[2007]
1
WIZENED, GRIZZLED, INTO HIS SIXTIES, and back in Tacoma for the first time since joining the Merchant Marines after high school, Perry White sat in the docket at the County-City Building, listening to his arraignment on murder charges. His hands were in his lap and he stared at them.
“He grew up here, Your Honor, he’s got roots,” said his attorney, Susan Blake. “He’s not going anywhere.”
His attorney had been appointed by the court.
“Mr. White?” asked the judge. “Could you assure me of that directly?”
“Not goin’ anywhere. Got roots. Got my brother. He’s right back there.”
“Half brother, Your Honor, just to be clear,” said his attorney.
She turned toward the back of the room, where Perry White’s half brother sat with his hands in his lap, too. He raised one of them in order to salute the judge. “Nice to see you again, Your Honor.”
“Likewise, Mr. Lilly,” said the judge.
Both men smiled at the formalities. They’d known each other since college, when Judge Follett used to write wills for people in a tavern where Richard Lilly tended bar.
Judge Follett turned his attention to the prosecutor’s table. “Ms. Packer, I’m about to set bail if there are no objections from your office,” he said.
“Bail, Your Honor?” said Ms. Packer. “Are you kidding me?”
Though the courtroom was nearly empty, she looked back into it anyway, not at Richard Lilly but at the rows of vacant benches, as if they should also be shocked by the idea of bail for a transient charged with second-degree murder. She faced the judge again. She knew he wasn’t happy with “Are you kidding me?”
“My office vigorously objects,” she said. “Mr. White’s been gone for forty years. If he has roots, they’re planted somewhere else.”
Thank God the room was empty. She’d had a hellish fight with her mother last night and hadn’t slept.
“I don’t have roots nowhere else,” said Perry White.
“And Mr. Lilly has agreed to provide domicile as well as bail, Your Honor,” his attorney said.
“Anyone can see he’s a flight risk,” said Ms. Packer, but the judge set bail at $300,000. “That’ll put a dent in your wallet if he does fly the coop, Mr. Lilly,” he said.
“I know, Your Honor, but family is family,” said Richard Lilly. “And Perry has promised me he’ll stick around.”
“Family is family,” Ms. Packer muttered. “Can’t beat that as a tenet of the law.”
HERE ARE THE DETAILS OF THE CASE as we know them thus far. Perry White found a teenage girl wandering around in a cemetery, killed her, and placed her body on top of someone’s grave. The dead girl, Katie Smothers, had lived near the cemetery, and Perry had been seen during his time back in Tacoma visiting the grave Katie’s body was found on, that of a certain Winifred Wilcox. When questioned by the police, he said he’d simply been paying his respects. Before his arrest he’d lived at the Salvation Army apartments on Sixth Avenue, without contacting anyone from his past. But when the story hit the papers, Richard Lilly came forward, thus getting us to the point of his release on bail.
And here are the details concerning Ms. Packer’s fight with her mother and her poor performance in court. She’d made it clear to her mother and her mother’s longtime boyfriend that she wouldn’t recuse herself from the case. Her mother had asked her to do so because, in precisely the sort of coincidence that happens in towns like Tacoma, her longtime boyfriend was Richard Lilly, the defendant’s half brother.
Outside the courtroom, Perry White’s attorney was chatting with Richard Lilly when Beverly Packer came out. Though the judge had granted bail, it would take a while to complete the paperwork, and Richard hoped to lunch with Beverly in order to smooth things over from the night before. He’d been her mother’s boyfriend since Beverly was in high school and loved her quite as if she were his daughter. And she, though she’d have been hard-pressed to admit it at the moment, felt the same way.
When Susan Blake saw Beverly approaching them, she shook Richard’s hand and strode away while Beverly muttered, “How can you stand her, Richie? She’s more famous for her bleeding heart shenanigans than those Humane Society ads you hate so much on TV.”
Richard Lilly shrugged. “She champions the underdog,” he said, “but what’s gotten into you, Bev? You weren’t very good in there, you know.”
“My fight with Mom’s what’s gotten into me. I don’t mind fighting in court, but fighting with her makes me hate myself.”
“Why don’t we have lunch?” asked Richard. “Everyone said too much last night.” But Beverly said she had to meet her paralegal, prepare for possible jury selection, and develop a strategy. She hugged him and got out of there fast, before last night’s tears demanded a return engagement.
When she got to her office a half an hour later, her boss was there, sitting on the edge of her desk.
“Got a minute?” he asked.
Her boss was not the prosecuting attorney but his chief assistant, with eyes too close together and shoots of unruly hair that gave him the look of having just gotten up. Beverly put her briefcase down. She was in no mood to hear what she feared she’d hear, and hoped her look let him know it.
“Okay, Clement, who called you?” she asked. “Or is this coming from the horse’s mouth?”
“I’m afraid it’s coming from the horse’s mouth. He’s reassigning the case.”
“The hell he is,” said Beverly. “It’s my turn, dammit. Don’t we do things in rotation around here? What ever happened to our storied office backbone?”
“The man’s your father’s brother, Bev. You should’ve known that wouldn’t fly.”
“He’s not my father’s brother; he’s the half brother of my mother’s boyfriend. That’s it. Who’s in line to take the case if I do recuse myself?”
She picked up her briefcase again, pressing it against her breasts.
“You know as well as I do that it’s me,” he said. “That way, you won’t miss your turn.”
“Too bad I’m not recusing myself then,” she said. “Tell the horse’s mouth he can kiss my horse’s ass.”
But he only told her to have her notes in his office by the end of the day.
“LOOK, MR. WHITE,” SAID SUSAN BLAKE when they got to her office a few minutes later. “My job is to counter what the prosecution throws at you; your visits to the cemetery, your talk with Katie Smothers over the fence to her backyard, and most of all your first words to the cops, which they thought were a confession. But I don’t want a confession from you; I hope that’s clear.”
“Weren’t no confession anyway,” said Perry, “’cept on how her body got over to Winnie’s grave.”
Susan fingered a message she’d found taped to her door. Clement Page had called. “I think they have an offer for us,” she said. “How about I see what’s up before we talk?”
She picked up her phone to call Clement Page at about the same time that, back across town, Beverly Packer picked up hers to call her husband, Bill.
“Hey,” she said when Bill answered, “did Richie call you?”
“Yep,” said Bill, “and so did your mom. Richie told me what happened in court just now, and your mom told me what happened last night.”
Bill had been asleep when Beverly got home the night before, and he’d left for work before she woke up. Bill owned a garage.
“Mom wants me off the case and now so does Clement. Should I fight it, Bill, or cave like a wuss?”
“How are you gonna fight it? Doesn’t what Clement says go?”
Bill had grease on his thumb and little finger, so he held them away from the phone. It made him look like he was pantomiming a phone call.
“Usually it does, but I’ve got an ace up my sleeve, which I’m thinking of pulling out,” Beverly said.
Bill didn’t ask what her ace was since he knew she didn’t have one.
Meanwhile, Clement Page hadn’t called Susan Blake with a plea offer but with word that Beverly was off the case and he would be opposing Susan now. He said it was a courtesy call, but Susan knew a come-on when she heard one. Clement was famous for hitting on women who opposed him.
“Thanks for the warning, but how about we talk about his innocence?” she said.
That made Clement laugh. “I’ll recommend the minimum sentence if he pleas out,” he told her. “That means he might not die in jail.”
“Come on, Clem, give me something I can work with here.”
She knew that saying “Clem” would appeal to him.
“I don’t know the case yet. Let me catch myself up on it, and then we can talk about it over drinks,” he said.
When she got off the phone, she and Perry went over again what he remembered from the night of the murder, what he’d told the police, and why he had been at the Wilcox grave in the first place.
“You knew her when you were kids, but the last time you saw her was years ago? That’s your story?”
“It’s my story ’cause it’s true. Winnie was kind to me when others wasn’t, kind to her family’s pets after they died, digging ’em proper graves and such.”
“Do you have a thing for graves, Perry? Did you wander around when you were up there, look at other people’s names and dates?”
“Yeah, but only so I could let Winnie know who her neighbors was. I suppose you think that’s nuts.”
“I think a lot of us would like to talk to those we once loved. But tell me the ‘when’ and ‘where’ of it one last time, and why you dragged Katie over to Winnie’s grave.”
“First off, I didn’t drag her; I carried her. I seen her lyin’ across the way ’bout eight o’clock but left her alone ’cause I thought she was asleep. Kids was always fooling around up there, so I figured maybe Katie was tired.”
“You recognized her as Katie, as the girl you talked to over the fence to her backyard?”
“Not till I went over to her.”
“I don’t know, Perry, if I spied a sleeping girl in a cemetery, I think I’d worry I might scare her if I woke her up.”
“Which is why I didn’t go earlier. Not till I thought she’d get in trouble for stayin’ out late.”
“But you just said you didn’t know it was Katie.”
“Any kid might get in trouble for a thing like that.”
“Okay, what happened when you did go over there?”
“I knew the grave she was lyin’ on belonged to a man named Jonathan Fleming, whose wife come up there sometimes. I even thought it might be her sleepin’ there. Grief makes a person do funny things.”
“First you say you were worried about Katie and now you say it might’ve been Jonathan Fleming’s wife?”
“That thought only fluttered by; I knew it was a kid all right. I weren’t wearin’ shoes, so I went over quiet and nudged her with my toe. That’s when I saw she was dead and I shoulda called the cops.”
“Why didn’t you? It would have saved us all a lot of trouble.”
“You ever been to Egypt, Ms. Blake, or seen King Tut at one of his traveling shows?”
“Haven’t been to Egypt, but I saw King Tut when he came to Seattle that time.”
“So you know what a sarco-gophus is? Them carved-out depictions of folks?”
“Sarcophagus, yes …”
“I ain’t sayin’ Katie looked like Winnie. I don’t know what Winnie looked like as a grown-up person, but I knew her kid face, and that night Katie looked like Winnie would have if she’d died young. So I carried Katie over so Winnie could have a sarco-gophus. Maybe it was crazy, but I wanted Winnie’s goodness to show itself aboveground one more time.”
That stopped Susan Blake. He’d answered her questions, but how could she take that into court? He was watching for signs of ridicule, so she asked him casually, “How come you weren’t wearing shoes?”
“’Cause you don’t wear shoes when you go into one a them Egyptian mosques. It’s how you show respect.”
“So if you did what you said you did, who killed Katie Smothers and left her on Jonathan Fleming’s grave?”
Perry said he didn’t know and asked her to take him to Richard’s house.
BEVERLY WAS STANDING IN RICHARD’S KITCHEN with her mother when Susan Blake dropped Perry off. That alone should have told her that fighting her removal from the case was a bad idea. She should be removed; she was too close to it.
She hadn’t meant to stay at Richard’s this late, so she hid in the pantry while Richard greeted Perry and showed him to his room. And when he came back downstairs, Beverly was gone.
“Are you surprised by how hard she’s taking this?” he asked Donna, Beverly’s mom. “All these years, who has been the levelheaded one among us if not that daughter of yours?”
“I’m not at all surprised,” said Donna. “This case has caught the public eye like nothing since the Frugal Gourmet. And you know it’s more complicated than simply having Perry in the family. There are too many weird connections…. We both knew Winnie as kids, for crying out loud.”
“Winnie, my god,” said Richard. “They quoted her sister in the paper, calling Perry a pervert and a lowlife. Only the good die young, I guess.”
When his phone rang, he answered to hear Bill ask for Beverly, then say that he’d found a letter she had written, resigning from the prosecutor’s office. He said if she didn’t get home soon, he would go out looking for her.
“That Bill always was a snoop,” said Donna when Richard hung up.
“Maybe I should go look for her,” said Richard. “It’s odd she’s isn’t home yet. It isn’t that long a drive.”
“If she doesn’t get there soon, I’ll go,” said Donna. “She’s probably watching the Canada geese down on Ruston Way. And speaking of geese, Perry will be up with the chickens, so you should get some sleep.”
That was Donna’s way of saying Richard wasn’t Beverly’s father. She didn’t say it often, but each time she did so, it stung.
When he went upstairs again and saw Perry asleep on his bed instead of in it, he found an old family afghan, covered him with it, then sat in a rocking chair by the window. Perry had simply been a kid in the neighborhood before they found out about the affair between Richard’s father and Perry’s mother, and though they’d tried to act like brothers after they found out, it hadn’t lasted long. And now here he was, dead to the world in Richard’s house. When Donna asked him why he’d come forward not only with bail but with the offer of a place for Perry to stay, Richard had said he was doing it for his father, though that was probably a lie. His father had never embraced the fact that Perry was his son. When his father died, in fact, Richard hadn’t looked for Perry, nor had he looked for him when Perry’s mother died the next year, alone and decrepit in Perry’s old house. So whatever had been between them had long ago run its course…. Still, there was no question he’d felt compelled to offer Perry a place to stay.
When Richard stood up from the rocking chair, the chair kept rocking, as if it were nodding to itself.
THE BAR CLEMENT PAGE ASKED SUSAN BLAKE to meet him in had a “lounge-around” feeling to it, with windows that looked out onto the street. And it wasn’t a sports bar, so you could hear yourself think.
Susan didn’t see him when she walked in, so she ordered a beer and paid for it. She wouldn’t let him buy her anything. Indeed, after her talk with Perry, she wished she hadn’t agreed to meet him, for it now seemed a cheap sort of move, another round in the game she sometimes liked to play when she ought to be fighting for her client. She decided that if Clement didn’t show up by the time she finished her beer, she’d go home. She drank down a quarter of it and looked at her phone. Seven minutes after nine. She finished the beer and ordered another one.
Beverly, meanwhile, wasn’t watching Canada geese down on Ruston Way but was at a market up on Proctor Street. She began eating the ice cream she’d been craving right there in the store while scanning the numbers in her phone for those of Susan Blake and Detective Triplet, the lead cop on Perry’s case. She wouldn’t call either of them tonight, of course, and surely not Susan until she’d officially resigned. But she didn’t have Susan’s number anyway, only Detective Triplet’s. She punched it in, knowing he wouldn’t be there, not this late. But he answered right away, saying, “Hi, Ms. Packer, what’s up with you tonight?”
“Do you think we could talk?” she asked. “It’s about the Katie Smothers case.”
If he knew she’d recused herself, he might turn her down she realized, but he said quite cheerfully, “Frisco Freeze in half an hour? I don’t have long.”
She held her phone away from her in order to see the time. Nine-seventeen. “I haven’t had dinner yet,” she said.
After she ended the call, she went home to put her ice cream in the freezer and pick up her resignation letter, which she would mail before meeting Detective Triplet. She hardly noticed that Bill wasn’t there.
Meanwhile, back at the bar, when Clement Page finally did arrive, Susan was sitting in an easy chair near the bar’s front door.
“So sorry!” he said. “I was talking with my boss about your erstwhile opposing counsel. Please now, what are you drinking? My treat.”
“Only the bartender knows,” Susan said, “but how come she’s ‘erstwhile’? Did something happen to Ms. Packer?”
He said only what he’d said on the phone, that she’d recused herself, then went to get their beer. While he was gone, Susan tried to sit properly, but the chairs were meant for sprawling, which was what, she often feared, her body was also meant for. She sometimes looked up sloth, expecting to see a photo of herself, but only got that three-toed animal.
“Look,” she said when he got back, “I’m sorry about Ms. Packer, but why are we here? What do you have to offer?”
“I just gave you what I have to offer,” he said, pointing at her beer.
Good, he was pissing her off. He saw it and said, “Thing is, I read the case notes and think your client confessed. We’ll still lighten the sentence for a guilty plea, but otherwise it’s you and me, babe, facing off in court.”
“If he confessed, I’ll eat my hat,” said Susan. “You all at your office … don’t you ever get tired of thinking everything anyone says is just the tip of the iceberg?”
She was pleased with “eat my hat,” but he only pushed his beer mug across the gap between them, clicking it against hers.
She wrapped her legs around each other when he sat down.
WHERE WAS BILL AND WHY HADN’T BEVERLY NOTICED that he wasn’t home when she stopped to put away the ice cream and get her resignation letter?
The answer was that for the past few weeks Bill had either stayed late at his garage or gone back to it in order to avoid confronting what he feared might be happening between himself and his wife. There was plenty for him to do at the garage. A ’54 MG roadster that Richard had given him sat under tarps. He meant to make it cherry again, but all he’d managed so far was to sit beside it drinking beer. And on this night, too, while Beverly met Detective Triplet, he took the tarp off the MG and picked up his notebook. There were drawings in the notebook, not of the repairs he had to make, but of the MG with Beverly in the driver’s seat, her scarf stretched out behind her in the wind. He got a can of Miller High Life, stepped over the MG’s sidewall, and sat down. Richard had done that years ago, making Bill like him right away. If not for Richard, in fact, he and Beverly wouldn’t have made it through Beverly’s college and law school. There were other men back then, but Beverly always returned to Bill; he was sure this was because she saw in him something like what her mother saw in Richard. Now, though, as he sat in Richard’s car, the old fear came back: that Beverly would leave him as soon as she discovered who he was.
“IT’S A DOUBLE MEAT, DOUBLE CHEESE BURGER,” said Detective Triplet. “I can’t go a week without one. I got fries and coffee, too. If you want, we can eat in my car.”
Beverly’d bought a regular burger and a strawberry milk shake she didn’t want. They walked across the parking lot to a police-issued Chevy, its seat pushed back to accommodate Detective Triplet’s height and bulk. They sat their drinks on the console and ate for a while in silence until he said, “Okay, shoot, Ms. Packer. What’s up?”
“I’ve got two questions: Do you think Perry White is guilty, and did you think, when you interviewed him, that he confessed?”
“He didn’t confess to the murder, but he did confess to moving Katie’s body,” Detective Triplet said. He reached around to grab a file. “‘Suspect insisted that he carried Katie to the Wilcox grave. Then he talked about King Tut.’ I’d say that adds up to some pretty substantial sanity questions.”
Beverly sat there thinking about that for a while, then asked what his opinion was of Susan Blake. The expression on Detective Triplet’s face didn’t change, but his voice grew flat.
“Whatever fishing’s going on here, I suggest you do it in the light of day,” he said. “I agreed to talk to you about the case.”
“I don’t understand,” said Beverly. “Do you have some kind of beef with Susan Blake?”
Both of them looked at their burgers, but she was the only one who smiled. “I don’t have a beef with her; I have a history with her,” he said.
He picked up his coffee and sipped from it. When he put it back down, Beverly took it and sipped from it, too, making the warmth of the coffee invade them both.
“I quit the case,” she said, “and since I called you, I have also resigned from the prosecutor’s office.”
Detective Triplet took his coffee back, though he loved the fact that she’d sipped from it.
“I only asked about Ms. Blake because … well, because I’m tired of putting people away, wouldn’t mind helping defend them for a while.”
Was that the truth? If so, it hadn’t occurred to her until she said it.
“Susan Blake has two gears,” Detective Triplet told her. “One is aimed at the acquittal of her clients and the other at the destruction of whoever gets too close.”
He pulled out one of his business cards, found a pen, and wrote Susan’s cell phone number on the back of it.
And then he reached across her to open her door.
THE BAR WAS OTHERWISE EMPTY when the bartender said, “Last call.”
“I’m done,” said Clement Page. “You, Ms. Blake?”
“Three’s my limit,” said Susan, though by then she’d had four.
The bartender gave them the bill.
“A nightcap at my house?” Clement asked. “Not to be forward, but I do have a terrific Bordeaux.”
Susan waved him away and stood. She was about to step out into the rain but then looked back down at him.
“How terrific is it?” she asked.
2
ON THE MORNING AFTER ALL THE BUSYNESS with Bill and Beverly, Detective Triplet, Susan Blake, and Clement Page, at Perry White’s request, Richard drove him out to visit some of their old haunts at Brown’s Point.
“Do you remember that boulder that sat on the beach in front of yer house?” Perry asked. “More’n half buried and underwater when the tide come in?”
“Remember it well,” said Richard. “We used to dive off of it.”
They had already driven past where Perry’s house once stood and were parked near their old school bus stop. Rain was dotting Richard’s windshield and he didn’t want to get out of his car, hoped that he could get away with simply driving around a bit and going home. Brown’s Point hadn’t changed much, but he didn’t live there anymore.
“Let’s go find it,” Perry said. “What’s with the tide? Is it in or out?”
Richard had a tide app on his phone.
“It’s more than halfway in,” he said. “And there’s a wind coming up.”
The part about the wind was not on his tide app.
“In Egypt, they revere old things, but here we tear ’em down,” said Perry. He cast a thumb back to where his house had been. Donna’s old house, across from it, was also gone. “Come on, man, let’s go,” he said. “This is what we come for.”
They got out of Richard’s car and walked to the beach. Richard’s childhood home was off toward Dash Point and high up on a bank. The boulder Perry wanted to visit wouldn’t be visible until they got to it. Richard knew that something was up. He didn’t fear—yet—that Perry might get violent with him, but it was a fear he’d had often during their childhood.
“Do you want to talk about the case?” he asked. “It won’t go further than us, no further than right here and now, Perry. I promise.”
“Okay, then,” said Perry. “No one knows this, but over there in Egypt I had me a girlfriend who looked a lot like Winnie. When she died, too, there weren’t no sarco-gophus for her, so when I carried Katie over to Winnie’s grave, I was pretty much thinkin’, Two birds with one stone. I may not be good at much—no one thinks I am—but I know how to mourn those I loved. And I loved ’em both, Richie, one for all my life and the other for a while.”
Years ago there’d been a piling sticking out of the water some fifty yards offshore in front of Richard’s house. It was long gone now, but Richard couldn’t help thinking of it as a sarcophagus for his poorly spent youth. He looked toward where it had been.
“Your girlfriend died, too?” he asked. He could hear the caution in his voice.
“She was darker’n Winnie, didn’t care ’bout pets, and half the time she didn’t like me, but other’n that she was Winnie’s whatever you call it … like a twin you never met. That’s how I first come to notice her.”
“Winnie’s doppelgänger?” said Richard. “What was her name?”
“Name was Hetshepsit, but I called her ‘Hetty.’”
They had walked down to just below Richard’s old house. During the month or so that Perry’d lived with them, when Perry’s mother and Richard’s father were trying to work things out, Richard had tried, too, to make an actual brother out of him. But as soon as it grew clear that living together wasn’t working, Perry’d picked a fight with him. They’d been right here, and the tide had been more than halfway in.
The boulder seemed smaller and more ancient than it had at the time of their fight. It extended only a foot out of the rocky beach.
“Winnie lived next door to you,” Perry said. “I used to sneak into her basement. Snuck into yours a couple a times, too.”
He stepped up onto the boulder, looking down at Richard.
“Let’s get back to Hetshepsit,” said Richard. “How did she die, and does her death have anything to do with Katie’s?”
“Died of bein’ a whore. Her mother was a whore before her ’cause whorin’ was the family business. If you wanted, you could find ’em in the Egyptian whores’ registry, but I pretended I didn’t know about it.”
A burst of cold wind came in off the bay. The rain had not let up. Perry got down off the boulder again and bent to pick up a couple of rocks, this time looking at Richard out of weasely eyes. “Okay, since yer askin’, she died of gettin’ a pillow in her mouth,” he said. “Come home late and laughin’. Late’s okay and laughin’s okay, but a man don’t cotton to both….”
He threw a rock up toward Richard’s house, where it disappeared into an ivy bank. “You coulda let us keep on livin’ here…. You coulda told yer dad that drinkin’ weren’t the worst thing in the world, but you wanted me outta yer life.”
“The way I remember it, it wasn’t just drinking. Your mom was a little like Hetshepsit,” said Richard.
He braced himself for Perry’s fury, but Perry was concentrating on his remaining rock.
“It weren’t just you. Seems like ‘Get out of my life’s’ been people’s slogan for me my whole life long, so I figured I’d oblige ’em. That’s why I wanted us to come out here today, Richie. Figured I’d get myself gone where yer daddy and my mother got me started. You remember how I always used to hate to swim?”
“I do,” said Richard, “but I think we came out here so you could say you smothered Hetshepsit and admit to killing Katie. So go ahead and say it. I’ll keep my promise.”
He braced himself again, but Perry only said, “Well, I guess you’re gonna think what you’re gonna think. What’s the word the newspaper used for how Katie died? Was it ass fixation? They think the man who killed her had lewd thoughts, but even if he did, Katie weren’t messed with. I made sure of that before I picked her up. Any fool knows that Winnie couldn’t have no messed-with sarco-gophus. I hope you’ll tell her parents that if you ever run across ’em.”
Now Richard stepped up onto the boulder, to look for exit routes, he supposed. But all he saw was empty beach.
“The word the paper used was asphyxiation,” he said. “I guess that’s how Hetshepsit died, too.”
“When we was livin’ here, my mother told me lots of times she’d change, but she never did. I guess yer dad was right about that much…. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks. I also guess my mom and me is just about the same.”
He swung his arm around, kicked his leg back, and flung the rock he still held down toward a seagull standing in the nearby shallows. In the old days, he’d have brained the seagull first try, but the rock landed in front of it. He picked up another, bigger rock, turned to smile at Richard again, then smashed it mightily into his own forehead. It knocked him back a couple of feet, but he managed to stay upright.
“Perry!” screamed Richard. But Perry’s eyes shone merrily below a starburst of blood. He hit himself twice more, until he fell to his knees and the seagull he’d tried to brain flew off.
BACK AT RICHARD’S HOUSE, Donna and Beverly grew worried after Richard and Perry had been gone for a little over six hours. Donna’d called Richard’s cell a few times, but he didn’t answer, so at her urging, Beverly called Detective Triplet, who agreed to come over before his night shift started. At Detective Triplet’s urging, she also called Clement Page, who drove over, too, with Susan Blake beside him in his car. He hadn’t received Beverly’s letter yet, so he believed the call to be from his subordinate.
Why these five would so readily gather at Richard’s house, which probably wouldn’t happen normally, can be credited to the goings-on of the day before. These five, plus Bill, who worried about Richard, too, but was glad to see Clement Page’s interest in someone other than his wife.
“I’m sure it seems so to you, but six hours isn’t that long,” Detective Triplet said. “After twenty-four hours maybe we can act.”
His reaction at seeing Susan Blake was the opposite of Bill’s when seeing Clement Page. It made him fall back on his rule book. When Beverly asked if he wanted coffee, Donna’s frustration boiled over.
“We’ve got soda, too, or how about a beer?” she said. “Good Christ, under these conditions six hours is plenty long!”
“Why not try calling again,” said Susan Blake. “Sometimes persistence pays off.”
“Harrumph,” said Donna, but she pulled out her phone.
She could see by its clock that the number of hours Richard and Perry had been gone was now a lot closer to seven.
NEAR THE ROAD THAT RICHARD AND PERRY used to get to the beach stood an ancient cement boat ramp, crusted with barnacles and stacked with driftwood and seaweed and kelp. Richard meant to carry Perry all the way back to his car, then hurry off to the hospital, but by the time they got to the ramp he’d grown too heavy and Richard had to put him down. The tide had come in sufficiently to lift the driftwood slightly, but Perry’s weight plus Richard’s settled it back down. Perry’s blood was all over Richard’s arms and face and chest, so he dipped his hands in the water to wash himself off. He’d been aware of his vibrating phone when standing on the boulder, and when he felt it again now, he pulled it from his pocket, nearly dropping it in the bay when he tried to answer it.
“Listen, Donna,” he said, “you have to call nine one one.”
“Richie, thank God! Are you hurt, Richie? What’s going on?”
“Remember the old boat ramp? Used to belong to the Irwins? Tell them that’s where we are. Please, Donna, hurry up and call them. I don’t think we have much time.”
“Richie?” said Donna, but Richard disconnected. He chanced a look at Perry, who lay beside him with his head smashed in and his eyes half open. Did that mean he was alive or dead?
“You know them sarco-gophuses, Richie?” Perry asked.
Richard leaned down close to him. “Yes,” he said, “I know them.”
When Perry said “Be mine,” those heart-shaped candies that children used to pass around on Valentine’s Day came into Richie’s head. He looked at his phone again. What if Donna didn’t remember the boat ramp? What if her sense of their youth was different from his? He’d just decided to call 911 himself when Donna called back.
“The firemen are on their way and so are we,” she said. “Now what happened, Richie? I’ve got you on speakerphone.”
“He wants me to be his sarcophagus,” said Richard.
He heard “What?” from Beverly, Bill, Detective Triplet, Clement Page, and Susan Blake, all of whom were in Donna’s car with her.
“We’re on a stack of driftwood and the tide’s coming in,” he said.
“Are you stuck there, Richie? Come on, honey, answer me. Are you hurt?”
Richard knew he wasn’t making sense, that seeing Perry beat his head in had scrambled his brain, too. He couldn’t think and also couldn’t see very well. When he looked at Perry now, Perry seemed to rise above him.
“Richie?” said some of those in Donna’s car, but he heard only murmurs. When the tide came farther in, never mind their weight, the driftwood groaned up off the boat ramp.
“We’re on our way now, Perry,” he said. “Set sail for Egypt, maybe, or for wherever Winnie is.”
“Richie? Richie?” said the phone murmurs.
Perry wore a threadbare jacket zipped to his neck. Beneath it Richard imagined the same striped T-shirt he had worn as a kid. As the driftwood lifted, a wind rose, too, to tack them out toward the shipping lanes.
“I can’t be your sarcophagus, Perry,” said Richard, “I haven’t lived well enough,” but Perry only said, “Be mine” again.
The rain and the wind increased as the emergency medical crew showed up. Men got out of their truck and ran down to the shoreline to raise their arms and shout. Donna’s van skidded on the gravel, turned sideways, righted itself, and stopped only inches from the fire truck. Donna got out and ran to the end of the boat ramp. She took off her shoes and was about to dive into the bay when Beverly caught her and held her in her arms.
Clement Page and Susan Blake stopped midway between the top of the beach and the waterline while Detective Triplet hurried down to show the firemen his badge. Bill had run onto the boat ramp, too, chasing Beverly, but when he saw how Donna’s love for Richie made her want to swim to him, he took off his shoes and pants and shirt. No one noticed it save Susan Blake, who left Clement Page’s side to gather Bill’s clothes. “Go and get them, Bill,” she said. “Bring them back to shore.”
Bill didn’t look at her, but his eyes met Beverly’s when she turned and saw him standing in his underwear. He went to the end of the boat ramp, slipped into the water, and began swimming out.
“Hey! Come back here!” yelled a fireman, but Bill wasn’t taking orders from anyone.
When Richard noticed his phone again, he saw by its timer that he’d been connected to Donna for twenty-five minutes. He sat up to look at those who’d gathered on the shore. And then he saw Bill.
“Someone’s coming to rescue us, Perry,” he said.
“Ain’t no rescuin’, Richie,” said Perry. “The time for rescuin’s over.”
As commanded by his words, a swell from a passing freighter reached them just then, causing the part of the raft holding Perry to break away from the part that Richie was on. When Perry’s side began to sink, he moved his hands from his sides to link them on the top of his chest. Richard watched him disappear from the surface of the water, his face still visible beneath it. When the strands of kelp that connected them broke and also went down, however, Richard lay back, linking his fingers, too.
He stayed that way until Bill got there and pulled him back to shore.
MUCH LIKE THE KELP HAD KEPT PERRY ATTACHED to Richard for a while, Perry’s disappearance kept the rest of them together for most of the next week while police boats dredged the shoals of the bay. By week’s end, however, a deluge caused the postponement of the search.
Clement Page was the first to break the bond they’d formed when he finally got Beverly’s resignation letter and told them without looking Beverly’s way that his workload was such that he had to get back to it.
The second to break away was Detective Triplet. He, too, spoke without looking at Beverly, but she thought she understood something in it and walked him to the door, with Bill not far behind her.
“Thanks for everything,” she said.
“Good-night and good luck,” said Bill, making Susan Blake laugh.
Each night after Perry’s disappearance, Bill went to his garage to work on Richard’s car, and twice Richard joined him. To work on a car with one’s son-in-law seemed just the thing after all they’d been through. That Bill was not his son-in-law was entirely beside the point.
The next to leave, two days later, was Susan Blake. On the night of Clement’s departure, he’d called her to say he had another terrific Bordeaux, causing her to say she’d grown partial to cabernet sauvignon. The next night, when he called to mention a good cabernet, she said that Malbec was more to her taste. He didn’t call again, and Susan went home alone.
That left the nuclear family: father, mother, daughter, and son-in-law. Bill and Beverly had their own house, of course, but when one of them went there, the other stayed at Richard and Donna’s. Donna didn’t like that. She was tired of having people around, so on the evening of Susan Blake’s departure, she asked Richard to go with Bill to his garage, then told Beverly that she needed time alone. She thought Beverly might argue, but Beverly said she could use some time, too, and left after giving her mother a kiss.
Donna found some bourbon in Richard’s cupboard, poured a couple of fingers of it into a glass, got some ice, and went into his living room to sit. She hadn’t been back to her house since Perry’s arraignment, and now she played with the idea of selling it. Richard had asked her to a couple of times before, but she’d put him off. It had been a good move for her financially—the house was worth twice what she’d paid for it—but she sometimes feared that Richard thought it meant she didn’t love him. And she did love him, if not with all her heart, at least with the part of it that told her whatever she waited for wouldn’t come. Or wouldn’t come again. She rarely thought of Beverly’s father, unless she was drinking alone.
Beverly never thought of her father. She didn’t think of Richard much, either, and though she often thought of Bill, it wasn’t in the way he wanted her to. On the night she left her mother, in fact, she drove past Bill’s garage, not because she was thinking of him, exactly, but to make sure he was there. He was and so was Richard. She could see them through the window, looking into Richard’s old car. She parked and took out her phone. Since Detective Triplet wasn’t working nights that week, she tried his home number. It rang seven times before he answered. He said he’d been asleep, that he’d needed an early night after all they’d been through. He didn’t say more until she told him she was thinking of buying a couple of double meat, double cheese burgers at the Frisco Freeze and asked if he’d like to share them with her. She thought he might say he’d meet her there, but he said they could eat at his house if she liked. She didn’t pause before saying she’d be right over.
When she got off the phone, she texted Bill to say they needed to talk. When Bill got the text, he sighed before he read it. Not because of some premonition but because it was the second text he’d received that night, the other one from Susan Blake, and he thought she was texting him again.
TWO WEEKS LATER, WHEN THEIR LIVES were once again in disarray, Perry’s body washed up among the detritus that the tide brought in at Point Defiance. When Richard heard about it, he cried like he hadn’t since he was a child. When Clement and Susan and Donna and Beverly heard about it, they went about their business, only nodding to themselves.
Bill was the last to hear about it but the first to offer to go to the morgue and identify the body. It was there he met the parents of Katie Smothers. They might not have spoken had Bill not seen their photos in the paper and stopped to offer his condolences.
“It’s all just the damnedest shame,” said Mr. Smothers.
That struck Bill as odd. Why would they come view the body of the man who’d killed their daughter, and what was the damnedest shame?
It wasn’t until the following morning, when he went out onto his porch to get his paper, that he understood. An autopsy had come back saying Katie had died of asphyxiation, yes, but caused by a heroin overdose.
Bill would have shown the paper to Beverly, had Beverly been home. Since she wasn’t, he called Richard and shared it with him. Richard shared it with Donna, and Donna shared it with Beverly, who’d been sleeping in the house she grew up in.
News of Perry’s innocence was picked up by the wire services and printed in one of the English-language dailies in Egypt. Hetshepsit read it while working in her mother’s stall at the local bazaar. She hadn’t died of getting a pillow in her mouth, nor was whoring the family business, nor had she lived with Perry White. When she shared the article with her mother, her mother remembered that Perry had often come to their stall. She remembered that they’d put up with him for a while but had finally told him that if he wasn’t going to buy anything, he had to make room for those who were. After that, he didn’t come again, and now they were reading the article. When the news broke in Tacoma, Judge Follett dismissed the charges against Perry, posthumously. It hadn’t been necessary, but when Richard called to thank him for it, he said it was only just, and that justice was his business.
Richard quoted him at dinner that night before asking Donna to sell her house again. Donna said she couldn’t sell it while Beverly was staying there, though both of them knew that Beverly spent most of her time at Detective Triplet’s.
Their dinner was a particularly delicious salmon that Donna had bought down on Ruston Way after sitting and watching the Canada geese for a while.
Perry was buried in the same cemetery as Winnie, but several sections away, in a plot next to his mother.
For the next half year, someone brought him flowers every Saturday.