Nocturnes

He made his way along the bar, grabbed a soda from the cooler, and patted the woman on the ass as he went by.

“I’m go

“Uh-huh,” said Maguire. “You got change of a dollar?”

“Asshole.”

Maguire took a seat across from me, lit up a cigarette, and laid its tip beside the still-smoldering remains of the waitress’s butt.

“So?”

“I’ve been hired by a man named Frank Matheson,” I said.

Maguire gave me nothing.

“You know who Frank Matheson is?” I said.

“I know. What’s it to me?”

“He’s concerned that someone with knowledge of the history of the Grady house may have gotten some ideas from what happened there in the past. He’s afraid that the someone in question may have targeted a child.”

“Like I said, what’s it to me?”

“What happened there took place before my time. I got some of it from the newspapers, a little more from Matheson, a little less from the chief over in Two Mile Lake. I was hoping you could tell me more.”

“Because I was there, you mean?”

“Yes. Because you were there. You were there when John Grady died.”

Maguire waited for a while before answering. He watched the woman moving behind the bar, joshing sourly with one or two of the regulars who had perked up some now that they were being exposed to a little female company. He seemed to take in the grim walls, the faded posters on the walls, the hole that someone had punched in the door of the men’s room.

“You know, I own this place,” he said at last. “Bought it three years ago from a man named Gruber. He was a German Jew. Never could understand why he had a shamrock on the sign. When I asked him, he told me that nobody ever lost money on a bar that looked Irish. Didn’t matter what happened once you got inside. Kind of people who come into a place like this, they’re not too concerned about decor. They want to drink, drink some more, have one for the road, then stagger home and be left to themselves from start to finish. So when Gruber said he was going to retire, I bought it, because it suited my disposition. I like being left to myself. I don’t like people asking about my present or my past. Why do you think I’d make an exception for you?”

Now it was my turn to pause before answering. There was a game being played, and I think Maguire knew it. I had come here in part to find out what he could tell me about the Grady house, because to understand the present you have to understand the past. But I also wanted to take a look at him. He was the only child to have entered the Grady house and survived, and I didn’t like to think about the kinds of scars that experience had left upon him. While those who have been abused in the past, or who have suffered in the way that he had, do not automatically themselves become abusers, it does happen, and it was something that needed to be considered.

“I came here to look into your eyes,” I said.

Maguire met my gaze levelly.

“And what do you see?”

“I know what I don’t see: I don’t see a man who has been transformed by his own pain into the very thing that caused that pain to begin with.”

“You thought I might have been behind whatever is troubling Frank Matheson.”

He said it softly, but without blame or anger.

“I had to consider it.”

He took a long pull on his cigarette, releasing the smoke slowly through his nostrils. Along with the fumes, some of the suspicion seemed to ease from his body.

“What made him hire a private investigator?”

I handed him one of the copies of the photograph, the unknown girl caught in her pose, ready and waiting for the ball to be released, for her chance to strike at it. Maguire picked it up and examined it for a time.

“Do you recognize her?” I asked.

“No. Where did it come from?”

“Matheson found it in the mailbox of the Grady house. He doesn’t know why it was left there. He thought that it might be some kind of tribute to John Grady.”

Maguire was quiet for a long time. I knew that at the end of his silence, he would either stand up and tell me to leave or open up to me. The decision would be his to make, and if I spoke before he reached it I felt certain I would get nothing from him.

“An offering,” said Maguire.

“Perhaps.”

“He used that word, you know, when I was with him. He called the Matheson girl that. He said she was an ‘offering.’ ”

“An offering to what?”

“I don’t know. Maybe to whatever he believed made him do the things that he did. He talked all the time I was there, but only some of it was addressed to me. I don’t remember so much of it. I was too scared to listen while I was conscious, and when I came to he was dead. I’ve blanked out most of the rest. I didn’t do so good in high school so they sent me to a doctor, a shrink, and he said I needed to confront what happened in that house, but I prefer it the way it is. Hidden. Locked up, just like I was.”

It wasn’t for me to comment on how he chose to deal with what he had endured, but I had a brief flash of a barred cellar door, and inside a small boy was being tormented by John Grady, over and over again. Whatever front he presented to the world, that was the reality of what was hidden inside De

He retrieved his cigarette from the ashtray, took a drag on it, and continued.

“Mostly,” he said, “he spoke to something that I couldn’t see.”

“What else do you remember?”

“The mirrors. There were mirrors on every wall. I could see him reflected in them. It was like the room was filled with John Gradys. I remember that, and I remember the remains of the other children. They were sitting over by the far wall. I don’t like to recall how they looked. He talked to them too, sometimes, in a way.”

“Do you recall anything about Louise Matheson?”

He shook his head.

“I think I heard the shot that killed her, but I was pretty far gone by then.”

“Why did he keep you alive?”

Maguire pretended to think about the question, but I guessed it was one that had troubled him all his life, ever since Grass had led him from that terrible place.

“I was the only boy he took,” he said. “He spoke to me some, told me about himself, about the house he wanted to create. He hated the little girls, but me, I was different. I still think he’d have killed me, in the end, or maybe just let me fade away and die. Could be he saw something of himself in me. I hope to Jesus he was wrong, but I think that’s what he believed.”

The cigarette had almost burned down to the filter. A column of ash toppled like a condemned building and exploded into dust upon the tabletop.

“Can you remember anything else that he said?” I asked.

He looked at me, then stubbed out the cigarette and rose.

“Like I told you, I don’t remember the details. I do recall that he didn’t talk directly to the other children,” he said.

It sounded as if there was dust caught in his throat.

“He talked to their reflections in the mirrors. He talked to them like they were inside the mirrors, and if those policemen hadn’t come, then he’d have been talking to me that way too. I’d have been lost in there with them.”

And in the gloom of his grim little bar, De

The streets around the Desperate Measure were quiet as I walked back to the parking lot at the rear of the bar. I wasn’t sure that I was learning much that I hadn’t already suspected: John Grady was a vile human being, and all those who had come into contact with him remained tainted by his touch.

When I turned the corner, I saw a man leaning against the hood of my Mustang. He was smoking a cigarette in his right hand while the fingers of his left tapped a delicate rhythm against the bodywork. I knew who he was, even as he watched my approach, his eyes lost deep in his domed skull and his lank hair hanging like an afterthought at the back of his head.