work. I framed Mrs. Phelps's photograph, then another and another as the hours passed and customers came and went, sometimes glancing in my direction, sometimes avoiding me altogether, both of which I found uncomfortable. It was a form of discomfort I didn't want Keith to experience, I decided, so at noon I called Meredith and told her that I thought it best that Keith go directly home after school until the matter of Amy Giordano was settled.
'I don't want him being looked at the way people are looking at me,' I said. 'Like an animal in the zoo.'
'Of course,' Meredith agreed. 'Besides, with him the look would be even worse.'
'What do you mean?'
Her answer chilled me with its unflinching starkness. 'Like the cage door is unlocked,' she said.
Warren arrived just as I was closing. He was dressed in coveralls, white cotton, dotted with paint. Bits of dried paint also clung to the wispy orange strands of his hair and dotted his hands and lower arms.
'Thought we might grab a beer, Bro,' he said.
I shook my head tiredly. 'It's been a long day, Warren. I think I'll just head home.'
Neil swept by, said hello to Warren, then made his way toward the old green Dodge he'd more or less inherited from his mother.
Warren laughed. 'Jesus, what a pansy,' he said. He looked at me, the smile now gone. 'I'd really like to have a beer, Eric.' He didn't wait for me to refuse a second time. 'The cops came by this house I was working on. Earl Bannister's place. They came right up to Earl and asked for me. Two cops. The ones that talked to you, I guess.'
'Peak and Kraus.'
'Sounds right,' Warren said. 'Anyway, that's not good, them coming up to Earl that way. I can't have cops coming around, asking for me while I'm on a job. Asking questions. Making it look like I'm ... involved in something.' His tone grew more tense and even a little resentful that he'd been drawn into circumstances he had not created but now knew no way to avoid. 'I'm a housepainter, for Christ's sake. In and out of people's houses. You got to be trusted in this business, not be on the job and a couple of cops show up.' His face reddened slightly. 'It's got to stop, Eric,' he said with sudden urgency. 'I mean, I can't let this go on. We have to talk about it, you know?'
He was working himself up, getting more and more agitated. It was one of Warren's traits, a continual escalation until his emotions peaked and he either started sobbing, as he did when he was drunk, or fell asleep, as he did when he was sober.
'All right,' I said. 'Let's go over to Teddy's.'
Teddy's was a small bar just a few doors down from my shop. Teddy Bethune, the owner, had died several years before, so that it was now run by his middle-aged daughter, a frowsy, irritable woman who had never made a secret of the fact that she actually preferred tourists to the boozy regulars who liked to sing old Irish songs, tell dirty jokes, and who continually regaled her with tales of how much more fun the bar had been before her father died.
'What'll you have?' Peg asked as she plopped two paper coasters before us.
We ordered two beers, grabbed the frosted bottles and headed for the booth at the back.
Warren took a long swig, then, before talking, decided on another. After that he put the bottle down on the table. 'Hits the spot,' he said.
'What did the cops want to know?' I asked.
'What I saw.'
'You mean, Amy?'
'Amy, yeah, and Keith.'
'Keith?'
'What he looked like.' Warren took another swig from the bottle. 'How he was acting. You know, like was he strange or anything that night. The short one was real interested in that.'
'Peak,' I said. 'What did you tell him?'
'Like you told me, Eric. The truth.'
'Which was?'
'That he was in a mood.'
I stared at my brother, appalled. 'Jesus, why did you say that?'
Warren looked at me, astonished. 'Say what?'
'That Keith was in a mood. What the hell does that mean, anyway, that he was in a mood?'
Warren looked the way he did when he was twelve, and I was eight, his younger brother berating him for some stupid blunder.
'I figured I needed to tell them something,' he said lamely. 'You know, give them something. You always got to give them something, right?'
'Why do you think that?'
Warren didn't answer, but I knew he'd gotten the idea from television or the movies.
I slumped forward and ran my fingers through my hair. 'All right, listen to me,' I said wearily. 'What exactly did you say?'
'Just what I told you,' Warren answered.
He looked vaguely frightened, like a little boy who'd screwed up his part in the class play, and I remembered how cruelly my father had dismissed him, and how, to please my father, and to feel in league with him, I'd often adopted the same attitude toward my brother, exaggerating his failures, mocking his small successes. I couldn't help but wonder if in some way I was still locked in that adolescent pattern.
'Listen, Warren,' I said, now trying for a less scolding tone. 'A little girl is missing. This town is small, and this thing is getting bigger and bigger. You've seen her picture all over. There's even one on the door of my shop. And ribbons now. Yellow ribbons all over town. That means the cops are under a lot of pressure. Their jobs are on the line. So they have to find Amy, dead or alive, and then they have to find whoever did this. See what I mean?'
Warren stared at me blankly.
'What I'm saying is that if they begin to think that Keith had something do with this, they'll hone in on him. They won't look anywhere else. They have to close the case.'
Warren nodded slowly, his big soft eyes blinking languidly.
'Which means that Keith being 'in a mood' gives them something to think about, turn over in their minds, and so they start thinking, okay, we got this kid, a little weird, no friends ... in a mood that night.'
'So things start to add up to the cops,' Warren said.
'Yes.'
He took another sip from the beer, then nodded toward my bottle. 'You not having any?' he asked, immediately shuffling off my warning, as well as any responsibility he might have for sinking my son deeper into police suspicion.
I pushed the bottle away. 'What else did you tell them?' I asked sternly.
Warren stiffened, like a lowly private at an officer's approach. 'Just that I drove Keith to the Giordanos' house,' he said. 'Amy was in the front yard. She came running up to the car. Then Keith got out and the two of them went inside.' He hesitantly took another sip of beer. 'Oh, and that I said hi to her.'
'Anything else?'
'They wanted to know how she looked with Keith.'
'Looked?'
'Like was she glad to see him, or did she act different when she saw him, like afraid, or backed away, stuff like that.'
'What did you say?'
'I told them I didn't notice how she looked. Then they asked me if he touched her, you know, in a funny way, like maybe he shouldn't have, that kind of touch.'
I dreaded the question but asked it anyway. 'Did he?'
'No.'
'Did he touch her at all?'
'He took her hand,' Warren said. 'He took her hand and led her inside.'
'And that's it?'
