Absolute Brightness (18 page)

I told Chuck that I wanted to meet Peggy Brinkerhoff and thank her personally. He said that wouldn't be necessary.

“Why not?” I asked him.

“Because,” he said, “she really doesn't need to be thanked. The thing washed up at her house. It was just dumb luck.”

I didn't push it, because obviously Chuck didn't understand how Peggy had become my only living link to Leonard and it was important that the connection be strengthened if we were ever going to find him. If Chuck had actually known Leonard, he might have understood that the whole world was a pulsing, glowing web of invisible fiber optics that connects one person to another. Leonard would have told him this; Leonard would've explained why it is that the more strands there are, the brighter the overall glow. And then Chuck would've been sympathetic to my idea of contacting Peggy Brinkerhoff; he would've known that what I really wanted was to make a connection with her as a way of creating more light by which we might, just maybe, see Leonard if we really looked.

Mom had just finished making a big pot of coffee, and Chuck was chitchatting and adding milk and sugar the way he liked it. Deirdre had already gone upstairs to bed, so I was sitting alone in the living room, staring at Chuck's big blue binder lying flat on the coffee table next to Leonard's sneaker. This was such a no-brainer. All I had to do was:

1. Open the binder.

2. Find Peggy Brinkerhoff's name and address, which would be written as plain as day in Chuck's perfectly legible handwriting on the first page, right below Dad's name and address.

3. Copy the information on the inside cover of my copy of
Lady Chatterley's Lover
by D. H. Lawrence.

4. Close the binder.

5. Yell good-night to Chuck and Mom.

6. Get the hell out of there.

And that's exactly what I did—steps 1 through 6.

The next morning, I set about trying to find a ride out to Shark River. I don't usually “set about” doing anything. If I decide to do something, usually I just do it. But these were unusual times, and suddenly not everything I wanted to do made sense to everybody else. Mom definitely would not have agreed to drive me to meet Peggy; she was already hard at work in the salon, and even if I had gone to the trouble of asking her permission, she would have told me that not in a million years was it going to happen because Chuck had told me to forget about it. Deirdre wasn't a possibility either; she was locked in her room, unavailable for comment and, as I've pointed out, without a car.

So who else?

There was my father, but of course after what I'd discovered about him, he was definitely out of the running—not only as a possible ride, but also as a father. As far as I was concerned, I wanted nothing more to do with him for as long as I lived.

Electra was also out. In the old days I might have called her and convinced her to convince her brother to become our designated driver. But ever since the incident at the Fourth of July picnic, we hadn't spoken on the telephone and I saw her only in passing. And that was weird, because I really thought she and I would be best friends for life. I just assumed that we would graduate high school and go to college together. Afterward we would move to the same city (probably New York), live in the same apartment building; we would meet our boyfriends at the same art opening and refuse to marry them. With the success of her artwork and my novels there would be plenty of money; we would buy some land. We would take up with wilder boyfriends who rode motorcycles and weren't afraid to cook. We would bake bread, and our children would be homeschooled. It was a good story.

But the moment Electra began championing the war in Iraq, every time she explained how we had to support our troops even if we thought the whole thing was wrong, the fantasy of our combined future chipped a bit and lost its shine, our present grew thin, and our shared past seemed to dwindle and disappear. If I saw her coming toward me on the street, I looked right through her. Once I even turned away. Eventually we settled into a routine that involved ignoring each other, not exactly enemies, but not exactly friends anymore either. When I mentioned this to Mom, she sighed and repeated her latest mantra: “Honey, things change.”

And then there was Travis Lembeck. He lived on the far side of Route 33, and because he owned a car and things had certainly changed between us in the past few weeks, I figured he was worth a try. The houses in that part of town were different from ours; they were smaller, less colorful, and many were surrounded not by shrubs and flowers but by stuff that you wouldn't find on the front lawns of any of my neighbors. Broken toys, rusted car parts, damaged furniture, discarded exercise bicycles, abandoned refrigerators, and busted-up televisions were a few of the items that doubled as lawn ornaments up and down Travis's street. Over there, it was as if the boundaries between the insides and the outsides of the houses were not so fixed, and life seemed to spill out of them and into the yards in an alarming and violent manner.

The house where Travis lived was in a state of severe neglect; it had been painted so long ago that the pale minty green was more a memory of the original color than an actual color. The front steps were crumbling, and the pavement leading up to the door was cracked as badly as the devil's back. One of the slabs was missing, like a tooth that had been yanked out just for spite. The gutters at the edges of the roof had long since given up. The mailbox was a milk crate nailed to a wooden post. A single sheet of plywood, which had been nailed up at a haphazard angle over one of the living-room windows, gave the impression that the house itself was half blind.

When I pressed my finger to the doorbell, there was no indication that it worked. I knocked hard on the screen door and waited. Nothing. Just dead morning air.

After a few minutes, Travis appeared at the door, looking all sleepy eyed. He had obviously just woken up.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” I replied.

Neither of us knew what to say, so I decided to get to the point.

“Look,” I began, “I'm not here for a make-out session or anything like that. That's not why I came. So don't … I just need a ride and I didn't know who else to ask. If you can't do it, if this isn't a good time, it's totally fine.”

He looked out the door, squinting into the daylight, and then said, “I can do it. Hold on a minute.”

After he disappeared into the darkness of the house, I leaned in and pressed my face against the screen. All I could see was the hulking presence of a big plaid sofa pushed against the far wall and some stacked boxes. The place didn't look very neat, and the lingering smell of cigarette smoke, beer, and burned popcorn was a total turnoff. I went and waited in his car.

“Where to?” he asked as he slid into the driver's seat and started up the engine.

“Shark River.”

He gave me a look.

“Shark River?”

“Yeah.” And I said it again, “Shark River.”

“What's goin' on there?”

As we drove, I told him what I knew about the sneaker, about Peggy Brinkerhoff; and because I thought he could handle it, I told him about the web of brightness that needed to be strengthened. He lit a cigarette and got quiet for about a mile. Then he said, “You're a good person, Phoebe.” This, I figured, was his way of telling me that I had a nice personality and he wasn't going to kiss me anymore. He exhaled a big cloud of smoke, and when he was finished he said, “People probably think I'm shit, huh?”

“People?” I said, stalling for time. Then added, “Well, yeah. But me, too. I mean, they think that of me, too.”

Meanwhile, strip malls, car lots, fast-food joints, and office complexes whizzed by us in a blur of uninterrupted dullness. All of a sudden Travis suggested that we skip Shark River and go to the beach instead.

“Ocean's better any day of the week. Wanna?”

“Can't,” I told him without looking at him. “I've got to do this thing. We can go after maybe.”

We didn't have any trouble finding Peggy's house. It was a real fixer-upper that had been fixed way up in a cutesy, cottage-by-the-sea sort of way. The shutters had little sailboats cut out of them, and there was a lot of nautical-inspired filigree around the edges of the house. Six sock ducks were planted on the lawn, but because there wasn't a hint of a breeze, they just hung there looking like dishrags on sticks. The same with the American flag, which drooped unpatriotically from a pole. Above the door there was a wooden sign with
THE BRINKERHOFFS
spelled out cursively in rope.

“Yup,” I said to Travis. “This is the place.”

I could see the lake out beyond the house, but so much light was skittering across its surface and the glare was so strong, I had to shield my eyes and then finally turn away. I was just about to hop out of the car when something happened to me. My stomach dropped and I felt that something wasn't right. Maybe the reality of Leonard being gone for good was suddenly impossible to ignore. Of course, no one had said it, not yet, but Leonard had drowned in that lake. It was what everyone had been thinking ever since the sneaker washed up. I knew it. Chuck knew it. Everyone knew it. But what if that Peggy woman didn't understand the rules? What if she didn't know that I am a Hertle, and Hertles have always been the kind of people who aren't ready to discuss the obvious until it's staring them straight in the face? I didn't know a thing about Peggy Brinkerhoff other than her name, her address, and the fact that she'd found Leonard's sneaker. She could've been the murderer for all I knew. But then I took another quick look at the sock ducks and the sailboat cutouts and I realized that she was probably not the type of person who was capable of talking about anything too real right off the bat. About her being a cold-blooded killer I was less certain.

“Will you come in with me?” I asked Travis. From the way he turned his head to face forward, I could tell he wasn't expecting to do anything other than just drive me.

“Um,” he muttered.

“You don't have to.” It
was
a bold request, but I couldn't think of any other way to get myself out of the car and up to the front door. A full five minutes had gone by, and I was still sitting in the front seat unable to move any part of my body. I needed help.

“I dunno. What would I do?” he asked, turning his face even farther from me and looking out toward the brightness of the lake.

“Basic handholding,” I said, and then I quickly added, “not literally. I mean … you know, like support or whatever.”

He flicked his cigarette into the street, and we both watched it sit there until the cherry went dead. Then he reached over and took my hand. Literally.

“Sure,” he said. “C'mon.”

*   *   *

Peggy Brinkerhoff was a sweet-faced woman with a gray perm and piercing pale-blue eyes. She wasn't the type to wear high heels, but she was a convincing argument for their invention. In her stocking feet she was barely five feet tall. If it hadn't been for her voice—a voice that seemed to crack and whine and cut through glass—people might not have paid much attention to her. Now retired, Peggy used to work at Hackensack Hospital in Bergen County as an electroencephalogram technician, recording the brain waves of patients who had suffered blows to the head, migraines, dizzy spells, and grand mal epileptic seizures. She wasn't trained to read the wavy lines and sharp peaks that appeared on the computer screen and then spurted from her printer. That was the business of the doctors who were her superiors. But she did get to wear hospital whites and a name tag and was allowed to use the staff cafeteria on Wednesdays and Thursdays. She liked the work. It was easy, steady, and she was promised a good pension. All she had to do was to fix the electrodes to the patients' heads, tell them to relax, turn on the machine, and then sit there for the thirty minutes it took to make a record of their cerebral activity. Sometimes, while the machine was busy recording, she read crime novels. Reading crime novels was Peggy's hobby. When she retired from the hospital, reading crime novels became her full-time job. She couldn't get enough of them. Not only did she read the trashy whodunits in paperback form, she was also a big fan of the better writers who wrote the hardbacks, like Patricia Highsmith, P. D. James, and Ruth Rendell.

Unlike the reluctant spies, granny detectives, and hard-boiled sleuths of novels, Peggy had never come in contact with evil: She herself was a no-crime zone. She had never been mugged or raped or shot at. No one had ever stolen anything from her, hijacked her car, hit her on the head with a lead pipe, or left her for dead. In fact, she'd never been a victim of any kind, and neither had anyone in her family. She found this amazing, and she often thought that her husband, Dick, her two grown sons, Frank and Ted, and she herself would seem like very dull characters if they ever showed up in one of her books.

Then one afternoon in the summer of 2001 when Dick was standing next to a boiler (he had a business repairing them), the thing exploded. Technically it was an accident, but because Dick was dead, Peggy felt that finally she had been touched by something bad.

“These things happen,” her friends told her.

But Peggy wasn't satisfied with that kind of talk. And so she began questioning Dick's coworkers, going through his files, combing the evidence for clues and getting on everyone's nerves. People rolled their eyes behind her back and said, “Grief,” as if that one word could explain all that Peggy was up to. But despite her best efforts, she never found out anything to prove that Dick's death was more than a plain old accident, just one of those things that happen.

Without Dick around, the little house on the edge of Shark River suddenly seemed enormous. Briefly, Peggy considered moving; but really, where would she go? Her sons lived nearby. The lake was a kind of comfort. And she was already familiar with the names of all the streets and neighboring townships. Every morning when she sat down with the local newspaper, she scanned it page by page for headlines of crimes and misdeeds. Usually in the first paragraph the location of the crime was mentioned, and usually Peggy was able to picture the scene exactly. Incidents involving drunk driving, petty thievery, carjackings, hit-and-runs, B and Es (breaking and enterings), and muggings became her new hobby. She also followed stories about corporate embezzlement, child molestation, drug busts, domestic violence, stolen cars, and her favorite, missing children.