Kimball seemed more than a little taken aback by the detective’s blunt question. A pained expression flashed across his face. “Me? I wasn’t even born yet. My mother was pregnant with me when my father went off to California looking for a job and never came back.”
“Who told you that story? That your father went to California, I mean.”
“Uncle Harold and Aunt Emily, I suppose. I don’t understand. Why are you asking about my father? What’s going on?” Dropping his jacket onto the surface of the desk, Burton Kimball sank back down in his chair.
“I’m afraid I have some bad news for you, Burt,” Ernie said kindly. “Your father never made it to California. Or, if he did, he must have come back home sometime later on.”
“He came back? …” Burton began, but then comprehension slowly dawned. “You can’t mean it! Surely, you’re not saying it’s him! The skeleton in the glory hole is my father?”
Ernie Carpenter nodded. “I’m sorry to have to break it to you like this.”
Burton’s ruddy complexion paled. “But how can you know that? How can you tell for sure?”
Ernie reached in his pocket and pulled out the newly cleaned dog tags, which he dropped lightly on the desk in front of Burton Kimball. For a moment, the other man stared at them without moving. Then, carefully, gingerly, as though the metal might be red-hot, he picked up the chain and held it up to the light.
“We also have dental records to go by,” Ernie said. “Those should cinch it. I thought you’d want to know.”
Abruptly, Burton spun his chair around. He sat with his back turned to Ernie Carpenter. Staring up at the soothing water-color garden scene Linda had given him last Christmas to hang on the bland wall behind his desk, he tried unsuccessfully to blink back tears. Ernie waited through the silence. “I always secretly hoped he was dead,” Burton Kimball croaked at last. “As a little kid, that was the only way I could cope. His being dead was the only reason I knew that justified his going off and leaving me alone like that. I wondered what was wrong with me that he’d do a thing like that And how could he tell something was wrong with me before I was even born?”
“Burton,” Ernie began.
But the younger man continued, ignoring the interruption. “And late at night I’d tell myself stories about him, about how he’d been run down by a train somewhere or how he’d drowned in the ocean and been washed out to sea. But deep in side, I always figured he was alive somewhere, living with a beautiful new wife and new children.
I always hoped he’d come back for me someday, like a knight on a white charger, and that he’d take me to live with them. He never did.”
Burton Kimball fell silent. It was a long time before Ernie Carpenter spoke again. “Was there any bad blood between your father and your uncle Harold?”
“Bad blood?” Burton repeated. “What’s that supposed to mean? And why would there be? Uncle Harold was my mother’s brother. After my mother died, from the time I was a baby, he and Aunt Emily took care of me. As far as I know, that’s all there was to it.”
Burton turned back around and faced the detective, a concerned frown etching his face. “Why are you asking?”
“Because,” Ernie answered simply, “they both ended up in the same place, dead in the bottom of a glory hole. From what I saw today, I’d say they were both murdered. Fifty years apart, but the same way. The killer or killers heaved rocks down at them from above.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Burton Kimball said. “What would the connection be?”
The room grew very still. “You,” Ernie Carpenter said softly.
“Me!”
“I’ve heard from several people that you and your uncle quarreled shortly before noon on Tuesday. I understand you stormed out of your office that afternoon and didn’t show up again until you came to the Election Night party looking for Harold Patterson.”
“That’s right. I saw his car in the parking lot and…”
“Where did you go when you first left your office?”
Burton Kimball stiffened under Ernie Carpenter’s suddenly chilly gaze. “Why do you want to know?”
“Just answer the question.”
“I went drinking.”
“Where?”
“Up the Gulch. The Blue Moon.”
“How long did you stay there?”
“Awhile. I don’t know exactly. I don’t remember.”
“And where did you go after that?”
As soon as Burton Kimball realized he was actually under suspicion, he snapped. “That’s none of your damn business, Ernie. Now get the hell out of here. And the next time you open your big mouth around me, you’d better either be apologizing or reading me my damn rights. Understand?”
Without another word, Ernie Carpenter scooped up the dog tags and beat it for the door. Burton sat frozen at his desk until the heavy outside door slammed shut behind the retreating detective.
Only after it closed did Burton get up. He staggered around the desk and pushed the knob that locked his office door from the inside.
Then, like a dazed sleepwalker, he groped his way blindly back to his desk. He dropped heavily into the chair and sat there, staring straight ahead while his fingers clung desperately to the polished edge of his desk. It was almost as if his white knuckled grip was all that was keeping him from being flung far into lifeless, timeless space.
Eventually, the all-enveloping, childlike whimper he had been trying so desperately to suppress managed to work its way to the surface. Forty-five years after the fact, the little boy who had never once cried aloud over his father’s desertion or his mother’s death put his arms on the desk, laid his head on his arms, and sobbed.
Afterward, he just sat there, dry-eyed and with out moving, totally unaware of the passage of time. Finally, an unexpected knock on the door startled him out of his painful reverie.
“Go away, Maxine,” he growled. “I don’t want to talk to anybody.”
“It’s me,” Linda Kimball replied tentatively.
“Maxine called to see if you’d come home yet. She said she thought something was wrong. I decided to come see for myself. Can I come in?”
“Come ahead.”
“I can’t. The door’s locked.”
Burton got up and stumbled around the desk.
Even though he hadn’t had a drop of liquor since Tuesday at the Blue Moon, he felt as though he’d been drinking. As though he were drunk.
When Linda Kimball saw her husband’s ray aged face, she put her hand to her mouth. “Burton!” she exclaimed. “What is it? What’s wrong?
Burton shook his head and blundered back to his desk. “You won’t believe it,” he said. “Never in a million years.”
“Yes, I will,” Linda insisted. “Tell me.”
Joanna PICKED up Jenny from the Bradys’ house at six and drove straight home. She couldn’t wait to strip out of her good clothes and the cumbersome bulletproof vest that had rubbed the skin under her arms until it was raw.
While Jenny went to her room to do homework, her mother set about cooking dinner. It seemed strange to look forward to an entire evening at home, an evening with no speeches to write or give, no campaign strategy meetings to oversee.
The sudden sense of decompression was almost palpable. For the first time in months, Joanna Brady had only one job to do instead of two.
While searching the refrigerator for leftover vegetables to put in the roast-beef hash, she discovered two forgotten Tupperware containers shoved into the far back corner of the bottom shelf. One contained a few desiccated and no-longer-green peas. The second, filled with some kind of mystery food, sported a brilliant layer of fuchsia-colored mold and exuded a powerful odor that somehow reminded her of the glory hole. And at that moment she didn’t want to think about the glory hole or Harold Patterson or Thornton Kimball.
Firmly shutting the lids on the two containers, Joanna tossed them into the sink, promising to clean both them and the refrigerator right after dinner. It was time to start paying attention to the little things again, to catch up on some of the domestic housekeeping chores that-in the after math of Andy’s death-had been allowed to fall victim to disinterest and neglect.