Ben Winters - Countdown City

“Was it the Catholics?” I ask him.

He shakes his head. “Christian Science.”

“Sure,” I say. I’ve started in drumming the fingers of my working hand on the tabletop. Now that I know that my kids are okay, that they didn’t suffer from my absence these last few days, I’m ready to move on, lay out my case. I hustled down here to make sure I caught Culverson within the loose bounds of the lunch hour, so I could run down my missing-person-turned-murder, see what he thinks.

“So I went to the address on the flier. Warren and Green. I didn’t have descriptions so I asked for the names.”

“How are they doing?” I ask. “Are they happy?”

“That’s the thing,” says Culverson. “They’re not down there.”

“What?” My fingers freeze. “They’re not?”

“Nope. A lot of other kids are, though. I found one named Blackwell.”

“Stone,” I say. “Andy Blackstone.”

“Yup. Funny kid. But Andy says that your guys…” Culverson flips through his notes; he’s got a steno pad like we used to use for case notes; I bet he helped himself to a box from the CPD supply closet before we were cleared out of the building. “He says they were there but then they left before the head count.”

“Oh.”

“And that’s as far as I could get.”

“Oh,” I say again, and stare down at the grimy linoleum. I can’t believe I let them go. They were my responsibility, those kids, a self-imposed responsibility but a responsibility nevertheless, and I treated them casually, like objects—a file that could be turned over to a colleague. I chose instead to follow the case of Martha Milano’s missing husband, and every choice forecloses on other choices; each step forward leaves a thousand dead possible universes behind you.

I think of the small broken boats I saw from the window of the blockhouse: the drowning, the dead.

“Detective Palace?” Culverson says. “Your turn. Tell me about your case.”

I nod. I look up, take a breath. This is why we’re here. I’ve come this far. I talk fast, giving him the highlight reel: Julia Stone at UNH, Brett Cavatone at Fort Riley. The gunshot, the orange leaf from the ghillie suit, the diary page. Detective Culverson stops me after the mysterious Mr. N.

“Wait,” he says. “Slow down.” He clears his throat, looks thoughtful. “So, you got a girl who comes to you for help. Husband is Bucket List, she wants him back.”

“Yeah.”

“You find the husband, and right away he’s shot.”

“Yeah. By someone who knows how to shoot.”

“Military?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. Someone who knows how to shoot.”

“Okay.”

“And then you get back home,” says Culverson. “How do you get home?”

“In a helicopter—that’s a whole other…” I shake my head. “Don’t worry about that. Skip ahead. I get home, I go over to Martha’s house this morning and she’s gone.”

“Any idea where she is?”

“No. Yes. I have a theory.”

Culverson raises his eyebrows, twiddles with his cigar.

“Okay,” he says. “Lay it on me.”

“Martha’s cheating on Brett with someone she calls N.”

“Right.”

“N. dies on the Fourth—at least, Martha thinks he dies. She writes of his death in her diary, but then Brett finds the diary, Brett decides this means his marriage is over, he’s free to go.”

“On his mission.”

“Crusade.”

“Crusade.”

“So he leaves. Martha’s confused and upset; she asks me to go out and find Brett. But while I’m out looking for him, the lover turns out not to be dead after all. They reunite, hit Cortez with a shovel, and leave town together.”

“Riding on a dragon,” says Culverson.

“You’re teasing me.”

“I am.”

Culverson widens his grin and drains the tea. In the silence I picture Alyssa and Micah. Where could they have gone? Where’s Martha? Where’s my sister?

It’s too quiet in here, unnervingly quiet: no radio playing from the kitchen, as there used to be, the cook Maurice singing along with a deep cut from Planet Waves . No muted clang of cutlery and murmured conversation from other tables, no humming ceiling fans. It occurs to me that this institution is in its twilight, not just the Somerset but this whole setup: young Palace putting the case to sage Culverson; Culverson pushing back, finding flaws. It’s untenable. It’s like the hospital, everybody doing their best on a project that is ultimately doomed.

“What I’m wondering about is that diary page,” he says. “You’re sure that diary page was the real McCoy?”

“Yes.” I pause. I stare at him. “No. I don’t know.”

“I’m talking about the handwriting,” he says. “You’re sure it was the girl’s handwriting?”

“No,” I say. “Yes. Dammit.”

I close my eyes and I can picture it, the block letters on the cinnamon-scented page: HE’S DEAD N. IS DEAD HE’S REALLY DEAD. I try then to hold it up next to the quote, transcribed from St. Catherine and taped up by Martha’s bathroom mirror: IF YOU ARE WHAT YOU SHOULD BE… but I’m uncertain, I can’t tell, and I don’t have that pink page anymore. It’s somewhere in the blockhouse, it’s drowning in the mud of Fort Riley or fluttering out over the ocean like a bird.

“I just didn’t think of it,” I say, appalled that I could have overlooked something so obvious.

“It’s okay,” says Culverson, signaling to Ruth-Ann with two fingers for more hot water.

It’s not okay. Nothing is okay. I toy with the mostly empty condiment jars: ketchup, mustard, salt. A plastic vase sits among them, bits of stem floating in a quarter inch of water at the bottom. It’s hot and dark in here, a couple stray beams of weak sunlight filtering through the dusty blinds. So simple. So obvious. The handwriting.

“I suppose it would be useless to note,” says Culverson, “that there is no point in investigating anything. It’s not like, you find this killer, and he’s locked up and you get a promotion. The office of the attorney general is shuttered. There are literally raccoons living in there.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Yeah, I know all that.”

“And if your babysitter has really been kidnapped, what are you going to do? Rescue her with that cute little gun that McConnell gave you?”

“No.” I scratch my head. “Actually, I lost it.”

Culverson looks at me for a second, and then he bursts out laughing, and I do, too, and we both sit there cracking up for a second, Houdini staring at me with questioning eyes from where he’s stationed himself under the table. Ruth-Ann comes over to pour our hot water—that’s about all she’s got left, hot water, and there’s something funny about that, too, there really is. And I’m really dying now, pounding the table, making the condiment containers dance and slide around the surface.

“You guys are a couple of lunatics, you know that, right?” says Ruth-Ann.

We both look down, and then up at her. Culverson’s shirt billows around my slender frame like a nightdress. Tufts of graying chest hair poke out over the V-neck of his undershirt. We laugh all over again, about our own ridiculousness, and then Culverson remembers he wanted to tell me about poor Sergeant Thunder, the weatherman, who has been waiting outside on his porch since six this morning, apparently, waiting for the convoy that’s supposedly coming to escort him to the World of Tomorrow.

“I just know the dumb S.O.B.’s going to come over tonight,” says Culverson, “wanting to borrow a cup of everything .”

We collapse in fresh giggles, and Ruth-Ann shakes her head, over at her counter, turns back to the same issue of the Monitor everyone has been reading for a month.