Blood Always Tells

car at Newark Airport and headed east to a town called Huntington. It wasn’t hard to get the address; Brantov was an uncommon name. Desmond breathed a little easier as he got away from Manhattan, but the pastoral expanse of land he was hoping for didn’t materialize. From the Long Island Expressway, Queens was an assemblage of shopping malls and buildings and houses. If he caught sight of a patch of green, it was undoubtedly a cemetery. He’d never liked cities. Even though he claimed to live in Chicagoland, his small house in Hammond was in a quiet part of town that was a world away from where he’d grown up. He found it difficult and draining, being around people too much. Flying released him from the burden, but only while he was in the air. He was still smarting from what Trinity Lytton-Jones had said about his wife. You were divorced almost two years ago, just after you retired from the Army. Interesting timing. Easy split, no children. I suppose your wife wasn’t keen to have you at home. He’d gotten married while he was serving in Iraq, to a tawny-eyed nurse with a Georgia accent. Everything had been fine between them when he was on foreign soil and only coming home for short stretches of leave time. That had satisfied him, but he hadn’t understood how much more his wife had wanted.

It’s like I’m married to a stranger, she told him a month after he retired from the service. You have your life, and I’m just on the edge of it. You don’t talk to me about anything.

He’d tried to joke. We’re talking now, aren’t we?

No, we’re not. I’m trying to talk to you, but you’re running around every day finding ways to fill up your time. It’s like you don’t want to be with me, except in bed. I hoped everything would be different when you came home for good. I prayed it would be different. But you won’t let me in. I don’t know if it’s me, or if you won’t let anyone in. All I know is, I can’t stand it.

A month later, she’d filed for divorce.

When Desmond arrived in Huntington, he found the Brantov house quickly; it was the only house on Greenlawn Road with a rusted-out mailbox with no number on it. It also had a police car parked in the driveway. He drove by and into the town of Huntington, parking his car on the street and himself in a bookstore called Book Revue. It had a little café near the front and books as far as the eye could see. Normally, that would’ve been heaven to him, but he was impatient and looking for a way to painlessly kill time.

He gave the cops half an hour. By the time he drove past the residence again, the police car was gone. He pulled into the long, curving gravel drive, noticing for the first time a six-foot-tall metal fence that looked like it covered three sides of the property. Unlike the mailbox, it wasn’t rusted out.

Getting out of the car, Desmond stared at the wildly overgrown front yard, choked with weeds even in November, and at the house behind it. It was set far back from the road, at least forty feet. The house was a two-story box, very plain in design. Its straight lines and sharp angles were dissolving through obvious neglect. A lintel rested on two posts, one on either side of the front door, but its left side sloped down; under the dark eyes of the of the second-story windows, it made the front of the house resemble a skull with a crooked smile. The wooden paneling was sorely weathered, with grayish white paint clinging for dear life in small clumps. The last time the house was cleaned up, the roof probably still had all its tiles.

That was what grief did, Desmond thought. It drained you until you sank in on yourself, collapsing under an invisible weight. He felt as if he suddenly understood the Brantovs. On the train out to pick up his car, he’d read up on the family, and the articles made it sound like the father and mother had split just months before Maxim vanished. The boy had been bound for his father’s and he never made it. The family would have waited for him to return, and the vigil was probably still going on somewhere inside that sad excuse of a house. Hoping against hope took up so much energy, there was nothing left over to spare for anything else.

He stood there for a while, thinking he might catch sight of someone passing by a window. Finally, he approached the house and rang the bell. He heard it echo, and then, much to his surprise, the door swung open.

“Yes?” Standing in front of him was a white-haired woman wearing a furry green robe. She was five foot eight, even with her slumped shoulders. The harsh frown lines in her ivory skin were as deeply etched as cut crystal, but if this was the missing boy’s mother, Desmond knew from what he’d read that she was only in her midfifties. There was a cloud of alcohol fumes around her, almost like a vapor of fine perfume.

“I’m sorry to bother you, ma’am. Are you Galina Brantov?”

She nodded.

“I’m here because of your son Max.”

The woman breathed in sharply. “You have found Maxim?” She had a Slavic accent, and she spoke with the painstaking dignity of a person who is drunk, yet aware of just how intoxicated she is.

“Not exactly. There’s DNA evidence that Max was at a house in Pennsylvania this weekend.”

“That is what the police said. They were just here. They said they had evidence, this DNA. They said they would come back when they found him.” She swayed slightly and her head drooped lower. “You haven’t found him?”

“No, not yet. Would you mind if I came in?”

“No more visitors.” Her voice was stern. Then, almost as