The Devils Teardrop

coffee shop and sat down in a window booth, where he had a good view of the vending machine and the side entrance to City Hall. He wanted to make sure the envelope was picked up—it was, beforeHavel even had his jacket off. He also wanted to see who’d be coming to advise the mayor. And whether reporters showed up.
    The waitress stopped by his booth and he ordered coffee and, though it was still breakfast time, a steak sandwich, the most expensive thing on the menu. Why not? He was about to become a very wealthy man.

2
    “Daddy, tell me about the Boatman.”
    Parker Kincaid paused. He set down the cast-iron skillet he was washing.
    He’d learned never to be alarmed by anything the children asked—well, never to appear alarmed—and he smiled down at the boy as he dried his hands with paper towels.
    “The Boatman?” he asked his nine-year-old son. “You bet. What do you want to know?”
    The kitchen of Parker’s house in Fairfax, Virginia, was fragrant with the smells of a holiday meal in the works. Onion, sage, rosemary. The boy looked out the window. Said nothing.
    “Go ahead,” Parker encouraged. “Tell me.”
    Robby was blond and had his mother’s blue eyes. He wore a purple Izod shirt and tan pants, cinched at the waist with a Ralph Lauren belt. His floppy cowlick leaned to the starboard this morning.
    “I mean,” the boy began, “I know he’s dead and everything . . .”
    “That’s right,” Parker said. He added nothing more. ( “Never tell the children more than they ask.” This was one of the rules from Parker Kincaid’s Handbook for the Single Parent —a guide that existed solely in his mind yet one he referred to every day.)
    “It’s just that outside . . . sometimes it looks like him. I mean, I looked outside and it’s like I could see him.”
    “What do we do when you feel like that?”
    “I get my shield and my helmet,” the boy recited, “and if it’s dark I put the lights on.”
    Parker remained standing. Usually, when he had serious conversations with his children, he subscribed to the eye-level approach. But when the subject of the Boatman arose a therapist had recommended that Parker stand—to make the boy feel safe in the presence of a strong, protective adult. And there was something about Parker Kincaid that induced a sense of security. Just forty, he was tall—a little over six feet—and was nearly in as good shape now as he’d been in college. Thanks not to aerobics or health clubs but to his two children—and their soccer scrimmages, basketball, Frisbee tourneys and the family’s regular Sunday morning runs (well, Parker’s run—he usually brought up the rear behind their bicycles as they looped around a local park).
    “Let’s take a look. Okay? Where you think you saw him.”
    “Okay.”
    “You have your helmet and your shield?”
    “Right here.” The boy patted his head and then held up his left arm like a knight’s.
    “That’s a good one. I’ve got mine too.” Parker mimicked the boy’s gestures.
    They walked to the back door.
    “See, those bushes,” Robby said.
    Parker looked out over his half acre in an old development twenty miles west of Washington, D.C. His property was mostly grass and flower beds. But at the back of the land was a tangle of forsythia and kudzu and ivy he’d been meaning to cut back for a year. Sure enough, if you squinted, some of the vegetation did resemble a human form.
    “That looks spooky,” Parker conceded. “Sure does. But you know the Boatman was a long time ago.” He wasn’t going to minimize the boy’s fear by pointing out that he’d been scared only by some scruffy bushes. But he wanted to give Robby a sense of distance from the incident.
    “I know. But . . .”
    “How long ago was it?”
    “Four years,” Robby answered.
    “Isn’t that a long time?”
    “Pretty long, I guess.”
    “Show me.” He stretched his arms out. “This long?”
    “Maybe.”
    “I think it’s longer.” Parker stretched his arms out farther. “As long as that fish we caught at Braddock Lake?”
    “That was this long,” the boy said, starting to smile and holding his own arms out.
    “Naw, it was this long.” Parker gave an exaggerated frown.
    “No, no, it was this long.” The boy danced from one foot to the next, hands up high.
    “It was longer!” Parker joked. “Longer.”
    Robby ran the length of the kitchen, lifting one arm. Then he ran back and lifted the other. “It was this