When Randy entered the family room that same afternoon, he found his daughter, Katie, sitting on the floor with a bunch of his old phonograph records spread out in front of her. A Bob Dylan song played softly from the stereo—“My Back Pages,” one of his favorites.
“What’s up, honey?” he asked, a soft smile playing on his face as he sat down on the edge of the couch. “This music is prehistoric. Not exactly your style.”
Katie’s attention was focused on the back of a Procol Harum album. “Just looking around,” she said, with an indifferent shrug.
“You like Dylan?”
“Not really.”
Randy had been anxiously waiting all day for Larry to get back with Melanie Gunderson’s file. Del had phoned at least four times, but there was nothing either of them could do. Randy envisioned Larry stopping at a bar to hoist a few and losing track of time. Larry was a talker. An extrovert. Get him started and he could go on for hours. On the other hand, Randy could come up with dozens of other scenarios for what had happened, each worse than the one before it. Sure, Larry could be a flake, but it wasn’t like him to just forget about Randy and Del, not when the stakes were this high.
“Something wrong?” asked Katie, her blue eyes fixed on her father.
“No, honey. Just wondering where Larry is.”
“You know, Dad, I don’t know why he’s even your friend. He smells. He’s a mooch. He tries to help around the house, but he always ends up making an even bigger mess. He’s like . . . this weird person who appears every few years, drinks your booze, makes you stay up late laughing at his raunchy jokes, and then disappears. And you . . . you get all goofy around him, like he’s some kind of guru, when anybody with a brain can see he’s, like, this total loser.”
She seemed angry. “He do something to upset you?”
She chewed on her lower lip, set the Procol Harum album down and picked up a Grateful Dead. “I don’t get you at all, Dad. You fall all over yourself to be nice to that man. Why can’t you be nice like that to Mom? It’s like you care more about Del and him than you do about Mom and me.”
“Never,” said Randy, the word catching in his throat. “That’s not true.”
“Feels that way to me.”
“Honey, I love you and your mother more than anything.”
“Then why’d you split up with her?”
“It’s . . . complicated. You’re so young.”
“Oh, right. The kid wouldn’t understand.”
“I see the way things are. You don’t talk to us. You’re always down in the dumps. You’re too busy with your holy righteous work to make time for anything else.”
“God, Katie—” It felt like she was flaying him alive.
“But you get all zippy when Larry arrives. You spend hours talking to him. So . . . I decided maybe it has something to do with Vietnam. You three guys were buddies, right. But so freakin’ what. Isn’t family more important than friends?”
“Yes. Absolutely.”
“Did they torture you over there? Is that why you’re so screwed up?”
“No, honey, please.” He felt a trapdoor open in his stomach. “You never talk about that time in your life. Why? Was it so terrible? Mom told me once that when you got home, the first thing you did was invite Del and Larry to come visit you. If war was so awful, didn’t they remind you of all you went through? I mean, I’d think you’d want to get as far away from them as possible.”
“It didn’t work like that,” he whispered. “Not for me.”
“Then tell me something that will make me understand.”
Randy got up and turned off the music. When he sat back down, he found that he was having a hard time looking at her. In a flash, it came to him. He was afraid of her, of her judgment. He felt suddenly old—an old man sensing how impossible it was to reduce the truth of his life to something simple enough to satisfy a child.
“How do I explain war to you, honey, when I can’t even explain it to myself?”
“Don’t talk down to me, Dad. I’m not as young and brainless as you think I am. I’m sixteen.” Her eyes were fierce.
Randy desperately wanted to get up and go do something else, make an excuse that he had work to do and they’d talk about it later, but they both knew that wouldn’t cut it. Not this time. “It wasn’t just the war, Katie, but what came after. It was like . . . you know that saying I hear people use every now and then. About getting their ‘groove on,’ or getting their ‘groove back.’ It was like we were in our own kind of groove over there—a mortal groove. Death—the possibility of dying or killing—was our reality. I don’t know if you can truly understand what that feels like.”
“I’m not a baby.” She seemed so indignant.
“One instant you could be walking next to a guy, a friend, talking casually about nothing in particular, actually being kind of bored, and the next second you’d still be walking along but what was left of your buddy was hanging from a tree. After a while, I got used to living that way. We all did. The flies and the heat, the horror and the stink, it became our norm. And this is the tricky part, honey. When we came home, we were still in that groove. It wasn’t like we could turn a switch and go back to our old way of living. We’d seen things no human being should ever have to see. Our reactions—our instincts—had been honed to keep us alive, but they didn’t work for us back here. They were so incredibly wrong. We tried to slip back into our old selves, but some part of our brains was still stuck back there.”
“But . . . like . . . how did that work?”
She really seemed to want to know, and that presented Randy with a problem. He felt obliged to give her a piece of the truth without getting himself in too deep.
“Well, for example. When I got home, your grandmother sent me to buy some groceries. I remember being in the store with all these other people who seemed so intent on what cereal they were going to buy. What brand of milk. I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs that men were fighting and dying a world away. How could they even care about cereal brands. It was insane.”
Randy watched his daughter go through a silent reassessment. “That makes sense.”
“I was so angry all the time. People were living their normal lives and it just made me furious.”
“Mavbe it still does.”
Randy lowered his head. “Yeah, maybe you’re right.”
“What else?”
She had no idea how hard this was for him. “Well, when Larry and Delavon came to Waldo to visit me, my mother told us to sleep in the basement. You remember the house, right? It was small, only two bedrooms. I’d always bunked with Ethan, but it didn’t seem fair for us to take over his room. The first night we were all there, Larry kept getting up. He was driving Del and me crazy. The next night, after dinner, we found him out back. He was digging himself a foxhole. He’d set up a perimeter, like we’d been taught to do. He had a bunch of gear—night vision binoculars, rifle, extra ammo, poncho, field jacket, a couple knives, a boonie hat. He wore that boonie hat for years, until it rotted right off his head. Anyway, he was all set to crawl in for the night. Neither Del nor I even asked him why. We knew. He just didn’t feel safe in the basement.”
“But you didn’t do that, right?”
“No, honey. Everybody reacted differently. We just knew enough to leave him alone, let him take care of his own business.” Randy laughed, remembering his mother’s reaction. “My mom thought he was nuts. And, of course, since Waldo is a pretty small community, word got around. When the three of us would go into town for some reason, or stop at a bar for a beer, Larry would get some strange looks.”
“So, did you just kind of hang out? Do nothing?”
“For a while, yeah. I had a year of college behind me before I was sent over. I was an English major. I’d always thought I’d be a writer.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I guess my priorities changed somewhere along the line. Larry had worked as a mechanic for a while out of high school. He’s from southern Ohio. Had no interest in college. Del, well, he was on his way to gang oblivion before Nam. For him, the war was a real turning point. When he came home, he was determined to make something of himself. He never thought he was very smart, but he’d learned otherwise. Eventually, he got his GED—he’d quit school when he was fifteen. And then he earned his undergrad degree in political science at the University of Minnesota. He could have gone on for a master’s, but he wanted to get out into the real world and see what he could do to change things.”
The doorbell chimed.
“That’s probably Mom,” said Katie. She seemed crestfallen.
Randy glanced at his watch. It was almost six. “Seems kind of early.”
“Can we talk about this again?”
“Sure, honey. Anytime you want.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.” He stood and walked over to the window. Instead of his wife’s car in the drive, he saw a police cruiser. “Honey, I want you to stay here while I go down and talk to the police.”
“What are they doing here? Why can’t I come?”
“I’m not sure what this is about. Please, Katie. Just stay here, okay?”
He rushed down the steps, his mind racing in a million different directions. When he pulled back the door, he found the same two cops who’d come by the house yesterday.
“Hi. Can I help you?”
“We need to talk to your houseguest, Larry Wilton.”
“He’s, ah, not here at the moment.”
“When do you expect him back?”
“To be honest, I don’t know.”
“But he’s still staying with you?”
Randy nodded.
The shorter one, Sergeant Williams, pulled some papers out of his shirt pocket, handed them to Randy. “We’ve got a search warrant here—”
Randy instantly began to sweat. He took a desperate stab, hoping this wasn’t about the bribe Larry had offered Gunderson last night. “Is this about the car you found in the ditch?”
“We need you to show us Mr. Wilton’s room.”
“Well, sure. Of course.”
They followed him up the stairs to the third level.
Ethan came out of his room, stood in the doorway in his Skivvies and a gray sweatshirt. “What’s going on, Randy? Hey, they shouldn’t be in here. You guys go away.”
“Ethan’s my brother,” said Randy, nodding to the cops. “He lives with me.”
The officers eyed Ethan warily as they walked past.
Randy opened the door to Larry’s room and flipped on the overhead light. Inside, the bed was a mass of tangled sheets and blankets, the ashtray on the nightstand overflowing with cigarette butts. An empty bottle of vodka poked out from under a pillow. The room stank of unwashed flesh and just a hint of weed.
The sergeant walked to the closet and opened the door.
Randy stood behind him, working on what he’d tell him if he asked about the marijuana. But as he looked over the cop’s shoulder, his surprise disconnected his thought process. “His clothes,” he said, moving closer. “They’re gone. And his duffel. What the—”
“You didn’t know he’d taken all his stuff?”
“No. He’s coming back, I’m sure of it.”
“When did he leave?”
“This morning. Early. I was still in bed.”
“So you didn’t talk to him?”
“No.”
“And you haven’t seen or heard from him since?”
He shook his head.
The cops proceeded to take the room apart.
“He told us the other day that he arrived by bus,” said the sergeant, flipping the mattress off the box springs.
“That’s right,” said Randy.
“Did you pick him up at the bus station?”
“No, he walked here—or hitchhiked. I mean, he must have. He just showed up.”
“Then how did he leave this morning?”
“He bought a truck.”
“You have any of the paperwork? The license number?”
“Sorry.”
“Know who he bought it from?”
“No idea.”
“What kind of truck?”
“Brown and white ‘84 Silverado with a topper on the back.”
As the cops finished up, Williams gave Randy an appraising look. “Tell me the truth, Mr. Turk. How well do you really know this guy?”
“But since then?”
“We get together every few years to catch up. What’s going on?” He asked the question again about the burned-out car. “You think Larry had something to do with it?”
“He got a temper, this friend of yours?”
“Sometimes. Who doesn’t in the right circumstance?”
“Likes bars, does he? Drugs?”
“I’m sure you’ve run a background check on him. You know he did time for assault.”
“You hear from him, you call us.”
“Of course.”
“You don’t call us and we find out you’ve had contact with him, we pull your license.”
“You don’t have to threaten me.”
“Just a word to the wise, Mr. Turk.”
Randy walked them back down to the front door.
Before they left, Williams turned to him one last time. “I know Wilton is your friend, but I suggest you be careful. And again, notify us if he contacts you.”
“I will,” said Randy.
“You take care now,” said Williams as he and his partner walked back out to their cruiser.
Randy had no sooner closed and locked the door than his cell phone rang. Pulling it out of his back pocket, he checked the caller ID. It was Del.
“I still haven’t heard from him,” said Randy. “But I do have some news.”
“So do I. Go turn on the TV.”
“What?”
Do it now.
Randy dashed up the stairs and switched on the 13” in the kitchen.
“Turn to Channel 5.”
The local early evening news was just beginning.
“What am I supposed to see?” asked Randy.
“Just wait.”
Katie walked out of the family room, stood behind him. “Who’s on the phone?” she asked.
“Del,” he whispered.
A moment later, he watched in stunned silence as the anchor moved to a story about an attempted murder that had taken place last night at the Unicorn bar in Uptown. Melanie Gunderson, forty, a reporter for City Beat, had been stabbed several times in the chest in the bar’s parking lot. She’d been taken to HCMC, where she was now in a coma, fighting for her life.
Still holding the cell phone to his ear, Randy heard Del say, “We are fucked so many ways, man, we’ll never see the light of day again.”
It was Monday morning. Standing on the Lyme House deck with the fog rolling in off the lake, Jane felt momentarily suspended. On mornings like these, when the world turned indistinct, when the outside blurred and forced her to look inward, she would often feel a quick, powerful rush, a sense that Christine, her partner now gone for so many years, was hovering just outside her vision. She couldn’t explain it. She had no proof. But Christine was there, her angel, her guide. Jane felt certain that one day she would turn her head too fast and Christine would be there, the threshold separating them momentarily breached. Maybe it would be a cosmic mistake, or maybe it was allowed. Jane had no real idea about any of these things. She wasn’t religious, but she knew it would happen, she would see Christine again, look into her clear, smiling eyes.
Jane wondered why these visitations never left her feeling guilty. After all, she had a new love now and a life very different from the one she’d shared with Christine. But these moments were out of time, on a different plane.
Looking out at the water, she saw that the sun was beginning to burn its way through the fog. The mist was rising, gathering itself at the tops of the trees. The corners of Jane’s eyes finally relaxed. She stood on the deck in that rare in-between state, her mind drifting, until a door behind her opened and then closed and she felt the familiar squeeze to her insides that told her the world was back in place. She turned to find her brother smiling at her.
“Am I interrupting something?” he asked. “You look so peaceful.”
“I love it out here,” she said. She had a busy life, too busy most of the time. That’s why she craved quiet. The Lyme House deck, early, before the restaurant opened, or late, after the restaurant had closed for the night, was one of her favorite places to just sit and think. “You’re back from New Jersey. How did the job interview go?”
Peter moved up next to her, leaned his arms on the wooden rail, and looked out at the dark, choppy water. “Actually, that’s what I came to talk to you about.”
“Don’t tell me you’re moving to New Jersey.”
He shook his head. “No, I’m taking the job Dad offered.”
“That’s great news.”
“I talked to him last night. We’re leaving this afternoon, flying down to Worthington. It’s the kickoff for another southern Minnesota swing. I’ve gotta run by his campaign office this morning, sign some papers. I’m already packed.”
“Yeah. Fine.” His lips parted in a grimace.
“Peter? What’s wrong?”
He looked up through the shifting mist, leaned farther out over the railing. “If I tell you, do you promise to keep it to yourself?”
She slipped her arm across his back. “Sure, kiddo. You know you can trust me.”
“You can tell Cordelia if you want, but nobody else.”
“Okay.”
“I didn’t have a job interview in New Jersey. You know about Sigrid and me . . . the problems we’ve been having?”
“I know you’d like to start a family and that she doesn’t want to have children.”
He hesitated. “Last year she confided something to me—something she’s never told another living soul. She got pregnant towards the end of her senior year in high school. She’d saved up some money, so she went to New York to live for a while, had the baby, but then gave it up for adoption.” He went on to explain all the struggles he’d had with her over Margaret, how he’d tried to get her to see that just because she’d given one child up didn’t mean she couldn’t have another. It took him nearly an hour to unload the frustration and accumulated bile in his stomach. By the time he was done, they were sitting at one of the tables, the sun burning hot over their heads.
“So that’s why you went to New Jersey on Friday, to talk to her adoption lawyer.”
He nodded, then launched into the conversation he’d had with the woman at Child Protective Services in Newark. “She basically told me it was hopeless, that I could never find Margaret. All the records are private.”
“What about this PI you hired?”
“That’s one of my problems, Janey. He’s expensive and I’m running out of cash. I refuse to believe that she can’t be found, but I’m not so out of touch with reality that I don’t realize it could take years. I just don’t see how I can afford it.”
“You haven’t told Sigrid any of this?”
“How can I? She’ll be angry, for sure, but then maybe she’ll get into it. If I raise her hopes only to dash them when Margaret can’t be found—I couldn’t live with that. No, I can’t tell her about any of this until I find the little girl. All this time I felt in my gut that she’s not in a good situation. And now more than ever, I think I’m right.”
“Have you thought about the kind of effort it takes to raise a special-needs child?”
“Of course I have.” Now he was indignant. “But it doesn’t change anything. I’ve never set eyes on that kid, but I already love her. Can you understand that?”
“To be honest, I’m not sure I do, but I believe you mean it.”
He leaned forward, spread his arms on the table. “While I was waiting for my plane to leave, I stopped at a bookstore, found a book on foster care. I read it coming home on the plane. I mean, did you know that over half a million children are part of that vile system? Less than half of them will finish high school. Two-thirds of the girls will get pregnant in their teens. Without a stable childhood, these kids don’t have a prayer, they just repeat the cycle. If they stay with their biological parents, the problems are poverty, neglect. Bad enough, but the problems in foster homes are even worse—sexual and physical abuse. One study found that abuse of all kinds was, like, seven times greater in a foster home than in a biological home—and the person doing the abusing was generally one of the foster parents. I know it’s not everybody. I’m sure there are good foster homes, but what if Margaret ended up in a bad one? And then there are ‘children’s homes’—the PC word for orphanages. They can even be worse.”
“It sounds awful.”
“It’s a fucking game of Russian roulette.” He yanked a paper out of the pocket of his tan chinos. “I did some searching on the Web last night, looking for information on the New Jersey child welfare system. Turns out, the rate of abuse and neglect for children in the adoption resource centers—the kids who have the best chance of being adopted—is thirty times the national average. And get this. According to a press release about the foster care system in New Jersey, the system has ‘egregiously failed the children in its care on a long-term, routine basis.’ ” He tossed the paper at her. “They need to hire, like, three hundred more social workers just to begin to dig out. It’s a national disgrace. And that’s the system Margaret ended up in. Do you see now why I have to do this? I have to find her before it’s too late. Shit, it might already be too late.”
She picked up the paper, read through it quickly.
“I know I seem like I’m hyperventilating all over you, but I needed to talk to someone, and I thought maybe you’d help me.”
“Anything. Do you want money?”
“No. But you’ve got that friend—the PI.”
“Nolan?”
“Yeah, him. All the way home on the plane, I kept trying to figure out a way to keep the ball moving. You think, maybe, he might help me?”
Jane had met A. J. Nolan during a particularly difficult time in her life. In the last few years, they’d become good friends. He was a retired homicide cop who’d started a PI business out of his house. Since he wasn’t hurting for money, he sometimes took cases that interested him from people who might normally have trouble paying. “Sure, I’ll ask him.”
“You think he’d do it? I mean, since he’s your friend, I thought maybe he might cut me a break on his fee.”
“He’ll do it, Peter. And he won’t charge you.” Jane figured she could pay the expenses. But she’d keep that between her and Nolan.
“Could you call him?”
“Today?”
“Right now.” He took his cell out of his pocket and pushed it across the table. Desperation flickered in his eyes.
Tapping in the number, Jane waited through several rings until Nolan’s voice mail picked up. She left him a message, outlined briefly the situation, and then asked him to call her when he had a minute. “There,” she said. “Done.”
“You’ll call me when you hear from him, right?”
“Either that or he’ll call you directly.”
“Thanks, Janey. You don’t know how much this means to me.”
As they got up, she put her hand on his back. “Good luck with Dad. Oh, by the way, I’m leaving town myself. Driving down to northern Iowa with Cordelia later today.”
He turned and cocked his head. “What on earth could you two possibly have going on in northern Iowa?”
“Long story. We’ll only be gone a couple of days. If there’s anything interesting to tell, I promise, you’ll be the first to hear.”