He hadn’t said a word on the ride to the Juvenile Justice Center, not even to comment on the smell of superglue, as Kelvin had. I’d noticed his own scent, grass and dew, as if he’d been sleeping outdoors, and old sweat.
Now I had a chance to appraise him in good overhead light for the first time. The first thing my eyes went to was his maimed left hand; Aidan had laid it on the table as if daring me to ignore it. Either the little finger had come off pretty cleanly at the joint, or perhaps a surgeon’s instrument had evened out the damage. Still, there was something ugly about the dark pink skin of the stump, no matter how old the wound.
Beyond that, Aidan had made good on his early promise of height. At six feet, he’d easily outstripped his father, and I didn’t think Colm or Liam would catch up, either. His long blond hair was stringy and unwashed, and his cheeks were precipitously hollow. A leather cord, some kind of necklace, disappeared under the collar of his T-shirt.
“I wanted to make sure Hugh wasn’t home,” Aidan said. It was the first time I’d heard him speak since he’d said, It’s okay, Linch, back at the house. “I’d been around all day and some of the evening and I didn’t see him. But his car was in the garage.”
“What do you mean, you were ‘around’?” I said.
“I was watching the house,” Aidan said. “I was waiting for Hugh to go out, so I could come in and see Linch and the boys. When I kept on not seeing him, I thought he might be out of town. But I couldn’t be sure, so I kept out of sight, and later I tried to climb up to his bedroom, to make sure.”
“Well,” I said, “the fact that you were lurking around outside the house for hours doesn’t do much to defuse the fact that you climbed up the side of the house with a knife.” When Aidan didn’t speak, I went on. “In your covert surveillance of the house, who did you think I was?”
Aidan said, “I didn’t see you.”
“Really?” I said. “I was there for over an hour before we all went to bed.”
“I wasn’t around then,” Aidan said.
He didn’t back down easily. I retraced my steps. “So if you weren’t around when I arrived, where were you?”
“Trying to find something to eat,” Aidan said.
“Where?” I repeated.
“A neighbor’s garden,” Aidan said. “They were growing some green peppers and carrots.”
He had to be starving. I thought of the vending machines in the correction officers’ lunchroom, but I didn’t want to break the rhythm of my questioning. About some things, Gray Diaz was right.
“Tell me about the switchblade,” I said.
“Protection,” Aidan said.
“From who?”
“I’ve been on the road,” Aidan said. “Life out there can be dangerous. The knife was a good investment.”
His gaze was very even, unperturbed by my questioning. His eyes were the exact color of Marlinchen’s.
“ ‘Investment,’ ” I said. “Interesting choice of words. You’ve been on your own for a long time. What have you been doing for money?”
“You mean, have I been jacking people?” Aidan asked. “No.”
“When did you get into town?”
“This afternoon,” he said. “I got a ride in Fergus Falls.”
“So,” I said, “with all the time you’ve been away, what prompted you to come home? Why now?”
“I wanted to see my family,” he said, then quickly clarified, “My sister and brothers, I mean.”
He hadn’t needed to tell me how he felt about his father; I heard it every time Aidan called him Hugh, not Father or Dad.
“And maybe you wanted to tap your old man for money,” I suggested.
“No,” Aidan said, shaking his head for emphasis.
“What about Marlinchen’s cat?”
“Snowball?” he said. “What about her?”
I stayed quiet, waiting for him to betray nerves with some small gesture, or to fill an unbearable silence. But he did neither.
I paused, not sure whether there was anything else to throw at him. One thing came to mind.
“You know,” I said, “since realizing your father wasn’t at home, you’ve shown very little interest in where he actually is. Aren’t you curious at all about that?”
Aidan Hennessy shrugged. “Okay,” he said. “Where is he?”
“Your father’s in the hospital, recovering from a stroke,” I said.
Aidan’s blue eyes flicked to mine. I’d surprised him at last, but there was no sign of concern in his gaze. Finally I said, “Are you hungry?”
“I could eat,” he said.
The vending machines were poorly stocked. Behind the scratched plastic windows I saw a pillowy white bagel, jalapeño potato chips, pork rinds. The soda machine looked fully stocked, but sugar water was the last thing a hungry teenager needed on an empty stomach, when he wouldn’t get anything substantial until morning.
I walked away, still holding a few quarters in the palm of my hand, to pace under the cold fluorescent lights.
I didn’t like him climbing the trellis. I didn’t like the switchblade knife in his possession. And most of all, I didn’t like him hanging around outside the house at night, so soon after the ugly late-night death of Snowball. Marlinchen had quoted him as saying, years ago, Snowball is your pet, and you’re Dad’s pet.
If Aidan had come home full of anger, primed for a confrontation with his father, might he have taken out some of that anger on a smaller target? And wasn’t there a chance, with his father safely out of his reach in a nursing home, that Aidan would deflect his anger again, onto his siblings?
I took out the switchblade that I’d confiscated from him, sprang the blade. Carefully, I looked for small traces of dried blood at the base of the blade and the haft, found nothing.
Doesn’t mean he didn’t clean it up really well.
Yet when I’d fired the question about Snowball at him without preamble or explanation, he’d responded exactly as he should have: What about her? Guileless confusion is one of the hardest responses to fake. Moreover, I had no proof that, in climbing the trellis, Aidan hadn’t been doing exactly what he’d said he was: checking to see if his father was home. I couldn’t exactly blame him for that; the last time he’d come home unannounced, things had worked out pretty badly, to say the least.
I’d feel a lot more comfortable if I could leave him safely in the Juvenile Justice Center overnight. Then I could go home, get eight hours’ sleep, and take another crack at talking to him in the morning. But I hadn’t arrested Aidan, just taken him downtown for questioning. To keep him here, I needed to arrest him.
That was possible, of course: the switchblade was an illegal weapon. But according to my research, Aidan Hennessy had not yet been in trouble with the law. He had no criminal record. If I charged him with carrying an unlawful weapon, I’d stick him with one.
My head was starting to hurt. When Judge Henderson had given me the responsibility to look out for the Hennessys for a few weeks, neither of us had imagined that it would lead here, to making this kind of decision at the Juvenile Justice Center at three in the morning. Still, I’d taken on this burden; no setting it aside now. And while I had a responsibility to ensure that Marlinchen and her younger siblings stayed safe, didn’t I have a tangential responsibility to Aidan, as well? He was one of the Hennessy kids, too.
When I got back to the interrogation room, Aidan looked at my empty hands, then to my face.
“I’m taking you home,” I said.
23
It did not come as a surprise that Marlinchen wasn’t asleep when Aidan and I returned. She came out to wrap her arms around Aidan’s neck and embrace him for a long moment, until I had to turn away from the intimacy of their reunion.