then carefully, for he could barely see in the sudden dark of the late afternoon, walked over to the north-facing window. There were no drapes or curtains up here in the attic.
Lester Carlson leaned against the window frame; swirled and then sipped his scotch. The reservoir, from this vantage point 10 miles away, stretched black and empty like a great ink spot. A thin string of lights were just flickering on in Belton as twilight set in and people returned to their homes from jobs and school and errands. But beyond the lights of the town sat a sea of blackness. Beyond Belton, there were no landmarks or building to catch the eye—just a uniform dark expanse of black land and water melting into the dark purple of the sky as the last light of day faded away.
* * *
Chapter 21
Hudson Richardson studied the hearse and the military honor guard that had brought the body of Marine Lieutenant Kevin Flanagan, missing in action for the past 25 years, to Willock’s Funeral Home in Belton, Massachusetts. Hudson was here on assignment. He was a reporter for The Hampshire County Daily News, the region’s largest newspaper. Hudson had lived and worked in the Quabbin region for 10 years and now almost always drew the major local news assignments.
He ambled over to the door of the funeral home and scribbled in his notebook, looking for detail and color to add to his story. The honor guard consisted of four young men in crisp dress blue United States Marine uniforms with white dress hats and black shiny shoes. Carefully, as if they were balancing a crate with an open carton of milk on top, they maneuvered the coffin from the hearse into Willock’s Funeral Home, a rambling yellow Victorian house facing the Belton Town Common.
The owner of the funeral home, Belton Selectman Ralph Willock, beamed in the doorway as he ushered the casket inside. There would be a short prayer service today and a big funeral and interment this coming weekend on Memorial Day; lots of attention, which meant free publicity for the funeral home and for Willock himself.
Hudson strolled over to chat with Willock just as David Scone, the Belton town clerk, emerged from the doorway. Hudson turned to both men.
“Hey there, how’s the newspaper business?” Ralph Willock boomed at Hudson.
“Looks like you got the prayer service going on time,” Hudson said.
“Well,” Willock said, “I was just telling David here I wouldn’t miss this one for anything. Imagine that. Local boy killed years ago by the Vietcong and were only now getting the body back. A real shame, but what a crowd we’ll get.”
David Scone nodded politely at Hudson. “Hello Mr. Richardson,” he said without offering to shake hands. Scone was a slight, short, fussy man with a partially bald head and small, pale blue eyes. Willock towered over him—tall, stout now, but once athletic, with wavy gray hair that gave a touch of dignity to his lumbering appearance.
“When you gonna announce for Lieutenant Governor?” Hudson asked Willock.
Willock turned from watching the Marine honor guard trundle the casket into one of his receiving rooms adorned with faded burgundy carpet and overstuffed easy chairs with floral patterns. Heavy crystal and faux gold candleholders were scat
tered about on available table and mantle surfaces. “Soon, my friend, soon. You gonna come ‘round and interview me when I announce?”
“Do I have too?” Hudson said with a straight face.
“Hell no,” Willock boomed. “Just don’t bother come sniffing ‘round after I get myself elected.”
“When’s the memorial service, Ralph?” Hudson asked nodding toward the room, into which the body had just vanished, knowing the answer even as he asked the question.
“Memorial Day. We got the prayer ceremony for today, but we’ll make it an official burial on Memorial Day. Hear the new guy himself wants to make a little speech.”
“Lester Carlson?”
“Yup. Nice looking daughter, too. Ever seen her? She’s a singer.”
“Hope to when I interview the old man.”
“When’s that?”
“Called him this morning. He said to drop by this afternoon after I’m done over here.”
“Don’t you ever wear a sport coat?” Willock wondered. Hudson was wearing jeans, a cranberry-colored chambray button-down shirt, and striped running shoes. “You’d better at least rent a coat and tie if you’re going to interview Lester Carlson. Why you interviewing him?”
“Words out that he’s gonna make a run for Lieutenant Governor,” Hudson said with a straight face.
“Ah, cut the bullshit,” Willock waved his hand dismissively.
David Scone turned to Willock. “I wonder, Ralph? What are you going to do if Lester Carlson plans to get active in town politics?”
Willock didn’t reply. Scone was trying to bait him, get a reaction out of him. Hudson watched the interplay between the two men with amusement. Willock had been a selectman in Belton for 12 years, the most powerful man in town. Willock didn’t read much, never cared for it, but he knew power. You didn’t have to read to understand power.
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