The Black Hour (30 page)

“Does she really want to see me?”

“She says, but—” He shrugged.

It couldn’t be mere curiosity. It could only be that her anger needed to find its focus.

“I’ll give you twenty minutes to get her there,” I said. “Then I’m going, and all offers are off the table.”

McDaniel hesitated, but what choice did he have? He looked at his watch, and I looked at mine.

I had to drive the tree- and president-named streets again, up and down the grid, before I discovered the library a second time. The wine stone building was less stoic than those on Main Street, more welcoming even as I stared at the door and wished I could turn and run. McDaniel wouldn’t waste the time I’d given him, but was she home? Would she change her mind? Would he have to convince her? I checked my watch again, hoping for all manner of scenarios.

A woman with an armful of books came out of the glass door and held it for me.

“Thanks,” I said. Thinking: meddler.

The library was one vast room with a staircase in the corner leading to a lower floor. Just inside stood a swiveling rack of worn paperbacks. I chose one and watched the door.

“We have a much bigger romance section downstairs,” someone said.

“I’m fine.” The street outside stayed empty.

“That book isn’t any good. I feel compelled.” The woman came to my side to aid me.

“Really, it’s OK.”

I felt the paperback slip from my fingers and finally looked at her, my head full of impolite ways of deflecting her attention.

She was smaller than I’d expected. Younger. She had large brown eyes behind outdated glasses, like his. Shape of the face, square of the jaw. I’d only seen one photo of him, the student ID photo with his dark, intense eyes gleaming, his mouth held tight and militant.

“These are better.” She held two books in her hands, glancing between them and me until she’d taken me in, before she could place me and deal with facts that must have seemed irreconcilable. Her chin pointed away, and she found something over my shoulder to study.

“You’re the librarian,” I said.

She put one of the books back, smoothed the cover of the other. I could see how she didn’t want to lose the only prop she’d been given for this two-woman show. “I’m a—volunteer.”

“That’s—” I could hear my voice begin to rise toward patronizing. That’s what? Great? Healing? Who was I to think my benediction was the one she waited for?

She nodded, petted the cover again. She put the book back on the rack, the whole contraption rattling under her shaking hands.

“I’m not sure why I came,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“They said—you don’t know anything?”

“Nothing helpful,” I said. In the silence afterward, I felt the true weight of this admission. In the face of what this woman had lost, I had nothing, was nothing, and had never been anything else. “I wish I did.”

“You really didn’t know him?”

I looked down at my shoes. Why had they not walked me out of here already? I tried to recall the grainy photo from the paper, his glasses thick, his hair too long and hanging into his hard and accusing stare. Sometimes I could almost trick myself into recognizing him. Somewhere, high on that back shelf of memory, must live the moment when I’d seen his cold eyes above the gun. For her sake, I tried.

Nothing.

She patted at the neckline of her sweater, smoothing herself now that she had given up the book. Mrs. Lehane—I remembered that her given name was a throwaway but not what it was—was a smoother, a fixer. A curtain straightener, the one who always tugged the towel on the bathroom rack into plumb. I imagined her going from one normal room in her normal house to another, fussing and arranging, folding and tucking, waiting for her life to hang true.

“He was,” she whispered, “a very special boy.”

Well, what else could she say?

Thoughts crawled up from my wretched gut to simmer at the base of my brain, resisting. If Leonard had been so special, why didn’t he have any friends? Someone to tell him it would be OK if he just gave it another day? If he’d been such a unique little butterfly, where did he get the gun? If he’d been a little more special, could he have succeeded and killed me?

I’d spent a lot of time on the receiving end of the scrutiny he and I should have shared. The words—
very special boy
—had struck a secret well of rage. I didn’t want to believe it was there, but my gut burned with bile.

I grabbed at a nearby chair to steady myself. Mrs. Lehane’s attention darted from that hand to the other, resting on my cane. She’d rather not have seen the cane, I could tell.
Special
boys did not cause such problems. Just as she was pissing on my version of the story, my cane posed hearty evidence against hers.

What was I supposed to say, though? “I’m sure—” I’m sure you thought so. There was nothing more I could say. “I’m sure he was.”

She searched my face for the lie.

“He’s my only child,” she said. “He’s—my only. Here.” She went to the desk and reached behind.

I stiffened. Her purse. Unlikely scenarios rushed at me.

She pulled out her wallet. I took a deep breath. What was taking McDaniel so long?

“He was such a darling little boy.”

How many times did I have to say it? I’m sure he was.

She came to me and held out an old, yellowed snapshot, trimmed into a tight square. A young boy’s face filled the image. Five or six years old, maybe, but I wasn’t a skilled guesser. The kid mugged at the camera, his eyes squeezed shut.

“Cute,” I said. I had no experience with this. Was he cute? I couldn’t tell. He made me think of Doyle’s kids, but maybe only because they were all small, a different species. I held the photo in my hands a respectable amount of time, then handed it back.

She took it, studied it, returned it to its slot, dug out another. In this one, he was older, wearing some sort of camping uniform with unfortunate knee socks. Less chance of being cute, less comfort with the camera. Ten, eleven. I was bad at this. Bad at being interested, at spending the time. What did I owe her, anyway?

Mrs. Lehane returned the scout photo to her wallet with precise and careful movements. I thought maybe I’d never treasured something the way she did this photo, but then there were a finite number of them now. The last photo of her son had been taken. All the lasts, actually. The last word to him spoken. The last time the phone would ring and she could rush to it, hoping it was him. For the first time I thought I might see the life she faced. To raise a child, to protect him, to fight for him, to make sure he was ready for the world, wipe his face, wipe his ass, pick him up from every tantrum and every scrape, to reach the part where the kid’s all grown up, a fully formed being, a sigh of relief—and then to have that door slammed shut. The last everything.

Which was just the sort of punishment I’d had in mind for myself. I felt worse. I hadn’t known I could feel worse.

She used the tips of her fingers to pry out another photo, took a long look, and then held the image out for me on the palm of her hand. This one, too precious even for me to touch.

I reached for it anyway, ignoring the little snap of electricity when our skin connected. The kid, as grown up as he’d ever be, turned in profile, unaware. A sharp nose, but everything else soft: eyes, cheeks. Only a kid, not the haunted guy from the newspaper. I thought—

“What?” she said. She held out her hand for the photo.

“He was a handsome young man,” I said.

“Yes.”

“They—the newspapers should have used this one.”

And meant it.

Because if this photo had been in the paper, we could have saved ourselves some trouble.

I knew this kid.

“What do you mean,
now
you know him?”

McDaniel had arrived in time to catch me scuttling from the library. He’d hurried to catch up, plucking at my sleeve as I brushed past. He saw Mrs. Lehane at the door and marshaled me to the lee side of his Jeep.

“I don’t
know
him. I’ve seen—that face.
That
face. Not the one in the newspaper—” I turned my profile to McDaniel. “From the side? A glance, I mean, real quick. I’ve seen him.” Not just the profile, though. In his student ID photo, the soft-focused image I’d folded into my nightmares, the kid had looked ready to hate. In the photo his mother kept in her wallet, he’d been caught unposed, his eyes open and wide. That very special boy, a real person.

McDaniel sighed. “It’s a small campus.”

But the photo hadn’t merely captured some aspect of Leo’s face that the newspaper photo hadn’t. The snapshot came with sense memory, so that I felt the moment I’d seen him, felt it on my skin and in my bones. Unease. The itch that I should jump up, move. I willed myself back to that moment, let the wariness chase me. I was in a hurry. I was—leaving my office.

“He was standing outside my door. Before that day, I mean. He was—he came to Dale Hall for some reason.”

McDaniel watched a car pass and turn out of sight, then the empty street. “This isn’t going to make the front page.”

“This is my life, OK? Not some story.”

“If it were a story, it would mean something,” he said.

“You don’t think it means something? That I’ve interacted with this kid after all?”

“Interaction.” His look was heavy. “Did he say something to you?”

I tried to put the moment back on, but it seemed far away now. “He was in my way.”

“If anyone asks for a recounting, I’d leave that part out. When was this?”

“I think we can narrow it down to the two months Lehane and I were on the same map point,” I said. “Sorry. That’s all I have.”

“He came to see you in your office, and you brushed him off. Is that what we’ve decided?”

“No, he was—waiting. He never came into the office, but he—”

Unease. I’d had to rush out. The image was so clear now. Leo Lehane, standing, one foot tucked up behind him against the wall across from my office. Just where the co-ed’s portrait hung now, his head turned away, and then I was past and had only the shadow of awkwardness, receding.

“He was waiting,” I said. McDaniel made a disinterested noise while I tried to reel the memory backward to the moment I’d hopped up from my desk to leave. Back to my desk, and the urge to make myself scarce. It hadn’t had anything to do with him; I hadn’t known he’d be out there.

“He was waiting for—”

Another student. Another student who’d come to see not me but Corrine. My mind rushed forward to Cor, standing in our doorway, her hand over her mouth. Not laughing. “Oh, shit.”

“What?”

I didn’t know. I couldn’t see anything but Corrine’s face, stretched in horror. “Nothing. You can’t print any of this.”

“You’re right. I haven’t heard anything worth the ink it would take.”

“Good.”

He frowned. “Tell me.”

“You said it. Nothing worth the ink.”

McDaniel wiped his face with his palm. “The two of you, I can’t believe it.”

I tried to calm myself. I couldn’t jump to crazy ideas. I couldn’t even separate the crazy ideas from one another. The two of us—Mrs. Lehane? I couldn’t work out how the two of us had aligned. I glanced back at the library doors, but she’d gone.

“You and your boy scout,” McDaniel said. “You’re up to your necks, but you won’t admit it and you won’t ask for help.”

A spatter of rain hit my neck. I felt for the drop. The black sky had caught up with me. I imagined the slow going back through Chicago, the hypnotizing wiper blades. “I don’t know why I’d ask you for help.”

“I’m the only one paying any attention. I’m the only one who—who. Who
cares
.” He looked away. “I mean—”

Adrenaline rushed through me. I felt it, too—that charged atmosphere when two orbits collide. I knew it well—I knew what it was like for looks over drinks to go long and suggestive, for the air to thicken. I remembered it, but from another lifetime, as though it had happened to someone else. Another dead Amelia Emmet.

Or maybe it wasn’t me he cared too much for, or the Lehanes, but this—all of this. I remembered the way McDaniel had watched me all the way to Dale Hall’s doors, the shadow of another idea that wouldn’t go away. How far would he go for a front-page story?