Blood Ties (35 page)

“When did Paul leave?” I asked, sitting with Lydia on a futon-frame sofa covered loosely with an India-print bedspread. The sofa was already occupied by an enormous orange cat, who opened one baleful eye, shifted grudgingly a quarter of an inch, and went back to sleep. “For Bear Mountain.”

“Friday, right after school. Didn't I tell you that before? I'm sorry.”

“Yes, you did. But one of the other boys said he saw Paul in Warrenstown Saturday night.”

“I don't see how that can be. He left on Friday.”

“Could he have come back, just for a while?”

“Why?” she asked, as though the question could not really have an answer. “He went camping. To meditate, in the woods. It would interfere with the process of his meditation to come back to town.”

“You know,” I said, “that a girl in Warrenstown died at a party on Saturday night?”

Paul's mother smoothed her skirt. “Yes, I heard. It's difficult sometimes.”

“Difficult?”

“The wheel of fate. To understand how it turns. Nothing happens without a reason, of course. But I do feel the pain of her parents.”

I opened my mouth to ask another question, but before I could, Lydia, nodding gravely, said, “Difficult to understand. But important to accept, whatever your karma brings you.”

“Yes, well,” Mrs. Cooper-Niebuhr replied, “that's the challenge of life, isn't it?”

The two of them sat there smiling gently at each other like junior members of some holy sect willing to help each other to enlightenment in any way they could. I wondered how badly my karma would be affected if I lit up a cigarette.

Lydia's face grew solemn. “Mrs. Cooper-Niebuhr—”

“Phoenix. Please call me Phoenix. It's the name I've chosen. Titles put such distance between us.”

“Phoenix.” Lydia smiled. “We think that the boy we're looking for, Gary Russell, may know something about this girl's death. And we think we were led here because your son may know something about Gary.”

That wasn't true; the reason we'd come here had nothing to do with Gary. But it was Lydia's game and I let her play it out.

“Paul?” Phoenix Cooper-Niebuhr asked. “What could he know?”

“They're friends, aren't they, he and Gary?”

Phoenix stared into the infinite, thinking. “When the Russells first moved here, in the summer, I think Paul and Gary spent time together,” she said. “But I haven't seen Gary lately.”

Not since Gary learned which friends let you belong in Warrenstown, I thought, and which ones kept you from that.

“Well,” Lydia said, “some of the other boys seem to think they're still friends.” What we'd heard, actually, was the opposite. I wondered where she was going. “Has Paul said anything to you about Gary recently?” she asked.

“No, I'm afraid not.”

“You don't know whether they see each other at school?”

“Paul doesn't speak very much about school. He finds the rules confining and the sense of community forced and artificial. In Warrenstown there's a lot of emphasis placed on football,” she added by way of explanation.

“Paul doesn't like football?”

“Not at all. Football gives off extremely negative energy. All that hitting and pounding.” She shook her head sadly, perhaps over the damage football players were doing to their own karma. “Paul prefers to be alone,” she told us. “He has a solitary nature.”

Lucky for him, I thought, since none of the other kids will speak to him.

“But Gary Russell,” Phoenix Cooper-Niebuhr added, “he's a kind boy.”

“Even though he plays football?”

“He has a strong sense of right and wrong. He brought back Paul's skateboard. Paul was very grateful.”

“Paul had loaned it to him?”

“Oh, no. The football coach won't let the boys on the team play with skateboards. That's why it was clear they were working out a deeper issue, when they took it.”

“I'm not sure I follow you,” Lydia said.

Phoenix's large eyes rested on Lydia. “Oh, because they didn't want it for itself. It was just after school started. I told Paul the most productive way to deal with the situation would be to focus on the real issue, and engage them in a dialogue over that.”

“Engage—” I started, but Lydia flashed me a look.

“Did he do that?” Lydia asked.

“I don't know. I don't interfere with his relationships with the other children. A child can never learn anything if you do that.”

I clamped my mouth shut as Lydia said, “But this boy Gary Russell, he brought it back?”

“Yes. He came over two days later with it, and said he was sorry.”

“He was the one who'd taken it?”

“No. But he felt bad that the boys on his team had done something as negative as that. I felt a strong sense of tribal identification from him toward the other boys.”

“That's what they say a team is,” Lydia said. “An outlet for our tribal feelings.”

“I suppose that's true.” Phoenix looked thoughtful, as though this hadn't occurred to her before. “He gave the skateboard back to Paul, and then he left.”

Lydia smiled at Phoenix. “That's a kind act,” she said. “The act of a friend. Now, Phoenix, I'm going to ask you a rather big favor,” she said. “In case it could help us. I'd like to ask if we could see Paul's room.”

Phoenix Cooper-Niebuhr's brow furrowed. “In this house we don't enter another person's room without permission.”

“I understand. If Paul were here we'd certainly expect to ask him. But this situation is different. It's so important . . .” Lydia let that trail off, let her sweet smile linger. I thought of what Tom Hamlin had had to say last night about situations that were different.

“Well, I don't . . .” Phoenix began, but a crash and a small cry from another room stopped her. Lydia and I jumped to our feet, and Phoenix rose, too, but without haste. Serenely, she headed to the back of the house. We followed, and there, in the kitchen in front of the open refrigerator, we found a smudge-faced little girl looking helplessly at the shattered remains of a pitcher dotting a puddle of milk. The milk had splashed out in all directions when the pitcher hit the floor, and the puddle had the form of a daisy with a pottery-shard center. Uh-oh, Smith, I thought, block those flower metaphors.

Phoenix crouched down and said mildly to the little girl, “Now, Janis, I know you like to do things independently. But sometimes it's better for a small person to ask a big person for help.”

And sometimes, I thought, it's better if a big person forgets about the hand-thrown ceramics and leaves the milk in the cardboard quart it came in, which a small person who likes to do things independently can probably handle. I bent down and began picking up pottery. Lydia went to the sink for a sponge and started soaking up milk.

“I want some milk,” Janis said.

“That was all the milk,” her mother told her.

“I want some!”

Phoenix shook her head sadly. “Well, you shouldn't have spilled it all. Now no one will have any until tomorrow.”

Janis looked stricken. Her face scrunched up. Phoenix, standing, said to me, “It's very important that they understand the consequences of their actions.”

I thought, when they're four? Janis started to wail. I asked, “How about some juice? Maybe there's juice in the fridge.”

In midhowl, Janis paused, suspicious, but giving me a chance to come through. I checked the fridge, and there wasn't any; but the freezer compartment held frozen organic grape juice. I mixed it up in another pottery pitcher, because that was what Phoenix, with raised eyebrows, handed me. I poured a glass for Janis as Lydia finished with the floor. The little girl took her juice and ran off.

“Thank you.” Phoenix Cooper-Niebuhr smiled at Lydia and me, looking around at her newly clean floor and her newly mixed grape juice. “It feels good to be with caring individuals.”

Lydia smiled back. I did too, wondering again how many extra lifetimes I'd have to spend in the insect world for indulging in tobacco products in this house, and whether karma granted you extenuating circumstances.

“Janis is a lovely child,” Lydia said. “Obviously creative, as you said. We were talking about taking a quick look at Paul's room? . . .”

Phoenix looked from one caring individual to the other. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I suppose that would be all right. I don't have the sense that Paul would object.”

Lydia and I followed Phoenix up an uncarpeted wooden stair to a short hallway with one door off to the left and three to the right, all closed. Only the bathroom door stood wide.

“This is Janis's room, and this is Grace's,” Phoenix said. “This is Paul's.” At each of those doors a pile of clean and folded laundry waited to be taken inside and put away.

Phoenix stood where she was, at the top of the stairs; it seemed the responsibility for actually opening Paul's door and invading his space was to be ours, not hers. Lydia, smiling yet again, reached and turned the knob, and the life of Paul Niebuhr was revealed to us.

The place was a mess. Dirty underwear, used towels, open magazines, pens, videotapes, a pack of cards, and a flock of gum wrappers carpeted the floor. Pulled window shades cut the sunlight to whatever managed to leak in around the edges, but even in the dimness we could see an unmade bed, cluttered bookcases, a TV where a flung sock hung over the screen like an unruly lock of hair. Paul had a computer on his desk and at some point he'd painted his walls a dull black. The room smelled of sweatsocks, stale marijuana smoke, and unwashed sheets. Paul's mother's face fell as she stared through the open door and I wondered how long it had been since she'd been in the room where her son spent his time.

Lydia entered and I went after her. Paul's mother hesitated in the hall, the house prohibition against trespassing obviously strong. She overcame it, though, and stepped over Paul's threshhold to stand behind us. But by then Lydia had found the light switch and she and I, looking around, had been stopped dead by what was clearly intended to shock like a blast of cold water. It had that effect, though not for the usual reason.

On the wall opposite the door hung a huge poster. Its violent, slashing graphics, the thick red blood and bare jagged bones among the grinning, contorted faces, were meant to bring ice to your spine. What did it for us, though, was the grafitti-tag lettering triumphantly rising above the five figures who howled in the center of the whirlwind of death and gore. These were the Avenging Mutants. These were the CyberSpawn.

And in a corner of the poster, out of reach of the others, a sixth figure mocked them as he disappeared into a blast of light. They swore they would stop him. They screamed his name.

He was Premador.

“Oh, my God.” Lydia looked at me, I back at her.

“Oh,” said Paul Niebuhr's mother softly. “Children are sometimes so difficult to understand, don't you think?”

Lydia glanced at Paul's computer, then at me. She turned to Phoenix, seemed about to speak. Then: “Oh, excuse me.” She took her phone from her pocket, opened it as if to read a message. “It vibrates instead of ringing,” she explained to Phoenix, her smile back in place. “I'd rather not answer it when I'm doing something else. I like to keep my attention in the moment. But sometimes . . .” She checked the readout. From where I was I could see nothing was on it; Lydia had gotten no call.

I caught on. I moved to the desk, began going through papers, slowly lifting and reading only what was out, careful not to violate Paul Niebuhr's privacy by opening drawers or cabinets. I flipped through an algebra workbook, looking for notes scribbled in the margins; I glanced at a battered Spanish text, sketchy chem lab reports, Cliffs Notes to
Of Mice and Men.
Lifting a small silver frame, I inspected the photo: the thin face of an adolescent boy, smiling at the camera with that I-can't-wait smile of youth. The photo was grainy, as if cut from a newspaper, and I wondered how long it had been since Paul Niebuhr had smiled that smile.

Lydia meanwhile was placing a call.

“These things,” I said to Phoenix, by way of distraction. “They're all Paul's?”

“These things?” Phoenix looked at me blankly.

“I just wondered if you saw anything that wasn't his. That may belong to the boy we're looking for. Gary Russell.”

“Well, I . . .”

“Take your time. Look around. We don't want to interfere with Paul's things.”

Lydia was speaking into the phone in rapid Chinese. Phoenix glanced at her. Lydia smiled, then turned back to her call. Phoenix looked around the room. It was obvious to me she had no way of knowing what in this room was her son's and what belonged to the man in the moon.

Lydia flipped the phone shut. “I'm sorry,” she said again. “My cousin. A family problem. Well, not really a problem.” She moved to the desk, switched Paul's computer on. I crossed away from her to the other side of the room, began picking up things from the floor, looking them over. Paul's mother glanced from one of us to the other. “I'm from such a big family,” Lydia explained, “that half the time someone's not speaking to someone else, and of course there's a banquet coming up—” A box appeared on the computer screen and she typed in
Premador
. “—you know, the Autumn Festival, and I'm expected to make peace, get them all to sit down happily together—”

“I'm not sure Paul would want you to be doing that,” Phoenix said as Lydia typed something else. This appeared on the screen only as asterisks, but it caused the screen to change. Another box appeared and Lydia typed again, saying, “Oh, anything Paul wants to keep private he'll have hidden behind passwords and things. The kids all do this so much better than we can.” She smiled ruefully. “I'm just hoping I can find his address book and maybe find Gary Russell's screen name.” The screen had changed again; Lydia did a few more things, then shook her head. Just as it seemed Phoenix was about to object once more, Lydia turned the computer off.