Public Secrets

military draft to interrupt his plans.
Whatever they were, he thought.
He hadn’t a clue what he wanted to do with the life that was ahead of him. His part-time job at Buzzard’s Tee Shirt Shop was mainly for gas and date money. He had no intention of spending his life screen-printing T-shirts. But just what he would do was still a cloudy mystery.
It was a little scary taking off the cap and gown. Like shedding his youth. He held them both in his hands as he scanned his room. It was cluttered with clothes, mementos, record albums, and since his mother had long since given up on cleaning it herself, his cache of Playboys . There were the letters he’d earned in track and baseball. The letters, he remembered, that had convinced Rose Anne Markowitz to climb into the backseat of his secondhand Pinto and do it to the tune of Joe Cocker’s Feeling Alright .

He’d been blessed with a tough athletic body, long legs, and quick reflexes. Like his father, his mother was fond of saying. He supposed in some way he took after the old man, though their relationship had had its share of battles. Over hair length, wardrobe, politics, curfews. Captain Kesselring was a stickler.
Came from being a cop, Michael supposed. He remembered being careless enough once to bring a single joint into the house. He’d been grounded for a month. And a few lousy speeding tickets had cost him just as dearly.
The law was the law, old Lou was fond of saying, Michael thought now. Thank God he himself had no intention of being a cop.
He took the tassel from the cap before tossing it and the gown onto his unmade bed. Maybe it was sentimental to keep it, but nobody had to know. He routed through his dresser drawers for the old cigar box that held some of his most valued possessions. The love letter Lori Spiker had written him in his junior year—before she’d dumped him for a biker with a Harley and tattoos. The ticket stub from the Rolling Stones’ concert he had, after a lot of blood and sweat, convinced his parents to let him attend. The pop top from his first illegal beer. He grinned and, pushing it aside, found the snapshot of himself and Brian McAvoy.
The little girl had kept her word, Michael thought. The picture had arrived in the mail only two weeks after the incredible day his dad had taken him to meet Devastation. The new album had come with it, the hot-off-the-presses copy. He had been the envy of his contemporaries for weeks.
Michael thought back to that day, the almost unendurable excitement he’d felt, the sweaty armpits. He hadn’t thought about that day in a long time. Now, perhaps because of his newly acquired adult status, it occurred to him that it had been a terrific thing for his father to do. And uncharacteristic. Not that the old man couldn’t come up with terrific things, but he had gone to the rehearsal hall on police business. Captain Lou Kesselring never mixed police business and personal pleasures.
But he had that day, Michael thought.
It was strange, but now that he was remembering it all, he could picture his father dragging home files, night after night. As far as Michael could recollect, his father had never brought home work that way before, or since.

The little boy, Brian McAvoy’s little boy, had been murdered. It had been in all the papers, and still cropped up from time to time, perhaps because the police had never solved the case.
His father’s case, Michael recalled.
That had been the year Michael had been named MVP on his Little League team. And his father had missed most of the games. And a lot of dinners.
It had been a long time ago, Michael mused, but he wondered if his father ever thought about Brian McAvoy and his dead son. Or the little girl who had taken the picture. Some people said that she’d seen what had happened to her brother and had gone crazy. But she hadn’t looked crazy when Michael had met her. He remembered her only vaguely as a slight girl with pale hair and big sad eyes. And a soft, prettily accented voice, he recalled now. A voice a lot like her father’s.
Poor kid, he thought as he placed the tassel over the snapshot. He wondered what had ever happened to her.

Chapter Fourteen

E MMA COULDN’T BELIEVE her time was almost up. In less than a week she would head back to New York and Saint Catherine’s. True, she missed Marianne. It would take weeks for them to talk through all the things that had happened over the summer. The best summer of her life, even though they’d only