Darkness My Old Friend

She looked up at the ceiling for a second, and he followed her eyes until he realized that this was something she did to keep herself from crying. When she looked back down, she wore an embarrassed smile but had managed to keep her tears at bay.

“I’m sorry.” It was maybe the fourth time she’d apologized for various little things since he’d arrived. She was sorry that it had taken her a minute to get to the door, that she was running behind with the baby’s schedule, that she hadn’t offered him tea right away. He didn’t think someone with so little to apologize for should be rushing to do it all the time.

“You’re fine,” he said. “Take your time.”

She took a sip of her tea. “Anyway, so Cole arrived. And guess what? He’s a total doll. All summer he helps around the house. He’s great with the kids. After a few weeks, I was leaving him with Cammy-that’s my oldest- while I ran to the store with the little one. Cole’s mother is a disaster, but she must have done something right, because the kid’s a gem.”

“That’s great,” he said. “It could have been a difficult situation.”

He still had no idea what the woman wanted. But if he had learned anything over his years as a cop and a husband, it was that women wanted to take a scenic route to the point. If you were smart, you kept your mouth shut.

“Cole was supposed to go back to New Jersey at the end of the summer. His mother was scheduled to pick him up on August fifteenth. But the day came and went; she never showed. The home phone was disconnected. The voice mail on her cell phone was full. The next weekend Cole and Kevin drove out to her place, only to learn that she’d been evicted. All their stuff was gone. And Robin, that’s Kevin’s ex, had stopped showing up to work a couple of weeks earlier.”

“When was the last time Cole talked to his mother?”

“He said she called on his cell phone a couple of days before she was supposed to come, and everything seemed fine.”

“And you believe that?”

She shrugged. “I don’t have a reason not to believe it.”

“So… what? Drugs?”

“Honestly, we don’t know. Kevin hadn’t had much to do with Cole or his mother. It was kind of sad, but she just didn’t want Kevin around.”

“Why was that?” asked Jones.

There was a quick darting of her eyes. “I don’t really know.”

But Jones could see that she did know. She knew exactly why.

She took a quick glance up at the ceiling again. Then, “Kevin said that there had been a lot of different men over the last few years. And most recently the guy Robin was involved with didn’t want Cole around. That’s why Cole came to spend the summer with us. Kevin just thinks she ran off with whoever that was.”

“How would he know that if there wasn’t much contact?” asked Jones.

“I’m not sure.” She shrugged and gave a little shake of her head.

“And what did Cole say?”

“I asked him when Kevin was at work. And he said his mother had had a few dates here and there, but nothing serious. If she’d told Kevin about a man who didn’t want Cole around, Cole had never met him. That’s kind of how Kevin made it sound, that Robin had confided in him. Which seems odd.” She released a breath, started twisting at her wedding band.

No pictures. That was it. There were no pictures on the walls, on the mantel, on any of the shelves… None of the expected perfect wedding shots and mall portraits of the kids. No vacation snapshots. Also not a speck of dust on any surface, not a crumb on the floor. In a house with three children? He and Maggie had one child, and their home was a veritable shrine to Ricky. When he was growing up, the place was always a mess-never dirty, but cluttered with all manner of stuff-toys, gear, costumes, tents, tricycles, all the paraphernalia of childhood.

“Mrs. Carr,” said Jones, “what is it that you’d like me to do?”

“I was wondering if you could help us find Cole’s mother.”

He started to shake his head, to say he didn’t do that type of work. But she misunderstood it as disapproval. She held up her palms.

“It’s not about wanting him to go. Don’t think that. It’s just that he’s so sad. So, so sad. His birthday was last week-no card, no call.” She didn’t bother to try to stop the tears this time, just let them fall. She reached into her pocket and pulled out a tissue, dabbed her eyes and her nose.

“Mrs. Carr,” said Jones, “the chances are she’ll come back on her own, probably before the holidays.”

She looked down at the table, then back up at Jones. “The thing is, he’s a good boy. She has done a wonderful job raising him. She obviously loved him. I didn’t know her-Kevin never wanted us to meet. So I don’t know, maybe she is the type of woman who would abandon her son for some new guy. Or maybe she does have a substance-abuse problem. But maybe, maybe, something has happened to her. It doesn’t seem right. Does it?”

She was looking at him so earnestly now, had leaned forward in her seat. Mrs. Carr was a genuinely nice person; he could see it in her expression, even in the way she held her shoulders. He’d met all different kinds in his life as a cop. And some people were just bad news-vacant, conscienceless, malicious, virtually brimming with bad intent. The honest people, those who obeyed the law and did the right thing, were common enough. But the genuinely good people, the innocent people like Paula Carr, the ones who thought of others and put themselves last, that was a rare breed.

It reminded Jones of a question asked of him by a troubled boy. How do you know if you’re a good person or a bad person? He’d done a lot of thinking on that lately. And he wasn’t any closer to the answer. But he suspected that for most people there was no way to know until the end of the day. And maybe not even then. Maybe the answer was different in any given moment, from one time to the next. Who was keeping a tally? Who added up your score when the game was over? He didn’t even pretend to know.

“Am I wrong in thinking that you didn’t want anyone else in your family to know we were talking?” Jones asked.

He saw a flush rise up her neck. “No,” she said. “You’re not wrong.”

“Why is that?”

“Well, first of all, I don’t want Cole to feel he’s not welcome here. Also, I wouldn’t want to get his hopes up.” That was two. Usually there were three things, three reasons. And number three was the real reason.

“And Kevin…” She let the sentence trail with a shake of her head, as if she didn’t know how to finish. Then, “He just wouldn’t like it. Kevin cares about what he cares about, and that’s it. He wants Cole to stay here with us. And he doesn’t seem to care much about what happened to Robin.”

He cares about what he cares about, and that’s it. Jones turned the sentence over, listened to the words again in his head. Jones had never met Kevin Carr, but he was pretty sure if at some point they did meet, they weren’t going to get along.

“I’m not a private detective, Mrs. Carr.”

She cocked her head at him, widened her eyes. “I thought you were.”

“Who told you that?”

She pursed her lips, looked down a second. “I got your name from the Pedersens. They said you were a retired cop who did some private investigating now.”

He heard the baby murmur on the monitor in the kitchen.

“I am a retired detective, true,” he said. “But mainly I just look after people’s houses while they’re on vacation, feed pets, let in the repairman.”

But she didn’t hear the second part, or didn’t care to hear it.

“Then you could make some calls if you were so inclined? Like, you still know people, right? You could do that?”

And for some reason he found himself nodding. Maybe because it was just that she was so young and pretty, so trusting of him. Or maybe Maggie was right about his not being able to resist a damsel in distress. And this one was most definitely in distress, whether over this or something else, he didn’t know. But there was something about Paula Carr that worried him. He wouldn’t say she had that skittish self-loathing that he’d seen in so many abused women, but there was something-something tense, something anxious.