Dad uttered an indignant “Ha!” I knew where this was going. I should have known better than to have asked. “Biggest scam in the world, bottled water. What comes out of the tap is good enough for anybody. This town’s water is fine, and I should know. Only suckers pay for it. Next thing you know, they’ll find a way to make you pay for air. Remember when you didn’t have to pay for TV? You just had an antenna, watched for nothing. Now you have to pay for cable. That’s the way to make money. Find a way to make people pay for something they’re getting now for nothing.”
Mom, oblivious to my father’s rant, said, “I think Marla’s spending too much time alone, that she needs to get out, do things to take her mind off what happened, to—”
“I said I’d do it, Mom.”
“I was just saying,” she said, the first hint of an edge entering her voice, “that it would be good if we all made an effort where she’s concerned.”
Dad, not taking his eyes off the screen, said, “It’s been ten months, Arlene. She’s gotta move on.”
Mom sighed. “Of course, Don, like that’s something you just get over. Walk it off, that’s your solution to everything.”
“She’s gone a bit crackers, if you ask me.” He looked up. “Is there more coffee?”
“I just said I made a fresh pot. Now who’s the one who isn’t listening?” Then, like an afterthought, she said to me, “When you get there, remember to just identify yourself. She always finds that helpful.”
“I know, Mom.”
“You seemed to get your cereal down okay,” I said to Ethan once we were in the car. Ethan was running behind — dawdling deliberately, I figured, hoping I’d believe he really was sick — so I offered to drop him off at school instead of making him walk.
“I guess,” he said.
“There something going on?”
He looked out his window at the passing street scene. “Nope.”
“Everything okay with your teacher?”
“Yup.”
“Everything okay with your friends?”
“I don’t have any friends,” he said, still not looking my way.
I didn’t have a ready answer for that. “I know it takes time, moving to a new school. But aren’t there some of the kids still around that you knew before we went to Boston?”
“Most of them are in a different class,” Ethan said. Then, with a hint of accusation in his voice: “If I hadn’t moved to Boston I’d probably still be in the same class with them.” Now he looked at me. “Can we move back there?”
That was a surprise. He wanted to return to a situation where I was rarely home at night? Where he hardly ever saw his grandparents?
“No, I don’t see that happening.”
Silence. A few seconds went by, then: “When are we going to have our own house?”
“I’ve gotta find a job first, pal.”
“You got totally screwed over.”
I shot him a look. He caught my eye, probably wanting to see whether I was shocked.
“Don’t use that kind of language,” I said. “You start talking like that around me, then you’ll forget and do it front of Nana.” His grandmother and grandfather had always been Nana and Poppa to him.
“That’s what Poppa said. He told Nana that you got screwed over. When they stopped making the newspaper just after you got there.”
“Yeah, well, I guess I did. But I wasn’t the only one. Everybody was fired. The reporters, the pressmen, everyone. But I’m looking for something. Anything.”
If you looked up “shame” in the dictionary, surely one definition should be: having to discuss your employment situation with your nine-year-old.
“I guess I didn’t like being with Mrs. Tanaka every night,” Ethan said. “But when I went to school in Boston, nobody...”
“Nobody what?”
“Nothin’.” He was silent another few seconds, and then said, “You know that box of old things Poppa has in the basement?”
“The entire basement is full of old things.” I almost added, Especially when my dad is down there.
“That box, a shoe box? That has stuff in it that was his dad’s? My great-grandfather? Like medals and ribbons and old watches and stuff like that?”
“Okay, yeah, I know the box you mean. What about it?”
“You think Poppa checks that box every day?”
I pulled the car over to the curb half a block down from the school. “What on earth are you talking about?”
“Never mind,” he said. “It doesn’t matter.”
Ethan dragged himself out of the car without saying good-bye and headed in the direction of the school like a dead man walking.
Marla Pickens lived in a small one-story house on Cherry Street. From what I knew, her parents — Aunt Agnes and her husband, Gill — owned the house and paid the mortgage on it, but Marla struggled to pay the property taxes and utilities with what money she brought in. Having spent a career in newspapers, and still having some regard for truth and accuracy, I didn’t have much regard for how Marla made her money these days. She’d been hired by some Web firm to write bogus online reviews. A renovation company seeking to rehabilitate and bolster its Internet reputation would engage the services of Surf-Rep, which had hundreds of freelancers who went online to write fictitious laudatory reviews.
Marla had once shown me one she’d written for a roofing company in Austin, Texas. “A tree hit our house and put a good-size hole in the roof. Marchelli Roofing came within the hour, fixed the roof, and reshingled it, and all for a very reasonable cost. I cannot recommend them highly enough.”
Marla had never been to Austin, did not know anyone at Marchelli Roofing, and had never, in her life, hired a contractor of any kind to do anything.
“Pretty good, huh?” she’d said. “It’s kind of like writing a really, really short story.”
I didn’t have the energy to get into it with her at the time.
I took the bypass to get from one side of town to the other, passing under the shadow of the Promise Falls water tower, a ten-story structure that looked like an alien mother ship on stilts.
When I got to Marla’s, I pulled into the driveway beside her faded red, rusting, mid-nineties Mustang. I opened the rear hatch of my Mazda 3 and grabbed two reusable grocery bags Mom had filled with frozen dinners. I felt a little embarrassed doing it, wondering whether Marla would be insulted that her aunt seemed to believe she was too helpless to make her own meals, but what the hell. If it made Mom happy...
Heading up the walk, I noticed weeds and grass coming up between the cracks in the stone.
I mounted the three steps to the door, switched all the bags to my left hand, and, as I rapped on it with my fist, noticed a smudge on the door frame.
The whole house needed painting or, failing that, a good power-washing, so the smudge, which was at shoulder height and looked like a handprint, wasn’t that out of place. But something about it caught my eye.
It looked like smeared blood. As if someone had swatted the world’s biggest mosquito there.
I touched it tentatively with my index finger and found it dry.
When Marla didn’t answer the door after ten seconds, I knocked again. Five seconds after that, I tried turning the knob.
Unlocked.
I swung it wide enough to step inside and called out, “Marla? It’s Cousin David!”
Nothing.
“Marla? Aunt Arlene wanted me to drop off a few things. Homemade chili, some other stuff. Where are you?”
I stepped into the L-shaped main room. The front half of the house was a cramped living room with a weathered couch, a couple of faded easy chairs, a flat-screen TV, and a coffee table supporting an open laptop in sleep mode that Marla had probably been using to say some nice things about a plumber in Poughkeepsie. The back part of the house, to the right, was the kitchen. Off to the left was a short hallway with a couple of bedrooms and a bathroom.