Nocturnes

“The cops at Two Mile Lake have it.”

“You want to tell me how you came by it?”

He took the photograph from me and carefully placed it on the counter ledge before putting the envelope on top of it so that it was entirely covered.

“You know who owns the Grady house?”

“No, but I could hazard a guess.”

“Which would be?”

“That you own the Grady house.”

He nodded. “The bank put it up for sale about two years after my Louise’s murder. There were no other bidders. I didn’t pay very much for it. Under other circumstances, you might even have said that I got a bargain.”

“You left it standing.”

“What would you have expected me to do: raze it?”

“It’s what a lot of folks would have done.”

“Not me. I wanted it to remain as a monument to what was done to my daughter and to those other children. I felt that if it was removed from the earth, then people would start to forget. Does that make sense to you?”

“It doesn’t have to make sense to me. It doesn’t have to make sense to anyone but you and your family.”

“My wife doesn’t understand. She never has. She thinks that all traces of John Grady should have been wiped away. She doesn’t need anything to remind her of what happened to Louise. It’s always with her, every single day.”

Matheson seemed to retreat from me for a moment, and I watched his relationship with his wife reflected in his eyes like a rerun of a desolate old movie. In some ways, it was a miracle that they had stayed together. Both as a policeman and as an investigator, I had seen marriages disintegrate under the burden of grief. People speak about a shared sorrow, but the death of a child is so often not apportioned in the same way between a father and a mother. It is experienced simultaneously, but the grief is insidious in its individuality. Couples drown in it, sinking beneath the surface, each unable to reach out and touch the other, incapable of seeking solace in the love that they feel, or once felt, for each other. It is particularly terrible for those who lose an only child. The great bond between them is severed, and in some cases they simply drift away into loneliness and isolation.

I waited.

“Can I ask you what you did with your house, after what happened?” he asked.

I knew the question would come.

“I sold it.”

“Have you ever been back there?”

“No.”

“You know who lives there now?”

“A young couple. They have two children.”

“Do they know that a woman and a child were killed in that house?”

“I guess that they do.”

“You think it troubles them?”

“I don’t know. Maybe they feel that what happened there once can never happen again.”

“But they’d be wrong. Life doesn’t abide by such simple rules.”

“Do you feel that way about the Grady house, Mr. Matheson?”

His fingers trailed across the envelope, seeking to find the lineaments of the face of the unknown girl hidden beneath. I thought again of new-fallen snow, and how I once believed I could see the outlines of faces beneath it, like the shapes of skulls beneath white skin. That was later, when I left behind the child I once was and those whom I loved began to fall away.

“You asked me where I found the photograph, Mr. Parker. I found it in the mailbox of the Grady house. It was in a torn envelope. The envelope had been sealed, then opened by someone to get at what was inside. Judging by the marks on the envelope, I’d guess there was more than one photograph in it originally. The shape of the remaining photograph didn’t quite match the marks of the bulge in the envelope. That’s how I knew.”

“Do you check the mailbox often?”

“Nope, just occasionally. I don’t go to the house much anymore.”

“When did you find the photograph?”

“One week ago.”

“What did you do?”

“I took it to the police.”

“Why?”

“It was a photograph of a little girl, placed in the mailbox of a house once owned by a child killer. At the very least, someone has a sick sense of humor.”

“Is that what the police think?”

“They told me that they’d see what they could do. I wanted them to go to the newspapers and the TV people, get this little girl’s picture shown across the state so that we could find out who she is, and-”

“And warn her?”

He drew a breath, and his eyes closed as he nodded.

“And warn her,” he echoed.

“You think she’s in danger, because someone put a photo of her in Grady’s mailbox?”

“Like I said, at the very least the person who put that picture there has a disturbed mind. Who would even want to link a little girl with that place?”

I slipped the envelope away and looked at the print of the child’s picture again.

“Was the photograph old, Mr. Matheson?”

“I don’t think so. It looked recent to me.”

“And the photograph itself was black-and-white, not just the copy that you made?”

“That’s right.”

“Anything on the back to indicate that it came from a lab? You know, any identifying marks, brand names?”

“It was Kodak paper, that’s all I know.”

That paper could be purchased in any camera store in the country. Whoever took the photograph had probably developed it in his own home or garage. It was simple enough to do, with the right equipment. That way, there was no chance of a curious lab worker spying suspicious photographs of playing children and calling in the cops to investigate the individual behind the camera.

The child really was beautiful. She looked happy and healthy, and the intensity of her concentration on the ball about to head her way made me smile.

“What would you like me to do, Mr. Matheson?”

“I want you to see if you can discover who this girl is. I want you to talk to her parents. I’ll come with you, when you find them. They should know about this.”

“That’s going to be difficult. Have you spoken to the police?”

“They won’t tell me anything, except that it’s under investigation and that I shouldn’t worry. They said it was probably nothing.”

Maybe they were right. There were those who might find amusing or arousing the idea of associating a little girl’s image with the memory of a child killer, but their actual potential for harm was likely to be limited. And yet someone had gone to the trouble of snapping at least one photograph of an unsuspecting little girl, and if Matheson was right in his suspicions, then there were probably more photos, some perhaps of this child, but some possibly of other children.

“I was also wondering if you might watch the Grady house for a while, just in case the person who left this picture comes back.”

Wintering at the Grady house didn’t sound like the best way to get into the Christmas spirit. I tried not to let my reluctance show, but it was hard.

“Have you seen any signs of damage to the house,” I asked, “any indications that someone might have tried to get inside?”

“Nope, it’s sealed up good and tight. I have a set of keys, and the police at Two Mile have another set. I gave it to them after some lunatic tried to get onto the roof and start a fire there a couple of years back. I don’t know if they’ve been inside since I gave them the photograph.”

I touched the picture of the little girl with my fingertips. My fingers brushed the image of her hair.

“It’s kind of an obvious question, but have you seen anybody hanging around the property, or has anyone displayed excessive interest in what went on there?”

“Well, we had some trouble with a man named Ray Czabo, but the chief warned him off. I don’t think he’s been back since. You know him?”

Matheson couldn’t have missed the pained look that crossed my face. Voodoo Ray Czabo was a death tourist from Maine, a haunter of crime scenes. He liked taking pictures of places in which people had died. When the cops were finished with their work, he would sometimes remove “souvenirs” from the location and try to hawk them on the Net. Ray Czabo and I had history. He had visited the house in Brooklyn in which my wife and daughter were killed, and had stolen from outside the door the carved wooden block upon which the house number was engraved.