Part Six

1

It had been more than a quarter of a century since my mother and I had been forced to leave Woodford to live with her parents in Columbus. Payne had told me that the town was now a flourishing bedroom community for the encroaching city. But I hadn't fully realized what that meant. After I steered from the interstate, following a newly paved road into town, I tested my memory. I'd been barely fourteen when Mom and I had left. Even so, from all the times that she and Dad had taken Petey and me to visit her parents, I remembered that there'd been a lot of farmland on the way to the interstate. Much of that was gone now, replaced by subdivisions of large houses on small lots. The panoramic outdoor view that owners had initially been attracted to had been obliterated by further development. Expensive landscaping compensated.

On what had once been the edge of town, I passed the furniture factory where my dad had been a foreman. It was now a restaurant/movie theater/shopping mall complex. The industrial exterior had been retained, giving it a sense of local history. Downtown-a grid of six blocks of stores-looked better than it had in my youth. Its adjoining two-story brick structures had been freshly sandblasted, everything appearing new, even though the buildings came from the early 1900s. One street had been blocked off and converted into a pedestrian mall, trees and planters interspersed among outdoor cafes, a fountain, and a small bandstand.

The area was busy enough that it took me a while to find a parking spot. My emotions pushed and pulled me. When I'd been a kid, downtown had seemed so big. Now the effect was the same, but for different reasons-helplessness made me feel small. Despite the passage of years, I managed to orient myself as I passed a comic-book store and an ice-cream shop, neither of which had been in those places when I was a kid. I came to the corner of Lincoln and Washington (the names returned to me) and stared at a shadowy doorway across the street. It was between a bank and a drugstore, businesses that had been in those places when I was a kid. I remembered because of all the times my mother had walked Petey and me to that doorway and had taken us up the narrow echoing stairway to our least favorite place in the world: the dentist's office.

That stairway had seemed towering and ominous when I'd climbed it in my youth. Now, trying to calm myself, I counted each of its thirty steps as I went up. At the top, I stood under a skylight (another change) and faced the same frosted-glass door that had led into the dentist, except that the name on the door was now cosgrove insurance agency.

A young woman with her hair pulled back looked up from stapling documents together. "Yes, sir?"

"I… When I was a kid, this used to be a dentist's office." I couldn't help looking past the receptionist toward the corridor that had led to the chamber of horrors.

She looked puzzled. "Yes?"

"He has some dental records I need, but I don't know how to get in touch with him because I've forgotten his name."

"I'm afraid I'm not the person to ask. I started working for Mr.

Cosgrove only six months ago, and I never heard anything about a dentist's office."

"Perhaps Mr. Cosgrove would know."

She went down the hallway to the office that I'd dreaded and came back in less than a minute. "He says he's been here eight years. Before then, this was a Realtor's office."

"Oh."

"Sorry."

"Sure." Something sank in me. "I guess it was too much to hope for." Discouraged, I turned toward the door, then stopped with a sudden thought. "A Realtor?"

"Excuse me?"

"You said a Realtor used to be in this office?"

"Yes." She was looking at me now as if I'd become a nuisance.

"Does he or she manage properties, do you suppose?"

"What?"

"Assuming that Mr. Cosgrove doesn't own this building, who's his landlord?"

2

"You mean the Dwyer Building." The bantamweight man in a bow tie stubbed out a cigarette. His desk was flanked on three sides by tall filing cabinets. "I've been managing it for Mr. Dwyer's heirs the past twenty years."

"The office Mr. Cosgrove is in."

"Unit-Two-C."

"Can you tell me who rented it back then? I'm looking for the name of a dentist who used to be there."

"Why on earth would you want-"

"Some dental records. If it's a nuisance for you to look it up, I'll gladly pay you a service fee."

"Nuisance? Hell, it's the easiest thing in the world. The secret to managing property is being organized." He pivoted in his swivel chair and pushed its rollers toward a filing cabinet on his right that was marked D.

"Dwyer Building." He searched through files. "Here." He sorted through papers in it. "Sure. I remember now. Dr. Raymond Faraday. He had a heart attack. Eighteen years ago. Died in the middle of giving somebody a root canal."

After what I'd been through, the grotesqueness of his death somehow didn't seem unusual. "Did he have any relatives here? Are they still in town?"

"Haven't the faintest idea, but check this phone book."

3

"… a long time ago. Dr. Raymond Faraday. I'm trying to find a relative of his." Back at my car, I was using my cell phone. There'd been only two Faradays in the book. This was my second try.

"My husband's his son," a suspicious-sounding woman said. "Frank's at work now. What's this got to do with his father?"

I straightened. "When my brother and I were kids, Dr. Faraday was our dentist. It's very important that I get my brother's dental X rays. To identify him."

"Your brother's dead?"

"Yes."

"I'm so sorry."

"It would be very helpful if you could tell me what happened to the records."

"His patients took their records with them when they chose a new dentist."

"But what about patients who hadn't been his clients for a while? My brother and I had stopped going to Dr. Faraday several years earlier."

"Didn't your parents transfer the records to your new dentist?"

"No." I remembered bitterly that after my father had died in the car accident and it turned out that his life-insurance policy had lapsed, my mother hadn't been able to afford things like taking me to a dentist.

The woman exhaled, as if annoyed about something. "I have no idea what my husband did with the old records. You'll have to ask him when he gets home from the office."

4

The baseball field hadn't changed. As the lowering sun cast my shadow, I stood at the bicycle rack where my friends and I had chained and locked our bikes so long ago. Behind me, the bleachers along the third-base line were crowded with parents yelling encouragement to kids playing what looked like a Little League game. I heard the crack of a ball off a bat. Cheers. Howls of disappointment. Other cheers. I assumed that a fly ball, seemingly a home run, had been caught.

But I kept my gaze on the bicycles, remembering how Petey had used a clothespin to attach a playing card to the front fender of his bike and how it had created a clackclackclackclack sound against the spokes when the wheel turned. It pained me that I couldn't remember the names of the two friends I'd been with and for whom I'd destroyed Petey's life. But I certainly remembered the gist of what we'd said.

"For crissake, Brad, your little brother's getting on my nerves. Tell him to beat it, would ya?"

"Yeah, he tags along everywhere. I'm tired of the little squirt. The friggin' noise his bike makes drives me nuts."

"He's just hanging around. He doesn't mean anything."

"Bull. How do you think my mom found out I was smoking if he didn't tell your mom?"