Деннис Лихэйн – Mystic River / Таинственная река (страница 7)

5

On Sunday morning, right before his daughter Nadine's First Communion[23], Jimmy Marcus got a call from Pete Gilibiowski, who was working at the store, telling him he needed help.

“Help?” Jimmy sat up in bed and looked at the clock. “Pete, since when you and Katie can't handle it?”

“That's the thing, Jim. Katie isn't here.”

“She isn't what?” Jimmy got out of bed and walked down the hallway toward Katie's room. He pushed the door open after a quick knock. Her bed was empty and, worse, made, which meant she hadn't slept there last night. “I'm coming,” Jimmy said to Pete, then hung up and walked back to the bedroom.

Annabeth was sitting up in bed, yawning. “The store?” she asked.

Jimmy nodded. “Katie did not show up.”[24]

“Today,” Annabeth said. “Day of Nadine's First Communion, she didn't show up for work. What if she doesn't come to the church either?”

“I'm sure she'll come.”

“I don't know, Jimmy. If she got so drunk last night. Do you even know where she could be?”

“Diane or Eve's,” Jimmy shrugged. “Maybe a boyfriend's.”

There was no talking to Annabeth when it came to Katie. Annabeth – the love of his life, no question – had no idea how cold she could be sometimes. Normally, she was either annoyed with her stepdaughter or happy that they were best friends. Katie was seven when she lost her mother. She was deeply wounded by her mother's death.

“Yeah? Who's she seeing these days?” Annabeth asked.

“I thought you knew better than me.”

“She stopped seeing Bobby O'Donnell in November. That was good enough for me.”

Jimmy, putting his clothes on, smiled. When Katie had begun seeing him last summer, the Savage brothers told Jimmy they'd sort it out[25], if it became necessary. But Katie had broken up with him herself, though, and quite painlessly.

Annabeth hated Bobby O'Donnell not only because he had slept with her stepdaughter, but also because he was something of a lousy criminal, and not like the pros she thought her brothers were and her husband had been in the years before Marita died.

Marita had died fourteen years ago, while Jimmy was in prison. One Saturday, during visitation hours, Marita told Jimmy a mole on her arm had been growing lately, and she was going to see a doctor. Just to be safe, she said. Four Saturdays later she was doing chemo. Six months later she was dead.

Jimmy, who got out of prison two months after the funeral, stood in his kitchen in the same clothes he'd left it in, smiling at his child. He remembered her first four years, but she didn't. She only remembered the last two, maybe some fragments of the man he'd been in this house, before she was allowed to see him only on Saturdays from the other side of an old table. Standing in his kitchen, watching her, Jimmy had never felt more useless. He had never felt as alone or frightened as when he took Katie's small hands in his.

Marita had died and left them together, not knowing what the hell they were going to do next.

“Your mom's smiling down at us from heaven,” Jimmy told Katie. “She's proud of us.”

Katie said, “Do you have to go back to that place again?” “No. Never again,” Jimmy promised her.

Jimmy got to Cottage Market, the corner store he owned and worked the cash register while Pete worked the coffee counter.

During a five-minute rest before the early church mass crowd, Jimmy called Drew Pigeon and asked him if he'd seen Katie. Jimmy asked the question and only then realized that he'd been very anxious.

“I think she's here, yeah,” Drew said. “Let me go check.”

Jimmy listened to Drew's heavy footsteps in the hallway. Then he heard Drew coming back toward the phone.

“Jimmy, sorry. It was Diane Cestra who slept over. She's in there on the floor of Eve's bedroom, but no Katie. Eve said Katie dropped them off around one A.M. Didn't say where she was going.”

“Hey, no problem, man,” Jimmy put a false brightness into his tone. “I'll find her.”

“She's seeing anyone, maybe?”

“Nineteen-year-old girl? Who knows?”

Jimmy hung up and looked down at the cash register as if it could tell him something. This wasn't the first time Katie had stayed out all night. And it wasn't even the first time she hadn't showed up at work, but she usually called.

The bell hanging at the top of the door rang, and Jimmy looked up to see Brendan Harris and his little brother, Silent Ray, walk past the counter and head for the aisles where the breads and cookies and teas were. Jimmy noticed Brendan looking at the cash registers like he was hoping to see someone. Who was he looking for? Could he be stupid enough to be thinking about robbing the store? Jimmy had known Brendan's father, Just Ray Harris, so he knew that some dumb ran in the genes, but no one was so dumb as to try to rob a store with his thirteen-year-old mute brother. Plus, if anyone got some brains in the family, Jimmy thought, it was Brendan. A shy kid, but good-looking, and Jimmy had long ago learned the difference between someone who was quiet because he didn't know anything and someone who just stayed inside himself, watching, listening, taking it all in. Brendan had that quality.

He turned toward Jimmy and their eyes met, and the kid gave Jimmy a nervous, friendly smile.

Jimmy said, “Help you, Brendan?”

“Uh, no, Mr. Marcus, just picking up some, uh, some tea my mom likes.”

Jimmy watched Brendan and Silent Ray communicate in sign language, standing in the middle of the center aisle. The hands went flying, the two of them going so fast it would have been hard for Jimmy to keep up even if they were making sounds. Silent Ray had always been a strange little kid, in Jimmy's opinion, more like the mother than the father.

Brendan and Silent Ray had reached the counter and Jimmy saw something in Brendan's face.

“So, uh, I thought Katie worked Sundays,” Brendan said as he handed the money.

Pete, standing nearby, raised his eyebrows and asked, “You're interested in my man's daughter, Brendan?”

Brendan wouldn't look at Jimmy. “No, no, no.” He laughed, and it died as soon as it left his mouth. “I was just wondering, you know, because usually I see her here.”

“Her little sister's having her First Communion today,” Jimmy said.

“Oh, Nadine?” Brendan looked at Jimmy, eyes too wide, smile too big.

“Nadine,” Jimmy said, curious as to how the name had come to Brendan so fast. “Yeah.”

“Well, tell her congrats from me and Ray.”

“Sure, Brendan.”

Ray hadn't been looking at his brother when he spoke, but he moved anyway, and Jimmy remembered once again the thing that people usually forgot about Ray: he wasn't deaf, just mute.

“Hey, Jimmy,” Pete said when the brothers had gone, “Can I ask you something?”

“Yeah.”

“Why do you hate that kid so much?”

Jimmy shrugged. “I don't know if it's hate, man. It's just.

That mute is just a little spooky.”

“Oh, him?” Pete said. “Yeah. He's weird, always staring like he sees something in your face. You know? But I wasn't talking about him. I was talking about Brendan. I mean, the kid seems nice. Shy but nice, you know? You notice how he uses sign language with his brother even though he doesn't have to? Like he just wants the kid to feel he isn't alone. It's nice.”

6

Brendan Harris looked at the phone. He looked at his watch. Two hours late. Not a surprise, since Katie was often late, but today of all days? Brendan just wanted to go. And where was she, if she wasn't at work? The plan had been that she'd call Brendan from the store, go to her half sister's First Communion, and then meet him afterward. But she hadn't gone to work. And she hadn't called.

He couldn't call her. Katie was usually at one of three places – at Bobby O'Donnell's place, in the apartment with her father, stepmother, and two half sisters, or in the apartment above, where her crazy uncles, Nick and Val, lived. Her father, Jimmy Marcus, hated Brendan for no logical reason. It made no sense. Brendan had never done anything to Mr. Marcus. Over the years Katie's father had told her to stay away from the Harrises.

“So how did it happen then – you and me?” Brendan once asked Katie.

She smiled sadly at him. “You don't know?”

“No, I don't know.” Frankly, Brendan didn't have any idea. Katie was everything. A Goddess. But Brendan was just, well, Brendan.

“You're kind. I see you with Ray or your mother and even everyday people on the street, and you're just so kind, Brendan.”

And Brendan, thinking about it, had to admit that his whole life he'd never met anyone who didn't like him. He'd never had enemies, hadn't been in a fight since school, and couldn't remember the last time he'd heard a harsh word. Maybe it was because he was kind. And maybe that was rare. Or maybe he just wasn't the type of guy who made people mad. Well, except for Katie's father.

Just half an hour ago, Brendan had felt it in Mr. Marcus's corner store – that quiet hatred. He'd stammered because of it. He couldn't look at Ray the whole way home because of how that hatred had made him feel – dirty.

Brendan couldn't call Katie at one of her two numbers and risk somebody wondering what the hated Brendan Harris was doing, calling their Katie. He'd almost done it a million times, but just the thought of Mr. Marcus or Bobby O'Donnell or one of those psycho Savage brothers answering the phone always stopped him.