I opened my mouth to object, but he raised his hand.
“Believe me, when I’ve finished tonight, you’ll have enough to think about. You’ll be grateful that I’ve stopped.”
He leaned forward, his hands cupped before him, and I saw that they were trembling.
“So your old man was waiting at your mother &rsquo R qmother &rs;s bedside when she woke…”
I think, sometimes, of what my father and mother endured that day. I wonder if there was a kind of madness to his actions, spurred on by his fear that he seemed destined to lose two children, one to death and the other to an anonymous existence surrounded by those who were not related by blood to him. He must have known, as he stood above my mother, debating whether to wake her or let her sleep on for a time, delaying the moment of confession, that it would sunder relations with her forever. He was about to inflict twin wounds upon her: the pain of his betrayal, and the perhaps greater agony of learning that he had succeeded in doing with another what she had failed to do for him. She was carrying a dead child in her womb, while her husband had, only hours before, looked upon his own son, born of a dead mother. He loved his wife, and she loved him, and he was now going to hurt her so badly that she would never fully recover.
He did not tell anyone of what transpired between them, not even Jimmy Gallagher. All I know is that my mother left him for a time and fled to Maine, a precursor to the more permanent flight that would occur after my father’s death, and a distant echo of my own actions after my wife and child were taken from me. She was not my birth mother, and I understand now the reasons for the distance there was between us, even unto her death, but we were more similar than either of us could have imagined. She took me north after the Pearl River killings, and her father, my beloved grandfather, became a guiding force in my life, but my mother also assumed a greater role as I came of age. I think, sometimes, that only after my father died did she truly find it in her heart to forgive him, and perhaps to forgive me the circumstances of my birth. Slowly, we drew closer to each other. She taught me the names of trees and plants and birds, for this was her place, this northern state, and although I did not fully appreciate then the knowledge that she was trying to impart, I think I understood the reasons for her wanting to communicate it to me. We were both grieving, but she would not allow me to be lost to it. And so each day we would walk together for a time, regardless of the weather, and sometimes we would talk, and sometimes we would not, but it was enough that we were together, and we were alive. During those years, I became hers, and now, every time I name to myself a tree, or a flower, or a tiny creeping thing, it is a small act of remembrance for her.
Elaine Parker called her husband after a week had passed, and they spoke for an hour. Will was granted unpaid leave, authorized, to the puzzlement of some at the precinct, by the deputy commissioner for legal affairs, Frank Mancuso. Will went north to join his wife, and when they returned to New York they did so with a child, and a tale of a difficult, premature birth. They named the boy Charlie, after his father’s uncle, Charles Edward Parker, who had died at Monte Cassino. The secret friends kept their distance, and it was many years before Will heard from any of them again. And when they did make contact, it was Epstein who was sent, Epstein who told him that the thing they had long feared was upon them once more.
The lovers had returned.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
MICKEY W="2">ALLACE FELT AS though the mist had followed him from Maine. Tendrils of it drifted past his face, reacting to each movement of his body like a living thing, slowly assuming new shapes before slipping away altogether, as though the darkness were weaving itself into being around him, enfolding him in its embrace as he stood before the small house on Hobart Street in Bay Ridge.
Bay Ridge was almost a suburb of Brooklyn, a neighborhood unto itself. Originally it had consisted mostly of Norwegians, who lived there when it was known as Yellow Hook, in the nineteenth century, and Greeks, with some Irish thrown in, as there always were, but the opening of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in the 1970s had changed that makeup as people began to move out to Staten Island, and by the early 1990s Bay Ridge was becoming progressively more Middle Eastern. The bridge dominated the southern end of the area, although Mickey had always felt that it looked more real by night than by day. The lights seemed to give it substance; during the day, by contrast, it looked like a painted back-drop, a gray mass too big for the buildings and streets below, an unreal thing.
Hobart Street lay between Marine Avenue and Shore Road, where a series of benches overlooked Shore Road Park, a steep, tree-lined slope leading down to the Belt Parkway and the waters of the Narrows. At first glance, Hobart seemed to consist only of apartment buildings, but on one side was a small row of brownstone, one-family homes, each separated from its neighbor by a driveway. Only 1219 bore the marks of abandonment and neglect.
The presence of the mist reminded Mickey of what he had experienced out at Scarborough. Now, once again, he was standing before a house that he believed to be empty. This was not his neighborhood, not even his city, yet he did not feel out of place here. After all, it was a crucial element in the story that he had followed for so long, the story that he was now going to set down in print. He had stood here before over the years. The first time was after Charlie Parker’s wife and child had been found, their blood still fresh on the walls and floor. The second time was after Parker had found the Traveling Man, when the reporters had an ending to their story and sought to remind viewers and readers of the beginning. Lights shone upon the walls and windows, and neighbors came onto the street to watch, their proximity to the action a good indication of their willingness to talk, of their desire to be interviewed about what had happened there. Even those who were not residents at the time had opinions, for ignorance was never an obstacle to a good sound bite.
But that was a long time ago. Mickey wondered how many people even remembered what had taken place behind those walls, then figured that anyone who had lived in this place when the murders were committed, and who continued to live here now, would find it hard to erase the memory of them. In a way, the house challenged them to forget its past. It was the only unoccupied residence on the street, and its exterior spoke eloquently of its emptiness. For those who knew of its history, the simple sight of it, its very otherness, would be enough to evoke memories. For them, there would always be blood on its walls.
Mickey’s search of the property records indicated that there had been three different occupants in the years since the killings, and the house was currently owned by the bank that had taken possession of it after the most recent residents had defaulted on their payments. He found it hard to imagine why anyone would want to live in a place that had known such violence. True, the house had probably initially been sold for far less than its market value, and the cleaners employed to scrub every visib Randd wle trace of the killings from within would have done their job well, but Mickey felt certain that something must have lingered, some trace of the agonies that had been endured there. Physical? Yes. There would be dried blood between the cracks in the floor. He had been told that one of Susan Parker’s fingernails had not been recovered from the scene. Initially, it was thought that her killer had taken it as a souvenir, but now it was believed that it had broken as she scraped at the boards and had slipped between them. Despite repeated searches, it had not been found. It was probably still down there somewhere, lying amid dust and wood chips and lost coins.