Odd and memorable days often have odd and memorable starts. 63-year old detective Silas Tully's day was beginning and he didn't know it yet, sun rays still creeping toward his bedroom window, the flash momentary, sleep trying not to let go. He'd been widowed a number of years now, and anxious about the remainder of life.
At that precise instant, beside the Saugus River, at the edge of Saugus and Lynn and just north of Boston, two town boys came carefully through heavy growth by the river's initial bend a ways from Saugus Center, their lips shushed, their cameras in hand. Discovery and highlight of the new day came for the boys near the river edge. Sitting on the bank as if a sensual, long legged blonde or redhead had just stepped out of them, a pair of fiery red high heels. Red, sexy even in their emptiness, but dancing shoes, dating shoes, going-out shoes for sure. The sun caught them in an illuminating shot and quickly bounced away from its own glare. But there were no tracks, no sign of either long or short journey, no story to go with such abrupt high heel punctuation.
Trouble shoes, each boy thought.
The placid morning rolled around the pair of shoes the way a fog lifts, as though a vagrant artist had placed them there for a vision to collect, paints to speak his mind. Nearby, in the tall and mass-struggling reeds, a remnant April breeze sounded like a comb making its way through old corn stalks. Out of the northeast the night wind had stopped its gallop, had laid down its head to sleep in the early sun. River waters, at a point of tidal change, sat still as molasses.
Questions, doubt, mystery all melded in the morning pot.
Silas Tully rolled out of bed on the button of 5:00 A.M. Without a glass of wine the night before there was no need for an alarm clock. He often wondered if morning birds at high choir did it or some trick his blood performed. Or else a place in the back of his mind that snapped a flag for attention, some other-world retreat he'd been off to. Then, as always, without doubt, Molly Popp's face came at him from that dark distance, sweet Molly, always potential Molly. Something electric, deep but not foreboding, moved within him. With an unsure touch he rubbed his stomach searching for an elusive gas pocket that might have roused him.
The youngster Darren was the first up out of the brush, saying to his pal Michael, "Think she drowned, Mike? Think some guy pushed her in, right out of her shoes? We have to tell Silas Tully. He'll put yellow tape around the whole area. And I don't see any pocketbook. There's always a pocketbook hanging around with chicks. They carry their own rubbers. I heard my sister Dollie telling Josie on the phone, 'You got to have your own rubbers 'cause they don't care half the time.' Jeezus, it's like nothing to them the way they talk about it!" His head was full of pictures he had seen in a few magazines; red high heels, long bare legs and the other bare mysteries that so often dried his throat. He wondered if this girl of the shoes had been a redhead, or a blonde, and that hard to tell.
Darren Popp and his fourteen-year old pal, classmate and bird buff, Michael Rodden, came upon the shoes along with the rising and splintering of the sun. Their cameras were ready for the first bird of the day, the first dawn-provoked, colored flight they would get a shot of coming up out of groundcover. Darren carried a Bowie knife at his belt. A just-in-case investment. Looking about carefully, the boys noted again that there were no tracks near the shoes, not the slightest impression. Not a one. The bank was darkly rich, April soft and muddy and would not dry out for days yet. But there were no tracks. The shoes cried out for tracks, for normal compliance, for mere explanation.
Mystified, the boys started back into town, imagination concocting tale upon tale. Measurements of some unknown kind were otherwise being contemplated, each boy with his own approach, his own angle on the shoes their own riverbank was wearing like a romantic remnant.
"Think we have a murder here?" Michael said, looking back to the Saugus River snaking away to the Atlantic, the bends behind him like a huge slow-breathing S emptying brackish ponds, upriver flats, other slow streams anteing up their own spring effluence. In the distance, darker than they would be minutes later, the range of hills around Saugus was also emptying damp April's offerings. The boys knew the hill music the spring waters compounded, for that was a territory of past haunt and old nesting grounds.
Michael pursued his attempt at measurement and his chase at reality. "How do you get a pair of shoes stuck on the banking that way and no tracks around them? In a hundred years you couldn't throw them together like that. Not from the reeds or the brush line. Not even from one of Guy's canoes." He looked back again. "Could have come right from a dance. I wonder what she looked like. Probably had great jugs that got her in trouble, and long legs from you know where. The chief of detectives, old Si Tully, won't let a soul near that place in a month of Sundays. Like he don't let no one get too near your grandma but never says anything anyways."
All of 5:00 A.M. had touched Silas Tully with its fingers, letting his bones know of its arrival. He washed the face of the older man looking back at him from the mirror, blinking his eyes at still having hair on his head and few wrinkles at the neckline for a 63-year old man. His eyes, he noted, were as pale green as ever and were not loaded with any great weight but his own measurement.
He swore he'd reach a song if he could, a good feeling moving in him, calling out to him. For a moment he figured it was morning rather than Molly Popp. She had a morning presence he had never told her about, figured he wouldn't tell her in a hundred years, give or take a few. Little said is little damage done. He wanted to say status quo but it would not come up from where it was hiding.
Day had officially started. He pinned on his badge and snugged his belt. For a quick recovery of duties, to reassert a sense of organization (really, he thought, to catch his breath), he gave the day coming a salute full of yesterday's leavings. Art Kornell was in a cell again, for raising hell at Mallory's Pub. Art would need his breakfast and dear friend Molly Popp at her house-diner would have it ready for delivery by 6:30. Yesterday's accident scene just outside town would need another look, if only to ease his mind. Mash Holcumb would still be out of town for his grandfather's funeral, and then a day's travel home before he'd come back on relief duty. Amid all that reflection he inhaled his near sixty-three years on and about the river, let it all come upon him; salt thrush, August fire in the reeds, love-lies-bleeding hanging about the banking near Guy's boathouse, even day-old fish thrown out on the high banks by young fishermen contemptuous of bones. All of it brought him measurements he was often not ready to accept or give away.
Even then, there was nothing unusual silhouetting or daubing the horizon of the new day.
That thought brought him back to Molly; he could see her leaning her goodness against the kitchen counter in the half-house and half-diner, as if all that goodness now and then needed some respite. Her still-lovely and comely being had worn him down long ago. Soft still-red hair would be tied up in a band, with a small portion of her years pushing at the backside of her dress. That part never failed to catch his eye. No calipers could ever lie or distort the lines of those curves, nor could they abort his wonder about her and the way she might be put together. He'd never be able to tell her that, he thought. Though, with him, her trimness counted and extended a mark of reliability. His own weight, controlled by work and practice, pushed lightly and comfortably against his belt.
This morning again, no different than hundreds of others, Molly wholly warmed him, small sparks traversing a mesh of inner wiring he could almost touch. My own gridline, he thought. He could easily compound a sense of spark or shock. Batteries included came at him with a grin. Plus, he thought, there'll be a sense of cinnamon about her, a pause of kitchen refreshment that could readily move to the bedroom. Or it ought. She would look over one shoulder at his entrance into the diner, hair evenly in place, her neck in a graceful curve. She'd smile a particular kind of radiance, so that a whole hearth beckoned in the gesture, made welcome of itself. And the wire mesh, his own gridline, would generate a kind of ignition south of his belt.
At 5:00 AM he knew the people of the town that were awake: there'd be Molly with his and Art Kornell's breakfast in the works, Art Kornell himself, pacing the jail cell in hunger, and Tab Glasser at the gas station on the edge of town keeping his eyes down the road. Sometimes there'd be those boys with their cameras out and about, looking for prized migrants heading away from exotic lagoons toward the northern fields and the lean and mean neighborhoods of glaciers.
When the phone rang he figured it had to be Molly or Ted.