Black House (Page 66)

"Let’s get you on your way home," Jack says, leaving his chair.

T.J. stands up and begins to move along the side of the table. "Oh! I just remembered!"

"What?"

"I saw feathers on the sidewalk."

The floor beneath Jack’s feet seems to roll left, then right, like the deck of a ship. He steadies himself by grasping the back of a chair. "Really." He takes care to compose himself before turning to the boy. "What do you mean, feathers?"

"Black ones. Big. They looked like they came off a crow. One was next to the bike, and the other was in the sneaker."

"That’s funny," says Jack, buying time until he ceases to reverberate from the unexpected appearance of feathers in his conversation with T. J. Renniker. That he should respond at all is ridiculous; that he should have felt, even for a second, that he was likely to faint is grotesque. T.J.’s feathers were real crow feathers on a real sidewalk. His were dream feathers, feathers from unreal robins, illusory as everything else in a dream. Jack tells himself a number of helpful things like this, and soon he does feel normal once again, but we should be aware that, for the rest of the night and much of the next day, the word feathers floats, surrounded by an aura as charged as an electrical storm, beneath and through his thoughts, now and then surfacing with the sizzling crackle of a lightning bolt.

"It’s weird," T.J. says. "Like, how did a feather get in his sneaker?"

"Maybe the wind blew it there," Jack says, conveniently ignoring the nonexistence of wind this day. Reassured by the stability of the floor, he waves T.J. into the hallway, then follows him out.

Ebbie Wexler pushes himself off the wall and stamps up alongside Bobby Dulac. Still in character, Bobby might have been carved from a block of marble. Ronnie Metzger sidles away. "We can send these boys home," Jack says. "They’ve done their duty."

"T.J., what did you say?" Ebbie asks, glowering.

"He made it clear that you know nothing about your friend’s disappearance," Jack says.

Ebbie relaxes, though not without distributing scowls all around. The final and most malignant scowl is for Jack, who raises his eyebrows. "I didn’t cry," Ebbie says. "I was scared, but I didn’t cry."

"You were scared, all right," Jack says. "Next time, don’t lie to me. You had your chance to help the police, and you blew it."

Ebbie struggles with this notion and succeeds, at least partially, in absorbing it. "Okay, but I wasn’t really flippin’ at you. It was the stupid music."

"I hated it, too. The guy who was with me insisted on playing it. You know who he was?"

In the face of Ebbie’s suspicious glower, Jack says, "George Rathbun."

It is like saying "Superman," or "Arnold Schwarzenegger"; Ebbie’s suspicion evaporates, and his face transforms. Innocent wonder fills his small, close-set eyes. "You know George Rathbun?"

"He’s one of my best friends," Jack says, not adding that most of his other best friends are, in a sense, also George Rathbun.

"Cool," Ebbie says.

In the background, T.J. and Ronnie echo, "Cool."

"George is pretty cool," Jack says. "I’ll tell him you said that. Let’s go downstairs and get you kids on your bikes."

Still wrapped in the glory of having gazed upon the great, the tremendous George Rathbun, the boys mount their bicycles, pedal away down Sumner Street, and swerve off onto Second. Bobby Dulac says, "That was a good trick, what you said about George Rathbun. Sent them away happy."

"It wasn’t a trick."

So startled that he jostles back into the station house side by side with Jack, Bobby says, "George Rathbun is a friend of yours?"

"Yep," Jack says. "And sometimes, he can be a real pain in the ass."

Dale and Fred Marshall look up as Jack enters the office, Dale with a cautious expectancy, Fred Marshall with what Jack sees, heartbreakingly, as hope.

"Well?" Dale says.

( feathers)

"You were right, they were hiding something, but it isn’t much."

Fred Marshall slumps against the back of his chair, letting some of his belief in a future hope leak out of him like air from a punctured tire.

"Not long after they got to the 7-Eleven, the Wexler boy sent T.J. down the street to look for your son," Jack says. "When T.J. got to Queen Street, he saw the bike and the sneaker lying on the sidewalk. Of course, they all thought of the Fisherman. Ebbie Wexler figured they might get blamed for leaving him behind, and he came up with the story you heard — that Tyler left them, instead of the other way around."

"If you saw all four boys around ten past eight, that means Tyler disappeared only a few minutes later. What does this guy do, lurk in hedges?"

"Maybe he does exactly that," Jack says. "Did you have people check out that hedge?"

( feathers)

"The staties went over it, through it, and under it. Leaves and dirt, that’s what they came up with."

As if driving a spike with his hand, Fred Marshall bangs his fist down onto the desk. "My son was gone for four hours before anyone noticed his bike. Now it’s almost seven-thirty! He’s been missing for most of the day! I shouldn’t be sitting here, I should be driving around, looking for him."

"Everybody is looking for your son, Fred," Dale says. "My guys, the staties, even the FBI."

"I have no faith in them," Fred says. "They haven’t found Irma Freneau, have they? Why should they find my son? As far as I can see, I’ve got one chance here." When he looks at Jack, emotion turns his eyes into lamps. "That chance is you, Lieutenant. Will you help me?"