that, I wanted to save for Lucas’s college education. As it turned out, I was able to move sooner than I planned. Lucas got those scholarships and Charles made up the rest of it.”
“Charles?”
“Yes. I told you he was in Vietnam. Charles sent his soldier’s pay to us. Lucas used some of it, and I bought a house in Charles’s and my name. I was able to move, and Lucas was able to live on campus. When Charles came back home, he lived with me in Riverside while he started his business. Later, he got his own place. Charles even helped Lucas with his graduate school expenses.”
I began to understand Charles a little better. Investing his combat pay in a brother who was kicked out of school must have caused some bitterness between them. And I began to see Lucas differently as well. The committee had denied him more than a degree. Lucas had been the bearer of dreams, the one who was supposed to make it.
“Where was your old neighborhood?” Frank asked.
She named a set of cross streets. I looked up at her.
“Do you know where that is?” she asked me.
“Yes,” I said. “I was just there a few weeks ago.”
I didn’t tell her that her son was there as well, sleeping on a bench.
IWAS RUNNING LATE by then, so I called the city desk. But before I could tell her what was going on, Lydia said, “John wants to talk to you.”
“Uh-oh.”
“I’m not sure you’re in trouble. He seemed cheerful when he told me that I should transfer any calls from you to his office.”
“Cheerful. Lydia, cats are cheerful when they have feathers sticking out of their mouths.”
“Hmm,” was her only answer to that, and she transferred me.
Figuring I’d go for the “best defense is a good offense” strategy, I explained to John what had happened the night before and said that I’d be in late.
“You’re not punching a clock, are you, Kelly?” he said easily.
“Not until deadline.”
That didn’t sound too promising.
“IREMEMBER ONE PHOTOGRAPH, and a letter, now that you mention it,” June said as we drove downtown. I had asked her again about the letters to Ben Watterson. “The letter was addressed to someone at a bank, I believe. Lucas asked me to mail it for him. He called one day, said he had left it behind when he was visiting me. Left it in his bedroom.” She looked out the car window, then added, “I always had a room ready for him, whenever he wanted to stay with me. When he was in college, he’d come out there to see me all the time. Not so much-not so much later on.”
When I asked her about his last visit to Riverside, she told me he had made the two-hour bus trip to Riverside one weekend; that was a few days before the first envelope arrived in Las Piernas.
“He only asked me to mail one, but he had been sending out a lot of resumes that weekend.”
“Did he tell you they were resumes?”
She frowned. “Well, no, but he was down to the copy shop one day, and I guess I just assumed that was what he was doing. He had some copies made, then typed up letters and took them with him. But he forgot the one envelope. That was the only one I really saw for more than a minute or two.”
“Do you know what was in it?” I asked.
“Well, I think so,” she said. “He asked me to write something on the back of a photograph for him-that photo of him and the man from the bank, where Lucas was receiving a scholarship from them. His own handwriting was so terrible, and I don’t think he wanted to type on the photograph. He had a letter all typed up and ready to go with it.”
“Letter? Are you sure you saw a letter?”
“Of course I’m sure. I saw him put the photo in that envelope with a letter. I figured he might be looking for a job there.”
So there was more than the scholarship photo in the first envelope, which Lucas must have mailed himself, sometime before he left Riverside. June, not knowing that first letter had been mailed, would think the second envelope-the one with the photocopy-contained the photo she wrote on.
“Did Lucas show you any other photos while he was visiting?”
“No, just the one. Why do you ask?”
“I’m just trying to figure out who he was in contact with, what kinds of things he was doing during the past six weeks. Did he make any phone calls while he was in Riverside?”
“Yes, now that you mention it, he called and talked to someone named…let’s see, what was it?” She murmured to herself for a moment. “Ed? No, Edison!”
“His last name was Edison?”
“No, his first name. I don’t know what his last name was. But Lucas called him when he was at my place. I remember because Lucas insisted on leaving some money for the call. He had spent twenty dollars to ride out to see me, didn’t hardly have a nickel to his name, but he left money for that call.”
“Was he working?”
“Nothing too steady. But he told me he took on odd jobs from the shelter-mostly handyman work-painting, carpentry, things like that. I think he was a little embarrassed to tell me that was what he was doing, but I told him, if carpentry was good enough work for the Lord, it was good enough for him.”
I wondered about the suit I had seen in the hotel room. I doubted even Jesus wore a suit to a carpentry job. I needed to talk to someone who had seen Lucas more recently.
“Do me a favor,” I said. “Go over your phone bill. Try to find the number he called, the one for this Edison.”
She smiled. “You
“I would have anyway.”
I figured she already knew that, but she seemed relieved all the same.
SHE DIDN’T SAY MUCHafter that, just kept looking out the car window. Soon I realized she was studying the street people. She was watching a man huddled in the entry way of a jeweler’s shop; a bone-thin woman picking at her matted hair as she sat at a bus stop, talking to herself. At one stoplight, June stared at a sleeping figure-a man in a knit cap, curled up in a ragged sleeping bag on a wooden pallet. A man about Lucas’s size. She turned to me and asked, “Where did he live?”
She meant Lucas, of course. There were so many answers to that question. I picked what I supposed was the best answer of the not-so-great alternatives. “Would you like me to take you by the shelter?”
She nodded.
IHADN ’T ESPECIALLYwanted to run into Roberta, but as it happened, she was one of the first people we saw. She had her arm around a teenager. The teenager held a pale, sleepy toddler, one child seeming not much larger than the other. Roberta was walking to the door with them when we opened it from the other side, in time to hear her say, “The clinic is just three blocks away. They’ll take good care of your son-” When Roberta saw me, her arm tightened on the young mother’s shoulder, causing the woman to eye me warily.
“Irene,” Roberta said, then surprised the hell out of me by bursting into tears.
“What’s wrong?” the young woman said with sharp concern, but Roberta only moved to embrace me. I held her a little woodenly, my own exhaustion and emotional state making it hard for me not to start crying myself. The toddler beat me to it-June and the teenager were left staring at us as the boy began to wail in sympathy.
That, fortunately, brought out Roberta’s caretaker instincts. “Oh, I’m sorry!” she said, straightening and pulling tissues out of a pocket. With reassuring words she sent mother and child on their way, and I finally got a chance to introduce June Monroe.
“Lucas’s mother?” Roberta asked in a strained voice.
