Matheson allowed himself a smile, although I still wasn’t certain that the little warning light had extinguished itself entirely. He sipped his coffee, lifting the cup with that callused right hand. It trembled slightly. His left had never ceased clutching the leather attaché case on his lap.
“I should tell you why I’m here,” he said. “I suppose I should start with my family. My-”
I interrupted him.
“Is this about your daughter, Mr. Matheson?”
He didn’t look too surprised. I guessed that it happened a lot. It probably took a little while for the name to register with some people, but they’d get there in the end. I imagined Frank Matheson, sitting in his office with a prospective customer, seeing the eyes narrow, the hands move awkwardly.
Was your daughter Louise Matheson? Jesus, I’m sorry, that was a terrible thing that happened. Death was too good for that guy, what was his name? Grady, yeah.
John Grady.
“In a way,” said Matheson.
He opened his case.
“I brought some material along, just in case you didn’t know about what happened, or needed some background.”
Inside, I could see a plastic folder. It contained copies of newspaper clippings and photographs. He didn’t remove it.
“I know about it,” I said.
“It was a long time ago. You must have been very young when it occurred.”
“It was a famous case, and people here don’t forget things like that too easily. They stay in the memory, and get passed along. Maybe it’s right that they should.”
He didn’t reply. I knew that his daughter was always in his memory, frozen in death at the age of ten. I wondered if he ever tried to picture what she might have been like had she lived, how she might have looked, what she might be doing with her life. I wondered if he ever saw other young women on the street, and in their faces caught glimpses of his own departed child, a faint trace of her, as though she were briefly inhabiting the body of another, trying to make contact with her family and the life denied her.
Because I saw my own dead child in the children of others, and I did not believe that I was alone in experiencing my loss in such a way.
“I know about you as well,” said Matheson. “That’s why I want to hire you. I believed you’d understand.”
“Understand what, Mr. Matheson?”
He reached into his case and withdrew a brown envelope. He slid the envelope toward me. It was unsealed. Inside was a single piece of unfolded paper, glossy on one side. I removed it and looked at the copy of the black-and-white photograph on the sheet. It showed a child, a little girl. The photo had been taken from a distance away, but the child’s face was clear. She was holding a softball bat, her attention focused on an unseen ball beyond the limits of the picture. The girl wasn’t wearing a helmet, and her brown hair hung loose around her shoulders. Even at a distance, and allowing for the relatively poor quality of the photo, she was a beautiful child.
“Who is she?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
I looked at the photograph again. There was nothing in it to indicate where it might have been taken. There was just the girl, the bat, and grass and dark trees in the distance. I turned the sheet over, but the reverse side was blank.
“Where’s the original?”
“The cops at Two Mile Lake have it.”
“You want to tell me how you came by it?”
He took the photograph from me and carefully placed it on the counter ledge before putting the envelope on top of it so that it was entirely covered.
“You know who owns the Grady house?”
“No, but I could hazard a guess.”
“Which would be?”
“That you own the Grady house.”
He nodded. “The bank put it up for sale about two years after my Louise’s murder. There were no other bidders. I didn’t pay very much for it. Under other circumstances, you might even have said that I got a bargain.”
“You left it standing.”
“What would you have expected me to do: raze it?”
“It’s what a lot of folks would have done.”
“Not me. I wanted it to remain as a monument to what was done to my daughter and to those other children. I felt that if it was removed from the earth, then people would start to forget. Does that make sense to you?”
“It doesn’t have to make sense to me. It doesn’t have to make sense to anyone but you and your family.”
“My wife doesn’t understand. She never has. She thinks that all traces of John Grady should have been wiped away. She doesn’t need anything to remind her of what happened to Louise. It’s always with her, every single day.”
Matheson seemed to retreat from me for a moment, and I watched his relationship with his wife reflected in his eyes like a rerun of a desolate old movie. In some ways, it was a miracle that they had stayed together. Both as a policeman and as an investigator, I had seen marriages disintegrate under the burden of grief. People speak about a shared sorrow, but the death of a child is so often not apportioned in the same way between a father and a mother. It is experienced simultaneously, but the grief is insidious in its individuality. Couples drown in it, sinking beneath the surface, each unable to reach out and touch the other, incapable of seeking solace in the love that they feel, or once felt, for each other. It is particularly terrible for those who lose an only child. The great bond between them is severed, and in some cases they simply drift away into loneliness and isolation.
I waited.
“Can I ask you what you did with your house, after what happened?” he asked.
I knew the question would come.
“I sold it.”
“Have you ever been back there?”
“No.”
“You know who lives there now?”
“A young couple. They have two children.”
“Do they know that a woman and a child were killed in that house?”
“I guess that they do.”
“You think it troubles them?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they feel that what happened there once can never happen again.”
“But they’d be wrong. Life doesn’t abide by such simple rules.”
“Do you feel that way about the Grady house, Mr. Matheson?”
His fingers trailed across the envelope, seeking to find the lineaments of the face of the unknown girl hidden beneath. I thought again of new-fallen snow, and how I once believed I could see the outlines of faces beneath it, like the shapes of skulls beneath white skin. That was later, when I left behind the child I once was and those whom I loved began to fall away.
“You asked me where I found the photograph, Mr. Parker. I found it in the mailbox of the Grady house. It was in a torn envelope. The envelope had been sealed, then opened by someone to get at what was inside. Judging by the marks on the envelope, I’d guess there was more than one photograph in it originally. The shape of the remaining photograph didn’t quite match the marks of the bulge in the envelope. That’s how I knew.”
“Do you check the mailbox often?”
“Nope, just occasionally. I don’t go to the house much anymore.”
“When did you find the photograph?”
“One week ago.”
“What did you do?”
“I took it to the police.”
“Why?”
“It was a photograph of a little girl, placed in the mailbox of a house once owned by a child killer. At the very least, someone has a sick sense of humor.”
“Is that what the police think?”
“They told me that they’d see what they could do. I wanted them to go to the newspapers and the TV people, get this little girl’s picture shown across the state so that we could find out who she is, and-”
“And warn her?”
He drew a breath, and his eyes closed as he nodded.
“And warn her,” he echoed.
“You think she’s in danger, because someone put a photo of her in Grady’s mailbox?”
“Like I said, at the very least the person who put that picture there has a disturbed mind. Who would even want to link a little girl with that place?”
I slipped the envelope away and looked at the print of the child’s picture again.