Mystic River Read online

  “I’m not judging you. Believe me.” Her face unreadable, even her voice, Jimmy wondering what she wanted to hear from him—that he was still in the life? That he was out? That he’d make her rich? That he’d never commit a crime again?

  Annabeth had a calm, almost forgettable face from a distance, but when you got up close, you saw so many things in there that you didn’t understand, a sense of a mind furiously at work, never sleeping.

  “I mean, dancing’s in your blood, right?”

  “I dunno. I guess.”

  “But now that you’ve been told you can’t do it anymore, you’ve stopped, right? It might hurt, but you’ve faced it.”

  “Okay…”

  “Okay,” he said, and slid a cigarette out of the pack that lay on the stone bench between them. “So, yeah, I was good at what I did. But I took a pinch and my wife died and that fucked my daughter up.” He lit the cigarette and took a long exhale as he tried to put it exactly as he’d said it in his mind a hundred times. “I ain’t fucking my daughter up again, Annabeth. You know? She can’t go through another two years of me doing time. My mother? She ain’t a well woman. She dies while I’m locked down? Then they take my daughter, make her a ward of the state, put her in some sort of Deer Island for tots. I couldn’t take that shit. So that’s it. In the blood, out of the blood, whatever the fuck, I’m staying straight.”

  Jimmy held her gaze as she studied his face. He could tell she was searching for flaws in his explanation, a whiff of bullshit, and he hoped he’d somehow managed to make the speech fly. He’d been working on it long enough, preparing for a moment like this. And, fact was, what he’d said was mostly true. He’d only left out that one thing he’d sworn to himself he’d never tell another soul, no matter who that soul was. So he looked in Annabeth’s eyes and waited for her to make her decision, and tried to ignore images from that night by the Mystic River—the guy on his knees, saliva dripping down his chin, the screech of his begging—images that kept trying to push their way into his head like drill bits.

  Annabeth took a cigarette. He lit it for her, and she said, “I used to have the worst crush on you. You know that?”

  Jimmy kept his head steady, his gaze calm, even though the relief flooding through him was like a jet blast—he’d sold the half-truth. If things worked out with Annabeth, he’d never have to sell it again.

  “No shit? You on me?”

  She nodded. “When you’d come by the house to see Val? My God, I was, what, fourteen, fifteen? Jimmy, forget it. My skin would start to buzz just hearing your voice in the kitchen.”

  “Damn.” He touched her arm. “It ain’t buzzing now.”

  “Oh, sure it is, Jimmy. Sure it is.”

  And Jimmy felt the Mystic roll far away again, dissolve into the dirty depths of the Pen, gone from him, rolling off into the distance where it belonged.

  BY THE TIME Sean got back to the jogging trail, the CSS woman was there. Whitey Powers radioed all units on-scene to do a sweep-and-detain of any vagrants in the park and squatted down beside Sean and the CSS woman.

  “The blood heads that way,” the CSS woman said, pointing deeper into the park. The jogging path went over a small wooden bridge and then curled off and down into a heavily wooded section of the park, circling around the old drive-in screen down at the far end. “There’s more over there.” She pointed with her pen, and Sean and Whitey looked back over their shoulders, saw smaller blood spatters in the grass on the other side of the joggers’ path by the small wooden bridge, the leaves of a tall maple having protected the spatters from last night’s rain. “I think she ran for that ravine.”

  Whitey’s radio squawked and he put it to his lips. “Powers.”

  “Sergeant, we need you over by the garden.”

  “On my way.”

  Sean watched Whitey trot onto the jogging path and then head for the garden co-op around the next bend, the hem of his son’s hockey shirt flapping around his waist.

  Sean straightened from his squat and looked at the park, felt the sheer size of it, every bush, every knoll, all that water. He looked back at the small wooden bridge that led over a tiny ravine where the water was twice as dark and twice as polluted as the channel. Crusted with a permanent greasy film, it buzzed with mosquitoes in the summer. Sean noticed a spot of red in the thin, greening trees that sprouted along the bank of the ravine and he moved toward it, the CSS woman suddenly beside him, seeing it, too.

  “What’s your name?” Sean said.

  “Karen,” she said. “Karen Hughes.”

  Sean shook her hand, the two of them focused on that spot of red as they crossed the joggers’ path, not even hearing Whitey Powers until he was almost on top of them, trotting, short of breath.

  “We found a shoe,” Whitey said.

  “Where?”

  Whitey pointed back down the joggers’ path, past where it curved around the garden co-op. “In the garden. Woman’s shoe. Size six.”

  “Don’t touch it,” Karen Hughes said.

  “Duh,” Whitey said, and got a look from her, Karen Hughes having one of those glacial looks that could shrink everything inside of you. “Excuse me. I meant—duh, ma’am.”

  Sean turned back to the trees, and the spot of red was no longer a spot, it was a torn triangle of fabric, hanging from a thin branch about shoulder high. The three of them stood in front of it until Karen Hughes stepped back and snapped several photographs from four different angles, then dug in her bag for something.

  It was nylon, Sean was pretty sure, probably from a jacket, and slick with blood.

  Karen used a pair of tweezers to pull it from the branch and stared at it for a minute before dropping it into a plastic baggie.

  Sean bent at the waist and craned his head, looked down into the ravine. Then he looked across to the other side, saw what could have been a heel print dug into the soft soil.

  He nudged Whitey and pointed until Whitey saw it, too. Then Karen Hughes took a look and immediately snapped off a few shots from her department-issue Nikon. She straightened and crossed over the bridge, came down on the embankment, and took a few more photographs.

  Whitey dropped into a squat and peered under the bridge. “I’d say she might have hid here for a bit. Killer shows up, she bolts to the other side and takes off running again.”

  Sean said, “Why’s she keep going deeper into the park? I mean, her back’s against the water here, Sarge. Why not cut back toward the entrance?”

  “Could be she was disoriented. It’s dark, she’s got a bullet in her.”

  Whitey shrugged and used his radio to call Dispatch.

  “This is Sergeant Powers. We’re leaning toward a possible one-eighty-seven, Dispatch. We’re going to need every available officer for a sweep of Pen Park. See if you can scare up some divers, maybe.”

  “Divers?”

  “Affirmative. We need Detective Lieutenant Friel and someone from the DA on-scene ASAP.”

  “The detective lieutenant is en route. DA’s office has been notified. Over?”

  “Affirmative. Out, Dispatch.”

  Sean looked across at the heel mark in the soil, and he noticed some scratches to the left of it, the victim digging her fingers in as she’d scrambled up and over the embankment. “Feel like taking a guess what the fuck happened here last night, Sarge?”

  “Ain’t even going to try,” Whitey said.

  STANDING ATOP the church steps, Jimmy could just make out the Penitentiary Channel. It was a stripe of dull purple on the far side of the expressway overpass, the park that abutted it serving as the only evidence of green on this side of the channel. Jimmy spied the white sliver top of the drive-in movie screen in the center of the park peeking just above the overpass. It still stood, long after the state had grabbed the land for short money at the Chapter Eleven auction and turned it over to the Parks and Recreation Service. Parks and Recreation spent the next decade beautifying the place, ripping up the poles that supported the car speakers, leveling
and greening the land, cutting bike paths and jogging paths along the water, erecting a fenced-in garden co-op, even building a boathouse and ramp for canoers who couldn’t get very far before they were turned back at either end by the harbor locks. The screen stayed, though, ended up sprouting from the edge of a cul-de-sac they’d created by planting a stand of already-formed trees shipped in from Northern California. Summers, a local theater group performed Shakespeare in front of the screen, painting medieval backdrops on it and skipping back and forth across the stage with tinfoil swords, saying “Hark” and “Forsooth” and shit like that all the time. Jimmy had gone there with Annabeth and the girls two summers back, and Annabeth, Nadine, and Sara had all nodded off before the end of the first act. But Katie had stayed awake, leaning forward on the blanket, elbow on her knee, chin on the heel of her hand, so Jimmy had too.

  They did The Taming of the Shrew that night, and Jimmy couldn’t follow most of it—something about a guy slapping his fiancée into line until she became an acceptable servant wife, Jimmy failing to see the art in that but figuring he was losing a lot in the translation. Katie, though, was all over it. She laughed a bunch of times, went dead silent and rapt a few more, told Jimmy afterward it was “magic.”

  Jimmy didn’t know what the hell she meant, and Katie couldn’t explain it. She just said she’d felt it “transport” her, and for the next six months she kept talking about moving to Italy after graduation.

  Jimmy, looking out at the edge of the East Bucky Flats from the church steps, thought: Italy. You bet.

  “Daddy, Daddy!” Nadine broke away from a group of friends and ran toward Jimmy as he reached the bottom step, slammed into Jimmy’s legs full-force, still saying it: “Daddy, Daddy.”

  Jimmy picked her up, got a sharp whiff of starch from her dress, and kissed her cheek. “Baby, baby.”

  With the same motion her mother used to push hair out of her eyes, Nadine used the backs of two fingers to push her veil out of her face. “This dress itches.”

  “It’s itching me,” Jimmy said, “and I’m not even wearing it.”

  “You’d look funny in a dress, Daddy.”

  “Not if it fit just so.”

  Nadine rolled her eyes and then scraped the underside of his chin with the stiff crown of her veil. “Does that tickle?”

  Jimmy looked over Nadine’s head at Annabeth and Sara, felt all three of them blow through his chest, fill him up, and turn him to dust at the same time.

  A spray of bullets could hit his back right now, this second, and it would be okay. It would be all right. He was happy. Happy as you could get.

  Well, almost. He scanned the crowd for Katie, hoping maybe she’d pulled up at the last moment. He saw a state police cruiser instead as it slammed around the corner of Buckingham Avenue, went wide into the left lane of Roseclair, rear tire slapping the median strip, the bleat-beep and sharp squawk of its siren slicing the morning air. Jimmy watched the driver floor it, heard the big engine rev as the cruiser shot down Roseclair toward the Pen Channel. A black unmarked followed a few seconds later, its sirens mute but no mistaking it for anything else, the driver cutting the hard ninety-degree turn onto Roseclair at forty miles an hour, engine humming.

  And as Jimmy lowered Nadine back to the ground, he could feel it in his blood, a sudden, mean certainty, a sense of things falling miserably into place. He watched the two cop cars zip under the overpass and turn hard right onto the entrance road of Pen Park, and he felt Katie in his blood now along with that humming engine and slapping tires, the floating capillaries and cells.

  Katie, he almost said aloud. Sweet Jesus. Katie.

  8

  OLD MACDONALD

  CELESTE WOKE UP Sunday morning thinking about pipes—the network of them that coursed through homes and restaurants, movie multiplexes and shopping malls, and dropped in great skeletal sections from the tops of forty-story office buildings, floor by giant floor, plunging toward an even grander network of sewers and aqueducts that ran beneath cities and towns, connecting people more viably than language, with the sole purpose of flushing the things we’d consumed and rejected from our bodies, our lives, our dishes and crisper trays.

  Where did it all go?

  She supposed she’d considered the question before, in a vague sense, the way you wondered how a plane really stayed aloft without flapping its wings, but now she really wanted to know. She sat up in the empty bed, anxious and curious, heard the sounds of Dave and Michael playing Wiffle ball in the backyard three stories below. Where? she wondered.

  It had to go somewhere. All those flushes, all that hand soap and shampoo and detergent and toilet paper and barroom vomit, all the coffee stains, bloodstains, and sweat stains, dirt from the cuffs of your pants and grime from the inside of your collar, the cold vegetables you scraped off the plate into the garbage disposal, cigarettes and urine and hard bristles of hair from legs, cheeks, groins, and chins—it all met up with hundreds of thousands of similar or identical entities every night and poured, she assumed, through dank corridors fleeced by vermin and out into vast catacombs where it commingled in rushing water that rushed off to…where?

  They didn’t dump it in the oceans anymore. Did they? They couldn’t. She seemed to remember something about septic processing and the compacting of raw sewage, but she couldn’t be sure that wasn’t something she’d seen in a movie, and movies were so often full of shit. So if not the ocean, where? And if the ocean, why? There had to be some better way, right? But then she had an image of all those pipes again, all that waste, and she was left to wonder.

  She heard the hollow plastic snap of the Wiffle-ball bat as it made contact with the ball. She heard Dave yell, “Whoa!” and Michael whoop and a dog bark once, the sound as crisp as the bat against the ball.

  Celeste rolled over onto her back, realizing only at that moment that she was naked and had slept past ten. Neither circumstance had occurred much, if at all, since Michael could walk, and she felt a small wave of guilt roll through her chest, then die in the pit of her stomach as she remembered kissing the flesh around Dave’s fresh scar in the kitchen at 4 A.M., on her knees, tasting the fear and adrenaline in his pores, any worries about AIDS or hepatitis conquered by this sudden need to taste him, to press herself as intimately as possible against him. She’d slid her bathrobe off her shoulders with her tongue still roaming along his skin, knelt there in a half-T-shirt and black underwear feeling the night slipping under the porch doorway and chilling her ankles and kneecaps. The fear had given Dave’s flesh a half bitter, half sugary taste, and she ran her tongue up from the scar tissue to the base of his throat and cupped her hand between his thighs and felt him harden and heard his breathing grow shorter. She wanted this to last as long as possible, the taste of him, the power she suddenly possessed in her body, and she rose up and covered him. She slid her tongue over his and tightened her fingers in his hair and imagined she was sucking the pain of his parking lot encounter straight out of him and into her. She held his head and pressed her skin against his until he stripped off her shirt and sank his mouth over her breast, and she rocked herself against his groin and heard him moan. She wanted Dave to understand that this was what they were, this pressing of flesh, this enveloping of bodies and scent and need and love, yes, love, because she loved him as deeply as she ever had now that she knew she’d almost lost him.

  His teeth pinched her breast, hurting, sucking too hard, and she pushed herself further into his mouth and welcomed the pain. She wouldn’t have minded if he drew blood, because he was sucking at her, needing her, fingertips digging into her back, releasing the fear onto and into her. And she would take it all and spit it out for him, and they would both feel stronger than they’d ever felt before. She was sure of it.

  When she’d first been dating Dave, their sex life had been characterized by a raw lack of boundaries; she’d come home to the apartment she shared with Rosemary covered in bruises and bite marks and scratches on her back, rubbed straight down to th
e bone with the kind of urgent exhaustion she imagined an addict felt between fixes. Since Michael’s birth—well, actually, since Rosemary had moved in with them after cancer number one—Celeste and Dave had slipped into the type of predictable married-couple routine joked about nonstop on sitcoms, usually too weary or without enough privacy to do much more than a few perfunctory minutes of foreplay, a few oral, before moving on to the main event, which, over the years, seemed less like a main event and more like something to pass the time between the weather report and Leno.

  But last night—last night had definitely been main event/title card sort of passion, leaving her, even now as she lay in the bed, bruised to the marrow with it.

  It was when she heard Dave’s voice from outside again, telling Michael to concentrate, concentrate, damn it, that she remembered what had been bothering her—before the pipes, before the memory of their crazy kitchen sex, maybe even before she’d crawled into bed this morning: Dave had lied to her.

  She’d known in the bathroom when he’d first come home, but she’d decided to ignore it. Then, as she’d lain on the linoleum and raised her back and ass off the floor so he could enter her, she’d known it again. She watched his eyes, slightly glazed, as he inserted himself and pulled her calves over his hips, and she met his initial thrusts with the dawning certainty that his story didn’t make sense.

  For starters, who said things like, “Your wallet or your life, bitch. I’m leaving with one of them”? It was laughable. It was, as she had been sure in the bathroom, movie talk. And even if the mugger had prepared the line beforehand, no way he’d actually say it when the time came. No way. Celeste had been mugged once on the Common when she was in her late teens. The mugger, a high-yellow black man with flat, thin wrists and swimming brown eyes, had stepped up to her in the abandonment of a cold, late dusk, placed a switchblade to her hip, and let her see a glimpse of his winter eyes before he whispered, “Whatcha got?”

  There had been nothing around them but trees stripped by December, the closest person a businessman hurrying home along Beacon on the other side of a wrought-iron fence, twenty yards away. The mugger had dug the knife a little harder into her jeans, not cutting, but applying pressure, and she smelled decay and chocolate on his breath. She’d handed over her wallet, trying to avoid his swimming brown eyes and the irrational feeling that he possessed more arms than he showed, and he’d slid her wallet into the pocket of his overcoat and said, “You lucky I’m short on time,” and strolled off toward Park Street, no rush, no fear.