Ordinary Grace

20

Gus went with my father and Doyle to the sheriff’s office to discuss the locket. Jake and I stayed with our mother which was difficult. She communicated her fear through silence and random movements. She sat at the kitchen table and smoked for a minute then stood and paced and ended up in the living room where she picked up the phone as if to make a call but put the receiver back down and crossed her arms and stared through a window while the cigarette smoldered in her hand. From the kitchen I watched the ember crawl toward her fingers as she stood frozen in terrible thought or speculation.

“Mom,” I said when I couldn’t stand it anymore and I was sure she would be burned.

She didn’t look away from the window.

“Mother!” I said. “Your cigarette!”

She didn’t move or acknowledge my words in any way. I rushed across the room and touched her arm and she looked down and suddenly realized what was about to happen and dropped the cigarette and stamped the ember out leaving a black smudge on the honey-colored floorboard.

I glanced back at the kitchen. Jake had been watching and I saw the frightened look on his face. It was clear that the house with Mother in it was a place oppressed by desperate worry and I didn’t know what to do or how to help.

Then I heard the crush of gravel in the driveway. I went to the kitchen and looked out the window. Karl had pulled up in his little Triumph with Emil in the passenger seat. Above them loomed a brooding sky. Karl helped his uncle out of the car and led him to the kitchen door.

“Mr. Brandt’s here!” I called.

“Oh, Emil,” Mother said sweeping into the kitchen and drawing Mr. Brandt into her arms. “Oh, Emil. I’m so glad you came.”

“I couldn’t stand waiting this out alone, Ruth. I had to be here.”

“I know. I know. Come and sit with me.”

She led him into the living room where they sat together on the sofa.

Karl hung back with me and Jake. He asked, “Any word?”

“They found her locket,” I said.

“Who?”

“Officer Doyle. Warren Redstone had it.”

“Who’s Warren Redstone?”

“Danny O’Keefe’s great-uncle,” Jake said.

“How’d he get it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “My dad and Gus and Officer Doyle went to the sheriff’s office with it.”

“How long ago?”

“Half an hour maybe.”

Karl stepped into the doorway to the living room. “I’m leaving for a little while, Uncle Emil,” he said. “I’ll come back for you.”

He took off in a hurry. He leaped into his red sports car and shot from the drive and sped up Tyler Street toward town. With my mother and Brandt in the living room and my father and everyone else gone to the sheriff’s office, Jake and I were left alone with our own concerns.

“You hungry?” I asked.

“No,” Jake said.

“Me neither.” I sat down at the table and ran my hand across the smooth Formica. “How’d he get it?”

“Get what?”

“Ariel’s locket.”

“I don’t know.” Jake sat down too. “Maybe she gave it to him.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe he found it.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“You don’t think he hurt her or anything?”

I thought about Warren Redstone and about how when we’d met him for the first time under the trestle with the dead man I’d been afraid for Jake. I thought about how we’d stumbled across him at his lean-to on the river when Danny was with us and how Danny had fled. I thought about his cold dismissal of me in the basement of Danny’s house just before we went to the quarry. And I thought about how, when he’d interceded for me the night before, there was something in him that had frightened even Morris Engdahl.

“I stood up. I’ve got to get out of here,” I said.

Jake stood up too. “Where are you going?”

“The river.”

“Me, too,” he said.

I went to the doorway and saw my mother and Brandt in deep urgent conversation. “Jake and me are going out for a while,” I told them.

Mother glanced in my direction and then went back to talking with Brandt. Jake and I left the house through the kitchen door.

The sky had changed. The gray had deepened to the color of charcoal and the clouds had begun to boil. An erratic wind had risen and within its gusts was carried the sound of distant thunder from the west. We crossed the backyard and the pasture where the wild grass and daisies rippled as if the skin of the earth was alive. We skirted the Sweeneys’ house where laundry hung on the line and I could hear the pop of bed linen snapping in the wind. We crossed Fourth Street and threaded our way between two fenceless houses and across Fifth. On the far side the ground sloped immediately toward the river. The slope was covered with bramble but a path had long ago been worn through the tangle of thorny vines and we followed it to a dry mudflat that edged the brown water and we turned northwest where two hundred yards away lay the long reed-covered stretch of sand on which Warren Redstone had constructed his lean-to.

“What are we doing?” Jake asked.

“Looking,” I said.

“For what?”

“I don’t know.”

“What if he’s there?”

“Then he’s there. Are you afraid?”

“No.”

“Then come on,” I said and quickened my pace because I’d felt the first drops of rain.

We didn’t bother trying to hide our approach but plunged recklessly through the reeds that grew higher than a man’s head. We emerged to find the clearing vacant. I went straight to the lean-to and ducked inside and saw immediately that the buried can had been removed. What remained was a small mound of sand beside an empty hole.

“It’s gone,” I said and backed out and stood and turned and found Jake terrified and mute in the grip of Warren Redstone.

“Little thieves,” the man said.

“We’re not thieves,” I shot back. “You’re the thief. You took my sister’s locket.”

“Where’s my can?” Redstone said.

“We don’t have your can. The police do. And they have Ariel’s locket and they’re going to arrest you.”

Redstone said, “What for?”

“Let Jake go,” I said.

Redstone did as I’d demanded, released Jake with a rough little shove in my direction. My brother stumbled to my side and turned and we both faced Danny’s great-uncle.

“Where’s Ariel?” I said.

He looked at me and I could not read his face. He said, “Your sister?”

“Where is she?”

“I haven’t seen her.”

“You’re a liar. You had her locket.”

“I found that locket.”

“Where?”

“Upriver.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I don’t give a rat’s ass whether you believe me or not. I just want my can.”

“The police have it and they’re going to put you in jail until you tell them what you did with Ariel.”

“Christ, boy, the only thing in that can are bits and pieces of my life. Nothing important to anyone but me. Everything in there I found somewhere or someone gave me. I’m not a thief. And I sure as hell don’t know anything about your sister.”

Redstone stared at me and I stared back and if there was any fear in me at all it lay so deep beneath my boiling anger that it had no effect. If Redstone at that moment had attacked I’d have fought him tooth and nail.

Rain began to fall in drops so large and heavy they left dents in the sand. The wind was fierce and steady and the thunder that had been distant broke now above the town and although I couldn’t see the lightning I could smell the electricity of the storm. Rain ran down Redstone’s face like water down a rock and still he did not look away from me or move. I stood as unyielding as he although I knew that with his huge hands he could at any moment destroy me.

Then we heard the sirens approaching.

Redstone cocked his head and listened. From the direction of the slope along Fifth Street I heard the sound of car doors slamming and men shouting.

I hollered, “Here! He’s here!”

Redstone swung his dark eyes back to my face and there was in them at last something that I understood and that to this day makes me ashamed.

He said calmly and without hate, “You’ve just killed me, white boy.”

He turned and began to run.