"Well, I'm glad to hear that," Byrnes said.
"Yes, Mr. Schwartz," Miss Kerry replied, "you should be very proud of your son."
"Well, I am. I'm happy to hear…" Byrnes stopped. He stared at Miss Kerry for a long, terrible moment.
"My son is Larry Byrnes," he said.
Miss Kerry frowned. "Larry Byrnes. Oh, I'm sorry. I mean… your son isn't in the show at all. Did he say he was? That is… well, he didn't even try out for it."
"I see," Byrnes said tightly.
"I do hope I haven't… that is, well, perhaps the boy had reasons of his own for wanting you to believe he was… well… you can't always take these things on face value, Mr. Byrnes. The boy undoubtedly had reasons."
"Yes," Byrnes said sadly. "I'm afraid he had."
He thanked Miss Kerry again, and then left her in the big, empty auditorium.
Chapter Eight
Byrnes sat in the living room and listened to the methodically monotonous locking of the grandfather clock. The clock had always been a comfort to him, a possession he'd desired ever since he'd been a boy. He could not have told why he'd wanted a grandfather clock for his own, but he had wanted one, and one day he and Harriet had driven out to the country and stopped at an old barn repainted red and white, displaying the sign ANTIQUES.
The proprietor of the shop had been a thin, wispish man with an effeminate walk, dressed like a country squire,' complete with weskit and leather-elbow-patched sports jacket. He had floated around among his rare pieces of china and cut glass, fluttering anxiously whenever Harriet lifted a piece of crockery. Eventually, they had got around to the grandfather clock. There were several clocks, and one was going for $573, and had been made in England, and was signed and dated by the craftsman who had fashioned it. It was still in fine working order, a stately, proud time-telling machine. Another clock had been made in America, and it was unsigned and undated, and it would probably need repairs—but it cost only $200.
When the proprietor saw that Byrnes' interest was in the cheaper clock, he immediately disqualified them as true aficionados. Caustically, he said, "Well, of course, if you want the garden variety of grandfather clock," and then concluded the deal with barely disguised distaste. Byrnes had taken his garden variety of grandfather clock home. The local jeweler had charged $14 to set it in fine running condition. It had never given Byrnes a bit of trouble since. It stood now in the hallway, and it tocked off the minutes in a deep monotonous voice, and its delicately wrought hands held the white moon face in a wide-angled grin, and the grin read ten minutes to two.
There was no comfort in the clock now, no comfort in the ordered, well-regulated spacing of its breathing. There was neither—and curiously—a sense of time attached to the clock. There was instead a desperate feeling of urgency, the hands advancing, the mechanism whirring, as if time-disconnected, separate and apart from the living universe, the clock would suddenly clasp its own hands and then explode into the hallway leaving Byrnes alone, waiting for his son.
The house creaked.
He had never before noticed how the house creaked.
There was sound everywhere around him, the sound of an old man with rheumatic joints. From the bedroom upstairs, he could hear Harriet deep in slumber, the sound of her even breathing superimposed on the dread tocking of the clock and the uneasy groaning of the house.
And then Byrnes heard a small sound that was like an ear-splitting thundercrack, the sound he had been waiting for and listening for all night long, the sound of a key being turned in the front-door latch. All other sounds vanished in that moment. He sat tensed and alert in his chair while the key twisted, and then the door swung wide, creaking a little, and he could hear the malicious gossip of the wind outside, and then the door quietly easing shut and snuggling into the jamb, and then the boards in the hallway creaking as feet fell upon them.
"Larry?" he called.
His voice reached out of the darkened living room, and fled into the hollows of the house. For a moment, there was complete silence, and then Byrnes was aware of the tocking of the grandfather clock again, his garden-variety clock complacently standing against the wall and watching life rush by, like an idler leaning against the plate-glass window of a corner drug store.
"Dad?" The voice was surprised, and the voice was young, and the voice was a little breathless, the way a voice will sound when its owner has come into a warm room after facing a sullen cold outside.
"In here, Larry," he said, and again the silence greeted him, a calculating silence this time, broken only by the steady punctuality of the clock.
"Sure," Larry said, and Byrnes listened to his footfalls as he came through the house and then paused outside the living-room door.
"Okay to put on a light?" Larry asked.
"Yes, go ahead," Byrnes said.
Larry came into the room, walking with the familiar skill of a person who has occupied a house for a long time, walking in the darkness directly to an end table and then turning on a lamp there.
He was a tall boy, much taller than his father. His hair was red, and his face was long and thin, with his father's craggy nose, and his mother's guileless gray eyes. His chin was weak, Byrnes noticed, nor would it ever be any stronger because adolescence had forged the boy's face, and it was set now for eternity. He wore a sports shirt and slacks, over which had been thrown a sports jacket. Byrnes wondered if he'd left his overcoat in the hallway.
"Doing some reading?" Larry asked. His voice was no longer the voice of a child. It sprang full-chested and deep from the long, reedy body, and somehow it sounded ludicrous in a boy so young, a boy hardly eighteen.
"No," Byrnes said. "I was waiting for you."
"Oh?" Byrnes watched his son, listening to him, amazed at how the single word "Oh?" could have conveyed so much sudden wariness and caution.
"Where were you, Larry?" Byrnes asked. He watched his son's face, hoping his son would not lie, telling himself a lie would shatter him now, a lie would destroy him.
"At school," Larry said, and Byrnes took the lie, and it did not hurt as much as he expected it would, and suddenly something inside the man took over, something alien to a father-son relationship, something he reserved for the squad room at the 87th. It came into his head and onto his tongue with the ready rapidity of years of familiarity. In the space of three seconds, Peter Byrnes became a cop questioning a suspect.
"The high school?"
"Yes, Dad."
"Calm's Point High, isn't it? Isn't that where you go?"
"Don't you know, Dad?"
"I'm asking you."
"Yes. Calm's Point."
"Late to be getting home, isn't it?"
"Is that what this is all about?" Larry asked.
"What kept you so late?"
"We're rehearsing, you know that."
"For what?"
"The senior play. Holy cow, Dad, we've only gone over this about a hundred times."
"Who else is in the play?"
"Lots of kids."
"Who's directing it?"
"Miss Kerry."
"What time did you start rehearsals?"
"Hey, what is this?"
"What time did you break up?"
"About one o'clock, I guess. Some of the kids stopped for a soda afterwards."
"The rehearsal broke up at ten thirty," Byrnes said clearly. "You weren't there. You're not in the play, Larry. You never were. Where did you spend the time between three thirty yesterday afternoon and two o'clock this morning?"
"Jesus!" Larry said.
"Don't swear in my house," Byrnes said.
"Well, for Christ's sake, you sound like a district attorney."
"Where were you, Larry?"