Willnot Read Free

suppose you’ll be joining me, this time of day?”
    “No, ma’am.”
    She poured what looked to be precisely an inch and a half of whiskey into a glass that resembled, more than anything else, the holder for a votive candle, and rejoined me. “You lived here as a child, didn’t you?”
    “When I was fourteen. But only for a year, before my father moved us on. Moving on was what he did.”
    “I was eighteen when I came. Not a cent to my name, stars in my eyes. Two summer dresses and a brokeback pair of saddle oxfords. Five years before that, I’d come home from school, got the sandwich my mother left for me in the refrigerator for a snack, did math and history homework, listened to the radio. Around five, I went out and sat on the front porch to wait for my parents to come home. They never did.
    “To this day I don’t know what happened to them. I got sent to a juvenile facility, then to a foster home, Sven and Carey Waters. That’s what they did for a living, but they were good, kind people. They raised me, other kids coming in and out, in and out, all the time. When I was eighteen, I left.”
    “I didn’t know that.”
    “No reason you would.”
    “Did you stay in touch with them?”
    “Just a postcard or two, those first years. But when I started getting onto what they’d done for me, seeing that, understanding it, I began writing letters. Every week, just about. The two of them had done everything together, and they died the same way, within days of one another, must be better than forty years ago now.”
    “I’m sorry, Miss Ellie.”
    “Nothing to be sorry about. Sven and Carey took good care of me, taught me independence, I’ve had a fine life. Unlike those people out there by the gravel pit. It got me to thinking, is all. People disappearing. Families. How some of us find our way and most never do.
    “A friend I had back then, when I heard the Waterses had died, she told me ‘They’ve passed on to their reward, Ellie.’ I looked at her a long time and said, ‘You ever think about what you’re saying, or you just open your mouth and let words fall out?’ Nell never cared much for me after that. But you can’t fix stupid. And you sure as hell can’t kill it.”
    She finished off her whiskey, picked up my cup and saucer. “Thinking I’ll wait a spell on that operation, Lamar. Doesn’t seem the time for it just now.”
    I told her I understood, we’d talk later. Outside, the air was crisp and clear, still bearing witness to yesterday’s rain, and thesun was bright. I thought back to my psych rotation as an intern. William Johnson, “Mister Bill” to everyone, fingers twisted like roots, half a leg gone to diabetes, half his mind gone to bad whiskey. “Look up there,” he said to me one day on the yard, hand quivering—left, right, up, down—as he did his best to point, “that old sun’s grinning like a fool.”

    Maryanne was not grinning.
    “Stephen’s back.” She shook her head. No doubt whatsoever about what she was thinking. “I put him in your office, hope that’s okay.”
    “Of course.”
    With Stephen you never knew what to expect. He could as easily be sitting quietly staring at the wall, down on hands and knees picking lint out of the carpet, or pacing about the room.
    I tapped at the door, took a breath and went in.
    Option number one, more or less.
    “Close, Doctor Hale. I’m close.”
    Stephen was twenty-three. When he was eighteen, his parents and sister died in a car crash, hit and run. He was supposed to have been in the car as well but had begged off. Over the next couple of years we watched Stephen pass from wanting to find the person responsible, to believing that the crash was intentional, not an accident at all, but willful murder. The boy’s gone gumshoe, as Richard said, Stephen’s time so given over to his obsession that he’d abandoned friends, personal hygiene, regular meals and health, then lost his job. Almost lost the house as well, before an