Lost Boy Lost Girl

“Can you think of a better way to get a good look at him?”

“Yes. From the other side of a one-way mirror. What if he wants to know my cousin’s name?”

“Your cousin’s name is Arnold Trueright.”

“Give me a break,” I said.

“Seriously. Arnold Trueright is my accountant and he lives at 304 Loblolly Road.”

Shaking my head, I took my foot off the brake and rolled up the long, curving driveway. Gradually, the house came into view. Half Manderley, half Bill Gates. The enormous round window looked like a well-tended blister.

I got out of the car, knowing that at least one camera, and probably two, were trained on me, and thought of “Ronnie” scrutinizing my image. It was a deeply uncomfortable moment. When I looked back at Tom Pasmore, he flipped his hand toward the front door. A team of horses could have fit through that thing. The flat gold button of the bell shone from the fluted center of the frame. I pushed it down and heard nothing. I pushed it again.

Without warning, the door swung open. I found myself looking into the bland face and intense, lively eyes of a large, black-haired man in a blue blazer, a white shirt, and khakis. His nice white smile and nearly snub nose made him appear friendly, harmless, eager to please. Professor Bellinger’s description to the police sketch artist had been as accurate as Sergeant Pohlhaus hoped it would be.

“Sir,” he said, and glanced quickly at Tom in the passenger seat, then back to me. Instantly, he noticed something in my face or eyes. “What? Do we know each other?”

“No,” I said, alarmed. “For a second I thought you looked familiar. I guess you kind of remind me of Robert Wagner twenty years ago.”

“I’m flattered,” he said. “Is there some way I can assist you gentlemen? I’m sure you rang my bell for a reason.”

“We got lost,” I said. “I’m trying to find my cousin’s house on Loblolly Road, but I keep driving around and around past the same houses.”

“What part of Loblolly Road?”

“Number 304.”

He hmmm ed. His eyes were full of light and amusement. My bowels felt cold and watery. “What’s your cousin’s name, by the way? Maybe I know him.”

“Arnold Trueright.”

“Arnold Trueright, the daredevil CPA. Right over on Loblolly, that’s correct.” He gave me excellent directions back the way we had come. Then he peered into the car and gave Tom a cheerful little wave. “Who’s your well- dressed friend? Another cousin?”

In my haste to get away from Ronald Lloyd-Jones’s chilling force field, I said something stupid. “Another accountant, actually.”

“Accountants don’t look like that. Your friend reminds me of someone . . . someone rather well known who lives in town, I can’t think of who it is. Name’s right on the tip of my . . .” Still smiling in Tom’s direction, he shook his head. His own folly amused him. “Never mind. Not important. Take care, now.”

“Absolutely,” I said, and moved away as quickly as I could without revealing my alarm.

Lloyd-Jones disappeared behind his fortress door before I got to the car.

“That was him,” I said. “That’s the son of a bitch who tried to pick up the boy in the park.”

“Sometimes,” Tom said, “I really am forced to admire my genius.”

While we were driving past Arnold Trueright’s beautiful imitation Victorian on Loblolly Road, Tom talked to Franz Pohlhaus on his cell phone. It was simple, he was saying. I’d been so convinced that the Michigan Street house had something to do with Mark’s disappearance that we looked up the property records and drove out to see what its owner looked like. What do you know, he looks just like the police sketch of the mysterious Ronnie! Sounded like good probable cause, didn’t Sergeant Pohlhaus agree?

Evidently, the sergeant did agree.

“Rich people don’t get arrested the way poor people do,” Tom said. “It’s going to take hours to get all their ducks in a row. They’ll get him in the end, however. They’ll come out with a search warrant and tear that house apart. Lloyd-Jones is going to be taken away in handcuffs. No matter how loudly his lawyer yells, he’s going to get arrested, booked, and charged with at least a couple of murders, depending on what and how much they find in his house. He will not get bail. Your Professor Bellinger will positively I.D. him as the man she saw in Sherman Park, and sooner or later, the police will uncover human remains. Just for people like him, I wish this state still had the death penalty. Nevertheless, thanks to you and me, Mr. Lloyd-Jones is going to spend the rest of his life alone in a cell. Unless he’s killed in prison, which is actually pretty likely.”

“I wish Mark were here to see this,” I said. “Boy. I feel like I could run a marathon, or jump over a building. What happens now?”

“Pohlhaus promised to keep me in the loop. He’ll call me after Lloyd-Jones gets processed through, and he’ll let me know if the search of his house turns up anything incriminating. From the look of the guy, they’ll find enough to indict him.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s so arrogant, that’s why. At the very least, I bet we’re going to find out that he’s obsessed with Joseph Kalendar. That’s why he bought that house on Michigan Street. And I bet somewhere in this house, in a closet, an attic room, something like that, he has a little shrine to Joseph Kalendar.”

He took in the expression on my face, leaned toward me, and patted my knee. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to make a stop downtown.”

All the way back to Eastern Shore Drive, I kept seeing Ronald Lloyd-Jones’s face in front of me. The impact he had made on me diminished hardly at all as the miles rolled by. He had smiled, he had called me “Sir” and probed my story. He had been completely accommodating and agreeable. He had frightened me very badly. For far too many people, a number at which I could not even guess, that amused, well-cared-for face had been the last thing they had seen. Ronald Lloyd-Jones had appointed himself the escort to the next world, and he loved his work. After having met him, I was even more grateful that Mark was elsewhere.

As proof or reassurance or something of the kind, he wonderfully showed himself to me while I drove Tom to his errand, which turned out to be picking up a Basque beret and a gray homburg hat at one of the few places in America where such things can still be found. Identifying a serial killer, buying two fancy hats, this was a real Tom Pasmore kind of day. We had just pulled up at the light on the corner of Orson and Jefferson streets, directly across from the little pocket park where on my first day back in Millhaven I had seen two boys who turned out to be Mark and Jimbo. At that moment, just before the light changed, there occurred the remarkable event I alluded to earlier, the one that has elevated my spirits from then to now.

Not looking at anything in particular but merely letting my gaze drift across the immediate surroundings, I happened to take in the large plate-glass window of a crowded Starbucks. Young people read newspapers at small tables or picked at the keyboards of their laptops. The first thing that caught my attention was the stunning combination of almost unearthly beauty and real richness and warmth of character shining forth in the face of a young woman at one of the window tables. No matter how long you live, said a voice in my head, you’ll never see anything more beautiful than that.

A kind of electrical tingle ran up my arms. A boy—a young man—was leaning across the table, saying something to the young woman. I noticed that the young man wore layered T-shirts like Mark’s before I saw that the young man was Mark. He turned his head to the window, to me, and in that half second, two things became radiantly clear: he seemed more adult than he had been, and he was blazingly happy.

It was a gift. Not the only one, but the first. Mark and his “Lucy Cleveland,” whose real name I knew, had exited their elsewhere long enough to display themselves before me in all the fullness of their new lives. After all, the elsewhere was right next door.

The light changed. The horns erupted and hallooed behind me, and I made myself accelerate slowly forward, toward the Pforzheimer and Grand Avenue. A big loop onto Prospect Avenue, then Eastern Shore Drive would bring us home. A share of that blazing joy resided in me now, and I thought it would be mine for eternity. It partook of eternity. What I had seen, that glory, burned in my memory. What I saw there and then, on