ONE MORNING IN early September, Frank was in his bathroom, shaving naked at the sink, when Ian pounded at the door and finally nearly fell in. Ian asked, “Why’s your penis so big? Why’s it got hair on it? Are you sick?”
“That happens when you grow up,” Frank said, reaching for his pajama bottoms. He’d obviously never seen a grown man naked. So much for his beloved father. “It’ll happen to you, too.”
“No. I’m pretty sure I don’t want it to.”
“Well, it happens anyhow.”
“Did it happen to Claudia? Is she sick?”
Sweet Christ. Wasn’t this talk supposed to come later? Like at age fifteen?
“Women don’t have penises. They have vaginas.”
“That’s . . . like . . . what?”
“Like a hole sort of.”
“Like your butt? Girls have to pee out their butts?”
“Nope. They have two holes. One for, well, for being their vagina where a baby comes out when they have a baby.”
“A real baby could come out your butt?”
“No, honey. It’s different. It’s like . . . stretchy. Anyhow, they grow up and they get a little hair there, too. Under their arms, too. Men and women.”
“Do you think it happened to Colin?” Ian asked.
His brother.
“Not yet. Colin would only be . . . how old was Colin when the flood came?”
“Eight.”
Frank would have guessed six, but it had been only moments, pulled taut by anxiety and exhaustion; there had been no time for a good look. How light Ian had felt that morning, in his arms, like a bundle of sticks. Ian must have gained ten pounds since Christmas.
“So he’d be almost nine now.”
“Hmm,” Ian said. “Are you pretty old, Dad?”
The jocular affirmative answer, something about older than mud, sprang to Frank’s lips, but he quelled it. Children with lost parents were extremely serious about death, and he didn’t need a psychiatrist to tell him that. The margin between death and their parents concerned them, particularly if they’d experienced loss. “No, I’m not that old. Look at old Grandpa Jack. I could get that old. My father died, when he was my age, but it was in an accident. He got caught in a big accident. I’m pretty good.”
“I hope you don’t get old like Jack,” Ian said. “Jack is very, very, very sad.”
“But Grandma’s happy, and she’s old, in a way. She’s not going to die.”
“Is Claudia pretty old?”
“Claudia’s only the same age as Eden. She’s not even a little old.”
“What about Glory Bee?” Ian said. “She could die. I don’t think Sultana would die.”
“She could die.”
“Would you be sad?”
“Yes.”
“I mean about Claudia.”
Frank’s head felt cold, the way it had when he was a child and slugged down a second tumbler of lemonade with ginger—cold so intense it was an ache that seemed it would never abate.
“I would be sad.”
“Would you shoot a bad guy if he was killing her?”
“I don’t know. Probably yes.”
“Would you shoot a bad guy killing your old people?” Frank knew that Ian meant Cedric and Tura. “I know a bad guy killed your old people. I liked them.”
“I would have. Cedric and Tura were very good. They were very good to me and to you. I wish I had been there.”
“If you were there, maybe they would still kill them. And you, too.”
“I don’t think so.”
“They’re very bad,” Ian said. “Those bad guys are really bad. Colin says they are.”
“Did he know them?”
Frank slipped his pajama bottoms back on, trying not to make too big a deal of it, as Ian leaned over the sink, studiously squeezing a whorl of toothpaste around the edge of the drain.
“Yes.”
“Yes what?”
“Yes. Colin knew the bad guys,” said Ian. “You’re not Peter Parker.”
“Who’s Peter Parker?”
“Uh, Spider-Man?”
“Sorry. That’s a silly name. Peter Parker. Especially for a superhero.”
“He wants it to be silly. It’s a secret. Do you want to go bowling tonight? You can bring Claudia.”
“It’s a school night. I don’t think we can. Now go run. You’re late for school.” Ian dawdled so much over breakfast that he nearly invariably missed the bus, but Hope didn’t mind driving him.
Frank heard the car’s initial crunch on the gravel die away to the sound of the rain sticks they’d built as children with rice and paper towels. He turned to some papers. The hours melted. It seemed only minutes later, but the sun at the window told him hours, that Patrick yelled up the stairs, “Frank! Gent to see you.” Frank looked down from the bedroom window and saw, instead of the usual pickup truck that had seen better days, a car—nondescript, the kind of car a child would draw if asked to draw a car. It was perfectly clean, as if newly waxed. Acting on a signal from the lizard brain, Frank went into his room, pulled on his clothes, and then, carefully closing the door and turning the old key lock, he walked into the closet. Reaching up to one side, he moved the indistinguishable false panel of breadboard that hid a combination safe set flush in the wall of the shelf. His Glock was clean and loaded, as he kept it always. With it stuck in the waistband of the back of his Levi’s, under his bomber jacket, he jogged down the stairs and stepped behind the open door to glance out at the man Patrick was talking to—a relaxed, slender, healthy-looking man who could have been fifty or sixty, with his hands in the pockets of what Frank could tell was a very costly suede coat. After a minute, Frank made a noise and stepped outside.
“Hello, Frank,” the man said, extending his hand.
“Hello. How are you today?”
“I’m very well, thanks. You look good.”
“Thanks, but I don’t remember if we’ve met.” Frank was comfortably aware of the weight of the gun at his waist.
“We haven’t met that you would remember. But I knew your father as a young man, and your grandfather, your mother as well.”
“She’s off driving my son to school.”
“You have a son? A fourth generation?”
He didn’t ask if Frank had a wife. Frank’s fingertips tingled, the way people’s forearms do after they’ve narrowly avoided being creamed in a car smashup. Something about the way the visitor stood was telltale, the way a tennis pro might stand, at the ready to move left or right. An athlete. A soldier.
A cop.
“I’m a widower. My wife died nearly a year ago.”
“I’m sorry for your loss. I am a widower as well.”
Was this guy police? The phrase was so earnestly spoken, yet seemed to glide so effortlessly from the guy’s lips, without even a shift in posture, that there was history behind it. Frank said, “Are you on the job?”
“I’m retired. You?”
“Once upon a time. Long time ago. How can I help you?”
“I came to see a man about a horse actually. My daughter was at the Mistingay in Chicago in July and she got her heart set on a horse she said you owned. A horse named Glory Bee.”
“That’s my horse, but the truth is, she’s not for sale,” Frank said.
“I can offer a very nice price. As a matter of fact, isn’t that the horse?” Claudia was leading Glory Bee down from the arena. Frank wanted to signal her, Go back! Instead, he put himself between the horse and the man’s line of vision. “Were you there?”
“I wasn’t. We live north of the city. She’s a grown woman, but still her dad’s little girl. And she’s looking for a horse. My daughter described a tall, entirely black mare about five years old. First event and she all but walked away with it, Lynette said. That never happens.”
“It never happens. There was some luck involved.”
“Not according to Lynette. She was very impressed with the horse’s presence.”
The pale girl whom Patrick paid to rub Glory Bee down and watch her overnight. The tiny girl from the jockey school. Not Lynette.
Linnet, like the bird.
Frank experienced the sensation police psychiatrists sometimes called flooding, a cascade of perceptions that refused to be categorized, all pertinent and all in no order. People he had known described this kind of event to shrinks almost like a kind of breakdown, when they went in for mandatory visits after a shooting, or an accidental death in custody. Who was the girl? If he called the jockey school where Patrick had gone to speak, would there be a student of that name? How could an ex-cop afford a horse that would cost several hundred grand, easy? Why would a girl bent on flat racing suddenly decide she wanted a jumper? Unless his wife left him loaded, but even then. Frank said, “Patrick, go help Claudia rub Glory Bee down, would you?”
“She’s okay. She’s still got half her workout to do.”
“I want her to rest for today, okay?” Frank turned back to the friendly father. “My friend Patrick likes her, your daughter. I think he’s visited her school. I know they were together at the Mistingay.” He didn’t say he had himself met Linnet, like the bird, at the Mistingay.
“Really?”
“Long drive from here. To her school. For Patrick. Long drive for you.”
“Yep.”
“Do you go see her much?”
“We do sometimes.”
“You and your wife?”
“Hmm. She’s an only child.”
“Must be difficult, having only one and her in Kentucky. Kentucky, right?”
“Kentucky, yes. You get used to it.”
“Well, unless you want to talk about something else, Glory Bee’s not for sale. She’s training right now with a rider for the U.S. team.”
“She’s that good. Mind if I watch?”
Frank bared his teeth and made huffing noises he hoped resembled a laugh. “Oh, well, if you know much about show jumping, you know we can’t afford to let out those trade secrets, can we?” He said then, “You like Volvos?”
The man said, “They’re the best. Lynette calls it a grandma car. But I get a new one every three years.”
Linnet. Like the bird. Clearly, neither name was her real name.
“I might get one.”
“Sure,” the man said, in a hurry now, his voice just a quarter note flatter, like an iron bell struck while someone was holding the side of it with one hand. “I’ll be going, then.”
How bad a bad guy could he be and be this shitty stupid? He dressed very well, too. On the other hand, Frank had met some really ignorant bad guys who did very well for themselves.
Without further ado, or any handshakes, the man got into his spotless car and took off.
“Pat!” Frank called. “Did you ever actually see that girl Linnet ride a horse?”
“No,” Patrick said. “She didn’t come to the talks I gave because she said it was her practice time and they were very tight about that.”
“And the college was in Indiana, Patrick, not Kentucky. Right?”
“All those flats run over each other for me, guv. But I would have remembered Kentucky. I used to look at the pictures of the farms when I was a lad. Indiana sounds right.”
“Did you know she was coming to Chicago?”
Patrick blushed. “I never asked her to. I just saw her at the school until then. How I found out about her school, I wrote a letter once, I was a kid, twelve, to ‘the Jockey,’ a fanboy sort of a thing. They had a story about schools. So I asked, could I come see the place? Place to work if this didn’t work out here maybe. Which it did, Frank.”
“And?”
“And she was a pretty little bird.” For a moment, Frank thought Patrick was referring to a bird, to the girl’s name. Then he recognized old Brit slang.
“So you . . .”
“A bit. Then she showed up inside by the barns in Chicago. That’s her dad, huh? Toff.”
Frank said, “A bit.”
Almost idly, Frank called in the tags on the car. Minnesota plates. Memorizing plate numbers was a skill he’d mastered long ago.
The guy who looked up the plates was Eden’s age. His name was Shane Baker, and their mothers were acquainted.
“This is unremarkable, Frank,” he said, after they exchanged pleasantries, and Shane offered Frank condolences for the loss of his wife, and congratulations for the marriage of his sister. “This car is registered to Patricia Roe, of Minnetonka, Minnesota. No arrests, no violations, not even a parking ticket.”
“She didn’t live in Chicago?”
“No. Nothing here seems to suggest anything such as that. She was an ordinary citizen, according to these records. An exemplary citizen.”
Frank wanted to laugh. Like many people without much of an education, Shane Baker spoke with a formality that verged on parody. It reminded Frank of the horse race gamblers in Guys and Dolls. He glanced down at his watch. Ian’s bus would come soon. The guy in the black car hadn’t been gone for two full minutes. What if the guy simply waited, out of sight, as Ian descended from the bus? That’s all he would need to do. Sally, who could hear Ian’s school bus two miles off, gave up herding Hope’s newest project, five milking goats, and began racing toward the end of the drive, where she would lie in wait for Ian with her muzzle on her paws. As Frank watched, she then followed Ian, running out and then back to circle Ian’s legs as he made his slow, digressive journey up the drive—stopping to pick up stones and examine them for veins of gold, to prod coyote scat with a stick to find mouse skeletons, to search the gully where he’d once found, and proudly left untouched, a nest of tawny-flecked quail eggs. He was still so small and skinny, his favorite green necktie askew, blond hair spangling red strands in the bright sun.
When he got to the dooryard, Frank lifted him up. “Would you like to move to England?” he said.
“I don’t know,” Ian told him, warily. “Where is it? I’d like to go bowling.”
Ian had his birthday party planned. It would be all bowling, including the cake. He and Frank had scouted the location. Ian had gone over the guest list. He’d written down the triplets, a quiet little boy named Ted, and a talkative girl named Mai Lin.
“Can you help me put the saddle on Sultana?”
“You look beat today, buddy.”
“She likes a ride every day. Just a little ride.”
“Okay, son. Here we go.” Frank brushed Sultana and laid her red saddle pad across her back, and then buckled her into her saddle, finally setting Ian astride her. As he did, Ian reached out and brushed the back of Frank’s neck with his small hand, a tiny gesture between a pat and a hug.
Frank thought, I would shoot them. I would shoot them all.
As Ian circled the paddock, Frank heard his phone buzzing. Shane Baker was calling back.
He said, “About that car. This is rather interesting, Frank. Patricia Roe is deceased. She had not committed a crime, but it may be that she was the victim of one. She died two years ago, of a fall, in her house. She simply fell down a staircase. But there was an investigation. There was a suspicion of foul play, for some things were missing from her house. Some jewelry. An expensive oil painting of museum quality.”
“Not this car?”
“No, that car is not a stolen vehicle. The registration is current.”
“Who has it? Who are her relatives? Her children?”
“She had no relatives, no children or spouse. She was a marathon runner. Her possessions went to the library in her town and to a scholarship fund for female athletes.”
“But who has the car? It’s a new car. Newer. Two years old.”
“Well, Frank, it says here that she does,” Shane said. “I’m going to pass this along.”
Frank was willing to bet that the driver of that crisp Volvo had already decided on an early trade-in.