Stony River Read online

  “For how many nights?”

  “Two.” In case she couldn’t get hold of Buddy tomorrow.

  “American Plan or à la carte?”

  “American Plan.” She was feeling patriotic.

  “The rate is six dollars a night. Are you comfortable with that?”

  “Yeah, no sweat.”

  He handed her a card and a pen. “I’ll need name, address and telephone number.”

  Tereza stared at the card, her heart pounding against her ribs. She set the briefcase and shopping bag beside her feet and slowly picked up the pen, buying time while her mind conjured up a phony name and address. Stop watching me, she wanted to yell as she gripped the pen in her fist and printed ugly letters that strayed off the line. His X-ray eyes burned through her new clothes to the dumb old Tereza underneath. She looked up at him. “Don’t got no phone.”

  He took the card from her and read it quickly. “May I see some identification, Miss Derek?” When she didn’t respond, he said, “A driver’s license or social security card will do.”

  “I got money in case you’re worried.” She opened the new pocketbook and pulled out what remained of the second roll.

  He lifted his eyebrows and smiled flatly. “Excuse me a moment.” He ducked through a doorway behind the desk.

  She snatched up the briefcase and shopping bag and left.

  REENIE OPENED the door just a wedge, so the cop couldn’t see inside. He stood feet apart, hand on holster. He flashed his badge and gave his name but her head was too full of noise to take it in. “Tereza Dobra’s mother?” Her legs went spongy. They’ve found her, she thought, face down in the river or run over. “Call me Reenie,” she said, her voice coming from someplace else. She squeezed out a smile to cover the fear seizing her lungs. “Anything wrong?” “Your children weren’t at school today, Reenie, and the principal’s concerned. They home now?” “My boy is. The school send the cops every time a kid don’t show up? That must keep you busy.” “Mind if I come in and talk about it?” She didn’t want a cop in the house. Didn’t want Allen hearing whatever he might say. “My husband ain’t here.” “Would it be better if we spoke outside on the porch?” A gentleman cop; that made a change. “Yeah, it would, thanks, just a minute, lemme turn off the stove.” She shut the door, leaving him in the hallway. Allen was sprawled on the floor watching The Mickey Mouse Club, the first show in days to drag him away from the window. “Stay here,” she told him. She grabbed her coat off the hook, her Winstons and matches from the counter. The cop tested the porch railing before half-sitting on it. “I heard there was trouble between your husband and daughter Friday night, an incident involving a belt. I understand your daughter ran away afterward and hasn’t been seen since.” “Who told you that?” “Is it true?” Reenie drew a cigarette from the pack and handed him her matches. He flinched like she’d stepped on his toe but recovered and offered her a light. She took a deep drag and watched her icy breath fuse with the smoke. Linda, she thought, it had to be Linda who told. “I don’t know nothing about a belt. Tereza was late coming home, my husband seen her coming down the street and went out to meet her, to make sure she come in, you know? He said she yelled at him and ran away.” “Did he say why she yelled at him?” This cop was good-looking but so tall you’d have to kiss him on the stairs, him a couple steps below. Reenie pursed her lips and shook her head. Sometimes the truth was nobody else’s business. Tereza thought that too, and it drove Jimmy nuts. “What have you done about finding your daughter?” “I called around the neighborhood all weekend. Stayed home from work today—pissing off the shift boss; Tereza’s got no idea the trouble she’s making. Anyway, I stayed here because my boy was too upset to go to school but also because I thought Tereza might sneak back to get some clothes. My husband’s out right now checking places she might be at.” Doing penance, she thought but didn’t say. Jimmy always felt like crap after a row with Tereza. “Why would she have to sneak home?” “She don’t, of course, just that when she gets a bee in her …” Reenie didn’t finish because Allen’s worried little face was pressed against the window. She turned her back so he couldn’t read her lips. “She’s stubborn is all, thinks nobody but her is ever right.” “Why do you think she hasn’t come home, Reenie?” “I got no idea.” “Sure you do.” Reenie shivered and hugged herself. She studied the peeling paint on the porch, the same baby-shit color of the last building they’d lived in. She hated having to leave places just when they started to feel like home. Hated having to choose between being a good wife and a good mother. “Has Tereza run away before?” “Not here, but yeah, last place we lived. She always came home after she cooled off.” “Does your husband hit her?” Reenie took a last drag and tossed the butt over the railing. “Why’d you ask that?” Her teeth clicked like castanets; it was goddamned cold out. “Because Tereza has been observed with marks on her arms and legs.” Ah, only four months in Stony River and already time to move on. Well, this apartment was nothing special and she’d need a lobotomy to do that job at the Catalog Club much longer. “She’s a tomboy is all,” she told the cop, “always taking a tumble, scraping or breaking something.” He nodded slowly, looked straight at her and said, like a punch in the gut, “Does he hurt you and the boy, too?” If Jimmy went to jail, how would Reenie take care of Allen? It might be better if Tereza didn’t come back; she’d be leaving in a few years anyway, and Jimmy was calmer when she wasn’t around. She stared right back into the mirror of the cop’s brown eyes. “You bring me any news about my girl? If not, I gotta go feed my boy.” She could tell he didn’t like that. He slid off the porch rail and stood like he had a rod up his behind. “I inspected a vacant house a few blocks from here. Someone’s been in it recently. It might have been your daughter. We’ll keep an eye on it in case she returns. Also, I put in calls to the county hospitals and police stations this afternoon. No unidentified young females found. I’d like a recent photograph of Tereza to show around.” Imagining her baby in a morgue, no one to claim her, Reenie teared up. She thought about that lump of bone where Tereza’s jaw had healed. “Don’t have no picture, no camera.” “When will your husband be home?” “Seven, maybe.” “I’ll be back then.” Inside, Reenie took Allen’s chin in her hand. “Don’t tell nobody about that cop being here, understand? And I’ll be the one lets Pop-Pop know.”

  A COLD and windless night. Trick-or-treaters filled the sidewalks and spilled onto the streets.

  “What if she don’t got food or water?” Allen asked. He and Linda were traveling house to house, holding pillowcases out for treats. He’d never said more than a few words to her before. He was supposed to be Sailor Jack from Cracker Jacks in Jimmy’s old flat white hat and navy middy. Even over a jacket, the middy came down to his ankles.

  “Tereza wouldn’t let herself starve,” Linda said.

  “But what if she’s tied up?”

  “I don’t think she’s tied up.”

  “Ma calls her Tez,” Allen said. “That rhymes with Pez. I used to like Dots, but Pez is gooder. I have Mickey Mouse and Santa Claus. Maybe somebody’ll give me a Popeye dispenser tonight.”

  Fat chance: too expensive. Linda’s house was handing out candy corn in yellow napkin pouches—a Tootsie Pop, head down, sticking out of each. Daddy said they looked like “festive plumber’s helpers.” That had dragged a laugh out of Mother, making Linda relieved but jealous. Lately, the most she got from her mother was a smile so slight it seemed to have been squeezed from her. Linda had assembled fifty pouches, counting ten pieces of candy corn for each, to be fair. Mother fretted that fifty might not be enough (Daddy had done the shopping). She said she’d rather die than tell a child she’d run out of treats. So just do it, Linda thought, immediately sending up a frantic plea for God’s forgiveness. She and Daddy had been doing just fine until Mother got up and interfered. Linda promised to drop back partway through to empty her pillowcase.

  She kept her eyes open for a camouflaged Tereza sneaking up to surprise Allen. That’s
what she would have done if her little brother were so worried about her he couldn’t sleep. She would’ve had a brother too, if she hadn’t killed him. She hadn’t meant to. She didn’t even remember doing it. She’d been three, and Mother six months pregnant, when she crawled into her parents’ bed after a nightmare. Once back to sleep, she kicked Mother in the stomach, making her lose the almost-boy they named Robert. “He was the length of a ruler,” Mother would say reverently. She told the story whenever people asked, “Only one child?” Always adding, “Of course, it wasn’t her fault.”

  No chance of a brother now. Daddy had finally confided that mother’s operation in August was to remove her uterus, which, it turned out, wasn’t diseased after all. Growing Up and Liking It had a sketch of a uterus. Ugly as a bagpipe. Linda couldn’t imagine having one inside her.

  Mother had returned from the hospital right before Labor Day and slipped into a funk the doctor couldn’t explain. She’d be in bed when Linda left for school and in bed when she returned. Linda brought her ginger ale and toast every afternoon, but it didn’t help. “Is your father home yet?” was all she’d say.

  It seemed she saved her voice for Daddy. “She says she feels too heavy to move,” he’d report. Or, “She says she can’t see colors anymore.” He’d look at Linda as if she could make everything hunkydory in the few hours she had after school.

  For two months Linda had wished, “star light star bright,” that Mother would get well so Linda could win Tereza back from the boys she’d started hanging around with after Linda took over the housework. And now that it was too late, Mother had arisen from her bed like Lazarus to make Linda’s favorite dishes and hand out Halloween treats. Her sudden recovery had something to do with Friday night, Linda was sure, and if Mother ended up back in the room that smelled of unwashed hair and stale sheets, it would be one more thing that would and wouldn’t, at the same time, be Linda’s fault.

  BEHIND THE WHEEL of Doris’s ’53 Ford—sea foam, not a color he’d choose—Bill Nolan felt the colossal moon tracking him, its features clearly defined, each crater seemingly illuminated from within. It was the first full moon on a Halloween since before he was born: an alien yet benevolent presence that wouldn’t let him come to harm. Doris hadn’t wanted him to leave his revolver at home, but sometimes it was a barrier for people to get past when you needed their confidence. The gun, the uniform, the cuffs, the badge and the billy club gave him an unearned superiority, transformed him into an alien presence people rarely found benevolent.

  Tonight he was in cords, last year’s Christmas sweater from Doris and his dad’s old fishing jacket. He’d decided against the panda car to spare the Dobras additional gossip. The neighbors would have been speculating already about his afternoon visit. While he knew Reenie Dobra hadn’t been straight with him, he didn’t want to add to her troubles. Her unschooled speech and bravado made him want to protect her. From what, he didn’t know yet.

  He’d formed a mental picture of her husband: overweight, belligerent, as dark as she was. Hard to reconcile with the thin, fair, sharp-featured fellow at the kitchen table submissively clasping callused hands before him. He didn’t look like he belonged with Reenie. Bill could see her in some Egyptian get-up. He’d never been to Egypt; it was just a feeling. Judging from the sparsely furnished apartment, Dobra wasn’t a great provider. But with an honest-to-Pete tear in his eye, he said he loved his stepdaughter and wanted her back. “I’m strict, won’t lie about that, but only because I don’t want her going bad. Don’t expect no medal for taking care of her. Seeing her grow up right will be enough.”

  Their boy was trick-or-treating, Reenie said in her tobacco-lusty voice, and she wanted to settle whatever they had to before he got back.

  Doris had taken Carolyn in her ballerina costume to a few houses in the afternoon, along with their month-old baby in the carriage. Bill couldn’t get over it: a son, Michael David, the goofs at the station dubbing him Mickey D, like some little mobster. He couldn’t conceive of doing anything that would make his kids want to run away. It irked Doris that he dropped by the house or telephoned several times a day to check on them; made her feel he didn’t trust her. Not at all, he’d explained, hoping she’d understand that, when you see what a cop sees day after day, you can’t pretend nothing bad could ever happen to those you love.

  Reenie had brewed coffee. She served it in cups with thick rims. Bill scalded his tongue on the first bitter sip. For a while that afternoon he’d thought she was flirting with him, but she was preoccupied tonight, lighting her own cigarettes, tapping them into a Cinzano ashtray. Considering the heat blasting from the radiators, she was appropriately dressed in a summery white blouse and red cotton skirt. Dobra was stripped down to workpants and a sleeveless undershirt that revealed an anchor tattooed on a ropy arm.

  “Don’t let them hoodwink you,” Doris had warned him over dinner. “You wouldn’t believe the lies some parents tell.” Sure he would. He’d heard a few in his six years on the force, but Doris, having worked for Children’s Aid before Carolyn was born, assumed the mantle of expert in their home when it came to such matters. She’d given him heck for not knowing what had been going on in the Haggerty house, had actually wanted to keep those kids. She’d returned from a visit with the girl yesterday steamed at him about it all over again. Bill’s mission for tonight, she said, was to collect any evidence that the Dobra kids were in danger and report back to her for further consultation. She wasn’t concerned about the wife. “She’s a big girl.” That was Doris for you.

  Bill brought out his notebook and a handkerchief to wipe his forehead, considered peeling off the sweater. “What happened Friday night, Mr. Dobra?”

  “After work, I stopped in at Rolf’s for smokes.”

  “The corner store?”

  “That’s right. Rolf tells me there’s a story going ’round about Tereza.That she gets into cars at the garage down the street. Rolf says he thinks I should know.”

  “Tony Tomasso’s garage?”

  “If you say so. Anyways, the story is she does things with men in those cars, things I don’t want to talk about in front of her mother.”

  Reenie lit another cigarette.

  “Did you ask Tereza if the story was true?”

  “Didn’t need to. It added up. The slutty way she’d started dressing, not staying with her brother until her ma got home like she was supposed to. When I saw her coming home late again, sashaying down the street like the Queen of Sheba, I blew up.”

  “A witness saw you threaten her with a belt. Did you?”

  “I didn’t hit her.”

  “She ran away before you could?”

  “If you say so.”

  Dobra’s habit of lobbing questions back was annoying. “Taking a belt to a child could be considered assault, you aware of that?”

  “Were you in the war, son?” Dobra asked. A locker-room challenge. A rutting elk looking to lock antlers. For a moment, Bill regretted not having worn his uniform.

  “No. It was all over by the time I was old enough. You?”

  Dobra narrowed his eyes, as though wringing out the memory. “A troop ship in the Pacific. At dawn, we’d throw cargo nets over the side, watch the troops climb down, swaying and cussing, stepping on each other’s hands. They’d drop into LCAs and take off and we’d still be watching as the Japs blew them all to Hades. You do that enough, it gets to be routine, you know, body parts in the water, the sea turned to blood, you get to thinking, today wasn’t so bad, not so many as yesterday. If a girl lies and whores enough it gets to be routine for her, you know what I’m saying? And it gets around. When Tereza gives me lip, says what’s the big deal, I can’t see nothing in my mind but her busted-up body in a puddle of blood.”

  A prickle rose from Bill’s tailbone to his scalp. His mind groped for mollifying words. “My father-in-law’s a retired officer,” he said. “Not navy, but I could ask him if he knows someone you could talk to about what you went through in the war.”


  Jimmy’s torso snapped to attention. “What the fuck you talking about?” The muscle beneath his anchor started to twitch.

  Bill’s long legs slowly pushed his chair from the table. Foolish to have come without Frank.

  “Jimmy,” Reenie said quietly, putting her hand on Dobra’s arm.

  He shrugged her off. Got up and turned on a stove burner, bent down and lit a cigarette. He took a long drag and let it out, his eyes wild and unfocused for a moment. Then he came back into himself. Said, “Let’s talk about finding Tereza.”

  Bill asked to see the girl’s room. He thought it might offer a clue.

  “It ain’t cleaned up,” Reenie said. “Allen insisted everything stay like when she left.”

  A blanket over a rope divided the room. On what Reenie said was Tereza’s side: a narrow bed with rumpled sheets, a movie poster tacked on the wall, an old dresser and a lamp with cowgirls on the shade that made Bill’s eyes sting with sudden emotion. Schoolbooks had been dumped on the bed, a dresser drawer left open. No games or stuffed animals, no bedspread or curtains. Not much to come home to. He peeked over the rope to the boy’s side. Just as bleak.

  He agreed to visit Tony’s Garage the next morning and to keep checking the vacant house and the police reports. He asked them to confirm the description he’d gotten from Tereza’s friend and the school principal. “If we suspect foul play, we’ll assemble a search team, get the newspapers involved, even drag the river if it comes to that. But teenagers run away all the time. Most come home.”

  “That’s what I told her,” Dobra said, flipping a thumb at Reenie.

  When Bill asked if Tereza had any birthmarks or scars, Reenie’s shoulders started to shake.

  LINDA TOOK ALLEN one block down and two over to newer houses boasting bigger yards and front doors with wrought-iron flamingos. Those houses gave out better treats, sometimes a Hershey bar or a package of Chuckles. A Pez was a long shot, but for some reason— maybe to show she was “gooder” than Tereza—she wanted Allen to get his wish. Tereza’s friend Richie was sitting on the steps outside his house in dungarees and high-school jacket, cigarette smoke settling on his pompadour like a cloud.