“All right, and...?”
“He has offered me occasional work as he needs me. With deliveries, shipments, things of that nature. I am of use to him not only because I have done work of this kind before, but because I can speak English and Russian with equal proficiency. It is not hard to find Russian workers, but it is not so easy to find Russian workers with wonderful English.” He smiled. “It will be no more than once or twice a month.”
“But you already have a full-time job.”
“I can make twice as much in a day with Vladimir as I can at Intel, and he pays me in cash besides. Therefore, when he needs me, I will arrange to take the day off. I will use a sick day or vacation day. So: as it happens, he asked me to assist him today.”
He went on to say they’d gone to Yacolt for a limestone shipment, a drive of several hours each way.
“When did he ask you along?” I wanted to know. “How far in advance?”
“He told me about this job on Monday.”
“Why didn’t you mention it to me?”
“Well,” said Stas. “I thought you might not like it if I use my vacation days in this way.”
“Didn’t you think I’d find out? Like the next time I try to plan a trip and you have no more time coming to you?”
“You see?” said Stas. “This is what I thought you would say. Yes, of course I knew that in time you would find out. But do you remember what Bryce used to tell us? ‘It is better to ask forgiveness than permission.’ ” He smiled again, then added: “I thought you might not like it, but I also thought that right now it is necessary. We need the money, and—”
“Stas,” I interrupted. “What happened this morning? With Jack?”
Stas paused, as if weighing what to say. “We had some words,” he said at last.
When nothing more was forthcoming, I said, “Could you be a little more specific?”
“I told him, ‘Look, we don’t want you working on the house anymore. And do
not
talk to my wife anymore—if you have anything to say, you can say it to me.’ Then I paid him for the first half of the job and that was it.”
“And he left? Just like that?”
“Yes,” Stas said.
“Well, but I mean, how did he react? He must have said
something
.”
“He said, ‘Okay.’ ”
“Just ‘okay’? He didn’t seem offended, or...or surprised...?”
“No,” Stas said. “He did not seem surprised.”
I sat there for a moment, taking this in.
“He said he understood,” Stas added. “So is there anything to eat? I never had dinner.”
* * *
I did not see Jack the next day, or the day after that. In fact, construction on the house next door seemed to be at a standstill; I saw no one there for days at a stretch.
Every morning I woke up happy, and it would take a moment to remember why. I no longer left the house with my eyes down and my shoulders drawn in; I no longer felt as if I were wandering into the sights of some surveillance instrument. I looked around at the sky, the birds on the telephone wire, the neighborhood kids on their scooters and skates. The construction van at the curb next door had lost its sinister aspect.
Back in the house again, I opened the curtains and even the windows, left the kitchen door ajar so the cat could come in and out. I hauled Clara’s plastic play house from the garage to the front yard and hung the bird feeder from a tree within view of the living room. Patches of the lawn were turning brown and brittle from the recent drought, and now I dragged out the hose and watered the grass. The ache between my shoulder blades faded, then disappeared. My home had been returned to me.
That Friday morning, since there was no longer any reason not to have a cup of tea on the side porch, I was sitting there with the third-rate local newspaper when a car pulled to the curb next door. A lean man wearing a baseball cap got out and came around to our front walk.
“Leda,” he called. As he drew closer, I saw that it was Walt.
“Walt,” I said. “How’s it going? We’re still getting some of your mail, let me give it to you.” I set my mug down and stepped into the house. Stas had stacked all of Walt’s bills and letters and left them on the counter. I picked them up and returned to the front yard, where he stood squinting in the sunlight. “Can I get you some water or coffee or anything?”
“Oh, no, that’s all right. But thank you. Hey, the place is looking good. Are you all settled in?”
“Getting there, I’d like to think. We really love the house.”
“That’s nice to hear.” He hesitated. “I’m not sure how to put this. Well, let me just ask you. I’m wondering if you’ve seen Jack lately.”
“Jack?”
“I haven’t heard from him in a while. I know he was friendly with you guys, did a little work for you, and I was just wondering if you’ve seen him around.”
“Not since last week,” I told him.
“Did he say anything to you about leaving town?”
“He said he was going to Yakima.”
“That’s where his wife lives. He was supposed to spend the weekend with her but he never showed up. He hasn’t answered his cell since Friday or returned any of my calls. His boss said he hasn’t shown up for work either. I just don’t know what to think.”
And what did
I
think, in that moment? I had no real foreboding yet. I thought that maybe Stas, or more likely Vladimir, had scared Jack into blowing town. And if that was so, he’d left his boss hanging. A boss he owed money, no less. It would make sense for him to lay low for a while, in light of all that.
Still, when my husband came home, I told him, “Walt was over here today.”
“He was?” Stas said. “What did he want—his mail?”
“He wanted to know if we’d seen Jack.”
Stas looked up from the stack of bills in front of him. “Jack?”
“Apparently, no one’s seen or heard from him in days.” I watched his face as I said this. It didn’t change.
“What did you tell him?”
“I said we hadn’t seen him either.”
“You did not mention anything about Friday?”
“Of course not.”
“Well, good,” Stas said. “He has no need to know about that.”
That night in bed, as my husband slept, I found myself staring at the gold chain around his neck. Stas knew I didn’t like it but he never took it off. It belonged to his best friend in Russia, a young man named Alexei who—upon going to prison—had given it to Stas for safekeeping. My husband wrote to Alexei every month, and once or twice a year he received a letter back: a few terse lines in Cyrillic asking about Stas’ family, sending his regards, never saying a word about himself or his situation. Stas never expected to see him again.
“What was his crime?” I asked early on.
“He was involved with the wrong people.”
“Okay, but what did he do?”
“He was convicted of robbery and assault.”
“Nice friend to have.”
“I said he was convicted of these. I did not say he was guilty. My guess is that it was a set-up.”
According to Stas, the Russian police were criminals themselves: all of them. “You think American police are corrupt?” he would say. “You have no idea what corruption is.”
“Stas, tell me—were
you
mixed up in anything bad there?”
“Not really.”
“What does that mean
—not really?”
“It means no.”
Stas had never been back to Russia. He claimed that he would be arrested if he ever did go back.
“Arrested for what?”
“For draft evasion. For my refusal to rape and murder the Chechens.”
I had to wonder, now, whether this was the real reason.
“What if your mother were dying?”
“I could not go and see her.”
How did it feel to break with everyone you’d ever known and everything you’d been? Because Stas did not have much to say about this, his few words on the subject had been memorable.
“Before I met you,” he told me once, “I had no feelings left. I was nothing but a cold heartless surviving machine.”
It pleased me to hear this, of course. It pleased me to think I’d restored and redeemed him. I’d never really thought about the cold or heartless part.
Tonight we had gone to bed early. Stas fell asleep within minutes while I lay awake and brooded about him. Now it was almost two in the morning. In all this time, he had barely stirred.
* * *
“Are you Mrs. Vasiliev?”
The man on the side porch was about five-foot-seven and somewhat heavyset, with dark hair shorn to within a quarter inch and small, close-set eyes. His face was flushed from the heat and his collar stained with sweat. He had the labored breathing of a smoker and his clothes, too, bore the scent of cigarettes.
“Yes,” I said, after a startled pause. I hadn’t expected a stranger to know who I was, and even after two years, I was still taken aback whenever I heard myself identified in this way. Not as Leda Reeve, or Ms. Reeve, but as some Russian man’s wife.
He lifted one of his lapels to show me a badge, then withdrew a business card from an inner jacket pocket. “Mrs. Vasiliev, I’m Detective Rayburn. Your name was mentioned to me by Walter Marcum, in connection with the disappearance of his cousin, Jack Shelby. We’re trying to speak with anyone who might have seen him during his last days here in town.” He passed me the card and I took it, shifting Clara to one hip while I stared at its spare black print.
“He’s officially missing?” I said. “I knew Walt was having trouble getting hold of him, but I didn’t realize it was anything serious.”
“Do you have a few minutes right now, Mrs. Vasiliev?”
“I don’t have to be anywhere until one,” I told him. “Would you like to come in? Can I get you a cup of coffee?”
We sat at the kitchen table while Clara played with a set of stacking rings on the floor. “Pretty little girl you got there,” he remarked.
“Thank you.”
“So what can you tell me,” he asked, taking out a notepad, “about your acquaintance with Mr. Shelby?”
“Well, let me see. I met him the day before we moved in,” I said. “He was working next door. He introduced himself to me and told me he was Walt’s cousin. And he was very helpful with some of our household issues—he was able to turn our water on, for one thing, and he fixed a leak in our ceiling. We knew he was hoping for paid work of some kind, and we eventually hired him to paint one of our rooms.”
I was amazed by how steady and matter-of-fact I sounded, as if this were the role I’d been waiting for all my life. Meanwhile, I tried to imagine what the detective was seeing. I was grateful that Clara was wearing a little pink smock dress and that her face was clean and rosy-cheeked. I was glad, too, to be visibly pregnant, glad to be wearing my own modest dress with its gentle old-fashioned pattern of cornflower-blue roses. Surely this mother-and-child picture could arouse no suspicion.
Everything I noticed about the detective, on the other hand, seemed to confirm our advantage. His suit was cheap, and he had bad teeth, crooked and streaked with nicotine. His fingernails were ragged, as if he bit them.
“About how often would you say you talked with him?” he wanted to know next.
“Well, probably close to every day for a while. I mean, he was right next door, so he’d see me coming and going, and he seemed anxious to be helpful and neighborly. Like he knew my husband was concerned about a rodent problem in the garage, and he brought over a bunch of traps. Things like that.”
What was agonizing was not being able to ask questions of my own. Questions like,
Why are you really here? Are you questioning me as a witness or a suspect? A suspected accomplice? Do you have anything on my husband?
Without knowing the context of this little chat, I couldn’t know what details were safe to disclose.
For instance, should I tell the detective how thoroughly Jack had unnerved me? That could only invite closer scrutiny. But if I said nothing about that, and somehow it came to light, would it render my testimony suspicious?
“When was the last time you saw him?”
And here I felt the first pang of fear. I sat there as if trying to remember. Stas had said,
Do not speak of this to anyone.
But refusing to talk to the detective could come to no good, and it was too dangerous to make up details I might need to remember and defend.
“Last Friday morning.”
“Morning of the eighth, okay. And where was this?”
“He came over to finish painting the room.”
“Gotcha,” he said, writing. “And what time was that, would you say?”
“Around nine-thirty in the morning.”
“Very good. And when did he leave?”
I took a drink of coffee; it was some effort to swallow. “I’m not sure. I went out for a while and when I came back he was gone.”
“You left him in the house while you were away?”
“Yes.”
In the silence that followed, I felt compelled to add, “I wasn’t worried about theft since he was working right next door.”
“That makes sense,” the detective said. “My wife and I would do the same. We figure if we know who you are and where to find you, well, you’d have to be pretty dumb to steal something, wouldn’t you?”
Again I tried to read the man in front of me. Was he one of those deceptive types—comfortable, affable, the kind who lulled you into thinking they were befuddled and sweaty and clueless until the noose was around your neck? Or was he truly as he seemed—a fourth-rate dick detailed out here to the sticks, thinking mostly about the buttermilk biscuits in his lunchbox? I couldn’t tell.
“What time did you return to the house?” he asked next.
“Around eleven.”
“And Mr. Shelby was gone by that time.”
“Yes, he was.”
“Had he finished painting the room?”
“No,” I said. “Not quite.”
“How much progress had he made? I’d just like to determine when he might have left.”
“Uh, not very much.”
The detective paused in his note-taking and looked at me. “And yet he was gone when you came back. Did you wonder about that at all, or—?”
I made myself meet his gaze. “You know, he’d been in and out a lot. He seemed to be someone with a lot of drama in his life. He’d mentioned an emergency in Yakima, so I thought maybe he just cut out earlier than planned. And there’s no real urgency yet with this paint job...I mean, we won’t need a finished nursery for several more months.” Here I put a hand on my swelling belly and attempted a maternal smile.