Mission Flats Page 7

  The hardest moments were in simple conversation.

  ‘Do you have . . . ?’

  ‘Do I have what, Mum?’

  ‘Never mind. It’s not important.’

  ‘No, what is it?’

  ‘I don’t know – I can’t—’

  ‘Go ahead, Mum, it’s alright. Do I have what?’

  ‘Ben.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘What do you . . . ?’

  ‘I’m in school, Mum.’

  ‘Of course. Of course, I knew that.’

  Word-finding troubles were particularly infuriating for her. Over and over, she would pause in mid-sentence, suspended, unable to grasp the word she needed. If we were walking, she would stop and stare at her feet, fists pressed to her forehead, while she racked her brain for the missing tools. I learned not to guess at the next word, which frustrated her even more. ‘Shh! Shh!’ she would hiss, and swing a stop-sign hand at me.

  For all that, I still intended to go back to Boston when my break ended. I convinced myself that the Forgetting Disease was no more than an inconvenience. It was still in an early stage (she was only fifty-six), and Annie Truman would outwork it the way she’d outworked every other damn thing.

  It took a calamity to open my eyes.

  December 24, 1994, was absolute cold. At eight A.M., the temperature was five degrees above zero, fifteen below with the windchill. Gray, sunless, with a stabbing wind. The snow encasing us – on the roof, in the yard, in tree branches – made creaking sounds.

  Mum and I did not walk that morning. Around eleven, Dick Ginoux called to say there was an impromptu Christmas party at the station. Sandwiches and beer (diet orange soda for The Chief). I declined, but Mum urged me to go. ‘It’s Christmas Eve, Ben. Go have a good time for once.’ The kitchen thermometer had risen to ten degrees or so. Still, it was a forbidding day, and I hated like hell to leave her alone in that house. But it was only for an hour or two. ‘I’m not a child,’ she insisted.

  When I got back around two, the house was quiet. An empty ticking sound in the halls. I called out and got no answer. Mum’s bedroom was empty too, the bed made up neatly.

  To ward off panic, I indulged the notion that she must be lost inside the house. I’d once found her standing in the hallway, confused about which doorway led to her room; maybe she’d fallen into a similar confusion now. But racing around the house was just a waste of time. Her coat, hat, and knit mittens were gone.

  In the front yard I shouted her name.

  No answer. The wind loud in my ears.

  Anxiety thickening into dread.

  How could I have left her? Stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid.

  I shouted her name. The cold swallowed my calls. There were no tracks. It was possible she’d walked off down the road, which had been plowed clear.

  Or into the forest. On our little street the forest crowds right up to the road’s edge. The curtain of trees is pushed back as if by an invisible arm to reveal the house in its shadow. She might have wandered anywhere in these woods.

  Stupid stupid.

  I phoned the station. No one in town knew where she was. Within minutes there were twenty guys out looking for her, then fifty.

  ‘She’ll be fine, Ben,’ Dad said.

  ‘The sun sets at five,’ I reminded him.

  Why didn’t I insist we walk that morning, cold or no cold? We should have walked till we were both exhausted.

  I set out along the unmarked trails in the thick woods around our house where we often walked and where my mother had been hiking for as long as I could remember. It was gloomy among the trees but warmer since the wind was somewhat subdued here. My undershirt was soon clammy with sweat as I ran along shouting for her.

  No answer. Just the crunch of my boots in the snow.

  I had a radio on my belt. Now and then a searcher would call in to report he’d seen no sign of her.

  I receded into the forest along familiar trails until each ran out, then doubled back until I reached a new spur to follow. Others were searching near me. I could hear their shouts – ’Anne!’ – and my own, more frantic – ’Mum!’

  The light became shadowy and dull as afternoon began to dim.

  How ridiculous that she might die this way. That an entire remarkable life could arrive at such an abrupt and stupid terminus.

  I scrambled through the forest for two hours, through the bare pines growing thick like hairs on a vast scalp. Dusk was coming. It was foolish to run around this way, calling crazily into the trees. The search needed better planning, better organization. Who the hell was in charge here? Didn’t they realize? These woods stretched for miles in all directions, thickening into impenetrable old growth. We would never find her by trial and error. We would run out of light and time long before we ran out of trees.

  I stopped to think. Where did we walk? Where would she go?

  Think.

  An idea crowded in: This was what Alzheimer’s disease meant. This was the lethal danger behind that austere Teutonic name. She had wandered, in the clinical parlance; she’d had a catastrophic event.

  Control your emotions. Where would she go?

  A blackbird flitted in the trees, unsettling the branches.

  She would go to the lake. I knew it with a crashing certainty. She would follow the road to Lake Mattaquisett, lured by some memory of a vanished summer – an engram not quite expunged, a nano-thought surviving as a skittery arc of electrical current jumping across a damaged synapse somewhere. The lake, her lake. Had the weather not been so extremely cold, or had it not been Christmas Eve, maybe the roads would not have been empty and someone would have seen her walking. She’d have been picked up on small-town radar and her whereabouts would never have been a mystery. But she’d chosen a bad day for wandering.

  I ran up the trail, scrabbling past the fingers of the trees.

  To the house, the car.

  Driving, I felt this adrenalized sense of certainty grow. She was there, I knew it. I raced along the Post Road. I was a policeman, a real one this time, rushing to an emergency.

  At dusk I found her curled on the dirt road that rings the lake. The sports use this road to reach their summer rentals. In winter it is abandoned, and far enough from the house that no one had thought to search there. No one thought she could walk that far.

  I knelt and put my arms around her. Her body trembled. She pulled her arms against her chest so I could hold her. I squeezed tight to stop the shivering. Her lips were blue, her eyes frightened.

  In the gloom, the water beside us looked black. This lake had been the scene of so many blithe sunny afternoons. Now it was transformed into a forbidding place. Deep, glacial, primal.

  I carried her to the car to warm her up. Her cheek against mine was cold rubber.

  ‘I . . . I got lost.’ Her jaw chattered, her lips and tongue were thick.

  ‘Mum, you’ve been on this road ten thousand times.’

  ‘I got lost.’

  I understood she meant more than she’d said. It was not simply that she’d got lost or even that she’d had such a dangerous close call. She’d glimpsed the horrifying course of her disease. The illness was no longer theoretical. It was the inescapable future: erasure of everything she had ever learned – even near-instinctive ideas like how to chew and swallow food, how to speak, how to control bowel movements – and the inevitable end when the brain would lose its ability to regulate essential bodily functions, when she would become bedridden and at last perish from diseases common to the bedridden, heart failure, infections, malnutrition, pneumonia. Mercifully – and it was merciful – my mother died before experiencing the full devastation of Alzheimer’s. But what she did experience – starting that Christmas Eve, I think, as she lay shivering on the frozen dirt road – was almost worse: the foreknowledge that this would be her end, the awareness that her brain had begun to clot with plaque and fibrous tangles, that neurons had begun to shut down by the tens of thousands, winking out like lights on
a sinking ship. She would be stripped. Her body, unbrained, would continue to operate for years, maybe decades. Babbling, demented, incontinent. A fool.

  ‘What will . . . I do?’

  ‘I don’t know, Mum.’

  When Dad arrived a few minutes later, he opened the passenger door of the car as if he meant to tear it off the hinges. He buried his head in her neck and kissed her and muttered, ‘Jesus, Annie. Jesus.’

  The next morning I withdrew from school and joined the Versailles Police Department.

  7

  It was inevitable, I suppose, that I would look inside the cabin. It was a constant temptation, wrapped in that cheerful yellow crime-scene tape like a big gift just waiting to be opened. The Game-Show Hosts had already swarmed over it and taken anything that was remotely relevant. What harm could there be in having a little peek? I gave in, finally, on a sunny Wednesday afternoon, October 15.

  Of course, I had broken the door lock myself when I found the body, so it was easy to pull off the tape and swing the door open. The sour stench scratched in the nostrils but did not send me reeling into the woods to vomit, as it had four days earlier. The techs had done a job on the interior. There were gaps in the floor where floorboards had been sawed out and removed for testing. An outline had been marked where the body fell, not in chalk but with little cones, presumably to preserve the surface underneath. As my eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, I saw the blood spatters. Blood was everywhere, an incomprehensible amount, a flood of it, too much to have been contained in one body. There were smudges on the walls too, from the powders used to illuminate fingerprints and hidden speckles of blood. Somewhere in the shadows an insect buzzed intermittently, like a small plane with engine trouble.

  I walked around the cabin, being extremely careful not to disturb any of the cones or markings. Until you have seen something like this, you cannot appreciate how much fluid a human head contains. Danziger’s had burst like a water balloon. Near the body, the floor was painted thick with it in an immense dark oval. At the edges this stain gave way to heavy splats, which in turn gave way to shapely teardrops. Furthest from the body, the blood was no more than a mist on the wall. Delicate microdroplets with an irresistible needle-fine texture. I lifted a finger to touch them, to feel the tiny Braille bumps they’d formed.

  ‘Unh-unh-unh.’ This was a voice behind me. ‘I wouldn’t do that.’

  An inch from the blood-spattered wall, my hand froze.

  I turned to see a very tall, lanky man in the doorway. Backlit, his features were difficult to make out. He wore a flannel jacket and a scally cap, which made him look like a longshoreman, one of the tough guys who beat up Brando in On the Waterfront.

  ‘It’s okay. I’m a cop.’

  ‘I don’t care if you’re J. Edgar Hoover. You touch that blood, you’ll be tampering with a crime scene.’

  ‘J. Edgar Hoo – I didn’t touch anything.’

  ‘Didn’t touch anything? Son, you’re marching around in there like it’s a parade ground. You have no blessed idea what you’ve touched.’

  I exited, retracing my steps with the same exquisite care I’d used in entering the cabin.

  ‘Don’t knock anything over,’ the tall man advised, unimpressed.

  In the pine-needle yard, I told him, ‘I’m Ben Truman. I’m the chief here.’

  ‘Well, Ben Truman, you won’t be chief for long if you keep this up. Didn’t they teach you anything in school?’

  ‘History’

  ‘History Ah.’

  Neither of us spoke for a moment while we considered the irrelevance of my education.

  ‘Did you want something here?’ I asked him.

  ‘Just to have a look.’

  I hesitated.

  ‘It’s alright. I’m a cop too.’

  ‘Are you working this case?’

  ‘No, no. Just came to scratch an itch.’

  ‘Alright. Just don’t go inside. It’s not a parade ground, you know.’

  He stepped to the threshold of the cabin, where he stood stiffly, scanning the one-room interior. His hands never emerged from the pockets of his coat. The inspection took only a minute or two and when it was concluded the tall man abruptly turned, thanked me, and walked off.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ I called after him, ‘wait a minute, that’s it? I thought you wanted to look at it?’

  He turned back. ‘I just did.’

  ‘But you can’t see anything from there.’

  ‘Of course you can, Ben Truman.’ He gave me a little wink and turned to go.

  ‘Hold on a second. You came all the way out here just to—Who are you, anyway?’

  ‘I told you, I’m a policeman. Well, a retired policeman. But as they say, a retired policeman is like a retired whore – she can stop working but she’ll always be a whore. We’ll always be policemen, you and I. It’s the nature of the job, Ben Truman.’

  He stood there, hands in pockets, waiting for another question.

  I was distracted, though, first by the joke – the wisdom of which eluded me, as did the humor – and then by the archaic term policeman. When had policeman been laundered out of the language, replaced by the antiseptic but gender-neutral police officer or the slangy, vaguely disrespectful cop? Policeman belongs to a more prosaic past – Officer Friendly in a brass-buttoned tunic, that was a policeman. But this man had used the term without self-consciousness. He was an older guy, maybe sixty-five or seventy, and I had the feeling he used other anachronisms as well, girl to refer to a grown woman, or tennis shoes for sneakers.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Good luck with it.’

  Evidently he thought this was my case. It was a welcome misapprehension at first. Flattering. But I knew I had only the faintest idea what a homicide detective actually does. And if this guy was a detective . . . well, what harm in asking?

  ‘What did you see in there?’

  His face registered the realization that I was no homicide detective, nor any other species of detective. He frowned. Whoever he was, he had not come out here to hand-hold a novice. ‘The same things you did. I just didn’t step on them.’

  ‘I told you, I didn’t step on anything. Anyway, there was nothing to see.’

  ‘Nothing to see? So tell me, what happened in there?’

  ‘A guy got shot.’

  ‘Well, of course. But what then?’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘A guy got shot – then the body was moved. You’ll have to figure out why.’

  ‘How do you know the body was moved?’

  ‘I know because I looked. Keep looking, Ben Truman. Figure it out.’

  ‘No, show me. What did you see in there? Show me.’

  ‘Show you, why?’

  ‘Because I’m curious. I’m just – I’m curious about things.’

  ‘I thought you said you were a policeman.’ He regarded me a moment before saying, ‘Come here.’ We moved to the doorway, where he stood behind me. ‘Tell me what you see.’

  ‘I see a cabin with a lot of blood all around. Some cones where the body was. Little signs to show where things were found.’

  ‘Yes, those are the obvious things. But what’s wrong here? What’s out of place?’

  I looked.

  ‘Look at the blood. The spatters.’

  I stared obediently at the whole baroque pattern of blots and curlicues.

  ‘Do you know anything about blood-spatter patterns?’

  ‘No. I’ve never—’

  ‘Well, there’s nothing mysterious about it. When blood or any other fluid falls straight down, it spatters evenly. You get a stain that’s a round circle with splashes of blood around it, the same in all directions. But when it strikes a surface at an angle, the blood’s own momentum makes it spread across the surface. So, instead of a round stain, it leaves a stain the shape of a teardrop. The fat end of the teardrop is where it hits first, then it tapers off, thinner and thinner as it moves away from the point of origin. You can tell all kinds of things f
rom stains. If you get a round stain on the floor, you know the blood probably just fell with gravity rather than being projected by force. That’s called passive bleeding. A wounded victim will leave a lot of stains like that as he moves around and blood drips from his wounds. There’s not much of that here, of course, because your victim died instantly. But look at these stains, the ones like little comet trails. The blood was spattering out’ – he gestured – ’this way. You see, those cones are behind the blood spatters. The body couldn’t have fallen there. The way those cones are placed, it looks like the blood came flying toward the victim, and of course that’s impossible. So this body was moved after it hit the ground.’

  ‘Maybe he didn’t fall straight down,’ I argued. ‘Maybe the bullet pushed him in that direction after the blood sprayed out, so he just landed on the wrong side of the spatters.’

  ‘No, no.’ He shook his head – but patiently, even respectfully, with no suggestion that I was some hayseed sheriff from Acadia County. He seemed to take me for what I was, a young cop with a lot to learn. He seemed to enjoy playing the professor too, for a while at least. ‘You’ve been watching too many movies, Ben Truman. In movies, you see a man standing stock-still, and when he is shot the bullet sends him flying against the wall. Pure bullshit. It doesn’t work that way. A bullet can’t do that. Shooting into a human body is like shooting into a bag of sand. The bullet pierces the surface, and the sandbag, which is much heavier than the bullet, just absorbs the impact. Same with a person. The bullet is too small and too penetrating to shove him in any direction. So in real life, if a person is standing still and he’s shot, he falls straight to the ground. Now, if a man is moving – if he’s running, say – and he gets shot in the back, then yes, he’ll fall forward. But that’s not because the bullet knocked him forward; it’s because his own momentum carried him in that direction. Even allowing for Danziger’s height, he could not have landed that far on the wrong side of the spatters. So this body was moved, we presume by the shooter.’