The taller of the two had cropped dark hair and shoulders so broad his arms seemed to swing at a distance greater than usual from his slim body. He was walking backward and waving his arms. The smaller boy, wider, rounder, and with long, sandy-reddish hair, had the resigned, rubbery face of a comedian, but Tim saw that his instinctive equanimity was strained to the breaking point. He kept slowing the pace, jamming his hands into the deep, low pockets of his capacious jeans, then raising them in a gesture that said,
What can I do? Sorry, I can’t help you.
Dancing before him, the dark-haired boy seemed to be saying,
Man, I need you with me on this. Give me a break!
A pair of mimes could not have drawn the poles of their disagreement any more clearly, nor the passion of one and the resistance of the other. The tall boy stopped moving and clutched the sides of his head. Tim knew he was cursing and hoped he was not trying to coax his red-haired friend into some illegality. It did not look like that kind of dispute, exactly. Something crucial was at stake, but probably an advanced form of mischief, not a criminal charge.
Come on, we’ll have a blast, it’ll be great
versus
Give it up, there’s no way I’m doing that, and I don’t think you should do it, either.
Tim thought he heard a wail of frustration and outrage.
The red-haired boy dodged around his gesticulating friend and continued up the sidewalk. The taller boy ran up to him and clouted his shoulder. Looking extraordinarily graceful in his pale blue and light yellow shirts, he shot out an arm and pointed at, or very near to, Tim Underhill’s window. Instinctively, Tim stepped back. Almost immediately, he moved forward again, drawn by an unexpected recognition. The taller of the two boys was strikingly handsome, even beautiful, in a dark-browed, clean-featured manner. A second later, Tim Underhill’s recognition system at last yielded the information that he was looking at his nephew, Mark. By a kind of generational enhancement, features that passed for pleasing but unremarkable in his mother emerged, virtually unchanged, as beautiful in her son. In all likelihood, Mark had no idea of how attractive he was.
The next message that came bubbling into consciousness was that just then Mark could have been speaking of him to his red-haired friend. Philip had probably mentioned that he would be in town for the funeral, and it would be like Philip to throw in a sneering reference to the Pforzheimer. That Mark was probably speaking of him meant that Tim had some role in the dispute between the two boys. What sort of role, he wondered: advice, direction, decision?
Whatever his point had been, Mark—for it really
was
Mark, Tim saw—had decided to save his powder for another day’s battle. That this was a truce, not surrender, was evident in his loping slouch, the ease of his stride, the wry set of his mouth. The red-haired boy spoke to him, and he shrugged in feigned indifference.
It almost hurt, that Mark should have become so beautiful—the world at large had already begun to conspire against the straightforward destiny that would otherwise have been his. Would you just look at him, down there on the sidewalk? He’s pretending to be too tough to be wounded by his mother’s death.
Both boys stopped moving to watch the man in the seersucker suit and straw hat once again come hitching down the red steps of the MAC. There was always something horrible about catching an actor at work, suddenly becoming aware that he was after all merely playing a role.
From Timothy Underhill’s journal, 20 June 2003
Eight days after my last entry, and I must go back to Millhaven again. Philip told me that Mark has been missing for a couple of days, and he only called me
because he thought I might have been hiding him in my loft!
Really, he was furious, barely able to contain it. And though I resent his attitude, in all honesty I can’t be angry with him or even really blame him very much for what he’s been thinking.
From what I could make of Philip’s rant, Mark vanished sometime in the evening of, I think, the 18th. Philip waited up for him until two in the morning, then retired in the reasonable certainty that before long Mark would be in his bed. In the morning, Mark’s bed was still empty. Philip called the police, who informed him of what he already knew, that two other boys recently had disappeared from that part of town, but added that he ought not jump to any conclusions. They added that most teenage runaways come back home within twenty-four hours and recommended patience. Philip drew on his capacity for patience and discovered that he possessed a limited supply. By noon he was calling the police again, with the same result. He had of course walked up the block to confront Jimbo Monaghan, Mark’s best friend, but Jimbo either knew nothing about the disappearance or pretended he knew nothing. Thinking he smelled complicity, Philip accused the boy of lying. Jimbo’s mother, Margo, ordered him out of the house—threw him out, really. For a couple of hours, Philip drove around Millhaven, looking for his son everywhere he thought his son might be, every place he had heard Mark speak of. He knew it was a hopeless effort, but he was unable to keep himself from cruising past playgrounds his son had not visited in years, staring in the windows of fast-food restaurants, driving around and around Sherman Park. He felt so desperate he wept. In the space of ten days, he had lost both wife and son.
Grimly, Philip bounced back and forth between two equally fearful notions: that Mark had been abducted by the “Sherman Park Killer,” who had already claimed two boys his age; and that Mark had killed himself, possibly in imitation of his mother, even more possibly out of the mixture of horror and despair set loose within him by what he had been obliged to witness. The police, being police, were concentrating on the first of these alternatives. They walked through the parks and searched the wooded areas in Millhaven but failed to uncover a body. They also checked the records at the airport, the train and bus stations; they, too, questioned Jimbo Monaghan, his parents, and other teenagers and parents Mark had known. When none of this yielded as much as a suggestion of the boy’s whereabouts, the police released Mark’s information and requested the assistance of the city’s residents. A none-too-recent photograph was sent to the FBI and to police departments across the country. There, for all practical purposes, the matter rested.
Except of course for Philip, who at this pre–Dewey Dell stage could face none of the possibilities aroused by his son’s disappearance: that a psychopath had kidnapped and probably murdered him; that he had killed himself in some location yet to be found; or that he had simply run off without a word. When Philip found himself face to face with this unacceptable series of choices, another occurred to him, and he called his overprivileged, never quite to be trusted brother in New York.
“All right, you can tell me now,” he said. “I never thought you’d be capable of doing a thing like this to your own brother, but I’m sure you had your reasons. He must have told you a hell of a story.”
“Philip, you’d better start at the beginning. What can I tell you now, and what do you think I did to you?”
“What
did
he tell you, exactly? How bad is it? Did I beat the crap out of him every night? Was I psychologically abusive?”
“Are you talking about Mark?”
“Gee, do you think? Why would I be asking you about Mark, I wonder? If my son happens to be there with you, Tim, I’m asking you to let me talk to him. No, I’m not asking. I’m begging.”
“Jesus, Philip, Mark left home? What happened?”
“What happened? My son hasn’t been here for three days, that’s what. So if he’s staying in that fucked-up circus of yours on Grand Street, goddamn you, I’m on my knees here. Put him on. Do whatever you have to, all right?”
It took a while, but I did manage to convince Philip that his son was not hiding in my loft, and that I’d had nothing to do with his disappearance. I felt silenced, stunned, baffled.
“Why didn’t you call me before this?”
“Because it didn’t occur to me that he might be in New York until about an hour ago.”
Seen one way, Philip and I are alone in the world. We have no other siblings, no cousins or second cousins, no grandparents, no aunts or uncles, no living parents.
I asked him if there was anything I could do for him.
“Isn’t one of your best friends Tom Pasmore? I want you to talk to him—get him to help me.”
Tom Pasmore, I add for posterity’s sake, is an old Millhaven friend of mine who solves crimes for a living, not that he needs the money. He’s like Sherlock Holmes or Nero Wolfe, except that he is a real person, not a fictional one. His (biological) father was the same way. He solved crimes in city after city, chiefly by going over all the records and documents in sight and making connections everyone else missed, connections you more or less have to be a genius to see. Tom inherited his methods along with his talents and his wardrobe. As far as I’m concerned, Tom Pasmore is the best private investigator in the world, but he only works on cases he chooses by himself. Back in ’94 he helped me work out a terrible puzzle that my collaborator and I later turned into a novel.
I told Philip I would get to Millhaven as quickly as possible and added that I’d do my best to get Tom Pasmore to think about the boy’s disappearance.
“Think about it? That’s all?”
“In most cases, that’s what Tom does. Think about things.”
“Okay, talk to the guy for me, will you?”
“As soon as I can,” I said. I didn’t want to explain Tom Pasmore’s schedule to my brother, who has the old-time schoolmaster’s suspicion of anyone who does not arise at 7:00 and hit the hay before midnight. Tom Pasmore usually turns off his reading light around 4:00
A.M
. and seldom gets up before 2:00
P.M
. He likes single-malt whiskey, another matter best unmentioned to Philip, who had responded to Pop’s alcohol intake by becoming a moralistic, narrow-minded teetotaler.
After I arranged for my tickets, I waited another hour and called Tom. He picked up as soon as he heard my voice on his answering machine. I described what had happened, and Tom asked me if I wanted him to check around, look at the records, see what he might be able to turn up. “Looking at the records” was most of his method, for he seldom left the house and performed his miracles by sifting through newspapers, public records on-line and off, and all kinds of databases. Over the past decade he had become dangerously expert at using his computers to get into places where ordinary citizens were not allowed.
Tom said that you never knew what you could learn from a couple of hours’ work, but that if the boy didn’t turn up in the next day or two, he and I might be able to accomplish something together. In the meantime, he would “scout around.” But—he wanted me to know—in all likelihood, as much as he hated to say it, my nephew had fallen victim to the monster who earlier probably had abducted and murdered two boys from the same part of town.
“I can’t think about that, and neither can my brother,” I said. (I was wrong about the latter, I was to learn.)
Forty-five minutes later, Tom called me with some startling news. Had I known that my late sister-in-law had been related to Millhaven’s first serial killer?
“Who was that?” I asked.
“A sweetheart named Joseph Kalendar.”
The name seemed familiar, but I could not remember why.
“Kalendar became public property in 1979 and 1980, when you were misbehaving in Samarkand, or wherever it was.”
He knew exactly where I had been in 1979 and 1980. “Bangkok,” I said. “And by 1980 I was hardly misbehaving at all. What did Kalendar do?”
Joseph Kalendar, a master carpenter, had begun by breaking into women’s houses and raping them. After the third rape, he began bringing his fourteen-year-old son along with him. Soon after, he decided it would be prudent to murder the women after he and his son raped them. A couple of months later, he got even crazier. During his third-to-last foray, on the verbal orders of a persuasive deity, he had killed, then decapitated his son and left the boy’s headless body sprawled beside their mutual victim’s bed. God thanked him for his faithfulness and in a mighty voice sang that henceforth he, lowly Joseph Kalendar, family man, master carpenter, and Beloved Favorite of Jehovah, was charged with the erasure of the entire female gender worldwide, or at least as many as he could get around to exterminating before the police brought a close to the sacred project. In 1979 Kalendar was at last arrested. In 1980 he went on trial, was found not guilty by reason of insanity, and was sentenced to the Downstate Hospital for the Criminally Insane, where three years later he was strangled by a fellow inmate who objected wholeheartedly to Kalendar’s attempt to wash him in the blood of the Lamb and deliver him posthaste into the arms of his Savior.
“This florid madman was related to Nancy Underhill?”
“They were first cousins,” Tom said.
“I guess that explains something my brother told me after the funeral,” I said.
“Can you think of one reason your nephew would have taken off?”
“Well,” I said, “I can certainly think of one.”
3
Not long after he had read Nancy’s obituary in the paper and seen Mark through his hotel room’s window, Tim got into his rented Town Car and set out on an eccentric course to his brother’s house. Even allowing for one or two episodes of backtracking, the drive from the Pforzheimer to Superior Street should have taken Tim no longer than twenty to twenty-five minutes. If he had chosen to get on the expressway, the trip would have been five minutes shorter, but because he had not been in his hometown for nearly five years, Tim decided to drive north from downtown, then turn west on Capital Drive and keep going until he hit Teutonia Avenue’s six wide lanes, jog southwest on a diagonal and drive until he saw Sherman Park, Sherman Boulevard, Burleigh, or any of the little web of streets backed by alleys he had known in childhood. He knew where his brother lived. Assuming that its essential makeup had not changed significantly beyond a nice economic updrift, Philip had moved back into the neighborhood of his childhood. And as far as they went and no further, his assumptions had proved correct: adjusted for inflation, the average household income in the neighborhood made up of Superior, Michigan, Townsend, Auer, and Forty-fourth Street had probably quadrupled from the days of Tim’s and Philip’s childhood. However, other aspects, ones Philip had not taken into account, had changed along with income levels.
Tim had no trouble getting on Capital Drive and rolling west to Teutonia Avenue’s wide swath through a landscape of shopping centers and three-story office buildings separated by taverns. Everything looked like a cleaner, brighter, more prosperous version of the Millhaven of old, exactly what his earlier visits had led him to expect. He saw the Burleigh sign from a block away and turned into a more residential area. Identical four-story apartment buildings of cream-colored brick marched along side by side, the narrow concrete strips to their entrances standing out against the grass like a row of neckties.
Half a mile on, he saw a sign for Sherman Drive and turned left. It was not Sherman Park or Sherman Boulevard, but it had to be in the same general area. Sherman Drive dead-ended in front of a windowless bunker of poured concrete called the Municipal Records Annex. Tim doubled back and turned left again onto a narrow one-way street called Sherman Annex Way, and this came to an end at the southwest corner of Sherman Park itself, where Pops had now and then escorted little Tim and little Philip to the magnificent wading pool, the jouncing teeter-totter, the high-flying swing set, and the little realm given to the sleeping tigers and ponderous elephants of its stupendous, now long-vanished zoo.
He drove completely around the park without quite figuring out where to go next. On his second spin around the perimeter, he noticed the sign for Sherman Boulevard, turned onto it, and was instantly rewarded by the appearance on the left side of the street in remembered or shadow form of a great, ambiguous landmark of his childhood, the Beldame Oriental Theater, presently the tabernacle of a sanctified Protestant sect.
But when he turned into the old network of alleys and intersections, Tim drove twice past his brother’s house without being absolutely positive he had found it. The first time, he said to himself,
I don’t think that’s it;
the second time,
That isn’t it, is it?
That, of course, was Philip’s house, a combination of brick and fieldstone with a steeply pitched roof and an ugly little porch only slightly wider than the front door. Screwed into the screen door’s wooden surround were the numerals 3324. With no further excuse for delaying, Tim parked his ostentatious but entirely comfortable vehicle a short way down the block and walked back through the humid sunlight. Where enormous elms had once arched their boughs over the street, the dry leaves of plane trees clung to their branches a modest distance above their pale, patchy trunks. Tim reached the walkway before his brother’s house and checked his watch: the twenty-five-minute journey had taken him forty-five.
Tim pushed the buzzer. Far back in the house, a tiny bell rang. Footsteps plodded toward the door; a smudgy face ducked into, then out of, the narrow glass strips set high in the dark wood; the door swung back; and Philip stood before him, scowling through the gray scrim of the screen door. “Decided to show up, after all,” he said.
“Nice to see you, too,” Tim said. “How are you doing, Philip?”
With the air of one performing an act of charity, his brother stepped back to let him in. He looked a decade older that he had the last time Tim had seen him. His thinning hair was combed straight back from his forehead, revealing strips of scalp the same pinkish-gray as his deeply seamed face. Rimless spectacles with thin metal bows sat on his high-prowed nose. Above his soft, expansive belly, a silver tie tack anchored a shiny claret necktie to his cheap white shirt. He was still doing his utmost, Tim thought, to look exactly like what he was, a midlevel administrator of a thoroughly bureaucratic enterprise. A vice principalship was the kind of job Philip had spent all of his earlier life struggling to attain: unassailably respectable, tedious unto stupefaction, impervious to the whims of the economy, tied into a small but palpable degree of power, fodder for endless complaints.
“I’m still ambulatory,” Philip said. “How the hell do you think I should be?” He moved the few steps that took him from the little foyer into the living room, and Tim followed. Nancy, it seemed, was not to be mentioned until Philip’s sense of ritual had been satisfied.
“Sorry. Dumb question.”
“I guess it was nice of you to come all this way, anyhow. Sit down, rest up. After being in New York, you probably appreciate our famous midwestern peace and quiet.”
Having been given all the thanks he was likely to get, Tim walked across the living room and placed himself in an upholstered armchair that had come into Philip’s household after Nancy’s arrival. Philip stayed on his feet, watching him like a hotel detective. Philip’s gray suit was too heavy for the weather, and he tugged a wrinkled handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed his forehead. From overhead came the ongoing rhythmic pulse of an electric bass.
“There’s a lot of action around the Pforzheimer,” Tim said. “Some big-time director is shooting a movie on Jefferson Street.”
“Don’t tell Mark. He’ll just want to go.”
“He’s already been there. I saw him from my window. He and a red-haired kid came out of Cathedral Square and walked down the street to watch them filming a scene. They were right beneath me.”
“That was Jimbo Monaghan, his best buddy. Hell, his one and only buddy. You see one, the other one’s right behind him. Jimbo’s not a bad kid, for a dodo. Went through junior high at Quincy without any more than a half dozen demerits. Most kids rack up twice that.”
“Did Mark?”
“I had to be a little extra hard on Mark. The kids would have made his life hell if I’d shown any favoritism. Do you remember what kids are like? Find a weakness, they home in like sharks. Little bastards are barely human.”
Philip thought giving his son demerits proved that he was a stern and responsible father, but the truth was that it had given him pleasure.
“I got Cokes, root beer, ginger ale. You want beer or anything stronger, you can supply it yourself.”
“Ginger ale, if you’re having something.”
Philip ducked into the kitchen, and Tim took his usual cursory inspection of the living room. As ever, it contained the same peculiar mixture of furniture Philip had shifted from house to house before settling back in the old neighborhood. All of it seemed a bit more worn than it had been on Tim’s previous visits: the long green corduroy sofa, black recliner, highboy, and octagonal glass coffee table from Mom and Pop sharing space with the blond wooden furniture from some now-bankrupt “Scandinavian” furniture store. Tim could remember Mom sitting in the rocking chair beside Pop’s “davenport,” the fat needle working as she hooked thick, interwoven knots of the rug that covered three-fourths of Philip’s living room floor. Fifty years ago, it had been a lot brighter: now, it was just a rag to keep your shoes from touching the floor.
Philip came back into the room holding two glasses beaded with condensation. He passed one to Tim and dropped onto the far end of the davenport. His gray suit bunched up around his hips and shoulders.
“Philip, with apologies for my earlier question, how are you doing these days? How are you handling it?”
Philip took a long pull at his ginger ale and sagged against the worn cushions. He seemed to be staring at something akin to a large insect moving up the half-wall leading to the dining room and kitchen.
“With apologies, huh? That’s nice. It should be Nancy who apologizes to me, not you.” He fixed Tim with a cold, brown-eyed glare. The rimless spectacles slightly magnified his eyes. “We’re getting into a strange, strange topic here. It is
truly
strange, this topic. I have to say, it surpasseth comprehension. Do you know what I mean, or do I have to explain it to you?”
“I think I understand. I read the obituary in today’s
Ledger
. When I saw the words ‘without warning,’ I thought—”
“You thought?”
“I thought Nancy probably killed herself.”
“Is that what you thought? Well, guess what? Big brother rings the bell.”
“Would you prefer it if I didn’t understand?”
“
I
don’t know what I’d prefer.” Philip’s face twisted, and everything below his nose seemed to collapse like a punctured paper bag. “Nobody asked me for my opinion about anything.” He snatched off his glasses and passed a hand over his eyes. “No, they just go ahead and do whatever they feel like.” He emitted a shaky sigh.
“Do you think she should have asked your permission before she killed herself?”
Philip aimed an index finger at him. “There, that’s a great question, I mean it. A
great
fucking question.”
Tim swallowed cold ginger ale and forced himself to remain silent.
“Yes,” Philip said. “I do think so. I would have said,
You selfish bitch, you can’t kill yourself. You have a husband and a son. Are you crazy
?
”
“It was selfish—a selfish act.”
“All suicides are selfish.” He considered that proposition. “Unless the person is in tremendous pain, or dying, or whatever.”
“Was she feeling depressed lately?”
“What are you, a shrink? I don’t know. Nancy usually seemed a little depressed, if you ask me.” He shot Tim a wary look. “Are you asking if I
noticed
that she seemed depressed lately?”
“I’m not accusing you of anything, Philip.”
“Keep it that way. I’m not to blame for what happened. Nancy and I got along all right. Why she did it is a mystery to me. Maybe she had some kind of secret existence. Maybe I didn’t know what was going on in her life. If she didn’t tell me, how the hell could I?”
“How is Mark handling all this?”
Philip shook his head. “The kid keeps his feelings all wrapped up inside. He’s been hit hard, though. Keeps to himself, except for when he’s with Jimbo, the knucklehead you saw today. We’ll see how he gets through tonight and tomorrow and the next couple of weeks. If he looks like he needs it, I’ll get him some counseling or therapy, or whatever.”
Tim said that sounded like a good idea.
“Sure it does, to you. You live in New York, where everybody sees a shrink. For you people, a shrink is a status symbol. Out here in the real world, it’s different. Plenty of people see it as an admission that something is wrong with you.”
“You wouldn’t have to tell anybody. Neither would Mark.”
“Word gets out,” Philip said. “Vice principal’s wife commits suicide, his son starts seeing a headshrinker. How do you suppose that plays out? What kind of effect do you think it would have on my career? On top of that, those appointments don’t come cheap. Excuse me, elder brother, but I’m a humble educator in the public school system, not a millionaire.”
“Philip, if Mark could benefit from therapy, and you’d have trouble paying for it, I’d be happy to take care of it.”
“Things aren’t quite that dire,” Philip said. “But thanks for the offer.”
“Do you really think your job is going to be affected by what Nancy did?”
“One way or another, yeah. Subtly, in most ways. But what do you think my odds are of moving into a principal’s office anytime soon? I was on track before this. Now, who knows? It could hold me back for years. But you want to know the worst part of this whole deal?”
“Sure,” Tim said.
“Whenever anybody looks at me, they’re going to say to themselves,
There’s Underhill. His wife killed herself.
And two-thirds, three-fourths of them are going to think I had something to do with it. She did it because of me, they’ll think. Goddamn it, I never thought I’d hate her, but I’m getting there. Fuck her.
Fuck
her.”
Tim decided to say nothing and let him roll on.
Philip glared at him. “I have a role in this community. I have a certain
position
. Maybe you don’t know what that means. Maybe you don’t care. But it is of very, very great importance to me. And when I think that stupid woman did her best, out of no reason at all but her own private unhappiness, to tear down everything I’ve worked for all my life—yes, I’m angry, yes I am. She had no right to do this to me.”
At least one thing was clear to Tim Underhill as he watched his brother chewing an ice cube from the bottom of his empty glass: Philip was going to be of no use at all.
“What’s our schedule?” he asked.
“For tonight?”
“For everything.”
“We go to the Trott Brothers Funeral Home from six to seven for the viewing, or the visitation, or whatever it’s called. The funeral is at one tomorrow afternoon, out at Sunnyside.” Sunnyside, a large cemetery on the Far West Side of the city, was still segregated into separate areas for Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. There were no African-Americans in Sunnyside. When you drove past it on the expressway, it went on for mile after mile of flat green earth and headstones in long rows.
“Philip,” Tim said, “I don’t even know how Nancy died. If it isn’t too painful for you, could you tell me about it?”