Flowering Judas (2 page)

Mark came in from the back, looked at Kenny's books, and shrugged.

“She's upset,” Mark said.

“I can hear she's upset,” Kenny said.

“You can't blame her for being upset,” Mark said. “The last time one of us left home, he went missing. And you know she's convinced Chester is dead.”

“I'm convinced Chester is dead,” Kenny said. “But that's not the point. I mean, for God's sake, Mark. I can't do this anymore.”

“Can't do what? Live with your family? Lots of people live with their families.”

“It's not the living with them I don't like.”

Mark looked away. “It's not an unreasonable thing to ask. That you be in school, I mean. You can't just lounge around the house and not do anything.”

“I don't lounge around the house and not do anything. I've got a business. I'm not selling drugs, and I'm making more than enough to live on my own. And if she doesn't want me to do that, then let's cut this crap about school and stop treating me like I was six.”

Mark looked at the floor. Kenny wondered what it was his brother thought about all the time. The hallway was all polished up and pretty the way their mother liked it. It had some kind of long-haired carpet on the floor, and little pictures of kittens in frames on the walls. The place made Kenny claustrophobic.

“Maybe,” Mark said, “you should give up the fancy cars and come to work in the business.”

“They're antique cars, not fancy cars,” Kenny said. “And the business wouldn't pay me enough money. Never mind the fact that it wouldn't stop all this crap about school. Look, all I want to do is concentrate on my own business, open a showroom somewhere, expand the Web sites, do what I have to do. And not go to school. There's no point to it.”

“There's always a point to school,” Mark said.

He looked so smug, Kenny wanted to hit him.

Then the door at the back of the hall opened, and their father came in. Their father was the largest man Kenny had ever known. He was six foot three if he was anything at all. Chester had been tall like that. Kenny was not.

Stew Morton came down to where Kenny and Mark had faced off, and looked at Kenny's books. Then he looked anywhere at all except at Kenny's face.

“Your mother's crying,” he said.

“I've been trying to talk to him,” Mark said.

“Nobody needs to talk to me,” Kenny said. “I'm not going to do this anymore, Pop, that's all there is. This is the last of school, I really mean it. I'm going to finish this course. I paid for it. I can't get a full refund. I'll finish it. But that's it. I'm done.”

“It's not school your mother is crying about,” Stew said. “It's you. Moving out.”

“I won't move to the damned trailer park,” Kenny said.

“How do you think she feels? I'm not asking you to stay forever. She doesn't want you to stay forever. She just wants you to stay until it's cleared up.”

“It's been twelve years,” Kenny said. “Maybe you have to accept the possibility that it's never going to be cleared up. There are cases like that, Pop. There are cases that just don't get solved.”

“This one will get solved,” Stew said. “She's got the FBI interested.”

“No, she doesn't,” Kenny said. “She's tried them before. They just aren't going to come across. They can't even do it unless they can prove a crime has been committed and that it had something to do with crossing state lines. We don't even know a crime was committed here—”

“Your brother wouldn't just run off without telling anybody,” Stew said. “And he wouldn't have left all his things in that trailer. Your mother talked to him at eight o'clock on the night he went missing, and he was going over to that woman's house—he was going—”

“Yeah, I know. He was going over to see Darvelle. I was here when all this happened. And it's beside the point. I'm not going to school anymore. That's the end of it. And I'm not going into the business. That's the end of that. And if you can all live with both those things, that's one thing, but if you can't, you can't.”

“Your mother won't force you to go to school anymore,” Stew said. “I've talked to her about it.”

“You talked to her about it before,” Kenny said. “She lets up for a few weeks until she thinks the crisis has passed, and then she's right back at it. I've found a place over in Morris Corners. I can move in on the first of September. I'm not going to live in Chester's trailer park.”

“What happens if you go missing?” Stew said. “It will kill her. It really will.”

“I'm not going to go missing,” Kenny said.

He looked at Mark and then back at his father. Then he took his books and went out the back door.

His truck was parked in the driveway behind Mark's, a big red pickup he used to haul stuff around. He wasn't about to use more than one vehicle as long as he could help it. It was always possible to make money if you just watched your expenses. That was the genius of the Internet. It was great for keeping your expenses under control.

Kenny climbed into the cab of the truck and sat back. He could look up and down their street and see the flyers posted on every telephone pole. The flyers had been there since Chester had been missing a week, and his mother refreshed them every week or two. She went around to the grocery stores and gas stations and put up new ones. She made hundreds and sent them out by bulk mail.

Kenny got the truck started and took a deep breath.

If he ran into Chester on the street, he'd kill him right there.

Everybody's life would be better if they only had the body.

3

Shpetim Kika knew a few things, in spite of having been brought up on a sheep farm in Albania. One of the things he knew was that everything was better under capitalism, except morals, which were a mess. Sexual morals were a mess, that is. On the bribery and corruption front, Shpetim could scarcely believe how clean this place was. It had taken him only a few weeks to figure it out. If you gave some politician money to give you a job, they put both you and the politician in jail, and they didn't care what political party you belonged to or who was the president in power in Washington. There were good things and bad things about this. The good things were that you got the job if you were good at your work, and you didn't get accused of something and thrown in jail so that somebody with better connections could get it instead. The bad things were that you had to work your ass off.

They had been working their asses off all day on this particular job. They would be working their asses off for at least another two hours. They'd stay as long as the light lasted. It was late August and the days were already beginning to go dark a little earlier. It wasn't much earlier, but still. It was coming. The fall was coming. The winter was coming. They had to have the shell up before the first snowstorm, or they were never going to get this thing done on time.

“It's a matter of track records,” Shpetim said to his son, Nderi. Then he made a mental correction and said, “Dee. What a name for a man. Dee.”

“People find Nderi too hard to pronounce,” Nderi said. “I find Nderi too hard to pronounce.”

“We've got to bring it in on time and on budget,” Shpetim said, “or as close to both as possible. It's our first job for the state. If we do it well, we'll get another one. There's a lot of money in doing construction for the state.”

“We'll get the shell up in time,” Nderi said. “Don't worry about that. If you're going to worry about something, worry about the electricians. It's the wiring that keeps me up at night.”

“You shouldn't be keeping up at night,” Shpetim said. “You should be rested to come to work in the morning. And you should consider a girl. It's time you were married.”

“I have considered a girl.”

“A Muslim girl.”

“I have considered a girl who will convert.”

“Yes, all right,” Shpetim said. “I know. I'm not comfortable.”

“She's even Albanian,” Nderi said. “Born and brought up in Albania. Only came here three years ago. Modest to a fault, if you ask me.”

“Eh,” Shpetim said. “It's that you're young. You don't really want those things you see on TV.”

“Every man alive wants those things I see on TV,” Nderi said, “but not in a wife, I agree. But Anya is not like that, and you know it. She's willing to convert, and you know it. She has no family—”

“You don't think that's strange?” Shpetim said. “You don't think there's something wrong with that?”

“I think we know enough people who saw half their families vanish into Soviet jails, they weren't the ones there was something wrong with. There's no family to object to her conversion. Give it up. I will get married to her, one way or the other. You can't prevent it. This is America.”

“Then calm your mother about it first,” Shpetim said. “Just because you can't sleep nights doesn't mean your mother should be keeping me up. Have they stopped work over there? What is going on?”

The two of them were standing at the edge of the site for the new technology building at Mattatuck–Harvey Community College, standing at the door of the little shed they had built at the very beginning of the job. The shed was the place where they could do paperwork if they had to in the middle of the day. They had every man in the business out here working. Shpetim himself came out here to work, even if he couldn't lift heavy objects anymore. Nderi could lift them. He could pick up steel girders as if they were made out of bread dough.

“It's not like we're Arabs,” Nderi said. “Our women don't go veiled. They don't even wear the hijab most of the time. She won't have a hard time fitting in. And Albanian cooking is Albanian cooking.”

“They've stopped work over there,” Shpetim said, pointing across the site to where poured concrete and steel reinforcement bars were sticking out of the ground. A half-dozen men were in a little clutch right next to a pile of concrete blocks. The earthmover next to them was puffing away, using up fuel, but not actually doing anything.

“They can't just stop like that,” Shpetim said. “What do they think they're doing?”

“I want you to help me talk Ma into letting Anya come for dinner some night,” Nderi said. “That's how you start this kind of thing. You have the girl to dinner. And I want Ma to meet her.”

“Your mother has met her.”

“I want her to meet Anya
formally,
” Nderi said.

One of the men broke away from the clutch and began to walk across the blasted landscape toward Shpetim and Nderi. It was Andor Kulla, looking—Shpetim couldn't put a name to how he looked.

“There's something wrong,” Shpetim said.

“There's always something wrong,” Nderi said.

Andor walked up to them and stopped. Shpetim was about to start shouting, but then he didn't. He didn't know why.

“Why are you not working?” Shpetim asked. “What are you all doing, standing around like that? You know we've got a deadline.”

Andor looked up, then down, then back the way he had come. The other men were all standing in their clutch, looking at Shpetim and Nderi and Andor. Andor turned back.

“You've got to come,” he said. “We found something.”

“Found something? Found what?” Shpetim asked.

Andor shook his head and turned away. “This is the last place they saw him alive, isn't it?” Andor said, walking back across the site as he talked. “That kid. Ten, twelve years ago. This was the last place anybody saw him alive.”

Shpetim felt something drop right inside him, as if his intestines had fallen loose and were about to come out. He hurried after Andor, walking over the pocked earth as quickly as he could. Nderi came with him, moving faster.

This is what I need,
Shpetim thought.
Something to bring all the work on the site to a halt. Something to make me a suspect in an investigation.
He had no idea what kind of investigation. The men must have found a body. That was the only thing that made any sense. They must have found a body, or a skeleton, and this would be a crime scene, and the work would stop, and they would be blamed for it. There would be blood. There would be policemen. It would be the end of everything he had started out to do here, and then he would have to go back to Albania.

Except that he couldn't go back to Albania. He was an American citizen now.

Shpetim got to where the men were standing and looked around. They backed up, and he could see that there was a hole where the earthmover had been digging earlier in the day. He looked into the hole expecting to see a ghostly skeleton hand reaching up out of the dirt.

What he saw instead was the top of a bright yellow backpack, full of something.

4

For Darvelle Haymes, life in Mattatuck, New York, was a matter of putting one foot in front of the other. That was what she had been doing when Chester went missing, and it was what she was doing now, as the day began to fold in on itself and the dark began to creep in around the edges. She pulled her Honda Civic into the driveway of her small brick ranch house and turned the engine off. She took the key out of the ignition and looked around. This was a reasonably good neighborhood for Mattatuck. She'd only been able to buy the house because, being a real estate agent, she'd seen it go on the market, underpriced, five days before anybody else knew it was there.

She got out of the car and looked around again. The telephone pole at the curb was just a telephone pole. The community bulletin board at the bus stop was empty. She thought about going into the house right away, and then she thought better of it. She marched down to the street and looked around. All the telephone poles she could see were just telephone poles.

Darvelle went back up the driveway and then through the breezeway and into the house by the side door. She could have parked the car in the garage, but she didn't want to.