The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (67 page)

Cal. Calvin Sparks. The ballplayer.

So now I knew that much at least: when Peppy Schissel had driven her back from New York that day, it was Sparks’s baby she was carrying, not the company nephew’s. Why else would he have paid her money to “get it done”? Not out of altruism, from the tone of his letter. But shit, if one of the babies in that chest was hers and Sparks’s—and I was pretty sure it had to be the smaller one, not the Ripley’s Believe It or Not oddity lying beside it—then where did my father fit into all this? Why had
he
been the one to bury those babies? The only person who might be able to answer that one had taken a powder.

Yet rather than going out and looking for him, I pulled up a kitchen chair and sat there with the babies. Kept a kind of vigil, I guess. They’d been lying out there under the cold ground, alone with only each other for company, for longer than I’d been alive. Now that, for better or worse, they’d been brought back into the light of day, I was reluctant to leave them.

I must have sat there for an hour or more, the way you’d sit at a wake—contemplating their too-brief lives, wondering about the people who’d brought them into existence. As usual, I had so many questions, so few answers…. Somewhere during that hour, I felt
the need to reach in and touch them. Comfort them in some small, belated way. But my hand inside the chest was as big and clumsy as a catcher’s mitt, and when my knuckles grazed the dress of the mummified one, I flinched. Drew my hand back.

I tried again. Touched the smaller one—the one whose mother, I felt pretty sure, had been my mother, too. I cupped my hand around its skull, the curve of its tiny shoulder. Touched its femur, its foot. Had it been a little girl? A boy? There was no way to tell….

The skin on the other one’s face had looked sturdy as leather, but it wasn’t. When I touched it lightly at the temple, the skin and bone beneath it crumbled and caved in. Its fragility both frightened and repulsed me, and when I pulled my hand back, I saw that my fingertips were covered with a powdery residue of long-dead skin cells. I brushed my hand against my pant leg, but some of the residue had settled into the whorls of my fingertips. I looked across the room to the sink, the faucet I could have used to wash away its traces. But for some reason, I didn’t, or couldn’t, do it.

I stood, opened the back door, and called out to him. “Ulysses!”

If he had wandered back to the field where we’d dug up the trunk, and then had wandered into the woods behind, he might have been oblivious to the sharp drop-off. I thought about Zinnia, the Bride Lake prisoner who had worked for us when I was a boy—who had hugged me so tightly and later had fallen from that sheer drop-off to her death…. So I left the babies and went outside—walked the path to the orchard, the field. Walked past the hole I’d dug a few innocent hours earlier and into the back woods. “Ulysses! You out here, U? … Hey, Ulysses!” A couple of times, I thought I heard his footsteps, then saw it was only the squirrels running over dead leaves. Standing at the edge of the drop-off, I looked down, looked from side to side. I called his name again and again, but the only answer I got was my own echo.

Approaching the house again, I looked at the empty places where the Micks’ cars were usually parked. I was grateful that they were both
away for the weekend. Velvet, too. The way she was drawn to freaky stuff, she’d have probably thought my grisly discovery was “fuckin’ rad!” or something, and her enthusiasm for the macabre was about the last thing I needed…. What I
did
need was to talk to Maureen—lean on her a little and get her opinion about what I should do as I tried to wrestle with this … this what? Could you call the discovery of two dead babies on your propery a crisis? I wasn’t sure, but crisis or not, it wasn’t like I could pick up the phone and call her. It didn’t work that way. Under DOC rules, she could only call me.
This is the operator. I have a State of Connecticut prisoner on the line. Do you wish to accept the charges for a call from Maureen Quirk?
There was no telling what Mo’s reaction was going to be—to the babies, to the news about Kareem Kendricks’s rampage. She’d been in a pretty good place lately, pretty stable, and I didn’t want anything to set her back. Still, I’d have to tell her when I visited the next day.
If
the scuttlebutt about a coming lockdown was wrong, which it probably wasn’t. The jailhouse grapevine was pretty reliable, Mo said, given the liaisons between COs and inmates. A heads-up about what was being planned was power, and power could be bargained for. If they did go into lockdown, she’d be unreachable for the better part of a week….

And Alphonse was away; I couldn’t call him either. Not that the Mustang King would’ve been much help. Al had always been a little creeped out by death. Dead babies, one of them mummified? Forget it….

I had Jerry Martineau’s home number, but I hesitated for a while, weighing the pros and cons. But Jesus Christ, I needed to talk to
somebody.
When his wife answered, I told her it was “semi-urgent.” And when Jerry called back a few minutes later, I was vague. I told him I needed some advice about something I’d found on my property.

“What kind of ‘something’ we talking about?” he asked.

“Something kind of strange. Can you come out here as a friend, rather than as a cop?” He said he could come over in that capacity,
but depending on what it was I was going to show him, he wasn’t necessarily going to able to
leave
as such. He said he needed to hit CVS on the way over, but that he’d probably be by inside of an hour.

“
YOU KNOW, I REMEMBER MISS
Rheingold,” he said. “Cardboard box with their pictures on it, a pad of ballots, little pencil on a string. Every summer, my sister and I would walk down to my Aunt Dot’s package store, pick who we wanted, and stuff the ballot box.” He kept rubbing his cheek and looking back and forth between the old
New Yorker
ad he was holding—”It’s time to elect Miss Rheingold 1950! Your vote may decide !” —and the two small corpses at his feet. “My old man drank Rheingold,” he said. “Had a can every night with his supper.”

“One
can?” I said. “Well, there’s the difference between your old man and mine.”

“Hey, they may have taken different routes, but neither one of them saw their fortieth birthday,” Jerry noted.

“And scrawny little Ulysses outlived them both by over forty years. Man, he better be okay, because I’ve got some questions for
his
ass.”

Jerry nodded. “So do I.”

“Officially, you mean? Why? What’s the point?”

“The point is, what we’ve got here, I’m guessing, is two deaths that were covered up and never accounted for. Which means I’m going to have to call in the coroner, see if she can determine whether or not these two died of natural causes. Because if they didn’t, that hole you dug out there is a crime scene.” He peered in again at the remains, and I watched a shiver pass through him. “I tell you, Caelum, I’ve seen a lot of bodies over the years, investigated a lot of screwy domestic situations. But this one may just take the cake.”

“Look,” I said. “If a crime
was
committed, it happened over fifty years ago. By people who’ve been dead for decades.”

“Except for one of them maybe. If he helped your dad cover up a homicide—or
two
of them; I’m not ruling anything out at this stage of the game—then that makes him an accessory.”

I shook my head. “He’s dying, Jer. Why put him through that kind of an ordeal at this point?

“Because he picked up a sledgehammer and started busting up that concrete. And because you two opened Pandora’s box here.
You
called
me.
Remember? What do you expect me to do? Look the other way again?”

Again:
fair enough. Jerry had looked the other way after Maureen had been caught “doctor-shopping,” and down the line, a seventeen-year-old kid had ended up dead in the road. I flashed on Jesse Seaberry, the way he’d looked as he’d spoken of his own culpability in his brother’s death.

“Ulysses say where he was going when he left here?” Jerry asked.

“Nope. But wherever he is, he’s not drinking any more of the vodka I let him have last night when he slept over here. I poured the rest down the sink.”

“You gave him liquor? In his condition?”

“Yeah, well … give drink to the thirsty, right? It’s one of the seven acts of Christian virtue.” Jerry gave me the kind of quizzical look I must have given Kareem Kendricks the day before in my office. “You see that thing on the news last night? About the soldier who opened fire at that office over in New London?”

“Yes, I saw it. What about it?”

“Student of mine. A few hours before he did what he did, he was in my office, reciting the seven acts of Christian virtue: feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty …”

“Jesus,” Jerry said. “You’ve had a hell of a couple of days, haven’t you?”

I nodded. “I was up most of the night, letting the what-ifs do a number on me. What if I’d realized what he was planning and been able to prevent it? Said just the right thing that might have brought
him back to his senses and … Then, of course, there’s the bigger, scarier what-if.”

Jerry cocked his head. “Meaning?”

“He’d been acting pretty unstable in class that morning, and one of the other students said something to antagonize him. He could have just as easily pulled out his gun and started taking victims then and there instead of … could have found ourselves in the middle of another …”

He finished it for me. “Columbine.”

I turned my back to him and walked over to the window. “I’ve been trying for eight years to wrap my head around
that
one,” I said. Outside, a hawk lifted off a sycamore limb and flew through the grim gray sky. I turned back and faced him. “You’re a cop, Jerry. Maybe you can tell me. Why is it that these damaged people who can’t take the pain anymore have to pick up firearms and go out in a blaze of glory? Destroy other people’s lives along with their own?”

“I don’t know, Caelum,” he said. “How’s she doing over there, anyway?”

“Okay. Better, actually. Although I’m not exactly looking forward to our next conversation when she asks me what’s new.” I looked down again at the babies. “Come on, Jerry. Think about it. What good’s some long, drawn-out police investigation going to do these two at this point?”

He rose and walked over to me. Put his hand on my shoulder. “I don’t know, my friend. Acknowledge their existence maybe? Give ‘em a little belated justice?”

“When that train smashed into him, it dragged him along for several hundred feet. Severed both his legs. She was doing time for vagrancy when they fished her out of Bride Lake. What’s the matter, Jerry? Cosmic justice not enough for you?”

“Not when I’ve got regulations to adhere to. Protocols to follow.”

“Yeah, well, you’ve got your protocols, and I’ve got a lawsuit hanging over my head with my land and my home hanging in the balance.
I don’t exactly need a lot of negative attention drawn to this place right now.”

He sympathized, he said, but he wasn’t going to put his job on the line for me
or
Ulysses. “But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, okay?” He pulled a pen and a small notepad out of his pocket. “Read me again what that letter says.”

I walked over to the counter. As I read him Sparks’s letter, he jotted some notes. “This is conjecture on my part,” he said. “But from that comment about ‘dollar signs’ in her eyes, I’m guessing she may have been trying to extort money out of him,” he said. “Threatening to go public about her pregnancy, maybe. So he would have had to either pay her off or scare her off, and it sounds like he opted for the latter. When was it Jackie Robinson broke through to the majors? Forty-six?”

“Forty-seven,” I said. “Why?”

“Well, put it in context. Robinson’s a great player on the field and a stand-up guy off of it, and when he broke through,
he
was getting death threats, for Christ’s sake. Couple of seasons later, this Sparks comes along, and not only is he cheating on his wife with some pretty little white model, but then he gets her pregnant on top of that? You know what would have happened if the papers got ahold of a story like that? He played for the Giants, you said? Probably would have brought his career to a screeching halt. Hell, there’d have probably been a lynching party right there at the Polo Grounds. So let’s say his letter works. Scares her into shutting her mouth.
Now
what the hell’s she going to do? … Interesting that she ripped up his letter and threw it in there, isn’t it? That’s hostile. Shows how pissed off she must have been when she realized she wasn’t going to get what she wanted from him. But, you know, this is all guesswork. I could be way off base.”

I shook my head. “She had a temper when people thwarted her. I know that much.” I told Jerry about the old newspaper article—the one about how, as a seventeen-year-old, Mary Agnes had swallowed India ink after Great-Grandma Lydia forbade her from seeing my
fourteen-year-old father. And about how, after she got hauled into court and the judge ordered her to stay twenty-five feet away from him when they were at school together, she ripped into His Honor and got slapped with a contempt fine. “And after Rheingold fired her? Before she vacated the fancy apartment they’d set her up in? He told me she trashed the place. Broke mirrors, slashed the furniture.” “Who’s he?” Jerry asked.