Cry Mercy

SEVEN

Nick had remained standing on the walk while Emme backed out of the parking spot. He'd walked her outside mostly to satisfy his curiosity about her ride.

He'd figured her for a turn-of-the-century smallish sedan that had good gas mileage but not much under the hood. He permitted himself a smug smile as he watched her drive off in her 2001 Honda. That had been way too easy a call.

A pity. A woman that beautiful should be behind the wheel of something with more style, something small and zippy-maybe a Z or a Saab convertible. Then again, she hadn't seemed too interested in cars. Didn't know a classic Porsche when she saw one, but then again, to be fair, how many people did?

The understated sedan fit her to a T in some ways. She'd been pretty understated herself-rich, reddish hair pulled back in a simple elastic, and not much makeup, even on her eyes, which seemed to be where most women wore the most color. Her eyes had been the first thing he'd noticed about her. They were green-not almost green, but green-green-and flecked with gold. She had skin fair enough to burn if too long unprotected from the sun, he'd noticed that, too, and small hands that seemed to be moving all the time. An image flashed across his mind, Emme handing him the photocopy from Belinda's datebook. No rings on either hand. He was surprised that he hadn't picked up on that at the time. His fingers toyed with her business card. He knew he'd be calling her.

After she'd left, Nick had gone back to work and tried to keep his focus on the Porsche, but he was distracted thinking about the boxes of Belinda's belongings that had arrived at the farmhouse in Liberty Creek when the new semester had started. Back in February, the housemother had called with concern, but the bottom line was that she felt it would be better for everyone-especially Belinda's roommate-if his niece's things were removed from the sorority house. If he trusted her to pack for him, she would be happy to do that, and would she like him to ship them directly to his house. Her way of making sure it was done and done soon, he'd thought at the time. He'd opted to have everything sent to the farmhouse, since his place was small and he had no intention of unpacking her things and putting them away. The cartons could sit out there until she came back for them… or not. He'd given little thought to the call until Herb Sanders, whose property bordered the old Perone farm, left him a message saying that a whole lot of boxes had been delivered to the back porch and he'd put them in the barn for safekeeping. That had been sometime in March, Nick recalled. He'd kept telling himself that Belinda would be back and she could see to her own things, but that had proven to be just so much wishful thinking.

Nick rubbed a smear of grease from the back of his hand and turned off the spotlight he'd trained on the engine. It had been months since he'd been to Liberty Creek. Today was as good a day as any to go back.

The drive through the Maryland countryside was an uneven one, here an acre-sized lot sporting a trailer, there a breeding farm of thoroughbred horses or a herd of bison, then suddenly, a small town would appear as if by magic, like Brigadoon. It was only a forty-five-minute drive, but Liberty Creek was worlds away from Khoury's Ford.

He couldn't remember the last time he'd gone there without Belinda. Upon her mother's death, the property had passed to her. It suddenly occurred to him that if the worst had happened to his niece-he could not bring himself to even think the words If Belinda was dead-the farm would be his.

That was a sobering thought.

Not that Nick hadn't wanted it-he had. Still did, if he were to be honest with himself. He'd spent the happiest days of his life there when his grandparents were alive. There were a lot of surprised faces around Liberty Creek when it became known that Wendy, not Nick, had inherited the property. Back then-ten years ago, now-Nick hadn't minded. All he'd really wanted was his grandfather's garages and what they held. As long as he had those-and he did-Wendy and Belinda were welcome to the house and all the property that went with it.

He turned onto Evergreen Road without even realizing he'd done so. A quarter mile more and he made a second right, this time onto the long drive his grandfather had had paved almost twenty years earlier. Nick never drove up that lane without hearing his grandmother, Angela, bending her husband Dominic's ear over having spent so much money on the macadam.

“What, are you crazy?” She'd been incredulous when she found the entry in the checkbook. “For a driveway?”

He'd responded calmly, but from behind the safety of his newspaper. “I haven't spent all those hours and all that money on my cars to have them bottom out on a pothole, not to mention all the dust.”

The only other time she'd mentioned it, he'd silenced her with a softly said, “Gotta protect my investment, Angie,” and that was the end of that.

The house came into view before the row of cinder-block garages did. Since the passing of both grandparents, Nick had never driven up that lane without feeling his heart pinch just a little. He missed them both, and probably always would. More, maybe, even than he missed his parents.

He parked near the back porch where his grandmother's roses stretched up and over onto the roof and got out of his car, listening to the stillness there. No traffic noise, no human sounds. It was the quietest place he knew. He fingered the old key ring in his pocket, debating. House first or barn or garages? He opted for none of those, and instead, made his way down to the pond.

The air smelled clean, of new grass and the late spring flowers that grew wild. He knew the names of some-marsh marigolds, violets, cornflowers-but he'd forgotten more than he'd remembered. As a boy, learning the names of flowers hadn't been a priority. He knew roses, of course, and dandelions, and Queen Anne's lace, but it was too early still for them. He had a sudden memory of seeing a picture in one of his grandmother's magazines of a woman identified as Princess Anne, and wondering aloud if she was the lady the flower was named for, and if so, what she'd done to have been demoted from queen to princess. Wendy had laughed at him and called him a cute kid. It was the last summer they'd both spent time at the farm together. The following year, Wendy had gone off to Princeton and Nick had the farm and his grandparents to himself.

The cattails were thicker than he'd seen them in past years, and as he walked the slope down to the water, a great blue heron rose on wide wings from the reeds and took off abruptly, as much spooked by Nick as Nick had been by the bird. Geese nested amidst the grass that had grown long, and weeds grew unchecked on the bank. He put Clean around pond on his mental checklist.

The playhouse his grandfather had built on the bank still stood, but it looked as if it had taken a beating during that last winter storm. Nick pushed the door open and stepped inside. The smell of musk and dry rot hung in the air, and he added another mental note to ask Herb if he knew a good carpenter who could come out and take a look at it, see if it could be salvaged. He hated the thought of having to take it down. Wendy had moved most of the furniture up to the house at the end of the summer before she died. Belinda was too old for a playhouse, she'd told Nick, but a glance at the contents of an old bookshelf made him wonder. Pippi Longstocking. Nancy Drew. Anne of Green Gables. He picked one from the shelf and opened it, recognized the BH written in the fancy, curly script Belinda had affected when she was younger. He replaced the book on the shelf and went back outside, noting that the doorframe was rotting and the door itself loose on the hinges.

Better make that Call Herb today.

He checked the barn on his way to the house, the old door squealing like mad on its rusty hinges. Belinda's boxes were still stacked inside the door, and he carried them, one by one, up to the house where he placed them in the front hall. As he carried out the last of the cartons, he saw that the barn, too, could use some repair. He placed the box on the ground and walked back inside, taking note of the work that needed to be done. By the back door, he spied his grandfather's old John Deere tractor, the one he'd had for as long as Nick could remember. He'd retired it when Nick was in his teens, having decided that renting out his fields and having someone else plow and plant and harvest gave him more time for the things that really mattered to him.

The things that had mattered most to Dominic Perone-after his family, of course-were housed in the sturdy block garages he'd built, one after another, to accommodate them. By the time Nick was five years old, he could rattle off the names of every one of the occupants of those garages.

The 1955 Chevy. The 1959 Cadillac. The 1957 Studebaker Golden Hawk. The 1953 Oldsmobile Fiesta.

“These are the modern classics,” his grandfather would tell Nick as he cleaned a spark plug. “Yes, sir, these and the American muscle cars, they're going to bring in big bucks one day. You mark my words, Nicky.”

He'd point to the cars, ten years old or so, that he'd bought for cheap.

“GTO, Camaro, Charger, Mustang,” he'd prophesized. “These babies breathe fire.”

And then he'd open the garage that held his two very special loves. “Sixty-three Corvette Stingray split-window coupe, Nick. Instant classic. Only produced one year. Damn, but she's a beauty, isn't she?”

The other-“Sixty-eight Shelby Cobra GT 350 fast-back. This little sweetheart could shake the ground under your feet and rattle the teeth in the back of your mouth”-he'd worked on restoring only when Nick was available. It had taken two full summers to complete. Nick had never had a better time in his life. Every minute he spent working on that car had been golden, magic.

Hell, that whole summer he'd been seventeen-the summer of '89-had been magic. There'd been the hot August night he and his granddad had been glued to the TV to watch the replay of Nolan Ryan of the Texas Rangers pitching that mystical five thousandth strikeout to the Oakland A's Rickey Henderson. Five thousand strikeouts! The thought of it had made Nick's head spin. His grandmother had been sitting in her favorite chair reading The Joy Luck Club and had paused to watch the replay and peered over the top of her glasses to murmur, “I'm not sure I understand what all the fuss is about.”

The next year, Dominic sold the Shelby Cobra to pay Nick's college expenses after his mother died and his father had gone off to look for wife number three. Nick would never forget the sense of loss he felt when he found out that prized car soon would be parked in someone else's garage.

“You did what?” Nick had come very close to shouting at Dominic, something he'd never done.

“Sold it,” his granddad replied with more nonchalance than he'd probably felt. “Got a great price for it.”

“We spent two whole years on that car.” He was close to going into shock. “How could you sell it?”

“It was an investment, Nick. It was always meant to be an investment. Nothing more.”

Nothing more? As young as he'd been at the time, Nick had known rationalization when he heard it.

Even now though, almost twenty years later, the car and his grandfather both long gone, Nick almost believed he could open that garage bay and he'd see that blue car-Acapulco blue, to be precise-up on the lifts, his grandfather underneath it, a small part in one hand, the other hand gesturing for Nick to come see, to watch and to learn.

Magical days, indeed.

But if he had that car back now, what would it be worth? The last one he'd seen go at auction topped $110,000 and hadn't been in as good condition as theirs had been. But what was the point in looking back?

Try as he might to keep his focus on the present, sometimes looking back was unavoidable.

He entered the house from the side porch and noted two of the steps were sagging. Just something else for the list to go over with Herb. Once inside, he got himself a glass of water and a kitchen knife and went into the front hall where he'd stacked Belinda's boxes. He opened the front door and the side windows to let the stiff, settled air escape and hopefully allow some fresh, dust-free air in.

His eyes went from one box to the next and wondered where to start. He didn't really want to start at all, he realized. If she were to come back, would she be annoyed that he'd rifled through her belongings? And if she wasn't coming back, it seemed macabre to him to go through the clothes she wore and the books she read and the things that mattered to her. The thought that she might not come back at all was one he'd avoided as much as possible, because it was too sad to think about.

Buck up, Perone.

With the knife, he cut through the tape on the top of the first box and peeled back the cardboard. Determining that the box held only clothes, Nick put it aside and turned his attention to the next one. Same thing: clothes. The third and fourth boxes were filled with more clothes.

“How many times a day did this kid change?” he muttered as he moved the unopened boxes to the living room.

Ah, this was more like it-books, papers, tests, more papers, notebooks. Nick took out a stack and shuffled through them, but he found no reference to anyone named D.S. nor anything that would give him a sense of where she was going on January twenty-fourth.

“Come on, Belinda. Help me out here,” he muttered.

On to the next box. More textbooks-had he known she'd been taking a class in genetics?-and a blizzard of index cards scattered throughout. He reached into the box and pulled out the one thing he could see that had color. The orange folder held some printed sheets, which proved to be Belinda's cell-phone bills. He recalled that the police had requested copies from the carrier, but they hadn't been much help in identifying D.S. He put the file back in the box, stood and stretched, thinking about where he might go to grab some food. His stomach had begun to loudly remind him that he'd skipped lunch and it was well past the time when he usually ate. There was the Friendly Diner down on Wilkins Road; they were always good for a decent meal.

He was out the door and behind the wheel of his car, about to make a K-turn, when he hesitated. Something nagged at him, something about the phone bills. Nick turned off the ignition and returned to the house, to the foyer, to the box he'd just closed up. The orange folder was visible through the crack made by the top flaps, and he stuck his hand in and pulled it out. The most recent bill was on top, and he scanned it for the date.

July, 2008. Then he remembered that she'd gotten a new phone, a new plan, a new carrier-and a new number that summer. What had she said at the time? Something about an old boyfriend who wouldn't stop calling. Deb would know.

He flipped through the pages, taking note of all the out-of-state calls Belinda had made over the 2007-08 school year and into the summer of 2008. Maybe Deb knew something about those as well.

He tucked the bill back into the folder with the others and took the whole thing with him. Back in the car, he plugged his phone into the charger to give it a little more juice. He had a feeling he'd need every one of those bars before the night was over.