All That Is Mine I Carry With Me, page 3
* * *
—
A few days after my conversation with Miranda at her studio, I called Tom Glover, the lead detective on the case back in 1975—the man with the port-wine stain above his right eye. I was having a hard time shaking the idea of this book. I doubted the story was rich enough to hold my interest (and yours), but the idea was worth a little digging, certainly.
I did not know Detective Glover. Before I became a novelist, I worked for a few years as an assistant DA in Middlesex County, which includes the city of Newton, but I had never handled a case of his or even met him. I knew he had retired from the force several years earlier, with the rank of lieutenant. Some of my old friends who had known Glover remembered him as smart, prickly, reserved. Not a bad guy, exactly, but then no one had his phone number, either. Still, I expected he would be happy to talk with me about the Larkin case.
He was not. When I called, he turned me down flat. “That’s still an open investigation,” he said. He made an insincere apology and, while he did not hang up on me, he made it clear he had no interest in prolonging our phone call. The whole conversation lasted only a minute or two.
Now, I am not so presumptuous as to think everyone should be eager to talk to me when I call for my novel research, but in fact most people are. It is flattering to be told that your life is the stuff of novels. Cops in particular have always been happy to talk. Maybe it helps that I used to be a prosecutor and that I am generally referred to them by another prosecutor or a cop. I am on the right team, at least I used to be. Whatever the reason, cops have always been receptive to my questions.
Glover’s excuse was also ridiculous. The Jane Larkin case was ice cold. Talking to me could not possibly endanger the investigation. There was no investigation, just a bunch of forgotten old file folders in a storage unit somewhere.
I called Miranda to report all this. Evidently there was some frustration in my voice because she said, “Don’t be mad at him. He doesn’t mean to piss people off. Let me talk to him.”
“You think he’s going to talk just because you tell him to?”
“I know he will.”
And Miranda was right. After she called Detective Glover, he did agree to meet. He was not especially enthusiastic about it, but he allowed me to come to his home, a little Cape-style house in Burlington, north of Boston.
We spoke in the living room. There was a small brick fireplace. On the mantel was an old picture of Glover’s father in a Cambridge Police uniform. He looked like a thicker, coarser version of the man standing beside me, the raw material that had been refined in the next generation.
Glover himself was handsome, just as Miranda had described him, though he was now seventy-one years old. I could see how as an eleven-year-old girl she might have been awed by him. He had a guarded, diffident, watchful sort of manner, like a very smart, shy child.
About the port-wine stain, which Miranda had described several times and which I had prepared myself to ignore: In the actual event, I could not help being distracted by it at first. It lay on his forehead like a thought, and, watching him, I had the uncomfortable sense of his nakedness, as if what lay exposed was a private part of himself that ought to be hidden. Its color was not as lurid as Miranda had described. The stain was not the strawberry red that she remembered, but a darker nut-brown, not all that different from the surrounding skin. It is possible the stain had a brighter appearance when Miranda met the detective in November of ’75, when Glover was thirty-one years old. Or maybe she simply saw it with a child’s eye and could not help being fascinated by it. Because of the way it was placed on the right side of his forehead, as he turned his head, it created a two-faced, Janus-like impression. His left side in profile was unmarked and strikingly handsome; his right side in profile was an entirely different face, dominated by the stain. I will say no more about it. Now that I know Tom Glover—I would even call him a friend—I understand that he would hate to be defined by it.
I want to get off the subject, as well, because as a writer I hate that port-wine stain. It is a clumsy, ridiculous device and, believe me, I’m embarrassed by it. I would no sooner give one of my fictional characters a port-wine stain to suggest some mysterious inner torment than I would give him enormous ears to show that he is a good listener. But the truth is Tom Glover did (and still does) have that port-wine stain, and I am determined to report this story exactly as I found it, so let’s leave the damn thing on his forehead and move on.
* * *
—
That afternoon—Thursday, November 13, 1975, the day after Jane Larkin vanished—Glover was waiting in an unmarked car a half block from the Larkins’ house when Miranda walked by, on her way home from school. In the rearview mirror on the driver’s door, he watched the little girl shuffle toward him on the opposite side of the street. She moved slowly, head down, scuffing her feet, cradling her books and lunchbox.
Detective Glover had not been waiting for Miranda. He had been watching the house, or rather watching Dan Larkin, for nearly six hours now. He mistrusted Dan from the start. That morning Larkin had behaved in every way as a distressed husband might. He was worried sick about his wife; he said so several times. He would stay home from work all day in case she called. He asked Glover if it would help to call in the state police or even the feds; he had the connections, Glover only had to say the word. But there was something about Larkin’s performance—wooden, self-conscious, calculating, meticulous—that ignited Glover’s suspicion. It was possible, of course, that the guy just had a stiff manner, but Glover could not help doubting him. All that playacting.
What Larkin wanted, perhaps, was to establish for the record that he had reacted appropriately, and that was why he had demanded the police send someone so quickly: he wanted an audience to witness his distress. Later, if the case came to trial, Detective Glover could be called to testify to the whole show: the panic, the pacing, the fruitless phone calls to friends. It was a pitiless, cynical impression, even for a cop, and Glover did not entirely trust it. So all morning and afternoon he watched. He watched to see if Larkin really meant to stay home and wait for his wife’s call, or if in fact he knew the call was not coming. He watched simply to see what Larkin would do next. He watched, in the end, because he did not know what else to do. There was no clear evidence that a crime had been committed and no leads to follow if one had been. Without more, until forty-eight hours passed, Jane Larkin’s disappearance would not be a police matter at all, even as a (noncriminal) missing-person case.
The truth was Glover enjoyed surveillance. At least if he could be alone like this. There was something peaceful in watching, motionless and silent, hidden, like an owl in a tree. A lot of detective work, it turned out, amounted to no more than being watchful, and his whole life had prepared him for it. To be acutely self-conscious is, equally, to be acutely other-conscious—to observe people and note their reactions, to watch them watching you.
That morning Miranda had been too shy to speak with him, and Glover considered letting her walk past now, but the little girl recognized him and stopped. There was no more than ten feet between them as he looked through the open car window. She was looking at the unmarked side of his face, but Glover could see her thinking, remembering the stain, painting it onto him.
He allowed her a moment to work through her thoughts.
“She didn’t come home, did she?”
“No. I’m sorry.”
The girl’s eyes dropped and she stood there, frozen.
“We’ll find her,” he said. He did not believe this, at least he was not sure of it, but it seemed like the kind of thing one ought to say to a child. “You want to talk about it?”
The girl managed to shake her head, eyes fixed on her own toes.
“Are you okay?”
No response.
“You want a ride home?”
“I’m not allowed to take rides from strangers.”
“I’m not a stranger, I’m a policeman.”
“It’s the same thing.”
“True.”
A beat.
“I don’t want to go home anyway.”
“Why not? Your dad’s there.”
“I don’t want my dad!”
And with that, after nearly twenty-four hours of waiting, it was all finally too much for Miranda. She fought to contain her emotions for a moment, and there were a few sniffles. Then she surrendered. Her books slipped out of her arms and cluttered around her feet, and all at once the little girl was sobbing so extravagantly, so unapologetically—her shoulders bouncing and shrugging, her breath coming in wet gasps—that Glover was awed by her lack of inhibition.
Glover, poor childless Tom Glover, had no idea how to respond. He stared at her a moment, wondering at her capacity for release. He wished she were a boy; then he would have some idea how to talk to her and shut this whole thing down. He looked around to see if anyone else was nearby, but there was no one. Finally, diligently—what choice did he have?—he forced himself out of the car and quick-marched across to her. He said, “Shh, shh,” and put his hand on her head, testing it first with his palm as you would tap on a stove to see if it was hot. When that did not work, he knelt beside her, and Miranda abruptly threw herself against his shoulder and tossed her arms around his neck and went right on sobbing, so that he hardly had any choice but to wrap his arms loosely around her, and when she tightened her grip, he returned a cautious squeeze, and for the first time the gravity of what was happening to these kids sunk into Glover, and it became more than an idea, a case to be solved. They stayed like that for a few seconds. Glover was startled by his own emotion as much as Miranda’s. He was pierced. He resolved not to move until the little girl released him.
When she finally unclinched her arms, his shoulder was wet with tears and snot, and he understood that he—his shoulder, his awkward, inexpert touch—had somehow comforted this child. The strange emotion was sinking away, and he struggled to name it before it vanished. Not pity, not protectiveness, not love. It was a kind of covenant between them.
“Here,” he said, “let’s pick up your books.”
“I don’t care about my books.”
“Well, I can pick them up for you.”
He collected them, arranged them, and offered them to her.
“I don’t want them.”
“No? Okay. So, um, why don’t—I can carry them home for you.”
“I don’t want to go home. I want my mother.”
“We can go see if she came home.”
“You know she didn’t. You already said so.”
“Well, maybe she called, maybe there’s news. Your father will know.”
“You’re just trying to get rid of me.”
“I am not trying to get rid of you. Why would I want to get rid of you?”
“I’m not a little kid. You don’t have to talk to me like that.” She refused to look at him.
“Okay. We could go sit by the lake. You want to go sit by the lake? We can just hang out until you’re ready to go home.” This was Crystal Lake, a block away.
“I’ll never be ready.”
“Well, then I guess we’ll just sit there all winter.”
He had not meant it as a joke and he did not see anything funny in it, but the little girl laughed, so Glover did too.
He left the books in his unmarked Ford, and together they walked to a shady slope beside the lake. They sat down on a wood-slatted bench there, Miranda to the detective’s right, the same side she had chosen to walk beside him. He thought she must be choosing this side because she was curious about the port-wine stain, but she was not stealing any glances at it. It occurred to him that she took this side to put him at ease, to show him that she was not fazed by it, that he needn’t be self-conscious. He liked her so much for this gesture that he immediately convinced himself that it was impossible, she had not done it at all. It was just a coincidence that she had chosen to sit on his right side, because children are not so kind and neither, generally, are adults.
“Do you want to talk about it?” he said.
“No.”
“Do you want to talk about anything?”
“No.”
They sat there in silence for a long time, or what felt to Detective Glover like a long time.
“What’s your name?”
“Detective Glover.”
“No, your real name.”
“It’s Tom.”
“Tom. Do you like being a detective, Tom?”
“Not really.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. I suppose it’s because I meet a lot of unhappy people.”
“Like me?”
“Like you.”
“You meet happy people, too, don’t you?”
“Not many. Happy people don’t call the police a whole lot.”
“How do you get that job?”
“Well, you start by being a police officer, the kind that wears a blue uniform.”
“Did you wear a blue uniform?”
“Yes. I used to.”
“Why blue? Why not green?”
“I don’t really know. I guess people just like policemen to wear blue. I used to wear a green uniform, in the army. I’ve worn lots of uniforms.”
“But now you don’t.”
“Now I don’t. Not anymore. I wish I did. It’s easier. You don’t have to think about what to wear.”
“Can you find my mom?”
He looked down at her. “Yes.”
“Do you know why she ran away?”
“What makes you think she ran away?”
“Because she left.”
Glover nodded. He looked out at the lake, not at the girl. He waited for her to speak.
“Do people ever just leave like that?”
“Sometimes.”
“And then they come back?”
“Sometimes.”
They watched a duck capsize itself to snap at something under the surface.
“Why do they leave?”
“I don’t know. Lots of reasons, I guess. What makes you think your mother would run away?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did she fight with your dad?”
“Sometimes, I guess. Everybody fights.”
“What did they fight about?”
“They didn’t, like, fight fight. Just regular fighting.”
“Well, like what would be an example of them fighting?”
“I don’t know. Don’t you ever fight with people?”
“Sure. Did they have a fight recently?”
“No.”
“Maybe about money?”
“No.”
“About something else?”
“No.”
“Maybe about something your father did?”
“No. There was no fight. I told you.”
“Did you ever see them do worse than arguing?”
“Worse like what? I don’t get it.”
“Did your mom ever get hurt? Bruises, black eyes, anything like that?”
“You mean, by my dad?”
“Yeah.”
“No!”
“Your dad never hit your mom? Or pushed her?”
“No! Never.”
“Threatened her?”
“No.”
“You’d tell me if he did?”
“Yes.”
He leaned back, folded his arms, stretched out his legs, and crossed them at the ankles. “Did you see your dad yesterday morning before you left for school?”
“I see him every morning.”
“Was there anything unusual about him? How he looked, how he acted?”
“No. He was happy.”
“He wasn’t angry or nervous or anything?”
“He was just normal.”
“What was he wearing?”
“A suit.”
“What color, do you remember?”
“Gray.”
“You remember his shirt?”
“Yeah.”
“What color was it?”
“Blue. Light blue. With a white collar.”
“That’s pretty good. How do you remember that?”
“When he comes down for breakfast, he always does the same thing. He hangs his coat over the top of the kitchen door, and when he sits down, he flips his necktie over his shoulder like a scarf so it won’t get dirty.”
“He must have been eating something messy.”
“No, just a muffin.”
“That can be messy, can’t it?”
“No. He used a fork and knife.”
“Why would he eat a muffin with a fork and knife?”
“He always does. He says it’s greasy. He doesn’t like to get grease on his fingers.”
“Hm. Okay. But you remember him wearing that shirt specifically?”
“Yes. It’s my favorite. It has little holes in the collar for a clip that he wears.”
“You have a good memory. How about the tie, do you remember that too?”
“Yeah. It was red with, like, decorations.”
“Decorations?”
“You know, a pattern.” She pronounced it patterin. “Like little flowers, kind of.”
“Have you seen that tie before?”
“All the time.”
“But he has other red ties too?”
“Yeah.”
“But you know the specific red tie you mean?”
“Yeah.”
“Would you recognize it again if you saw it?”
“Yeah.”
“Did he have any marks on him yesterday morning, scratches or bruises or cuts, anything like that?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
