DAVE WAS WALKING Michael back from school when they turned the corner and saw Sean Devine and another guy leaning against the trunk of a black sedan parked in front of the Boyles’ place. The black sedan had state government plates and enough antennae attached to the trunk to shoot transmissions to Venus, and Dave could tell just by looking at Sean’s companion from fifteen yards away that, like Sean, the guy was a cop. He had that cop tilt to his chin, jutting up and out a bit, and a cop’s way of leaning back on his heels and yet seeming set to lunge forward. And if that didn’t give it away, the jarhead haircut on a guy in his mid-forties coupled with gold-rimmed aviator shades was definitely a tip-off.
Dave’s hand tightened around Michael’s, and his chest felt as if someone had dunked a knife in ice water and then placed the flat of the blade against his lungs. He almost stopped, his feet trying to plant themselves to the sidewalk, but something pushed him forward, and he hoped he looked normal, fluid. Sean’s head swiveled in his direction, the eyes blithe and empty at first, then narrowing in recognition as they met Dave’s.
Both men smiled at the same time, Dave giving it the full wattage and Sean’s pretty wide, too, Dave surprised to see what might have been actual pleasure in Sean’s face.
“Dave Boyle,” Sean said, coming off the car with his hand extended, “what’s it been?”
Dave shook the hand and got another small jolt of surprise when Sean clapped him on the shoulder.
“That time up the Tap,” Dave said. “What, six years ago?”
“Yeah. About that. You’re looking good, man.”
“How you been, Sean?” And Dave could feel a warmth spread through him that his brain said he should run from.
But why? There were so few of them left from the old days anymore. And it wasn’t just the old clichés—jail, drugs, or police forces—that had claimed them. The suburbs had taken just as many. Other states, too, the lure of fitting in with everyone else, becoming one big country of golf players and mall walkers and small-business owners with blond wives and big-screen TVs.
No, there weren’t many of them left, and Dave felt a stirring of pride and happiness and odd sorrow as he gripped Sean’s hand and remembered that day on the subway platform when Jimmy had jumped down on the tracks and Saturdays, in general, had felt like Anything Is Possible Days.
“I been good,” Sean said, and it sounded like he meant it, though Dave could see something small crack in his smile. “And who’s this?”
Sean bent down by Michael.
“This is my son,” Dave said. “Michael.”
“Hey, Michael. Pleased to meet you.”
“Hi.”
“I’m Sean, an old, old buddy of your dad.”
Dave watched Sean’s voice light something in Michael. Sean definitely had some kind of voice, like the guy who did the voice-overs for all the movie coming attractions, and Michael brightened at the sound of it, seeing a legend, perhaps, of his father and this tall, confident stranger as kids who’d played in these same streets and dreamed similar dreams to Michael’s and those of his friends.
“Nice to meet you,” Michael said.
“Pleasure, Michael.” Sean shook Michael’s hand and then rose up to face Dave. “Good-looking boy, Dave. How’s Celeste?”
“Great, great.” Dave tried to recall the name of the woman Sean had married and could remember only that he’d met her in college. Laura? Erin?
“Tell her I said hi, will you?”
“Sure. You still with the Staties?” Dave squinted as the sun broke from behind a cloud and bounced hard off the shiny black trunk of the government sedan.
“Yeah,” Sean said. “Actually, this here is Sergeant Powers, Dave. My boss. State Police Homicide.”
Dave shook Sergeant Powers’s hand, that word hanging between them. Homicide.
“How you doing?”
“Good, Mr. Boyle. Yourself?”
“Okay.”
“Dave,” Sean said, “you got a minute, we’d love to ask you a couple quick questions.”
“Uh, sure. What’s up?”
“We maybe go inside, Mr. Boyle?” Sergeant Powers tilted his head in the direction of Dave’s front door.
“Yeah, sure.” Dave took Michael’s hand again. “Follow me, guys.”
Heading up the stairs past McAllister’s place, Sean said, “I hear rents are rising even here.”
“Even here,” Dave said. “Trying to turn us into the Point, an antique shop on every fifth corner.”
“The Point, yeah,” Sean said with a dry chuckle. “’Member my father’s house? Cut it into condos.”
“No shit?” Dave said. “That was a beautiful house.”
“’Course he sold it before the market got hot.”
“And now it’s condos?” Dave said, his voice loud in the narrow stairwell. He shook his head. “The yuppies who bought it probably get per unit what your old man sold the whole place for.”
“’Bout the size of it,” Sean said. “What’re you gonna do, right?”
“I dunno, man, but I almost think there’s gotta be a way to stop them. Send them back to wherever they grow them and their goddamn cell phones. Friend of mine said the other day, Sean? He said, ‘What this neighborhood needs is a good fucking crime wave.’” Dave laughed. “I mean, that’d send property values back to where they belong. Rents, too. Right?”
Sergeant Powers said, “Girls keep getting murdered in Pen Park, Mr. Boyle, you might get your wish.”
“Oh, it’s not my wish or nothing,” Dave said.
Sergeant Powers said, “Sure.”
“You said the f-word, Dad,” Michael said.
“Sorry, Mike. Won’t happen again.” He winked over his shoulder at Sean as they opened the door to the apartment.
“Your wife home, Mr. Boyle?” Sergeant Powers said as they entered.
“Huh? No. No, she’s not. Hey, Mike, you go do your homework now. Okay? We gotta get over to Uncle Jimmy and Aunt Annabeth’s soon.”
“Come on. I—”
“Mike,” Dave said, and looked down at his son. “Just go upstairs. Me and the guys gotta talk.”
Michael got that look of abandonment little kids got when they were brushed off from adult conversations, and he walked toward the stairs, his shoulders drooping and his feet dragging like he had blocks of ice tied to his ankles. He sighed his mother’s sigh and then began to climb the stairs.
“Must be universal,” Sergeant Powers said as he took a seat on the living room couch.
“What’s that?”
“That shoulder thing he’s doing. My kid used to do the same thing at his age when we’d send him up to bed.”
Dave said, “Yeah?” and sat in the love seat on the other side of the coffee table.
For a minute or so, Dave looked at Sean and Sergeant Powers, and Sean and Sergeant Powers looked back, everyone’s eyebrows raised and expectant.
“You heard about Katie Marcus,” Sean said.
“’Course,” Dave said. “I was up the house this morning. Celeste is still there. I mean, Jesus Christ, Sean, you know? It’s a fucking crime.”
“You got that right,” Sergeant Powers said.
“You get the guy?” Dave said. He rubbed his swollen right fist with his left palm, then noticed what he was doing. He leaned back and slid both hands in his pockets, trying to seem relaxed.
“We’re working on it. Believe that, Mr. Boyle.”
“How’s Jimmy holding up?” Sean asked.
“Hard to tell.” Dave looked at Sean, happy to tear his eyes away from Sergeant Powers, something in the man’s face he didn’t like, the way the guy peered at you like he could see your lies, every one of them as far back as the first one you ever told in your goddamned life.
“You know how Jimmy is,” Dave said.
“Not really. Not anymore.”
“Well, he still keeps it all in,” Dave said. “No way to tell what’s really going on up in that head of his.”
Sean nodded. “The reason we came by, Dave…”
“I saw her,” Dave said. “I don’t know if you knew that.”
He looked at Sean and Sean opened his hands, waiting.
“That night,” Dave went on, “I guess it was the night she died, I saw her at McGills.”
Sean and the cop exchanged glances, and then Sean leaned forward, fixed Dave in a friendly gaze. “Well, yeah, Dave, that’s actually what brought us here. Your name showed up on a list of people were in McGills that night to the best of the bartender’s recollection. We hear Katie put on quite a show.”
Dave nodded. “She and a friend did some dancing on the bar.”
The cop said, “They were pretty drunk, huh?”
“Yeah, but…”
“But what?”
“But it was a harmless kinda drunk. They were dancing, but they weren’t stripping or nothing. They were just, I dunno, nineteen. You know?”
“Nineteen and getting served in a bar means the bar loses its liquor license for a while,” Sergeant Powers said.
“You didn’t?”
“What’s that?”
“You never drank underage in a bar?”
Sergeant Powers smiled, and the smile got into Dave’s skull the same way the man’s eyes did, as if every inch of the guy was peeping.
“What time would you say you left McGills, Mr. Boyle?”
Dave shrugged. “Maybe one or so?”
Sergeant Powers wrote that down in a notebook perched atop his knee.
Dave looked at Sean.
Sean said, “Just crossing out t’s and dotting our i’s, Dave. You were hanging with Stanley Kemp, right? Stanley the Giant?”
“Yeah.”
“How’s he doing, by the way? Heard his kid caught some kind of cancer.”
“Leukemia,” Dave said. “Couple years back. He died. Four years old.”
“Man,” Sean said, “that just sucks. Shit. You never know. It’s like one minute you’re cruising on all cylinders, the next, you turn a corner, catch some weird disease in the chest, die five months later. This world, man.”
“This world,” Dave agreed. “Stan’s all right, though, considering. Got a good job with Edison. Still shoots hoop in the Park League every Tuesday and Thursday night.”
“Still a terror under the boards?” Sean chuckled.
Dave chuckled, too. “He do use those elbows of his.”
“What time would you say the girls left the bar?” Sean said, his chuckle still trailing away.
“I dunno,” Dave said. “The Sox game was winding down.”
What was up with the way Sean slid that question in? He could have just asked it up front, but he’d tried to lull Dave with talk of Stanley the Giant. Hadn’t he? Or maybe he’d just asked the question as it had occurred to him. Dave couldn’t be certain either way. Was Dave a suspect? Was he actually a suspect in Katie’s death?
“And that was a late game,” Sean was saying. “In California.”
“Huh? Ten-thirty-five, yeah. So, I’d say the girls left maybe fifteen minutes before I did.”
“So we’ll say twelve-forty-five,” the other cop said.
“Sounds about right.”
“Any idea where the girls went?”
Dave shook his head. “Last I saw of them.”
“Yeah?” Sergeant Powers’s pen hovered over the pad on his knee.
Dave nodded. “Yeah.”
Sergeant Powers scribbled in his pad, the pen scratching against the paper like a small claw.
“Dave, you remember a guy throwing his keys at another guy?”
“What?”
“A guy,” Sean said, flipping through his own notebook, “name of, uh, Joe Crosby. His friends tried to take his car keys. He threw them at one of them. You know, all pissed off. You there for that?”
“No. Why?”
“Sounded like a funny story,” Sean said. “Guy’s trying not to give up his keys, he throws ’em anyway. Drunk’s logic, right?”
“I guess.”
“You didn’t notice anything unusual that night?”
“How you mean?”
“Say someone in the bar maybe wasn’t watching the girls in a real friendly manner? You’ve seen those guys—the ones look at young women with a kind of black hate, still pissed off they sat home the night of the prom and here it is fifteen years later and their lives still suck? Look at women like it’s all their fault. You know those guys?”
“Met a few, sure.”
“Any of those guys in the bar that night?”
“Not that I saw. I mean, I was watching the game mostly. I didn’t even notice the girls, Sean, until they jumped up on the bar.”
Sean nodded.
“Good game,” Sergeant Powers said.
“Well,” Dave said, “you had Pedro up there. Could have been a no-hitter, it wasn’t for that bloop in the eighth.”
“Got that right. Man earns his pay, don’t he?”
“Best there is in the game today.”
Sergeant Powers turned to Sean and they both stood at the same time.
“That’s it?” Dave said.
“Yes, Mr. Boyle.” He shook Dave’s hand. “We appreciate your help, sir.”
“No problem. Happy to.”
“Oh, shit,” Sergeant Powers said. “I forgot to ask: Where’d you go after you left McGills, sir?”
The word popped out of Dave’s mouth before he could stop it: “Here.”
“Home?”
“Yup.” Dave kept his gaze steady, his voice firm.
Sergeant Powers flipped open his pad again. “Home by one-fifteen.” He looked up at Dave as he wrote. “Sound right?”
“Roughly, sure.”
“Okay then, Mr. Boyle. Thanks again.”
Sergeant Powers made his way down the stairs, but Sean stopped at the door. “It was real good seeing you, Dave.”
“You too,” Dave said, trying to remember what it was he hadn’t liked about Sean when they were kids. The answer wouldn’t come, though.
“We should grab a beer sometime,” Sean said. “Soon.”
“I’d like that.”
“Okay then. You take care, Dave.”
They shook hands and Dave tried not to wince at the pressure on his swollen hand.
“You, too, Sean.”
Sean walked down the stairs as Dave stood at the top on the landing. Sean waved once over his shoulder, and Dave waved back even though he knew Sean couldn’t see it.
HE DECIDED to have a beer in the kitchen before heading back to Jimmy and Annabeth’s. He hoped Michael wouldn’t come running back down now that he’d heard Sean and the other cop leave, because Dave needed a few minutes’ peace, a little time to get his head right. He wasn’t entirely sure what had just transpired in the living room. Sean and the other cop had been asking him questions as if he were a witness or a suspect, and the lack of a firm tone to their questioning had left Dave uncertain as to the real reason they’d dropped by. And this uncertainty had left him with a bona fide motherfucker of a headache. Whenever Dave was unsure of a situation, whenever the ground seemed to be shifting and slick beneath his feet, his brain tended to split into two halves, as if cleaved by a carving knife. This gave him a headache and occasionally something worse.
Because sometimes Dave was not Dave. He was the Boy. The Boy Who’d Escaped from Wolves. But not merely that. The Boy Who’d Escaped from Wolves and Grown Up. And that was a very different creature than simply Dave Boyle.
The Boy Who’d Escaped from Wolves and Grown Up was an animal of the dusk that moved through wooded landscapes, silent and invisible. It lived in a world that others never saw, never faced, never knew or wanted to know existed—a world that ran like a dark current beside our own, a world of crickets and fireflies, unseen except as a microsecond’s flare in the corner of your eye, already vanished by the time your head turned toward it.
This is the world Dave lived in a lot of the time. Not as Dave, but as the Boy. And the Boy had not grown up well. He’d gotten angrier, more paranoid, capable of things that the real Dave could never so much as imagine. Usually the Boy lived only in Dave’s dream world, feral and darting past stands of thick trees, giving up glimpses of himself only in flashes. And as long as he stayed in the forest of Dave’s dreams, he was harmless.
Since childhood, though, Dave had suffered bouts of insomnia. They could slip up on him after months and months of restful sleep, and suddenly he’d be back in that agitated, jangling world of the constantly waking and the never quite asleep. A few days of this, and Dave would begin to see things out of the corner of his eye—mice mostly, zipping along floorboards and across desks, sometimes black flies darting around corners and into other rooms. The air in front of his face would pop unexpectedly with minute balls of heat lightning. People would turn rubbery. And the Boy would lift his leg over the threshold of the dream forest and into the waking world. Usually, Dave could control him, but sometimes the Boy scared him. The Boy yelled in his ears. The Boy had a way of laughing at inappropriate times. The Boy threatened to leer up through the mask that normally covered Dave’s face and show himself to the people on the other side.
Dave hadn’t slept much in three days. He’d been lying awake every night watching his wife sleep, the Boy dancing through the sponge of his brain tissue, bolts of lightning popping in the air before his eyes.
“I just need to get my head right,” he whispered, and took a sip of beer. I just need to get my head right and everything will turn out fine, he told himself as he heard Michael descend the stairs. I just need to hold it together long enough for everything to slow down and then I’ll catch a nice long sleep and the Boy will go back to his forest, people will stop looking rubbery, the mice will go back in their holes, and the black flies will follow them.
WHEN DAVE got back to Jimmy and Annabeth’s house with Michael, it was past four. The house had thinned out and there was a sense of things gone stale—the half trays of doughnuts and cakes, the air in the living room where people had been smoking all day, Katie’s death. During the morning and early afternoon there’d been a quiet and communal air of both grief and love, but by the time Dave got back, it had turned into something colder, a kind of withdrawal maybe, the blood beginning to chafe with the restless scrape of chairs and the subdued good-byes called out from the hallway.
According to Celeste, Jimmy had spent most of the late afternoon on the back porch. He’d come into the house a few times to check on Annabeth and accept a few more condolences on their loss, but then he’d worked his way out to the back porch again, sat there under the clothes that hung from the line and had long since dried and stiffened. Dave asked Annabeth if he could do anything, get her anything, but she shook her head halfway through his offer, and Dave knew it had been silly to ask. If Annabeth had truly needed something, there were at least ten people, maybe fifteen, she’d turn to before Dave, and he tried to remind himself why he was here and not get irked by this. In general, Dave had found, he was not the kind of person people turned to when they were in need. It was as if he weren’t even on this planet sometimes, and he knew, with a deep and resigned regret, that he’d be the kind of guy who would float through the rest of his life as someone who was rarely relied upon.
He took a sense of that ghostliness out onto the porch with him. He approached Jimmy from behind as Jimmy sat under the flapping clothes in an old beach chair, his head cocked slightly as he heard Dave approach.
“I bothering you, Jim?”
“Dave.” Jimmy smiled as Dave came around the chair. “No, no, man. Have a seat.”
Dave sat on a plastic milk crate in front of Jimmy. He could hear the apartment behind Jimmy as a hum of barely audible voices and clinking flatware, the hiss of life.
“I haven’t had a chance to talk to you all day,” Jimmy said. “How you doing?”
“How you doing?” Dave said. “Shit.”
Jimmy stretched his arms above his head and yawned. “You know people keep asking me that? I guess it’s to be expected.” He lowered his hands and shrugged. “It seems to shift, hour to hour. Right now? I’m doing okay. Could change, though. Probably will.” He shrugged again and looked at Dave. “What happened to your hand?”
Dave looked at it. He’d had all day to come up with an explanation, he’d just kept forgetting to. “This? I was helping a buddy move a couch into his place, slammed it against the doorjamb squeezing the couch up a staircase.”
Jimmy tilted his head and looked at the knuckles, the bruised flesh between the fingers. “Uh, okay.”
Dave could tell he wasn’t sold, and he decided he’d need to come up with a better lie for the next person who asked.
“One of those stupid things,” Dave said. “The ways you can manage to hurt yourself, right?”
Jimmy was looking into his face now, the hand forgotten, and Jimmy’s features softening. He said, “It’s good to see you, man.”
Dave almost said, Really?
In the twenty-five years he’d known Jimmy, Dave could never remember a time he’d felt Jimmy was happy to see him. Sometimes, he’d felt Jimmy didn’t mind seeing him, but that wasn’t the same thing. Even after they’d rotated back into each other’s lives when they’d married women who were first cousins, Jimmy had never once given an indication he could remember when he and Dave had been anything but the most casual of acquaintances. After a while, Dave had begun to accept Jimmy’s version of their relationship as fact.
They had never been friends. They had never played stickball and kick-the-can and 76 on Rester Street. They had never spent a year of Saturdays hanging with Sean Devine, playing war in the gravel pits off Harvest, jumping roof to roof from the industrial garages near Pope Park, watching Jaws together at the Charles, huddled down in their seats and screaming. They had never practiced skids on their bikes together or argued over who would be Starsky, who would be Hutch, and who would get stuck being Kolchak from The Night Stalker. They had never cracked up their sleds during the same kamikaze run down Somerset Hill in the first days after the ’75 blizzard. That car had never driven up Gannon Street, smelling of apples.
Yet here was Jimmy Marcus, the day after his daughter was found dead, saying it was good to see you, Dave, and Dave—as he had two hours before with Sean—could feel that it was.
“Good to see you, too, Jim.”
“How are our girls holding up?” Jimmy said, and the playful smile almost reached his eyes.
“They’re okay, I guess. Where are Nadine and Sara?”
“With Theo. Hey, man, thank Celeste for me, would you? She’s been a godsend today.”
“Jimmy, you don’t have to thank anyone, man. Whatever we can do, me and Celeste are happy to.”
“I know that.” Jimmy reached across and squeezed Dave’s forearm. “Thank you.”
At that moment, Dave would have lifted a house for Jimmy, held it up to his chest until Jimmy told him where to put it down.
And he almost forgot why he’d come out here on the porch in the first place: He needed to tell Jimmy he’d seen Katie on Saturday night at McGills. He needed to get that information out or else he’d keep putting it off and by the time he finally did say something, Jimmy would wonder why he hadn’t told him sooner. He needed to speak before Jimmy heard about it from someone else.
“Know who I saw today?”
“Who?” Jimmy said.
“Sean Devine,” Dave said. “Member him?”
“Sure,” Jimmy said. “I still got his glove.”
“What?”
Jimmy waved it off with a shake of his hand. “He’s a cop now. He’s actually investigating Katie’s…Well, he’s working the case, I guess they call it.”
“Yeah,” Dave said. “He dropped by my place.”
“He did?” Jimmy said. “Huh. What was he doing at your place, Dave?”
Dave tried to make it sound offhand, casual. “I was in McGills Saturday night. Katie was there. I showed up on a list of people who were in the place.”
“Katie was there,” Jimmy said, his eyes staring off the porch and growing small. “You saw Katie Saturday night, Dave? My Katie?”
“I mean, yeah, Jim, I was in the place and so was she. And then she left with her two friends and—”
“Diane and Eve?”
“Yeah, those girls she was always hanging with. They left and that was it.”
“That was it,” Jimmy said, staring far away.
“Well, I mean, as far as I saw of her. But, you know, I was on a list.”
“You were on a list, right.” Jimmy smiled, but not at Dave, at something he must have seen in that far-off gaze of his. “You talk to her at all that night?”
“Katie? No, Jim. I was watching the game with Stanley the Giant. I just nodded hello, you know. Next time I looked up, she was gone.”
Jimmy sat silently for a bit, sucking up air through his nostrils and nodding to himself a few times. Eventually, he looked at Dave and smiled a broken smile.
“It’s nice.”
“What?” Dave said.
“Sitting out here. Just sitting. It’s nice.”
“Yeah?”
“Just to sit and look out at the neighborhood,” Jimmy said. “You’re on the go your whole life with work and kids and, shit, except when you’re sleeping, you hardly have any time to slow down. Today, right? An out-of-the-ordinary day if ever there was one, but still I have to deal with details. I gotta call Pete and Sal and make sure they cover the store. I gotta make sure the girls are clean and dressed when they wake up. I gotta watch out for my wife, see she’s holding up, you know?” He gave Dave a loopy smile and leaned forward, rocking a bit, his hands clenched into one big fist. “I gotta shake hands and accept condolences and find room in the fridge for all the food and beer and put up with my father-in-law, and then I got to call the medical examiner’s office, find out when they’ll be releasing my child’s body because I need to make arrangements with Reed’s Funeral Home and Father Vera at Saint Cecilia’s, find a caterer for the wake and a hall for after the funeral and—”
“Jimmy,” Dave said, “we can do some of that.”
But Jimmy just kept going like Dave wasn’t there.
“—I can’t screw any of this up, can’t screw up one fucking detail, or she dies all over again and all anyone remembers of her life ten years from now is that her funeral was fucked up, and I can’t let that be what people remember—you know?—because Katie, man, one thing you could say about her since the time she was, like, six is that the girl was neat, she took care of her clothes, and so it’s okay, it’s almost nice, right, to come out here and just sit, just sit and look at the neighborhood and try and think of something about Katie that’ll make me cry, because, Dave, I swear, it’s starting to piss me off I haven’t cried yet for her, my own daughter, and I can’t fucking cry.”
“Jim.”
“Yeah?”
“You’re crying now.”
“No shit?”
“Feel your face, man.”
Jimmy reached up and touched the tears on his cheekbones. He took his hand away and looked at the wet fingers for a bit.
“Damn,” he said.
“You want me to leave you alone?”
“No, Dave. No. Sit here for a bit if that’s cool.”
“That’s cool, Jim. That’s cool.”