Nocturnes

John Grady had long fingers and large hands. Amy Lowell told the police that, when he gripped her friend’s head, the man’s fingers had closed on it entirely like the talons of a great bird, extending almost to her eyes. Despite her shock, Amy Lowell gave the police a good description of the individual who had taken Louise Matheson, and the vehicle that he drove. There were those who recalled John Grady’s ownership of a red Lincoln, and the police arrived at the Grady house and found the car. Nobody answered their knocks to the door, and a debate ensued on the porch steps of the Grady house concerning the nature of probable cause. It was curtailed by the sound, real or imagined, of a child’s cry, and the door was kicked in.

John Grady was standing in the hallway of his house. His great work remained uncompleted, and there were ladders and drapes everywhere. His left hand was on the handle of the door to his basement, and he held a gun in his right. Before he could be stopped, he darted through the basement door and locked it behind him. He had reinforced it specifically for such an eventuality, replacing the flimsy original with sturdy oak and strengthening it with steel bands and a security bar. It took the police twenty minutes to break it down.

When they entered the basement, Louise was dead. Slumped on the floor beside her was another child, a little boy. He was still alive, but unconscious from hunger and dehydration. This was De

John Grady stood over them both with his gun to his head. His last words, before he pulled the trigger, were:

“This is not a house. This is a home.”

II

Winter was here. The north wind had almost stripped the last of the leaves from the trees, leaving only a sprinkling of foliage to threaten the dominion of the evergreens. Clusters of young beeches trembled beneath the canopy, and sugar maple seedlings lay sprinkled through the forests like lost gold. There was a kind of silence now in the woods, as animals prepared to slumber, or to die.

In Portland, the trees of the Old Port were festooned with white lights, and a Christmas tree burned brightly farther up on Congress. It was cold, although not as cold as the winters I recalled from my childhood. When I was young, we would spend New Year’s at my grandfather’s house in Scarborough. He and my father would share whiskey and war stories, for they were both policemen, although my grandfather had retired many years before. My mother would listen indulgently to tales that she had heard told over and over again, then hustle me off to my bed. Outside, the snow would gleam with a bluish tinge, lit by a bright moon in a clear, dark sky. I would sit at my window, wrapped in a blanket, and stare at it, following its contours, basking in the otherworldliness of it. Even on the darkest of nights, when the moon was invisible, the snow seemed to hold light within it. To the child gazing at it from his window, it glowed from deep inside, and I would fall asleep with the curtains open so that its unsullied beauty was the last thing I saw before my eyes closed, the voices of those whom I loved distantly rising and falling in low cadence.

In time, those voices from my past would be stilled. My grandfather, my parents, all were gone now. I found that I became what I had most feared when I was a child: a man whose blood ran only in his own veins, a figure without visible ties to those who had brought him into this world. And when I tried to anchor myself with a family of my own, that too was taken from me, and I drifted, and was lost for a time in places without names.

Yet at last I learned to recognize that I was not entirely alone, and that there were deep co

Occasionally, even now, I would hear one of my neighbors joke about heading for Florida, that this was the last damn winter he could endure in the cold Northeast, but I knew that the speaker would never leave. It was part of the game we all played, the dance of which we were all a part. I could not live without seasons, for in seasons are reflected the rhythms of our existence: of birth and maturity, of decline and decay, yet always with the promise of renewal for those who remain. Perhaps I would alter my attitude as I grew older, as the winters took a greater toll upon me and the north wind brought with it a reminder only of my own mortality. I wondered, sometimes, if that was part of the appeal of Florida or Arizona for those in their later years: cut off from the seasons, it was possible to forget the rhythm that governed one’s life, even as one’s feet still moved to complete the final steps of the dance.

My prospective client was late, but I didn’t really care. Up on Middle Street, the Half Moon Jug Band was playing carols to cheer the shoppers. I could hear the music from where I sat in JavaNet on Exchange, surrounded by kids playing with the computers. I kind of liked JavaNet, even if the geek quotient tonight was a little greater than I would have preferred. It had decent coffee, and some comfortable armchairs. It was also a pretty good place to meet people, as most of those sharing space were too caught up with internet dating or email to bother with what was happening around them. Its window was also a good spot for people-watching, and outside of Newbury Street in Boston or just about anywhere below 14th Street in Manhattan, the window of JavaNet on Exchange was one of my favorite places from which to watch the world pass by. I had already counted at least three women who, if I hadn’t been perfectly happy with Rachel, would probably have refused to have anything to do with me, and rightly so. I had also seen Maurice (pronounced “Maur-reese”) Gardner, who was something of a local celebrity among those of us with a blacker than average sense of humor, since Maurice had once shot and superficially wounded a Santa Claus at the mall. Maurice claimed that Santa had snuck up on him, while Santa, when he gave evidence at Maurice’s trial, claimed that he had merely been heading for the men’s room beside the mall office. Since Maurice was hopped off his head at the time on coke riffed with Persian Brown, a combination likely to make even Buddha a little edgy, the judge sided with Santa Claus and Maurice was locked up for a while for his own protection and to ensure that Christmas did not become a time of mourning for traumatized junior patrons of the mall stores. Maurice was now clean, taking his medication, and working as second mate on a lobster boat. In a nice circularity of events, he volunteered each Christmas to play Santa Claus at some out-of-town children’s charity. From what I heard, he felt it was the least that he could do to make up for his past sins.

I like Portland. It has all the advantages of a city, but still feels like a small town. There’s an eccentricity to it, and a strength of character. It has more coffee shops than maybe any city its size rightfully needs, and there are one or two bars that could slide into the sea and make this a classier place by their absence, but that’s okay. It has a little movie theater that plays mostly foreign imports, and the downtown Nickelodeon has promoted itself back to first-runs. The Public Market is still going, and there are decent bookstores and a big library. All told, it’s not such a bad place to have on your doorstep, and when it preyed on my nerves-as it sometimes did-I had the reassurance that I didn’t actually live here. I could retreat back to my house on the Scarborough marshes within minutes, and watch the sun set on still waters.