Midnight Haul

Chapter Two

It didn’t make any sense to Crane. He was the serious one; he was the one who got occasionally depressed. Mary Beth had always kidded him out of his moods. “Hey asshole,” she’d say. “Don’t take life so serious.” And now, suicide? Mary Beth? Didn’t make sense.

His friend Roger Beatty had driven him from Iowa City to Cedar Rapids, where he could catch the plane that would take him to New Jersey; he’d have to take a bus from there to Greenwood, Mary Beth’s hometown, the East Coast equivalent of his own small hometown in Iowa, Wilton Junction. Or at least that’s how Mary Beth had described it to him: “That’s why we have so much in common, Crane: we grew up in the same town — only where you come from they sound like Henry Fonda, and where I come from it’s strictly Rodney Dangerfield.”

He smiled at the sound of her voice as it drifted through his head; it didn’t sound anything like Rodney Dangerfield. Then he felt his smile fade and wondered why he hadn’t wept yet. He looked out the window of the plane and a large chemical plant far below was making its own clouds beneath the others.

“Suicide happens,” Roger had told him in the car. Roger was Crane’s age, twenty-two, a slightly overweight, dark-haired guy, with thick glasses and the absent-mindedly sloppy appearance of somebody scientific, which he was, sort of: Roger was majoring in sociology. He’d apparently had some psych, too, because he had, in a well-meaning but irritating way, given Crane a mini-lecture on the subject of suicide.

“You don’t have to be depressed your whole life to commit suicide,” Roger said. “Just one day. Or night, or afternoon. But it only takes once.”

“Roger,” Crane said. “I don’t want to talk about this right now.”

“You got to, sooner or later.”

“Make it later.”

Now it was later, on the plane, and he still didn’t want to talk — or think — about it. But there it was: Mary Beth, twenty, dead. Mary Beth, long brown hair, wide brown eyes, wry little smile, supple little body, gone.

He pressed the heels of his hands against his forehead and sat forward in his seat.

“You okay, man?”

Crane turned and looked at the passenger in the next seat. Actually, there was an empty seat between them, here in second class, and that was okay with Crane: he didn’t care to make conversation, particularly not with another college student, this one a bearded long-haired throwback to the ’60s, in jeans and gray T-shirt, some jerk who thought Kent State happened last week.

“Need an aspirin or something?” the guy was saying. “I can go get the flight attendant for you.”

“No. That’s okay.” Why was he thinking this guy was a jerk? He was nice enough. The jerk.

“My name’s Phil Stanley,” the guy said, and held out his hand.

After just a moment, Crane took the hand, got caught in a sideways “soul” shake, and said, “My name’s Crane.”

“You a student, too?”

“Yes.”

“Headed back to school, huh? Where d’you go?”

“Actually, no. I go to Iowa. Graduate student — fall semester starts in a few weeks and I’m, uh...”

“Taking advantage of your last few weeks’ vacation. For sure. Don’t blame ya.”

“Right.”

“What you taking?”

“I’m a journalism major.”

“No shit? Me too. Or anyway, sort of — I’m into broadcast journalism.”

The guy would have to clean up his image if he wanted to go on camera, Crane thought, then, noticing the guy was expecting him to report back, said, “I’m in print media.”

“Oh, yeah? What’s your specialty?”

“I don’t know yet. Maybe investigative.”

“One thing this country’ll never run out of,” the guy said, shaking his mangy head, “is Watergates.”

Crane hated it when people invoked Watergate after he told them he was interested in investigative reporting. Maybe he could remember to quit telling people that. Maybe he should say he was interested in writing sports or something.

“That’s the ticket,” the guy was saying. “Keep the fuckin’ government on its toes.”

“And big business,” Crane said. “Don’t forget big business.”

“Right on,” the guy said.

Right on? Did that guy really say “right on”? Why do people like this always assume you’re liberal? And if you tell them you believe in the system, that you don’t see anything wrong with capitalism, why do they make you out as some sort of right-wing lunatic?

“Because,” Mary Beth used to say, “you are one. You think you’re middle-of-the road, mainstream America. A political moderate. Sure you are. Compared to the Ku Klux Klan. How many black folks you got in Wilton Junction? You never called anybody nigger ’cause you never saw one, except on TV. You’re just a reactionary hick, Crane, and I’m gonna educate you if I have to spend the rest of my life doing it...”

“Are you sure you’re okay?” the bearded guy was asking.

“Maybe I will take that aspirin,” Crane said.

The guy rose to go find a flight attendant.

Crane sat back in his seat and thought about the fight he and Mary Beth had had their first night together. He was living in an apartment that was actually half a house, a duplex, sharing it with three other guys who were gone for the weekend. He’d only known Mary Beth for a few weeks; he was a senior and she was a sophomore, and both had been at the University for over a year, Crane having transferred from Port City Community College just as she was enrolling as a freshman. But it was a big campus with a lot of students, and until some mutual friends introduced them they’d never even seen each other. He liked her sense of humor, and (one of the mutual friends told him) she liked his sandy brown hair and freckles; thought he had a nice, innocent look.

Which was what the fight was about, really.

He’d planned to seduce her, and that was a major step for him, requiring a lot of strategy, and making him very nervous, because he was less experienced than he supposed most other twenty-year-old males in this country to be. So he had cooked an Italian dinner for her (her favorite, and his), bought a Phoebe Snow album (her favorite — hardly his), dimmed the lights prior to her arrival, and found himself naked on the couch with her before the first course of the meal and without even taking the plastic wrapper off the goddamn Phoebe Snow album.

He was proud of himself, though — he didn’t come right away, like he thought he would; after all, it was his first time, and most people, on their first time, come right away. Not him. Which was something, anyway.

Of course it clearly wasn’t her first time, and that was part of what the fight was about, too.

“It was your first time, wasn’t it?” she said later, nibbling her lasagna.

“You weren’t supposed to know that,” he said, smiling a little.

“Hey, you did fine. Most guys come right away, their first time. You didn’t.”

“Neither did you.”

“Well I did in the long run, and that’s something, anyway.”

And they’d both smiled and finished their lasagna and wine and listened to Phoebe Snow (which he even sort of liked, at this point) and made love another time. Finally they watched a late movie about vampires — one of those sexy British ones from the ’60s — and that’s when the fight started.

“It sure wasn’t your first time,” he said. Out of nowhere. Surprised by the petulance in his own voice.

“I never said it was,” she said, still smiling, but on the edge of not.

“No big deal.”

“I’m glad you see it that way.”

“I do. It’s no big fucking deal.”

“Hey, ain’t we profane all of a sudden. ‘Farm boy says fuck.’ Stop the presses!”

“Don’t you make fun of me.”

“Then don’t you insult me.”

“All I said was—”

“Hey. Make you a deal.”

“What?”

“Don’t give me a bad time about not being a virgin, and I won’t give you a bad time about being one.”

“Well fuck you!”

She smiled again. “That’s the general idea, yes.”

And the fight was over.

When he woke the next morning she was playing with his hair.

“I like playing with your hair,” she said.

“You like my freckles, too.”

“I suppose Fran told you that.”

Fran was one of the mutual friends.

“Yeah, she did.”

She smiled, crinkling her chin. “I’d like to get my hands on the little bitch...”

“Me, too.”

She hit him with a pillow. Not hard.

“Don’t,” she said. Kidding on the square.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t be with anybody else. Not Fran or anybody.”

“I wasn’t serious...”

“I know. But I am. I won’t be with anybody else from now on, and you just be with me. Understand?”

He’d understood. They’d been together since then. Lived together, starting last school year. They’d had the normal squabbles any couple has, but nothing serious; Mary Beth had been loving and sarcastically cheerful throughout. Though they’d never met, Mary Beth’s mother (her father died a few years before) seemed to approve of him and of the relationship — which had become an engagement; his parents loved Mary Beth and even seemed resigned to the wedding being held in New Jersey.

But the need for both Crane and Mary Beth to work had separated them this summer. He’d been working construction, and she’d gone home, to Greenwood, NJ, where she had a summer job lined up. They’d spoken on the phone at least once a week, usually more often...

“Here’s that aspirin,” the bearded guy was saying. He was handing a paper cup of water and two packaged tablets to Crane, who said, “Thank you very much,” and meant it.

“Listen,” the guy said. “If I’m out of line, say so: but I can tell something’s bothering you, and it’s an hour and a half yet to New Jersey, so if you want to talk, it’s fine with me. And if not, that’s fine too...”

“Thanks, no,” Crane said. Then felt compelled — perhaps out of guilt for calling somebody this considerate a jerk, even to himself — to add, “I’m not on a vacation. Someone close to me died recently. I’m going East for the funeral.”

“Hey, man. I’m very sorry. Really.”

“It’s okay. I just need to sit here quietly — if you don’t mind.”

“You got it. Why not put on the ’phones and just relax?” The guy was referring to the headsets they’d been given that could be plugged into the armrest for a dozen channels of music and such.

“Maybe I will,” Crane said, taking the headset out of its plastic wrapper.

“There ya go,” the guy said, smiling, nodding.

It had been a week since he’d talked to her last, when she killed herself; razor blades... Jesus, razor blades.

She was still wearing his engagement ring; she’d be buried with it, tomorrow. No note. Nothing. No reason.

But there had to be. A reason. He had to know what it was. He wouldn’t leave that goddamn town till he knew what it was.

He put the headphones on and heard “You Light Up My Life,” as arranged for elevators. He switched channels, thinking, just my luck, I’ll get Phoebe Snow. He hit the comedy station and heard Rodney Dangerfield.

He began to weep.

Chapter Three

At the funeral, he didn’t weep.

Crane just sat there, feeling out of place. The people in the pews around him were strangers, and almost all of them old. He’d never met Mary Beth’s mother before, and she was as much a stranger as any of them; the fact that Mary Beth’s eyes were in the face of this plump, fiftyish woman seemed somehow nothing more than an odd coincidence. He was alone in a church full of people, none of whom he knew, except for Mary Beth. And she was dead.

Yesterday, he’d walked two miles into town from the truck stop where the bus from the airport had deposited him. He’d come to New Jersey expecting a landscape cluttered with fast-food restaurants, gas stations, billboards, one big sprawling city with no houses, just industries belching smoke, highways intersecting at crazy angles, traffic endless in all directions.

What he found was green, rolling farmland that could’ve been Iowa.

He’d come down over a hill, walking along a blacktop road, and there, in the midst of a Grant Wood landscape, was Greenwood. Or so the water tower said. He saw one gas station (Fred’s Mobil) and one fast-food restaurant (Frigid Queen) and a John Deere dealership, before reaching a single, modest billboard that welcomed him to “New Jersey’s Cleanest Little City,” courtesy of the Chamber of Commerce, three churches and two fraternal lodges. Just past the billboard was a power and water facility and a sign that gave the population: 6000.

Still on the outskirts, he passed twenty or so modern homes, off to the left; the land was very flat here, the only trees looking small and recently planted and underfed. The lack of foliage was emphasized by the homes being spread further apart than they’d be in a similar development in a larger city. Crane’s parents lived in a house like that, on the outskirts of Wilton Junction.

None of this made him feel at home; rather, he felt an uneasiness, and had retreated to a motel, barely within the Greenwood city limits, without even phoning Mary Beth’s mother to let her know he was in town. There he watched television till his eyes burned, none of it registering, but helping keep his mind empty of what had brought him here.

He even managed to sleep. Eventually.

The next morning, this morning, he woke at eleven and called Mary Beth’s house. He knew the funeral was at one, but he didn’t know how to get there. An aunt answered the phone and gave him directions. He showered, shaved, got dressed for the occasion, and sat in a chair and stared at a motel wall for nearly two hours. The wall was yellow — painted, not papered — and there was a window with an air conditioner and green drapes in the middle of the wall. There was also a crooked picture, a print, of a small girl sitting beside a lake under a tree in summer. It was a pleasant enough picture, but it bothered him it was crooked. He straightened it before he left to walk into town to the church for the funeral.

The casket was open, and he’d overheard several people saying how pretty Mary Beth looked, and, inevitably, that she looked like she was sleeping. But Crane had seen dead people before and none of them had looked asleep to him. The father of a close friend of his in high school had died in a terrible fiery car crash, and his casket had been open at the funeral, displayed up by the door as you exited, so you couldn’t avoid looking at the admirable but futile attempt the mortician had made at making his friend’s father look like his friend’s father.

He and his friend and his friend’s father had spent two weeks three summers in a row at a lodge in the Ozarks; the lodge was more an elaborate hotel posing as a lodge than a lodge, and his friend’s father, who had money from a construction business, the same construction business Crane worked for this and other summers, was generous and fun to be with. Crane had spent many hours with the man. But now, whenever he thought of his friend’s father, he saw the face of the car crash victim in the open casket.

So he did not go up to the front of the church to see Mary Beth one last time. In the future, when he thought of Mary Beth, he wanted to think of Mary Beth.

The wood in the long narrow Presbyterian church was dark; the stained-glass windows, with their stilted scenes, let in little light. Even the minister, a thin, middle-aged man, was making his innocuous comments about this young woman, with whom he’d barely been acquainted, in a deep, resonant voice, its tones as dark as the woodwork.

Right now he was saying something — “a gentle person, thoughtful, kind” — that might have pertained to anyone, outside of Adolf Hitler or Mike Wallace. And Crane’s mind began wandering, and he glanced down toward the left, three rows up from him, at the back of the head of the blonde girl. Or woman. Crane had a hunch she was the type who’d consider “girl” a sexist word. That was okay. He didn’t consider “sexist” a word.

She seemed so out of place here. Even more so than him. At least he was wearing a suit, wrinkled as it was from being stuffed in his one small suitcase. But among all these people in their forties, fifties, sixties, seventies, wearing their Sunday best, this blonde girl, woman, whatever, with jeans and an old plaid shirt...

He’d watched when she came in, a little late, and he was watching her now, the back of her head, side of her face. Good-looking girl. Woman. Cute face, no makeup. Nice body, no bra.

Jesus: he was getting a hard-on.

He crossed his legs. Tried to cross his legs. Folded his hands in his lap, feeling uncomfortable and ashamed. But he could hear an amused Mary Beth saying, “A hard-on at my funeral? Very classy behavior, asshole.” At least that’s how his Mary Beth would’ve reacted; he didn’t know how the Mary Beth who killed herself would react. He didn’t know that Mary Beth at all.

The moment passed, and so did the casket, brought up the aisle by the pallbearers, men in their forties and fifties, nameless relatives all, and now the only thing Crane felt was empty.

It was good to get outside, in the sunshine. Cool, crisp, early fall day. Football weather soon. Iowa City. It would be nice to get back to Iowa City... if Mary Beth were there...

They were putting Mary Beth into the hearse. That is, the pallbearers were, with the guiding hand of someone from the funeral home, putting the casket in the back of the black Cadillac.

This isn’t happening, he thought.

“I suppose you don’t have a car.”

He turned. The blonde girl — woman — in the plaid shirt and jeans was standing there. He felt a rush of embarrassment.

“Do you always blush at funerals?” she asked. Her voice wasn’t particularly friendly. It was, in fact, coldly sarcastic.

“I... don’t know you...” Crane stammered.

“You’re Crane. You’d have to be. I’m Boone.”

“Boone?”

“It’s my last name. My first name is Anne, but let’s just keep it Crane and Boone, okay? I got a car.”

“Huh?”

“A car. I got a car. You want to be in the funeral procession or what?”

“I’d like to be at the graveside, yes, when they...”

“Then come on.”

She had a little yellow Datsun, a couple years old, and she opened the door on the rider’s side for him and he got in.

“You were a friend of Mary Beth’s?” he asked her.

“I still am.”

“Nobody else her age was there.”

“I wasn’t her age. I’m older than she was. And I’m older than you, too.”

“Oh.”

They found a place in the line of cars. Boone switched her lights on. A five-minute drive brought them to Greenwood Cemetery in the country, amidst more Grant Wood scenery.

Crane stood near the grave as a few more words were spoken and the casket was lowered into the ground. Boone stayed back by her car.

Mary Beth’s mother approached Crane and said, “Please stop by the house before you leave town,” and turned away, a male relative in his forties or fifties guiding her by the arm toward a waiting car.

When everyone had gone, Crane was still there. Standing. Staring. At the arrangements of flowers near the hole in the ground where Mary Beth was. And would be.

Boone was still back by the car. She called out to him.

“Are you about done?” she said. Cold as stone.

“Hey — fuck you. I can walk back to town.”

“Suit yourself.”

A few minutes later he realized she was standing beside him, now, and she said, “Look. You better come with me. Come on.”

Crane rubbed some wetness away from his eyes and he and Boone walked to the Datsun.

“You got a place to crash?” she asked him.

“Motel.”

“Leaving tonight?”

“I guess.”

They got in the car and drove out of the cemetery.

“You’ll be starting back to school, then,” Boone said, suddenly, after several minutes of silence.

“Uh. Yeah. Sure. I guess.”

“Fine. That’s just dandy.”

“What’s your problem?”

“My problem?”

“You don’t know me. I don’t know you. But the hostility in here’s so thick I’m choking.”

“Yeah. Well. I shouldn’t take it out on you.”

“Take what out?”

“I liked Mary Beth. That’s all.”

“I loved her.” His eyes were getting wet again.

“I’m sorry. Sorry, Crane. She never said a bad word about you. She loved you. She did.”

They were at the motel now.

Crane got out.

“If she loved me,” he said, “why’d she kill herself?”

“Who says she did?” Boone said.

And drove away.

Chapter Four

Mary Beth’s mother lived in one of the new houses in the development on the edge of town, a split-level that differed from the pale yellow house on its left and the pale pink house on its right by being pale green. There were a lot of cars parked in front of the place and in its driveway. Crane walked across the lawn, with its couple of sad-looking scrawny trees, and past a trio of men with their coats off and beers in hand, talking loud. He didn’t hear Mary Beth’s name mentioned in their conversation.

He knocked on the screen door (the front door stood open) and a middle-aged woman with a floral print dress and a haggard look greeted him with a suitably sad smile, saying, “We’re so glad you stopped by.” He had never seen her before.

He said, “Thank you,” and was inside the living room with a dozen other people, who stood in small groups, talking in hushed voices, plates of food and cups of coffee in hand. All the chairs were taken. On the couch, flanked by elderly female relatives, was Mary Beth’s mother. He went over to her.

It took her a moment to recognize him.

“This is Mary Beth’s fiancé,” she said, with a weak smile, nodding to the woman on her left and to her right.

They were all pleased to meet him and he took each offered hand and returned it.

He looked down at Mary Beth’s mother and again saw Mary Beth’s eyes in the plump face, and impulsively, leaned over and kissed her cheek. It surprised her. She touched her face where he’d kissed her and said, “There’s food in the kitchen.”

There was food in the kitchen. A table of it: hors d’oeuvre plates, plates of cold cuts, white bread, rye bread, nut bread, banana bread, chocolate chip cookies, sugar cookies, pecan pie, lemon meringue pie, angel food cake. Food. People were eating it.

There were more men than women in the kitchen. Though it was serve-yourself, a woman in an apron stood behind the table of food, offering help that was never needed. Another woman in an apron was doing dishes: apparently some of the mourners had eaten and run, or perhaps some people were onto a second plate. The men stood with beers in hand, talking softer than the men out on the lawn but louder than the people in the living room.

Crane took some coffee, sipped at it occasionally, leaned against a wall in the kitchen. No one spoke to him. The bits and pieces of conversation that drifted his way didn’t include Mary Beth’s name.

He wandered off, unnoticed, into the other part of the house, the upper level of the split-level.

He looked in at Mary Beth’s room. It was a small room, four cold pale pink swirled plaster walls, a dresser with mirror, a chest of drawers, a double bed with a dark pink spread. There was a stuffed toy, a tiger, on the bed, a childhood keepsake she’d had with her in their apartment. Little else in the room suggested Mary Beth’s personality. This summer was the only time in her life she’d lived in this room. Her mother and father had moved into this house after she’d left home for college. So this was not a room she’d lived in, really.

But there were some books on the chest of drawers: Kurt Vonnegut, some science fiction, a couple of non-fiction paperbacks on ecology and such.

And his picture, that stupid U of I senior picture, was framed on her dresser. And a couple snaps of them together were stuck in the mirror frame. He removed them. Put them in his billfold.

“That’s stealing,” a voice said.

He turned and saw a plump woman in her late twenties in jeans and sweater. Her hair was dark and long and she looked very much like Mary Beth, but with a wider face, which made her not quite as pretty.

“Hi Laurie,” he said. He’d never met Mary Beth’s sister before, but he felt he knew her.

“Hi there, Crane,” she said, and smiled and came across the room and hugged him hard.

They looked at each other with wet eyes and then sat down on Mary Beth’s bed. She took his hand in both of hers.

“I’m glad you’re here,” she said.

“I didn’t see you at the funeral.”

“I wasn’t there, I had to stay with Brucie.” She gestured toward the doorway.

“Brucie? Your husband?”

“No. You’re thinking of Bruce. He was my husband. Emphasis on was. We split up.”

“Mary Beth never mentioned...”

“It wasn’t too long ago. Two months.”

“Brucie is Bruce, Jr., then.”

“Right. Ten months old yesterday.”

“I’d love to see him.”

“He’s next door, in my room. I live here, you know.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Since the divorce, I live here. I’m not surprised Mary Beth didn’t tell you about it, because it’s all a little bit of a downer. And talking with you on the phone once a week, well, it was something she looked forward to. She didn’t want to talk about depressing stuff, I’m sure.”

“Depressing stuff. Just how depressed was she, Laurie? She never gave me any indication...”

“Like I said, your phone calls were a bright spot in her week. She didn’t want to spoil ’em, I guess.”

For a while Laurie sat silently and so did Crane; her hands felt cold around his.

“What happened, Laurie?” he asked her.

She looked at him with a face that was much too much like Mary Beth’s and said, “I haven’t the faintest idea.”

“Laurie, Mary Beth wasn’t depressed one day in the two years I knew her.”

“She wasn’t all that depressed this summer, either. Just kind of blue.”

“Kind of blue.”

“Worse, I guess, the last week or so.”

“What happened the last week?”

“Crane, I was close to my sister, growing up. But we didn’t talk much this summer. Something was bothering her, that much I know. What it was, exactly, I don’t know.”

“It had to be something...”

“Maybe you didn’t know her as well as you thought. Never depressed a day while you knew her, huh? Well, a week after she got home I found her up in the middle of the night, sitting in the bathroom, bawling.”

“What about?”

“I don’t know. Her period, maybe, who can know? Only it was more often than that... I found her bawling like that four or five times.”

“And she never said what was troubling her?”

“Once she admitted to me that she was thinking about Dad. He died of cancer about three years ago, you know. They were close. Being in this house reminded her of him, and that got to her.”

“Got to her enough to make her do what she did, Laurie?”

“Who can say?”

“You mean you can understand it? You can understand somebody going into a bathroom and... and...”

“Slashing their wrists? I don’t understand it, exactly. But I can see it. Haven’t you ever thought about killing yourself, Crane? Hasn’t everybody?”

“Maybe everybody else has. I haven’t. It’s a fucking waste, Laurie! It’s the biggest fucking waste I can imagine.”

“Why? Because life is so wonderful? What’s wonderful about it?”

He pulled his hand away from hers. He didn’t like what he was hearing coming out of this face that was so much like Mary Beth’s. He didn’t like the sickness that Laurie seemed to have, in a small way, that Mary Beth must’ve had in a larger way.

She must’ve sensed it, because she seemed to soften, reaching out and touching his shoulder as she said, “She loved you, Crane. I know she did. You were the most important thing in her life.”

“A life that meant so little to her she flushed it down the goddamn toilet.”

He stared at the wall. Laurie wasn’t saying anything. When he looked over at her, she was crying into her hands.

“Laurie,” he said, putting an arm around her, “it’s been rough on you, too. I know that.”

“I... I do know one thing that depressed her.”

“Yes?”

“Brucie.”

“Brucie?”

“Brucie. My little Brucie. She was unhappy for him.”

He didn’t understand that. He let it pass.

“Laurie, who found her?”

“Mom. In the morning. Mom came and got me up. Mary Beth had been gone for hours by the time we found her.”

“Can I see where it was?”

“Sure,” she said, shrugging.

She led him there.

He hesitated a moment.

Then he looked in and saw a bathroom, shining clean, guest towels hanging.

“I don’t know what I expected,” he said.

“I know,” Laurie said. “It should be more dramatic than just a bathroom. But it’s just a bathroom. It’s the only one in the house, too, so both Mom and I were forced to use it, and that helped us, in a weird way. It helped make it just a bathroom. I use it sometimes and don’t even think about her lying there.”

He looked at Laurie. She was looking at the bathroom floor, blankly.

“Laurie,” he said, guiding her back into the hallway. “Are you okay? I mean... are you really okay?”

“You mean, am I gonna be next?” She smiled a little. “I don’t think so. I’m depressed. My sister just killed herself. I got a right to be. And, anyway, I got Brucie. I still got little Brucie. I live for that kid. You want to see him?”

“I sure do.”

She took him into her room, a blue room with a bed with ruffled blue spread, and a Jenny Lind crib with a blue blanket nearby. She peeked in the crib and began playing with the well-behaved child, who made cooing, gurgling noises back at her.

Crane looked in at the child.

Brucie was adorable, but it wasn’t hard to see why Mary Beth had been disturbed about the boy.

He didn’t have any hands.

Chapter Five

The street light on her block was out, but there were lights on in the downstairs of the big white two-story house. It was a gothic-looking structure with no porch and paint just beginning to peel. There were trees on either side of the place and the overall effect was rather gloomy. He knocked on the door.

He put his hands in his pockets and waited. It was a cool evening; perhaps he should’ve stopped back at the motel for his jacket. There was no sound except the crickets. No sound from within the house, either. He knocked again.

Finally a muffled voice behind the door, Boone’s voice, said, “Who is it?”

And he felt another wave of embarrassment, like he had outside the church, after the funeral, and he couldn’t bring himself to say anything. He turned to go.

He heard the door open behind him. Then: “Oh. It’s you.”

He turned and she was still in the plaid shirt and jeans, her blonde hair pinned back, pulled away from her face, and it was a good strong face with hard cheekbones but very pretty. Her expression, though, was cold, condescending, and it pissed him off.

His face felt tight as he said, “What did you mean?”

“What?”

“What did you mean by saying Mary Beth didn’t kill herself?”

“Did I say that?”

“You said it. And I want to know what you meant by it!”

“Is that why you were walking away with your butt tucked between your legs, when I opened the door?”

“Why don’t you go fuck yourself.”

“Why don’t you just go? Go home, Crane!”

The door slammed shut.

He stood and looked at it, wondering what he was doing here, standing in front of this door, of this house, in this town, in this state... maybe going home wasn’t such a bad idea.

But how could he, till he found out what Boone knew about Mary Beth’s death?

He was raising his fist to knock again when the door opened. Boone leaned against the door and looked at his upraised fist, smirked, shook her head, sighed and said, “Come on in. You look like a horse’s ass just standing there staring.”

The house seemed very big inside, but that was because there wasn’t much furniture, just a lot of dark wood trim and dark polished wood floors that reminded him of the church this afternoon; the cream-colored plaster walls and the secondhand-store furniture in the living room area she led him to reminded him of the duplex he used to share in Iowa City, where he and Mary Beth had spent their first evening.

She motioned to a sagging red sofa and he sat down. She pulled up a hardback chair, which was one of the few other pieces of furniture in the room. The place did look lived in; in one corner was a portable TV on a stand; against one wall was a small stereo flanked by speakers the size of cereal boxes, with a stack of albums, one of which — “No Nukes” — was propped up against the wall; and in the middle of a floor covered by a worn braided rug was a red toy fire truck which clashed with the faded red of the sofa.

“My husband left me the house and the kid,” Boone said, “and took all the furniture. Any other questions?”

“Jeez,” Crane said, “it’s kind of hard to picture you and some guy having trouble getting along.”

“I had that coming,” she said, smiling with almost no sarcasm at all. “Do you want something to drink?”

“Please. Nothing alcoholic.”

“I got nothing alcoholic. You can have milk or herbal tea or juice.”

“What kind of juice?”

“V-8 or orange.”

“Orange.”

She brought it to him, in a big glass with Bugs Bunny on it, with ice. She had V-8 and the Road Runner and no ice.

He sipped the juice and said, “Thank you.”

She sat back down and said, “It won’t kill me to be civil to you, I guess. For some reason I find myself wanting to take it out on you.”

“Mary Beth dying, you mean.”

“Yeah. That and my divorce and life in general. You just make a handy whipping boy.”

“It’s nice to serve a purpose.”

“How did you find me? I’m not in the phone book.”

“Laurie gave me your address. I just came from there.”

“How are Laurie and her mother doing?”

“The mother seems dazed, in shock. People are standing around eating and smoking and talking about sports. How Laurie’s doing, I don’t know.”

“Laurie has her problems.”

“I know. I saw her son.”

“Little Brucie isn’t unique, you know.”

“What do you mean?”

“Birth defects are nothing to write Ripley about, is what I mean. Especially around here.”

“How so?”

“I know of two other women in Greenwood in the past three years whose kids were born with deformities. Mary Beth knew about them.”

“Boone, I was down this road with Laurie... she seems to think Mary Beth was depressed over Brucie’s birth defect, and by her father’s death... but I just can’t buy it. You knew her. Did she seem at all suicidal to you?”

“No. I told you... I don’t believe she killed herself.”

“What do you believe?”

“I believe she’s dead. Don’t you?”

He stood; the orange juice in his hand splashed.

“Goddamnit,” he said, feeling red in the face, flustered, “tell me! Quit playing with me! If you know something, suspect something, let me in on the goddamn fucking secret!”

A little boy about six in a T-shirt and pajama bottoms wandered in. He had thick dark hair and was rubbing his eyes and saying, “Mommy, what’s going on out here? I’m sleeping.”

Boone smiled at the boy, tousled his hair and said, “Mommy’s got company. Go on back to bed.”

The boy looked at Crane and said, “Who are you?”

Crane didn’t know what to say; he was standing there with a glass of orange juice in his hand, half of which he’d just splashed on himself, knowing he looked like an idiot, both to this six year old and himself.

“Just a friend of Mommy’s,” Boone said.

“If he stays all night I’ll tell Daddy,” the boy said.

“He won’t be staying all night,” she said, getting firm. “Now go to bed!”

The kid shrugged and said, “Okay,” and gave Crane a dirty look and shuffled off.

Crane sat down. “Sorry I got loud,” he said.

“I’m sorry I seem so evasive...”

“You’ve got a nice-looking boy, there.”

“He looks like his father. Same disposition, too, I’m afraid.”

“His father must be a good-looking guy.”

“He is.”

“There isn’t much affection in your voice.”

“There isn’t much affection in me, period, where Patrick is concerned.”

“Patrick? Your husband’s name is Patrick Boone? Pat Boone?”

She smiled. “Yeah. We used to kid him about that, back in the old days.” She laughed softly. “The old days. Did you ever think the Vietnam years would be the ‘old days’?”

“Nobody ever thinks any time is going to be the ‘old days.’ That’s when you met your husband, then? In college?”

“Yeah. He was a little older than me. We worked together on an underground paper. The Third Eye, it was called.”

“Was that around here someplace?”

“No. Back in your neck of the woods — the Midwest. Eastern Illinois University. Very straight school. We were regular outlaws.”

“It must’ve been a good time to be an outlaw.”

“Yeah, I keep forgetting. You weren’t there. You were just a kid. Still are.”

“You’re not that much older than me.”

“I’m older than you’ll ever be. You didn’t even live through the draft, did you? Jesus.”

“Neither did you. They weren’t drafting women, the way I heard it.”

“I lived through it with Patrick. A lot of young women lived through it with their men. Their husbands. Brothers. It wasn’t easy for anybody with that hanging over them.”

“You were active in the anti-war movement?”

“Yes. Patrick was. I was. We both were. Carried signs. We were at Chicago. Patrick got his head smashed by a cop. Pig, as we used to say. Six stitches. Back on campus, he was a draft counselor. He was studying pre-law.”

“So he’s a lawyer now?”

“No. He shifted over into business and that’s what he got his degree in.” Her voice took on a sad sarcasm. “Currently he’s in the personnel department at Kemco.”

“Kemco. That’s where Mary Beth was working this summer.”

“Right. It’s where her father worked. It’s where everybody in this town who isn’t a farmer works. Everybody in the whole area.”

“Why do I get the feeling you don’t like Kemco much?”

“I guess that’s because it’s what broke my marriage up.”

“I see.”

“No, I doubt if you do. What do you know about Kemco?”

“They’re big. Not the biggest. But big.”

“What do you know about Agent Orange?”

“Defoliant used in Vietnam. Some Vietnam vets exposed to it are now complaining about illnesses. Headaches, nausea, acne, that sort of thing. Lots of media play.”

“Mary Beth said you were a journalism major. You really do know a little bit about what’s going on in the world. Not much, but a little, anyway.”

“Well why don’t you bring me up to your level of awareness, then? If that’s possible without dropping acid.”

She flinched. “I said I was into the anti-war movement, way back when. I didn’t say I did dope.”

“Forget it. Go on.” Crane wondered why dope was a sore point with Boone; but she was talking again...

“Agent Orange is an herbicide. We dumped forty-four million pounds of it on Vietnam. To kill the plants, so we could see the people better, to kill them, too.”

“Don’t take this wrong,” Crane said, “but it was a war. Killing the enemy is the point in a war.”

“The point is that undeclared war was supposed to be saving a country for democracy. Doesn’t it strike you as odd that one of the ways we saved that country for democracy was to dump poison on it? Poison that killed plants, and animals, and people, and caused miscarriages and raised the infant mortality rates and...”

“And Kemco made this stuff?”

“One of the major suppliers, yes. I remember when they came to our campus in the early ’70s, recruiting, and we protested. And nobody protested harder and louder and better than Patrick. Nobody.”

“Only now he works for them. For Kemco.”

“Right.”

“He took the job and you divorced him.”

“It wasn’t like that.”

“I’ll tell you what it was like. He told you he’d work from within. Change the system by getting inside the system. That he’d cut his hair and put on a three-piece suit and be quietly subversive.”

He’d struck another nerve: she got up and walked over to him and looked down at him with a stone face and said, “I didn’t leave him, Crane. He left me. Because I wasn’t the corporate wife. I didn’t adjust to the life-style. I couldn’t entertain his business associates. All I could do was spend my time writing my ‘little articles,’ as he called them, for what remains of the radical underground press.”

She sat next to him.

“He bought this house, you know,” she went on, “and filled it with modern furniture. Can you image? This house must be seventy, eighty years old — it’s beautiful — and he fills it with modular this, and modular that. The son of a bitch. He sold me out. He sold us all out. Himself especially. That’s the worst fucking part.”

“People change.”

“Oh, fine. People change. They drift apart. Like in, one of them stays in Iowa and digs ditches, and the other one comes home to New Jersey and slashes her wrists.”

It hit him like a physical blow. She saw it and said, “Sorry. Sorry. I keep taking it out on you, don’t I? Mary Beth didn’t get depressed and kill herself, Crane. Kemco killed her.”

“Yes, well,” Crane said, rising. He handed her the half-empty glass of juice and said thanks.

“You’re writing me off as a nut, aren’t you?” Boone said, quietly, calmly, following him to the door.

“Good night, Boone,” he said, and let himself out.

“You’ll be back,” she said from the doorway.

He’d have felt better about it if there had been some hysteria in her voice, when she said that; some bitter craziness.

But there wasn’t.

“They killed her, Crane,” she called out to him. Quiet. Sane.

He walked away from the house and crossed the quiet town and went to his motel room and tried to sleep.

Chapter Six

Waking up came as a surprise to Crane: he didn’t remember falling asleep and, for a moment, didn’t know where he was. Then the yellow walls brought the motel back to him. He sat up in bed. He had a sense that he’d been dreaming, but he didn’t remember what about. He did know that he was glad the dream was over.

He got up and showered and put on his jeans and a shirt and stuck his head out the front door. A brisk morning, but he wouldn’t need a jacket. He glanced at his watch: ten minutes after ten. Had he slept that long?

He sat back down on the bed, feeling disoriented, off balance. He didn’t feel so hot, his stomach grinding at him. Then he realized, suddenly, that he hadn’t eaten yesterday.

He walked from the motel to the business district, five blocks of double-story white clapboards, an occasional church and the constant trees for which Greenwood had undoubtedly been named, a few of which were turning color as fall took hold. The business district took up a couple of intersecting streets and consisted of old buildings with new faces: hardware, florist, druggist, accountant, insurance, jewelry, medical clinic, pizza place, laundromat, one of everything, and two each of bars and cafés. An American flag drooped outside the Wooden Nickel Saloon, an old brick building painted white with a Pabst sign in the window; next door was a unisex hairstyling salon. Across the street was the Candy Shop Restaurant, a two-story brick building with a white wooden front and a green-and-black striped awning that said: “Since 1910.” A neon sign, circa 1940, said candy in yellow, soda in red and lunch in yellow. He went in.

On the right was an old-fashioned soda fountain, with a mirror wall behind it upon which magic marker menus were written; on the left, a “penny candy” showcase — the penny candy starting at a nickel — and an oak cabinet displaying everything from sunglasses to aspirin. There was a high, white sculpted ceiling and walls that were dark wood and mirrors, with booths on either side of the long, narrow room, with porcelain counter tops and reddish brown leather seats.

Behind the soda fountain was a man about seventy with white hair and a white coat and wire-frame glasses who was probably called “Pop.” Crane felt like Andy Hardy.

“Help you?” the man in white said, his voice high-pitched and forty or fifty years younger than him.

“Can I still get breakfast?”

“Sure. Take a booth and the girl will be with you.”

None of the five seats at the counter was taken, but several of the booths were; there was a cop in one of them, drinking coffee and looking at a paper, a guy in his mid-twenties, thin, dark. Crane took a booth.

The person “Pop” had referred to as the “girl” turned out to be a friendly heavy-set woman about fifty. Did this make “Pop” sexist? It was a mystery to Crane. He ordered eggs and bacon and juice and got it quickly, ate it quickly.

Then he went over to the booth where the cop was sitting. The cop looked up from his paper and coffee with a smile, then realized he didn’t know Crane and his expression turned neutral.

“My name’s Crane. I’m from out of state.”

The smile came back, tentatively. “Sit down, Crane. I bet I know who you are.”

The cop had the first real New Jersey accent Crane had run into in Greenwood.

“You do?” Crane sat.

“Mary Beth’s boyfriend. Here for the funeral.”

“You knew Mary Beth?”

“Just to say hello to. My younger brother was in school with her. Beautiful girl. What a waste. I’m really very sorry, Crane.”

Crane glanced at the front of the cop’s uniform to see if his name was there.

The cop picked up on it, smiled again, said, “Name’s Ray Turner.”

They half rose in the booth and shook hands.

“I wonder if you could give me some information, Officer Turner.”

“Ray. Sure, if I can.”

“I’d like to talk with the officer who was called to the scene when Mary Beth’s... when Mary Beth was found by her family.”

“You are talking to him.”

“Oh?”

“That’s right. I handled that.”

“I didn’t expect to stop the first cop I saw and...”

“No big coincidence. We only have three full-time people on the force, Chief included. Plus a few part-timers.”

“Must have your hands full.”

“Not really,” Turner said, sipping his coffee, smiling again. “We don’t have a highway running through town, you know, so we don’t use a radar car. What’s the point of a speed trap, if you’re off the beaten path? We do have schools to look after, morning, noon, afternoon. Run regular patrols at night, checking buildings and such. And accidents happen, now and then; we cover some of them out on the highway, if we’re closer to it than the state patrol. Otherwise it’s real quiet around here.”

“So a suicide must be pretty unusual.”

“Not really. We’ve had our crimes here. Bank was robbed, a year ago. We’ve had our murders. A few months ago a guy shot his wife and two kids and himself.” Turner gazed into his coffee, distractedly. “ ‘They’ killed his wife.”

“Pardon?”

“Nothing. Something the guy said before he blew his brains out.”

“He said, what? That somebody else killed his wife?”

“He killed her, and his kids, too. Poor sad sorry son of a bitch. There was only one gun in the house and that’s the one he used. ‘They’ were going to kill him, too. Typical paranoid nut.”

“I see.”

“That kind of thing doesn’t happen everyday, Crane. I won’t lie to you. This is a pretty soft job.”

“Tell me about Mary Beth.”

“I really didn’t know her. Just to speak to.”

“No. That morning. Tell me about that morning.”

“Oh. Her mother called the station. That’s over in the basement of City Hall. The Chief got the call. He called a local doctor, and the County Examiner. Informed the state patrol. Then we went over there. She’d cut her wrists, that you know. It was a little messy. The mother and sister were upset, so I asked them their minister’s name and they told me and I called him and he came over. The County Examiner was there within forty-five minutes. He pronounced her dead, of self-inflicted wounds, wrote it up in his book, and turned the body over to the family. I called the funeral home for ’em. They were upset, like I said.”

“Right. So then there was no investigation?”

“Of what?”

“Her death!”

“I just told you. It was clear-cut. There’s no doubt with a thing like that.”

“I suppose you see suicides every day.”

“Not every day,” he said, smiling, without humor. “I been working here a year and a half and there’s been four, five, including the guy I told you about. People get depressed. Life’s a bitch, ain’t you heard?”

“I heard. Look, I don’t mean to be insulting, Officer Turner. Ray. But if you Greenwood cops act mostly as crossing guards and ride around checking buildings after dark, how can you be sure you’re up to investigating what could be murder?”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Mary Beth’s death. How do you know it wasn’t just supposed to look like a suicide?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It’s just... nobody really looked into it. It could’ve been something else, other than the way it looked. Can you deny that?”

“It was suicide.”

“Why didn’t the state patrol investigate it? What qualifies a glorified security guard to...”

“Hold it. Right there. First, we did call the state patrol, I told you that. We’re supposed to do that, it’s the procedure. If we think they should come in on it, or if they think they should come in on it, they come in on it. But any cop worth a damn knows a clear-cut open-shut suicide when he sees it. Second, this wasn’t my first job, pal. I worked in Newark for two years and got my fill of real police work. I didn’t like it. So I came back to my hometown here and took this candy-ass job. But I been there. I seen murders. I seen suicides. This wasn’t murder. It was suicide. I know what I’m talking about, here. I know what I’m doing.”

“I didn’t mean to imply you didn’t.”

“Sure you did. Glorified security guard my ass. You think we didn’t talk to the family, the mother, the sister, to see if she had been depressed lately or not? They said she had. Why didn’t you know that? You’re the boyfriend. Didn’t she write you or anything?”

“Nothing she wrote me or said on the phone indicated her state of mind was so...” He swallowed. “Look. Both Mary Beth’s sister and mother were asleep when she died, which was in the middle of the night. Who’s to say somebody didn’t sneak in, maybe... what, chloroform Mary Beth and cut her wrists for her and... it sounds far-fetched, but couldn’t it have been that way? Shouldn’t you have checked to see if it happened like that?”

Turner looked at him for what seemed like a long time. “I know how you feel. What you’re going through. You’re looking for reasons, answers, and there aren’t any. Life gets to people, sometimes. And sometimes they do something about it.”

“I guess.”

“Your girl killed herself. It begins and ends there. Let it go. Go home. Bury it.”

Crane nodded, got up from the booth.

Walking out, he didn’t feel much like Andy Hardy, anymore. Behind him he heard Turner call out to the “girl” for more coffee.

He walked back to the motel, stopping for a few seconds to look at Boone’s house. Some of the trees in her yard looked dead.

He packed.

He had one thing to do, before he left. Then he’d leave it behind him, like the cop had said. Leave it buried.

Chapter Seven

There were no cars in front of Mary Beth’s mother’s house, now, just a several-year-old Buick in the drive. The relatives, the mourners, had faded back into their own lives. Mary Beth’s mother, her sister Laurie and little Brucie would be alone, now.

Laurie was coming out the front door as he was coming up the walk; she was digging her car keys out of a jacket pocket, and smiled when she saw Crane.

“Crane. How are you today?”

“I don’t know. Okay, I guess. You?”

“Better. Not feeling so blue. You don’t have to worry about me, if you were.”

“Well it did seem like the strain had got to you a bit. But you’ll do fine, Laurie. You and your kid’ll do fine.”

“I’m just going to get some groceries. There’s plenty of cake and cookies and garbage left from yesterday, but no food. You can ride along, if you want to talk.”

“Actually, I kind of wanted to chat with your mom. I haven’t really had a chance to, yet. How is she?”

“Not bad. Existing. She hasn’t said much, but it’s her nature to be on the quiet side. Doctor has given her some mild sedatives, too.”

“Would it be all right if I went in and talked with her?”

“I’m sure the company would do her good. She and Brucie are in the living room. Just go on in.”

“Thanks, Laurie.”

“I’ll see you later, then.”

“Well. Maybe not.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. I’ll be leaving this afternoon. That’s why I wanted to make this call on your mom, actually.”

She gave him a long look and smiled as she did; it was a very good-natured, and very sad, smile. Her plumpness and wide face did not diminish the strong resemblance to Mary Beth. It made him want to be around her and at the same time not.

She kissed his cheek.

“Good-bye, Crane,” she said, and turned and walked to the Buick.

Laurie had said to go on in, but he knocked anyway, and a soft, childlike voice from within said, “Come in, please.”

He went in.

Mary Beth’s mother was sitting on the couch, just as she had the day before, after the funeral, when she’d sat framed by relatives. It was as though she hadn’t moved since. Brucie was nearby, where she could watch, her hand on the edge of his playpen, barely moving, a photorealistic sculpture.

Her head turned slowly on her neck as she looked at Crane; her movements reflected the sedation she was on — she moved like Lincoln at Disneyland: vaguely human, but not terribly convincing.

But she did manage a slow, small smile, recognizing Crane immediately this time.

“Nice to see you, young man,” she said. It was a voice you could barely hear.

He went over and sat beside her.

“I’m going to be leaving this afternoon,” he said. “And I wanted to stop by and say good-bye.”

“Kind of you,” she said. She was still smiling; the smile hung there on an otherwise blank face.

“I wish you and I could have gotten to know each other better.”

“Yes,” she said, but there was confusion in her face, now, and in her voice; she really had no idea why Crane wished he could have known her better.

So he told her: “I loved Mary Beth. Very much. We’d have been married soon.”

“I know,” the mother nodded, with her blank smile.

“And we’d have been family, you and me. I’m sorry that didn’t happen.”

Somewhere beneath the sedation, what Crane was saying began to sink in. The smile became less mechanical. Mary Beth’s eyes looked out of her mother’s face at him.

Then he was crying, and she was comforting him. Holding him.

“I’m sorry,” he said, pulling away gently. “Sorry.”

“I know,” she said. “Can I ask you something, young man?”

“Anything.”

“Why?”

“Pardon?”

“Why did my little girl die?”

The question surprised him: he had no answer.

She said, “You knew her so well. Can you tell me why?”

“I can’t,” he said, finally. “I hoped I might find the answer here in Greenwood. But I don’t think I can. I hoped your daughter Laurie might’ve been able to tell me, but she couldn’t.”

“You hoped I might tell you, too, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” he said, confessing to her and to himself, without saying so, that he’d come here today not to say good-bye really, but for one last try at finding the answer to the question that Mary Beth’s mother was now asking him.

“You lived with her this summer,” Crane said, looking into the sedated face and hoping to keep the person behind it in touch with him. “Did you know Mary Beth was depressed? Troubled? Laurie says there were some indications she was.”

The mother thought about that for a few moments. “She seemed a little down,” she said, gazing at the floor. “She talked about her father a lot. She said, two of her best friends in town, their fathers died of cancer, too. She said that more than once.”

“I see.”

The woman looked over toward Brucie and gestured slowly. “She was upset about Brucie’s problem. That made her unhappy. Sometimes she cried about it.”

“She never told me,” Crane said. “We spoke on the phone every week, exchanged our letters, but not a word about any of this.”

“I can tell you one thing,” the mother said, touching Crane’s arm, her smile anything but mechanical now, “she was never down after your phone calls. She was never down after your letters. She loved you.”

Crane held the tears back. “It’s hard to understand how she could love me and take away the one thing that was most precious to me: her.”

She touched his face. “She was sick. Like her father was sick. Just a different kind of sick.”

He hugged her. She hugged back. She was soft. He could’ve stayed in her arms forever; it was as close to Mary Beth as he could get, now.

He rose. Smiled, said, “I’d like to keep in touch.”

“That would be nice.”

“I have your address. Do you have mine?”

“Yes. Send a card at Christmas.”

“I will. You, too.”

“Would you like to hold Brucie before you go?”

“Uh, no. I wouldn’t want to disturb him.”

“He isn’t sleeping. Hold him for a while.”

She got up, moving like a film slowed just slightly down, and gave the bundled baby to Crane. He held Brucie. Looked at him. He was a beautiful baby. Happy. Look Ma. No hands.

He handed Brucie back to her and she took him in her arms and rocked him.

“Well,” Crane said. “I better say good-bye.”

“Good-bye, son.”

Back in the motel room, he sat on the bed and called to find out about the bus and the plane he’d be connecting with. Then he called his friend Roger Beatty, back in Iowa City, to let him know he was coming home.

“I’ll be waiting at the airport for you,” Roger said. “It’ll be good to have you back. There’s nobody here to go to lousy movies with me.”

He and Roger often went to the Bijou, which was a theater within the Student Union where old films were shown.

“I’ll be glad to be back,” Crane admitted. “This hasn’t been pleasant.”

“I can imagine. How’s her family? It’s just her mom and her sister, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. They’re doing pretty good, considering.”

“And how are you doing? Pretty good, considering?”

“I guess. I... well, I hoped to come away from here feeling I understood why this happened. But I don’t, really.”

“You’re going to drive yourself crazy looking for a reason, Crane. You know what Judy said?”

Judy was Roger’s girlfriend, a science major, Ph.D. candidate.

“No. What did Judy say?”

“She said one theory, which is I guess widely accepted these days, is depression comes not just from events in your life that get to you, but a biochemical breakdown in brain function.”

“Jesus that’s comforting, Roger.”

“No. I’m just saying that you want an answer. You want to find out, what? That she found out from her doctor that she had a month to live, so she killed herself. That’s the movies, Crane. I’m saying that, according to Judy at least, depression is a physical thing, not just a reaction to shitty things happening around you.”

“I see your point. Look, this is costing me more money than my ticket back. I better get off the phone.”

“Okay. But you don’t sound so good.”

“Well, fuck, what do you expect?”

“Get your butt home, Crane. Get home and forget about all this.”

“I will, but it’s just... there’s this girl. Woman.”

“Oh, really?”

“Give me a break, Roger. Her name is Boone. She was a friend of Mary Beth’s. She’s a fruitcake, is what she is.”

“What about her?”

“She told me something crazy.”

“Which was?”

“She told me Mary Beth was murdered.”

“What?”

“You heard me. She’s one of these leftist conspiracy nuts who thinks that the chemical plant everybody around here works for was behind Mary Beth’s death.”

“How so?”

“We didn’t really get into it. She’s just a flake, Roger. It wasn’t worth listening to, really.”

“Well it must be worth talking about, ’cause you’re doing it long distance.”

“It’s nothing. I talked to the local cop here who handled it, and he said it was a clear-cut, cut-and-dry case.”

“Really? How many suicides does a small-town cop like that handle, anyway?”

“More than you’d think. He said he’s handled five in a little over a year.”

“He said that?”

“Yeah. So what?”

“Oh. Nothing probably. Listen, what time should I be at the airport?”

“You were going to make a point, Roger. Make it.”

“Oh it’s nothing. Uh, tell me. What’s the population of that town? What’s it called? Greenburg?”

“Greenwood. 6000.”

“I see.”

“Roger.”

“Crane, it’s no big deal. It’s just that five suicides out of 6000 people is a high suicide rate. I mean, I’m a sociologist. I know these things.”

“You’re a grad student. You don’t know shit. How high a suicide rate is that, exactly?”

“About ten times the national average.”