Stony River Read online

  The phone wouldn’t shut up.

  Buddy and Ladonna had hovered around her room all day yesterday. She’d heard them in the kitchen discussing what they might coax her into eating, their cozy voices hinting at something different between them, something more personal. Part of her was relieved—maybe the hormones they’d given the boy hadn’t messed him up after all—but being locked up again would. Buddy was too trusting. Later, when he came in with a bowl of chicken noodle soup for her, she couldn’t tell if his eyes were wild on account of spooning or fear. On the chance it was spooning, she’d gone ahead and warned him, “Be careful around that little girly. She ain’t legal age.” He’d frowned at first like he didn’t get it then went red-faced and backed out of the room.

  Whoever was on the phone wasn’t about to give up. Dearie forced her legs over the side of the bed and shuffled to the hallway. Put the cold, black receiver against her ear.

  She hadn’t heard from her niece in nearly four years. Not since the twit called the cops on Buddy. Irene had made Dearie scrape and bow before she agreed not to press charges, but by then they’d slapped Buddy around and tied him to a chair in a cell.

  No question whose sharp, bitter voice it was at the other end. “Don’t say a word,” Irene said. “I still have a party line.”

  Bile rose into Dearie’s mouth but she swallowed it back. Four years ago Irene had told Buddy he was brain-damaged—a load of hooey; the doctors had ruled that out. She’d told the police Buddy was dangerous. More hooey. The boy just made poor decisions sometimes.

  “If anything gets out,” Irene said, “I’ll know it was you and that’ll be it for your little psycho.”

  Dearie could picture her mousy-haired niece with a holier-thanthou hand on her bony hip. “You threatening me?” she said. “An old lady who ain’t done nothing but love you since you was a little girl? If your pa was alive he’d be ashamed of you.”

  Irene hung up.

  Dearie looked at the receiver for a few seconds like it might start talking on its own. She stepped into the kitchen for the Lysol. Came back and wiped down the phone in case Irene’s venom had seeped through. She strode into her room, yanked the yeasty-smelling sheets off her bed and turned toward Alfie’s urn. “Look at me,” she said, “lying around for two days like some dying swan. Forgetting the boy needs me to keep telling him everything’s gonna be fine.”

  MARCH 13, 1957. An unexpected snowfall silenced all but the low thud of a bass drum steady as a heartbeat, leading the sixth, seventh and eighth graders out of Millard Fillmore and down the middle of Jackson Boulevard. Even kids you’d expect to sing “Found a Peanut” or do something else just as jerky were respectful. It moved Linda to tears that froze on her eyelashes.

  The police had closed the route to cars. The students marched through the colored neighborhood, across Main Street and past the railroad station. One right and one left turn and they were at City Hall, where the doors and windows were draped in black and the flag flew at half-mast.

  Inside, the body of Officer William Nolan lay in repose.

  Linda could picture those words at the top of a panel for “Another Audacious Adventure with Glenn and Gilda Daring.” She’d spring the idea on Richie tomorrow. It might be his big chance to get into True Crime comics.

  Officer Nolan was the first Stony River cop ever killed on duty. The story had made the front pages of the three papers Daddy brought home. Linda was drawn to the photos in them: a little boy in a rowboat, a skinny young man graduating from the police academy in 1949, a white-jacketed groom the same year, his wife all lace and pearls and fingerless gloves. The one with his little girl on his shoulders would have been enough to break Gilda’s heart.

  According to the paper, someone who wouldn’t leave his name had called and told the police to check the alley between Jacob’s Hardware and Bing’s Pharmacy where Officer Nolan lay dying. Linda could see the Darings showing up at the alley, Gilda with her Brownie Hawkeye to record clues the police would miss and Glenn with his magic fingerprint kit. In the comic strip townspeople like Mother would be overreacting, blaming it on hoodlums. Richie could draw their doughnut-shaped mouths wailing, “New Jersey isn’t safe anymore. We must move to Kansas.” Gilda would say, “Compassionate love is the answer.”

  After they’d heard about Office Nolan, Mother said, “You’re not to be out after dark, Linda, or walk around town on your own.” As if Linda had ever been allowed to. Daddy had been shaken by the news, too, especially since he’d been a policeman once. “When we lose one, we all hurt,” he said. Linda wanted to say she’d met Officer Nolan but was afraid to admit how, even a year and a half later.

  The lineup of students from other schools stretched for blocks. Linda made fists inside her mittens to warm her fingers. Her toes were numb and her kerchief soaked with snow by the time she got into City Hall. She and Connie shuffled with the crowd down a slippery hallway and into a large room where a casket sat on a raised platform, guarded by two policemen standing at attention. The casket was closed.

  Connie whispered, “They don’t want us to see the bullet hole.”

  The only other dead person Linda had ever known was Grandmother Wise, who’d looked like a corpse months before she actually died. She’d lain “in repose” in a funeral home, but few had shown up to file past her.

  Richie said he didn’t believe in life after death; that you lived on only in somebody’s memory. As soon as the last person who ever knew you died, you would be gone for good. Linda made it a point to remember Grandmother Wise once in a while, even though she’d been cranky.

  Walking to Richie’s house after school the next day, Linda built the scene in her mind: a sickly looking woman breaks into the drugstore at night, looking for painkillers. A young police officer, acting on a tip that a runaway teenager is taking shelter in the store, catches the woman sneaking into the alley, her pocketbook full of pills. Little does he know she’s lifted her husband’s old police revolver out of the bedside table and concealed it in her coat. Gilda would arrive at the crime scene and know exactly where the bullet that killed the officer entered. The story needed some filling out, but it would give Richie a good start.

  A weary-eyed Mrs. Sulo answered the door but didn’t invite Linda in. She said Richie had gone to help out his grandma in Indiana because she’d cracked a rib. Linda wondered why Mrs. Sulo, a nurse, hadn’t gone instead, but it would’ve been impolite to ask.

  “How long will he be gone?”

  “Hard to tell.”

  “May I have the address? I’d like to write to him.”

  “That wouldn’t be a good idea,” Mrs. Sulo said and shut the door.

  Linda walked home on shaky legs, puzzled why Mrs. Sulo had treated her so rudely. She was more than a little hurt: would it have been too much trouble for Richie to say goodbye?

  MARCH 24, 1957. Pulling their coats tightly around them, Miranda and Doris sit on a stone bench before a statue of the Virgin, their backs to the gigantic wooden door Miranda once feared would lock her in forever. All about them, the fresh green of new life pokes through thawing ground. This part of spring is Miranda’s favorite: the ground soggy from the last of the melted snow, the air smelling of fermented leaves, the trees raising their arms to receive the rain.

  The pigeons that roost in St. Bernadette’s eaves do their jerky, head-bobbing dance on the gravel footpath fronting the bench. No matter how far away the birds fly, Sister Theodore said, they find their way home. From the time Miranda arrived at St. Bernadette’s the prospect of returning to the home she shared with James has sustained her. She knows now it will never be. Mother Alfreda informed her that the house was sold to pay for Cian’s keep and her own, offering it as another reason Miranda should consider convent life. Miranda’s tears and protests against the injustice of it had no effect. “Self-pity has never reversed a turn of events,” Mother Alfreda said.

  How easily all you’ve known can be taken away.

  Miranda hasn’t seen
Doris in a month. Minutes ago, they embraced awkwardly outside the visitors’ lounge. Doris didn’t offer her typically broad smile and Miranda held back from what: insecurity, hurt, anger? Sometimes her own feelings are beyond her ken. The bench’s damp cold bleeds through the dark brown coat she borrowed from the donation bin. Doris is dressed more warmly in gray trousers and a houndstooth coat but her face is pale as paper, her eyes small with fatigue. A slight breeze—a faerie wind, the Voice of James whispers—lifts the back of a red kerchief from her hair.

  She tells Miranda it happened on the Saturday before the visitors’ day she missed without explanation. She’s sorry she didn’t call; the pain was too new and tender. Miranda’s spine begins to soften and her resistance eases into compassion as what Doris relates unfolds like a scene in a novel. A watery-eyed Frank Dunn appears at the door just after midnight, Father Wolchek, the police chaplain, right behind him. Miranda recalls Officer Dunn at her own door nearly three years ago on that sweltering day, a damp shirt sticking to his back. Although she’s never met Father Wolchek, she puts Father Shandley’s face on him and garbs him in a priestly cassock.

  Doris grips Miranda’s arm, infusing it with a gentle current of energy. “All Frank could manage was my name,” she says. “Father Wolchek had to ask if they could come in. He asked me to take a seat. Told me Bill was shot interrupting a break-in.”

  Miranda feels a sharp pain in her chest. She’s aware of a siren on the street outside St. Bernadette’s as she sees Nolan’s legs collapse like a marionette’s, then the rest of him drop onto the pavement, the dark blue hat Doris has with her today tumbling off his head.

  “I got my coat so I could go wherever he was, take care of him.” Doris’s hands twist Nolan’s hat. “Frank found his voice, then. ‘He didn’t make it, Doris,’ he said.” She straightens her back and pastes on a plucky smile. “There, I’ve told you without crying. I couldn’t have, even a week ago. I couldn’t tell Bill’s folks or mine that night. Father Wolchek had to.”

  Miranda pictures Nolan on a gurney in the room he called the cooler and shudders.

  “Oh, sweetie, are you cold?” Doris asks. Her hands vigorously rub Miranda’s arms and shoulders through her coat. “Should we walk around?”

  Miranda quickly shakes her head, ashamed of concerning Doris at such a time but annoyed as well. She’s not some newly orphaned waif needing to be coddled. “May I?” she asks, reaching for the hat. She remembers Nolan balancing it on his knee the day she met him.

  “I brought it hoping you would.”

  Miranda runs her fingers over the gold braid encircling the brim, the gold feathery shapes on the stiff bill and the bronze eagle on the front. She closes her eyes and draws into the blindness all that her fingers have felt. She inhales deeply for a count of six, exhales for six. Repeats until her body feels light and her mind lifted up and free. She envisions the hat big enough to enter. The lining is cold and slippery, redolent with a gray smell of unwashed hair that pinches her nostrils. Fear and urgency reside within. Swirling colors and shapes behind her eyes give way to images. Her lungs tighten. “Two men running, one falling behind, out of breath.”

  “Is one Bill?”

  “I think not. Neither is tall enough.” Miranda hasn’t seen Nolan since he and Doris left her at St. Bernadette’s, but his height has stayed with her. “One has a gun. There’s a car. Three shots. Two wounds.” How tragically unnecessary it was. She opens her eyes when she hears Doris weeping. The images vanish.

  “Don’t stop,” Doris says. “I’m okay.” She smiles weakly. “Honestly, you’d think I’d be all cried out.”

  “I’ll not be seeing more right now,” Miranda says. At times this blind sight feels like a curse. It’s as though she’s behind heavy panes of warped glass. Did she just see what actually happened or only what Doris thinks happened? Miranda folds Doris’s hands into hers and fully absorbs the impact the news had on this woman she loves. She feels no personal loss at Nolan’s passing but is fond of Carolyn and wee Mickey. She senses the holes already opening in their hearts.

  “I can try another time if you’d like.”

  “I’d like,” Doris says.

  Doris has often praised Nolan as a devoted father. Miranda knows only the man who sent Nicholas away. She wouldn’t have wanted to be at the funeral even if Doris had invited her, but it wounds her sorely that Doris didn’t.

  DORIS’S MIND STEWED with emotions: awkwardness at having waited to tell Miranda about Bill’s death; guilt over not having been able to rescue Miranda and Cian—a guilt aged nearly two years and implacably linked to anger at Bill; and the grief, of course, the heartstopping grief. Waking up each morning still feeling the weight of him in her arms.

  Now this: Miranda hearing three shots and seeing two men besides Bill.

  Having Miranda at the funeral would have been a slap at Bill. Adopting her and Cian was out of the question while he was alive. Now, she dared imagine them living with her, away from the clutches of St. Bernadette’s—she’d come to see even the building as evil. She felt its eyes on their backs, sensed its jaws eager to seize and devour them both. Doris blamed St. Bernadette’s for Miranda’s disturbing ability to go into trances and see things others could not. She prayed every night for Miranda’s soul. To see the poor girl in that ratty coat with the missing buttons and those dreary black oxfords! Early on, Doris had borrowed money from her mother and bought the child an adorable fitted red wool coat with a black velvet collar, but it had ended up in some communal wardrobe. Doris was dying to get that trim figure into something spiffy, put some pale pink lipstick on her and enough face powder to smooth out the complexion that had lost its milky purity at St. Bernadette’s.

  She’d need to go to confession for coveting the girl’s share of the proceeds from the house sale, but Bill’s life insurance wouldn’t hold them for more than a year. She’d met with the mother superior and Miranda’s tutor this morning. Mother Alfreda said it was unlikely she’d release a child to a single parent.

  A single parent.

  The awful truth of those words.

  Sister Celine asked Mother Alfreda if an exception couldn’t be made; Doris was such a faithful visitor. A faint possibility, the reverend mother said, and only if Miranda returned once a month for religious guidance until ready to enter the convent. Mother Alfreda was worried that secular life would “extinguish the light” of Miranda’s soul. Sister Celine said experiencing life outside for a while would ensure that Miranda’s choice of a religious vocation was freely made. Doris had kept her tongue but was thinking that, once Miranda got a taste of outside, no way in blazes would she go back. She sensed a sad resignation in Mother Alfreda, who nodded finally and said Miranda would have to agree to it. If she did, Doris would petition the court for an advance on the girl’s trust fund. Thank the Blessed Virgin the department had covered Bill’s funeral.

  “Frank came up to me after we buried Bill, his eyes all red,” Doris told Miranda. “He was suffering terribly. He said, ‘It should have been me. My kids are grown.’ That touched me, sweetie.” She pulled a hanky from her coat pocket and wiped her eyes. “It made me feel good to know Frank held him as he died, honestly it did.” The walls of her throat closed up; she couldn’t stop her voice from going thin and shaky. “Since it couldn’t be me.”

  “Oh, look, I’ve made you cry,” she said as Miranda swiped at her eyes with a sleeve.

  Doris’s small living room had swelled that night with the police chief, the mayor, the editor of the Record, the doctor who’d pronounced Bill dead and the rescue squad volunteers who’d responded after hearing the radio call. She didn’t tell Miranda she’d tossed everybody out except Frank and Father Wolchek after the mayor said a guardian would have to be appointed for Carolyn and Mickey. The nerve of anyone deciding a child’s mother wasn’t guardian enough. Thinking about it enraged her all over again that Miranda had come so close to losing Cian.

  “How’s my little guy?” she asked now. “I miss
him something fierce.”

  Last summer St. Bernadette’s had begun allowing Doris to take the children off the grounds on visiting Sundays. She often brought Carolyn and Mickey along. Cian was a dreamy child, good-natured and affectionate. He called her Dori and gave her little wet kisses. She wanted to clasp him to her bosom every five minutes like some bambino-starved Italian grandmother. She hardly noticed anymore that his head was too small for his body. A sunhat she’d bought him when they went down the shore made him appear almost normal.

  “He made a spatter painting yesterday,” Miranda said. “Rubbed the toothbrush over the screen, then peered underneath quite seriously and said, ‘ooh, ooh,’ as the white paint came out on the gray construction paper Sister Cameron gave him.”

  “What was it like, his painting?”

  “Like what the pigeons have left us here, I’m thinking.”

  Doris laughed. The last time she saw Cian he’d hopped on one foot and counted to two for her. She was sure Carolyn had counted higher when she was three, but being bright wasn’t everything. What Doris saw was a child content with whatever the day brought. If that meant he was retarded, she could think of a worse fate. She suspected he’d be further ahead if he had spent the last two years in her care. And poor sweet Miranda, beset with calluses on her knees and visions she couldn’t explain. Doris would be forever atoning for abandoning those children. Why did Bill ask her to take care of them that day and then deliver their souls to an orphanage?

  She wanted to ask Miranda, Do you hate me? Instead, she said, “How would you feel about coming to live with me? You and Cian. I’ll get a job to support us. You can stay home with the kids. On weekends, we’ll take them all over the place. It’ll be great fun.”

  MIRANDA HAS ACHED for these words, imagined her heart thickening in gratitude. She wants to ask, Why now? She’s often wondered if, at Doris’s house two years ago, she did something so terrible that Doris would never bring her home again, not even for an hour. She studies the pigeons strutting around them, unable to spot two with exactly the same coloring. She admires them for not feeling they have to dress alike as jays, robins and nuns must do.