“I ain’t arguing with you,” Coyne says. “How does Jules feel about being bused?”
She stares at him for so long he finishes his cigarette and starts to look uncomfortable.
“Mrs. Fennessy?”
She sees where this is going now. “A black kid runs in front of a train, and you think some white kids were somehow involved because they were pissed off about busing?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to.”
“And the kid didn’t run in front of any fucking train,” Pritchard says.
Coyne’s jaw tightens and his kind eyes flash, cold and unkind, at his partner.
“How’d he die?” Mary Pat says.
“Still waiting on a final determination of that,” Coyne says.
“Why don’t you ask your daughter?” Pritchard says.
“Vince,” Coyne says to his partner, “will you shut up, please? Just do me that courtesy.”
Pritchard rolls his eyes and shrugs like a teenager.
Coyne turns back to Mary Pat. “We have witnesses who saw Auggie Williamson exchange words with a group of white kids on the outskirts of Columbia Park around midnight. Those kids then chased him into Columbia Station, where he died. We can’t confirm whether your daughter was one of those kids, but it would be very smart for her to come to us before we come to her. So, Mrs. Fennessy, if you know where she is, do yourself a huge favor and tell us.”
“I don’t know where she is,” Mary Pat says. “I’ve torn my hair out trying to find her.”
He holds her gaze with his own. “I want to believe you.”
“I could give a shit whether you believe me, I just want to find my daughter. So if you guys want to go on the hunt for her, please, be my fucking guest.”
Coyne nods. “Do you know any place she could be hiding out?”
If Jules is hiding, she’s hiding in her secret life. The one that may involve Frank Toomey. Which would, by association, involve Marty Butler. And saying anything to a cop that leads them to Marty Butler would be the same as sticking her head in an oven, turning on the gas, and firing up one last cigarette.
“I don’t.”
She’s trying to keep the hope from her eyes and voice because something finally makes sense — if Jules was involved in some stupid shit that led to the death of that black kid, then she could very well be hiding somewhere within a ten-block radius of where Mary Pat sits right now. And if that’s the case, well, Mary Pat can address any bad shit her kid may have gotten up to, she can deal with that.
Coyne hands her a business card — Det. Sgt. Michael Coyne, BPD Homicide Div.
Homicide. Hom-i-cide. This is not your everyday bad shit that would bring a cop calling. It’s not a shoplifting beef or check kiting. This is as serious as a tumor on an ovary.
Coyne points at the card. “If she pops her head up, you call that number and have them put you through to that extension. Or you just ask for me by name.”
“Detective Michael Coyne.”
“Bobby,” he says. “Everyone calls me Bobby.”
“Why?”
He shrugs.
“What’s your middle name?”
“David,” he says.
“But everyone calls you Bobby?”
He shrugs. “This life. You know? Try and make sense of it.”
“Okay, Bobby.” She pockets the card.
He stands and brushes at the wrinkles in his trousers. Pritchard flips his notepad closed.
“If you see your daughter,” Coyne says, “do the smart thing, Mrs. Fennessy.”
“And what would that be?”
“Have her call us first thing.”
She nods.
“Is that a yes?”
“It’s a nod.”
“As in you’ll think about it?”
“As in I heard the words that left your mouth.”
She scoops up her cigarettes and walks back to her building, lets herself in.
9
She falls asleep in the La-Z-Boy and wakes an hour later when someone pounds a fist against her door. She runs to the door and opens it without checking who’s on the other side, her body throbbing with the scream of a hope that it’s her, it’s Jules, it’s her.
But it’s not Jules. It’s not anyone. No one’s there. She looks up and down the hall. Still no one. She looks back in at her apartment. It’s empty in a way it was never empty after Dukie or Ken Fen or even Noel left. It’s empty the way graveyards are empty — filled to bursting with the remains of what can never be again.
Back in seventh grade, Sister Loretta used to say that even if hell was not the firepit with the horned demons and the pitchforks that the medievalists supposed, it was, make no mistake, a void.
It was an eternal separation from love.
What love?
God’s love.
Anyone’s love.
All love.
The pain from a pitchfork or even from an eternal flame cannot compare to the pain of that void.
“Everlasting exile,” Sister Loretta said, “the heart forever untouched and forsaken.”
Mary Pat steps back inside long enough to grab her smokes and her lighter.
When she reaches the Fields, the sign is still up — Closed for Private Function — and the lights behind the single high window are dim, but she starts knocking and she doesn’t stop. She uses her left hand because the right is still barking from the contact with Rum’s woodchuck head. She’s been pounding a solid minute when someone throws the locks on the other side of the door. Three of them. One after the other. And then nothing. It’s her last warning — if you want in, you open the door. Final chance to walk away.
The fear is not small. Suddenly, it’s the only thing she can feel. A full-bodied presence. As real and substantial as another human being standing on the sidewalk beside her. Other people have gone through this door, she knows, and never come back out. This door is not just the door to a building; it’s a border between worlds.
She flashes on Jules dancing around the kitchen in her bathrobe the other morning, pretending to box, smiling that lopsided toothy smile of hers, and Mary Pat pushes the door open.
The guy standing behind the bar has a lit cigarette between his lips and squints at the smoke floating into his right eye as he pours himself a shot of rum. He’s a guy everyone calls Weeds because he’s skinny and unpleasant to look at. Has a harelip, a left eye that floats in the socket, and is rumored to have pushed his little brother off a roof when they were kids just to hear the sound of the poor bastard landing. He’s not wearing his Baracuta jacket tonight, just a T-shirt that looks soiled in the dim light.
Larry Foyle sits at a table along the wall. Larry’s body looks like a set of tires stacked atop one another, and his neck isn’t much smaller. His head is enormous, like the head of a statue. His hands could cup a moose in one palm. He still lives with his parents and can often be found pushing his grandfather in his wheelchair along Day Boulevard. Larry is usually affable, a sly cutup, but tonight he looks at his beer and not once at Mary Pat. Like Weeds, he’s stripped down to a T-shirt. She can’t make out the state of it, or even the color, but she can smell his body odor from twenty feet.
They’re the only two men in the room. Down at the end of the bar, the back door is open; she looks at Weeds. His eyes pulse once in the poor light, an indication she’s to head to that back door. Then he downs his shot and pours himself another.