Reed Coleman - Empty ever after

I searched the dresser drawers, remembering how my dad had grown odd at the end, obsessed with making lists of the inconsequential aspects of his life. He wrote reams and reams of lists on foolscap. When he died, we knew where his hankies and t-shirts, his pens and broken watches, his rings and school yearbooks could be found, but we could never find where his happiness had got to. We wondered if he had ever truly been happy at all. There are some things it’s better for kids not to wonder about their parents.

There wasn’t anything to be found in the dresser drawers or in the closet or beneath the bed, but in the nightstand drawer were old letters from Jack, all with New York postmarks. Behind the family Bible and photo albums on the nightstand shelf were twenty neatly stacked cassette boxes. Each box was labeled with Jack’s name, an event, and or a corresponding date. Jack, Christmas 1976. There were tapes in nineteen of the twenty boxes. It did not take me long to figure out where that missing tape had gone. Questions filled my head. How had Ray Martello gotten to Mary White? What could he have told her? How much could he have paid her? What had Katy or I ever done to her except treat her with respect?

I shook my head, thinking Mary mustn’t have understood what was going on. But in my bones I knew that was wrong. Not only had Mary White known, she was an active participant. Now I understood Mary’s discomfort around me, her strange affect on the phone, the weirdness in the cemetery. There were never any roses on her brother’s grave or, if there had been, Mary White placed them there herself. No one painted on Jack’s headstone. Mary simply scrubbed the stone for my benefit: the missing dirt from where she’d washed it had been enough to convince me of the vandalism.

I slid a few of the cassettes into my pocket and headed toward the back door, but decided to take a second, more careful look around. In the kitchen, I found some flight information, two phone numbers, and an address in Kentucky scribbled onto a pad. Next to the address was the notation, #12. I ripped off the sheet and tucked it into my pocket with the cassettes. There was nothing else to see. I tiptoed out the back, replacing the key in the planter. Unfortunately, Roweena-double e, one lazy eye-had been keeping watch.

“Well?”

“Nice,” I said, “but a bit claustrophobic.”

She didn’t look pleased. I fairly ran to my rental car. Her kid was still crying.

Locating the cemetery proved more challenging than expected. With some help from a trucker, I found my way. Once through the gates, I was confident I’d be able to find Jack’s resting place. Wrong. I thought I retraced the route Mary had taken-around the huge stone crucifix, two lefts, straight ahead twelve rows, a right and a left-but I just couldn’t find the small chunk of stone adorning Jack’s grave. I tried it three more times with some minor variations before admitting defeat and heading into the administrative offices.

The woman at the desk checked the book.

“You weren’t wrong, sir. Mr. White is indeed interred there, but your confusion is understandable.” She made a sour face. “The headstone has been recently replaced.”

Had it ever. No wonder I hadn’t recognized the site. In place of the tasteful block of beveled granite which had stood vigil at the head of Jack White’s grave was a massive black tombstone vaguely reminiscent of the monolith in 2001. I couldn’t quite believe the scale of it: a sequoia among the shrubbery. Carved into the rich black stone were prayerful hands, crosses, scrolls, angels, and a rendering of Jack’s face. There was a bible quotation, lines from a favorite poem. With all that, there was still enough empty space on the stone to have added the entire text of War and Peace or to list the names of America’s war dead. All of them, ever. A mourners’ bench had been added as well. It was constructed of the same black stone, tasteful only by comparison to the monolith. I suppose Mary could have tried to buy Cleopatra’s Needle or Stonehenge, but she’d done okay on her own. Looking past the hideousness of the new monuments, I realized just how much they must have set Mary back. Ray Martello had paid her a pretty penny for her betrayal.

Without his sister around to scowl at me, I considered placing a rock atop Jack’s new headstone. Unfortunately, Mary hadn’t thought to include an elevator or build steps into the side of the headstone. I placed a pebble at the base of the black giant and walked away. Poor Jack. If anything ever cried out for a sledgehammer, it was that thing in my rearview mirror.

NOT UNEXPECTEDLY, THE address in Kentucky was a cheap motel near the airport. One of the phone numbers Mary had scribbled down was traceable back to room twelve at that same motel. The desk clerk, a Pakistani kid, was happy to help. The fifty bucks I slipped him was more of an incentive than the bullshit story I laid on. I described Mary, gave him the date of her flight, and asked him to check on who had been registered in room twelve that day.

“No, I am very very sorry,” he said in an Urdu-inflected lilt. “We did not have a woman like you describe in the room that day.” He read me a list of three names, all men, none of them familiar. I asked if he remembered what any of the men looked like. “One was a nasty older fellow. Big, with an eye patch.”

The desk clerk might have said something else, but I didn’t hear him. I think I might have thanked him. So, there was a mystery man, but his existence raised some questions not even Feeney could ignore. Suddenly, I didn’t feel quite so stupid or desperate.

Back in my rental, I called the other phone number Mary White had written down. Someone picked up. I could hear breathing on the other end.

“Hello,” I said, feeling cocky, overplaying my hand.

He snickered at me and hung up. I got a chill, but not because I knew who had been on the phone. I didn’t. I didn’t need to know. I could recognize a ghost when I heard one.

Us Air to New York. Aer Lingus to Dublin. Those were Mary White’s flight details. I had checked the numbers out at the airport before getting on my plane back to LaGuardia. Problem was, both of her flights were one passenger short. At least that’s what Feeney told me. Mary White was somewhere, but it wasn’t Dublin, Ireland. Dublin, Ohio, was more likely.

Detective Feeney was a stubborn bastard, not a fool, so when I returned from Cincinnati armed with a little bit more than desperate questions, he was, at least, willing to listen. I had to give the man credit. Most detectives with such a neatly closed case would have told me to go fuck myself. On the other hand, he wasn’t exactly reopening the investigation. He agreed, if grudgingly so, to keep an eye out for Mary White. He’d also alerted both the Dayton PD and the Ohio State Police that Mary White was a “person of interest” for the NYPD-although she was only of interest to me-and that she might be on the run. But that was as far as it went. Feeney had no intention of looking for the mystery man.

“But why would this guy be meeting with Mary White after Martello was dead?”

“Don’t push it, Prager. This mystery man’s not my problem. Maybe he was a real loyal friend to Ray Martello and was fulfilling a promise or somethin’. You know, like makin’ a last payment. Frankly, I don’t know and I don’t give a shit. I’ll do you the one favor and keep tabs on what the Ohio cops come up with about the old broad, but this mystery guy’s your headache.”

So it was official, Cyclops was my headache. Now he was Brian Doyle’s headache as well. I got Brian to take the few personal days we owed him. He was glad to do it seeing as I was matching his per diem-in cash-plus expenses. Double time and expenses: nice gig if you can get it. I just couldn’t bring myself to march back into the office and reinvolve the staff, not officially. I’d already used the agency for my private business for too long. It was bad for business and bad for morale. Until I had something more substantial than a missing cassette tape from Mary White’s bedroom and a meeting in an airport motel between an old lady and a one-eyed man, I would play it close to the vest.