The Dark Root

30

Gail pulled over to the curb and cut the engine. “He wanted to meet you here?”

I looked past her at the gentle curve of Morningside Cemetery, the ragged rows of individual and sometimes idiosyncratic monuments, the hulking, dormant mass of Mount Wantastiquet beyond. The air was tinted with the perfume of spring in full flower. “I called Megan Goss about him yesterday, after he asked me here. I wanted to run his symptoms by her to see what she thought. She said it sounded like he was in mourning-for a loss of innocence, maybe, compounded by what had happened to Dennis, and exacerbated by having a new baby on the way. Her guess was he wants to tell me he’s quitting the department. I guess a cemetery’s as good a place as any to do that.”

Gail studied my face for a moment and then reached across and squeezed my hand. “He’s not the only one in mourning, is he?”

I smiled slightly. “I suppose not. I hadn’t allowed any time for it till now.” I paused and then added, “I’d hate to lose Ron as well.”

Gail released my hand. “You better find out what he wants.”

I leaned over and kissed her on the cheek.

I found Ron Klesczewski crouching at the foot of Dennis’s grave, staring distractedly at the broad river far below. I sat down next to him, using a neighboring stone as a backrest. “Hey, there.”

He didn’t turn his head. “Hi, Joe.”

"Guess you heard we closed the case, shut down the task force. We found Amy Lee, too-scared, but all in one piece.”

“I saw it in the paper,” he answered tonelessly.

I didn’t know what else to say, and despite my gloomy prognostication to Gail, I had no idea how this was going to end. The last thing I wanted was to precipitate a gesture he hadn’t been intending.

Groping for something benign in the silence, I finally said, “Willy put a donut in the coffin.”

Ron slowly turned away from the view and stared at me. “What did you say?”

“Willy said he put a donut into the casket when no one was looking at the funeral home, tucked just out of sight under the bottom lid panel. He thought Dennis would appreciate it.”

Ron shook his head, puzzled. “I thought Kunkle hated Dennis.”

“Dennis was a cop. Willy never dumped on him about that.”

Ron’s anguished face cracked a smile. “A donut? Jesus Christ.”

“Honey glazed-right on his chest, where he could reach it. And a napkin.”

Laughing now, Ron sat down against the stone next to me and stretched his legs out before him.

Seizing the moment, or maybe just wanting to get it over, I asked him, “You gonna’ quit the department?”

The laughter stopped, but the smile lingered encouragingly. He shook his head, his eyes fixed before him. “I was going to this morning. Even told Wendy.”

“What did she say?” I asked in the silence that followed.

He looked up at me. “Not to do it. She said she’d never seen me happier than the day I made detective. That it wasn’t something to give up just because I was in the dumps.” He rubbed his forehead. “That surprised me. She was one of the reasons I was thinking of quitting-Wendy and the baby.”

“Not bad reasons,” I murmured, thinking of Gail.

He sighed. There was still something unaddressed-some issue we’d stepped over that I hadn’t noticed.

“What is it?”

“I feel guilty.” His words were barely audible above the soft breeze from the river.

“Because you lived to worry that you almost got killed? You gotta see the irony in that.”

He smiled again, but I knew I hadn’t quite hit it. I had picked Ron as my Number Two a few years ago, over Brandt’s reservations, and I’d worked hard to make him feel comfortable in the role-perhaps too hard. I thought back to Truong Van Loc, and his relationship to his brother, on whom he’d pegged so much. I realized I too had been selfish, albeit a little less dramatically. Ron’s anxiety was as much my fault as a result of his own insecurities. I hadn’t paid attention to the price he’d been paying for a decision all my own.

“I’d be happy to switch things around a little, if you’d like-take you off as my second,” I told him.

He turned to me, surprised-and I thought a little relieved. “You sure that would be okay?”

“You’ve got a lot on your mind, especially with the baby due. Good time to step back a bit-not be so wrapped up in the job. Maybe Sammie’d be interested. You think she’d take it?”

He laughed. “In a heartbeat.”

I got up and walked to where the hillside fell off sharply to the railroad tracks and the near shore of the river, a hundred feet below. That was it, then. Life would resume for us all again, if in modified form.

At least almost-for there was loss lingering still, and a few things left I had to set right.

The Lee residence looked much as it had the last time I’d seen it-abandoned, neglected, in mourning, sitting among its tidy neighbors like a scream in the night no one wanted to acknowledge.

Amy Lee sat next to me, tired and wan, her face reflecting the ethereal glow from the dashboard’s instrument lights. Unmolested and in good health, she’d been found in Da Wang’s stronghold in Montreal by Lacoste and his people. It had taken time for them to confirm her identity, and for me to get to her and vouch for her. The paperwork to bring her back had prolonged things further, forcing me to precede her back to Brattleboro. An INS agent had finally picked her up at the border and driven her here in his car, rather than having her ride a bus, as was standard.

I’d intercepted her at that point, not wanting some anonymous federal employee delivering her home. My motives were also self-serving, of course. Having visited both Tony in the hospital, where he was fully recovering, and Dennis’s family at their home, I was engaging in a quest of sorts, taking an inventory of my world, making sure that what was left of it was secure and in place and on the road to recovery-reestablishing that the differences between me and Truong Van Loc were as broad as I’d once imagined them.

Amy looked over at the still house, its few lights barely glimmering from behind tightly drawn curtains.

“You okay?” I asked her, anxious that this reunion, of all things, should go right, and that this young voyager between cultures-a victim and a beneficiary of both-should recover. For all our sakes.

“I think so,” she murmured.

The door to the house opened, spilling light onto the shaggy lawn, and the outlines of two small, slightly bent people reached toward us. Amy, hesitant no longer, bolted from the car and ran to them, her own shadow melting into theirs. Slowly, as a group, weakened by exhaustion, happiness, and jittery relief, the three of them slumped to their knees in the grass, their arms intertwined, their heads buried in each others’ hair.

I stood by the car, smiling inanely in the darkness, rewarded at last by some palpable measure of success. All the misery and loss that had led to this one, small embrace was by no means a total redemption, but what I was seeing at least gave it some meaning.

I was getting ready to leave when Thomas Lee’s pale, oval face turned to look at me. He slowly disentangled himself, and came over.

For a split second, I was apprehensive. The police had meant nothing but trouble for this man, whether here or in the country of his birth, and despite the joy of his daughter’s return, I was braced for the worst.

He stopped short of me, his expression shaded and hard to read. Then abruptly he stuck out his hand. In the dim light, I could just see the glimmering of tears on his cheeks. “Thank you, Mr. Gunther, for keeping your word.”

The handshake was warm, and firm, and brought with it the measure of peace I was seeking. “Thank you, Mr. Lee.”