I hadn’t meant to tell Frank the bathtub part, but once I started talking, almost everything spilled out. I suppose it had to spill to someone if I was ever to get on with my life. I’d assumed that John Storrow would be the one on the other side of the confessional when the time came, but John didn’t want to talk about any of those events except as they bore on our ongoing legal business, which nowadays is all about Kyra Elizabeth Devore.
‘I’ll keep my mouth shut, don’t worry. How goes the adoption battle?’
‘Slow. I’ve come to loathe the State of Maine court system, and DHS as well. You take the people who work in those bureaucracies one by one and they’re mostly fine, but when you put them together . . . ‘
‘Bad, huh?’
‘I sometimes feel like a character in Bleak House. That’s the one where Dickens says that in court nobody wins but the lawyers. John tells me to be patient and count my blessings, that we’ re making amazing progress considering that I’m that most untrustworthy of creatures, an unmarried white male of middle age, but Ki’s been in two foster-home situations since Mattie died, and — ‘
‘Doesn’t she have kin in one of those neighboring towns?’
‘Mattie’s aunt. She didn’t want anything to do with Ki when Mattie was alive and has even less interest now. Especially since — ‘
‘ — since Ki’s not going to be rich.’
‘Yeah.’
‘The Whitmore woman was lying about Devore’s will.’
‘Absolutely. He left everything to a foundation that’s supposed to foster global computer literacy.
With due respect to the numbercrunchers of the world, I can’t imagine a colder charity.’
‘How is John?’
‘Pretty well mended, but he’s never going to get the use of his right arm back entirely. He damned near died of blood-loss.’
Frank had led me away from the entwined subjects of Ki and custody quite well for a man deep into his third Scotch, and I was willing enough to go. I could hardly bear to think of her long days and longer nights in those homes where the Department of Human Services stores away children like knickknacks nobody wants. Ki didn’t live in those places but only existed in them, pale and listless, like a well-fed rabbit kept in a cage. Each time she saw my car turning in or pulling up she came alive, waving her arms and dancing like Snoopy on his doghouse. Our weekend in October had been wonderful (despite my obsessive need to check her every half hour or so after she was asleep), and the Christmas holiday had been even better. Her emphatic desire to be with me was helping in court more than anything else . . . yet the wheels still turned slowly.
Maybe in the spring, Mike, John told me. He was a new John these days, pale and serious. The slightly arrogant eager beaver who had wanted nothing more than to go head to head with Mr.
Maxwell ‘Big Bucks’ Devore was no longer in evidence. John had learned something about mortality on the twenty-first of July, and something about the world’s idiot cruelty, as well. The man who had taught himself to shake with his left hand instead of his right was no longer interested in partying ’til he puked. He was seeing a girl in Philly, the daughter of one of his mother’s friends.
I had no idea if it was serious or not, Ki’s ‘Unca John’ is closemouthed about that part of his life, but when a young man is of his own accord seeing the daughter of one of his mother’s friends, it usually is.
Maybe in the spring: it was his mantra that late fall and early winter. What am I doing wrong? I asked him once — this was just after Thanksgiving and another setback.
Nothing, he replied. Single-parent adoptions are always slow, and when the putative adopter is a man, it’s worse. At that point in the conversation John made an ugly little gesture, poking the index finger of his left hand in and out of his loosely cupped right fist.
That’s blatant sex discrimination, John.
Yeah, but usually it’s justified. Blame it on every twisted asshole who ever decided he had a right to take off some little kid’s pants, if you want,’ blame it on the bureaucracy, if you want,’ hell, blame it on cosmic rays if you want. It’s a slow process, but you’re going to win in the end. You’ve got a clean record, you’ve got Kyra saying ‘I want to be with Mike’ to every judge and DHS worker she sees, you’ve got enough money to keep after them no matter how much they squirm and no matter how many forms they throw at you . . . and most of all, buddy, you’ve got me.
I had something else, too — what Ki had whispered in my ear as I paused to catch my breath on the steps. I’d never told John about that, and it was one of the few things I didn’t tell Frank, either.
Mattie says I’m your little guy now, she had whispered. Mattie says you’ll take care of me.
I was trying to — as much as the fucking slowpokes at Human Services would let me — but the waiting was hard.
Frank picked up the Scotch and tilted it in my direction. I shook my head. Ki had her heart set on snowman-making, and I wanted to be able to face the glare of early sun on fresh snow without a headache.
‘Frank, how much of this do you actually believe?’
He poured for himself, then just sat for a time, looking down at the table and thinking. When he raised his head again there was a smile on his face. It was so much like Jo’s that it broke my heart.
And when he spoke, he juiced his ordinarily faint Boston brogue.
‘Sure and I’m a half-drunk Irishman who just finished listenin to the granddaddy of all ghost stories on Christmas night,’ he said. ‘I believe all of it, you silly git.’
I laughed and so did he. We did it mostly through the nose, as men are apt to do when up late, maybe in their cups a little, and don’t want to wake the house.
‘Come on — how much really?’
‘All of it,’ he repeated, dropping the brogue. ‘Because Jo believed it. And because of her.’ He nodded his head in the direction of the stairs so I’d know which her he meant. ‘She’s like no other little girl I’ve ever seen. She’s sweet enough, but there’s something in her eyes. At first I thought it was losing her mother the way she did, but that’s not it. There’s more, isn’t there?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘It’s in you, too. It’s touched you both.’
I thought of the baying thing which Jo had managed to hold back while I poured the lye into that rotted roll of canvas. An Outsider, she had called it. I hadn’t gotten a clear look at it, and probably that was good. Probably that was very good.
‘Mike?’ Frank looked concerned. ‘You’re shivering.’
‘I’m okay,’ I said. ‘Really.’
‘What’s it like in the house now?’ he asked. I was still living in Sara Laughs. I procrastinated until early November, then put the Derry house up for sale.
‘Quiet.’
‘Totally quiet?’
I nodded, but that wasn’t completely true. On a couple of occasions I had awakened with a sensation Mattie had once mentioned — that there was someone in bed with me. But not a dangerous presence. On a couple of occasions I have smelled (or thought I have) Red perfume. And sometimes, even when the air is perfectly still, Bunter’s bell will shiver out a few notes. It’s as if something lonely wants to say hello.
Frank glanced at the clock, then back at me, almost apologetically. ‘I’ve got a few more questions
— okay?’
‘If you can’t stay up until the wee hours on Boxing Day morning,’ I said, ‘I guess you never can.
Fire away.’
‘What did you tell the police?’
‘I didn’t have to tell them much of anything. Footman talked enough to suit them — too much to suit Norris Ridgewick. Footman said that he and Osgood — it was Osgood driving the car, Devore’s pet broker — did the drive-by because Devore had made threats about what would happen to them if they didn’t. The State cops also found a copy of a wire-transfer among Devore’s effects at Warrington’s. Two million dollars to an account in the Grand Caymans. The name scribbled on the copy is Randolph Footman. Randolph is George’s middle name. Mr. Footman is now residing in Shawshank State Prison.’
‘What about Rogette?’
‘Well, Whitmore was her mother’s maiden name, but I think it’s safe to say that Rogette’s heart belonged to Daddy. She had leukemia, was diagnosed in 1996. In people her age — she was only fifty-seven when she died, by the way — it’s fatal in two cases out of every three, but she was doing the chemo. Hence the wig.’