Jan Burke - Dear Irene

“Detective Harriman said the police were already looking for me when you received the letter. He said that you had helped him prepare a list of people who might be…” His voice trailed off, and he took a swig of scotch, then got to his feet. He walked over to the windows, looking out at the darkened sea. “I wasn’t in my office today, so they hadn’t located me yet.” His voice caught, and he paused again. He looked back to us, embarrassed. “Sorry. I think all of this is just now hitting me.”

“Take your time,” Mark said.

He came back to the chair and then looked over at me, giving me another quick smile. Two or three nanoseconds this time. He didn’t strike me as someone who found it easy to smile, not even for that long. “Where was I?” he asked.

“You were saying that you weren’t in your office when the police looked for you,” I said. “What kind of work do you do?”

“I own a security systems company. Everything from industrial to home security.”

“And your office didn’t know how to locate you this morning?” Mark asked.

“I took the day off. My business has reached a point where I don’t have to spend every single day in the office. It’s a nice switch after years of never being home, always being in the office. In those first years, I was often there all day and night – except for a couple of hours at the gym. I’m a big believer in exercise – and even then I knew that if I wanted to be a good manager, I needed the stress-relief a workout brought me. Later, I’d catch a quick nap on my office sofa and be ready to roll.

“But now I have a team in there that I can trust, and I have time to pursue my real interests – especially flying and skydiving. I own my own plane. A Cessna182.”

He stood up, and again he offered us a drink. When we declined, he refilled his own and took a sip before continuing.

“Today, I didn’t even get close to my plane. Airport Security met me at my car and walked me into their office. A Detective Baird was there, and he asked me to wait for a moment. Then Detective Harriman came in, and explained that he had asked my mechanic, Joey Allen, to check my plane while Airport Security looked on. Poor Joey. It’s his first day back from a two-week vacation in Hawaii, and he gets hit with investigations and questioning – I probably caused his whole schedule to go hell.”

“It took a long time to find the problem?” Mark asked.

“No. Joey saw it within minutes. Someone had put the wrong fuel in my plane.”

“How could he tell?”

“Color. To explain it in simple terms, each type of fuel is color-coded; it’s a method of preventing mix-ups in fueling, a mistake which can be deadly. So by looking at the color, Joey knew that the wrong fuel had been mixed in with the one I would usually use. I probably would have been able to start the plane, even take off, but I would have had engine trouble in no time.”

“Is Joey the one who would normally fuel the aircraft?”

He shook his head. “I take care of that sort of thing myself. I know my own plane, and I pack my own chute. I use Joey’s help mainly for safety’s sake – to check my work and to take care of problems that are beyond my skill level.”

“When did you last fly the plane?” I asked.

“About a week ago.”

Well, I thought, that lets Joey off the hook. “And no one saw anyone near your plane since then?”

“No. But over the course of a week, any number of people could have been near it and not attracted any special attention. The airport is busy and there are a lot of Cessnas out there.”

We asked him a few more questions, none of which got us much of anywhere on the matter of the airport, but Mark did get some great quotes for his story. We started asking about the Olympus Child Care Center.

“Oh, yes, I remember it. Probably as much from hearing my mother talk about it as being there, to tell the truth. There were a lot of changes in our lives as a result. We moved to Las Piernas, for one thing. But as for the incident itself, I can’t tell you much. I remember a group of kids yelling at Mrs. Grant, remember the ambulance coming for the kid who got hurt – Robbie, I think it was. Not much else.”

He said he didn’t remember any of Thanatos’ victims. “No, I haven’t had contact with any of them. It’s been a long time. I don’t think I would have recognized any of them if I saw them on street. We were all just kids.”

“What about Jimmy Grant?” I asked.

He was quiet for a moment, swirling his drink. “What kind of monster wouldn’t pity Jimmy Grant? He was sort of an outcast to begin with. Didn’t have many friends – he was the one I thought about when my mother used to tell the story. Funny.

“Maybe it was because I didn’t understand enough about death to feel sorry for Robbie. I thought, well, he’s gone. But Jimmy – I remember people talking about how Jimmy would never see his mother again. She killed kids, they said, so they wouldn’t ever let her near Jimmy again. I don’t think anyone ever heard what happened to him.” He sighed. “As I said, who couldn’t understand what that must have been like for an eight-year-old boy?”

“Is your mother still living?” Mark asked.

He was quiet again. When he spoke, his voice was flat. “Is my mother still living. Good question.”

“You don’t know?” I asked, surprised.

He gave me another one of those faint smiles.

“Sorry, that’s a philosophical question at this point. Peggy Davis, the body, is alive. Peggy Davis, the mind, is dead. She suffers from a severe memory-loss disorder. She’s in Fielding’s Nursing Home – a very good one, but still a nursing home.

“Putting her there was a difficult decision to make. I guess in her own way, she made it for me in October. Mother was being taken care of by a private nurse in her own home. This was about the tenth nurse I had hired within the past year. I paid top dollar, but unfortunately, my mother’s condition is one that causes her to be violent and verbally abusive at times.

“Her memory loss has become much, much worse this past year as well, so she’s harder to care for. Anyway, she wandered out of the house when the nurse got a phone call. Managed to catch a bus. I didn’t find her for another five hours – downtown, in Sheffield Park. She had a scrape on her head, never knew how or where she got it. She didn’t know me. She didn’t even know who she was. That was about all I could take.”

We talked a little longer, as much to take his mind off his problems with his mother as to gather any information. When we were leaving, he thanked me again, bestowing one last, rare smile on me.

It didn’t endure any longer than the other smiles. When I looked from the car to his doorway, where he stood watching us, I thought he looked sad. For a moment, I was certain that sad look meant that he had more to tell us, but dismissed this as the product of an imagination still suffering from lack of visual stimuli.

“WHAT’S ON YOUR mind, Irene?” Mark asked.

I realized that I had been brooding as we made the long drive from Justin Davis’s house toward Don Edgerton’s place.

“Not very good company, am I, Mark? Sorry. I was just thinking about Peggy Davis.”

THE ANCIENT GREEKS believed that the dead drank from the River Lethe and were transformed from beings with remembered lives into shades, existing in a state of oblivion.

Now, it seems, some of us come to that river long before we die.

THE TWO DOBERMANS behind the chain-link fence were barking at us as if it were something personal – loud and unrelenting, their lips curled and bodies bristling with focused tension. It was clear that they wanted to release that tension by ripping our throats open.