“It rips your leg off, then runs for help.”
Mona giggled and wiped a dribble of tea from the corner of her mouth.
“I prefer that one,” she said.
“You would,” I said. But it was nice to see her delighted.
I was nursing a mild hangover
the next morning, but it was nothing bad enough to keep me from propping myself up at my desk, flipping through an occasional cit pile, moving my mouse now and again.
I also managed to put the
Teaglass
cits back into the files. Mona offered to put back the last few stacks of 1953 cits I’d been hoarding at my apartment, including the
top banana
cits. She stuck those in with the
banana
cits in hopes that someone would find them later and chalk it up as a filing error.
As I neared the end of the
Teaglass
cits, this one caught my eye again:
But maybe someone picked it up before the police got there, during the cold dawn of that first next day. Sometime at sunup, long after the gurgling had stopped behind the trees, but before the body was found. Someone might have been jogging, tripped over this
softbound
scrap of history, and taken it home, thinking they might just read it. Or it was kicked away—kicked along the path by some kids shortcutting their way to school. Or carried away by a stray mutt and chewed to
a slobbery pulp. Somehow shoved beyond the parameters of what would be the crime scene. In any and all versions, it’s out of my hands. After everything, could this be all that it was meant to be? That I would have something to carry with me that day? Did all that history lead me to nothing more than an odd good luck charm? And now that it’s gone, what will I carry with me, from this thing to the next?
48
The missing book was one of the unanswered questions of this story. And there were others. I slid the cit into my pocket. I’d done everything else Dan had asked. But I wasn’t ready to give this one up.
I fingered the cit in my pocket all afternoon, and toyed with the idea of knocking on Dan’s door. If there was more to the story, he probably wasn’t going to volunteer it. But maybe he wouldn’t be angry, I thought, if I simply asked for it?
Grace came by. She told me a story about her lost cat who had mysteriously reappeared that very morning. I nodded and watched her bright red mouth move and wondered if I could ask her about her old coworker Mary Anne. But no, I decided. It would be unwise. There was no telling what she already knew. Or who’d find out I was asking.
No, I decided, around three o’clock. Dan was the only one I could ask. And the sun was going down on my opportunity to ever bring it up again. Today I had something to report to him—that I’d done what he’d asked with the cits and their copies. Tomorrow it would be history. I charged toward his door and knocked on the doorframe before I could change my mind.
He seemed in high spirits. “Come in, come in.”
I closed the door carefully.
“How’s your cactus?” I asked.
“Decent. Alive.”
“I put everything back in the files.”
Dan blushed a little and nodded.
“And destroyed the copies.”
“Good,” he said. “Thank you. I appreciate your discretion. I’ll talk to Phillips about it, and as for Mona—”
“I’m pretty certain she’ll understand.”
“Thank you,” Dan said again.
“I just …” I began.
“What is it?” he asked gently.
“I had a question … as I put the cits back a couple of things dawned on me, and I know it’s none of my business but—”
“No apology necessary. What did you want to ask?”
“Well, I can’t figure out why Brownlow singled out Mary Anne. Why
her?
I mean, we gathered that he corresponded with the company for a while, but it didn’t sound like he had enough of a reason to want to punish her specifically for anything.”
“Well.” Dan paused. “Of course, a sociopath’s motives are often difficult to determine. His selection of her probably wouldn’t make any more sense to us than his tendency toward depravity. From what I gathered from the newspaper profiles, they suspected him of some pretty perverse crimes against young women. In some cases young women who had wronged him or belittled him in some way, however trivial. What about their brief correspondence set him off has never been clear to me, though. Or how long he’d been watching her. He knew about her weekly walks through the park. We know that much.
“Maybe he came to Claxton specifically for her. It’s a frightening prospect. But for all intents and purposes it was a
random act. She was really just a name to him, but in his mind perhaps she had done him some terrible wrong. And that’s largely what makes the story so disturbing. Its randomness. The randomness of the weapon she used, for one. The fact that someone so quiet, so reserved, so feminine, managed to defend herself against that … that …”
There was awe in his voice. He shook his head, then he leaned back and folded his arms.
“It’s so troubling. From his letters, you’d have imagined a sniveling, bookish type. You’d never have guessed him to be so big, so strikingly robust a figure. And with that long hair, and the beard stubble, he looked like, well, like a Viking of some kind—”
Dan stopped talking. We sat in silence for a couple of minutes. I wondered, at first, if his sudden stoniness was for the realization that Mona and I had messed around in Needham’s correspondence file. But that wasn’t it, I realized. He was describing someone he’d
seen
, and we both knew it. It was not so much the details of his description, but the way he said it, so matter-of-factly.
You’d never have guessed… like, well, like a Viking of some kind
. My heart raced. The air between us was chilly enough to make his little cactus croak. One of us needed to say something, and I decided it would be me.
“You asked me if I can handle silence,” I said shakily.
“Yes,” Dan said flatly. I couldn’t tell what was in his eyes.
“I can,” I promised.
Dan’s face looked weary but his voice was hard.
“Good,” he said. “Then get back to work.”
That night, I dreamt again of
choking on butterscotch candy.
I tossed in my bed, thinking of all of Mary Anne’s cits, now scattered and buried in the file again. I wished I had certain ones to look at once more. The parts where Scout seemed oblivious. The parts where Scout seemed suspiciously knowing. The shifting “you” of the audience—sometimes a stranger, sometimes an intimate. The parts where the “you” didn’t seem to be Red at all—the parts that had—perhaps unconsciously at first—made me think they were somehow intended for Scout.
Then there was the odd reference to Scout as a “white knight”—when he usually came across as mealymouthed. Their kiss in her kitchen. The fact that Scout seemed to come home from his weekly class two nights in a row. Lines came back to me that had seemed a little incongruous upon my first reading, but that I’d ignored for the overall sensation of the story.
I slept well that night. Afraid of my affection for him. I invited him into my bed to chase away the nightmare. He ended up entering the nightmare instead. How could it ever work with such a story between us?
She’d been sloppy somehow. Inconsistent. There was
something she was trying her melodramatic best not to say. But she lost herself in her narrative a few times. Maybe lost sight of what, exactly, she was trying to tell.
One particular line kept running through my head:
This is the best version either of us can probably conceive of, and the only one I care to imagine
.
I avoided Mona the following morning
, and buried myself in citations for
madwoman
and
madwort
.
My phone buzzed.
I picked it up.
“Billy?” someone said softly, hoarsely.
“Come on, man,” I mumbled. Not Mr. Phillips. “Not
now.”
“Excuse me?”
I started to sweat under my twice-worn polo shirt. Those two words didn’t sound like Mr. Phillips at all. Had I just said that to a customer? An old man with pen poised to write his wife’s epitaph? Or a pimply-faced artist checking the grammar on a suicide note?
“I’m sorry …,” I said. “Is this …?”
“It’s Dan.”
“Oh.”
“Do you have plans for lunch?”
I hesitated.
“Billy?” Dan said.
“Yes?”
“Yes, you have plans?”
“I mean, no. No plans.”
“Okay, then. Let me buy you lunch. There’s a little pizza and sub place a couple of blocks away. Best-kept secret in this neighborhood.”
Right at noon, I looked up to find Dan towering over my cubicle.
“Ready?” he said.
I got up and followed him.
“Get a twelve-inch,” Dan instructed me
as we stood by the counter. “I’m buying. I like to watch young people eat.”
I nodded and pointed to
Meatball sub
on the menu card.
We sat in an orange booth, beneath a poster for Michelob.
“I apologize if I startled you yesterday. In a way, of course, I startled myself.”
I nodded. I had to strain to hear him over the sound of sizzling onions.
“If you’ll indulge me, Billy, I wanted to show you something.”
He took out a piece of lined yellow paper and pushed it across the table to me. It looked like it had been folded and refolded a number of times—maybe even put through a washing machine.
“I’d thought of just giving this to you at your desk, but I didn’t want to startle you again. Giving it to you would imply that I expect something to be done with it, and I don’t want that, either. Open it,” he said. “And read it.”
As I began, he said, “And you needn’t take this damned silence business so literally.”
I didn’t reply, but kept reading:
In fact, she called him that very night. As soon as he got home from his class. And he drove to her apartment. She was crying. She was certain of this man’s intentions but did not know who he was or if he’d died. She was oddly frantic about a book
she’d left there, that might or might not have an incriminating name scribbled into it. He thought for a bit that she was either drunk or had lost her mind, but the cuts on her hands indicated that it was all true. He offered to go to the park himself. To see who and what, if anything, was left. To get a better sense of what had happened after she’d fled.
“Stay here in the apartment and keep the door locked,” he told her, feeling oddly bold. As he drove to the park, it struck him that this, what he was doing, was what men do. Men go back and check out the scene after women come home screaming. He’d never felt such a sense of importance.
This is what men do, he thought again as he drove into the dark park road. He turned on his high beams and sucked in his breath. The brown car she’d described was there. It was real.
He left on the headlights as he got out of his car. He didn’t see anyone. He certainly didn’t see any book. He fumbled around the edge of the pavement for a while, looking behind trees and kicking up leaves.
He was about to return to his car when he heard the crack of a twig, and then a gasp.
This is what real men do
. He followed the sound, but even so, he nearly stumbled over him. A man sagging limply against a tree. He had blood all over his hands and shirt. In the beams of the headlights, the blood looked black. He looked like he was struggling to stay awake, or stay alive—the young man couldn’t tell. When he caught sight of the younger man, the injured man tried to speak. His lips moved but no sound emerged. He stared up at the young man with pleading eyes. He had managed to pull out the plastic bag but not all of the glass.
This young man had never seen anything so terrifying before. This sight gave life to her story and all of the pain and
violence it implied. It was all of the evil he’d read about in Latin texts and Victorian novels but somehow never truly believed existed. There it was, right there before him, breathing and gurgling.
He picked up the plastic bag and, in a panic, silenced the sounds. He did it much as a child squeezes his eyes shut in a horror movie, or runs for a light in the dark. It was not revenge. It was not mercy. It was not even anger. He just wanted the sounds to stop.
Neither he nor she knew that night who he was. The name came later. His history came later. The news came to them as it did everyone else, in newspaper headlines and the excited innuendo of TV announcers. The recognition of his name was a shock, but an inconsequential one. The real shock was always the raw events of that evening. The scant hows and whys did little to change either his or her feeling about what happened that night.
She was able to face her own role in the death, but not his. His role was not excusable the way hers was. His could not be called self-defense. She probably would have come forward, in the end, if she hadn’t decided to protect him. The “confession” she left behind was to protect him.
What she left in the files was a fiction. Or more accurately, half-fiction. She wrote the story out perhaps as she wished it had happened. To make him appear innocent if there was ever a need. She told him about this confession just before she left. She didn’t mention the addressee—Red. Why she told it that way was never clear. Maybe it gave her a sense of safety, telling Red. Maybe it was a further measure of protection. Maybe Red seemed the natural audience—accounting for his lost book. Most likely it reflected a longing to really tell—to tell someone, anyone, besides me.
I refolded the paper. I handed it back to Dan. He held it for a moment, then put it back inside his jacket pocket. It occurred to me that he had taken me here because he didn’t trust that paper out of his sight. He wanted someone to see it, but he didn’t trust anyone enough to possess it. I wondered how many times he had rewritten it.
“I’ve often thought of filing it under some word or other,” he said, softly. “Or several, as she did. But I’ve never been sure which would be the correct ones.”
I was curious why he was telling me this—what he saw in me that made him say more than he needed to. Was it something kind and gentle, or something cynical and ugly?