Julian takes the pack of cigarettes from the dashboard and shakes one out, then takes out another and holds it toward the boy.
Go on," he says when the boy doesn"t move. "I just told you. You can"t bulls.h.i.t me."When Julian lights the cigarette the boy inhales deeply, then coughs his dry, brown cough. There"s panic all over him, so Julian speaks softly, as if talking through the chain link of the kennel.
"You got yourself into a mess, all right. But I"ll tell you what I"m going to do. I"m not going to turn you in."
The boy cups his cigarette in his palm and narrows his eyes. Julian notices that his right hand is on the door handle. He"d be fast if he decided to run.
"Anybody ever tell you how stupid you are?"
Julian asks. "Anybody ever tell you that everything you"ve done so far has made you look guilty of just about anything, including murder?"
He can see the boy"s fingers tighten on the door handle. "You can run now," Julian tells the boy.
"But whoever did kill that neighbor of yours might just catch you and slit your throat. One thing you can be sure of-I"m not about to kill you.
The boy lets go of the door handle and wraps his arms around himself so he"s all hunched up.
"Okay." Julian nods. "You made a good decision right there. Now just put out that cigarette before you burn a hole in my upholstery, and follow me into the house."
The boy is shivering, but his mouth is set in a fierce line. Julian can"t help but remember exactly how much he had to prove at that age.
He used to climb out his bedroom window and meet his cousin where the willow trees stood until last week. They could easily find their way along the road without a flashiight, even on nights when there was no moon.
The boy has reached through the wire meshing, into the back, so that Arrow can sniff his fingers.
"Want to leave that dog of mine alone?" Julian says as he swings his door open. "He"s vicious."
After going around to the pa.s.senger side, Julian opens the door and waits. The boy looks up at him, then gets out. His hair sticks up on one side, from sleeping all folded up against the door.
"Just watch out for coral snakes," Julian says, in case the boy gets it into his head to take off.
The boy is shivering so badly that his teeth hit against each other, and Julian wonders if he should have offered him his own shirt. As they near the house, Julian realizes just how run-down the place has become; the porch is sagging and the roof is covered with leaves. Miss Giles stands at the screen door, holding her robe closed. In the dark, with the wind coming up, Julian figures this could easily look like a place where they popped you in the oven, then ate off your fingers and toes."Don"t tell me you"re scared?" Julian says softly when the boy hesitates.
The boy gives him a look of pure hatred, then continues up the steps.
Julian knows that when he was twelve he didn"t want anyone too close to him, so he makes certain to walk a pace behind.
At the top of the steps, he reaches past the boy and pushes open the screen door, and when he sees that Miss Giles is holding her long-handled axe, Julian has to bite his lip to stop from laughing out loud. It"s a test. If they can"t trust the boy, they might as well find out right now. The boy looks terrified of Miss Giles, who greets him in her robe and the fuzzy slippers she always refers to as mules.
"If I"m going to make you hot chocolate, then I need some wood,"
Lillian Giles says. She holds out the axe and the boy stares at her; Julian can see the lump in his throat. "Right out by the back door,"
Lillian says.
The boy takes the axe, but then he sees the stuffed bunny, so badly stained with chocolate and dirt, and it becomes clear to him that he"s not going anywhere without the baby. He opens his mouth but nothing comes out.
"He doesn"t talk?" Lillian asks Julian.
"He"s having a problem with his throat," Julian says. I don"t know, maybe he"s got strep."
The boy keeps on staring at the bunny, running his fingertips along the smooth handle of the axe.
He looks as if he"s been swimming in mud; when he turns his head, little clouds of gnats fly out.
"I"ll let your mother know you"re all right," Julian tells him. "All you have to do is chop some wood and keep your mouth shut, which shouldn"t be too hard for you to do."
But the boy still refuses to move, and that"s why Miss Giles leads him to the spare bedroom. She waits in the hall till the boy gets up enough nerve to follow her; then she opens the door so he can see the baby in her crib, filthy and safe, sucking on her thumb.
"Now you go out by the back door," she tells the boy. Bossing around runaways who carry sharp axes has never bothered her in the least. The boy has no choice; since he"s not about to run and leave the baby behind, he does exactly as he"s told. The dog in the car is watching him as he walks to the woodpile. Arrow makes a soft whining sound that makes the boy shiver even more.
Shirtless and cold in the moonlight, he"s afraid of coral snakes and death and his own loneliness, but he starts to chop wood anyway.
They can hear him in the kitchen, where Miss Giles heats up a pan of milk. She hasn"t had a wood-burning cookstove for years, not since one of her foster children grew up to manage an appliance store in Hartford Beach, but sometimes chopping wood is what"s needed anyhow."You"re exhausted," she tells Julian as he lights a cigarette off the back burner of the stove. "You"re getting that froggy look around your eyes."
Julian grins and heads for the living room, but he stops and turns back in the doorway. "You"re sure I can leave you with that?" he asks, nodding toward the back door.
"Baby, you can leave me with ten more just like him," Lillian Giles says.
If Julian weren"t who he is, he would put his arms around her. He always loved to watch Miss Giles make hot chocolate; she used a big wooden spoon and round motions that made it appear she was using all her strength.
"You"ve got diapers and all that?" he says, hesitating.
"I"ve got everything," Miss Giles a.s.sures him.
"Scat."
Julian walks out to his car just as the quarter moon appears in the sky. He gets in behind the wheel and works the wipers once, just to get some of the mosquitoes off the windshield. In the back, Arrow stretches out and groans, then licks at the torn pads of his paws. As Julian hears the boy chopping wood, he remembers that all you needed was three strokes to split a log. But to get a pile big enough to suit Miss Giles took a lot of energy. By the time that boy was done, his shoulders and arms would ache, his palms would be b.l.o.o.d.y and raw, and he"d be just about tired enough to crawl into bed and sleep the whole night through.
part five.
LUCY is asleep on the couch when he phones her. It"s only natural that she thinks at first that it"s Evan, who"s been calling her constantly.
As soon as she does recognize Julian"s voice, she sits up straight, completely awake. He tells her that her son is safe, but that isn"t enough. Even after he explains how isolated Miss Giles"s place is, after he gives in and tells Lucy exactly where the house is, she isn"t satisfied. She needs to know how long she has before Julian turns Keith over to the police for questioning. It"s late, but Lucy quickly gets dressed. She chooses her clothes carefully: a short black skirt, a silk blouse, high heels. When you are going to beg you must never look like a beggar. That"s common sense. You need to look like you deserve what you"re asking for, and in Lucy"s case all she wants is time.
She drives toward the marshes, but in the dark everything looks different; she"s not certain she"ll recognize his driveway until it"s right in front of her. She parks out on the road, near the sweet bay, which leaves its scent on her clothes, then walks down Julian"s driveway. As she finds her way in the dark, she rehea.r.s.es what she will say to him. She"ll say Please and Thank you and if you had a son, you would know. But mercy is more difficult to ask for than to grant, and when she nears the house, she hesitates. She doesn"t notice the toad that scrambles across her path.When she stumbles, the dust rises around her in a cloud and the dog in the kennel begins to bark.
It"s an awful, bellowing sound, as if the dog had been wounded.
Is it possible that Julian Cash waits for prowlers? He"s wearing jeans and has already stepped into his boots when he comes out to the porch.
He"s holding tight to the female shepherd"s collar, so she can"t break away. When he sees Lucy, there in the dark, almost at his front door, she looks like something he dreamed, as though she belonged to him.
Julian quiets Loretta and has her sit. There are white moths trying to get inside his open front door, and his porch is lined with rotten boards. Julian can"t look away from Lucy; he"s hypnotized by the way she opens and closes her hands when she speaks, as if she were using sign language. Behind her, the black sky shimmers with living things, mosquitoes and night beetles and moths.
"I want to make a deal with you," Lucy is saying.
Julian signals for Lucy to follow him. Maybe he didn"t hear her, maybe that"s why he"s leading her into his house and maybe that"s why she"s going. Loretta goes directly to her place beside the door. It"s a small house, basically one room, with a couch and an unmade bed and a braided rug, which is dusty no matter how many times it"s hung over the porch railing and beaten with a broom. In the kitchen there are the shadows of everyday things: a toaster, a plastic dish rack, a blue tin pot used for boiling water. Right in the center of the ceiling there"s a circular fluorescent light, but when Lucy reaches up to pull the string, Julian stops her. He doesn"t want her to see him.
He doesn"t want her to know how hot he is in this tiny kitchen where the windows don"t budge unless you hit the frames with a can opener.
The white moths smack their wings against the small panes of gla.s.s as Julian sits down on a wooden chair. He takes out a cigarette, and when he strikes a match there"s a sudden flare of yellow light. Quickly Julian shakes out the match without bothering to light his cigarette.
"I could make coffee," he offers.
If you drank hot coffee in this kitchen you might faint from the heat.
You might lose all your willpower.
"No," Lucy says. "Thanks."
"Good, because I make terrible coffee. All I have is Cremora," Julian says. He knows he sounds like a complete idiot.
"I don"t want you to tell anyone where the children are," Lucy says.
"Just for a few days," she adds after he looks at her. "Until I can find out who Karen Wright was and why someone would want to kill her."He doesn"t argue with her the way she expected he would; he doesn"t ask why she thinks she has a better chance at the truth than the Verity police or Paul Salley. He just keeps looking at her. He"s not going to stop.
"I don"t want Keith to look like he"s guilty," Lucy admits.
"He does," Julian says. "Look it." He places his unlit cigarette on the table and studies it. "And what do I get out of this?"
"You get the ident.i.ty of the dead woman and maybe the person who murdered her."
Julian should reach for the phone and call Walt Hannen right now. When he looks up, he sees that one white moth has managed to find a crack in the gla.s.s; it sweeps in from the night air, wings beating.
"I don"t think that"s what I want," Julian says.
In the doorway to the kitchen, Lucy can feel him wanting her. If it weren"t so dark, she"d be able to see that the mark across his forehead has turned scarlet.
"You should tell me to go home," Lucy says from the doorway.
"Go home," Julian says, and he means it.
But in this place, in the middle of the night, they are light-years away from reason. Julian would never make the first move. He knows if it were day she would run, and who could blame her?
He doesn"t have to look in a mirror to know who he is. As a boy, he was frightened not of ghosts and spiders but of his own reflection.
Drawn by his desire, Lucy steps through the kitchen doorway, and once she"s done that it"s impossible to go backward. Julian reaches for her hand, and when he pulls her onto his lap, he knows he"ll never be able to stop himself.
Lucy can feel his hands under her blouse. She can feel his heart beating. It"s so hot in the kitchen it"s unbearable, hotter still when he kisses her throat. It is possible, in heat like this, to find yourself dissolving. When he takes her face in his hands and kisses her on the mouth he wills her to close her eyes, and she does. This is what they call May madness, when you do things you never expected or even imagined yourself capable of. It comes upon you suddenly, and it doesn"t let go.
Lucy feels his shoulders, his back, the ladder of ribs that hides his heart. Her skirt rides up, past her thighs, as she moves to wrap her legs around him. That"s when he stops kissing her, abruptly, leaving her gasping. He wills her to open her eyes; he gives her one more chance to really look at him, and to flee.
Right then, Lucy decides to forgo daylight and perfection, simple thoughts and reason. She lifts her mouth to his ear and whispers that she wants him, and he takes her to his bed, where the sheets are blue and unironed. He pulls off her skirt and her underpants, he can"t do it fast enough; he lifts her on top of him, cross-st.i.tching himself onto her skin. The noises he makes sound as if he is in pain, and whenhe moves inside of her he has his fingers laced through hers.
Lucy kisses him on the mouth certain she"s under a spell. For this one night she"s crazy, crazy to be in his bed, where he keeps her until it"s no longer possible to tell what part of the heat is outside and what part is made up of their own flesh and bones. By the time the stars have begun to fade, the sheets are soaked and the heat has risen into an arc just below the ceiling. Never in his life would Julian have believed he could have fallen asleep with someone in his bed.
Still, it comes as no surprise to him that when he wakes up, he"s alone. It makes perfect sense that he would be awakened by the barking of dogs and the sound of a woman running down his driveway in the pale first light of morning.
No child has driven Lillian Giles crazy, not yet.
She pities parents, it"s such a thankless job and so many of them mess up so badly. She probably would have done the same with her own, would have scolded too often or not often enough; she might have whacked her truant boy with a hickory stick or sent her fresh-mouthed girl to bed without supper. As it is, she"s more patient than the spider who"s been living in her rafters for years. She"s convinced she"s so good with children because of Julian. Once you bring a child back from the dead, nothing he does can distress you. After that, everyone else seems easy.
She lifts her curtain and watches through the window. That baby is still trailing after the boy, playing in the tall, dry gra.s.s. She"s just about the best-natured child Lillian has ever seen; this morning, when she was fed her oatmeal with cinnamon sugar she opened her mouth like a bird whenever she wanted more. Lillian does not plan to get overly attached, since sooner or later someone will come along to claim the child. She"s getting a little too old to have so many emotional ups and downs, but it"s hard to stop herself from loving this baby.
Just once, she would like to raise a child all the way through. She almost did it with Julian, but then he was sent off to that boys"
school, and anyway, he was never anyone"s baby, not really. From the start, Miss Giles knew enough not to hug him; even as an infant, he never liked to be held and preferred to be in his playpen, set up outside in the fresh air.
This baby girl would be different. This one you could take in your arms and rock, you could tell her stories and she"d look at you, with those wide brown eyes, and listen to every word. The Social Services Department has decided that Miss Giles is too old for their list, but they"re wrong. This baby"s going to need her, since her heart"s going to be broken real soon. The way she looks at that mixed-up boy sends shivers down Miss Giles"s spine, even though she"s drinking a hot cup of lemon tea. When they finally have to separate these two, and they"ll have to, that baby"s going to cry hard enough to wake the dead.
She"s going I; to have sleepless nights and beg for her bottle, even though she"s just about outgrown it, and Miss Giles would like to be able to comfort her.
She"s tried her best with the boy, with no success at all. She"s given him licorice cough drops and honey and he still can"t say a word; she"shad him sit on the rim of the bathtub with the hot water turned on full blast, so the room is steamy and gray, and his throat is as closed up as ever.
She"s had him chop more wood than any boy in her memory, aside from Julian, and he doesn"t complain. Last night, Miss Giles dropped her big iron pot, the one she uses for boiling corn, on his foot, purposely, just to get him to cry out loud, but he didn"t do anything more than blink, then turn white with pain.
Early this morning, when the sky was still gray, and the boy was at the kitchen table, adding raisins to the baby"s cereal, Miss Giles went to fill her teakettle, and that was when her heart nearly stopped. She let the water go on running as she looked through the window above the sink.
Behind her, the baby was banging her spoon on the table; the milk Miss Giles had put up for hot chocolate had begun to boil. Out in their cages, the rabbits were growing restless, because over where the willow trees used to stand was a woman looking through the kitchen window; only it wasn"t Miss Giles she was staring at, it was the boy.
It took a few seconds for Miss Giles to understand that this woman was real; as soon as she understood that, she knew this was the boy"s mother. It gave her the chills, it really did, it made her feel that the first baby she ever loved had been given to her yesterday. She turned to see exactly what this woman saw: the boy at the table, sleepily eating his breakfast; and when she looked back out the window, the woman was gone. Miss Giles took the pan of milk off the stove then, and set her teakettle down; as long as she lives she will never figure out why it is that some boys refuse to see that somebody loves them.
And now there he is, out in the tall gra.s.s. To Miss Giles it looks as if he"s studying weeds, but the boy is simply considering his options.
He can"t help but wonder if there"s a man somewhere in town who would like to kill him. He"s sure that the man who watched them run across the parking lot that night got into his car all set to follow them.
He remembers the white moon of the man"s face reflected in a windshield; he may have seen a line of blood on the man"s shirt.
Although he"s not certain about the blood, he gets all shaky just thinking about it. Would he be able to recognize this man in a lineup?
He doesn"t know, but he"s fairly certain that the man would be able to pick him out in a crowd. The boy has no idea of how he could disguise himself; all he can think to do is to take the skull earring out of his earlobe and throw it, as far as he can, till it disappears into the tall gra.s.s.
The baby is wearing a red sundress Miss Giles has kept stored in a dresser drawer. Her hair has been washed and brushed and she"s got on white sandals that Miss Giles found high up on a shelf in the front closet. She keeps one hand on the boy"s ankle while she pulls up blades of gra.s.s and pats them into a pile. The boy is as sure as he can be that her face was hidden that night. She was leaning againsthim, and it was so dark no one could have identified her features. No one could know her mouth was a little crooked when she smiled, or that she had a small scar on one knee, or that when she insisted on holding your hand in hot weather your palm got all sweaty.
The baby can"t know what"s happened to them; all she knows is that they"re in this together. The boy can feel her watching him for a signal: Should they run or stay? Should they eat the cereal they"re offered or spit it out? By now, Laddy Stern has probably got himself a new best friend, since they never meant that much to each other anyway.
He figures that a thousand miles from here on the street where he grew up, the boys have all forgotten his name. He thinks of his mother, and for some reason he"s reminded of a night soon after they moved to Florida when he lay in bed, in despair, wanting desperately to call out for her and not allowing himself to. Now he couldn"t call out if he wanted to. It"s a punishment, that"s what he thinks; he"s said so many awful words that his wicked tongue is paralyzed. He"s actually grateful that the baby can"t really speak; not one horrible word has come out of her mouth. She doesn"t have to wish she could take it all back.
The meanest boy in Verity watches dust, dragonflies, low white clouds above him in the sky.
When the sun is in the center of the sky, he leads n the baby back to the house. She does whatever he wants her to, and because of that he has to do what he"s told. He has to go inside to the kitchen when Miss Giles calls them for lunch, otherwise the baby would never eat her chicken soup with carrots and rice. He has to mind Miss Giles so the baby will, and after lunch he has to lie down on the cot, otherwise the baby would refuse to stay in her crib for her nap.
He stretches out and stares up at the cracks in the ceiling, listening to the mockingbirds that pull at the last remaining roots of the willow trees. In her crib, the baby is falling asleep; she turns on her side and slips her thumb into her mouth and hums to herself the way she always does when she"s tired. There are clean white pillowcases and sheets, washed so many times they"re as soft as snow. The boy can hear Miss Giles"s slippers, and the sound of the old bra.s.s hinges as she opens the bedroom door to check on them. He has never in his life taken a nap, but for some reason he closes his eyes and when he dreams he dreams about the dog who found him, he dreams about another place, far from here, where you don"t have to speak in order to be free.
Walt Hannen is having coffee in the last booth at Chuck and Karl"s diner. The coffee tastes like rocket fuel, but that"s not what"s working on his ulcer. He knows what can happen with these G.o.dd.a.m.ned May cases. There"s a good chance that somebody who happens to up and disappear during the month of May might never be found. It"s the yellow light at dusk and the d.a.m.ned humidity. Before you know it, clues start to evaporate in the palm of your hand.
Someone with experience can tell when these cases are slipping away, and Walt Hannen"s got a feeling it"s happening again. He"s even more certain of it when Julian"s car pulls into the parking lot. The hair on the back of Walt"s neck rises up when Julian comes into the diner.