As usual by this time in the late November afternoon, Holland’s father’s house was almost completely dark. Standing outside in the driveway, she could see the flicker of the television and the one small table lamp lit in the family room. She knew he was probably asleep in his oversized old black-leather bullet chair with the footrest up, a tumbler of Scotch filled with melted ice cubes on the table beside him and the latest copy of Model Trains open on his lap.
Loneliness wore a dress in this house. It was dainty, soft and subtle. It draped its shadow over pictures of her mother and pictures of her mother and father. It was never acknowledged, or if it was, it was always in a vague way. She could see that resistance in her father’s still determined eyes and she could hear his thoughts: Death got the best of me once. It took the love of my life, but it won’t be permitted to gloat. He walled himself in with his fixation on independence. It was a game she played with him, a scenario they followed strictly—as strictly as actors under the control of a tyrannical director.
When she entered the house, or when her father first set eyes on her at the start of a visit, there would always be a short but warm glint of happiness in his eyes. Then he would blink, bring himself to an erect military posture, deepen his voice and methodically reject any offer of assistance. No, he didn’t need her to do any shopping for him. No, he didn’t need her to take him for a haircut or a doctor’s or dentist’s visit. As far as dinner was concerned, he’d cook something for himself later. If she brought something, he would spend the first few minutes complaining and then he would settle down and enjoy it because, ‘You’ve left me no choice.’
As she stood there in the driveway today, she shook her head at the yet-to-be-repaired black shutter on the living room window. It dangled like a bird with a broken wing clinging to a branch. As long as she could remember, she had always ascribed some sort of animal life to different aspects of her home. The wood cladding resembled fish scales. The cracks in the cement sidewalk snaked through it, and it snaked through the small front lawn. The windows in the dormers turned the dormers into owls in the moonlight. When she put her hand on the walls inside, she imagined the beating of a heart, the pulsating movement of blood through its pipes and wires.
Do you really ever grow out of childhood fantasies or do they just lie dormant waiting to be resurrected as nightmares? she wondered.
Holland shook her head and smiled. There was her father’s automobile, outside the garage because the garage was filled with his model trains—three engines and dozens of cars—all able to travel on different tracks through a model city with people and animals and trucks. It was a whole make-believe world, perhaps his true escape. It had always been, she thought. Maybe that was why neither she nor her brother ever dared touch it without him and never really thought of it as a toy.
Holland’s father’s house wasn’t exactly an eyesore, but the dull gray clapboard two-story eclectic Queen Anne was as stubborn a remnant of the twentieth century as was the man who resided in it. All of the other houses on this Bethesda, Maryland street were modern structures or homes recently remodeled with the most up-to-date roofing, siding, windows and doors, created from synthetic materials that were guaranteed to last a hundred years without any maintenance. There wasn’t very much variety in color. Most were a metallic rust, with some a dark-grained pecan shade. The newer homes were one-story high with a second-story below. In fact, on this particular street, there were now no other two-story houses but her father’s. Richard Byron told his daughter his neighbors lived like rodents. The human race was going underground and he would have no part of it.
It was truly as if her dad were conducting a private war against all forms of technological progress. He still watered his small lawn with a hose and refused to install the rainmaker sprinkler systems that were tuned into the soil and were turned on and off according to the dryness and dampness meters. These days it was a real curiosity for people to see him out there watering his grass, bushes and flowers. Cars slowed and people stood on the sidewalks and watched as if they were watching a circus performer. He knew it, but it only encouraged him even more to hold on to his ways and beliefs. He was always a little impish.
Holland’s dad had retired ten years ago from an active homicide detective position. He had served as a military policeman and had then become a Washington, DC city police detective. Occasionally, he was called upon to consult or offer advice. Because he was bored immediately after retirement, he hired himself out as a private detective for a few years, but what he called ‘the pursuit of human frailties’ depressed him. Too many wives were spying on husbands and vice versa. Some employers wanted him to spy on their employees and a few attorneys hired him to locate the assets of people they were suing for their clients.
‘I’m not retired; I’m in retreat,’ he would tell Holland.
In his prime, however, Richard Byron had been an outstanding homicide detective. He had what his superiors called the hound’s instinct for tracking through clues. In his entire career, only two of his cases went longer than a year, but the end result was he solved them and he did it well enough to give the prosecutors what they needed to get convictions.
Holland had always been in awe of him. The respect she saw lavished on him by his superiors and partners instilled in her an interest in pursuing a career in law enforcement, contrary to her mother’s hopes for her. One of the things her father had passed on to her was his intolerance of evil. It wasn’t just a God vs. the devil thing. Evil that went unpunished was simply unbearable. It threw off the delicate balance and it could go on and on, making subtle changes to avoid detection. He compared himself to a doctor curing a disease, cutting out a cancer. He had little patience for anything that stood in his way and a number of times had been reprimanded for skipping mandatory procedural steps.
‘I’m not a wild card. I’m no Dirty Harry, but I like to fight it out on an even playing field and sometimes you have to bend rules to get there,’ he would say.
Holland had inherited the same intolerance for bureaucracy, often justified in the name of due process. Naturally, he was very proud of her and never evinced any surprise at her chosen vocation. It was as though he knew it was in the blood or something.
Apparently, it wasn’t for her younger brother Roy, who had become a pharmacist after serving a stretch in the Navy. He bore more resemblance to their mother and liked his quiet, mild, simple nine-to-five world, with his weekends of golf or boating. He was married with two small children: a boy Evan, four, and a girl, Renee, two. They lived in Raleigh, North Carolina, where his wife Terri’s family lived.
Their mother had found it incongruous that her daughter had put off marriage and a family and her son had not. This lack of understanding between them had been a source of some pain for Holland. Rather than argue or struggle with that, they had accepted each other the same way two antagonists might agree in the end that there was no way to get along. All they could do was compromise and ignore each other as best they could.
It had been a constant sore point between them, a chasm Holland couldn’t cross.
‘Roy should have been the one to go into law enforcement, not you,’ her mother had told her a hundred times, if she had told her once.
‘It’s not solely a man’s world anymore, Ma,’ she had replied. Not that she had to say that. Her mother had been an executive for a department store chain, responsible for more than a thousand employees. She had begun as a clothing buyer and had moved quickly up the corporate ladder. With both their parents very occupied in their careers, Holland and Roy grew up with a streak of independence that she now believed gave her the strength to do battle with every obstacle that came her way, especially in the bureau. She had never been one to run or whine to superiors. You suffered and you bore it and you improved or you made sure you wouldn’t be that vulnerable again.
With her head down, she walked slowly to the front door of her father’s house, inserted her key in the lock, and entered. As soon as she did, she flicked on the entryway light and brightened the narrow hallway. Thrown over the hard oak balustrade was her father’s brown leather jacket. She remembered how her mother had hated that.
‘Why don’t you just hang it up? Why do you have to throw it off as soon as you enter and treat this balustrade as if it were nothing more than a clothes hanger?’
Her father would grunt a promise to stop doing it, a promise he would never keep. Holland stood there smiling, remember the dialogue, her mother’s face full of frustration and then the way she shook her head and lifted her arms to ask, ‘What can I do?’
‘I don’t know, Mommy,’ she whispered and then took the jacket and hung it on the hooks that were in the entryway. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Dad?’ she called. Sometimes he heard her enter and came to the family room doorway.
She walked down the hallway and stopped to look in at him. He was just as she had expected, his head tilted to one side, his mouth slightly open as he breathed with a regularity that at least comforted and assured her he was fine. He was still a strong man. There was a lot of time left in that 6 feet 1 inch stout frame, ballooning belly or not. She stood there a moment, debating as to whether she should wake him or just go prepare some dinner.
She opted for the kitchen.
Ten minutes later, after she had begun to broil some chops he had remembered to defrost and started on some green beans and a couple of baked potatoes, she heard him approach the kitchen doorway, pause and peer in as if he half-expected it to be fifteen years ago and Darlene Byron had not yet succumbed to an unexpected brain embolism. His eyes started to widen and then stopped.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ he asked sharply, partly because he was disappointed his fantasy wasn’t true, Holland thought.
‘I’m hungry and I can’t wait for you to get around to doing anything,’ she replied and kept working.
‘What time is it?’
‘In the east where I am it’s half past six.’
‘Very funny,’ he said and walked in. ‘Don’t overcook them,’ he ordered, nodding at the chops.
She raised her eyebrows. ‘Like you don’t?’
‘You don’t have to make every mistake I make.’
They stared at each other like two gunslingers for a moment, and then she laughed and he sat at the kitchen table.
‘I don’t know where the time goes anymore,’ he said.
‘Down a clock hole, you used to tell me and Roy.’
‘Um,’ he grunted. ‘So, what’s up? You don’t come here and start to make dinner on me unless you’re on your way somewhere and won’t be around for a while.’
‘Why ask if you know the answer?’ she countered.
‘Anyone ever tell you you were a smart ass?’
She paused, pretended to consider and then shook her head. ‘Nope. You’re the first, Dad.’
He laughed and watched her work as if she were doing something really special with the food.
‘I was going to bring my new partner here, but he doesn’t eat,’ she muttered. ‘He just has to be oiled and greased periodically.’
‘A new partner? What’s he, older or younger?’
‘I’d say older.’
‘You don’t know?’
‘Just know his name. Come to think of it, I don’t know if it’s a joke or a real name.’
‘What is it?’
‘Wyatt. Wyatt Ert,’ she said. ‘Sounds like Wyatt Earp.’
‘Ert?’ He thought a moment. ‘ERT. That’s an abbreviation for Emergency Response Team.’
‘Huh? I don’t remember that.’
‘The ERT is the paramilitary arm of the RCMP, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.’
She stared at him. ‘I don’t think he’s Canadian.’
Her father shrugged. ‘I had a case that involved an ERT that had gone over the top. Paramilitary are civilians trained and organized in a military fashion.’
‘I know.’
He had told her the story at least three or four times, but that wasn’t going to stop him now. She smiled to herself and listened.
‘In this case, my perp was part of a commando unit who took himself too seriously. Tracked someone and killed him in DC. As it turned out, he killed the wrong guy. It was almost an incident between us and the Canadian authorities.’
She shook her head.
‘I doubt it has anything to do with him. I’m certain it’s just a coincidence. He’s not paramilitary.’
‘Don’t be so sure. The only things I’m certain of are…’
‘Death and taxes. I know, I know.’
‘Where are you and Mr Ert going, Miss Smarty Pants?’ he asked.
‘Los Angeles. We’re investigating a missing person.’
‘Who’s missing?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know who’s missing?’
‘Not exactly, no,’ she said. ‘Furthermore, we don’t know if he’s really missing.’
‘You’re not making any sense.’
She nodded. ‘No, I’m not.’
‘Well what’s this possibly missing person do? What gives anyone the suspicion he might be missing and why is it a problem for the FBI?’
‘Can’t tell you any more than that,’ she said. ‘If I did, I’d have to shoot you immediately.’
‘You’re going off with Wyatt Ert to investigate the disappearance of someone you know nothing about and who might not be missing after all?’
‘That’s it.’
‘Glad I was born when I was,’ he said, rose, rubbed his cheeks and started out. ‘I’ve got to shave. If I’m having dinner with a lunatic, I want to be clean and neat.’
She looked after him and laughed. Then she turned to be sure she didn’t overcook the chops.