“Yeah, well, he sure wishes he’d done that.” Claire realized she’d spoken of him in the present tense, and bit her lip. Tears welled up in her eyes almost instantly. I wanted to keep her focused on the story, so I asked her what happened next.
“That was when Dennis heard someone coughing.”
I turned and looked at her. “So someone was home?”
“Yeah.”
“Phyllis Pearce?”
“No,” Claire said. “It was a guy. An old man. I mean, Dennis didn’t know he was an old man at first. All Dennis heard was the coughing. It was coming from the basement, just down this hall from the laundry room.”
She took another sip of her water.
“So Dennis goes to this door, but it’s got a lock on it. Like, with a key? Kind of like what you have on your locker at school, but not a combination. There’s someone behind the door, locked in. He’s coughing and shouting, ‘Fire,’ but he can’t shout very loud because it’s all smoky and the man is really old and sick.”
“What’d Dennis do?”
“He figures he should get the guy out right away, get him some fresh air, and he looks around for a key, and it’s right there, sitting on a windowsill, so it’s really easy to find, and he takes off the lock and opens the door and he’s, like, totally freaked out by what he finds.”
Claire stops her story. She seems almost afraid to continue it.
“What did Dennis find, Claire?”
She swallowed. “First of all, Dennis said, forget the smoke. It was the other smells that just took his breath away. Like, shit and piss and stuff like that. So there’s this guy in there, he’s, like, seventy or eighty years old or something, and there’s a wheelchair in the room, and this guy’s sitting up in bed, he can’t walk or anything and he wants Dennis to get him out of there if the place is on fire. And Dennis calms him down, says the fire is out, but he’s, like, what the fuck, right? Who is this guy and what’s he doing down there?”
I got out my phone and handed it to Claire. “Open up Safari,” I said. “Google ‘Harry Pearce, Griffon, Niagara Falls’ and see what you get. While we’re waiting, keep talking.”
She tapped the app, typed the words into the search field. “It’s taking a while.”
“That’s okay.”
“So anyway, when the old man realizes he’s not going to burn up, he tells Dennis he has to get him out of there. That he has to do it fast before his wife gets back because she’ll get really mad. But then Dennis hears this noise from upstairs. Someone racing into the house. See, what Dennis figured was, the house had, like, an alarm system, but instead of going to a security company, it just sent a message to a couple of people.”
“Phyllis Pearce, and Ricky Haines,” I said.
“Yeah. The old man knows someone’s coming, so he throws this thing to Dennis. That notebook I was going to show you.”
I tapped my chest. “I got it.”
“Okay. So Dennis picks up the book and stuffs it in his pocket just before Ricky shows up, yelling ‘Dad, Dad, Dad!’ And he comes into the room, and he finds Dennis standing there. Ricky’s all, like, who the hell are you, and Dennis says there was a fire, and by the way, what the fuck is this? You got an old guy prisoner in your basement?”
She looked down at her phone. “Okay, some stuff’s coming in. There’s a story here about Niagara Falls tragedies.”
“See what it says about Harry Pearce.”
Claire moved the story up the screen with her thumb. “Okay, so it says here he went out in a boat one night, didn’t have oars with him and the motor didn’t work, and he went over.”
“What else?”
“Okay, it was, like, seven years ago and—”
“What’s it say about a body?”
“A body?”
“Did they find him?”
“Hang on.” She continued reading. “Okay, they found the boat, but his body was never found.” Claire looked up from the screen. “So, that’s him? In the basement?”
“Evidently,” I said.
“That’s messed up,” she said.
“So Ricky finds Dennis with Harry Pearce. Then what?”
“Ricky says something like, ‘You’re a dead man,’ to Dennis, and starts to go for him, except Dennis is still holding the little fire extinguisher, right? And he aims it up and shoots shit right into Ricky’s face. It buys Dennis enough time to get past him and get the hell out of there.”
“Why doesn’t Dennis go straight to the cops?” I asked.
Claire looked at me like I was an idiot. “How many reasons do you want? First, Dennis tells me, when you’re black, you don’t ever go to the cops. Not for anything, not ever. Second, Ricky is the cops. Then Ricky shouts out to Dennis as he’s leaving, ‘You go to the police and you’re dead. Totally dead.’ That if he goes to the cops, Ricky’ll know.”
I wasn’t convinced. If Dennis didn’t feel it was safe to go to the Griffon cops, he could have gone to the state police.
“And there was one more thing,” Claire said. “Ricky says to Dennis, he says, ‘You tell anyone, and I’ll find your girlfriend, that fucking mayor’s kid’ — that’s what Dennis says he said — ‘and slice her goddamn tits off.’”
I shot Claire a look.
“Yeah,” Claire said. “Harsh, huh?”
Fifty-nine
“So that’s why Dennis had to see me. He was scared for me, and he didn’t know what he should do,” Claire said.
“After a couple of days, you must have come to some decision.”
Claire nodded. She found another napkin, blew her nose. “I said to him that we should talk to my dad, that he’d know what to do. Dad doesn’t trust the Griffon cops, but he would probably know someone, like, in the FBI or something like that.”
“That was a good plan,” I said.
“He was still scared to do it, but we talked about it for hours and hours, looking at the pluses and minuses. But we both realized we couldn’t go on like this forever, hiding out.”
“No.”
Claire nodded. “I can’t believe they’re both dead. Hanna and Dennis. My best friend, my boyfriend.” She started to sob quietly.
I let her cry for the next few miles, figured she might as well get it out. Not that she was likely to be finished before we got to Griffon. She’d be doing this for weeks. When her crying subsided somewhat, I got out my phone and placed a call.
I thought it was time.
Augustus Perry answered. “What?”
“I didn’t know one of your guys — Ricky Haines — was Phyllis Pearce’s son.”
“If you’re going to start telling me things you don’t know, I’m gonna be on the phone with you all day,” he said.
“Why’s his name not Pearce?”
Augie let out a long sigh. “What the fuck does this have to do with anything?”
“Bear with me, okay?”
“Okay, from what I know, Phyllis was married once before to some guy with the last name Haines. They had Ricky, but when Ricky was a kid his dad had lung cancer or a heart attack or something. Few years after that, Phyllis started living with Harry Pearce and eventually married him, but she wanted the kid to keep the real dad’s name. And Harry Pearce is dead, too.”
“Which leads me to my next question. He went over the falls seven years ago.”
“Why are you wasting my time if you already know this stuff?”
“They never found his body, right?”
I could almost hear Augie thinking through the connection. “That’s right. Just bits and pieces of the boat.”
“There’s a reason,” I said. “Harry Pearce is alive. He’s living in Phyllis’ basement.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”