7
Sunny Acres is ritzy. Elizabeth Wharton is not.
She’s in a wheelchair, hunched over in a posture that reminds Hodges of Rodin’s Thinker. Afternoon sunlight slants in through the window, turning her hair into a silver cloud so fine it’s a halo. Outside the window, on a rolling and perfectly manicured lawn, a few golden oldies are playing a slow-motion game of croquet. Mrs. Wharton’s croquet days are over. As are her days of standing up. When Hodges last saw her—with Pete Huntley beside him and Olivia Trelawney sitting next to her—she was bent. Now she’s broken.
Janey, vibrant in tapered white slacks and a blue-and-white-striped sailor’s shirt, kneels beside her, stroking one of Mrs. Wharton’s badly twisted hands.
“How are you today, dear one?” she asks. “You look better.” If this is true, Hodges is horrified.
Mrs. Wharton peers at her daughter with faded blue eyes that express nothing, not even puzzlement. Hodges’s heart sinks. He enjoyed the ride out here with Janey, enjoyed looking at her, enjoyed getting to know her even more, and that’s good. It means the trip hasn’t been entirely wasted.
Then a minor miracle occurs. The old lady’s cataract-tinged eyes clear; the cracked lipstickless lips spread in a smile. “Hello, Janey.” She can only raise her head a little, but her eyes flick to Hodges. Now they look cold. “Craig.”
Thanks to their conversation on the ride out, Hodges knows who that is.
“This isn’t Craig, lovey. This is a friend of mine. His name is Bill Hodges. You’ve met him before.”
“No, I don’t believe . . .” She trails off—frowning now—then says, “You’re . . . one of the detectives?”
“Yes, ma’am.” He doesn’t even consider telling her he’s retired. Best to keep things on a straight line while there are still a few circuits working in her head.
Her frown deepens, creating rivers of wrinkles. “You thought Livvy left her key in her car so that man could steal it. She told you and told you, but you never believed her.”
Hodges copies Janey, taking a knee beside the wheelchair. “Mrs. Wharton, I now think we might have been wrong about that.”
“Of course you were.” She shifts her gaze back to her remaining daughter, looking up at her from beneath the bony shelf of her brow. It’s the only way she can look. “Where’s Craig?”
“I divorced him last year, Mom.”
She considers, then says, “Good riddance to bad rubbish.”
“I couldn’t agree more. Can Bill ask you a few questions?”
“I don’t see why not, but I want some orange juice. And my pain pills.”
“I’ll go down to the nurses’ suite and see if it’s time,” she says. “Bill, are you okay if I—?”
He nods and flicks two fingers in a go, go gesture. As soon as she’s out the door, Hodges gets to his feet, bypasses the visitor’s chair, and sits on Elizabeth Wharton’s bed with his hands clasped between his knees. He has his pad, but he’s afraid taking notes might distract her. The two of them regard each other silently. Hodges is fascinated by the silver nimbus around the old lady’s head. There are signs that one of the orderlies combed her hair that morning, but it’s gone its own wild way in the hours since. Hodges is glad. The scoliosis has twisted her body into a thing of ugliness, but her hair is beautiful. Crazy and beautiful.
“I think,” he says, “we treated your daughter badly, Mrs. Wharton.”
Yes indeed. Even if Mrs. T. was an unwitting accomplice, and Hodges hasn’t entirely dismissed the idea that she left her key in the ignition, he and Pete did a piss-poor job. It’s easy—too easy—to either disbelieve or disregard someone you dislike. “We were blinded by certain preconceptions, and for that I’m sorry.”
“Are you talking about Janey? Janey and Craig? He hit her, you know. She tried to get him to stop using that dope stuff he liked, and he hit her. She says only once, but I believe it was more.” She lifts one slow hand and taps her nose with a pale finger. “A mother can tell.”
“This isn’t about Janey. I’m talking about Olivia.”
“He made Livvy stop taking her pills. She said it was because she didn’t want to be a dope addict like Craig, but it wasn’t the same. She needed those pills.”
“Are you talking about her antidepressants?”
“They were pills that made her able to go out.” She pauses, considering. “There were other ones, too, that kept her from touching things over and over. She had strange ideas, my Livvy, but she was a good person, just the same. Underneath, she was a very good person.”
Mrs. Wharton begins to cry.
There’s a box of Kleenex on the nightstand. Hodges takes a few and holds them out to her, but when he sees how difficult it is for her to close her hand, he wipes her eyes for her.
“Thank you, sir. Is your name Hedges?”
“Hodges, ma’am.”
“You were the nice one. The other one was very mean to Livvy. She said he was laughing at her. Laughing all the time. She said she could see it in his eyes.”
Was that true? If so, he’s ashamed of Pete. And ashamed of himself for not realizing.
“Who suggested she stop taking her pills? Do you remember?”
Janey has come back with the orange juice and a small paper cup that probably holds her mother’s pain medication. Hodges glimpses her from the corner of his eye and uses the same two fingers to motion her away again. He doesn’t want Mrs. Wharton’s attention divided, or taking any pills that will further muddle her already muddled recollection.
Mrs. Wharton is silent. Then, just when Hodges is afraid she won’t answer: “It was her pen-pal.”
“Did she meet him under the Blue Umbrella? Debbie’s Blue Umbrella?”
“She never met him. Not in person.”
“What I mean—”
“The Blue Umbrella was make-believe.” From beneath the white brows, her eyes are calling him a perfect idiot. “It was a thing in her computer. Frankie was her computer pen-pal.”
He always feels a kind of electric shock in his midsection when fresh info drops. Frankie. Surely not the guy’s real name, but names have power and aliases often have meaning. Frankie.
“He told her to stop taking her medicine?”
“Yes, he said it was hooking her. Where’s Janey? I want my pills.”
“She’ll be back any minute, I’m sure.”
Mrs. Wharton broods into her lap for a moment. “Frankie said he took all the same medicines, and that’s why he did . . . what he did. He said he felt better after he stopped taking them. He said that after he stopped, he knew what he did was wrong. But it made him sad because he couldn’t take it back. That’s what he said. And that life wasn’t worth living. I told Livvy she should stop talking to him. I said he was bad. That he was poison. And she said . . .”
The tears are coming again.
“She said she had to save him.”
This time when Janey comes into the doorway, Hodges nods to her. Janey puts a pair of blue pills into her mother’s pursed and seeking mouth, then gives her a drink of juice.
“Thank you, Livvy.”
Hodges sees Janey wince, then smile. “You’re welcome, dear.” She turns to Hodges. “I think we should go, Bill. She’s very tired.”
He can see that, but is still reluctant to leave. There’s a feeling you get when the interview isn’t done. When there’s at least one more apple hanging on the tree. “Mrs. Wharton, did Olivia say anything else about Frankie? Because you’re right. He is bad. I’d like to find him so he can’t hurt anyone else.”
“Livvy never would have left her key in her car. Never.” Elizabeth Wharton sits hunched in her bar of sun, a human parenthesis in a fuzzy blue robe, unaware that she’s topped with a gauze of silver light. The finger comes up again—admonitory. She says, “That dog we had never threw up on the rug again. Just that once.”
Janey takes Hodges’s hand and mouths, Let’s go.
Habits die hard, and Hodges speaks the old formula as Janey bends down and kisses first her mother’s cheek and then the corner of her dry mouth. “Thank you for your time, Mrs. Wharton. You’ve been very helpful.”
As they reach the door, Mrs. Wharton speaks clearly. “She still wouldn’t have committed suicide if not for the ghosts.”
Hodges turns back. Beside him, Janey Patterson is wide-eyed.
“What ghosts, Mrs. Wharton?”
“One was the baby,” she says. “The poor thing who was killed with all those others. Livvy heard that baby in the night, crying and crying. She said the baby’s name was Patricia.”
“In her house? Olivia heard this in her house?”
Elizabeth Wharton manages the smallest of nods, a mere dip of the chin. “And sometimes the mother. She said the mother would accuse her.”
She looks up at them from her wheelchair hunch.
“She would scream, ‘Why did you let him murder my baby?’ That’s why Livvy killed herself.”
8
It’s Friday afternoon and the suburban streets are feverish with kids released from school. There aren’t many on Harper Road, but there are still some, and this gives Brady a perfect reason to cruise slowly past number sixty-three and peek in the window. Except he can’t, because the drapes are drawn. And the overhang to the left of the house is empty except for the lawnmower. Instead of sitting in his house and watching TV, where he belongs, the Det-Ret is sporting about in his crappy old Toyota.
Sporting about where? It probably doesn’t matter, but Hodges’s absence makes Brady vaguely uneasy.
Two little girls trot to the curb with money clutched in their hands. They have undoubtedly been taught, both at home and at school, to never approach strangers, especially strange men, but who could be less strange than good old Mr. Tastey?
He sells them a cone each, one chocolate and one vanilla. He joshes with them, asks how they got so pretty. They giggle. The truth is one’s ugly and the other’s worse. As he serves them and makes change, he thinks about the missing Corolla, wondering if this break in Hodges’s afternoon routine has anything to do with him. Another message from Hodges on the Blue Umbrella might cast some light, give an idea of where the ex-cop’s head is at.
Even if it doesn’t, Brady wants to hear from him.
“You don’t dare ignore me,” he says as the bells tinkle and chime over his head.
He crosses Hanover Street, parks in the strip mall, kills the engine (the annoying chimes fall blessedly silent), and hauls his laptop out from under the seat. He keeps it in an insulated case because the truck is always so f*cking cold. He boots it up and goes on Debbie’s Blue Umbrella courtesy of the nearby coffee shop’s Wi-Fi.
Nothing.
“You f*cker,” Brady whispers. “You don’t dare ignore me, you f*cker.”
As he zips the laptop back into its case, he sees a couple of boys standing outside the comic book shop, talking and looking at him and grinning. Given his five years of experience, Brady estimates that they’re sixth- or seventh-graders with a combined IQ of one-twenty and a long future of collecting unemployment checks. Or a short one in some desert country.
They approach, the goofier-looking of the pair in the lead. Smiling, Brady leans out his window. “Help you boys?”
“We want to know if you got Jerry Garcia in there,” Goofy says.
“No,” Brady says, smiling more widely than ever, “but if I did, I’d sure let him out.”
They look so ridiculously disappointed, Brady almost laughs. Instead, he points down at Goofy’s pants. “Your fly’s unzipped,” he says, and when Goofy looks down, Brady flicks a finger at the soft underside of his chin. A little harder than he intended—actually quite a lot—but what the hell.
“Gotcha,” Brady says merrily.
Goofy smiles to show yes, he’s been gotten, but there’s a red weal just above his Adam’s apple and surprised tears swim in his eyes.
Goofy and Not Quite So Goofy start away. Goofy looks back over his shoulder. His lower lip is pushed out and now he looks like a third-grader instead of just another preadolescent come-stain who’ll be f*cking up the halls of Beal Middle School come September.
“That really hurt,” he says, with a kind of wonder.
Brady’s mad at himself. A finger-flick hard enough to bring tears to the kid’s eyes means he’s telling the straight-up truth. It also means Goofy and Not Quite So Goofy will remember him. Brady can apologize, can even give them free cones to show his sincerity, but then they’ll remember that. It’s a small thing, but small things mount up and then maybe you have a big thing.
“Sorry,” he says, and means it. “I was just kidding around, son.”
Goofy gives him the finger, and Not Quite So Goofy adds his own middle digit to show solidarity. They go into the comics store, where—if Brady knows boys like these, and he does—they will be invited to either buy or leave after five minutes’ browsing.
They’ll remember him. Goofy might even tell his parents, and his parents might lodge a complaint with Loeb’s. It’s unlikely but not impossible, and whose fault was it that he’d given Goofy Boy’s unprotected neck a snap hard enough to leave a mark, instead of just the gentle flick he’d intended? The ex-cop has knocked Brady off-balance. He’s making him screw things up, and Brady doesn’t like that.
He starts the ice cream truck’s engine. The bells begin bonging a tune from the loudspeaker on the roof. Brady turns left on Hanover Street and resumes his daily round, selling cones and Happy Boys and Pola Bars, spreading sugar on the afternoon and obeying all speed limits.