Mrs. McCoy rose to her feet.
"Don't be sorry, young man," she said. "Don't. It's good to remember a child you loved, even if you've lost him."
He thought of his own tears, his own rage, his years of hiding in old houses from himself and the whole world. The pain he had suffered... and yet she was right.
"I know," said Don. Almost he told them about Nellie. But he couldn't. In this home, there was only one lost child to be remembered. There were other places where Nellie's memory was the foundation of life. After ten years, they still shed tears for their boy. The edge of grief never lost its sharpness. And yet... there was a nobility about their suffering. Their child still lived in them as a light of goodness. If Lanny were still around, they would not have the grief; but they would not have the illusion, either. Just as Don would never hear a teenage Nellie shout at him what a terrible hateful man he was, how he was trying to ruin her life. She would never wreck his car, never fight with him over whether she would or would not wear that outfit on a date. The lost child remained a dream of a child. A sweet ghost haunting the memory. The tears that came were not bitter for these people. It was a sweet grief they felt. They had lost him, but once they had him, such a good child, they had him and he still gave shape and meaning to their lives.
He hadn't bargained on learning so much from these people.
Mrs. McCoy came to him in the doorway, took his hands, held them in hers. "I believe you do know," she said.
Out in his truck, driving back through the streets of Greensboro, Don got caught up in the traffic of teenagers from Page High School racing to get to the Weaver Center downtown for special classes that no one high school in the city could afford to teach. The kids called it the "Weaver 500," and drove like stock car madmen. Don wasn't exactly moseying down Elm, but they were whipping around him to pass at fifty or sixty on what was, after all, a residential street through this part of town. Miracle that more of them weren't killed.
He imagined talking to Nellie when she got her license. "I don't care how late you are," he'd have said. "You got twenty miles an hour over the limit for three blocks, do you know how much time you've saved? Exactly none. But in the meantime you've put your life, everybody else's lives at risk. Better to be late. Always be late. I'll never be mad at you for being late. Just be safe. Be safe."
It was blinding him, the tears that came when he thought this way, when he imagined the kind of father he might have been. The father he would never be. Even if he married someone and had children, none of them would be Nellie. That ache would never be eased. Besides, look who he fell in love with lately. A woman who couldn't trust herself with her own children. Then a dead woman. Nope, he wasn't exactly picking the child-rearing type. Nellie was it. Because he knew how much it cost to lose one. Couldn't put himself at risk like that again.
It was obvious, of course, that Lanny McCoy was dead. When Lissy told his parents that story about him running off with Sylvie—how ludicrous to imagine even if Sylvie hadn't been dead!—it could only mean one thing. Lissy knew that neither of them would ever be showing up to contradict her story. How did it play out? Did she tell Lanny what had happened, and then he got all these crazy ideas about going to the police and pleading self-defense? He could imagine him earnestly telling her, "She hit you with a rock, you had to defend yourself," but Lissy would know that the prosecutor would have an expert testify that you had to hold onto the victim's throat so, so, so long in order to strangle her. Strangling is never a crime of passion, the prosecutor would say. It's a cold-hearted crime. It's a crime of icy hate. So what could Lissy do? She lures Lanny somewhere, maybe even tells him she wants to show him the body, but they're down in that gully maybe, and suddenly there's a rock in her hand, a blow to his head.
Or maybe she never talked to him at all. She knew already that she couldn't afford to have anyone else who knew about that tunnel. The body couldn't be found until she was long gone. Lanny never got a choice. Because a woman like Lissy, she doesn't love anybody. Lanny was good for sex and drugs. But expendable. So she went up to the kitchen and got a knife and was waiting for him when he arrived. For all Don knew, his body was farther down the tunnel.
Then she went to his parents and told them a story that would hold them for a while. A few days. Long enough to get away. Only instead of a few days, it held them for years. Because Lanny had never told them about the tunnel. And since the house was closed, why would they dream of looking there in the cellar? No, Lissy's secret was safe in that old house. Until now.
He had to laugh at his own pretension. Until now? What a joke. Her secret was still safe. Sure, he could go to the police and tell them he found a body in the tunnel. But how could he possibly explain anything about it? Everything he knew, he learned from a ghost. The dead woman was not going to be acceptable as a witness. Nobody was going to take her deposition. So they'd have a body and no leads and that would be it. They probably wouldn't even figure out who it was. Sylvie was never reported missing, except to the McCoys, and to them she was missing because she ran off with their son. The story of the body found in the basement could play for a day in the local paper and on the TV news—they'd find a way to sneak footage of that corpse onto the screen—but no one would ever make the connection. Or if they did, nothing would come of it. The trail was too cold.
Lissy actually went to Lanny's parents and wept as she told them her lies. Cried as if her heart were breaking, when in fact she murdered the two people she was slandering. Don boiled with rage against her. This Lissy Yont—for sheer gall she topped even Don's ex-wife when she testified how the baby couldn't be Don's because he only had sex with his secretaries at the office.
He got to Friendly Avenue and headed west, but instead of turning south into the College Hill area where the Bellamy house was, he drove on to the grocery store where he'd been making his phone calls. The huge new Harris Teeter—the local pundits were now calling it the Taj Ma-Teeter—had a pretty good deli. He went in and bought vast quantities of basic food. The soup of the day in a tub the size of a paint can. Another container of potato salad, another of fruit salad. Don remembered how much food could disappear when it was carried upstairs to Gladys. He had to talk to the Weird sisters, and so he needed a serious peace offering. He stopped in the bakery and bought a cheesecake. None of the food would be as good as what they made themselves—but if they were as weary and sick as Miz Judea or whoever it was said this morning, they'd be glad of the break from cooking.
Don pulled up in front of the carriagehouse instead of parking around the corner beside the Bellamy house. He got the bags of food out of the cab and carried them up to the porch.
It took even longer to get someone to answer the door this time. Naptime? Or both of them upstairs with Gladys, and now so feeble that getting down the stairs took forever? He wasn't going to give up, though. He pounded on the door, he rang the doorbell over and over. Finally the door opened, and not a crack, either. Miz Evelyn stood there, haggard, stooped, her eyes bloodshot and angry enough to kill on the spot. "Who the hell do you think you are!" she demanded.
"I'm lunch," he said, holding out the bags. "It's only Harris Teeter deli stuff, but it's edible and you didn't have to cook it."
"After what you done—"