“No, to be perfectly honest, they think you’re the one who’s out of his head. And you’re the one who’s running around killing people.”
[118]
“I need to make a stop,” Walt said.
They were on their way back to the apartment after visiting the Building Department at the County Offices, where they had picked up the blueprints to the Institute. Walt had seemed draggy the last thirty or forty minutes, not tired so much as self-absorbed. He had been distant and uncommunicative, and Teri had wondered if maybe he knew something that she didn’t, if maybe it had something to do with Aaron Jefferson.
They had bumped into Aaron on the steps outside the County Offices. It was the first time she had ever met the gentleman. He was tall and thin and had a smile that came easily. It left you feeling as if you had been friends most of your life.
For the most part, they exchanged small talk, Aaron mentioning something about a proposed change in the structure of the department, Walt remarking on how easy it had been to get the set of blueprints. The exchange had been short and affable. It was after they parted and they were on their way to the parking lot that Walt mentioned that Aaron was the man who had run the fingerprint checks on her shoe.
“Did he find anything?” Teri asked, not remembering if they had discussed the results or not. So much had happened the past week; it was hard to keep track of it all.
“Nothing important,” Walt said, and then he had fallen uncharacteristically silent. He climbed into the car, turned on the radio and lost himself somewhere in the lyrics of Neil Young’s The Needle and the Damage Done. For a man who purported to abhor the Sixties, wasn’t that a little red flag going up? Teri let it flap in the wind, without making an effort to extract any kind of explanation. If he had something on his mind that he wanted to talk about, she told herself, then sooner or later it would come out on its own. As long as he understood that she would be there to listen…
The stop Walt had wanted to make was at the Hillcrest Cemetery, off Remington Drive just north of the city, overlooking a small agricultural valley nestled in the foothills. They parked out front, next to the Hillcrest Chapel.
“My father’s buried here,” he said, unbuckling his seat belt. He sank back, his hands suddenly wrapped around the steering wheel, and stared out across the graveyard, a man who had seen his share of ghosts in his life. “So’s my son.”
“You want me to wait?” she asked.
“No, you can come.”
They got out. He locked up the car and waited for her to join him. A gentle afternoon breeze kicked up, whistling through the trees, stirring the souls of all the ghosts that made their residence here.
“My father’s greatest fear was dying,” he said solemnly as they walked through the huge ironwork gate. “I never understood that.”
“A lot of people fear death.”
“I don’t.”
As strange and as stark as that might have sounded, Teri didn’t doubt it in the least. In fact, she thought she might even understand it. She had felt much the same way after Gabe had disappeared, especially after she reached the point of giving up her search for him. After that, whether she lived or died hadn’t mattered much. Death, she decided, was something you feared when you had a reason to live. Her reason had gone the way of the wind.
“My father died a thousand little deaths in his life. Every time he changed a name or quit a job or moved to a new town. Each and every one of them, they were all little deaths and it never occurred to him he was even dying.”
They came upon the gravesite, which was at the far end of the third row, just out of the shade of an old oak. It was marked by a marbled headstone set flush in the ground, the grass long and unkempt around the edges. There was a small bouquet of yellow daffodils above the name on the marker.
Walt knelt and crossed himself, then brushed away the debris that had collected around the chiseled-out letters. Underneath a matting of oak leaves and pine needles, he stirred up a red-ribbon bow, faded and pinkish and curled at the edges. He stuffed it into his pocket.
“I hated him as much as I loved him, you know. He was that kind of man.”
Teri stood back, silent, not knowing what to say. She wished now that she had opted to wait in the car. She was out of place here, a voyeur catching a glimpse of a moment best left private.
“We moved around a lot when I was a kid; I ever tell you that?”
She shook her head.
“That was because we were running most of the time.” He sat back on his haunches, then raised his eyes to the sky, which was still overcast, though you could catch a patch or two of blue trying to battle its way through in the distance. “Oh, Christ, what we do with our lives.”
Teri placed a hand on his shoulder.
He covered it with his own.
“Ever wish you could go back and start all over?”
“Sometimes,” she said.
“Me, too. I’d live in a small town, in an old Victorian. Maybe go to the same school all my life. Come home to mom baking cookies, the smell in the house warm and delicious. I’d play catch with dad when he got home, talk about the Giants, oil up my mitt, make plans to go down to the creek and do a little fishing. So many things would have been different.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Guess I’m making an idiot of myself, huh?”
“We all wish things could be different, Walt.”
He nodded and made a face. It was something he already knew, and something she imagined he had already tried to deal with on numerous other occasions. The way a childhood could follow you around the rest of your life, though – that was frightening. There was no escaping the little boy, was there? He was your conscience, your memory, your teacher, your student.
Walt finished a silent prayer, crossed himself, then moved to the adjacent plot and kneeled again. The marble headstone marked the grave as follows:
Walt’s son.
He climbed back to his feet. He brushed off the knees of his slacks where they were grimed with gravel and loose blades of grass. He looked at her, almost apologetically, then leaned over and picked up the bouquet of daffodils. A bright yellow ribbon formed a bow around the middle. Beneath the bow was a card. He opened the card and read it twice before handing it to her.
She accepted it reflexively. The card said: There’s nothing quite like family, is there? Sorry to hear of your daddy’s death. It was signed: Richard Boyle.
Walt shook his head. “Bastard’s sure enjoying himself.”
Teri fell silent.
If she hadn’t felt the voyeur before, she felt the voyeur now.
[119]
Michael pulled into a McDonald’s off Cypress and found himself in a drive-through line of five or six cars. He rolled down the window and hung his arm over the door. The sky was clear, the sun bright, the outside temperature nearing ninety. He had been running the air conditioner most of the morning and realized now that he had lost sight of how hot the day had actually become.
He had lost sight of quite a few things lately, he supposed. Not the least of which was how far he had drifted from most of his old college friends. After Peggy’s purported overdose, Michael had started calling as many of the old crowd as he could track down. He didn’t really know what he was looking for, only that it was too much of a coincidence that Peggy’s death had come when it had. So he did some calling and was surprised to find that Teri had spoken to many of these same people only a few days before.