And in this case two negatives don’t make a positive, or at least I don’t think they do. But maybe because Ethan is gone it means Truman will return. Because how could God decide to take both of them so that I wander around in this huge house alone without anyone to see or talk to? But like I said before, He wants us all to accept Him as the sole provider of benediction.
It’s like that slave, Margaret Garner, who could not trust God and killed her own child rather than have that child enslaved as she had been. She knew, if she returned to Kentucky, the wind or even the slightest draft could kick up and carry away her children, take them away from her so that she’d never see them again. Better they were dead by her own hand than to live with that kind of dread. Better they were dead than have uncertainty. But her children would live in depraved conditions no matter where they were, even with their mother. It was different with Truman.
He could come back and lay in his bed and cross his legs and that would be that. Not another word would be said about where he’d been or why he’d made his father and mother feel such anguish. I know I speak for Ethan, too, when I say that Truman could come back tomorrow and we’d never even ask him where he’d gone. It didn’t really matter where he’d gone, did it? It wouldn’t matter even if you just left and didn’t want to tell us why you’d gone. We’d accept it and then we’d go on with our lives as if none of this had ever happened, as if all of it was a bad dream. And it was then that I wanted to tell Ethan I thought that’s exactly what it was: a very bad dream. I went out into the garage again and only my car was there. His was still gone. I’d wait to see him tonight, though. I’d wait until all the other people on this side of the world were sleeping and then we’d stumble into each other, Ethan with his whiskey in his hand and me with my wine in mine, and I’d tell him then.
It would be a wonderful thing to watch his reaction, to watch him throw his head back like the old Ethan and say out loud,
That’s just like our Truman to pull something like that. If he isn’t the God-damnedest kid the two of us made. God damn if he isn’t.
Then everything would be fine. Just like that.
Detective Parachuk
Twelve days after Truman’s death
Not a thing. Nothing. The mayor calls me nightly as if his pestering can somehow make a difference. The state police are here, the FBI, and yet nothing. I am puzzled by the fact that no one heard a sound the night of the murder. One man, Brent Lawson, said he heard a scream, a girl’s scream, at about the time Truman was killed, but he also said he had woken every night for the past five years to the same scream. His daughter had been killed in an auto accident. Did he look out the window? No. The screams subsided and then he was able to sleep.
Wendy wants me to resign. I truly do think about it. I hardly know these people anymore. But as soon as I consider it, I think of the Engroffs. I think of the sadness I see in both of them. Their marriage is more than likely ruined. Their lives are more than likely ruined, and if I could find who killed their son, maybe that would give them some solace.
I felt the charge of learning about this Roger Claus after the Marsh boy told me about him, but his father has powerful people in Washington and, even though we’ve alerted the embassy in Saudi Arabia, we’ve gotten no response, only a promise to look into the matter. They claim they don’t have access to all the Americans who have financial dealings with Saudi businesses. We contacted Columbia University and they said Claus left early because of a family matter, and they’d agreed to send his final exams through the embassy, but the exams haven’t been developed to this point, and so we have to wait on that. We are trying to get a court order to get access to the address that was given to Columbia, but as with Truman Engroff’s cell phone, the process is long and most courts are reluctant to get involved with a foreign government, even when it is only indirectly.
Plus we’ve discovered Claus has dual citizenship, which makes it even more complicated.
It seems like, at every turn, the investigation is deflected by wealth and influence or both. I wish Persia were like it was when I was a kid. Things were simpler. We had rules and no one thought they could ignore them just because they had money. Even the folks who came out from the city knew how to behave. It’s like they would come out here in the way people come to a house as guests. When you’re a guest you conduct yourself in such a way that you’re not imposing on your host. In the past, when scions of the Vanderbilts and others like them came here, they knew they were guests, I guess.
But that has all changed now. Sometimes some of us old-timers feel like we’re the guests now, even in our own town. It’s like everything else nowadays: There’s privilege and then there’s the rest of us.
Ethan
Twenty-nine days after Truman’s death
I knew as soon as Frank Rodenbaugh said,
That’s just the thing, Ethan. I know for a fact she never would talk to him again after your Truman…after Truman died.
I knew then that Carly knew.
I’d promised Frank Rodenbaugh I’d call her. He wanted me to call her but instead I drove to the school and I waited in a corner of the parking lot under some very old white pines, the shade, I hoped, camouflaging my black Lexus. I got there just before the last bell would ring and I waited with the air conditioner on because it was a very hot late April day. I began to cry when the students poured out of the building onto the waiting school buses and the upperclassmen started streamed toward their cars, their voices full of hope and a haphazard happiness, not knowing there was the possibility they’d never see another day, it was that easy for bad things to happen even to kids only beginning to start their lives. I watched them with their backpacks full of books and they ran or lumped along out to their cars, laughing and calling to each other like a chorus of boisterous birds flitting around, and I thought all the time,
My Truman will never be with them again. He’s not been here for a long time and he’ll never be with these children walking to his car and coming back home to us.
I felt a resentment because there were students going out to the cars and driving into freedom who didn’t want Truman to have freedom, wanted him locked in that casket so that he would no longer make them uncomfortable, no longer remind them that not all people were the same. And some were happy to point that out or brave enough to point that out, and I couldn’t have pointed out any of those kids by name but I knew they were among that throng and it made me want to do something violent so they would know they weren’t always right and they weren’t always safe and there were people out there who might very well want to hurt them just as they’d contemplated hurting my Truman.
Then I saw Carly. She was with three other girls and they were walking to the far end of the parking lot, and I realized I should’ve considered that, because Carly was always late, a thing Truman was constantly griping about. Her car was parked at the far reaches of the parking lot and the farthest away from the school, because she’d be one of the last kids to make it to school. She had on a plaid skirt like girls wear in Catholic schools and a white, short-sleeved blouse and a brown pair of Uggs, seemingly incongruous to the rest of what she was wearing. The two other girls were dressed more casually with shorts and blouses. All three had backpacks and all three were pretty.
One of them I recognized. She’d come with Carly a few times in the past year or so to visit Truman in his room and she’d seemed friendly, if aloof, as all kids were at that age unless they really knew you, as Carly did us. Unlike the other kids they walked with less energy, as if their discussion had some weight instead of the conversations of destinations to meet to do what? fuck? smoke weed? somehow get high? For a moment they stopped in a part of the parking lot where cars had already begun to exit and stood talking.
I watched Carly closely to see if she smiled or laughed, but she didn’t, or at least from this distance. She was lingering longer than I’d hoped and I was beginning to wonder if security people or other students would see me as some pedophile with my car running and my face eclipsed by shadow and sun glare, waiting for the ideal girl to climb into a car so I could follow her. The parking lot was emptying and it struck me that Carly might recognize the Engroff Lexus and come and confront me, asking what I was doing in the parking lot lurking around.
None of that happened, though. After a few more minutes Carly turned to go and then turned back in a final gesture and put her hand on the arm of the girl I’d recognized, the girl with curly black hair, as I’d seen her do so many times with Truman, and I felt a swirl of emotion that settled in my heart and I felt, as I did so often now, the greatest weight of sadness.
Finally, Carly walked to her car, threw her book bag into the back and then climbed into the front seat, sweeping the bottom of her short skirt behind her so it wouldn’t ride up. I waited until she drove out of the lot and onto the school road, passing the tennis courts, which were now crowded with boys ready to start practice, before I pulled out at the further end of the lot and followed behind. She made the left heading for town rather than heading the opposite direction, which would have led to my house and her own. I stayed behind her at a safe distance, but close enough to see if she’d turn left to go into the main part of town or right to go up the hill toward the town athletic fields and a park above the fields. She made the right.
There is less than a mile before the road splits and goes over railroad tracks, and Carly veered left toward the park. I pulled back safely, knowing she was heading for George Manner Park. Actually, Persia had originally been called Manner, but he had owned property in Virginia as well and at some early point it was discovered he’d owned slaves, so the town changed its name to Pershing, after John J. Pershing. But then the town fathers, thinking too many things were named after old Black Jack, shortened it to Persia and there it stayed. Why the park never had its name changed I don’t know.
I pulled into the park slowly and saw the BMW parked between two other cars, both late-model station wagons, both with child car seats in the back. Carly was no longer in her car and I took a cursory glance at the park to see if she was visible. She was not. I parked on the opposite side of the parking lot and climbed out of the car and into the heat. The trees were across the other end of parked cars and I scanned them where I knew there were benches interspersed. The sun beat down on me and I felt a wave of nausea. I needed a glass of beer to settle my stomach.
I began to walk toward the trees and then I saw her. She was sitting on the grass under a tree. I knew the ground was still wet from the amount of rain we’d had, so I thought immediately of her legs and rear getting damp, but as I got closer I saw she was sitting on a blanket. It made me think her being here was premeditated, and also that she may have been doing this often lately. I walked to a corner of the tree line beyond the lower parking lot, so she wouldn’t see me. I wanted to wait and see if she were waiting for someone else. Meeting someone who may also have been involved in Truman’s death.
I was certain she was waiting for someone, because she didn’t seem to have an iPod or anything with her, or at least wasn’t using one, nor was she reading a book or magazine. She just sat there in the shade, her face flushed from the warmth of the day. So many times I’d sat and watched her as she grew up next to Truman. We’d all loved each other so long it seemed almost impossible she was somehow responsible for his death, but I knew now, instinctively, that she was.
I’d gone over it in my mind countless times since Frank Rodenbaugh had talked to me, and I knew just from the way he’d described Carly and the change in her, I knew she was somehow involved. I’d thought about when I saw her at the funeral and at the memorial service, how she’d hung back and waited her turn to come to us. That wasn’t like Carly. She was part of us; she’d been part of Truman. The Carly I knew would’ve come forward and stood next to us whether she’d been invited or not. Even at the time I’d thought that was odd. But either I’d been too occupied with grief, or too distracted, or had attributed it to her own grief and her own callowness.
Rethinking it, though, I remembered the kind of person Carly had always been. Almost from the beginning she would march into our house as if it were her own, kicking off her shoes on the way, and walk up to Truman’s room, eat dinner with us without an invitation, open the refrigerator or go to the pantry if she was hungry. She walked into my study and sat in the large leather chair I had facing my desk and read without asking if she could impose and after a while I didn’t expect her to ask. Instead I just expected to hear the sound of her padding on the carpet while I enjoyed a martini, her unceremonious plop as she nestled into the chair and began reading, looking over the top of her novel to smile once before she nuzzled her shoulders back into the comfort of my chair.
If she was away more than two days and Truman was unwilling to communicate her whereabouts, Amy would call to see if she was sick or angry with Tru.
But then it changed when they reached high school, and she began to come over less and less. We had to adjust to that and we did. She was growing into a breathtakingly beautiful girl and it was then that I ached for Truman, ached for his inability to yearn for her, yearn for her as even I did in fleeting moments, longing to touch the skin of her arm or brush my lips against the down on her neck. I won’t apologize for that, because most men my age, in the middle of their lives, experience the same longings. Of course, those ephemeral moments of desire were entwined with the desire I had that Truman would want her and eventually live with her, as we all expected, until it gradually became clear that our Truman wasn’t marrying Carly, or any girl for that matter. None. Ever.