Flowering Judas(5)

The two of them were standing at the edge of the site for the new technology building at Mattatuck–Harvey Community College, standing at the door of the little shed they had built at the very beginning of the job. The shed was the place where they could do paperwork if they had to in the middle of the day. They had every man in the business out here working. Shpetim himself came out here to work, even if he couldn’t lift heavy objects anymore. Nderi could lift them. He could pick up steel girders as if they were made out of bread dough.

“It’s not like we’re Arabs,” Nderi said. “Our women don’t go veiled. They don’t even wear the hijab most of the time. She won’t have a hard time fitting in. And Albanian cooking is Albanian cooking.”

“They’ve stopped work over there,” Shpetim said, pointing across the site to where poured concrete and steel reinforcement bars were sticking out of the ground. A half-dozen men were in a little clutch right next to a pile of concrete blocks. The earthmover next to them was puffing away, using up fuel, but not actually doing anything.

“They can’t just stop like that,” Shpetim said. “What do they think they’re doing?”

“I want you to help me talk Ma into letting Anya come for dinner some night,” Nderi said. “That’s how you start this kind of thing. You have the girl to dinner. And I want Ma to meet her.”

“Your mother has met her.”

“I want her to meet Anya formally,” Nderi said.

One of the men broke away from the clutch and began to walk across the blasted landscape toward Shpetim and Nderi. It was Andor Kulla, looking—Shpetim couldn’t put a name to how he looked.

“There’s something wrong,” Shpetim said.

“There’s always something wrong,” Nderi said.

Andor walked up to them and stopped. Shpetim was about to start shouting, but then he didn’t. He didn’t know why.

“Why are you not working?” Shpetim asked. “What are you all doing, standing around like that? You know we’ve got a deadline.”

Andor looked up, then down, then back the way he had come. The other men were all standing in their clutch, looking at Shpetim and Nderi and Andor. Andor turned back.

“You’ve got to come,” he said. “We found something.”

“Found something? Found what?” Shpetim asked.

Andor shook his head and turned away. “This is the last place they saw him alive, isn’t it?” Andor said, walking back across the site as he talked. “That kid. Ten, twelve years ago. This was the last place anybody saw him alive.”

Shpetim felt something drop right inside him, as if his intestines had fallen loose and were about to come out. He hurried after Andor, walking over the pocked earth as quickly as he could. Nderi came with him, moving faster.

This is what I need, Shpetim thought. Something to bring all the work on the site to a halt. Something to make me a suspect in an investigation. He had no idea what kind of investigation. The men must have found a body. That was the only thing that made any sense. They must have found a body, or a skeleton, and this would be a crime scene, and the work would stop, and they would be blamed for it. There would be blood. There would be policemen. It would be the end of everything he had started out to do here, and then he would have to go back to Albania.

Except that he couldn’t go back to Albania. He was an American citizen now.

Shpetim got to where the men were standing and looked around. They backed up, and he could see that there was a hole where the earthmover had been digging earlier in the day. He looked into the hole expecting to see a ghostly skeleton hand reaching up out of the dirt.

What he saw instead was the top of a bright yellow backpack, full of something.

4

For Darvelle Haymes, life in Mattatuck, New York, was a matter of putting one foot in front of the other. That was what she had been doing when Chester went missing, and it was what she was doing now, as the day began to fold in on itself and the dark began to creep in around the edges. She pulled her Honda Civic into the driveway of her small brick ranch house and turned the engine off. She took the key out of the ignition and looked around. This was a reasonably good neighborhood for Mattatuck. She’d only been able to buy the house because, being a real estate agent, she’d seen it go on the market, underpriced, five days before anybody else knew it was there.

She got out of the car and looked around again. The telephone pole at the curb was just a telephone pole. The community bulletin board at the bus stop was empty. She thought about going into the house right away, and then she thought better of it. She marched down to the street and looked around. All the telephone poles she could see were just telephone poles.