Absolute Brightness (23 page)

“What the hell's going on here?”

“I woke him up,” I said, trying to explain the situation. “I scared him. It's not what you think.”

Mom stood for about thirty seconds looking at the two of us as if we were a complicated equation and she was determined to do the math and get it right this time. She had gotten the answer wrong once before, and I guess she didn't want to take any more chances. When she was satisfied that it all added up to nothing, she told me to go upstairs and make myself decent, but she said it in a tone of voice that implied that the whole thing had been my fault.

“He should be up already,” I added as a way of presenting my defense. “It's late.”

Afterward, I fixed Uncle Mike a hot breakfast. It was just a frozen waffle and a cup of coffee that I'd reheated in the microwave, but still, he seemed to enjoy it.

“Said I was sorry,” I reminded him as I handed over a paper napkin and pointed to the thin dribble of maple syrup on his chin.

Finally he gave in and smiled.

“Yeah, well, it was a rude awakening.”

“Ha-ha,” I replied, because I recognized this as one of Uncle Mike's lame attempts at being witty. I offered him more waffles.

“Nah,” he said, “I'm good.”

On our way out to Shark River in his rented blue Malibu, I explained to him the purpose of my mission. I told him that I had to give some woman a perm. Her name was Peggy Brinkerhoff, I explained, and because she was a pathetic, bedridden invalid for whom trips to the salon were too painful to be considered, I was required to visit her home on a semiregular basis and fix her hair. But at the moment we pulled up in front of the house, Peggy was scrambling around in her garden looking about as healthy as a person can look for a woman of her age. How was I going to explain her sudden recovery? Before I could figure it out, she had spotted us and was practically sprinting toward the Malibu.

“Hey, you came,” she said to me. Then she leaned into the car so she could get a better look at Uncle Mike.

“Hi,” she said, this time directing herself to him. “I'm Peggy Brinkerhoff. I'd shake, but you can see my hands are filthy.”

And then she let out a girlish laugh.

“This is my uncle,” I told her. “Just give me a minute, will ya?”

And that's about how long it took for me to make up a story about how Peggy had a mother who was also named Peggy, and Peggy Senior was the one who needed the perm; not Peggy Junior, who was the Peggy we had just met. I went on to assure Uncle Mike that witnessing a perm would be just about as exciting as watching someone rake a lawn, but in miniature. I told him that he might want to drive around the block a few hundred times or maybe wait down by the lake.

“This is the place, isn't it? This is where Leonard was … where he died.”

“Yeah,” I told him. “Will you be okay?”

We both stared out at the still, blue lake; it looked like a big chunk of sky that had plummeted to earth on a hot day in August and landed flat in the middle of nowhere. The trees around the lake were leaning in toward the water; their branches, full of summer, hung down until they just touched the surface.

“Yeah, no, sure. I mean, I'm working on a new song so … yeah, I'm good.”

My mother considered Uncle Mike a lost cause. For years she
tsk-tsk
ed over his hair, his clothes, his choice of girlfriends, and especially his liberal use of marijuana. She commiserated with anyone who would listen because she was sure that without the pot, everything would have turned out perfectly for Mike and he would have made something of his life. In high school he had been the star quarterback, he was offered several scholarships to name-brand colleges, he had girlfriends calling the house at all hours. But after graduation, Mike decided to blow it all by taking a series of menial jobs in cut-rate department stores so he could pursue his dream of becoming Bruce Springsteen. He taught himself to play the guitar, he sometimes talked about getting a band together, and even after he moved to Phoenix, got a job, and met Leonard's mom, he continued to get high and write songs that no one ever heard.

“It's just not finished,” he would say whenever any of us asked to hear his latest.

As he ambled down toward the lake, humming a half-baked tune, I thought that the same thing could have been said of Uncle Mike—he was just not quite finished. But, as he was always reminding us, he was good.

“I really didn't think you'd come,” Peggy said, showing me into her cozy little dining area.

I don't think I had any intention of visiting Peggy when I woke up that morning. But lying alone in my bed, I suddenly knew that despite all my best defenses and regardless of the many excuses I was making to myself, I was going to be with Peggy before the day was out simply because I needed to know.

Her home was just as clean and tidy as I remembered. There were the studio portraits of her family members lined up just so along the mantel of the fireplace, the porcelain figurines of melancholy shepherdesses arranged around the room, the furniture looking catalog appropriate. I had grown up in a house where we were always fighting back a rising tide of mess and dust, bobby pins, hairnets, curlers, and misplaced homework. A place like Peggy's set my teeth on edge. I just wasn't used to such order. It seemed to me that in a home like Peggy's where everything had a place and everything was in its place, anything could go wrong at any moment.

Sunlight was bouncing up from the lake and into the house; it filled the dining area with a silvery sheen and shot through the fake Tiffany lampshade that hung over the table. Patterns of tiny colored squares were reflected onto the wall, and if I stood in the right position, I could make them play across my hands and face.

“I told you I'd come.”

“Yuh,” she said, adjusting her glasses so that she could read the message on my T-shirt. “Whales. Nice. How's your friend? Travis, is it? He didn't come with you.”

“No. He's … um, he's busy. I mean, I guess he's busy. I haven't seen him much since, y'know.”

“Must be a lot going on. I mean, for you. This past week. How're ya handling it all?”

I didn't want her to think that I was the kind of girl who gets dumped by cute boys with cars and then forgets to get properly dressed when she goes to visit strangers, so I told her that I was fine. And then added that I'd been keeping myself pretty busy.

“Really?” she said, scrunching her face at me. “How?”

“Oh, y'know. Stuff.”

This didn't seem to satisfy her, because she just stood there staring at me.

“Actually,” I finally said, “I'm thinking about writing about it all. Y'know, about Leonard. But…”

“Good good good. You do that! Wish I could write. But I can't. Not for beans.”

And with that she was off to the kitchen to root around in what sounded like a large junk drawer.

“Is this a crime novel you're gonna write?” she asked me from the kitchen, clearly hoping that I would say yes.

“No.”

“Detective story?”

“No.”

“Murder mystery?”

“No.

“Then what?”

“I dunno. I don't really like those kinds of novels,” I explained to her. “I think they're totally bogus.”

When she came back to the dining area, she was carrying some rope and a metal ring about six inches in diameter.

“Bogus?”

The table was covered in one of those easy-wipe tablecloths, the kind that have pastel pictures of old-fashioned kitchen items printed on one side and a fuzzy felt underlining on the other. She pushed a neat pile of newspaper clippings to one side and placed the rope and the metal ring on the table.

“Yeah,” I told her. “I think it's a cheap way to get people to care about reading a book when really they should just be reading because they care about the words, the ideas. Maybe it's just me. I mean, does everything have to always be a problem or something that's got to get solved?”

“I don't know,” she said. “I just like 'em. Here. Sit.”

She used a pair of gardening shears to cut the rope into lengths of about a yard each. I felt as though she were preparing to perform a magic act—or a murder.

“What's this all about?” I asked, nervously picking up the metal ring. She took the ring from me and gently placed it back on the table, but this time closer to her. Then she continued until she had cut three pieces of rope. She arranged them in front of her, laying each one alongside the other. She counted them just to make sure she had the right number for her demonstration.

“One. Two. Three. Okay,” she said as she splayed her hands out flat over the setup. “I'm ready. So this is what I wanted to talk to you about. It's kinda complicated and it's gonna take some follow-up. But we might as well start somewhere.”

With her forefinger, she pushed her glasses onto the bridge of her tiny nose and then picked up the ring and a single piece of rope. She slipped the end of the rope through the ring and then brought it around a second time to create a loop. She repeated this two more times, making three loops of about the same size. Holding the three loops against each other with her left hand, she began to wrap the end of the rope three times around the loops with her right hand. Finally she pulled on both ends of the rope, causing the tangle to magically organize itself into a neat, tight knot. It was quite a trick, made all the more amazing by the fact that she continued to talk as she performed it.

“My husband was big on fishing. He was. All he wanted to do was fish. Out on the lake a lot. But he loved ocean fishing best. I wasn't much interested, really. I took it up, though, 'cause it was a way the two of us got to spend time together. Anyway, I learned what I had to. Tying knots was top of the list.”

As she presented me with the first of what I assumed would be a series of rope tricks, the doorbell chimed.

“I'll get it!” I said, practically knocking back my chair as I jumped up and ran for the door. “It's probably my uncle checking on me.”

When I opened the door, Chuck was standing there, wearing one of his everyday off-duty outfits—a blue short-sleeved shirt, tan slacks, and work boots. But because he was carrying his blue binder under his arm, I knew that today was not like every day; he was there on business. We were definitely into Phase Two.

“Phoebe?” he said tentatively, not sure it was really me. Maybe he thought I was some girl living on the other side of town who amazingly looked just like Phoebe Hertle except for the hair, which was now midnight blue. In any case, he seemed genuinely surprised, and confused.

“Wait. What're you doing here?”

“I got a call,” he said, peering past me and into the coolness of the house. “I got a call from the woman who lives here. Mrs. Brinkerhoff. What're
you
doing here?”

By this time Peggy had found her way to the door and was already pulling Chuck inside. After she thanked him for coming, told him to call her Peggy, offered him coffee (he declined), she was ready to resume her lecture demonstration.

“I saw something out there on the dock the day … y'know. That day. I'm pretty sure I'm right and all. It was the rope. It was tied to the anchor in such a way that … let's just say I know a thing or two about fishing. Only a fisherman would do it like this.”

She held up the neat, tight knot that she had just made for me and handed it to Chuck. He looked at it closely and turned it over and over. It was a pretty thing, and Peggy obviously knew what she was doing.

“They call it a Jansik special. It's slip-proof. It's a good way to fix your hook good to a line. And lemme just say you'd have to be a darn good fisherman to do a knot like this in the dark. And there's another thing. I'm not positive, and that's why I asked you to bring the pictures, Chuck. Can I call you Chuck? Whoever made the knot I think was a leftie.”

Chuck opened his blue binder and pulled out a manila envelope. He undid the clasp as we watched, and then he slipped out a few black-and-white eight-by-ten photographs. They were close-ups of either the knots that had been used to tie up Leonard's body or the one used to secure the rope to the anchor. He laid the photographs out on the table alongside Peggy's rope trick. Peggy pushed her glasses in place and leaned in close over them.

“Yuh,” she said, nodding and pointing to one particular picture, the knot that was tied to the anchor. Even I could see that the design of the knot was reversed.

Then she picked up one of the other photos lying on the table to have a closer look.

“Okay. That's strange.”

“What?” Chuck asked. By now he was hooked, leaning in, and good old Peggy had proved her worth as a reliable expert in the case.

“Look,” she said as she held the photo out so we could all see it. “This knot is where the two ends of the rope are tied together around the boy's middle. It's just a plain overhand knot. Sloppy work. The kind of knot that just about anyone in the world would make. And it's not even that good.”

She picked up the remaining two pieces of rope from the table and tied them together. Though her knot was cleaner than the one in the picture, she'd made her point. This was clearly the work of someone who didn't know knots, someone
other
than the person who had tied the Jansik special.

We all looked up and waited for someone to say it.

“So there was more than just one person.” Chuck finally said it.

Peggy looked at him over the rim of her glasses and nodded. “Yuh. Looks that way.”

Just then we heard a splash out in the water. When we looked up and squinted out the picture window, we saw someone swimming away.

“It's my uncle Mike,” I told them. “I'd better go see what's up.”

I left them and walked out the back door and into the yard. The lawn sloped gently down to the water's edge, and it had been clipped and maintained by a gardener who obviously believed in the military style. The orderliness and uniformity was almost spooky. A large sycamore tree grew in the middle of the yard and provided plenty of shade. Planted off to the side where the light was strong and unobstructed, a couple of young fruit trees were struggling to grow. But what really caught my attention were the clothes piled neatly by the sandy shoreline—a blue T-shirt, a pair of khaki shorts, two white socks, a scuffed-up pair of gray Nike running shoes, and a pair of Joe Boxers.