“Hello,” Theo said, somewhat surprised that Ike was awake at such an early hour. He was not known as a morning person.
“Theo, it’s Ike. Good morning.”
“Good morning, Ike.” Though Ike was in his early sixties, he insisted that Theo call him simply Ike. None of that uncle stuff. Ike was a complicated person.
“What time are you headed to school?”
“Half an hour or so.”
“You have time to run by and have a chat? I have some very interesting gossip that no one knows.”
Theo was required by family ritual to stop by Ike’s office every Monday afternoon. The visits usually lasted about thirty minutes and were not always pleasant. Ike liked to quiz Theo about his grades and his schoolwork and his future and so on, which was tedious. Ike was quick with a lecture. His own children were grown and lived far away, and Theo was his only nephew. He could not imagine why Ike wanted to see him so early on a Friday morning.
“Sure,” Theo said.
“Hurry up, and don’t tell anyone.”
“You got it, Ike.” Theo closed his phone and thought, How odd. But he had no time to dwell on it. And, his brain was already overloaded. Judge, no doubt because of the sausage, was scratching at the door.
Woods Boone had breakfast five days a week at the same table in the same downtown diner with the same group of friends at the same time, 7:00. Because of this, Theo rarely saw his father in the morning. Theo received a peck on the cheek from his mother, who was still in her robe, as they exchanged good morning and compared how they slept. Marcella, when she wasn’t tied up in court, spent the early part of each Friday morning getting worked on. Hair, nails, toes. As a professional, she was serious about her appearance. Her husband was not quite as concerned about his.
“No news on April,” Mrs. Boone said. The small television next to the microwave was not on.
“What does that mean?” Theo asked as he took a seat. Judge was standing next to the stove, as close to the sausage as he could possibly get.
“It means nothing, at least for now,” she said as she placed a plate in front of Theo. A stack of small round pancakes, three links of sausage. She poured him a glass of milk.
“Thanks, Mom. This is awesome. What about Judge?”
“Of course,” she said as she placed a small plate in front of the dog. Pancakes and sausage, too.
“Dig in.” She took her seat and looked at the large breakfast sitting in front of her son. She sipped her coffee. Theo had no choice but to eat like he was starving. After a few bites, he said, “Delicious, Mom.”
“Thought you might need something extra this morning.”
“Thanks.”
After a pause in which she watched him closely, she said, “Theo, are you all right? I mean, I know this is just awful, but how are you handling it?”
It was easier to chew than to talk. Theo had no answer. How do you describe your emotions when a close friend is abducted and probably tossed in a river? How do you express your sadness when that friend was a neglected kid from a strange family with nutty parents, a kid who didn’t have much of a chance?
Theo kept chewing. When he had to say something, he sort of grunted, “I’m okay, Mom.” It was not the truth, but at the moment it was all he could manage.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
Ah, the perfect question. Theo shook his head and said, “No, I do not. That just makes it worse.”
She smiled and said, “Okay, I understand.”
Fifteen minutes later, Theo hopped on his bike, rubbed Judge’s head, and said good-bye, then flew down the Boones’ driveway and onto Mallard Lane.
Long before Theo was born, Ike Boone had been a lawyer. He had founded the firm with Theo’s parents. The three lawyers worked well together and prospered, until Ike did something wrong. Something bad. Whatever Ike did, it was not discussed in Theo’s presence. Naturally curious, and raised by two lawyers, Theo had been pecking away at Ike’s mysterious downfall for several years, but he had learned little. His father rebuffed all nosiness with a brusque, “We’ll discuss it when you get older.” His mother usually said something like, “Your father will explain it one day.”
Theo knew only the basics: (1) Ike had once been a smart and successful tax lawyer; (2) then he went to prison for several years; (3) he was disbarred and can never be a lawyer again; (4) while he was in prison, his wife divorced him and left Strattenburg with their three children; (5) the children, Theo’s first cousins, were much older than Theo and he’d never met them; and (6) relations between Ike and Theo’s parents were not that good.
Ike eked out a living as a tax accountant for small businesses and a few other clients. He lived alone in a tiny apartment. He liked to think of himself as a misfit, even a rebel against the establishment. He wore weird clothes, long, gray hair pulled into a ponytail, sandals (even in cold weather), and usually had the Grateful Dead or Bob Dylan playing on the cheap stereo in his office. He worked above a Greek deli, in a wonderfully shabby old room with rows of untouched books on the shelves.
Theo bounced up the stairs, knocked on the door as he pushed it open, and strolled into Ike’s office as if he owned the place. Ike was at his desk, one even more cluttered than his brother Woods’s, and he was sipping coffee from a tall paper cup. “Mornin’, Theo,” he said like a real grump.
“Hey, Ike.” Theo fell into a rickety wooden chair by the desk. “What’s up?”
Ike leaned forward on his elbows. His eyes were red and puffy. Over the years, Theo had heard snippets of gossip about Ike’s drinking, and he assumed that was one reason his uncle got off to a slow start each morning.
“I guess you’re worried about your friend, the Finnemore girl,” Ike said.
Theo nodded.
“Well stop worrying. It ain’t her. The body they pulled from the river appears to be that of a man, not a girl. They’re not sure. DNA will confirm in a day or two, but the person is, or was, five feet six inches tall. Your friend was about five one, right?”
“I guess.”
“The body is extremely decomposed, which suggests that it spent more than a few days in the water. Your friend was snatched late Tuesday night or early Wednesday morning. If her kidnapper tossed her in the river shortly after that, the body would not be as decomposed as this one. It’s a mess, with a lot of missing parts. Probably been in the water for a week or so.”
Theo absorbed this. He was stunned, relieved, and he couldn’t suppress a grin. As Ike went on, Theo felt the tension ease in his chest and stomach.
“The police are going to make the announcement at nine this morning. I thought you might appreciate a little head start.”
“Thanks, Ike.”
“But they will not admit the obvious, and that is to say that they’ve wasted the last two days with the theory that Jack Leeper took the girl, killed her, and tossed her in the river. Leeper is nothing but a lying thug, and the cops allowed themselves to chase the wrong man. This will not be mentioned by the police.”
“Who told you all this?” Theo asked, and immediately knew it was the wrong question because it would not be answered.
Ike smiled, rubbed his red eyes, took a gulp of coffee, and said, “I have friends, Theo, and not the same friends I had years ago. My friends now are from a different part of town. They’re not in the big buildings and fine homes. They’re closer to the street.”
Theo knew that Ike played a lot of poker, and his pals included some retired lawyers and policemen. Ike also liked to give the impression that he had a large circle of shady friends who watched everything from the shadows, and thus knew the street talk. There was some truth to this. The previous year, one of his clients was convicted for operating a small-time drug ring. Ike got his name in the paper when he was called to testify as the man’s bookkeeper.
“I hear a lot of stuff, Theo,” he added.
“Then who’s the guy they pulled from the river?”
Another sip of coffee. “We’ll probably never know. They’ve gone two hundred miles upriver and found no record of a missing person in the past month. You ever hear of the Bates’s case?”
“No.”
“Probably forty years ago.”
“I’m thirteen years old, Ike.”
“Right. Anyway, it happened over in Rooseburg. A crook named Bates faked his own death one night. Somehow snatched an unknown person, knocked him out, put this person in his car, a nice Cadillac, then ran it into a ditch and set it on fire. The police and firemen show up and the car is nothing but flames. They find a pile of cremated ashes and figure it’s Mr. Bates. They have a funeral, a burial, the usual. Mrs. Bates collects the life insurance. Mr. Bates is forgotten until three years later when he’s arrested in Montana outside a bar. They haul him back to face the music here. He pleads guilty. The big question is—who was the guy who got fried in his car? Mr. Bates says he doesn’t know, never got the boy’s name, just picked him up one night as a hitchhiker. Three hours later, the boy was reduced to ashes. Guess he got in the wrong car. Bates gets life in prison.”
“What’s the point here, Ike?”
“The point, my dear nephew, is that we may never know who the cops pulled from the river. There’s a class of people out there, Theo—bums, drifters, hobos, homeless folk—who live in the underworld. They’re nameless, faceless; they move from town to town, hopping trains, hitchhiking, living in the woods and under the bridges. They’ve dropped out of society, and from time to time bad things happen to them. It’s a rough and violent world they inhabit, and we rarely see them, because they do not wish to be seen. My guess is that the corpse the cops are inspecting will never be identified. But that’s really not the point. The good news is that it’s not your friend.”
“Thanks, Ike. I don’t know what else to say.”
“I thought you might need some good news.”
“It’s very good news, Ike. I’ve been worried sick.”
“She your girlfriend?”
“No, just a good friend. She has a weird family and I guess I’m one of the few kids she confides in.”
“She’s lucky to have a friend like you, Theo.”
“Thanks, I guess.”
Ike relaxed and put his feet on his desk. Sandals again, with bright red