“Why, hello there, Detective Wolfe,” Rainey said.
I didn’t pick up on the tone. That mocking singsong quality.
“I understand they’ve brought Dennis back up here,” I said.
“That’s right.”
“I need to see him,” I said.
“Sure thing. No problem.”
He opened the door.
“I’ll stick you in a room somewhere while I go get him. That sound all right to you, detective?”
It sounded fine. I was going to say good-bye to Dennis. I was going to go to one last place and wrap this thing up and go win a Pulitzer Prize.
“Hope you don’t mind the decor,” he said, after assuring me he’d be back with Dennis in a jiffy.
I didn’t mind the decor. I didn’t notice it.
I was admiring my connect-the-dots drawing.
Look, everybody.
I was holding it up for the whole diner to ooh and ahh over, my dad and my mom and my editor and my PO and Dr. Payne and the reporter who’d knifed I lie, therefore I am into my desk. Benjy and Belinda and Nate the Skate and Norma and Hinch. Them too. I was emerging from a dark cave and bathing in the glow of the resurrection.
It wasn’t completely filled in.
Enough of it was.
Let me take you from dot to dot.
John Wren had found a disoriented and traumatized Vietnam vet sleeping in the town gazebo. Eddie Bronson-that’s what he said his name was.
Dot one.
At some point Wren had gone to Washington and discovered something puzzling. Eddie Bronson was a Vietnam corpse. MIA. He was up there on that wall. People were incapable of dying twice.
Dot two.
So who was this Eddie Bronson? Obviously a vet suffering from some kind of survivor’s guilt. Someone disoriented enough to take someone else’s name and forget his own. Forget his family, his past. But not the way home.
No.
Of all the town gazebos in America, he’d bedded down in that one. He’d called it home.
Why?
Because it felt that way.
Close enough, at least.
Once upon a time, he’d lived just twenty-three miles down the road in a town that no longer existed.
In Littleton Flats. Wren would’ve found that out.
Dot three.
But everyone in Littleton Flats that day had died.
Everyone.
Including Benjamin Washington.
Unless they hadn’t.
Wren had begun his exposé on the Aurora Dam Flood.
Discovered things.
Gotten all excited. Then gone off the deep end-Littleton loco. That’s what they said. Locked himself in the offices of the Littleton Journal one night and wouldn’t come out.
Why?
What was he doing there that night?
He’d been evicted from the premises, then gone and holed himself up somewhere to work on the story.
What was the story?
I think I knew.
It was a story about MIAs helping one another out.
Purely for bureaucratic purposes.
Those MIAs up on that granite wall-their records remain open in the VA system as long as their bodies remain missing. They’d helped out a few MIAs from a different kind of a national disaster. Unknowingly, of course. They’d given them their names. The disappeared from Littleton Flats-where it wasn’t a dam that blew sky-high that Sunday morning.
No.
You might want to get yourself a Geiger counter, Mr. Wren.
I still hadn’t really looked at where I was.
If I had, I would’ve noted that it resembled a padded cell minus the padding. I would’ve been aware that Rainey hadn’t come back in a jiffy, that one minute had become two, then three, and four and five.
Time needed to register.
Tick-tock-tick-tock-tick and suddenly it was fifteen minutes after Rainey left. Suddenly I was sitting on the hard metal bench, which folded down from the wall. I was in a room you didn’t want to spend too much time in.
I wasn’t collecting accolades as I showed off for the crowd.
I was staring at my surroundings. I was reading what various incarcerated people had knifed into the wall.
I am a man of constant sorrows, someone had scrawled.
Call God collect.
I am MIA from the world.
And this:
Greetings from Kara Bolka.
Even as I stood up and walked the four feet to the door-it had a small grill in it like the door outside the elevator-even before I turned the knob, I began to sense that it might not open. That doors can open and doors can close and sometimes open doors can become closed ones.
I grasped the knob and turned.
Locked tight.
I put some wrist into it. Nothing.
I pushed against the door as if making sure that it was really, truly locked. I tapped on it, politely at first, as if it might be a misunderstanding, just a technical glitch, and Rainey would come running over in one minute to open it up and apologize.
After a while, I started pounding on it.
“Hey! Hey, Rainey! What’s going on here?”
Sometimes when you shout a question out loud, you already know the answer. It’s mere formality. What are you doing? you yell when someone pulls a gun on you in a dark and scuzzy part of town. You know what they’re doing. They’re preparing to shoot you.
“Hey, c’mon! Open the damn door. What is this?” I shouted, with the rising panic of someone trapped between floors.
It took ten minutes for Rainey to show up.
Long enough to have bloodied my knuckles and to be dripping in sweat. To have put numerous scuff marks on the bottom of the door where I’d tried to kick it open.
Rainey wasn’t smiling anymore. He wasn’t letting me out, either.
“Shut the fuck up,” he said.
“You know what you’re doing? I’m a cop.”
“Yeah, I’m a cop too. I’m the fucking chief of police.”
Okay, charade up.
“Okay, fine. I’m a journalist.”
“You don’t say?”
“My name is Tom Valle. I’m from the Littleton Journal. Sometimes reporters have to lie a little to get the story. You can’t lock us up for that. Otherwise we’d all be in jail. Look, just let me out, and we’ll forget about this…”
“Lie a little? That’s a lie right there. That’s a whopper.”
Someone had been talking to him.
“Look, you’re breaking the law here. You’re aiding and abetting the wrong people. Right here-right in this fucking hospital.” Sometimes the first time you know you’re really scared is when you hear it in your own voice. Up till then, you think you’re doing okay-you’re in control, you’re going to get out of this.
“Wrong people, right. That’s good. That’s funny. Why don’t you just be cool, okay? Why don’t you sit back down?”
“Rainey, let me out of here. I’m a reporter, for god’s sake. There’s something criminal going on here.”
“Yeah. You’re right about that.”
“I’m not the criminal.”
“Yeah, you’re the cop. You’re Detective Wolfe.”
“You wouldn’t have let me in if I told you I was a reporter.”
“Well, now that you put it that way…”
“You’re going to let me out?”
“No.”
He was taking orders. This was a military hospital and he was taking orders.
“Look, you can’t just lock me up. This is fucking nuts. I have rights…” It was a tired refrain, something he probably heard a hundred times a day. It was like every prison on earth. No one’s guilty. No one belongs there. It’s all a mistake.