“I can’t find the damn switch,” Ed mutters beside me, and then there’s a click and the little room fills with bright white light. For a second it’s too bright, and I close my eyes against the shock. They’re closed when I hear Ed begin to scream.
My eyes snap open and I take a stumbling step backward, trying to get out of the garage, thinking that there is an attacker in here, some sort of threat to make Ed scream like that. My back hits the wall, though, and in the extra second I’m kept in the garage my eyes finally take in the scene.
Ed’s father’s Chevy Nova is inside the garage. The driver’s window is down and upon the doorframe rests Norm Gradduk’s head. His face is pointed toward the ceiling, his skin puffy and unnatural. It takes one look to tell even me, a child, that he is dead.
Ed runs toward the car, shrieking in a pitch higher than I would’ve thought he could possibly reach. He extends his arms to his father, then pulls them back immediately. He wants to help him; he’s scared to touch him.
“We gotta call somebody,” I say, my own voice trembling. I step closer to the car despite a deep desire to get as far from the scene as possible, and now I can see inside. There’s a bottle of liquor in Norm Gradduk’s lap. One of his hands is still wrapped around it. On the stereo, Van Morrison sings of a foghorn blowing, “I want to hear it, I don’t have to fear it . . .”
Ed turns and runs past me, out the door and into the yard. He’s still screaming, and after one more look at Norm Gradduk, I begin to shout, too. Inside the house, Ed’s mother yells for everyone to keep it down out there.
It takes the paramedics seven minutes to arrive, and about seventy seconds for them to tell Ed and his mother that there is nothing they can do.
CHAPTER 2
I still knew the house, although I hadn’t been inside in years. Word of mouth brought me the news that Ed had bought his childhood home, and while I could no longer remember the source, I remembered hearing about it. The house had never been a showpiece—nothing in our neighborhood was—but when Ed’s dad was alive it had been the best on the block, hands down. He’d spent hours on it, painting and repairing and weeding. My own father had always been impressed by it, telling me on many occasions that while Norm Gradduk had his faults, he took pride in his home, and there weren’t enough men around who still did that.
It was evident that Ed intended to match his father’s devotion. The house looked bad, with a sagging porch roof, a broken window on the second story, and paint that had forgotten whether it was pale yellow or white and decided to settle on grimy gray. A ladder was leaning against the west side of the house, though, and it was clear that someone had been scraping the peeling paint off that wall with the idea of applying a fresh coat. A stack of discarded scrap wood near the porch was evidence of new planking laid on the floor. No doubt the porch roof was next on the list.
No police cars were in the driveway or at the curb when I arrived, but I saw a black Crown Victoria parked on the street two blocks down. They would be there all night, watching for a return that would surely not occur. I parked my truck facing them, and then I walked through the yard and up the front steps. Maybe someone would be home. A girlfriend, or a roommate. Hell, he could be married by now for all I knew.
My footsteps were loud on the new porch. I stood there and looked around for a minute, lost in memories, then nearly fell back off the porch when someone screamed at me from inside the house.
“Go away, go away, go away,” a woman’s voice screeched. “I told you filthy bastards to go away!”
I started to heed the command, but then the voice jarred something loose in my memory, and I stopped and turned to the closed front door.
“Mrs. Gradduk, it’s Lincoln Perry,” I said, speaking loudly.
Cars passed on the street, and a few blocks down some kids were yelling and laughing, bass music thumping in the background, a party building. The streetlight flickered and hummed, and I stood with my hands in my pockets and waited. I waited until I was sure she was not coming to the door, and then I reached out and knocked. I’d hardly laid my knuckles to the wood when the door swung open and a thin woman with hollow eye sockets and deep wrinkles stood before me.
“You son of a bitch,” she said. Her voice was as thin as she was; you could hear it fine but it always seemed on the verge of breaking, maybe disappearing altogether. If you didn’t know the woman, you’d associate those vocal qualities with old age or a lifetime of cigarettes. But I knew that the voice had always been the same and that she’d never smoked. Her hand rested on the door-knob, and her forearm and wrist were the sort of severely thin that made me think of starving children in Africa and black-and-white footage of Holocaust concentration camps. Her skin hung draped from sharp, angular bones in the same fashion as her sleeveless dress, creased and puckered and wrinkled. Her blond hair was gray now, filled with split ends and tangles. Looking at her, it was hard to believe that she had once been a beautiful woman. Not that many years had passed, but it seemed she’d aged ten with every one that had gone by on the calendar.
“Evening, Mrs. Gradduk,” I said. Evening. As if I’d dropped by for a glass of lemonade and a chance to discuss the weather and the kids.
She tightened her hand on the knob, and I couldn’t help but stare at it, waiting for the bones to splinter.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing here?”
A fine question. I licked dry lips and ran a hand through my hair, my eyes on the fresh planks beneath my feet.
“Well?” she said.
“I didn’t know you were living here, too,” I said, just to fill the silence with something.
“I asked what you want.”
I straightened up and looked her in the eye again. “I guess I’d like to find Ed. Maybe I can . . . maybe I can help him.”
“Help him? Help him?” She took a half step out onto the landing, peering up at me, her mouth twisted with distaste. “You’re the one to blame for this, you know? He made one mistake and then you ruined him. He was never the same.”
“That was a long time ago,” I said. “I can’t fix that. But I hear Ed’s in a lot of trouble now. I’d like to find him.”
She leaned back and glared at me. “You even spoken to him in the last ten years?”
It hadn’t been ten years, but I also hadn’t spoken to him. I didn’t answer, just stood there awkwardly before a woman who’d once baked me cookies and was now looking at me as if she’d like to sink her teeth into me, pour venom into my veins.
“What the hell do you think you can do, you asshole?” she said, and I was struck by her language, the stream of profanity. In all the years I’d known Alberta Gradduk, I couldn’t think of one time I’d heard her swear. “The police have it all on tape. He did it, you know. He set that fire and burned that girl up. And you want to know why he did it?”
I didn’t answer.
“Because it’s what he turned into after you turned your back on him. He made a mistake. People make mistakes. And you were supposed to be his friend. His best friend.”
“I did what I was required to do, Mrs. Gradduk. I’d taken an oath, and it didn’t stop with friends.”