‘Got a problem with that. No name on the birth certificate.’
‘Huh?’
‘The lady clerk I talked to said it wasn’t all that unusual. The certificate’s filed on the date of birth, and some parents just don’t have a name ready. Unless they call it in after they decide, it just stays blank. But the name of the hospital was there, and they gave me the name of the family doctor.’
‘You talk to him?’ Bonar asked.
Halloran shook his head.
‘Don’t tell me. He’s dead.’
‘Alive and golfing. His wife said she’d have him call back tonight.’
Bonar nodded, looked out the window again. ‘So we’re on our way.’
‘Maybe. You want to catch a bite before the doc calls? I gave his wife my cell number so we could get out of here.’
Bonar turned and looked at him, a tired, massive silhouette blocking the last of the day’s light from the window. ‘I’ll meet you at your place. I’ve got to stop at the grocery first.’
‘We can go to the cafe.’
‘It’s the twenty-fourth, Mike.’
‘I know that . . . ‘Halloran started to say, and then stopped abruptly. ‘Oh, shit. Bonar, I totally forgot. I’m sorry, man.’
‘No sweat.’ Bonar had a sad, silly grin that forgave everything. ‘We’re getting too many October dead people, you know that?’
‘That is the truth.’
But you shouldn’t have forgotten
Technically, Bonar was a bachelor, but in all the ways that mattered, he’d been widowed since the October blizzard of ’87, when his high-school sweetheart had gone off the road and buried the nose of her father’s pickup in Haggerty’s swamp. Thirty-seven inches of snow had fallen over the next forty-eight hours, but the road past Haggerty’s was seldom traveled, so it was four days before the county snowplow finally got to it and found the frozen, unpretty remains of Ellen Hendricks.
She hadn’t died right away, and that had been the worst of it, since she used the time to write Bonar a letter that wound all around the borders of a Standard Oil road map of Wisconsin. She’d been hurting, and she’d been cold, but there was no fear in that letter, just a dead certainty that Bonar would find her. She talked about their upcoming wedding, the three kids they were going to have, the two-seater Thunderbird that Bonar absolutely positively had to trade in because there was no room for children, and toward the end, when the pencil lines were starting to waver, she scolded him gently for taking so long.
She wrote her last words on October twenty-fourth, and every year since Halloran and Bonar had spent that evening together, eating, drinking, and not talking about things that might have been. The tradition had become more a part of their friendship than a conscious tribute to a girl who had died a long time ago, but in some way they never tried to understand, the date remained important. He shouldn’t have forgotten it.
‘Yeah, well, you shouldn’t have forgotten the Kleinfeldts’ goddamned keys, either,’ he said aloud, and then he banged on the steering wheel until the side of his hand hurt.
Hundred-year-old elms shaded the single acre that remained of his great-grandfather’s farm. He’d kept up the house and yard, but the old Dutch Colonial looked like an interloper in this new subdivision of tacky ramblers and split-levels. The house was much too large for a man living alone, but four generations of Hallorans had been raised in it, and he couldn’t make himself let it go.
He got out of the car and walked across the lawn to the front door, tugging the open flaps of his jacket closed. The wind had picked up since he’d left the sheriff’s office just a few moments before, and dried leaves skittered and swirled away from his boots, heading for Florida if they had any sense. You could almost smell the coming winter, and Halloran remembered Danny’s prediction of an early snow yesterday, while he had been driving the young deputy to his death.
He walked into the small entryway and heard his snowy childhood boots hitting the floor, and then his mother’s voice, silent for ten years now, reminding him to close the door, what did he think he was doing? Trying to heat the whole outdoors? In a gesture of defiance a decade too late, he left the door ajar for Bonar, wondering why most of his memories were of winter, as if he’d lived thirty-three years in a place with no other season.
He hung his heavy jacket in the front closet, then placed his belt clip and gun on the shelf above.
‘How dumb is this?’ Bonar had asked the first time he’d seen him do it. ‘I’m a drug-crazed burglar, okay? And here you go, leaving your piece right here in the front closet so I can pick it up on my way in and shoot you in the gut when you come stumbling down the stairs in your skivvies.’
But Emma Halloran would never permit firearms beyond the entryway of her house. Not her husband’s fifty- year-old Winchester, and certainly not her son’s department-issue 9mm. Ten years she’d been in the ground, and Halloran still couldn’t make himself walk past that front closet wearing his gun.
There was a bottle of Dewar’s in the refrigerator, a criminal offense according to Bonar, but Halloran liked it cold.
He poured healthy shots in two glasses that had once held grape jelly, then sipped out of one as he examined the contents of the freezer. He pushed aside a stack of frozen dinners and found treasure in a rectangle of butcher paper covered with frost.
‘Honey, I’m home!’ Bonar called from the front door, slamming it hard behind him. He stomped down the hall into the kitchen and dropped two grocery bags on the counter. Halloran looked skeptically at the greenery poking out of the top.
‘You brought flowers?’
‘That’s romaine lettuce, you numbnuts. You got anchovies?’
‘Are you crazy?’
‘That’s what I thought.’ Bonar started unloading the bags. ‘Never fear. Got the anchovies, got the garlic, got a sad and limp bunch of green beans here that are going to need life support . . . ’
‘I got Ralph.’
Bonar sucked in a breath and looked at him. Ralph had been the last Angus Albert Swenson had raised before he sold his farm and moved to Arizona. They’d bought the young steer together, feeding him out on corn and beer for the last two months of its life. ‘I thought we polished him off last time.’
Halloran nodded toward the white package in the sink, then handed Bonar his Dewar’s in a jelly jar. ‘I saved the tenderloin.’
‘Praise Jesus.’ Bonar clinked his glass, downed his shot, and winced. ‘Man, how many times I gotta tell you? Cold mutes the flavor. You can’t keep this stuff in the fridge, and you sure as hell shouldn’t be drinking it out of old jars with cartoons all over them. Who is this? The Martian?’
Halloran peered at the dark figure on his friend’s glass. A lot of the paint had worn away over the years, but part of the helmet was still identifiable. ‘Damn. I wanted the Martian.’
Bonar snorted as he refilled his glass, then started to rub a clove of garlic around a wooden bowl Halloran had always thought was supposed to hold fruit. ‘Nuke Ralph on defrost for about three minutes, turn the oven as high as it will go, and get me out that big cast-iron skillet.’
‘I thought we’d just grill him outside.’
‘Well, you were wrong. We’re going to sear him on high heat and then finish him in the oven. Then I’ll add wine to the skillet drippings, reduce it to a glaze, throw in some morel mushrooms, and voila.’
Halloran rummaged in the silverware drawer for steak knives. ‘You’re kidding, right?’
‘Of course I’m kidding. You ever try to buy morels at Jerry’s Super Valu?’
‘In the old days you would have stuck this thing on a stick and held it over a blowtorch. I wish you’d quit watching that cooking channel.’
‘Can’t help it. Those guys are the twenty-first-century clowns. Like Gallagher without the watermelon, remember him?’
‘The guy with a sledgehammer.’
‘He’s the one. God, I loved that guy. Is he dead?’
