Set This House in Order (28 page)

“We saw Warren Lodge,” I told him.

“You saw Warren Lodge? On the street?” He looked out, taking in our surroundings. “So what are we doing in a train station? Why aren't you talking to the police right now?”

“Andrew decided to make a citizen's arrest,” Adam explained helpfully.

“He
what?
”

My father is a difficult soul to ignore even when he isn't hopping mad,
but for just a moment, I pretended he didn't exist. “Adam,” I said, “where do you suppose Warren Lodge was going on First Avenue?”

“I don't know,” said Adam. “Maybe nowhere.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well he's a fugitive now, right? The cops are watching his house, and they've probably frozen his bank and credit accounts. So if he can't go home, and he's got no money—”

“Homeless,” I said. “So you think he might just be roaming around Pioneer Square?”

“Could be. Which is another reason why you don't need to chase after him personally, because sooner or later—”

“So if he got scared, and wanted to go somewhere around here where he could lose himself in a crowd for a while, where would that be?”

Adam didn't say anything, but he didn't need to; I already knew the answer. It was a place I'd been to once already today: Occidental Park.

“Andrew,” my father said, as I raced up Occidental Avenue. “Andrew, are you
hearing
me?”

“I can hear you,” I said, “and I know you're upset with me, but—”

“Do you understand how dangerous this is? You're putting the whole house at risk.”

“I'm not going to confront him,” I promised. “I just want to find him, and then—”

“Andrew…”

“Wait,” I said.

Occidental Park stretches the length of two city blocks. Its southern half is lined with art galleries and antique furniture stores, but its northern half is seedier, bordered on one side by a parking lot, and with its many wooden benches it is a natural gathering spot for homeless people.

“Andrew…”

“There!”

He was sitting alone at the northernmost edge of the park. The hood of his jersey was still pulled up, and he was hunched over, as if sick or in pain, but it was him. Adam confirmed it.

“All right,” I said. “
Now
we call the police.”

There was a pay phone not far from where I was standing. I went to use it, but before I could dial 911 I noticed another of the park's occupants—a homeless man with a very long beard and even longer hair, like a desert island castaway—approaching the bench where Warren Lodge was sitting. The castaway, a true schizophrenic, came up shouting and waving his arms;
Warren Lodge jolted upright in alarm, slid sideways off the bench, and ran out of the park, fleeing along Washington Street.

“Damn it!” I said, setting the phone receiver back on its hook. By the time I got onto Washington Street myself, Warren Lodge was out of sight again. I ran east, uphill, for half a block…and found myself at a five-way intersection.

“All right, Andrew,” my father said. “I want you to go back
now,
get to the phone—”

“But he can't have just disappeared!” I said, turning in place, searching in vain for a clue to which way he had gone.

I ended up facing south along the Second Avenue Extension. Most of the block on my side of the street was taken up by a furniture showroom; there was also a bus shelter at the curb about a third of the way down the block. Farther on, the Extension became an overpass that stretched above the railroad tracks, and there were steps leading down to King Street Station.

“The train station,” I said. “Maybe he doubled back there…”

“That's not possible,” said Adam.

“Why not?”

“Because,” Adam said, obnoxiously, “to double back, he'd have to have gone there in the first place. But he didn't. You're the one who's running in circles.”

“Adam—”

“Enough, Andrew,” my father said. “Go back to the phone in the park; call the police.”

“I will,” I promised, heading towards the overpass instead. “I just want to check the train station one more time…”

Adam called out a warning then, but I was ignoring him and didn't listen. It took a few more seconds to realize my mistake: I'd thought the bus shelter was empty, but as I started to walk past it I saw that there was actually somebody inside, sitting hunched over…

“Just keep going,” Adam said. “Pretend you don't see him.” But I'd already stopped moving—and Warren Lodge had finally noticed me.

I was standing almost directly behind him, and the safety glass that formed the back of the bus shelter was between us, but he sensed me there anyway. He straightened up, and his head, still covered by the hood, turned sideways. I imagine he was wondering whether I was the castaway from the park, come to bother him some more.

He stood up.

My father and Adam both started yelling at me to run, and I felt Seferis
straining forward, trying to take over the body. The funny thing was, though, I wasn't scared. I mean of course I was
scared,
I was fearful, but I wasn't
terrified,
the way you ought to be when a child-murderer turns his attention to you.

Maybe I wanted to get his attention; maybe that's why I wasn't terrified. I'd told my father I wasn't going to confront Warren Lodge, but I think now that subconsciously, that was really my intention all along. Not to make a citizen's arrest, as Adam had suggested, but to be there when he was arrested, and to look him in the eye before he was taken away and punished—to condemn him, and also just to see what there was to see, to satisfy my curiosity, the same curiosity that had made my father want to read Mrs. Winslow's letters.

Well, I was going to get my chance now: he was on his feet, and he was turning around. The fact that he wasn't in handcuffs yet didn't concern me nearly as much as it should have. I stood my ground. And then we were face to face, with only a thin panel of glass between us.

He was a sorry sight for a predator. His eyes were puffy with exhaustion, and his chin was covered with a patchy, uneven layer of stubble, as if he'd started shaving and then thought better of it. The scratch on his forehead—the one he'd supposedly gotten wrestling the big cat—was still there, and it had gone a fiery red. His nose was running.

Some cougar,
I remember thinking. Then his lips moved, trying to frame a question—“Who…?” or maybe “What…?”—and I realized he was afraid, much more afraid than I was. For some reason this infuriated me; I wanted to slap him, but instead I shouted his name, “WARREN LODGE,” and I raised my arm and pointed at him and said, “We know what you did.”

Or at least I started to say it. I don't know if I got all the words out, because when I raised my arm to point, Warren Lodge began backing up. Maybe his eyes tricked him; maybe he saw my finger and thought I was aiming a gun at him. But whatever the reason, he took a step back, and another, and another, and another. The fourth step took him over the curb, into the street, and that's when the van hit him.

There was no warning, no horn or screech of brakes, just a green blur that came in from the side and swept up Warren Lodge with a loud bang. He never saw it coming; his attention was fixed on me right up until the moment he suddenly went away.

A period of confusion followed. I heard a squeal or a scream, and another bang, and a crash of glass, and some other sounds too, but it was difficult to
place them all. My vision became choppy, as if I were watching a movie riddled with bad splices.

The next clear impression I had, I was looking south towards the overpass again. Someone had parked a green van in the middle of the overpass, angling it sideways across two lanes, at the end of a long trail of skid marks; the van's nose was caved in, and steam hissed from under its crumpled hood. Closer in, to my right, someone—maybe the same vandal who'd trashed the van—had smashed one of the plate-glass windows on the furniture showroom.

I managed to draw a connection between the van and the green blur, but the significance of the broken window eluded me. I kept expecting to see Warren Lodge in the street or on the sidewalk, and when I couldn't find him in either of those places I got worried that he'd run off again. Maybe he was hiding behind the van. I got down on my hands and knees to see if I could see under it, but I was too far away, so I stood up again and took a few steps forward, and then I heard a sound to my right.

I was in front of the broken showroom window now. Inside, a living-room furniture set had been arranged on a stage; for added realism, a mannequin in a blue jersey had been placed on the sofa in a sleeping posture. It was a nice display, but everything was covered in broken glass, and some of the furniture had gotten wet, so that the colors on the sofa fabric were starting to run.

No, wait, that wasn't right…I was missing something. “Adam, what am I missing?” I said, and the mannequin sat up, and I saw that it had the head of a cougar, and the cougar's face was cut up and bloody, and there was a big chunk of glass sticking out the side of its neck, piercing the fabric of the blue jersey. The cougar tried to leap at me, but it tripped over the coffee table, and as it stumbled it opened its mouth to growl, but no sound came out, only a red gush, and then the movie hit another splice.

There was a sound of lapping water that became the growl of a diesel engine. I found myself staring down at my hands, and became aware by slow degrees that my hands were in my lap, that I was sitting down, and that the seat was in motion.

I looked up and saw that I was on a Metro bus. Outside, a familiar stretch of I-90 rolled by; the bus had just passed Issaquah and was headed towards Autumn Creek. The sky, which had been mostly clear a moment ago in Seattle, was now overcast.

I turned my attention to the other passengers on the bus. None of them
seemed surprised or even interested by my sudden appearance in their midst.

Maybe I hadn't suddenly appeared. Maybe I'd simply fallen asleep and was now waking up. Of course, in order to fall asleep on the bus, I would first have to have
boarded
the bus, something I couldn't remember doing. Still, the idea was strongly appealing: if I'd slept, I might have dreamed, which could mean that whole incident with Warren Lodge was nothing but a nightmare…

No good. Thinking of the accident I flashed back on it, vividly: I saw the van strike Warren Lodge, heard the showroom window shatter, felt broken glass crunch beneath my feet as I went to look—

I was staring at my hands again.

“Last stop,” the bus driver called. “Autumn Creek, last stop.”

I looked up; the bus was stopped on Bridge Street. I got to my feet and tottered outside. On the sidewalk a cool damp wind was blowing—no rain or drizzle yet, just little bits of moisture in the breeze, like phantom dewdrops—and it cleared some of the fuzziness out of my head. A dull throbbing replaced it.

I leaned against a lamppost and closed my eyes. “Adam?” I called.

My father answered: “Go home, Andrew.”

“All right,” I agreed, too tired to say anything more.

It was exactly the sort of day when I would have expected Mrs. Winslow to be waiting for me at the Victorian's front door, but she wasn't. I fumbled out my key and let myself in.

“Mrs. Winslow?” A television was on, its volume blaring. I followed the sound to the kitchen. Mrs. Winslow was standing in the middle of the room, staring at the TV, her hands gripping the back of one of the kitchen chairs for support. She was crying; but I couldn't tell from her expression whether they were sad tears or happy tears. “Mrs. Winslow, are you—”

“Ssssshhhh!” Mrs. Winslow hissed, with a fierceness I'd never seen in her before.

I turned to the TV, and saw a black-and-white image of the same downtown Seattle sidewalk where I'd just been. There was the bus shelter, and the shattered showroom window; farther down the street, slightly out of frame, was the van with the caved-in nose.

“—thorities believe that Lodge may have committed suicide,” a voice on the TV was saying. The view switched to a close-up of the wrecked van. “Charles Daikos, the driver of the vehicle, has admitted to police that he was attempting to retrieve his cell phone from underneath his seat when the
accident took place, and cannot confirm whether Lodge stepped in front of the van deliberately. Daikos suffered minor facial injuries in the collision but was otherwise unharmed…” The view switched back to the showroom window. Police officers were milling around out front of the jagged hole in the glass, while inside, a pair of paramedics lifted a long gray bag onto a gurney.

Then the TV was off, and I was sitting at the table, warming my hands on a mug of coffee. Mrs. Winslow, her tears wiped away, stirred a spoon in a cup of tea.

“So,” I said, the question feeling strangely out of context as I uttered it, “Warren Lodge is dead, then?
Definitely
dead?”

“Yes,” Mrs. Winslow said. “Are you hungry, Andrew?”

We ate a quiet dinner together, after which I retreated to my rooms. This was a time of day when I ordinarily would give up the body for a while, so that other souls could play or read or listen to music. But this evening I forgot all about that, and spent hours pacing aimlessly. No one complained about the change in routine, not even Simon.

It got dark out. Around nine o'clock the telephone rang; Mrs. Winslow knocked on the sitting-room door and told me it was Penny calling. “Tell her I'm not home,” I said.

More time went by. At some point I realized that my father was calling my name from the pulpit. He seemed to have been calling it for quite a while without my hearing him, which was strange, because you can't not hear things said from the pulpit—that's not even a house rule, it's just the way things work. My puzzlement at this was displaced by horror as I suddenly remembered how the blood had gushed from Warren Lodge's mouth.