Lost Boy Lost Girl

“From what I’ve been hearing,” Tim said, “he must have been a great carpenter. I guess you must have liked him, since you hired him twice.”

“Liked him?” Omar Hillyard scowled. “No one can say I liked Mr. Joseph Kalendar.”

“But he spent a lot of time in your house.”

“His prices were low, and the man lived across the street. Otherwise, we would never have spoken to him, much less had him in our house.”

“Ah.” Tim gestured toward the drawings and paintings on the walls. “He objected to your situation.”

“He hated our situation. The man had religious objections to homosexuality, and no doubt other objections as well. But after he let us know what he thought, and said he was going to pray for us, it wasn’t much of a problem anymore. The problem was him. The problem was what he did.”

“Like what?”

“Joseph Kalendar made rooms feel smaller and darker than they were. He had that power. Just by being there. He removed all the extra air from wherever he was. When you were with him, you felt like you were carrying a tremendous weight. Of what, I can hardly say. Hostility. It was like a black cloud surrounded him. When you were with him, it surrounded you, too. You felt all that stifled anger and hostility and depression even when he was telling you that he would pray for you. I’ve often thought that’s what evil feels like. That the evil in him poisoned the atmosphere and made it awful to be around him.”

“I’ve heard of people like that,” Tim said. “But only in psychoanalytic case histories.”

“Of course you don’t feel it right away. At first, Kalendar seemed like an ordinary, taciturn sort of working man. You had to let him get entangled a bit with you before you got the full effect.”

“Imagine being in the family of a person like that,” Tim said.

“That’s why his wife’s disappearance never aroused much suspicion. We all thought she ran off to get away from him. And the boy wouldn’t have gone with her. He was Kalendar’s assistant in the carpentry business ever since he was old enough to pick up a hammer. Dropped out of school. Completely loyal to his father. That’s why Kalendar wound up taking him along on his excursions. Naturally, after Myra took off they could bring the bodies home, dispose of them in the furnace. That’s where they found what was left of the boy—in the furnace.”

“And here you were,” Tim said. “Living right across the street from him. Didn’t anything ever strike you as funny? Were you even suspicious? Even if you wouldn’t have gone to the police with your suspicions, didn’t you have some?”

“Kalendarstruck me as funny,” Hillyard said. “Are you kid-ding? After I knew he was crazy, everything he did seemed wrong to me.”

“You must have been here when he saved the two children from next door.”

“You did some homework, didn’t you? But it wasn’t next door to here, it was 3325, the house just up the street from him. A black family named Watkins lived in that house.”

“Did you see any of what happened?”

“Saw it all, more or less.”

“Just out of curiosity, did this happen before or after he added the strange extra room to his house and built that wall to hide it?”

“That’s a very good question,” Hillyard said. “He rescued the Watkins family only two days before he started working on that big wall at the back of his property. He must have added the room after he finished the wall.”

“How did you know about the extra room if you’ve never been in the house?”

Hillyard bristled.

“I mow the lawn over there once every couple of months, don’t I? Well, I used to, before I got laid up like this, and I’ll be doing it again, I can tell you that.”

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to imply anything.”

“What could you have implied?”

“Nothing,” Tim said, taken aback. “I don’t know. I just meant, I seemed to have annoyed you with an innocent question.” It occurred to him that Hillyard might have been one of the people who tried to burn down Kalendar’s house.

“George used to tell me I sometimes got touchy for no good reason, and I’m probably worse now than I was then. We were talking about Kalendar and the fire. Tell me, Mr. Underhill. You’re a writer. Doesn’t that episode strike you as a little out of character for the man I just described?”

“Wouldn’t a very religious man feel it his duty to rescue people from a burning building?”

“Kalendar hated the blacks,” Hillyard said. “He didn’t even think they were people. I had the feeling he’d have been just as happy if the whole Watkins family had burned to a crisp.”

“My brother told me he kept running back in, he was so determined to save them.”

Hillyard gazed at him, looking superior and self-satisfied, like a cat with a bird in its mouth. “Suppose I tell you what happened, and then see what you think.”

“All right,” Tim said.

“Kalendar was in his backyard when the fire broke out. The flames were mainly at the back of the house, and he had to run around and break down the front door. The whole thing fell down flat. In he charged. Even from my porch, I could hear him yelling, but I couldn’t make out the words. In two or three minutes, a long time in a burning house, he came out, carrying one of the Watkins children and holding the other one by the hand. The kids were screaming and wailing. He sure looked like a hero to me, and I couldn’t stand the sight of the man.

“I called the fire department as soon as I saw smoke, and I was just hoping the trucks would arrive to save Kalendar and the kids’ parents. He dropped the kids down on the front lawn and ran back in. Smoke was pouring out of the side windows, and through the living room window I could see the flames. Right away, he came outside, shoving Mr. and Mrs. Watkins ahead of him. Then he turned around and ran back in. He was yelling a name.”

“A name?”

“‘Lily! Lily!’”

“Who was Lily?”

Hillyard shrugged. “At that point, the fire trucks arrived, and a lot of firefighters ran into the house, and the hoses started up, and in a couple of minutes the firefighters were dragging Kalendar outside and congratulating him for saving the lives of four people. To me, he seemed awfully disoriented, like he wasn’t really sure why these people were being so nice to him. He got away as soon as he could. But the Ledger and the TV people got hold of the story anyway, and they pushed it as far as Kalendar would let them. A racial harmony story, a feel-good story. This was only a few months after the big riots in Chicago and Milwaukee, remember—1968, it was. Detroit, too. Black people burned down their own businesses. It was a hideous tragedy. You must remember it.”

“I was out of the country in 1968,” Tim said. “But you could hardly say that I escaped violence altogether.”

“Do tell.” Hillyard’s eyes went flat. “I went on a lot of marches in 1968. We were marching against racism and against war.”

“Mr. Hillyard, you and I were both unhappy with what was going on in Vietnam.”

“All right,” Hillyard said. Tim could tell things were not all right. Omar Hillyard still had all the noblest principles. If he’d had any medals, he had returned them to the government in 1968 or 1969. When he had marched, he’d held up a sign that read VETERANS AGAINST THE WAR. He couldn’t get over it. He was still pissed off by people like Tim Underhill, whom he thought had taken a great army and marched it into a swamp. People like Underhill had tampered with his pride, and he could not forgive them.

“If I hadn’t been drafted, I would have been marching right alongside you.”

“All right,” Hillyard said again, meaning This subject is now officially closed. “I was talking about Joseph Kalendar and the press. When he refused to cooperate with them, they called him a modest man, a hero who shunned the spotlight. A nice story, you know? But when the reporters began to ask around about the new hero, it fizzled out in a hurry. The world’s most antisocial man wasn’t about to invite reporters and photographers into his house. He put up that hideous wall, and we all thought it was to keep the snooping press out of his backyard. At the front of his house, at least he could see the bastards coming.”

“He couldn’t have been a hundred percent antisocial,” Tim said.

Mr. Hillyard’s expression changed to stubborn frustration. He reminded Tim of photographs of Somerset