"Does he or she manage properties, do you suppose?"
"What?"
"Assuming that Mr. Cosgrove doesn't own this building, who's his landlord?"
2
"You mean the Dwyer Building." The bantamweight man in a bow tie stubbed out a cigarette. His desk was flanked on three sides by tall filing cabinets. "I've been managing it for Mr. Dwyer's heirs the past twenty years."
"The office Mr. Cosgrove is in."
"Unit-Two-C."
"Can you tell me who rented it back then? I'm looking for the name of a dentist who used to be there."
"Why on earth would you want-"
"Some dental records. If it's a nuisance for you to look it up, I'll gladly pay you a service fee."
"Nuisance? Hell, it's the easiest thing in the world. The secret to managing property is being organized." He pivoted in his swivel chair and pushed its rollers toward a filing cabinet on his right that was marked D.
"Dwyer Building." He searched through files. "Here." He sorted through papers in it. "Sure. I remember now. Dr. Raymond Faraday. He had a heart attack. Eighteen years ago. Died in the middle of giving somebody a root canal."
After what I'd been through, the grotesqueness of his death somehow didn't seem unusual. "Did he have any relatives here? Are they still in town?"
"Haven't the faintest idea, but check this phone book."
3
"… a long time ago. Dr. Raymond Faraday. I'm trying to find a relative of his." Back at my car, I was using my cell phone. There'd been only two Faradays in the book. This was my second try.
"My husband's his son," a suspicious-sounding woman said. "Frank's at work now. What's this got to do with his father?"
I straightened. "When my brother and I were kids, Dr. Faraday was our dentist. It's very important that I get my brother's dental X rays. To identify him."
"Your brother's dead?"
"Yes."
"I'm so sorry."
"It would be very helpful if you could tell me what happened to the records."
"His patients took their records with them when they chose a new dentist."
"But what about patients who hadn't been his clients for a while? My brother and I had stopped going to Dr. Faraday several years earlier."
"Didn't your parents transfer the records to your new dentist?"
"No." I remembered bitterly that after my father had died in the car accident and it turned out that his life-insurance policy had lapsed, my mother hadn't been able to afford things like taking me to a dentist.
The woman exhaled, as if annoyed about something. "I have no idea what my husband did with the old records. You'll have to ask him when he gets home from the office."
4
The baseball field hadn't changed. As the lowering sun cast my shadow, I stood at the bicycle rack where my friends and I had chained and locked our bikes so long ago. Behind me, the bleachers along the third-base line were crowded with parents yelling encouragement to kids playing what looked like a Little League game. I heard the crack of a ball off a bat. Cheers. Howls of disappointment. Other cheers. I assumed that a fly ball, seemingly a home run, had been caught.
But I kept my gaze on the bicycles, remembering how Petey had used a clothespin to attach a playing card to the front fender of his bike and how it had created a clackclackclackclack sound against the spokes when the wheel turned. It pained me that I couldn't remember the names of the two friends I'd been with and for whom I'd destroyed Petey's life. But I certainly remembered the gist of what we'd said.
"For crissake, Brad, your little brother's getting on my nerves. Tell him to beat it, would ya?"
"Yeah, he tags along everywhere. I'm tired of the little squirt. The friggin' noise his bike makes drives me nuts."
"He's just hanging around. He doesn't mean anything."
"Bull. How do you think my mom found out I was smoking if he didn't tell your mom?"
"We don't know for sure he told my mom."
"Then who did tell her, the goddamn tooth fairy?"
"All right, all right."
Petey had nearly bumped into me when I'd turned. I'd thought about that moment so often and so painfully that it was seared into my memory. He'd been short even for nine, and he'd looked even shorter because of his droopy jeans. His baseball glove had been too big for his hand.
"Sorry, Petey, you have to go home."
"But…"
"You're just too little. You'd hold up the game."
His eyes had glistened with the threat of tears.
To my later shame, I'd worried about what my friends would think if my kid brother started crying around them. "I mean it, Petey. Bug off. Go home. Watch cartoons or something."
His chin had quivered.
"Petey, I'm telling you, go. Scram. Get lost."
My friends had run toward where the other kids were choosing sides for the game. As I'd rushed to join them, I'd heard the clachclackdack of Petey's bike. I'd looked back toward where the little guy was pedaling away. His head was down.
Standing now by the bicycle rack, remembering how things had been, wishing with all my heart that I could return to that moment and tell my friends that they were jerks, that Petey was going to stay with me, I wept.
5
Unlike the baseball field, the house had changed a great deal. In fact, the whole street had. The trees were taller (to be expected), and there were more of them, as well as more shrubs and hedges. But those changes weren't what struck me. In my youth, the neighborhood had been all single-story ranch houses, modest homes for people who worked at the factory where my dad had been a foreman. But now second stories had been added to several of the houses, or rooms had been added to the back, taking away most of the rear yards. Both changes had occurred to the house I'd lived in. The front porch had been enclosed to add space to the living room. The freestanding single-car garage at the end of the driveway had been rebuilt into a double-car garage with stairs leading up to a room.
Parking across the street, seeing the red of the setting sun reflected off the house's windows, I was so startled by the change that I wondered if I'd made a mistake. Maybe I wasn't on the right street (but the sign had clearly said Locust) or maybe this wasn't the right house (but the number 108 was fixed vertically next to the front door, just as it had been in my youth). I felt absolutely no identification with the place. In my memory, I saw a different, simpler house, the one from which my dad and I had hurried that evening, scrambling into his car, rushing toward the baseball diamond in hopes of finding Petey loitering along the way.
A wary man from the property next door came out and frowned at me, as if to say, What are you staring at?
I put the car in gear. As I drove away, I noticed half a dozen for sale signs, remembering that in the old days everyone on the street had been so dependent on the furniture factory that no one had ever moved.
6
Mr. Faraday had thin lips and pinched cheeks. "My wife says your brother died or something?" "Yes."
"That's why you need the dental records? To identify him?" "He disappeared a long time ago. Now we might have found him."
"His body?" "Yes."
"Well, if it wasn't something important like that, I wouldn't go to the trouble." Faraday motioned me into the house. I heard a television from the living room as he opened a door halfway along the corridor to the kitchen. The quick impression I got was of excessive neatness, everything in its place, plastic covers on chair arms in the living room, pots on hooks in the kitchen, lids above them, everything arranged by size.
Cool air rose from the open cellar door. Faraday flicked a light switch and gestured for me to follow. Our descending footsteps thumped on sturdy wooden stairs.