She went back to Harry's notes. Lester Van Slyke worked as a quality assurance engineer for Boeing in Seattle. His wife had been with the law firm of Crumley and Pittman, also in Seattle.
Two calls got Anna the number of Boeing's personnel department. She was shuffled around to three different people but finally got what she was asking for-a list of the company's quality assurance engineers. Lester was one of nine in the electronics department.
She called the eight. Three were available. Without out-and-out lying, she gave each the impression that she was making routine calls gathering general background information on Lester Van Slyke to the end that he would be granted a higher security clearance on a government project where he was acting as a consultant.
Ms. Tremane was suspicious and told Anna nothing. Mr. Burman was uninterested in helping Lester and came across as jealous of the fictitious government consulting job. He told Anna that Lester took a lot of sick leave, implied that he was accident-prone and hinted that the government could get a more dependable consultant, namely himself. Mr. Richmond was positively loquacious. He seemed to genuinely wish to help Lester get the apocryphal security clearance. He described Les as quiet, self-effacing, humble, intelligent, caring, hard-working and a slew of other adjectives that fit with what Anna already knew. When pressed, Richmond admitted that Lester had been down on his luck for a few years and taken a good deal of sick leave. It wasn't bogus, the well-meaning Richmond went on to say. Twice Lester had been hospitalized.
Richmond was one of those people who so love to talk that the pure joy of rattling their tongues between their teeth overcomes reticence and discretion. He told Anna Les was concerned about his son. Though the boy seemed to love his stepmom, he'd never really recovered from his biological mother's death and Les's remarriage. Riding the tide of gossip, he told her Les always spoke highly of his second wife but not with the love and humor with which he'd spoken of Rory's real mom. Carolyn, he said, seemed attached to Les. She'd call him at work three or four times every day and Les would get anxious when he missed her call and downright upset when he had to work late for any reason. Anna kept him on the line several more minutes in which "tired, harried and worried" were added to the list of descriptors, and she obtained the name of the hospital where Richmond claimed to have visited Lester.
When she'd gotten everything of value she was going to get out of Mr. Richmond, it took another five minutes to get off the phone with him. Ear and brain were overheated from so much talk; talk without faces, or body language, no setting, merely voices piercing a tangled web of impersonal wires. Anna took a few minutes to breathe, to feel her butt on the chair, her feet on the floor, to hear the pleasant bustle of the office and see the shapes and colors that made up her surroundings. Anchored again in the real world, she allowed the fragments of information regarding Lester Van Slyke to coalesce in her mind.
Harried. Worried. Scared of missing Carolyn's calls, of getting home late. Rory attached to stepmother, yet not forgiving Les the marriage. Rory's contempt for his father. Humble. Self-effacing. Sick leave. Hospitalization. This fit with what Anna had observed in Lester Van Slyke, though at the time what she'd seen had no meaning for her.
The information operator provided her with the phone number of the hospital where Lester had been treated. Unsurprisingly, Anna got nothing from them. Medical establishments were well aware of what information they could divulge and what they could not.
Even without verification, Anna was sure of what she had seen: the bruises on Lester's legs, some new, some already fading, the cuts on his forearms.
Folding her notes, she left the resource management building and walked the quarter of a mile past pine-shrouded employee housing to where Rory shared a dorm with three city boys in the park to learn appreciation for the flora and fauna.
An African-American youth in sweatpants and a New York Rangers T-shirt answered Anna's knock. Rory was upstairs in his room. Two lung-deep bellows brought him shambling down. He also was clad in sweatpants and a T-shirt and looked as though he'd been dragged from sleep.
Rather than invite Anna into the mess, he stepped out on the porch and shut the door.
Anna chose not to give him time to organize his thoughts or get his defenses up but squared off in front of him and asked him point-blank: "Rory, how long had Carolyn been using your father as a punching bag?"
Chapter 12
Anna'd been hoping for a reaction to her jackbooted approach. She wasn't disappointed. As the words struck him, Rory stiffened, the muscles of his face paralyzed with shock. There followed a brief struggle where he forgot to maintain that paralysis, to keep control, or at least appear to. Emotion won out. The hardened cheeks, the wide-open eyes, the rictus of his lips began to melt. Then, in sudden collapse, they flowed together in a twisted malformation and Rory began to cry. Not as a boy cries but as a man who has denied tears for decades will cry with squeezed little whimpers, convulsive jerks and dry eyes.
Moments after this phenomenon began, rage roared up inside him, so strong it spun Rory around and brought his unprotected fists hard against the wood of the house, a fire out of control.
The porch was wide enough; Anna moved discreetly out of the way until the violence burned itself out. So vehement was his outburst, she knew it couldn't be sustained for long.
The pounding stopped. His knuckles weren't raw or bleeding. Even in extremity he'd chosen not to harm himself. A good sign. The constricted sobs subsided, leaving his face red and dry with unspent tears. At length he turned from the side of the house and looked at her, eyes empty after the storm.
"So," Anna said. "Am I to take it she'd been beating on him for a while?"
Rory collapsed. Back against the wood he slid down till his butt was on the porch and his knees poked up as high as his shoulders. The rough siding rucked his T-shirt up under his armpits but he seemed not to notice.
Anna sat down opposite him, her shoulders against the railing, her feet folded under her. After the weeping and wailing, the soft sounds of the park settled around them like a blessing. Needles in a great old lodgepole pine stirred and whispered overhead. From somewhere nearby came the purposeful skritching sounds of a squirrel squirreling away winter supplies. Into this Rory heaved a great sigh, blowing out unnamed mental toxins.
"Why don't you tell me about it?" Anna asked kindly.
Rory shot her a look as if her kindness was out of character. Anna was stung. She was alwayskind to animals and had been known to be kind to humans on those rare occasions when they deserved it.
"What's there to tell?" He looked past Anna, over the rail to the whispering pine boughs. By his tone she guessed he was shooting for blase. He only managed deep weariness.
His question was one Anna couldn't answer so she sat quietly enjoying the sun on her face and arms. Ephemeral warmth with an underlying hint of cruelty, the northern sun touched with cleansing power. In Mississippi, in summer, the sun struck like a blow. Only idiots and Yankees stood anywhere but in the patches of shade provided by the gracious old oaks and pines. Anna'd missed the scalpel touch of sunlight at higher elevations.
Rory sighed again then began to give up the shame he'd been carrying in secret for his father for so many years. "I don't know why it started. Mom-my real mom-died when I was little and it was just me and Dad for a while. That was okay, I guess. I don't remember much, really. Just a lot of quiet and a lot of TV. A lotof TV. I remember I thought it was pretty cool that I could stay up late watching television with Dad when my friends had to go to bed at eight."