The Why of Things: A Novel (21 page)

“So Steve got out?”

“Yes.”

“Did the owner notice? Because then what if he set a trap?”

“He didn’t notice. See, he opened up the fridge and the phone rang at the same time, so while he was reaching for the phone Steve made his escape.”

Eloise seems satisfied by this. Eve gets up from the floor and tucks her sister into bed, pulling the sheets as tight as she can get them and pinning them beneath the mattress, as Eloise requires, thrilled to think of the note she’s left beneath her sister’s pillow.

When she has pulled Eloise’s door shut behind her, Eve goes out to the lawn to collect the dinner dishes from the table in the grass. Now that dusk has gathered, the daytime sounds of lawnmowers and the distant cries of playing children have been replaced by the sound of night bugs beginning to swell, like an orchestra warming up, and the gentle rustling of an evening breeze. She pauses in the grass, cocks her ear, listening also for the sounds of car doors slamming, shouts in the woods, anything to suggest that the usual revelers might be out there. She wonders if Saul is out there tonight, as he has been the past few, and what
he might be up to. If Sophie were alive, she thinks, Saul would
not
be out there; he’d be here at the house. Instead of clearing the dinner dishes alone, she’d be hanging out in the kitchen helping Saul and Sophie tidy up, or maybe they’d all be making ice cream sundaes, or maybe she’d be setting up the backgammon board for a tournament that would last until her parents came home. Or maybe she’d just be up in her room with a book, alone but secure in the knowledge that Saul and Sophie were downstairs, or sitting out by the quarry—knowing that wherever they were, they were around, and that she and Eloise were not alone. The thought fills her with loneliness and longing, for her sister, for Saul, for the way things used to be.

She brings the dishes in to the kitchen and washes them carefully, sets them to dry in the rack. Afterward, she goes upstairs to her room, and, as has become her habit, pulls out from underneath her bed the bag with all of the stuff from James Favazza’s truck: the single blue flip-flop, the purple plastic bowl, the EMS water bottle, the Vic’s T-shirt, the beer bottles and beer cans. She gets a piece of paper and makes a list of all these things, including L. Stephens’ cooler bag, even if it’s not in her possession anymore. Beneath the list of things she’s found she draws a diagram of the quarry and the lawn, making arrows to show the route the truck followed through the trees and across the grass. On the back side of the paper, she writes down all of the facts she knows, which are that
supposedly
James Favazza was “last seen” at 11 a.m. outside of his mother’s house on Magnolia Street, that the window of the truck had to be smashed in order to open the door to get him out, that he died of drowning, that his blood alcohol level was five times the legal limit.

Five times
. Eve cannot get that figure out of her head. She scans the beer bottles and cans before her on the floor, wondering if these were the very beers that contributed to his intoxication
the day he died. She lines the beer cans up along the floor, and behind these she lines up the bottles, noticing for the first time that there is an even number of each. This suggests to Eve that there must have been two drinkers, one who preferred Bud, and one who preferred the fancy stuff, and that they kept up with each other beer for beer. She lifts one of the bottles, thoughtfully turns it around in her hand. Tuckerman’s Headwall Ale, she reads, Brewed in New Hampshire. She blinks.
New Hampshire!
An image flashes through her mind of Larry Stephens’ blue Camaro parked lakeside on that creepy street in Georgetown, surrounded by none other than Marlboros butts, with none other than
New Hampshire plates
. She lifts the other kind of bottle, this one a beer called Smuttynose: it is also brewed in New Hampshire.

She sets the beer bottle back into place, mulling over this new piece of evidence; it only goes to further cement in her mind the idea that Larry Stephens was without a doubt present the day of James Favazza’s death. Though she’s been certain of it all along, his presence definitely rules out suicide, because who kills himself in front of his friend, and what friend lets it happen? Her father, if presented with this evidence, would probably still insist it was an accident, and she can see his case, up to a point. She imagines Larry Stephens and James Favazza drinking together in the truck where they’d parked at the quarry’s edge—they must have arrived sober to get between those trees—Larry drinking the New Hampshire brews, James downing the Buds, Larry’s cooler bag on the seat between them. She imagines, after a time, Larry getting out of the truck for a piss, James putting the truck into gear, thinking he’d start to drive off and strand his friend at the quarry, a drunken joke, and accidentally driving into the quarry instead; on a gearshift, drive and reverse are just slight clicks away. But if this had happened, why wouldn’t Larry have
called for help? And why deny ownership of the bag, and knowing James Favazza at all?

She tries out another scenario: again, Larry gets out, this time to smoke one of his Marlboros, and while he’s gone, James—at five times drunker than the legal limit—passes out in the truck. When Larry comes back, he thinks his friend is dead, and he’s so drunk himself and fearful of the consequences he can think of nothing else to do but put the truck into netural and push it in! But she’s not sure that a friend, no matter how drunk, would react that way. More likely, she thinks, returning to her original theory of murder, they got into some kind of a drunken fight, maybe Larry hit James and knocked him out—but didn’t kill him—and then pushed the truck in. The question that remains is
why
.

Eve sighs and slumps back against her bed, letting her eyes wander from the lined-up beers to the T-shirt neatly folded beside them on the floor. Vic’s. Vic’s is another ingredient in the whole equation. She pictures the bar, that seagull on the roof, the forlorn lettering. If James was a regular there and they were drinking buddies, it makes sense that Larry is, too. Eve scratches at a mosquito bite on her chin, deliberating, then hoists herself with purpose from the floor. She hurries from her bedroom, closing the door behind her, and take the steps two at a time downstairs. It has only recently become dark, and there are no lights turned on downstairs, but Eve doesn’t bother to turn them on now, instead passing through the darkness to the telephone desk in the far corner of the room, where the telephone sits along with a phone book and their lumbering old answering machine. Eve pulls the chair out and spreads the phone book across the table of her thighs, her bare heels hugging the chair’s thin wooden rung. She finds Vic’s in the directory and dials the number, her heart going like a hummingbird.

The phone is picked up after the second ring. At first, she can only hear the background noises of a bar: muddled voices, tinny music, the occasional shout, glasses clinking. And then she can also hear the voice of whoever has answered the phone—the bartender, she assumes—and though she imagines that he is holding the phone to his ear, maybe has it tucked handless between ear and shoulder, he continues a conversation with someone else.
Yuh
, she hears him say.
Yuh, exactly, that’s my point. That’s exactly—wait a minute, would you?

“
Hell-
o,” he says, his voice suddenly loud in Eve’s ear.

“Hi.” Eve clears her throat. “Have I reached Vic’s?”

“This is Vic’s.” She hears a clink, and the distinct sound of liquid pouring, the mutter of voices in the background.

“Yes, I’m wondering if you can help me with something.”

“Yeah, I ah—you’re going to have to speak up, I can’t quite hear you,” he says loudly.

“I—” Eve clears her throat. “Yes, I—ah, I’m looking for James Favazza. Is he there?” She winces, waiting for a response.

“You’re looking for who? Mazzo? Mazzo’s not here.” Eve can hear tumbling ice, a whoop, chants of
Nomar! Nomar!

“No,” Eve says loudly. “Favazza. James Favazza.”

For a moment, there is no response. “Who is this?”

“Sorry?”

“Who’s calling?”

“Um, Joan,” Eve says. “Joan Anders . . . son.” Again, she winces.

There is another pause on the other end of the line, which seems to Eve pregnant with unsaid things. She holds her breath. “He’s not here,” the man finally says, and before Eve has a chance to reply, the line goes dead.

Eve sits for a moment, wide-eyed in the darkness, the phone forgotten at her ear until it begins to angrily buzz. She sets it down,
going over the whole exchange in her mind. There was something to it, she thinks. His hesitation. His silence. Those words:
He’s not here
. He didn’t say,
Who
? Or,
He’s not here right now
. So clearly, the bartender knew who James Favazza was, and also knows that he isn’t ever coming back. So James
was
a regular there, and Larry, too. Then the people at Vic’s, she thinks, are a whole new font of information . . . tipsy locals who can tell her what she wants to know about these guys, or at least more than she knows right now, like what they might have been fighting about—a bet, maybe, or a girl. The key is just getting in there—but how, without an ID? She looks out into the darkness, scheming, and before she has time to think better of it, or to remember Eloise asleep upstairs, she hurries outside and leaps off the porch, races into the night.

*  *  *

A
NDERS
drives them home when trivia night has ended, their winnings laid out on the seat between them: the cups and visors, the key chain, and finally, the World Cup soccer ball, which Joan won in the drawing. It rolls across the seat with every turn in the road, reminding each, as it hits a thigh, of Sophie.

They drive in silence, each staring intently into the pocket of light the headlights afford, watching the yellow line of the road disappear behind the car as if it were being reeled in. The night is mild, the heat of the day still emanating from the metal of the car, which is warm beneath Anders’ arm where it rests on the frame of the door. Sometime over the winter small stretches of the road were repaved; the wheels whir over the old sections, whoosh over the new ones,
whirrrrr, whooosh, whirrrrr, whooosh
. Joan reaches over to turn the radio on; she turns the knob, crackles through static, turns it off again.

“Antenna’s broken,” Anders says.

Joan does not reply. Anders steers through a curve in the road;
the soccer ball rolls across the seat. Anders picks it up, drops it over his shoulder onto the floor of the backseat. He saw Joan’s face when her number was called, and does not need to ask what she is thinking.

They pull up the driveway soon after. Anders turns the engine off and sets the key in the ashtray, and for a moment, neither of them gets out of the car. A gentle breeze rustles in the topmost branches of the trees, and somewhere at the quarry’s edge a frog is ribbiting away. Before them, the downstairs windows of the house are dark, though the light above the stove in the kitchen has been left on, and the windows of Eve’s room are still aglow.

“Home again, home again,” Anders says.

Joan gathers their prizes from the front seat of the car, and they go in through the kitchen door. Anders turns off the light above the stove and flips the overhead lights on; they flicker and buzz to life. “Remarkable,” he says, noticing the dishes gleaming in the dish rack. “The dishes have been done.”

Joan raises an eyebrow. “The sculptor’s crystal, no less.”

Joan sets the glasses and key chain on the table and hooks the visor on the edge of a chair, then leaves Anders in the kitchen putting the dishes away and goes upstairs to check on the girls. She comes first to Eloise’s room; behind the door she can hear her daughter whimpering. She frowns, and cracks the door open; a triangle of light falls across the floor.

“Eloise?” she asks, pushing the door open all the way. “What’s the matter, sweetie?”

At this, her daughter’s cries grow louder, and Joan crosses the room and kneels beside her bed, where Eloise lies in a ball.

“I have a stomachache,” she cries. “It really hurts.”

“Show me where it hurts,” Joan says, and Eloise uncurls herself to point. “We’ll get you some Pepto, okay?”

“What’s the matter?”

Joan turns; Anders has appeared in the doorway, silhouetted by the hall light. “Tummyache,” she reports.

“I’ll get the Pepto,” Anders says. He walks down the hall toward the bathroom, pausing in front of Eve’s room to tap on the door. When he gets no reponse, he taps again, and calls her name through the door. “Evie,” he says, “we’re home.” Again, he hears nothing. He frowns, reaching for the handle of the door, and when he eases it open, he finds that his daughter is not in fact within, and having just passed through both the kitchen and the main room downstairs, he knows that she isn’t down there, either. He sighs, looking into the room, where there are several beer bottles and beer cans lined up on the floor, along with an assortment of other junk that Anders has no doubt came from the quarry, and he understands quickly that she can only be off on some related mission. He goes into the room and puts his hands on his hips, surveying it all, and in a moment he hears Joan’s voice calling his name as she comes down the hall. He turns around as she appears in the doorway.

“Oh, no,” she says, her face falling.

“Oh, yes,” he says. “No Eve. I think we have a problem.”

*  *  *

S
AUL’S
brown Volvo is parked a few car lengths down from the gate to the public quarry, where three other cars have parked so far tonight. Eve makes it through the woods from the house to the road in record time, dodging limbs and leaping over fallen trees in her haste, no longer nervous amid the dark trees. When she reaches the gate, she pauses, breathing heavily, and wipes the sweat from her forehead with the back of her arm. She listens for the sound of voices, but it is quiet aside from the clicking timbals of cicadas and, in the distance, a barred owl asking over and over again what sounds to Eve like “Who cooks for
you
? Who cooks for
you
?”
She gazes over the gate and down the path, anxiously remembering the other night, and the ring of people gathered around the fire at the quarry’s edge that she’ll somehow have to penetrate tonight, and who might balk to see her there. But. She swallows, and looks again toward Saul’s car, reminding herself of why she’s come here at all. She needs him to take her to Vic’s.