“I never heard a hint, even a whisper that he was bent. I had him out on the homestead. He worked for me.”
“He worked for everybody.”
“I know.” She closed her eyes and shook her head. “I’ve got good instincts, Jim.”
“The best in the business,” he said. “Listen, Kate. We’ve all got our blind spots. Mr. Fix-it was yours.”
“How much damage did he do here?”
Jim was too smart and too experienced to give the obvious answer. “Not much. It’s hard to hide that kind of thing in a small community. If he’d married, say a woman with children from a previous relationship, and if one of those children had been a girl, then I’d be seriously worried. But he didn’t.” He thought. “He could have been that one guy who was moving himself out of the reach of temptation.”
She rubbed at the scar on her neck. “You read the report. You saw what the officer said about Duffy’s attitude. It’s the classic Who, me? response of the sexual predator. And they don’t learn, and they don’t grow, and they don’t ever, ever change, and they never, never stop.”
“You would have heard,” he said. “I would have heard. Billy, Auntie Vi, Bernie, someone would have heard.”
“I sure as hell would have heard!” Bobby roared, causing them both to jump. His chair skidded to a halt and he glared impartially at both of them. Dinah, outlined against the gathering light outside the big windows in the creek-facing wall, came soft-footed up behind him and put a hand on his shoulder.
“Yeah,” Jim said, “we all would have.” He looked at Kate. “And none of us did. Maybe he was that guy, Kate.”
“No,” she said. She moved finally, to save and close the file and swing around to face them. “Who was his corrections officer?”
Jim rifled through the stack. “Melinda Davis. You know her?”
“No. You?”
“No. We can call in the morning, see if she has anything to add.”
“No.” Kate got to her feet.
“No?” With him sitting and her standing she actually had the advantage of height on him. Not much, but a little. It made him want to pull her into his lap.
“No,” she repeated. “I’m going to Anchorage.”
“I’m not going to Anchorage,” Johnny said. “My mother’s in Anchorage. What if we run into her? What if she calls the cops? I’m staying here with Auntie Vi. I’ve got school.”
That last remark showed how truly desperate he was to stay in the Park. She said, and despised herself for doing so, “Some nut burned us out of our house. You want him to do the same thing to Auntie Vi?”
“Oh.” He flushed. “No.”
“Okay, then.”
George rolled the Cessna out of the hangar and they were in Anchorage in an hour and a half, and on the doorstep of Jack’s town house on Westchester Lagoon fifteen minutes after that.
Johnny hung back. “I haven’t been back here since she sent me away to Arizona to live with Gran. Do you think it’s okay?”
“I changed all the locks. And she lives on the other side of town. She’ll never know we’re here, Johnny.” Unless I tell her, she thought.
“Still.” He stopped just inside the doorway and looked around like he’d never seen the place before. “How come we’re here, anyway? I figured it would be sold. She wouldn’t let me come back here and take anything with me.”
Kate should have known that, and she should have taken steps to see that Johnny got his belongings following his father’s death. She would have, if she hadn’t been off wandering in a grief-induced fog of her own at the time. “He left it to me,” she said. “It’s part of your college fund. I suppose I should rent it out instead of letting it sit empty, but he had mortgage insurance and it’s free and clear, with enough left over for taxes.” She shrugged. “I’ll get around to it one of these days. Find a manager or something.”
She was as uncomfortable as he was, which, perversely, made him relax a little. “My stuff still there?”
“Everything’s just like it was.” One of the reasons she was finding it hard to move inside.
He took the decision from her hands, pushed the door open, and ran upstairs to what had been his bedroom. “It’s all here, Kate! My Nintendo and everything!”
“Good,” she said.
“What?”
“I said that’s good, Johnny.” She closed the door behind her.
The next thing she knew she was standing outside the door of Jack’s bedroom.
A cold nose thrust into her hand, and she looked down to see Mutt looking up at her. “Yeah,” she said, and went back downstairs to drop her bag in the sparsely furnished guest room.
The bed had about as much give to it as bedrock, but the relief she felt was palpable. “Okay, let’s go,” she told Mutt. In the hallway she yelled, “Okay, we’re outta here!” and Johnny came clattering down the stairs.
She went through the connecting door to the garage, where sat Jack’s Subaru Forester. Johnny brightened. “This mine, too?” She smiled. “You bet. But for now, I drive.” “Aw, Kate, come on, I can drive. I’ve driven your truck.” Kate opened a door and Mutt leaped into the back seat. “Get in the car, Morgan.”
He was still arguing with her as they were backing out of the driveway.
Gary Drussell hadn’t been in the phone book but he was listed. He wasn’t exactly friendly when she called, Kate noted, but he did give her his street address and directions on how to get there.
He lived in Muldoon, in back of the Totem Theaters. This was way too close to Jane, who lived across Muldoon off Patterson. Johnny said nothing, but Kate noticed he slid down in his seat until his eyes were barely at dashboard level. She quelled a craven impulse to do the same. She wasn’t afraid of Jane, but she was afraid of losing Johnny, and she was terrified of letting Jack down.
The Drussells were living in one of the zero-lot line homes that had gone up like weeds in Anchorage during the oil boom of the early ‘80s, most of them built on filled-in wetlands. This last made for either a damp basement or an unstable foundation or both, but by the time this was discovered the developers had long since decamped to Maui or Miami with their profits and their trophy blondes, leaving homeowners with a choice: bail or bail. Many more than Anchorage lenders were comfortable admitting to had simply turned in their keys and walked away. The rest invested in small pumps and garden hoses, and during especially rainy Augusts you could go into any one of these neighborhoods and count by tens the green plastic lines snaking from downstairs’ windows, emptying the water out of basements as fast as it seeped back in again. Ear, nose, and throat specialists reported a radical increase in upper respiratory complaints during such seasons, mostly from the mold and mildew that resulted.
It made Kate proud that the Park had no such tiling as a Planning and Zoning Commission. Not that she had anything left to plan or zone.
Gary Drussell answered the front door before the recollection had time to plunge her into remembered gloom.
It was Saturday, with weak sunlight filtering through a broken cloud cover. His hair had darkened and his skin lightened since the last time she’d seen him. Instead of overalls covered in fish scales, he was dressed in sweats, dark blue with white piping, clean and neat. “Hi, Kate,” he said, and stepped back. “Come on in.”
“Hi, Gary. This is Johnny Morgan. Mutt okay in your yard?”
Gary cast a wry look at the street. “I think the question is, is the neighborhood okay with Mutt on the loose?”
“Stay,” Kate told Mutt, who gave a disgruntled sigh and plunked her butt down on the wooden porch.
“Morgan, huh?” Gary said, leading the way through a cluttered living room. A girl lay sprawled on the couch in front of a blaring television, remote in hand. She looked up, and Kate felt Johnny pause. She didn’t blame him; the girl was lovely, with a rich fall of dark hair, dark blue eyes, and new breasts pushing out the front of her cherry red T-shirt in a way no adolescent boy could ignore.