Beyond Recognition

“The sixty bucks. Cash or check?”

“Honey, do I look like I’d take a check? Gimme a little credit here.”

Daphne’s hope for a quick and easy solution slipped away. So did her hope that this woman would soften for very long. Then a second thought occurred to her. “The car. His car.”

“A truck.”

“His truck,” Daphne corrected. “Description?”

“Light blue. Old model. Maybe ten years old. White camper shell, not in good condition.”

“The dates?”

“October second the first time. I checked the papers on the third. Nothing much had happened. No fire,” she emphasized.

The Enwright fire had occurred September tenth; Heifitz, October fourth. “The second? You’re sure?” He might have set the accelerant for a future fire, she thought.

“Positive. And then again just-” She caught herself.

“When?” Daphne shouted.

“This last weekend,” Emily answered. “Saturday.”

Daphne’s pounding heart occupied her chest painfully. The timing seemed off-too rushed-unless October second had accounted for Heifitz. In which case, what was the significance of the weekend just past, another victim yet to come?

Daphne said, “We need to talk to this man with the burned hand. We need your help.”

“You could have just offered me the scratch. We’d been jake. I’d have told you what I knew. But now … this. I don’t like this. I don’t like the way you do business.”

“You helped us before,” Daphne reminded. “Was that the Power, or was that smoke and mirrors?”

“You remember that?”

“We credit you on the case report.”

“People talk when they’re in that chair. What can I tell you? They open up. And you know why?” she asked, shoving Daphne back and away to create some space between them. “Because they want to believe. They don’t believe in much anymore, but they’ll believe in me because they want to. They open up to me.”

Daphne understood. The detectives she saw as clients were no different. Solid at first, tight, unwilling to share. And then little by little she convinced them to believe in her, and suddenly the dam unleashed and they were spewing intimacies about impotency, suicide wishes, abusing their children, stealing from their day job. An endless laundry list of failures, both personal and private, and all because they discovered a sanctuary, a person willing to listen without judgment-they believed. Daphne realized that she and this woman before her were not so very different. The thought troubled her. “I need everything you have on the man with the burned hand.”

“Why should I?”

“Two hundred dollars in your pocket, and I walk away.”

“You-people like you-never just walk away. You’ll be back. That’s the thing about you.”

“Will he?” Daphne asked hurriedly, hopeful. “The man with the hand? Be back, that is?” Her heart pounded strongly in her chest-the possibility had not occurred to her-but people who believed in such things returned for more.

Emily met her eyes and nodded slowly. “Probably,” she said reluctantly. She nodded more strongly. “Yes, I’d say he will be back.” And then she added caustically, “But, honey, that one’s going to cost you people. That one’s gonna cost big.”

19

Living in Seattle had taught Ben about rain, the way living in Alaska teaches one about snow. There was mist and spray and teardrops and pearls, curtains, sheets, and waterfalls. On that day it began as a mist, light and delicate like the soft spritz at the end of a spray bottle. It changed the way the air smelled, from metallic and oily to fresh and clean. Exciting. It evolved quickly through wind-driven spray to teardrops, a pelting and unforgiving rain that drummed loudly on fall’s colorful leaves. The sidewalk before him became peppered with black teardrops, then consumed by them, transformed into a dark mirror reflecting Ben’s footfalls.

He suddenly felt as if someone were watching him, and he wondered if it was guilt or reality. But then the sensation sharpened into the same invasive feeling as when Jack stared at him from the chair in front of the television, stared as if looking right through him.

Ben didn’t want to look, didn’t want to know the truth. His ears remained alert, his heart pounding, his palms suddenly damp, a lump growing in his throat. His scalp itched. He was afraid.

The urge to look back, to assess his situation, pulled at him like a kind of gravity. He wanted out of this feeling.

He ran. He couldn’t simply walk. He looked forward, not back-never look back is what Emily had told him. He tore through the veil of pouring rain like a bat through the darkness of night.

Guilt soaked through him like the rain on his shoulders. Payment for his crime. He picked up his speed. Seen by others, he would be thought to be attempting to outrun the rain, though it was impossible, just as it was impossible to outrun that guilt from which he wished so desperately to distance himself. He crossed at a red pedestrian light, unaware; unable to face the reality of his theft. His legs grew leaden, his heart heavy. He could not live with himself. He wanted to be good; he wanted Emily to like him, to want him. He didn’t want to tell her, and yet he felt driven to do so.

When Ben arrived at the purple house, Emily saw the worry in his eyes, or perhaps she read his mind, he thought, and she immediately led him around back to the small porch overlooking the equally small back garden, so carefully cared for. Ben needed that same kind of care and attention.

Rain splashed only inches from them, and the wind swirled, filled with its fragrance. Emily’s skirt danced against her calves, and she absentmindedly swatted at it, like a horse’s tail after flies.

“So, young man, you have something to tell me.”

He would never understand her completely, though he longed to be given the chance. “The world is such a huge place,” he began, avoiding any mention of what was really on his mind. “So many people going so many places, doing so many things. I don’t see how I’m supposed to fit in. Where I belong.”

She wrapped a warm arm around him. It was all he lived for. How would she react if he told her what he had done? “You know, you have an advantage in life, Ben,” she said, confusing him. “You’ve grown up quicker than most people. No, I mean it,” she said, answering his expression. “You think things that even some adults never get around to. But the point is, the world is a good place, despite the way it looks sometimes. Life is good, despite the way it feels sometimes. Where you are right now, your age, the best thing to do is enjoy it as much as you can. I know that’s not always easy. Don’t think about it too much. Just kinda let life happen around you, you know? Basically, I think what you’ll find is that things pretty much work out if you let them, if you don’t get in their way. If you think good thoughts. If you do good things.”

His throat tightened, his eyes stung, and he felt himself begin to shudder and then cry. She consoled him with another squeeze of her arm, but it made him feel even worse, and he struggled to be free of her, leaning away.

“Ben?”

“I’m not good.”

“Sure you are. Of course you are.”

“I’m not.”

“You mustn’t let Jack do this to you, Ben.”

He shook his head, the tears falling all the harder, tears like the rain falling only a few yards away. How easy it would have been to allow her to believe it all Jack Santori’s fault. How simple and convenient. “It’s not that,” he squeaked out.

“Your mother,” she whispered.

He shook his head again. His memory of his mother was only a face, a smell, a smooth hand rubbing his back or tousling his hair. His mother was something, someone, too long ago to remember. “If I lost my wallet in his