we began. You've got a lot of gray in your hair. You're young to be having a mid-life crisis, but rest assured I know something about that.' Burke spoke with a clipped, rushed speech. Very tight but very carefully enunciated. 'Still, let me ask, don't you think it's simply a waste of time?'
Crease didn't know how to answer. Burke didn't wait for one though, and merely stepped past him into the living room.
'No,' Crease said to the man's back.
'Of course it is. You're just having some other crisis of life or faith, and you thought coming back here would be the way to resolve everything. You're on a grand search, a journey of conscience. Perhaps you've left a wife home wherever it is you now come from. Yes? Perhaps children. An irritated employer, a job half done. You've dug yourself a hole, you're walking a wire in high wind, would you say? And all these things will be set right if only you can solve the case that smashed your father's career and ruined his life. Do you really expect to clean the blood off his hands at this late date?'
The guy was sharp all right. You couldn't sell him short just because he had his collar buttoned and his windows stuck shut.
'Not everything will be straightened out,' Crease said. 'But it's a loose end that I want to try to tie up.'
He knew it was the wrong thing to say the moment it was out of his mouth.
Burke sat on the center cushion of the couch, crossed his legs and said, 'Well, how touching. Is that how you see it? What happened to my daughter? The greed that spurred your father?' Maybe the man was inoculated, safe behind his austere wall. 'I don't consider her murder a 'loose end' at all. Nothing dangling there, you see. Quite the opposite. Her death severed all ties. That's what death does. There's no point in dredging that all up. Digging up the dead. It's been so long. You not only look like your father, you act like him as well. Are you a police officer?'
Christ, Burke was on the ball. All this time in the house alone, thinking, it really exercised his gray matter. 'Yes.'
'Are you a good one?'
'Depends on who you ask.'
'I'm asking you.'
He hadn't thought about it for a while and wondered how Burke had managed to take control of the conversation the way he had. Crease had come here to ask questions, and in about two minutes flat Burke had him pinned beneath glass. Maybe he owed the man an answer, maybe not, but something about the house, and Burke's controlled energy and direct way of speaking, the way he peeled Crease apart with his gaze, made Crease feel like he should give it a shot.
'I'm effective because I spend my time down in the mud with the guys I'm trying to stop. I'm good at my job but that just means I'm rotten at everything else. You understand that?'
'It sounds as if you're striving for nobility.'
'If that's what you heard then you're mistaken.' And he was. Burke was burned up with a fever of his own. 'Perhaps,' Burke said. 'In any case, I think you should let the dead rest.'
He was surprised to hear Burke speaking like that, no matter how far down the man had gone to get away from his pain. Crease felt his father's presence all the time, often very strongly, and thought Burke would never be able to let his murdered daughter go, not even if he wanted to. Especially when you lived in the same house where she'd lived, from where she'd been stolen.
'Is that what they're doing? Is Mary at rest?'
'Are you prodding me?'
'Would you want me to?'
Crease finally decided to sit in a chair opposite Burke. The cushion made a heavy rasping noise. No one had sat here for a hell of a long time. The sound took on a whole new meaning in the silent house.
'Mrs. Burke?' Crease asked.
'My wife no longer resides with me. To be truthful, I don't know where she is, it's been some years since I've seen her. Perhaps with her sister in Terrytown, Connecticut. Or… elsewhere. I have no idea.'
It wasn't the kind of thing you could say you were sorry about, but there was no point. Crease looked around and couldn't help thinking about security. No burglar alarm. No lock on the front screen door. No deadbolt. A good second-story man could get up onto the roof, and the screens could easily be popped out of the window frames. Just like he used to do when climbing up to Reb's room.
He lit a cigarette-still only had the menthols on him, he had to get to a store soon-and was surprised when Burke didn't show any upset about smoking in the house.
Crease leaned forward and pulled a shining glass ashtray close to him.
He said, 'Tell me what happened.'
'What's the point?'
'Maybe there is none. But explain it to me anyway. Give me the details.'
'Don't you already know them?'
All that Crease knew about Mary's kidnapping, and everything that followed, was mired in memories of his own shame and urge to run. He had to start over, disconnect from it, get it clear. 'Not in the broader sense.'
'How broad a sense do you want them?'
Crease sat back, took a deep drag, and said, 'How about if you quit running me around the block and just tell me what happened the day Mary was taken?'
The voice got a rise out of Sam Burke, who raised his chin an extra inch like he was expecting to get jabbed. He folded his hands over his knee and focused himself, going way deep inside. Crease could see him diving.
'This isn't about my little girl. This is about you and your father. That's the only reason you're interested. For your own selfish reasons. '
'So what?' Crease said. 'Maybe I can get done what the others were never able to do.'
'I don't see how.'
'You don't have to see how.'
'Your father killed her.'
'I know that.'
Sam Burke sat waiting for more. It was going to be a long wait. Crease had never apologized for his old man and wasn't about to start now. Saying you were sorry for somebody else, ten years dead, just wasn't going to get the job done.
Crease wondered if Burke would get some kind of a kick out of hearing how he went to the mill and ran around pointing his finger and going bang bang, pretending to be his father, imagining the girl right there in front of him. Probably not.
'You've got nothing to lose,' Crease said.
'Don't I? Are you quite so sure of that? Because you shouldn't be, no, you truly shouldn't be, I would say. Every time I see her photo, every mention of her name, the name `Mary', I lose myself. Can you understand that? Can you possibly know what I mean? I disappear, I cease to exist for an instant. I go someplace where my girl is still with me, where she is looking up into my eyes, and holding my hand, and my wife is not in Terrytown or elsewhere. I vanish off the earth. And then I come back, you see. There's the trouble. That I come back. And yes, she's still dead, and I am alone, and the things that once mattered most can matter no longer. So I say to you, I do have something to lose, and it will be very costly to me to lose any more of it.'
So that's how it was for him. Crease got it now.
He'd been wrong. Burke didn't have nearly as much control over himself as he did over his environment. The man was ready to shake loose at any second. He didn't want to say anything more, but his mouth wouldn't stop working. You could tell it panicked him, but it had been so long since he'd spoken about Mary that he couldn't turn it off.
'You know what she enjoyed doing more than anything else? Playing hide-and-seek. It was more than a child's game, you see. This house is over one hundred and twenty years old. There are many nooks and niches in it, places for a little girl to hide herself away from the world. She would grab something from us-my watch, her mother's gloves or some kitchen utensil, and she would run. She would hide. A girl who likes to hide so much came out into the open and was stolen from our own yard. Yes, that's what happened. Appalling. She stepped into the open and was shot down by the sheriff whose duty it was to get her home safely again. Don't you find that
