Sympathy Between Humans

10

“I feel really bad,” I said.

I was standing on the Hennessys’ doorstep. Marlinchen had answered my knock, tinier than I remembered in faded jeans and what looked like a child’s T-shirt with a pencil-line dark-blue heart at the center. She’d listened with guarded patience as I’d explained about the illness that had made me a little more than twenty-four hours late in keeping our appointment.

Only late yesterday had I remembered it, my promise to drive out and talk with Marlinchen again. What made me feel worse was that when I’d checked the messages on my cell phone, there’d been nothing from her. She’d written me off as an adult who’d dismissed her and her problems as insignificant.

“I thought you’d changed your mind,” Marlinchen told me. “You made a point of saying that Aidan was way out of your jurisdiction.”

“I wouldn’t just stand you up,” I said. “Can I come in now, or is this a bad time?”

“It’s fine,” Marlinchen said, stepping aside to let me into their entryway. “But I thought you worked in the afternoon and evening.”

“I do, but this is my day off,” I said. “And anyway, I’m rotating back onto day shifts soon.”

Marlinchen led me back toward the kitchen and family room where we’d been earlier. Nowhere in the house could I hear activity, but there was a live feel in the air, and I knew the boys were around.

The kitchen, in fact, was occupied, but not by anyone cooking or eating. Instead, Donal sat in a chair that was elevated by an encyclopedia volume under each leg. He had a beach towel wrapped around his chest and shoulders. A pair of shears lay on a nearby counter, and a small corona of light-brown hair lay on the floor around the chair legs.

“Donal, you remember Detective Pribek,” Marlinchen said, picking up the shears.

“Hello,” Donal said.

“Hey,” I said. On second inspection, he looked younger than 11, his face still soft and pale with childhood.

To Marlinchen, I said, “Maybe I should wait until you’re done with Donal’s haircut before we get into… what we talked about the other day.”

But she disagreed. “All my brothers know the situation,” she said. “We can discuss it now.”

“All right,” I said. “Let me start with a broad question: Why wasn’t Aidan living at home?”

Marlinchen finger-combed Donal’s hair until a half inch stuck out at the ends, then cut. “Dad is a widower. He was raising five small children. That was just too many,” she said. “Aidan was the oldest, and the best suited to adapt to life away from home.”

“I thought Aidan was your twin,” I said.

Marlinchen smiled. “I make that mistake a lot, calling Aidan ‘the oldest.’ I don’t know why I do that, he was only born fifty-seven minutes before me.” She smoothed Donal’s hair down over his ear, then took up another thick strand and trimmed the end. “It’s ironic, too, because Aidan was held back to repeat the fourth grade, so after that, a lot of people assumed he was younger than me.”

That didn’t really tell me anything; I tried to get back on track. “That was the only reason Aidan was sent away?” I reiterated. “Your father just had too many kids?”

“Do you have children, Detective Pribek?” Marlinchen asked. Her voice had that faint shimmer of patronization that mothers have when asking single friends this question.

“No,” I admitted.

“Of course, I don’t either,” she said, “but I know it’s very, very difficult raising five kids on your own. Dad tried, but he just had his hands too full, with his teaching and his writing. He also had pretty severe pain sometimes, from a degenerative disk. There were episodes where it was almost disabling.” More hair fell. “Later, he developed an ulcer, I think from the pressure of working and raising a family on his own.”

“Mmm,” I said, noncommittal. “When was the last time you heard from Aidan?”

“We don’t really hear from him,” Marlinchen said. Her eyes were down, on her work. “The last I saw him was when he left for Illinois.” Another tiny sheaf of light-brown hair fluttered to the floor.

“ Illinois?” I said.

“Before he went to Georgia, he lived with our aunt, Brigitte, outside of Rockford, Illinois,” Marlinchen explained. “He would have stayed there, but Aunt Brigitte died five months later, and that was when Pete Benjamin offered to let Aidan live on his farm.”

“How did your aunt die?” I asked.

“A car accident,” Marlinchen said.

“How did your father and Pete Benjamin know each other?” I said.

“They grew up in Atlanta together,” she said. “Pete inherited a lot of land and went to farm it. Dad went to college, and the rest was history.” She paused to concentrate, lining up hair. “I think Dad thought Aidan would learn a lot from living on a farm. Dad left college at 19 and traveled through America, and he worked a lot of manual jobs, like farm labor. He said he learned more about life working on the road than in any classroom.”

Marlinchen tugged at the hair on either side of Donal’s ears. “Does this look even to you, Detective Pribek?”

I studied her handiwork. “Yeah,” I said. “I think it does.”

Marlinchen pulled back the beach towel. “Off you go, sport,” she said.

“Finally,” Donal said. “Can I have a Popsicle?”

“I guess that’d be all right,” Marlinchen said.

As Donal raided the refrigerator and left, I asked, “Do you know anything about Aidan’s friends in Georgia, his interests, where he might have gone?”

Marlinchen shook her head. “I wish I did. Maybe Mr. Benjamin can help you with that.”

“That’s a good point,” I said. “I’ll need his phone number. And I could use a picture of Aidan.”

Upstairs, the first doorway was Marlinchen’s. Inside, she almost immediately folded her legs underneath her and sank to a cross-legged position beside the bed. Reaching underneath the dust ruffle, she pulled out a wooden box and opened the lid. “This’ll take me just a minute,” she said.

While Marlinchen riffled through her box, I looked around at her bedroom. It was orderly and clean; I wouldn’t have expected otherwise. The twin bed was neatly made, covered in cream-colored eyelet. Her desk faced the window, likewise painted cream, and at its edge a pen with an old-fashioned ostrich-feather plume stood at the ready. It was charming, but the real work undoubtedly was done on the laptop that sat, jarringly modern, at the desk’s center.

“Do you write?” I asked her. “I mean, outside of school?”

Marlinchen shook her head, still looking down into the box. “Liam does,” she said.

Atop the dresser were two photos in frames. One was a snapshot of Marlinchen among classmates on what looked like a class trip to a Twins game, another of Marlinchen and her three younger brothers on the bank of a creek. For the bedroom of a middle-class teenage girl, it was a surprisingly small amount of sentimentalia. In doing missing-persons work, I’d been in a few adolescent girls’ rooms, and I’d seen displays that made me wish I owned stock in Kodak: dates, proms, class trips, sleepovers, all memorialized in pictures.

“Here,” Marlinchen’s voice interrupted me, “while you’re looking at photos, here’s one of Aidan.”

The Polaroid showed a boy of perhaps 11, standing next to a tire swing, which dangled from the willow I’d seen on the far side of the house. The boy in the photo clearly was going to be tall, taller than Hugh Hennessy, I thought. And, though the detail didn’t leap out, when you looked at the hand on the rope, you could see the nub of dark pink flesh where the smallest finger should have been. Otherwise, Aidan Hennessy was pleasant-looking, serious in expression, blond and blue-eyed like his sister.

“Listen,” I said, “do you have a photo of Aidan that’s more recent?” I said.

“No,” she said. “Is that a problem?”

“Yes,” I said. “The years between 12 and 17 are important ones. Kids change a lot. Hair gets darker, and faces change shape as they lose baby fat. Or sometimes kids gain weight. And they pierce and bleach and dye, too.”

“I don’t think Aidan would do that,” she said. “Besides, he won’t be hard to identify. You really can’t miss the hand,” she said.

“No, I suppose not,” I said. “How’d that happen, anyway?”

“A dog,” Marlinchen said. “He was bitten.”

“Ouch,” I said. “How old was he?”

“Three, maybe four,” Marlinchen said. “I really don’t remember it, except he was in the hospital a long time, and when they brought him back, I was scared of him, because of his hand. I started crying, and wouldn’t play with him.”

“Really?” I said. But maybe it wasn’t so strange, that a little girl would be so rattled by her brother’s frightening injury. “Tell me something else: How did you find out Aidan had run away from the farm in Georgia?”

Marlinchen nodded. “Oh, that. E-mail,” she said. “After Dad had his stroke, for a few days I spent a lot of time in here, looking through all his papers and financial records and so on. I read his e-mails on the computer, and at the bottom of the list were the old ones. You know, the ones you don’t delete?”

“You have his password?”

“No, the password automatically comes up when he logs in, as asterisks, you know?”

I nodded.

“So I just had to hit Return.” Marlinchen untucked a leg that had been crossed under her other thigh. “I wasn’t reading all the messages, but this one said, ‘Re: Aidan,’ so it caught my eye. I opened it and I saw Pete’s message to my dad, and under that, my dad’s original message to him.”

A farmer with e-mail? Well, why not?

“The messages were both about Aidan having run away. I guess there was a miscommunication about who’d report it to the police. I was afraid that neither one had, so I called Deputy Fredericks in Georgia.”

According to what Fredericks had told me, the communication between Pete Benjamin and Hugh Hennessy had been quite clear: that Hugh would deal with Aidan’s having bolted from the farm. But I didn’t want to get into that issue at the moment. I said, “Marlinchen, Deputy Fredericks told me that Aidan had run away to Minnesota once before.”

Marlinchen nodded.

“Your father sent him back, is that right?” I asked.

She nodded again, looking down at the floor.

“Did anything in particular cause Aidan to run away?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“Are you sure?” I pressed her.

“He was homesick. He came here and Dad sent him back. That’s all.” She chewed her lower lip. “Detective Pribek, what I said earlier, about not knowing anything about Aidan’s day-to-day life, or hearing from him… I know it might sound strange, that Aidan was sent away, and we’ve had so little contact with him, but after Mother died… it changes so many things in the dynamics of a family. It’s hard for people to understand, and I don’t think I explain it very well.”

“It’s not so hard to understand as you might think,” I said. “My mother died when I was young, and later my father sent me to Minnesota at 13, to live with a great-aunt I’d never even met before. It sounds severe, but in the end it was for the best.”

“Then you understand,” Marlinchen said, her voice almost relieved. “I knew there was a reason why I felt like you could help.”

“I’m not in a position to do that much,” I cautioned her. “I’m just going to do some things over the phone and on the computer that’ll go faster for me than they would for you. I can’t travel to Illinois or Georgia.”

“I know,” Marlinchen said quickly. “Anything you can do, I appreciate.”

“Then,” I said, “I need to talk to your brothers.”

It was Colm who’d been watching TV in the family room earlier; when I returned he was still there, lounging on the couch in T-shirt and sweatpants.

“Hey,” he said, not making eye contact.

The big TV screen showed an outdoor gun range with a glimpse of East Coast greenery in the background. Young men and women in blue shirts rolled to their feet, raised weapons, and fired rapidly at the black outlines of targets.

“It’s a special about Quantico,” Colm said. “That’s where they train FBI agents.”

“I know,” I said, watching. For a moment it transfixed me, all the youth and righteousness and promise that the trainees seemed to embody, standing on a vista where the best of their professional lives was just about to open up before them, and my heart felt briefly leaden at the sight.

Then I shook my head, clearing away the reverie, and said to Colm, “Maybe you could turn off the TV for a couple of minutes. I just need to ask you a few questions about your brother.”

Colm rolled off the couch to switch off the television, and I took a seat, flipping open my notebook. “When was the last time you had contact with Aidan?” I asked.

“When he left,” Colm said, taking a seat at the other end of the couch.

“Nothing since? Letters, phone calls?”

Colm shook his head, chewed at the corner of a fingernail.

“Based on what you know about him, can you guess at where he might have gone when he ran away?”

Colm shook his head again.

“Can you tell me anything about why it was Aidan who was sent away?” I asked. “As opposed to both the twins, or one of the younger kids.”

Colm shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“You can’t speculate at all?”

“I was nine,” he said. “Nobody told me anything.”

“Thanks,” I said, flipping the notebook closed.

“That’s it?” Colm said, startled.

“That’s it,” I affirmed, getting up.

“You didn’t even write anything down,” Colm said.

“I don’t usually write down things like ‘I don’t know’ and ‘I was nine,’ ” I said.

Colm looked a little sheepish.

“There’s not a lot you can tell me if you haven’t seen or heard from him,” I explained.

He turned the television back on. The agents-in-training were now learning to break down and clean their guns. I wondered if the field of law enforcement held an appeal for Colm Hennessy, like it did for many boys his age.

“They do really good weapons training at Quantico,” I offered.

Colm’s light-blue eyes flicked to me again. “What kind of gun do you use?”

“A.40 caliber Smith & Wesson.”

“Isn’t that a lot of gun for a woman to handle?” Colm asked.

“Excuse me?” I said, though I’d heard him clearly.

He shrugged. “It’s a big gun.”

It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him that I’d been the second-best shooter in my Sheriff’s academy class, but it was probably beneath the dignity of a county detective to get into a verbal pissing match with a boy half her age. So I bit my tongue and asked, “Are you interested in shooting?”

“Not really,” Colm said. “Dad hates guns. He won’t have one in the house, not even for hunting.” He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. I’m more into close-quarters fighting.”

“With what,” I asked, “a television remote?” Something in his dismissive tone had pushed me over the edge.

Colm really looked at me for the first time, as if he’d been bitten by something that he didn’t think had a mouth. His lips tightened with embarrassment, and finally he said, “No, I have a heavy bag. And weights, out in the far garage.”

Upstairs, I found Liam Hennessy at the computer in his father’s study. There, he told me essentially the same thing Colm had, just in more words. Liam, too, hadn’t heard from or written to Aidan since his older brother left for Illinois, and he too felt that Aidan had been sent away from home only because their father was struggling to raise five kids.

“It seems odd to me, though,” I said, “that Aidan didn’t come home for summers, or on holidays.”

Liam looked at the computer screen, blue light reflecting off his glasses, as though the answer could be found there. “Summer is an important time on a farm,” he said, “so it’s unlikely that Pete could have spared him then. As for holidays, I guess Dad felt that Aidan really needed to settle in at Pete’s, and think of that as his home.”

“For five years? That’s an awful long ban on visits home.”

Liam nodded slowly. It was clear he was uncomfortable. “I wish I could tell you more,” he said, “but I was young at the time. No one really explained it to me.”

“Okay,” I said. “If you think of anything else…”

“I’ll let you know,” he said hastily.

I got to my feet. Liam had lifted his long-fingered hands back to the keyboard, as if eager to escape again into whatever he’d been writing when I interrupted him, and I realized for the first time that it might not be homework that absorbed him. Liam, Marlinchen had said, was the aspiring writer among the kids.

On the way out, I paused at the doorway. “What happened to your carpet here?” The edge, where it met the carpeting of the hall, was rough-edged and fraying, as if the person who’d laid it had hacked it off carelessly with a utility knife.

“Dad happened to it,” Liam said, a flicker of amusement on his face. “He put down the carpet in here himself. It’s like that all around the edges. We’re used to it.”

It was true; the whole perimeter of the room looked the same as the doorway, rough-edged.

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” I said, “but was your father drinking when he was on this home-improvement kick?”

It wasn’t as light a question as my tone implied. Whenever there’s trouble in a family, it’s good to know which way the alcohol is flowing, if at all.

Liam smiled, untroubled by my inquiry. “I wouldn’t know,” he said. “I mean, Dad put down the carpet a long time ago, before my time. But I do know that he never drank much, and he quit a few years back. Just for general health reasons. It was never a problem.”

Marlinchen walked me out to my car, after I’d finished. “Were the boys helpful?” she asked.

“Yes, they were,” I said. The truth was that they hadn’t said anything useful, but neither had they seemed deliberately obstructionist. I’d spoken to Donal last, just to be thorough, but he scarcely remembered his older brother, and I’d only spent about three minutes with him.

A white cat emerged from the grass and went to Marlinchen, winding a figure eight around her ankles, pushing its trapezoidal head against Marlinchen’s shins.

“Friend of yours?” I said.

“Snowball,” she affirmed. “Our cat. I hardly ever see her in the daytime anymore. She gets around.” She sat on her heels to run one hand over the cat’s arched spine, then straightened.

“Well, she’s got plenty of room for that,” I said, looking around. The Hennessys and their neighbors had lots of open space between lots.

I also noticed again the freestanding outbuilding that I’d taken for a nineteenth-century carriage house; it was what Colm must have meant by “the far garage,” where he had his exercise equipment. Closer to Marlinchen and me was the lone tree on the bank of the lake. In this area, sugar maples were everywhere, as were smaller spruces and hardy little pines. Lilacs seemed to be the flowering tree of choice; some were still in bloom. This tree was none of them. It was obviously ornamental, deliberately planted in its solitary spot. I didn’t think I’d ever seen one like it before, though its few flowers, cream-colored and orchidaceous, were vaguely familiar.

“What kind of tree is that?” I asked.

“It’s a magnolia,” Marlinchen said.

“Really? I didn’t know they’d grow this far north,” I commented.

Marlinchen’s face was turned from me, looking toward the tree. “It was here when a real-estate agent showed our parents this place. It’s what convinced my mother that this house was The One.” I could hear a smile in Marlinchen’s voice. “She and Dad met in Georgia. She thought it was fate.”