The Why of Things: A Novel (35 page)

But what really stops Eve cold now, and makes leaving without investigation absolutely impossible, is the sight of Larry Stephens’ blue Camaro parked on the street a few doors down from the bar.

Eve stares, dumbfounded; she is right, then, and has been all along. The cooler bag, Larry, James Favazza, Vic’s—all of it is related, just as she’s thought; it has to be. What could the car’s presence there mean otherwise? Even if Larry Stephens isn’t the murderer she’s quite certain he is, there is no doubt in her mind, given the evidence she’s amassed—the cooler bag, the Vic’s T-shirt, the cigarettes and the cigarette butt, the beer bottles from New Hampshire, like Larrys Stephens’ car—that he was there at the time James died and that he knows what happened. And she’ll be damned if she’s not going to confront him and find out what it was. People don’t just
die
.

Eve hangs the bag with the photographs over the handles of her bike, which is propped against the side of the CVS, and hurries across the street, where she pauses in the shelter of an empty bay of the car wash near the bar. Eve glances around her; everyone around seems to be occupied with their own tasks; the man in the next bay over is busy with a vacuum deep inside his car,
and the people in the parking lot of the grocery store behind her are loading groceries. No one is paying her any attention, though really, she asks herself, why would they?

She crosses the street that separates the car wash and the bar; as she steps onto the sidewalk, she feels as if she is stepping into a photograph, or out of one reality and into another, which, flat from a distance, suddenly comes alive. She is acutely aware of the sounds of the Coke cup scuttling on the concrete and the humming of the powerline overhead, the rank scent of vomit mingling with beer. Cigarette butts litter the sidewalk, even though there is a standing ashtray by the doors. Eve wrinkles her nose, silently agreeing with Saul that Vic’s is a dump. She stands for a moment on the concrete, suddenly realizing the implications of the fact that the bar is closed. If the bar is closed, then Larry Stephens cannot be inside. Perhaps, she thinks, he left his car here overnight and took a cab home instead, too drunk to drive. Or he arrived here early, parked outside, and went off to George’s or somewhere else nearby for a bite to eat, to kill time until the bar opens in an hour. She takes a few steps in the direction of the Camaro—close enough that she can see inside it, yet not so close as to seem suspicious.

From where she pauses several feet away from the car, there does not appear to be much to see inside anyway; it is surprisingly clean, the backseat and floors devoid of any interesting items or telltale bits of junk. There is a single CD case on the passenger seat: Paul Simon, she can tell by the familiar cover; she’s got the same CD at home. Eve frowns. She’s not sure what sort of music she’d expect Larry Stephens to listen to, but it wouldn’t be Paul Simon.

But aside from the CD, there’s nothing of note. Just one of those Christmas tree air fresheners hanging from the rearview mirror. Eve looks up and down the street. Wherever he is, and for
whatever reason he’s left his car here, Larry Stephens has to come back at some point, she knows that, and in the meantime—she turns around—Vic’s is here before her, begging to be explored. It occurs to her that it’s possible that even though the bar is closed he’s in there anyway, talking to the bartender, who could well know something himself about what happened to James, judging from their brief conversation on the phone the other night. It’s also possible, she thinks suddenly, that Larry
is
the bartender. Why not?

She scans the bar again slowly, taking it all in. Two posters hang in the left-hand window. The larger poster is the nightly schedule of bands that will play at Vic’s this week—Shang-reg-gae-la, the Jax Scags Band, and the Obtuse Angles, among others. The smaller poster advertises a bluefish tournament sponsored by the bar, which is set to take place in August. Eve studies these posters carefully, and then she steps right up to the rain-streaked windows, and with a mild feeling of recklessness she cups her eyes against the glass.

To her combined relief and disappointment, the bar appears empty. It is dim, but Eve is able to get the general sense of the place. Lamps with darkly colored shades hang from the ceiling, where pipes run between exposed beams. A row of small booths recedes into the shadows at the back, installed against the wall opposite the bar. The bar itself seems to horseshoe around into another room that Eve supposes must be accessed by the door in the right side of the entryway, whereas she can see from here that the room she is looking into now is accessed by the door in the left side. She takes in the space greedily. Seeing Vic’s for real feels as unbelievable as actually finding James Favazza’s truck, even if there are tantalizing details that she can’t make out from here: the figures in the photographs on the Peg-Board on the wall, the names in the boxes on a betting pool chart behind the bar.

She goes to look through the window on the other side of the entryway, which she finds has no posters hanging in it for her to read, and again cups her face against the glass. This room, she sees, would be a mirror of the room on the left-hand side of the bar except that a pool table stands in the middle, to accommodate which there are two fewer booths against the wall. A large, triangular Budweiser lampshade hangs above it, and pool balls are scattered on the felt. The other main difference between the rooms is the hallway at the back of this one, which Eve guesses is where the rest rooms are located, and at the end of which is a door that appears to lead outside.

Eve steps back from the glass, noting with satisfaction the alleyway separating the thrift store from the bar. She walks over to investigate; a ladder lays propped against the bar on its side, and an AC window unit hums in a window above the thrift store, dripping into the alley’s overgrown grass. There is no gate or fence, no sign that warns to keep out, and so after a moment of hesitation, Eve ventures down the alley and around to the back of Vic’s to see where the back door leads.

Behind the bar, she discovers that whatever outdoor seating area is accessed by that rear door is walled in by a fence of wooden two-by-fours about eight feet in height, with lanterns mounted to the top of each main post. Between this fenced-in area and the more residential street beyond is a dusty lot, where a single car is parked right now, but which Eve imagines is jammed with cars on a busy night; probably, she thinks, James Favazza’s truck was parked right here many times before. She tries to picture it here, but the images that keep coming to mind are of the pickup front end down and dangling, water streaming through the cracks around the doors and windows, and of the same truck where it is now, pillaged in a crowded lot. She turns back to the fenced-in area, where a door on hinges leads out into the parking area; Eve
can’t resist giving it little push to see whether it will open, and to her surprise, it does. Having come this far, she knows she can’t stop. She pushes it open the rest of the way, and steps through.

Inside, she discovers green plastic chairs and tables scattered across a concrete patio; it is somewhat uneven at the edges, as if whoever owns the bar had simply dumped a pile of concrete and spread it out to harden into solid ground. She wonders how often James Favazza sat out on this very patio, if he might have even been here the day of his death, and she is contemplating the industrial-size cooler along the wall and wondering if inside it there might be Smuttynose Old Brown Dog Ale or Tuckerman’s Headwall Ale, the New Hampshire brews that Larry favored, when she hears the bar’s back door being unlocked from the inside.

For the first time Eve truly understands what it means for your heart to skip a beat. She takes a step back, her mind racing, but before she can decide on the best course of action—run away? Smile and say hello?—or come up with any good excuse for being here, a man is standing in the entryway. He is stocky and balding, with a soul patch beneath his lower lip that looks to Eve more like a chocolate stain. His build is like that of someone who spends a lot of time in the gym, not in the sculpted sense, but in the sense that he looks like he could pick up a car. Eve imagines a heavily tattooed torso beneath his T-shirt, even if his skin presently exposed appears to be ink-free.

“Can I help you with something?” he asks, without a hint of friendliness.

Eve gives him a nervous smile, wondering if he was the one she spoke to when she called up here the other night. “I . . . I didn’t think anyone was inside. Sorry.”

The man stares at her. “Can I help you with something?” he repeats.

Eve shakes her head. “No, sorry,” she says, taking another step back toward the door. “I was just looking.”

“I know you were looking. I saw you looking through the windows up front, too. But I don’t know if you were
just
looking.”

“I was,” Eve says. “Honest. I really was.”

“Seems to me you’re trespassing.”

“No!” Eve insists, though she hesitates just a fraction of a second, since she supposes technically she might be.

“No? Bar’s clearly closed, and not only are you on the premises anyway, you’re also under age.”

Eve blinks at him. A raindrop lands on her cheek, but she does not wipe it away.

“It’s against the law for a minor to enter a bar, or be on the premises of one. It’s against the law for a minor to drink, and it’s against the law for anyone to steal alcohol at all.”

“I wasn’t!” Eve cries. “I don’t even drink!”

“Yeah, then what exactly
were
you doing?”

Eve swallows, racking her brains for a legitimate excuse aside from curiosity. “I—”

“Huh?”

“I—”

“Hm?”

“I—”

“Yeah?”

Eve looks at him bewilderedly, beginning to feel mildly indignant. She narrows her eyes. “You shouldn’t ask a question if you don’t really want an answer,” she says, her face hot. “I was just
looking
. I was curious, I’m sorry, and I’m leaving.”

“No, you’re not,” the man says, coming down the steps to the concrete. “You’re not going anywhere till your ma comes to get you. Either your ma, or the police.”

Eve swallows. A raindrop lands on her head, and another on her shoulder.

“You got a phone on you?” the man demands.

Eve shakes her head.

The man gestures over his shoulder toward the door. “Get inside,” he says. “Use the phone in there.”

Eve realizes that she has no choice but to comply, and she picks a path through the plastic chairs toward the bar. The man opens the door; she glances at him nervously, and again he gestures inside with his chin.

Though it isn’t particularly bright outside today, it still takes a moment for Eve’s eyes to adjust to the darkness of the bar, especially in the windowless back hallway. She waits for the man to come inside, and follows him down the corridor, briefly through the room with the pool table and into the first room she looked into. In the backmost booth, there are papers, pen, and calculator out on the table, and she realizes that the man must have been sitting there earlier doing paperwork as she pressed her face against the glass. It gives her an uncomfortable feeling to consider being watched without her knowledge. Otherwise, the only real difference between looking inside and being inside is the smell; she had imagined the mingling smells of beer and stale smoke, but it smells oddly more as if something had recently been fried. The man lifts a folding segment of wood and steps behind the bar; Eve begins to follow, but the man shakes his head.

“Uh-uh,” he says. “You stay on the other side.”

Eve stays where she is, watching as the man walks up to the front of the bar, where there is a phone mounted against the wall perpendicular to the mirror, above three rising rows of liquor.

“Here,” the man says, handing her the receiver.

She takes it from him, looks down at it skeptically. While she
doubts that either parent would believe that she had been there intending to steal beer, she’s not sure how much more tolerance either one has left at this point with her fixation, and she feels a sudden sense of injustice at her current situation; it’s not as if she came to town specifically in order to search out the bar, it just happened that she’d ended up here. Reluctantly, she turns the phone on and dials the number to the house, figuring her mother must have returned from leaving Eloise at camp. It rings once, twice, three and then four times before the machine picks up, and her father’s voice tells her that no one is home. “Mom?” she says into the machine, picturing her mother writing up in her study, ignoring the phone, as she sometimes does. “Mom?” she says, louder, realizing that the machine is downstairs and her mother might not be able to hear her. “Mom!” she half yells, one last time. She waits several seconds. “Never mind,” she says, “I’ll try your cell.”

She looks up at the man behind the bar uncomfortably. He regards her with a look of disdain, his burly arms folded across his large chest. “Sorry,” she says. “I’m trying her cell.” The man’s eyebrows flicker a response, up then down.

Eve anxiously dials her mother’s number, sure she will pick up. If she is not yet back at the house, it’s likely that she is doing errands around town, which gives Eve some measure of comfort; it’s possible that at this very moment her mother is just minutes away, and can get her out from under this man’s withering gaze that much faster. And it’s possible, given the pages of writing Eve read in her mother’s study, that her mother just might understand. But in the end Eve gets her mother’s voicemail on the cell, too. She hangs up without leaving a message, and gives the man behind the bar a sheepish look. “She didn’t answer,” she explains, “but I’ll try my dad.”

She dials her father’s number, hoping against hope that maybe his dive was canceled; it is raining again outside, she can
see through the window, and hard. Despondently, she listens to it ring, picturing the phone ringing away in the side well of the Buick, the car parked on the edge of some road in the rain, and she is not surprised when she gets his voicemail.