The First Victim

CHAPTER 6

Boldt sat on the back porch on a warm Friday night, the kids in bed, waiting for Liz, the slide projector at the ready, aimed at the only smooth white surface available, a door that had once led into what was now the kitchen pantry. Painted shut. Lately, he had felt pretty much the same way as that door: closed off, stuck.

He might have set up the projector in the living room; there was a wall there, pretty much of it white if the framed watercolors were removed, but the noise of the carousel’s clicking was certain to wake Sarah, who was as light a sleeper as her father, and if she awakened it might be an hour or two before she could be coaxed toward slumber again. So the carousel sat out there on a wicker table, the yellow Kodak box alongside. Boldt blinked in an attempt to decipher the firefly mystery: He couldn’t figure out whether he was actually seeing fireflies or if those spots of white light before his eyes were simply another sign of his total exhaustion.

‘‘I think we have fireflies,’’ he told Liz when she finally joined him.

‘‘We’ll need to cover Miles before we go to sleep. Remind me, would you?’’

The wicker creaked as she sat into it. Boldt wanted her twenty pounds heavier. He wanted that wicker chair to cry when she took to it, not simply moan.

‘‘I didn’t think we had fireflies. Six years in this house, I can’t remember ever seeing a firefly.’’

‘‘I don’t see any fireflies,’’ she informed him.

‘‘Give it a minute,’’ he said. ‘‘Over toward the back fence.’’

She eyed the projector. ‘‘If we’d bought more carousels we wouldn’t have to load it each time.’’

‘‘Don’t use it enough to justify two carousels.’’

‘‘We should have the slides put onto video.’’

‘‘Then what would we use the projector for?’’ he asked.

She stared out into the lawn. ‘‘I don’t see them.’’

‘‘That’s what I was afraid of.’’

‘‘What are we looking at?’’

‘‘On her seventy-fifth birthday my mother gave each of us slides of old family photos.’’

‘‘I remember these.’’

‘‘Right.’’

‘‘Old, old family photographs.’’

‘‘Right. That’s what I said.’’ He got the projector up and running and focused the image of a gray-haired lady onto the overpainted door.

‘‘I love summer evenings,’’ she said. ‘‘The charcoal in the air, the fresh-cut grass. Shouldn’t ever take any of it for granted.’’

‘‘My mother’s mother,’’ he said. ‘‘She died in her sleep. I remember her clothes smelled like mothballs. Hair like cotton candy. But what sticks in my mind is that she died in her sleep.’’

‘‘That’s the cop in you. You’re always more concerned with how a person dies than how he lived.’’

He didn’t like the comment. He sensed she might apologize for it, and he didn’t want her doing that, and he wasn’t sure why. ‘‘I think it’s strange I’d remember that about her.’’

‘‘How’d your grandfather die?’’

‘‘No idea. They never told me, I guess. He came over first. He was the one who brought us here.’’ He fast-forwarded through a dozen slides. Liz wanted him to stop at a few, but he plowed through them with the determination of a man who knew where he was going.

He landed on a photograph, a sepia print, of a young boy of eighteen standing by the butt end of a huge fallen timber. He said, ‘‘We were Polish. My father called us Europeans.’’

‘‘This is about the container,’’ Liz stated. ‘‘This is about the women who died.’’

Boldt worked the projector through two more slides of his grandfather. ‘‘We all crossed an ocean at some point,’’ he observed. ‘‘Your people came in the early 1800s. Mine, during the Great War. You think our people would make it in now? All the qualifications and requirements?’’

‘‘Don’t do this to yourself.’’

‘‘Technically they died of malnutrition, but Dixie says that some kind of flu was a contributing factor. If they had lived longer, the flu might have killed them. How’s that for irony?’’

She pointed. ‘‘I think I saw one!’’ She craned forward. ‘‘I didn’t think we had fireflies!’’

‘‘Not over there. Those are those Christmas lights that they never take down.’’ He pulled off the carousel, leaving a blinding white box on the old painted door. Liz jumped out of her chair with the enthusiasm of a little girl and made hand shadows of birds flying. She wore shorts. Her legs were tan but too thin. She made a duck’s head and her voice changed to Donald Duck. Donald told him he worried too much. She wouldn’t have jumped up like that two years ago before the illness. She’d become unpredictable that way. He didn’t know what was coming next. She wouldn’t deprive herself of a single moment of joy. She seized each and every one unabashedly. He envied her that freedom, that allowance of youth. She was no longer painted shut.

‘‘Can you imagine leaving Christmas lights up all year?’’ she asked.

‘‘There ought to be an ordinance.’’

‘‘Always the cop.’’

He loaded the carousel with shots of a vacation they had taken years before.

‘‘If your grandfather had never made the crossing, we wouldn’t be here,’’ she said.

‘‘That’s what’s bugging me, I think. If those women had lived. . At least for a while they would have had a legitimate chance at freedom.’’

‘‘They found a different kind of freedom,’’ she said.

He wasn’t going to go there. He wasn’t going to touch that one for anything.