What Dies in Summer (20 page)

“Where’s the rest of us?” he said.

“Andy’s getting a retread.”

“Yeah, the little late arrival—he does go through those diapers. By the way, we got that uncle of yours booked in. I dropped by lockup right after they got through taking his mug
shots and prints, and I gotta say he didn’t look too amused. You pretty sure he did what they said?”

“L.A. says he did.”

Don drank root beer and thought about this. “Then he did,” he finally said. “But I can tell you it beats the hell out of me how a guy does a thing like that. How’d we
find out, exactly?”

“Gram did. She called the police.”

“Do you know who it was caught the call?”

“A tall serious-looking guy with a big ring, and a sort of chubby one who took off his hat in the house.”

Don nodded. “I know who they are. I’ll make a chance to talk to ’em, see what they can tell me.”

“L.A. had to tell them what Cam did to her.”

“Poor kid. Too bad there wasn’t some other way. We need more female officers.” He shook his head. “And it’s not over yet. But Lee Ann’s tough, isn’t
she?”

“Yes sir.”

“Well, Cam’ll probably bond out pretty quick now, if he hasn’t already—not a damn thing we can do about that. But with these judges we’ve got up there now, this is
gonna go hard on him if it sticks. I’d hate to be him or his lawyer.”

“What’s going to happen to him?”

“If he’s convicted, which it looks like he probably will be, he’ll go to prison. The judges have guidelines on the sentencing, but they don’t have to follow them, and
this is the kind of case where they’re likely to go the max.”

This caused me to imagine Cam sprawled in some forgotten cell with a long gray beard and spiderwebs strung out from his knees and elbows to the walls around him.

“He may be your uncle and all,” said Don, “but if it was up to me I’d throw away the key on a guy like him myself. But hey, you looking forward to the big
trip?”

I nodded. “Sure am,” I said. “It’s gonna be the farthest I’ve ever traveled. Gram says my folks took me to Ruidoso for the races when I was little, but I
don’t remember it.”

“Yeah, this’s a little farther. North country’s way different too—gets cold up there even in the summer sometimes. Marge’s daddy told me he saw it snow on the
Fourth of July one year. I remember the mosquitoes being pretty bad last time I was up, what was it, five years ago I guess it’s been. But you can put stuff on for that. Old-timers up there
get so they don’t even pay attention to ’em anymore. What I’m wanting is for Diana to get to see the place, and that country. It was her granddaddy built the cabin, but
she’s never been there the whole time we’ve had it.”

I tried to imagine what the place looked like but got only a mental picture of a little log house half hidden in the woods, which didn’t seem to fit at all with the way Don was
talking.

He pushed his root beer bottle a couple of inches to one side, then back, thinking. “We’re gonna try something new on these damn killings when I get back,” he said.
“Ferguson’s gonna be setting it all up while I’m gone.”

“What is it?”

He picked up the root beer, saying, “I’ve got this crazy theory that if you add up one and one and one the right way, you just might get more than three.” He smiled at me and
took a drink from the bottle. “Anyway, as long as Marge’s little sister doesn’t back out on keeping Andy, I guess we’re about set. Ought to be a real field day for you,
Jimbo,” he said. “Maybe you’ll get lucky and hang a muskie.”

“What’s that?”

“Muskellunge. Like a pike, only bigger. Mean-lookin’ fish. Always been talk about eighty-pounders coming out of that lake, but the Indians say there are some in there a whole lot
bigger than that. They even tell stories about them—or something—grabbing off kids and dogs.”

“Have you ever caught one?”

“No. Well, I mean yeah, but nothing like that size. I caught one on the last trip that went eleven pounds, but it was just a fluke. I was after walleyes.”

“How come?”

“They’re the good eating. None of those pikes, pickerels and pick-handles are much good on the table, too many bones. Natives call some of ’em snakes—shows you right
there how much use they’ve got for ’em.”

I could have listened to this all day. As Don took a long swallow from his bottle, I tried to think of ways to keep the conversation going, which as usual made my mind go blank.

“Daddy,” said Diana, coming into the kitchen with Andy on her arm and closing a cabinet door with her free hand. “He’s dry now but I need to feed him. Are you home for
the day?”

Looking at her, I was dumbfounded. How could this possibly be the same girl I’d been kissing just a few minutes ago? She seemed older, purified somehow, and her expression, the completely
natural way she stood there with Andy on her hip, made my chest tight. I wondered if what I was seeing and feeling had anything to do with the special energy between girls and their fathers.

“Yeah, babe, I think so,” said Don, setting his root beer down. “Want me to take him?”

She passed Andy to him and started getting the pan ready to heat his milk. She expertly took a clean bottle from the sterilizer and set it on the counter, then got out the formula. I watched Don
grinning and jigging Andy on his knee. They looked like a picture in a magazine. I tried to swallow the strange sadness that rose in my throat.

“I got one other thing, Jimbo,” Don said, shifting Andy and picking up his root beer again. He swallowed the last of it and leaned over to toss the bottle in the trash. “Lee
Ann’s got to come down to headquarters pretty soon anyway to talk to the stenographer, but I want you and her to come in with me before we get started on that. I need a little help on
something.”

Suddenly I felt much better. Don had my entire attention now.

“Yes sir?” I said.

“You and her are both pretty sharp, and you seem to get all over this end of town. Located us one dead body already this month.” He smiled, gave his head a small shake.

“Yes sir.”

“I want you both to look at some pictures for me, see if you recognize anybody, maybe tell me a few things I don’t know.” He kissed Andy on the cheek and then scratched his own
chin.

Andy began to fret.

“Here, Fubbit,” said Diana, bringing the bottle of formula over to Don, who took it and touched the nipple to Andy’s lips. Andy turned his head a little from side to side for a
second before he located the nipple and locked onto it. He sighed and sucked.

“There you go,” said Don. “Get after it, fullback.”

“Sure,” I said, my heart filling with the desire to help Don. “Anything you want.”

WHEN I OPENED
the unlocked screen and knocked on the door of Dr. Kepler’s neat little pink-brick house on Fernwood, Miz M, the nurse, let me in.
As always the house seemed bigger on the inside, with hardwood floors and foreign-looking furniture in light colors. The air in here was cool and medicinal, and the whole place had that quiet,
suspended feeling that terrible sickness brings to a house.

“She’s asleep,” said Miz M. She looked at the dish I was carrying, which was filled to the top with half the apricot cobbler Gram had baked this morning. Jiggling her round
cheeks over it, Miz M took me back through the arched doorway of the deep sunny kitchen, her thick legs whisking as she walked.

“Gram says there’s enough for us to have some too,” I said.

But Miz M was already into the dish cabinet. She set out small plates along with forks, napkins and glasses for milk.

“She had her morning morphine at ten,” said Miz M. “She’ll sleep for a while yet.”

As she talked, Miz M was dishing up cobbler and pouring milk for both of us. I sat down at the maplewood table. She took a bite of cobbler and said, “Hmm-mmm, Lord, this is iniquitous! Are
you going to stay awhile?”

“Yes ma’am, till Gram and L.A. get back this afternoon.”

“Good. She does love having you. Sometimes she’ll say, ‘Where’s that listening-boy of mine? I’ve got talking to do!’ ”

“Yes ma’am.”

“I hear you’re going on a trip to Canada or someplace like that.”

“Minnesota. With the Chamforts.”

“Good for you,” she said, taking another bite. “Isn’t it awful about those poor girls? My friends could hardly believe I knew the young man who found one of
them.”

“Yes ma’am.”

I had no appetite for food or talk, so I drank some milk as I looked out through the window above the sink at the mimosa in the back yard. Its powderpuff blooms were mouth-colored, and the
clusters of seedpods looked like snow peas. I wondered how long it had been there and how long it would live after this house and all of us were gone. Then, I thought, it would die too.

Thoughts and images of death kept coming—Dee’s funeral, naked and strangled girls lying in the grass, and finally Dr. Kepler herself, not dead yet but not really living either. Gram
had told me her mother, father and all three sisters had died in the war in Europe, and explained that Dr. Kepler was an atheist who believed in a strictly mechanistic universe.

This had been a new idea for me; hearing it, I imagined a huge noisy factory with gears and levers and drive belts everywhere, turning out some unknown but essential product. Then I was off into
speculation about how all the devices got there, how they knew what to do, who’d turn them on and off and keep them oiled and in repair.

But I knew speculating about it was a waste of time, because my mind wasn’t organized to deal with questions like that. And not only was I was too ignorant to figure anything out on my
own, there was no one I could conveniently get answers from, because generally people already had their minds made up and couldn’t discuss this kind of question sanely. Of course, that
didn’t include L.A.—not that she was necessarily sane in the strictest sense, just that she wasn’t the type to have any do-or-die opinions about mystical subjects. The problem was
that she would consider it all a matter of guesswork and foolishness. She only really believed in what she could see or hear or touch, so if I asked her about the mechanistic universe thing
she’d probably just look at me and say something like, “That’s dumb, Biscuit,” or “Pass the ketchup, sprocket-head.”

For all I really knew, though, Dr. Kepler didn’t actually believe in all the gears and machinery. I did know she was extremely intelligent and had taught things like relativity and
something called particle physics at SMU. She was too sick now to come to the book club meetings anymore, but she was still Gram’s friend, and I came to see her every Friday because Gram
asked me to. And because I wanted to.

“She’s not long for this old vale,” Gram had said. “And since she doesn’t think she’s going anywhere when she leaves it, you should try to give her what
comfort you may in the meantime, James. It’ll be a star in your crown, whether Joan thinks so or not.”

Actually it was me who did most of the talking when I was with Dr. Kepler, because that was what seemed to make her happy.

“Speak to me a little, dear boy,” she’d say. “All my words are old and tired, and I’ve had enough of them.”

But from time to time she did explain some interesting things to me, like who Max Planck was and what quantum mechanics was about and why a full moon can only rise around the time the sun is
setting. She said people of normal intelligence who considered things like this too complicated to understand were just mentally slothful—they’d never gotten in the habit of curiosity
about how things work, or of thinking clearly about cause and effect. It was a pleasure to listen to her, her words creating new ideas and bright, clean-edged images in my mind.

But mainly she wanted to listen to me, especially when the stories included Diana and L.A. And nothing was trivial to her. She wanted every detail about where we went and what we did and
thought, what we were wearing or how the sky looked the day something happened. It was like she was hungry and the stories I brought her were gifts of food. She’d listen and nod and smile in
the right places even when she was very tired or in a lot of pain. She particularly wanted to know L.A.’s reaction to things, chuckling or shaking her head at the stories, sometimes even
laughing until she made herself cough.

“Ah, she is
schelmisch
, that one.
Und so klug.
What did she say then?”

So I tried to remember everything for Dr. Kepler. Of course, I couldn’t, but it amazed me how much I did remember. And it amazed me even more how much better I understood things when I
kept them in mind to talk about later, as if ideas could somehow germinate and grow in the dark like mushrooms while you were thinking about something else.

I trusted Dr. Kepler with my thoughts, eventually even some of the ones I had about Diana and me, because Dr. Kepler was different from other adults in that nothing I said to her ever came back
to bite me on the ass. And there wasn’t much point in trying to be sly with her anyway, since she was almost Gram’s equal in her ability to read my mind.

One of the things she took a special interest in was what I was going to do about Diana. Of course, this sounded a little strange to me, because I hadn’t thought that was up to me.
I’d thought it was more a matter of what Diana was going to do about me. Or rather what she was going to let me do.

“Don’t obfuscate, James,” Dr. Kepler said. “You want to have sex with her, of course. I’d be worried if you didn’t. And soon enough, you will.”

Suddenly I didn’t know whether to smile or not, or what to do with my hands and feet. I coughed.

“But responsibility to each other is all we really have in this world, dear, and you’ve got some serious responsibilities where our Miss Diana is concerned.”

Seeing that I was blushing, she said, “That is precious, James! You didn’t expect an old lady to talk about such things, did you?”

I had to admit she was right, and the longer I thought about that the dumber I felt. This was sort of a turning point for me, because after that day I quit worrying about what I told Dr. Kepler
and just more or less let everything come out when it was ready. And she seemed to understand it all, hardly ever being critical or trying to talk me into or out of anything.