“No one else will.”
Her eyes narrowed, seeing half-truths.
“No one else must,” I said, finally.
“You really think she’s still alive?”
“If so, she’s safe someplace with a pot full of money.”
“If not?”
“If not, she died several weeks ago, tortured by someone who wanted that money.”
“She’s an old love,” Amanda said.
“We were kids; we went out for a few months. Her father was murdered and she disappeared.” I paused. “I have felt responsible.”
“How?”
“It took me a long time, years, to accept the possibility that she was dead, though that was what everyone was saying. She never called, and gradually… I always figured, if she was all right, she would have found a way to contact me, to let me know…”
“Maybe she’s a bitch.”
The urge to get up, walk away, came burning. Just as quickly, it passed. Amanda was right. And she loved me.
“I have to see this through,” I said.
“Because that’s what you do: see things through?”
“Not always, Amanda, but this time.”
She stood and reached down to touch the side of my face lightly. Then she was gone.
I joined the throng of purposeful people, sure of their next steps, hurrying to Union Station. The five fifty-three, west to Rivertown and better places, was a slow train that stopped at every crossing. That was fine. It was late enough to get a window seat, and for a time I let myself shut down a little, watching the passing stores and flashing lights, listening to the other riders talking on their cell phones about meetings and class schedules and things that were sure to make them rich.
At Rivertown, instead of crossing Thompson Avenue to head to the turret, I turned the other way. The sun was long gone, but the sidewalk was bright with neon and smiling ladies. Rivertown was shrugging itself to life.
I stopped on a very particular square of cement, three blocks down. Just ahead, multicolored lights pulsed from the street-level windows, in time with high-tech pong, ding, and zoom sounds from digitized machines. The pinball parlor had evolved with the times. It was now a video arcade and, according to rumor, a drug depot for high schoolers.
I’d come to that building every day, right after Maris vanished. I’d stood at the exact square on the sidewalk, in front of her door, where we’d argued that last time. Crazily, I’d tried to believe that I could change time, summon her back if I just stood there long enough, willed her back hard enough. Then that horrible August ended. I went to school in Chicago, and sometime after that, I gave up coming back to Rivertown altogether. When I did return, years later, I looked the other way each time I passed by her old door.
I stepped to the curb, looked up at the apartment on the second floor. A light burned in the bedroom that had been Maris’s. The window was covered by soft white curtains, as when Maris slept there. I stared up for a minute or two, half expecting to see a female shadow cross behind the curtain.
I walked on and turned off Thompson Avenue. Leo’s mother’s bungalow was in the middle of a block of identical bungalows. Ma Brumsky’s windows flickered the most brightly, from the biggest television screen on the block. Even from several houses away, so many primary colors were bombarding the pulled-down shades, and with such ferocity, that a stranger to the block could easily have assumed that fireworks were being set off in the parlor. Which, in a sense, was true enough.
I went into the narrow gangway next to his house. A light shone up from Leo’s office. I tapped on the window. He pulled open the curtain, grinned, and pointed to the back. I walked around and waited until he opened the porch door.
“I’ve got to come around back, like the service class?” I asked as I stepped in. His screened back porch was piled high with two-liter bottles of Diet Pepsi, for the effervescence; bags of potato chips, for the salt; and cans of fruit juice, for the regularity. Wintertime, those babushkas still left in Rivertown used their back porches as walk-through refrigerators.
“Ma’s lady friends are due here any minute. They’d get embarrassed if we were upstairs, to see them come in.”
“Always a risk when you’re running a porn theater for septuagenarians.”
I followed him down the basement stairs, then sat in his desk chair and switched his computer on to the Internet.
“Iowa?” Leo asked.
I nodded as I opened the e-mail Sergeant Patterson had sent.
“Nice to know people are recycling motor oil,” Leo said, looking over my shoulder.
It was true. The police photos of the Kovacs brothers showed shiny, slicked-back hair, acne scars, and the sullen, face-on expressions of the newly arrested.
“No bingo,” I typed in a reply to Patterson’s e-maiclass="underline" “Neither one is John Reynolds.”
“Shit,” said Leo.
“Exactly. It means we’ve got a third man in the equation, somebody else who wanted to hunt Maris.”
I stood up and moved to the overstuffed chair as Leo extracted a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and a tube of plastic cups from a desk drawer. “Snort?”
“I told Amanda about Maris,” I said.
“Definitely calls for a snort.” He poured two inches of Jack into each of the cups, set one down at the edge of the desk for me, and dropped into his desk chair.
He took a sip and asked, “How much did you tell?”
“Most of what I understand.”
He raised his glass in a kind of toast. “Which isn’t very much, then or now. Besides, you were kids.”
“I’m not a kid now,” I said.
He leaned forward, to speak carefully. “If she’s alive, she’s running with plenty of money, and she’s safe. If not, it doesn’t matter anymore.”
“It matters, Leo; either way, it matters.”
He looked away, realizing he’d stumbled with the words.
Upstairs, the front doorbell rang, and for a time we sipped Mr. Jack’s golden elixir and tried to grin, listening as Ma’s lady friends shuffled in, chattering excitedly in Polish. I finished the Jack and got up, and he walked me up the basement stairs.
He paused at the back door. “You told Amanda all of it?”
I knew what he was asking. He was the only person in the world, save Maris, who suspected how much there could be, but in all the years since that August, he’d never asked.
“I’ve never told anybody all of it,” I said. “Not even myself.”
Thirty
The answering machine light was blinking when I walked into my office late the next morning. For a second, I let myself hope it was Amanda, but then realized she would have dialed my cell phone. Aggert, I guessed then, calling to chastise me for not reporting in. I was wrong again. It had been Lieutenant Dillard, calling from Michigan. I called him back.
“There was a fire at the house of that woman you were looking for,” he said. “The fire department in Bangor forwarded me a report.”
“Days ago,” I said. “You people move fast.”
“Faster now, Elstrom. How soon can you get up here?”
“You have new information?”
“We found a body underneath the car in the garage.”
It took a few seconds to get the word out: “Female?”
“We don’t know yet.”
“Don’t play with me.”
“Come on up and find out, Elstrom.”
The county sheriff’s department was just north of West Haven, in a tan brick building with windows that needed paint. It looked like a place where people went to hear bad news.
Dillard was a big cop, my age, but a couple of inches taller and packing fifty more pounds. With his brush-cut hair and clear eyes, he could have been a drill sergeant in a recruiting poster, except for what he was holding in his big, meaty hand. It was a porcelain teacup, dainty and painted with little dark grapes, and it was steaming up something fruity. He led me down a cinder-block hall to a windowless office in back. More of the sickly sweet smell wafted from an electric teapot set on the low filing cabinet behind the metal desk. We sat, and when I said no to coffee, he asked if I’d like a soft drink. I said no to that, too.