The Loading Dock
A Short Story
Author’s Note
The idea for “The Loading Dock” originated with the factory job I held for a year after graduating from high school in 1967. Union, Massachusetts is a fictional version of my actual hometown, and the humid, gloomy summer I described is an authentic memory. So is the sinister loading dock, which haunted me for decades before the alchemy of imagination brought this tale to life.
“The Loading Dock” is included in my first short story collection, A Cold Day in August: Thirteen Tales of Criminality Most Foul, which is available on Amazon in Kindle and paperback editions. If you read and enjoy this story, I hope you’ll share it with family and friends, and perhaps even go on to read the other tales that comprise A Cold Day in August.
The Loading Dock
A Short Story by Thomas Gregg
The summer after my graduation from high school lives in my memory as a season of humidity and gloom. The last week of classes, the Senior Prom, graduation itself, passed in a blur and when they were over and done with the clouds closed in. By day a sinister gray overcast obscured the sun; the nights were black, hot, oppressive.
Copper Concepts, where I worked that summer, occupied one of the gruesome old mill buildings that lined the north bank of the Liberty River. Every morning, Monday through Friday, I biked up Main Street, turned left onto King Philip Avenue, crossed the Warner Street Bridge and turned right onto River Street. The mills stood on the right side of the street and Copper Concepts was the last of them, at the intersection of River and Broadway. If you turned left onto Broadway you’d find yourself in the part of Union we called Low Town, whose mean little brick houses had originally been company-built for the mill workers. In Low Town you could always catch the wet scummy smell of the river, whose morning mists crept along the narrow cobblestoned streets.
I worked in Shipping and Receiving. The boss was Jimmy Trent, a skinny, balding, sixty-something swamp Yankee with a store of tall tales and a desk drawer full of girlie magazines. He chain-smoked Lucky Strikes and the first two fingers of his right hand were permanently stained with nicotine. Then there was Mike Urban, a blocky, muscular Polak in his mid-thirties, well over six feet tall, with dirty blonde hair, pale blue eyes, a mouth full of crooked yellow teeth and large, misshapen working man’s hands. Like me, Mike was an only child. He lived in Low Town with his widowed mother.
Mike was a man of few words. People said that he was slow—this was 1965 and sensitive words like challenged had not yet come into vogue—and that’s what I thought at first. Later, though, I came to believe that Mike just didn’t see the point of speaking unless he had something definite to say. He didn’t mind listening if you wanted to talk, but conversations with Mike tended to be one-sided.
“Mike Urban’s an odd one,” my father told me once. “You be wary of him, Billy.”
Our base of operations was a cadaverous two-storey warehouse connected to the main building by an enclosed second-floor walkway spanning the alley that ran down to the river. There was a small office up front, where an overhead door gave out onto River Street. Smaller trucks were able to drive right in. For semis there was a loading dock around the corner, facing a large lot enclosed by a chain-link fence.
The job was simple enough but it kept us busy. We loaded and unloaded trucks, warehoused incoming materials, processed orders for shipment and distributed supplies to the various departments. Copper Concepts manufactured “Gifts of Distinction by Yankee Craftsmen”: copper bowls and trays and plates and planters and plaques, copper Christmas ornaments, even copper jewelry. These the company marketed through a network of sales reps who arranged home parties on the Tupperware model. Business was booming at the time and it was a rare day that we didn’t load two or three full semis.
On Fridays we generally spent the last hour of the workday in the office, smoking cigarettes and nipping from the bottle of Old Crow that Jimmy kept in the back of a desk drawer. “Worked us like dogs all week,” he’d say. “Shut that door, son. Got a smoke?”
Jimmy was always out of cigarettes by Friday afternoon. So Mike or I would pass him one, which he’d light with a kitchen match, and then we’d settle down to listen while Jimmy spun one of his tales.
He had a bunch of them, reaching back into the city’s dim colonial past. The Trents, it seemed, had been one of the five founding families of Union, Massachusetts. Without rancor or regret, Jimmy informed us that his forbearers had been prominent and well-to-do. “Grandfather Oliver was a drinking man, though,” he explained, nipping at the Old Crow. “And a gambler and a womanizer to boot. So there went the money and the land. And so here I am, slaving away in this Christless warehouse.”
He laughed after saying that, so I did as well. But Mike just sat smoking and if he cracked a smile it was thin and fleeting.
One Friday afternoon toward the end of July when the sky was canopied with gray overcast and you could have sliced the humidity with a bread knife, Jimmy told the story of the loading dock. Most of his stories were dirty or humorous or both but this one gave me a bit of a turn. Because truth be told there was something about that loading dock that I’d never liked.
It was a desolate place, particularly if you happened to step out onto the dock by yourself when there was no truck to load or unload. Then there was nothing to look at besides the ill-kept pitted lot with weeds growing through its crumbling asphalt. Here and there stood stacks of wooden pallets, weathered by many seasons of use. The whole was surrounded by a sagging chain-link fence. Beyond that was the high blank wall of another warehouse and to the left was the Liberty River, whose unwholesome smell permeated the air. Even when the sun was shining there was something sinister about the view from the loading dock.
Mike Urban, though, had an affinity for the place. When he wanted to smoke that’s where he went, to stand in whatever patch of shade the hour of day made available, staring over the lot with a Chesterfield burning between his fingers. Sometimes he’d slip out there when we were supposed to be working—the company allowed two ten-minute breaks, morning and afternoon, plus a half an hour for lunch—and Jimmy would have to give him a talking-to about it. Once I found him on the dock, prodding the carcass of a dead pigeon with the toe of his blocky work boot.
“Was a terrible thing that happened out there,” said Jimmy that Friday afternoon. “This was in the Forties, acourse, when New Process Metals owned this place. Made canteens and mess kits and such for the Army.”
A murder had been committed on the loading dock, Jimmy went on. A man named Jack Peters was bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat by the husband of the woman he’d been sleeping with, a curvy blonde with a pretty face named Brenda McDonald. “Jack was 4-F, you see. Had a gimpy leg from falling out of a tree when he was a kid. Draft board rejected him. Lucky Jack, people took to calling him after that.”
But Colin McDonald wasn’t so lucky. The draft board collared him late in 1942 and he was shipped over to England in time for D-Day. “Came home right around Thanksgiving in 1945. And acourse he knew his wife Brenda had been carrying on with Jack,” said Jimmy. “Secrets like that don’t keep in Union and someone had spilled the beans to Colin in a letter. She’d always been a wild one and people said that nothing good would come of it when Colin got drafted. Well, nothing did.”
Brenda had been telling people that she intended to throw Colin over, divorce him and marry Lucky Jack. And apparently that’s what she told her husband, on the very day Colin McDonald arrived home. “The cops figured she must have let him know they were washed up,” Jimmy said shaking his head. “Right in the front hall of their house on Cobb Street, with him still in his uniform. And it was right then and there that he did for her.”
Colin McDonald was a tall strong man who’d worked as a lineman for the electric company before the war and he made quick work of Brenda, snapping her neck just as easy as you please. Then he took that baseball bat from the hall closet, where it had been leaning in a corner since he went off to the war, and walked down to River Street.
“Hell of a shortstop, Colin was. Played on the electric company team. Anyhow, he came in right through there,” said Jimmy, pointing in the direction of the overhead. “It happened to be open just then. Ed Carpinski—he’s passed now—saw him and acourse he knew what was up. Hell, everybody in Low Town knew about Jack and Brenda. Colin asked Ed where Jack might be found and Ed told him: out on the loading dock. He didn’t want to tell but he said that the look in Colin McDonald’s eyes made him ascairt not to. Ed ran in here and called the cops but by the time they showed up, well, it was over and done with.”
There was a terrible mess, Jimmy informed us. “Ed came out with the cops and when he saw what was left of Jack’s head he lost his lunch over the side of the dock. Colin was just standing there with that bloody baseball bat in his hand, staring down at the body. When the cops collared him he went with them quiet enough.”
And he stayed quiet. Under questioning Colin McDonald said nothing at all. “Was like he didn’t much care what would happen to him,” Jimmy said. “That’s what Parker Travis told me—he was one of the detectives who investigated the case. Married a cousin of mine. Eyes of a dead man was how Parker described it. Never spoke a word, either, not to the cops, not at his trial.”
Jimmy said that people in Union mostly sympathized with Colin, who’d had a bad time of it over in France and Germany while back at home his wife was stepping out on him with Lucky Jim and who knew who else. But that cut no ice with the jury that convicted him on two counts of first-degree murder, which in those days carried a mandatory death sentence. “So down to Charleston State Prison he went,” Jimmy said, “and there he rode the lightning.”
Colin McDonald was strapped into the electric chair one snowy night in the winter of 1947. As it happened he was one of the last convicted murderers in Massachusetts to be executed. “There was just two more,” Jimmy concluded, shaking his head. “Couple of boys who murdered a returned Marine, if I remember correct.”
He passed the bottle of Old Crow; Mike and I both took a nip.
“I suppose you recall Colin and Brenda,” Jimmy said to Mike. “Lived two houses down from you, didn’t they?”
“That’s right,” Mike nodded.
“Acourse you were just a boy then,” Jimmy added with a glance at him. There was something pointed in that glance and I remembered that Jimmy had had to “speak sharp” to Mike earlier in the day when he caught him goofing off on the loading dock.
But now Mike said nothing.
“Well,” said Jimmy, eyeing his Timex, “I see it’s just about quitting time. Why don’t you check the dock for me, son? Make sure those doors are closed and locked.”
“Okay, Jimmy.”
The loading dock doors stood open and I stepped outside for a moment. The air was thick and still. I glanced down, curious to see if some evidence remained of Jack Peters’ violent demise. But the thick splintery planks, ingrained with decades of oil and grime, betrayed nothing.
I worked at Copper Concepts for a year before the draft caught up with me. Like Colin McDonald I got shipped off to fight in a thankless faraway war and as it happened I never returned to Union. While I was overseas my father—he worked for the phone company—bid on a job down the Cape in Brewster. So when I got out of the Army I spent two years on Cape Cod, living with my parents, working here and there.
That was my in-between time, as I thought of it later: the time it took for me to come all the way home from the war. Nowadays they have a name for what afflicted me: PTSD. Back then it was just nightmares, and night sweats, and flashbacks that had a way of snatching the breath from my throat. My father, who’d served in the Navy on a destroyer in the Pacific, watched me and understood, I think. But honoring the code of silence that veterans of his generation mostly observed, he never asked me about Vietnam.
Things got better, though—for most of us who went to that war things worked out all right. I used the GI Bill to get a degree in business administration and eventually I settled down in Savannah, Georgia, working for the Georgia Ports Authority. There I met my wife Jane. I seldom thought about Union and never went back there until my father died suddenly in 1987, felled by a massive stroke.
“He wanted to be laid to rest in the family plot,” I explained to Jane when she wondered why the burial service was to be in Union. “Dad was the last living member of his family. Except for me…”
After a younger brother had died of scarlet fever at the age of three Dad was an only child. As for the previous generation, his mother had died when I was still an infant and his father passed the year I entered high school. I flashed for a moment on the image of my grandfather’s wake, his cold waxy face so still in the coffin. Mom was from New Hampshire originally. Some kind of family dispute had estranged her from her parents, whom we never saw. Besides them there was an older sister who’d never married. Aunt Grace: a prickly difficult woman with a sharp tongue who used to come to Union every year for Thanksgiving.
“It’ll be strange for you,” Jane said. “Going back after all this time.”
What seemed strange, I reflected as she dozed next to me on the flight to Boston, was that I never had been back to Union. Well, there was nothing to go back to after my parents moved to the Cape. But still, for the first nineteen years of my life Union had been home. In those days, I recalled as the coastal plain of North Carolina unrolled beneath the wing of the plane, you kept close to home. In those days even Boston had seemed a long way off…
Jane stirred next to me. “Another hour,” I told her and she settled back.
Two years earlier I’d received a letter from Dick Curtis, who’d been president of Union High School’s Class of 1965. It was an invitation to our twentieth reunion. I briefly considered going but Jane had been pregnant at the time and we decided to pass.
Three or four months later, Dick sent me the newsletter he’d put together after the reunion. Who was doing what, who’d married whom, two or three photographs from the reunion and, black-bordered at the bottom of the second page, the names of four classmates who had died. Dick, who owned a printing and graphics company, had produced a nice, professional piece of work.
I read the names of the deceased. Teddy Hinton. Paul Krebs. Patrick Noonan. Sylvia Vernon. How they’d died was not mentioned but I imagined the usual: auto accident, heart attack, cancer. Except for Teddy. Him I knew about: killed in action, Republic of Vietnam, spring 1967, toward the end of Operation Junction City.
After the funeral in Brewster my mother and Aunt Grace accompanied Dad’s body on the trip to Union. “Now there’s no need for us all to travel together,” Mom said. “I’ll be fine with Grace.” So Jane and I drove to Union in a rental car. My old home town was located west of Fitchburg, ten or twelve miles north of Route 2. We crossed the town line just after four. I noticed that the dilapidated old barn at the edge of the cornfield on the right side of the road was still there.
But a little farther on the cornfield gave way to a new strip development and there stood the Holiday Inn where we’d all be staying. We checked in, unpacked and had lunch at a nearby Friendly’s. Then Jane announced that she needed a nap.
“And what are you going to do with yourself while I’m snoozing?” she asked.
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe take a drive around. Downtown’s just a couple of miles north of here.”
“Revisit the scenes of your youthful sins?” Jane suggested with a wink.
“Such as they were.”
She smiled then and as sometimes happened when she smiled in a certain way, I remembered her as she’d been on the day of our marriage: just the same, really, except for the lines now at the corners of her eyes and her hair, long and brown and shining then, now stylishly short. In the year of my father’s death, my wife had just turned forty.
In mid-October the weather in Union could be treacherous but the day before my father’s burial belonged on a postcard. White clouds in a blue sky, maple trees aflame with scarlet and gold in the sun, recently fallen leaves chased along the pavement and the sidewalks by a flirting breeze.
But downtown Union was a smudgy copy of its former self. I drove up Main Street past half-empty commercial buildings once home to the Five and Ten and Woolworth’s and New Haven Lace. Now there were payday loan companies and rent-to-own outlets and storefront law offices and a tattoo parlor, even, where Frenchie’s Newsstand used to be. The two movie theaters, the Stanton and the Greenfield, stood derelict with their entrances boarded up. The Common looked much the same, though, and the Old Colony Diner was still in business. Squint a little, I thought, and 1965 would snap back into focus…
A few miles farther on, about where Main Street became State Route 101, I found Union’s new commercial center: an industrial park, a block of modern office buildings, a row of small businesses. Among the latter was Unicorn Graphics. I parked, went inside and asked the girl behind the counter for Mr. Curtis. She picked up the phone, spoke briefly and a moment later Dick came through the door behind the counter. He gave me a quizzical look, then broke into a smile.
“Hello, Bill!” He came around the counter and stuck out his hand. “Recognized you right away. Hell, you haven’t changed a bit.”
“Hello, Dick,” I replied, taking his hand and giving it a businesslike shake. “I could say the same of you.”
And that was true—more or less. Dick had gained maybe twenty pounds and his hair was thinning but otherwise there hadn’t been much change. He still had the genial, slightly high-pressure manner of the natural-born politician. No doubt the president of my high school senior class was now a community leader: active in the Chamber of Commerce, chairman of the annual United Way Drive. He invited me back to his office for a cup of coffee and I accepted.
“So what brings you back to Union after all these years?” he asked. I explained about my father and he offered his condolences. Dick’s parents were still going strong and he himself was married with two kids.
“Two daughters,” he sighed. “The older one just turned fifteen. God help me. How about you, Bill? You’re married, right? Kids?”
“Right,” I said. “But no—no kids.”
We chatted for a few minutes about the Class of 1965.
“By the way,” I said, “thanks for sending me that newsletter. I was sorry I couldn’t make the reunion.”
“Well, the twenty-fifth is coming up in 1990. If I can find the time to organize it.”
Dick told me that to date seven of our classmates had died since graduation day. “Mostly what you’d expect,” he said with a shrug. “Heart attack. Cancer. Two car crashes. The usual. Well, except for Teddy Hinton. Christ, what a shame. Everyone in Union came to his funeral. You served in Vietnam too, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” I nodded, leaving it at that.
“And then Sylvia Vernon…” Dick stopped.
“What about Sylvia?” I asked.
“You didn’t hear?”
“I live down in Georgia.”
“Right, right. Well, Sylvia was murdered. Six years ago it was.” Dick looked to the side and cleared his throat. “Sorry. It’s a painful memory.”
“Jesus. What the hell happened?” I asked, remembering that he’d dated her in high school.
“Sylvia…was strangled. Her body was found on the riverbank, about half a mile past the intersection of River Street and Broadway.” Dick shrugged. “The police, though, they never made an arrest. She’d been divorced twice and they looked at both ex-husbands but…”
We sat there in silence for a minute and I thought: River and Broadway, Copper Concepts.
The loading dock.
“They found her purse on the lot next to the last building on River,” Dick said eventually. “It’s vacant now—they’re all vacant, those old mill buildings. The company—what was its name?—went out of business in the late Seventies.”
“Copper Concepts. I used to work there.”
Dick walked me out to my car. “Sorry for your trouble,” he said again as we shook hands. “Good to see you, though, Bill. Sure you and your wife can’t make time for dinner with me and Amy?”
“I wish we could but the burial’s tomorrow and we’re leaving first thing the next morning.”
I drove back down Main Street, turned right onto King Philip Avenue, crossed the Warner Street Bridge and turned right onto River Street. The old mill buildings still stood along the riverbank. At the intersection of River and Broadway I pulled to the curb. Across the street was Copper Concepts— what was left of it. The main building was to the right, still connected to the warehouse by the overhead passage. But most of the windows were boarded up and there was a blank unpainted space over the main entrance where the big CC logo had been removed. The warehouse too was derelict. The window that looked into Jimmy Trent’s old office was broken and someone had patched it with a square of cardboard. From where I was parked I couldn’t see the loading dock but the gate to the lot was standing open, as if waiting on one last semi.
My chest tightened with the sudden need for a cigarette, though I’d given up smoking years before. Like the abandoned buildings across the street the urge for a smoke was an artifact of the past. Jimmy, I remembered, had always been out of cigarettes by Friday afternoon.
I got out of the car and crossed the street. There were a couple of NO TRESPASSING signs posted but to judge from the litter of beer cans and cigarette butts in the angle of the lot formed by the warehouse and the fence no one really cared. I passed through the gate and there, half in sun, half in shadow, was the loading dock.
“You bastard,” I said aloud.
Ed came out with the cops and when he saw what was left of Jack’s head, well, he lost his lunch over the side of the dock, I heard Jimmy say in his swamp Yankee twang. They found her purse on the lot next to the last building on River, Dick answered. And I said, “Right by the loading dock, I bet.”
I strolled over. It looked just the same: a weathered concrete foundation surfaced with splintered planks discolored by decades of ingrained grime and oil. There was more litter over the side: a pint whiskey bottle—not Old Crow but Seagram’s 7—more cigarette butts, a couple of crumpled empty packs—Marlboros, Chesterfields.
Standing there in the sun with that insistent autumn breeze blowing litter past my shoes, I traced out the connections. Brenda, Lucky Jack, Colin McDonald—Sylvia. She’d lived in Low Town also, hadn’t she? Yes, on Monroe Street. And Monroe Street was—
“Sir? This is private property.”
I turned and the cop gave me a cop’s blank stare. Lost in the past, I hadn’t heard him pull up in his black and white cruiser.
“Oh. Sorry,” I replied. “I just…well, I used to work here. When I was young.”
“Yeah?” he replied without much interest. “I’ll have to ask you to move along, though.”
“Sure, of course,” I nodded, reaching into my jacket pocket for the car keys. “It was a long time ago and I was curious, you know?”
“How long ago?” the cop asked.
“Nineteen sixty-five, sixty-six.”
“Hell,” the cop said. “So you must have known Jimmy Trent.”
“I worked with him.”
“Now isn’t that a coincidence?” the cop said with a laugh. “Jimmy was my mother’s cousin. Quite a character, he was.”
“He was that,” I agreed, noticing for the first time the name plate over the pocket of the cop’s uniform shirt. TRAVIS, it read. “I suppose…”
“Yeah, he passed away nine or ten years ago. Lung cancer. Those cigarettes finally caught up with him.”
“Lucky Strikes,” I said.
“That’s right. Well, you have yourself a good day, sir.” He stuck out his hand and I took it.
“It’s Bill,” I said as we shook. “Bill Hennessy.”
“Ronnie Travis. I’ll have to tell my mother. She’ll get a kick out of hearing that I ran across someone who knew Jimmy from the long ago.”
“And Mike.” I said. “I bet she’ll remember Mike Urban. He worked with me and Jimmy.”
“Mike Urban?” A shadow seemed to pass over Officer Travis’ face. Then it cleared and he nodded. “Mike? Sure. He’s still around—still living on Cobb Street in Low Town.”
“Huh.”
“Have a good day, Mr. Hennessy,” Ronnie Travis said again. He touched the bill of his cap and strode toward his cruiser. I stood there for a moment longer, surveying the derelict lot and the loading dock. Then I turned and headed for my car.
The nice weather lasted through the next day, when we buried my father. A surprising number of people showed up at graveside, bearing names that brought back memories of my boyhood. Among them was a blocky, thickset man, seventysomething, well over six feet tall, with buzz-cut gray hair, pale blue eyes, crooked yellow teeth, large misshapen workingman’s hands. He was dressed in an old but well-kept blue suit, white shirt, red tie and shiny wingtips. It was Mike Urban, like downtown Union a smudgy copy of his younger self.
“Mike,” I said, stepping over to him. “Hello. And thanks for coming.”
“Hello, Bill,” he replied. “Sorry for your trouble.”
“You knew my father?”
“Remember him well.”
We stood silent for a moment.
“I heard about Jimmy,” I said finally. “Ran into his nephew, as a matter of fact.”
To this Mike said nothing.
“Well, come on and say hello to my mother,” I said. “And meet my wife.” Mike nodded.
Jane smiled when I brought him over but Mom gave him a sharp look and I noticed that her hand tightened on Aunt Grace’s arm. “Why, hello, Mike,” she said. “How nice of you to come.”
“Sorry for your trouble,” Mike replied.
“And your mother? How is she?”
“Had to put her in a nursing home over to Fitchburg.” Mike lowered his head—for him a considerable display of emotion.
“Such a shame.”
Then someone spoke to my mother from the side and with a brittle smile she turned away from us.
“There’s a buffet lunch,” I said. “At the Holiday Inn where we’re staying. Come on by, Mike. I’ll stand you a drink at the bar.”
“Wouldn’t say no.” And with a polite nod he took his leave.
“Such characters they have here in dear old Union,” Jane drawled.
“Mike was never much of a conversationalist,” I said.
“Well maybe a drink or two will loosen his tongue.”
Mike showed up at the Holiday Inn, spoke briefly to my mother again—and again she regarded him with a sharp eye—ate a hearty lunch in solitary state and went out to the bar where I joined him after making my rounds, thanking one and all for coming. He’d ordered a ‘Gansett on tap and I followed suit. For several minutes we sat there side by side, saying nothing, as we so often had during lunch breaks at Copper Concepts.
“So what are you up to these days?” I asked finally.
“This and that,” Mike said. In his laconic manner he described the mini-conglomerate that he managed: lawn care, snow plowing, trash pickup, house painting, haulage, etc. and so forth. As needed he hired greenhorns—Portuguese immigrants—to manage the workload. It was a nice little living, Mike allowed. “I stay busy, anyhow,” he concluded.
“So now you’re the boss,” I quipped. “Like Jimmy in the old days.”
“Guess so.”
On impulse I ordered a couple of shots of Old Crow. “Here’s to absent friends,” I toasted, raising my glass, and we knocked the bourbon back. It was the first shot of Old Crow I’d downed since leaving the employ of Copper Concepts and it tasted of memories.
“Remember that Friday when Jimmy told the story about Colin McDonald and his wife and Lucky Jack?” I asked and Mike nodded. “I thought of that yesterday—I drove down River Street to have a look at the old place.”
Mike said nothing.
“You and your mother lived in Low Town too,” I went on. “Just down the street from…”
“Got to be going,” Mike said. “Thanks for the beer. The Old Crow, too.”
“Sure, Mike. Good seeing you.” And we left it at that.
One night back in Savannah, a year or so after my father’s death, Jane and I had just gone to bed and she asked in the darkness, “Are you disappointed with me Bill?”
“Now why would I be?” But I knew what she meant. There had been a pregnancy but Jane lost the baby and then the fucking doctors said: No more of that, young lady. It’s too dangerous for you. It was churlish, I know, to put it on the doctors, who were merely the bearers of bad news. And irrational to tell myself that Jane’s misfortune was payback for certain sins of my youth.
“No,” I said, reaching for her hand under the covers. “No, of course not. Of course I’m not disappointed in you. Never think that, my love.”
“We could have adopted.”
We’d talked about adoption. But something in me resisted the idea. The Hennessy family’s grip on posterity had always been tenuous—a succession of only sons—and somehow it seemed more fitting to let the name perish with me than to graft it onto someone not of the blood.
“It’s all right,” I whispered. “I have you, so I have everything.”
Not long after that there was news from Union. This time I didn’t get it via one of Dick Curtiss’ newsletters but from cable news: MASSACHUSETTS MAN CONFESSES TO 1945 MURDER.
Though Colin McDonald had killed Lucky Jack Peters, it turned out that he hadn’t done for his round-heeled wife Brenda after all. She’d been seen to by Mike Urban, the tough-handsome teenager who lived down the street with his widowed mother. Brenda had seduced him, an easy thing for a curvy blonde with a pretty face to do to the seventeen-year-old kid who cut her grass, shoveled the snow off her front walk and did odd jobs around the house while her husband was over to France, fighting the Nazis.
As Mike told it, she’d summoned him that morning to say, So sorry, but with my husband coming home that’s it for us. And Mike, who believed that he loved her, went and lost his temper and with his big hands snapped her pretty neck. There Colin McDonald found her a little later. Assuming not unreasonably that his wife had tried to break it off with Lucky Jim and been murdered for her trouble, he took the baseball bat from the closet and strolled down to New Process Metals. Well, maybe he’d planned on doing that anyway. No one can say, because Colin never did.
Mike had confessed to his mother who, terrified of losing her son and being left all alone, begged him not to turn himself in and promised to lie for him if the police should happen to come calling—which they did. Secrets didn’t keep in Union and people suspected even if they didn’t know for sure that something had been going on between Mike and Brenda. She’d been a wild one, after all, and Mike had often been seen around her house. But his mother’s alibi sufficed and that’s why Colin McDonald rode the lightning for both murders.
“That old man at the burial,” said Jane over the breakfast table, shaking her head. “But why would he confess after all this time?”
“His mother passed not long after we saw him in Union,” I answered. “Maybe he kept the secret for her, not for himself. Maybe carrying it around just tired him out.”
But it wasn’t a secret, was it? Everybody knew, really: Jimmy, my father, my mother, Detective Parker Travis and his nephew Officer Randy Travis—the people who lived in Low Town and the ones who had to cross the Warner Street Bridge to get there. They knew but they let it alone, maybe for the sake of Mike’s mother, maybe because knowing but not saying gets to be a habit in a town like Union.
A few days later I called Dick Curtiss and he said he hadn’t been surprised, not really. “Mike, he was always a little off, you know? Reliable, though. Hell, I used his lawn service. But…”
Into the silence between us materialized the thought that maybe there was still more that they knew in Union, because hadn’t the cops found Sylvia Vernon’s purse on the lot near the loading dock on which Mike Urban used to stand and smoke?
But he never confessed to that or any other murder, of which there were three or four down the years that had never been solved. A man of few words to the end, Mike Urban had nothing more to say up to and including the day in 1997 that he died of lung cancer in the prison hospital ward. Those Chesterfields had caught up with him at last, just like the Luckies had caught up with Jimmy Trent.
Now I’m almost seventy myself. And sometimes late at night when Jane has fallen asleep but I am wakeful, I go back to that afternoon toward the end of July 1965 when the sky was canopied with gray overcast and you could have sliced the humidity with a bread knife. Was a terrible thing that happened out there, says Jimmy Trent in his swamp Yankee twang, settling back with a bummed cigarette to tell the story of the loading dock. And I marvel that in those days such dark knowledge swirled all about me, like the mists of Low Town, rising to poke fingers between the grim old mill buildings along River Street.
But I was only seventeen that summer, and I didn’t know jack.