He stroked her hair. A tear rolled from her uninjured eye. Her face felt as though it were aflame.
‘The bitch,’ she said. ‘Look what the bitch did to me.’
And: ‘I’m burned, but she is burning too, and her pain will be greater and longer than mine. The bitch, the burning bitch.’
She was not due another painkiller for a couple of hours, so he turned on the TV as a distraction. Together they watched some cartoons, and a comedy show, and a dumb action movie upon which she wouldn’t ordinarily have wasted her time but that now acted as a soporific. The night drew on, and the sun rose. She watched the light change through the crack in the drapes. The boy gave her another pill, then changed into his pajamas and curled up on the floor next to her bed as he saw her falling asleep, his head on a pillow and a comforter covering his body only from the waist down. She felt her eyes begin to close, and prepared to exchange real pain for the memory of pain.
From the floor the boy watched her, unfathomable in his strangeness.
Messages accumulated. Most were inconsequential. Still, the boy made a careful note of each one, and handed it to her when she was sufficiently alert to understand what she was being shown. Minor tasks were postponed for a time, major ones diverted elsewhere. She willed herself to recover. There was too much that needed to be done.
But for all of the boy’s solicitude, and all of the care he took with her phone, some contacts went unexamined for a time. The boy did not have access to the old Darina Flores answering service: it had come into existence before he was born, and there had been no reason to acquaint him with it. Anyway, it had been many years since contact had been made through that number.
And so it was that a message inquiring if she was still interested in news of an airplane that might have crashed in the Great North Woods remained unlistened to for days, and a little time was bought.
But only a little.
15
I called Gordon Walsh, a detective who now worked out of the Maine State Police’s Southern Major Crimes Unit in Gray. Walsh was about the closest thing I had to a friend in the MSP, although it would have been stretching the point to call him an actual friend. If Walsh was my friend, then I was lonelier than I thought. Actually, if Walsh was anybody’s friend they were lonelier than they thought.
‘You calling to confess a crime?’ he said.
‘Anything to help you maintain your unblemished arrest record. You have something in particular you’d like me to ’fess up to, or should I just sign a blank form and leave you to fill in the details?’
‘You won’t even have to fill in your name because it’s already there. Just put your “X” on it and we’ll do the rest.’
‘I’ll think about it. Maybe if you helped me out with something it might encourage me to make the right decision. You have any friends in the New Hampshire MCU?’
‘No, but I’ll have minus friends there if I set you on them. You’re a walking formula for negative friendship equity.’
I waited. I was good at waiting. At last, I heard him sigh.
‘Come on, give it to me.’
‘Kenny Chan. Killed in his house in Bennington in 2006.’
‘How did he die?’
‘He was broken up and folded into his own safe.’
‘Yeah, I think I remember that one. It was part of a spate of safe-foldings back in the day. Robbery?’
‘Only of his joie de vivre. Whoever did it left the cash in the safe with him.’
‘I take it you pulled up the names of the investigating detectives?’
‘Nalty and Gulyas.’
‘Yeah, Helen Nalty and Bob Gulyas. Nalty won’t talk to you. She’s straight edge, and in line for promotion to AUC.’ AUC was Assistant Unit Commmander. ‘Gulyas is retired. I know him a little. He might talk, as long as you don’t interrupt. He’s not patient like I am. It’ll be the usual deal. If you find out something useful—’
– ‘then it goes straight to him, and he whispers it in a sympathetic ear,’ I finished. ‘And if I get in trouble I don’t mention his name. I owe you on this one.’
‘You owe me on more than this one, but you can start paying now.’