Somewhere Over Lorain Road, page 8
Don’s mother said to Mrs. Hartner, “Would it help Johnny to eat if I cut up the meat into smaller pieces?” The boy never stopped contorting.
Mrs. Hartner said, “Oh, no, thank you, Mrs. Esker. He can only swallow soft foods.”
“That’s right!” Mr. Hartner replied. “He’s had his mashed peas and potatoes already. He’s just restless because he knows his mother’s famous blueberry custard pie is coming up next! Isn’t that right, son?” His eyes shining with love, he tickled Johnny with two fingers and the boy erupted with guttural sounds that horrified Don until he recognized the noise as unrestrained laughter.
“Can I hold Johnny?” Don asked.
His family was astonished, and the Hartner girls amazed, but Mrs. Hartner smiled with gratitude and delight. “You sure you can handle him? As you can see, he’s quite a handful.”
“Yes, I think I can. Can I try?”
“Don, maybe that’s not such a good idea,” his mother said.
“Oh, it’s perfectly all right,” Mr. Hartner said. “Evie, let the boy hold him.”
She plunked Johnny into Don’s lap and the boy screamed with joy, reaching up to tug at Don’s hair.
Don remembered being afraid of Johnny, but now he wondered why. The boy radiated happiness, bright with the thrill of life. Johnny recognized Don’s smile as friendly, and he squealed and gnashed his mouth with bliss.
As soon as Mom started to slice the pie, Johnny forgot all about Don and reached for his mother. He held still just long enough for Mrs. Hartner to put small pieces into his mouth.
The pie was delicious, tart and sweet and creamy, and everyone said they loved it. The Hartner girls rarely spoke, casting resentful looks at their brother.
At around eight o’clock, the Hartners insisted they’d overstayed their welcome, and although Don’s mom offered polite resistance, they made their way to the front door. Effusive thanks from both families filled the living room, and the Hartners left, trailing the blessings of Jesus.
A stunned silence descended, and when the Hartners’ shadows moved across the street, Tim said, “What a freak!”
Rich and Randy and even Dad broke up laughing, but Mom scolded them. “They were very kind to come here and offer support. And that pie truly was exceptional.”
But Tim didn’t let up, mocking Mr. Hartner’s prayers and effusions about everything. “Remember when he said he loved our table salt?” he asked, and everyone broke up laughing again.
Mom said, “You just wait and see. That may be the last show of support we get for a while.”
Even though Don suspected she was right, he couldn’t help but laugh along to Tim’s perfect impressions of Mr. Hartner. Mom finally gave up.
The next morning, Jeffrey Talent’s frantic parents, who lived just up the street and around the corner, reported he wasn’t in his bedroom. Rain had been predicted overnight, so at about nine o’clock he’d gone outside to get his Cleveland Browns cap and they assumed he’d returned, but his bed hadn’t been slept in.
Don’s family was glued to the six o’clock news. Jeffrey’s parents stood in the front yard of a house Don recognized immediately since he’d ridden his bike past it a thousand times.
“He wouldn’t have gone off with a stranger,” his mother said tearfully, and the father said, “He must have known whoever it was. And we don’t care who it was. We just want our boy back safely.”
Earlier that day, the police informed Dad his alibi cleared him of suspicion in Danny Miller’s murder, and Dad was home when Jeffrey Talent vanished. Don felt a desperate hope life would return to normal.
In the following days, Don learned logic and reason are pitiful weaklings against rage and fear. Everyone in the family talked of the sharp looks of hatred they encountered, the deliberate turns of the head, the phone calls where people whispered the most hateful things. The ringing phone became such a source of dread that Mom unplugged it, despite Tim’s promise to be the only one to answer.
On the second morning after Jeffrey’s disappearance, the groundskeeper at the Golden Tee Miniature Golf and Ice Cream stand noted some trash along with a fleshy bunch of something at the edge of a wood between the course and the neighboring Assemblies of God church. He walked over with a trash pail to collect it, and the smell hit him at the same moment he noticed it was a small hand.
Late that afternoon, with Dad and his brothers off fishing, Don and his mother sat alone inside the house. He hated fishing and had curled up with the book When Worlds Collide, a science fiction story that he found mesmerizing, even though it was written in the 1930s and the science was sometimes laughably outdated. It was an end-of-the-world epic, a thrilling depiction of society spinning out of control as doom approached from space.
He was on the sofa in the living room when he heard a frantic pattering of feet cross the porch. In seconds, someone banged on the door, screaming: “Mrs. Esker! Mrs. Esker!” He recognized Mrs. Hartner’s voice and Johnny’s terrified howls.
Mom was in the kitchen drinking coffee and reading the afternoon newspaper. She cried out and raced for the door. Don stood with his hands to his mouth, and the book dropped with a thud.
Mrs. Hartner looked frantic, and Johnny wriggled and wormed, tears streaming down his face. “Mrs. Esker, I need you to come right away! Please. It’s urgent!”
“What is it?” she asked, breathless from her dash, a hand to her chest.
“It’s the police. They’ve taken Mr. Hartner to the station for questioning, and now they’re searching our house.” She started to cry and forced out the next words between gulps of air, spit flying. “I told them we were here the night that boy disappeared. You saw us.”
Mom’s face hardened with resolve. “Yes, of course I’ll come. You were here until eight o’clock.”
“No! No!” Mrs. Hartner screamed, grabbing Mom’s arm for a second before returning to deal with her son. “You have to say we were here until after nine. That’s when that boy disappeared.”
Mom’s mouth moved silently, like a fish in a tank.
“Mr. Hartner wouldn’t hurt a soul, not a soul.” She pulled her son’s fist from her face. “He once spent an hour chasing a rat around the house until he got it outside. He could have killed it with one whack from a baseball bat, but he loves all of God’s creatures. Please come with me. Now!”
Her face uncertain, Mom ordered Don to stay indoors and followed the hysterical woman.
Don couldn’t stay inside. He stood on the porch and watched the scene unfolding at the old farmhouse. The driveway was no more than a dirt patch, so the police cruisers, their lights flashing, piled up in the road. Officers directed traffic away to side streets.
He could easily imagine the scene inside that house: the girls crying on a sofa, the mother whirling while holding her son, pleading with stony-faced officers to tell her something, anything, and his own mother adding her voice to Mrs. Hartner’s, her face conflicted with worry because she’d been asked to lie.
Soon the ghoulish, hateful gossips who lived up and down the road started to gather. Some spotted him but quickly looked away. A small crowd assembled, and Don hated them for their need to watch the destruction of another family. He felt he had a right to watch, that he knew the truth about police searches, that it didn’t have to mean anything other than the police were under pressure to stop the killings of little boys. That’s all this was. Mr. Hartner was not a killer.
“This is bullshit!” he screamed, but he was too far away and nobody heard.
He stormed back inside and sat up against the couch, shoving the book out of the way. He cradled his knees in his arms and waited for Mom to return. He thought of Johnny’s tearstained, frightened face and wept. Now he knew what it meant to weep bitter tears, the kind that burn your cheeks because they are hot with the rage of injustice.
It seemed to take hours for Mom to return, but it probably wasn’t that long. They shared a silent look. With a sigh, she sat in the chair across from the sofa. After a while, she said, “I told the police I wasn’t sure what time they left. It could have been nine o’clock, but I wasn’t sure.”
He didn’t reply.
“Then I told them that I was remembering more clearly, and that it was nine, that they had been here up until around nine.”
She gave him a strange look, and with a start Don realized his mother was seeking his opinion. She wanted her ten-year-old son to validate her decision to lie.
“He didn’t do it, Mom. Neither did Dad. It doesn’t matter if you lied.”
She nodded. “I think you’re right.”
Chapter Eleven
Don woke early on Sunday to work on the marketing memo, but his mind drifted away on choppy thoughts about criminal profiles and pointless memory searches for nights long forgotten. By dinnertime, he was only half as far on the memo as he’d planned. He’d have time later tonight and tomorrow morning to finish up.
His dad was adjusting to the fentanyl patch, and his mind was clearer, so when Tim and Sally and Randy arrived for dinner, they all gathered in his room to talk. They skipped from topic to topic until Dad said he was tired and was instantly asleep. They left the room as he started to snore.
Don couldn’t help but give Tim a few wondering looks. His brother had joined the Marine Corps days before his eighteenth birthday, dropping out of school. But that was long after the murders ended, which didn’t fit Hank Swoboda’s profile of a killer teen who had joined the military to continue murdering in faraway places.
They ate their mom’s delicious meatloaf and mashed potatoes. Don scolded himself for wondering if Tim, booming with laughter at Randy’s description of his skeevy new boss, was capable of such brutal crimes. What the hell was wrong with him? The paranoia ended years ago, he’d thought, but he realized it was much closer to the surface than he ever suspected. It was unsettling.
After dinner, Mom left to wash her hair.
Randy suggested, “Hey, why don’t we go see Rich?”
“I’m pretty tired,” Sally replied, plainly not liking the idea.
Randy said, “I’ll drive Tim home afterward.” Tim nodded with a downturned mouth. Fine with him.
“Will the gates be open at this hour?” Don asked.
“They don’t lock them anymore. They have surveillance cameras everywhere, so nobody’s going to fuck with anything. Come on, how long has it been since the three of us went to see him at the same time?”
Don wanted to object that he had work to do, but how could he? They piled into Randy’s car and set off. It was only a ten-minute drive.
A low, curving river-stone wall enclosed Memorial Park Cemetery. Randy drove slowly through the deserted, narrow lanes. High lamps spotted the ground with light, illuminating the nearby polished gravestones like small, precise rectangular ponds.
Randy stopped when they reached a circular shelter lined with benches where visitors could wait out rain, seek relief from the sun, or contemplate in silence. Many such structures sat about, each shaped differently, but Don never saw anybody inside one. Most people used them the way his family did, and what was probably their real function, as an easily recognizable landmark in identical rolling hills scattered with maples and firs and pines.
The weather was chilly, their breaths just visible as the most fleeting of ghosts. Nobody brought gloves, so they shoved their fists into their jacket pockets. The leaves on the ground were the first of the season, velvety and tender, and they made a silken rustle for the silent brotherly procession.
Even though Rich was buried away from the lights, they knew exactly where he was and Tim reached him first. He brushed the leaves from the gravestone and used his phone to reveal the words in a burst of light: Richard T. Esker, 1960–1976. Beloved Son and Brother. In smaller cursive script beneath, it read Always with us.
More and more, the year 1976 jolted Don. Rich had missed so much. Even the light from the small phone would have astounded him, let alone that the device allowed instant communication with the world.
They looked down in silence, and Don knew Tim and Randy were also remembering the Niagara Falls weekend, and the day they first gathered here, events so shocking and life shattering none of them would ever fully recover.
The cemetery workers had ruined this spot for Don, but he never told anyone the story. His brothers also didn’t know about Don’s last conversation with Rich.
“I always wonder what he’d be like today,” Tim said. “I think about it a lot.” Don and Randy muttered their agreement.
After a few moments, Randy said, “I don’t care what the police reports say. He was the last victim of that man.” Don and Tim nodded.
* * *
Don stayed up late into the night after visiting Rich and rose after only a few hours to help his dad, but he finished the memo and sent it off. It wasn’t his best work by far, but it was on time, and he figured he was entitled to one subpar performance.
Just as he sent the email, his mom walked into the kitchen, already dressed for the day. “Have you eaten?”
“I had some coffee and bananas.”
“Oh, that’s not enough. Let me fix you a real breakfast.”
“It’s okay, Mom. I have some errands.”
“Errands?” She looked at him like he was crazy. “What errands? We have enough groceries in this house to feed an army.”
He thought up a quick, innocent lie. “I want to get some records from St. Anne’s. My school records.”
Her confusion deepened. “Why?”
“One of my clients wants a full biographic profile. I don’t know why.” He smiled and held up his hands in a helpless gesture.
“Well, okay, but that seems silly. You’ve already proven yourself in your field. And nobody should be interested in your grade school records except your high school.”
It was almost nine, so he jumped in the shower, threw on some clothes, and was out the door inside of twenty minutes.
Hollyhock Elementary, a brick building low to the ground with a roof and eaves shaped like a secure square cap, looked identical to his recollection. Even the paint was the same deep brown. Each step forward took him farther back in time. When he reached the entrance, which matched his memory down to the smoked glass, Don would not have been surprised to hear a passing car blasting the Strawberry Alarm Clock or the Carpenters.
Like his brothers, he attended kindergarten here before moving on to St. Anne’s, but as he stepped inside, his memories ended. The layout and the noise confused him.
The hallways were empty, but a racket burst all around, with singing, laughing, recitations and the raised voices of teachers. It had an almost comforting smell of crayons, markers, and glue, along with a faint undercurrent of generic boiled vegetables and some sort of meat-flavored tomato sauce that was probably the combined odor of thousands of different cafeteria meals.
Behind a counter in the office sat a nicely dressed young woman tapping at a computer. As he entered, her eyes widened slightly with apprehension, and she pulled her hands up from the keyboard. Don suddenly realized that in modern America, where any mentally disturbed person can get as many firearms as they want, a stranger in the school was cause for alarm. He smiled pleasantly and moved no closer. The back-in-time feeling vanished utterly. This was the new America. Thank you, NRA, you twisted bastards, he thought.
“I’m really sorry to disturb you.” He clasped his hands to show he wasn’t holding anything. “I was a kindergarten student back here in 1971. I was hoping you could help me find someone.”
Her alarm faded, replaced by impatience. “We can’t release any information about former students. We don’t really have very much information anyway.”
“It’s a teacher I’m trying to locate. Or at least I think he was a teacher. He might have been a janitor or something else.” It sounded suspicious even to him. “His name was David Smith.”
“That’s a pretty common name.” Her voice was flat and unhelpful.
“I know, but he would have worked here in the early to mid seventies.” He thought up a quick lie: “He was a friend of my dad’s, who’s dying of cancer, and he said he’d like to get in touch with him before the end.” Using his father’s condition to gain her sympathy felt a bit sleazy, but he was only trying to help.
“Former employees don’t usually keep their contact information current.” Her voice had the barest hint of sarcasm. He imagined her retelling this story to friends with a full-on tone of exasperated disbelief: “So I told him, ‘Duh! How many former employees tell their old employers where they live?’” Her friends would be amused at how stupid people could be.
This had seemed like such a good idea, but it was utterly pointless. Even if an adult at Hollyhock Elementary committed the murders, what were the odds his name was David Smith and his dad knew he was the killer? Wouldn’t he have said so long ago? It was just a shot in the dark, and he realized it was useless.
“I’m sorry,” he said, turning to leave.
“Just a minute,” she replied, typing. “Let me just see if that name comes up.” She typed and clicked, and typed and clicked some more, but in the end shook her head. “I’m sorry. I can’t find any record of an employee of Hollyhock Elementary by that name.”
“Thanks for checking. Sorry to disturb you.” He left, keeping himself in her line of sight so she could see he was headed for the doors. Halfway there, an electronic chime sounded, and the school exploded with thousands of stomping feet, shouted conversations and doors slamming open. He broke into a trot and managed to exit just as swarms of students filled the hall.
As the grade school din faded, he berated himself for such a brain-dead plan. He didn’t know what he was doing. He had no clue how to investigate any crime, let alone one unsolved for more than forty years. There was no DNA, and the criminal profilers from the FBI couldn’t even settle on one suspect, for fuck’s sake. He was so desperate for some answers, he’d entertained, if only briefly, an insane thought about his brother. It was hopeless.
