“Why do you put up with him? He’s rude, obnoxious, and a drunk.”
“You should have known him twenty-five years ago, Denise. He was everything the rest of us were not. Top of the class, captain of the football team…I tell you, the guy had an arm like a cannon. He was recruited by Big Ten schools, ACC schools, and Notre Dame. Turned them all down to go to the Naval Academy.”
“That doesn’t change what he is now, Marc. What’s he doing now? Look at him.”
“I don’t know, exactly. He lives downtown off Eastern Avenue somewhere. He managed to get himself kicked out of Annapolis. Joined the army after that, I think. Now…I don’t know. It looks like he’s trying to drink himself to death.”
“And succeeding. It’s late. Let’s go home.”
Light staggered over to them. His tie hung loosely around his neck. The top buttons on his shirt had come unbuttoned. He’d lost his blazer somewhere. He waved a beer can in their direction. “Not leaving, are you?” he yelled. Beer sloshed down his arm.
“Time to go,” Marc said, taking his wife’s elbow and placing himself between her and Light.
“But I want to dance with your beautiful wife.”
“Not tonight, Dexter. We have to go.”
“One little dance is all.”
“Aren’t I a little too young for you?” Denise asked.
“You have a point,” he replied.
“That’s right, Dex. You always preferred older women. What ever happened to Hot Pants Parker?”
Light pulled up short. Denise could have sworn he sobered up in that instant. If looks could kill, she thought, Marc’s a dead man. He spun on his heel and walked from the tent and disappeared into the darkness.
“What was that all about?” she asked.
“I’ll tell you later,” her husband said. “Like I said, he could do anything in those days.” They left him, a dim shadow, staring into the darkness toward the woods, seemingly lost in thought, in another time and place.
***
A cloud cut off the bright mid-afternoon sun streaming through the trees. In an instant the day turned gray. He rolled onto his side. The ground still held the residual cold from the previous night. She’d brought a thin blanket so no dirt would smudge her clothes. It would rain that night, he thought. Rain to wash away any evidence they’d ever been there. For some reason, that thought made him sad. He sat up.
“I’ve got to get back,” she said. He loved her soft, honeyed accent. “Now you wait five minutes, you hear? And then you can follow, but be careful.” He once asked her if everyone from South Carolina talked that way. She’d laughed and said, “You should hear an Alabama accent.”
Dexter watched as she buttoned her blouse. The cloud moved on and the sun returned. The forsythia burst back into bright yellow, the green leaves moved up one full tone. She smiled, and for a moment it seemed the sun’s return was intimately linked to that smile, glowing ever brighter as she held it. He thought she might not leave after all. But she stood, smoothed her skirt, and squared her shoulders. She’d stuffed her bra in her purse rather than put it back on. When she stood that way, angled slightly to his right, her breasts pushed at the fabric of her blouse. She knew the effect it had on him. She spun. He reached for her.
“No more, Dex, honey, but next time we’ll be back in bed,” she murmured. “Marvin’s classes start up again Saturday and the apartment will be ours.” Marvin, her husband, went to night school and took some Saturday classes at Johns Hopkins University. Dexter and Luella Mae had been meeting in her apartment for a month. But not the first time. That happened in the library.
He had permission to stay up an hour after lights out to complete his essay. As the Assistant Librarian, it fell to her to wait with him and lock up. They started to talk. He remembered every word of that conversation and how it ended in the little storeroom behind the checkout desk where books were processed or repaired. She’d asked him to help her lift a box up to a shelf. He stepped in looking for the box. Finding none, he turned to ask her a question. She’d closed the door. The only illumination came from a night light. She seduced him then and there, surrounded by the smell of rubber cement and stamp-pad ink. After that, when her husband had classes, he’d slip into her apartment and they’d use her bed. Once they did it on the couch and one memorable time, on the kitchen table.
But this day her husband had stayed home with a cold, so they met in Old Oak Woods in a copse formed from wild forsythia and honeysuckle. It circled them like a huge green and yellow doughnut with a grassy clearing in its center. Bees and insects filled the air with their humming. Ants and other crawly things marched across their blanket and eventually their bare legs.
The copse had been his suggestion. She grinned at the thought of an
al fresco
tryst—her words. He knew from experience, the copse would screen them from the road, but he still worried. Others knew about the clearing. Too many others. Cigarette stubs, “roaches,” tobacco papers, and an assortment of cans lay about. The older students called it the Smoking Lounge. No, meeting in the open like this carried too many risks. He thought he’d heard someone in the brush a while back. Probably the campus kids he’d seen on the road near the main gate, but it could have been anybody or anything. Kids. If they had come into the woods, they could easily have stumbled onto the two of them. The little creeps were like ants at a picnic. And if one saw and were to tell a parent….
She pulled on a shapeless green sweater, bent over and kissed him on the lips. “Remember,” she repeated, “five minutes.”
“Did you see some kids on your way here?” he asked.
“Oh yeah, that group of brats that are always sneaking around. You know I caught them peeking in my bedroom window one night.”
“Did you tell on them?”
“No. I didn’t want any trouble. Five minutes.”
“Okay, five,” he said. And you didn’t want the parents to know you’d left the blinds up again, either, he thought. Those kids weren’t the only ones who checked out that window.
She stepped through the wall of shrubbery that sealed them off from the path and disappeared. He buttoned his clothes and tucked in his shirt. He listened but did not hear the crackle of branches or her moving away. He slipped out the other side of the thicket and walked deeper in the woods. His watch said quarter to. He still had time. If those kids had been there, he needed to know. Somewhere ahead of him he heard their voices. He had to find out. He couldn’t afford even a hint of trouble. He had graduation and his appointment to Annapolis to think about. Too much to risk. He had to know. He crept forward toward the voices.
***
“Mr. Light, are you all right?”
“What? Oh. I’m fine, Stark. Just dandy. How about you leave and let me sit here for a moment.”
Dexter sat slumped on a cold iron bench and stared back into the marquee. The crowd had thinned. People who earlier filled the night with laughter had all gone back to their lives and would not mix and mingle again for a year, five years, ten….The catering crew busied themselves with clearing off and packing up. A guffaw and a woman’s voice raised in mock indignation drifted back through the night air. Light held his head between his palms as if he thought it might otherwise fall off.
“You were one of them, weren’t you, Stark?”
“One of whom?”
“One of the bratty campus kids. You were one of them.”
“A long time ago, Mr. Light, and yeah, I was a campus brat.”
“You were there that day.”
Stark sipped his cola, ingenuousness plastered across his face. “What day would that be?”
“
The
day, Stark. Don’t be cute. You know what day.”
“Just in the beginning. But I had to go to DISH, so I left them before—”
“I had to monitor Detention Study Hall that day. You were there?”
“Me and ten other guys.”
“So, if it hadn’t been for that—”
“I might have disappeared, too.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I think about that sometimes.”
“I bet you do. But you didn’t have anything to say about that day to our celebrity sleuth to help him…do whatever sleuths do…crack the case.”
“No, nothing. And what about you, Mr. Light, did you have anything for him? A mention of a meeting perhaps?”
“No, nothing,” Light said, ignoring the last part of Stark’s question. “Just that that day was the last good day of my life.”
Rosemary placed her cup carefully on its saucer, which she in turn put on the coffee table in front of her. Still leaning forward, brows knit, she swiveled her head around and scrutinized him like a jeweler appraising an expensive antique necklace. How much value lay in its history, how much in the gold and diamonds alone? Frank returned the gaze, face expressionless except for the smallest trace of a smile.
“Do I pass?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I’m not sure what I’m looking for.”
He placed his half-filled cup and saucer down next to hers. Hot chocolate from a paper packet, decaffeinated at that, could not replace the real thing. The aroma seemed chocolaty but that was it. He’d accepted it only because she’d offered and it seemed as though he ought to.
“You said you looked me up on the Internet.”
“Yes.” She sat back and directed her gaze at the wallpaper on the opposite wall.
“And you are wondering about my wife?” Those amazing brown eyes shifted to his.
“It’s none of my business, is it?” She resumed her study of wallpaper.
“No,” he said, almost sadly, “it’s not, but you can ask anyway.”
“The report said you were a suspect in her disappearance. Is that true?”
“Disappearance…and probable homicide, too, don’t forget that part.” He lifted the cup and then put it down. “I’m their best bet. Something over eighty-five percent of disappearances and deaths of this sort are perpetrated by family members. I’m family. I had the means, motive, and opportunity. They can’t find anybody else who does. That leaves me. They don’t have anywhere else to go.”
“Oh.”
“The problem with surfing the Internet,” he said, as much to himself as to her, “is that there’s no control on what gets put there. Newspapers, TV, and radio have filters. Editors or owners screen what gets said and what doesn’t. Even in the face of the obvious bias of some media outlets, there are limits. But the Internet has none. Anybody can post anything. The truth is mixed in with lies like diamonds with sewage. There is no sure way to sort them out.”
“No, I suppose you’re right. So how do we find out the truth?”
Frank shook his head and shrugged. They sat for a moment, lost in their own thoughts.
“I thought about you last night after you left,” she murmured. “I didn’t get much sleep wondering how I’d ask you about her. It scared me a little, too. What if it turned out that….” She plucked at a fold in the fabric of her dress.
“She had cancer,” he said. “She had these stabbing pains and no appetite. Her doctors sent her to the Mayo Clinic, the one in Scottsdale. They did tests and…ovarian cancer. She expected it, you see. She just knew cancer would find her and it did. Do you know how ovarian cancer works?”
“It’s every gynecologist’s favorite topic for women over fifty. So I’ve heard the lecture more than once. It’s a silent killer.”
“By the time they made their diagnosis it was already at level four. There was no way they could attack it. All they could do for her was write prescriptions for pain killers and set up a hospice program. They gave her three months to live.”
“The report didn’t say anything about that.”
“I didn’t mention it to anyone.”
“Your children?”
“No. She wanted to hold off as long as possible. There was nothing anyone could do about it. She said they should be called at the end, but only then. She wanted them to remember her as she used to be, not the doped up, gray scarecrow she would become. You didn’t know her. She could fill a room with sunlight. She moved like a swan. She had all this energy. I never knew anyone who could tackle so many different things at once. Even on the day she disappeared, she went for her daily walk—only this time she didn’t return. I thought…I called hospitals thinking she might have collapsed.” He paused, closed his eyes, and took several controlled breaths.
“She enjoyed life so much…and then…suddenly, she found herself worn out by noon. It was like watching ice melt.”
Rosemary’s eyes filled with tears. “I don’t think I want you to say anything more, Frank. I don’t need to know the rest.”
“I’d better go,” he said, but didn’t move. She upended her purse on the table in search of a Kleenex. He handed her his pocket handkerchief.
“Stay,” she whispered.
***
“Do you think your man Meredith is hopping in the sack with the fabulous Mrs. Mitchell tonight?” Judith Stark leaned in the doorway. She had a hair brush in her hand poised in midair.
“Judith,” Stark protested, “what a thing to say. They’re pushing seventy. I expect they’re sitting around drinking hot chocolate and reminiscing about old TV shows or life on the campus in the fifties.”
“You think? Well, I don’t have any intention of giving up sex until I die. So consider yourself put on notice, sweetheart.”
He blushed. His wife could be embarrassing in public and private. Not that this particular threat bothered him. On the contrary, it might signal an end to their spat. He looked up but she turned her back and left the room.
“I’m in the guestroom tonight,” she said over her shoulder. He heard the door click shut. He sighed and pulled on the green paisley robe she hated.
The master bedroom boasted a tiny balcony. He stepped out onto it. He shivered in the chill May air, reached into his pocket and extracted a pack of cigarettes. He did not smoke often. Judith did not let him smoke in the house, but when he felt the world closing in on him he’d sometimes go outside and light up. And at that moment the world weighed heavily on him. He lit the cigarette and watched as the smoke curled upward. At the eaves, it dashed away, caught in an invisible air current. The land fell away from the back of the house. A long, shallow hillside that ended at the state road. He could just make out the streak of white concrete shining in the moonlight. Beyond it Old Oak Woods. He closed his eyes to shut it out, but the boys came out to dance for him anyway.
“Leave me alone!”
“Okay, if you insist,” Judith said from the bed, “but I started feeling horny and thought better of my decision to sleep alone. And I hoped you’d be in the mood for some atoning.” She could not see the expression on his face in the dark. Had she, she would not have been quite so flippant.
***
The police put Dexter Light in the drunk tank for the night. They’d found him wandering around the Owings Mills Mall. He seemed harmless enough but clearly in no condition to navigate his way back to Baltimore.
“Who’s your daddy?” he asked. “Who’s your daddy?” Then he burst into laughter. “That’s what I want to know, Officer. Can’t be Marvin, that’s for sure, so, who?” He collapsed on the steel bunk and passed out.
“I swear this is the same guy we get every year from Scott. Let’s see….” The cop, a veteran of nearly twenty years, rifled through Dexter’s wallet. “Driver’s license, Dexter Light. That’s our guy.” He carefully inventoried the contents of Dexter’s pockets and put them in a manila envelope.
“Now, here’s an old picture,” he said, holding a crinkled black and white photograph of a pretty, dark-haired woman up to the light. “Not a bad looking broad either.”
***
“I decided that I had to make a choice,” Rosemary said, wiping her eyes. “If we were…if I….” She trailed off.
Just say it, you idiot, he won’t think badly of you, and what if he does?
You haven’t seen him for fifty years and might not again for another fifty. Didn’t you say this morning you were old? So, stop acting like a teenager.
“Am I acting like a teenager?”
“I don’t think so, but then it’s been a long time since my kids were that age and I had any real contact with one, and I didn’t understand them then, either.”
“Here’s the thing. If I condition whatever relationship that may develop between us on first making sure you weren’t involved in your wife’s…disappearance, then it would seem like I could never trust you. I’d have to cross check every detail and that would mess up everything. Oh God, I’m making a fool of myself, aren’t I?”
“You aren’t if what you’re saying is—you want to feel safe, but by asking the question, you will have already put a precondition on whatever follows. Is that it?”
“Yes. That’s nicely put. How do you do that, anyway?”
“I’m a writer.”
“I’ll try to remember that.”
“Nevertheless, if you asked the question that sits like the proverbial elephant in the corner, I would say, ‘No, I didn’t have anything to do with it.’ But I might be lying, you see. Is it likely I’d confess to something like that?”
“I don’t think you’d lie. I don’t think you even know how.”
“I write fiction, remember. I’m very good at inventing stories.”
“Then I was right,” she said. “I’ll never know for certain. I’ll have to follow my instincts.”
Good for you.
“And they’re telling you…?”
She straightened up, rose, and walked across the room to a small desk painted dark green with a thin gilt line edging its fold-up writing surface. She reached into a drawer and removed a bulky envelope. She resumed her place on the sofa and handed it to him.
He opened the flap and peered in. Newspaper clippings, old photographs—all about him.
“What’s this?”
“It’s for you. My secret, now it’s yours.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I have been keeping track of you for years, Frank.”
“Really? Your husband…?”
“He didn’t know. He wouldn’t have understood. To even care about someone from far away would have seemed like infidelity. Men think if a woman is interested in a man it must be about sex.”
He sorted through the clippings. One very yellow one, no more than a column inch, announced that Frank and three other boys had won the 100 yard freestyle relay in the ninety-five pound class at Meadowbrook Swimming Pool. He looked up.
“Now what?” he asked.
“Now we see,” she said and kissed him lightly on the mouth.