Darkness, Take My Hand (Kenzie & Gennaro 2)

“So we got the weekend off,” Angie said. “What’re you going to do?”

“Spend as much of it as possible with Grace.”

“You’re whipped.”

“I am. How about yourself?”

“I’ll never tell.”

“Be good.”

“No,” she said.

“Be safe.”

“Okay.”

I cleaned my house and it was short work because I’m rarely there long enough to mess it up. When I came across the “HI!” note and bumper stickers again, I felt a warm prickle begin to knot under the skin at the base of my brain, but I shrugged it off, tossed everything in a cabinet of my entertainment center.

I called Richie Colgan again, got his voice mail, left a message, and then there was nothing left to do but shower and shave and go meet Grace at her place. Oh happy day.

As I went down the stairs, I could hear two people breathing heavily in the foyer. I turned the last corner and there were Stanis and Liva, squaring off for round one million or so.

Stanis was wearing about a half gallon of oatmeal for a hat and his wife’s blowsy housecoat was covered with ketchup and scrambled eggs so fresh they steamed. They stared at each other, the veins in his neck protruding, her left eyelid twitching madly as she kneaded an orange in her right hand.

I knew better than to ask.

I tiptoed past and opened the first door, closed it behind me as I entered the small hallway and stepped on a white envelope on the floor. The black rubber strip underneath the front door clamps so tightly over the threshold you’d have an easier time squeezing a hippo through a clarinet than you would sliding a piece of paper under the front door.

I looked at the envelope. No scuff marks or wrinkles.

The words “patrick kenzie” were typed in the center.

I opened the door into the foyer again and Stanis and Liva were still frozen as I’d left them, food on their bodies steaming, Liva’s hand wrapped around the orange.

“Stanis,” I said, “did you open the door to anyone this morning? In the last half hour or so?”

He shook his head and some oatmeal fell to the floor, but he never took his eyes off his wife. “Open door to who? Stranger? You think I crazy?” He pointed at Liva. “She crazy.”

“I show you crazy,” she said and hit him in the head with the orange.

He screamed, “Aaargh,” or something similar and I backed out quickly and shut the door.

I stood in the hallway, envelope in my hands, and I felt a greasy swelling of dread in my stomach, though I couldn’t articulate why completely.

Why? a voice whispered.

This envelope. The “HI!” note. The bumper stickers.

None of which are threatening, the voice whispered. At least not overtly. Just words and paper.

I opened the door, stepped out onto the porch. In the schoolyard across from me, recess was in full swing and the nuns were chasing children around by the hopscotch area, and I saw a boy pull the hair of a girl who reminded me of Mae, the way she stood with her head cocked slightly to one side as if listening for the air to tell her a secret. When the boy pulled her hair, she screamed and slapped at the back of her head as if she were being attacked by bats, and the boy ran off into a crowd of other boys and the girl stopped shrieking and looked around, confused and alone, and I wanted to cross the avenue and find the little prick and pull his hair, make him feel confused and alone, even if I’d probably done the same thing myself a hundred times when I was his age.

I guess my impulse had something to do with growing older, with looking back and seeing very few innocent violences committed against the young, in knowing that every tiny pain scars and chips away at what is pure and infinitely breakable in a child.

Or maybe I was just in a bad mood.

I looked down at the envelope in my hand and something told me I wasn’t going to be too keen on what I read if I opened it. But I did. And after I read it, I looked back at my front door and its imposing, heavy wood and portal glass fringed by alarm tape and three brass bolt locks gleaming in the late morning sunlight, and it seemed to mock me.

The note read:

patrick,

don’tforgettolockup.

13

“Careful, Mae,” Grace said.

We were crossing the Mass. Ave. Bridge from the Cambridge side. Below us the Charles was the color of caramel in the dying light and the Harvard crew team made chugging noises as they slid along, their oars slicing as clean as cutlasses through the water.

Mae stood up on the six-inch shoulder that separated the sidewalk from traffic, the fingers of her right hand resting loosely in mine as she tried to keep her balance.

“Smoots?” she said again, her lips smacking around the word as if it were chocolate. “How come smoots, Patrick?”

“That’s how they measured the bridge,” I said. “They turned Oliver Smoot over and over again, across the bridge.”

“Didn’t they like him?” She looked down at the next yellow smoot marker, her face darkening.

“Yeah, they liked him. Everyone was just playing.”

“A game?” She looked up into my face and smiled.

I nodded. “That’s how they got the Smoot measurements.”

“Smoots,” she said and giggled. “Smoots, smoots.”

A truck rumbled past, shaking the bridge under our feet.

“Time to come down, honey,” Grace said.

“I—”

“Now.”

She hopped off beside me. “Smoots,” she said to me with a crazy grin, as if it were our private joke now.

In 1958, some MIT seniors laid Oliver Smoot end to end across the Mass. Ave. Bridge and declared the bridge to be 364 smoots long, plus an ear. Somehow, the measurement became a treasure to be shared by Boston and Cambridge, and whenever the bridge is touched up, the Smoot markings are freshly painted.

We walked off the bridge and headed east along the river path. It was early evening and the air was the color of scotch and the trees had a burnished glow, the smoky dark gold of the sky contrasting starkly with the explosion of cherry reds, lime greens, and bright yellows in the canopies of leaves stretched above us.

“So run this by me again,” Grace said, wrapping her arm in mine. “Your client met a woman who claimed she was the girlfriend of a mob guy.”

“But she wasn’t, and he has nothing to do with any of this as far as we can tell, and the woman vanished, and we can’t find any record of her having existed in the first place. The kid, Jason, doesn’t seem to have any skeletons in his closet outside of maybe bisexuality, which doesn’t bother the mother. We’ve tracked the kid for a week and a half and come up with nothing but some guy in a goatee who might be having an affair with the kid, but who vanished into the air.”