Dennis Lehane: Moonlight Mile

Angie said, “Let’s have a few dozen more of those…”

“Okay.”

“And then a bit more of that thing we tried an hour ago…”

“That was interesting, wasn’t it?”

“And then a long hot shower…”

“I’m sold.”

“And then go home and see our daughter.”

“Deal.”

The phone call came at three the next morning.

“You remember me?” A woman’s voice.

“What?” I was still half-asleep. I checked the caller ID: PRIVATE NUMBER.

“You found her once. Find her again.”

“Who is this?”

Her words slushed through the phone line. “You owe me.”

“Sleep it off,” I said. “I’m hanging up.”

“You owe me.” She hung up.

The next morning, I wondered if I’d dreamed the call. If I hadn’t, I already had trouble remembering if it was last night or the night before. By tomorrow, I assumed, I’d forget the whole thing. On the walk to the subway, I drank my cup of Dunkin’s under a low, clay sky and ragged clouds. Brittle gray leaves stirred in the gutter, waiting to fossilize in the first snow. The trees were bare along Crescent Avenue, and cold air off the ocean hunted the gaps in my clothes. Between the end of Crescent Avenue and the harbor itself was JFK/UMass Station and the parking lot beyond. The stairs leading up to the subway station were already thick with commuters.

Even so, a face appeared at the top of the stairs that I couldn’t help but be drawn to. A face I’d hoped never to see again. The weary, embattled face of a woman who’d been passed by when life was handing out luck. As I drew close to her, she tried a hesitant smile and raised a hand.

Beatrice McCready.

“Hey, Patrick.” The breeze was sharper up top and she dealt with it by burrowing into a flimsy jean jacket, the collar pulled up to her earlobes.

“Hi, Beatrice.”

“I’m sorry about the call last night. I…” She gave a helpless shrug and looked at the commuters for a moment.

“Don’t mention it.”

People jostled us as they headed for the turnstiles. Beatrice and I stepped off to the side, close to a white metal wall with a six-by-six subway map painted on it.

“You look good,” she said.

“You, too.”

“It’s nice of you to lie,” she said.

“I wasn’t,” I lied.

I did some quick math and guessed she was about fifty. These days, fifty might be the new forty, but in her case it was the new sixty. Her once-strawberry hair was white. The lines in her face were deep enough to hide gravel in. She had the air of someone clinging to a wall of soap.

A long time ago-a lifetime ago-her niece had been kidnapped. I’d found her and returned her to the home she shared with her mother, Bea’s sister-in-law, Helene, even though Helene was not what you’d call a natural-born mother.

“How’re the kids?”

“Kids?” she said. “I only have one.”

Jesus.

I searched my memory. A boy. I remembered that. He’d been five or six, shit, maybe seven, at the time. Mark. No. Matt. No. Martin. Definitely Martin.

I considered rolling the dice again, saying his name, but I’d already let the silence drag on too long.

“Matt,” she said, careful eyes on me, “is eighteen now. He’s a senior up the Monument.”

Monument High was the kind of school where kids studied math by counting their shell casings.

“Oh,” I said. “He like it?”

“He’s… under the circumstances, he’s a, ya know, he needs direction sometimes, but he turned out better than a lot of kids would.”

“That’s great.” I regretted the word as soon as it left my mouth. It was such a bullshit, knee-jerk modifier to use.

Her green eyes flashed for just a second, like she wanted to explain in precise detail just how fucking great her life had been since I’d had a hand in sending her husband to prison. His name was Lionel and he was a decent man who’d done a bad thing for good reasons and flailed helplessly while it all transformed into carnage around him. I’d liked him a lot. It was one of the more cutting ironies of the Amanda McCready case that I’d liked the bad guys a hell of a lot more than the good ones. One exception had been Beatrice. She and Amanda had been the only blameless players in the entire clusterfuck.

She stared at me now, as if searching for a me behind the me I projected. A more worthy, more authentic me.

A group of teenage boys came through the turnstiles wearing letter jackets-varsity athletes heading to BC High a ten-minute walk down Morrissey Boulevard.

“Amanda was, what, four when you found her?” Bea said.

“Yeah.”

“She’s sixteen now. Almost seventeen.” Her chin tipped at the athletes as they descended the stairs toward Morrissey Boulevard. “Their age.”

That stung. Somehow I’d lived in denial that Amanda McCready had aged. That she was anything but the same four-year-old I’d last seen in her mother’s apartment, staring at a TV as a dog-food commercial played in the cathode rays bathing her face.

“Sixteen,” I said.

“You believe it?” Beatrice smiled. “Where’s it go, the time?”

“Into somebody else’s gas tank.”

“Ain’t that the truth.”

Another group of athletes and a few studious-looking kids came toward us.

“You said on the phone she was gone again.”

“Yeah.”

“Runaway?”

“With Helene for a mother, you can’t rule it out.”

“Any reason to think it’s more, I dunno, dire than that?”

“Well, for one, Helene won’t admit she’s gone.”

“You call the cops?”

She nodded. “Of course. They asked Helene about her. Helene said Amanda was fine. The cops left it at that.”

“Why would they leave it at that?”

“ Why? It was city employees who took Amanda in ’98. Helene’s lawyer sued the cops, sued their union, sued the city. He got three million. He pocketed a million, and two million went into a trust for Amanda. The cops are terrified of Helene, Amanda, the whole thing. If Helene looks them in the eye and says, ‘My kid’s fine, now go away,’ guess what they do?”

“You talk to anybody in the media?”

“Sure,” she said. “They didn’t want to touch it either.”

“Why not?”

She shrugged. “Bigger fish, I guess.”

That didn’t make sense. I couldn’t imagine what it was but she wasn’t telling me something.

“What do you think I can do here, Beatrice?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “What can you do?”

The softening breeze moved her white hair around. There was zero doubt that she blamed me for her husband getting shot and being charged with a grocery list of crimes while he lay in his hospital bed. He’d left his house to meet me at a bar in South Boston. From there, the hospital. From the hospital, jail. From jail, prison. He’d walked out of his house one Thursday afternoon and never walked back in.

Beatrice kept looking at me the way nuns used to look at me in grammar school. I hadn’t liked it then, I didn’t like it now.

“Beatrice?” I said. “I’m real sorry your husband kidnapped his niece because he thought his sister was a shitty parent.”

“Thought?”

“But he did, in fact, kidnap her.”

“For her own good.”

“Okay. So we should just let anybody decide what’s good for a kid who doesn’t belong to them. I mean, why not? Every kid with an asshole parent, line up at the nearest subway station. We’ll ship you all to Wonkaville where you’ll live happily ever after.”

“You through?”

“No, I’m not.” I could feel a rage building in me that got closer to the surface of my skin every year. “I’ve eaten a lot of shit over the years for doing my job with Amanda. That’s what I did, Bea, what I was hired to do.”