The Request

by David Bell

  “Why? Never mind. There’s plenty to see.”

  My phone chimed. Amanda.

  Are you on your way?

  I should have been driving. She hated it when I glanced at my phone while I was driving. And my car was too old to have the most up-to-date Bluetooth technology that read your texts to you.

  “I have to go,” I said. “And after all the craziness of the last day, I don’t want anyone in the house. Can we do this later?”

  “It can’t wait.”

  “Why?”

  “Ryan, just let me in to see it. There are things going on with Sam. I just need to figure some things out. Okay?”

  “Wait until I get back.”

  “Ryan. It needs to happen now. I told you—you could still be exposed. Do you want that to happen? Do you? Just let me see the data from the phone.”

  “No, get lost. Too many people have been hurt already.”

  “I agree, Ryan. Damn it.” His voice rose higher than I’d ever heard it. His eyes were misted by emotion. “Just . . . Can you just do this for me? I know I’ve asked for a lot. Okay? I know I’ve stirred up a whole shit storm. I get it. And if you don’t ever want to see me again when this is over, then so be it. Okay? Just do this for me. Okay?”

  I’d never heard him plead that way. Never heard him being so achingly sincere.

  “Are you in more trouble?” I asked. “Are you okay?”

  “Just let me in. Then you can be done with me.”

  I wanted to say no, but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.

  “Okay. But get out of there before we come back.”

  I went over and unlocked the back door. When I turned, he still leaned against the garage.

  “Come on,” I said. “I’m in a hurry now.”

  He pushed off the garage and came over, his steps slow and deliberate. He looked like a kid on his way to the principal’s office.

  “What’s wrong with you? Aren’t you off the hook now?”

  He nodded, some life and energy returning to his body. “Sure. I’m just tired. It’s been a hell of a night. And day.”

  “Come on.”

  He followed me in, down the hallway, and to the office. While I opened the laptop and entered the password, he sank into a chair. I pointed at the screen.

  “It’s all there. Everything from her phone. Texts, contacts, social media messages. You should check out the ones from Facebook. Somebody was threatening her. Big-time. We have to tell the police about that. In fact, you should call them right away. Or I will when I get to my in-laws’ house.”

  He nodded. Calm. He seemed unbothered by the threats.

  “Call me when you’re finished. I’m going over there to get Amanda.”

  I started to go, but by the time I reached the office door, he still hadn’t said anything.

  “Did you hear me?” I asked. “You’ll call?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’m on it.”

  I left, but his voice stopped me again.

  “Seriously, Ryan,” he said. “Thanks for everything. You’re a good friend.”

  “Are you feeling sentimental or something? What gives?”

  “I’m just thanking you. Okay?”

  My phone chimed again. I locked the door behind me and took off without saying anything else.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  Since I couldn’t drive and check my Twitter feed at the same time—something I silently lamented—I turned the car radio on as I headed back to my in-laws’ house. News about Kyle and the investigation into Jennifer’s death had slowed to a trickle. The radio mindlessly scanned through all the stations, beeping each time it landed on a new one, but only sports, information about a flower show, and a minister imploring us all to return to Jesus and give up our sinful ways came through.

  The sky clouded over, and the wind picked up, shaking the trees and bushes as I entered the subdivision. The April weather was changeable, jumping from sun to clouds at random. I looked forward to the coming weeks when it would calm, when we could take Henry to the park and push him around the walking trail in his stroller, the flowers in bloom, the winter far behind.

  I eased to a stop at the end of the driveway. Before I pushed the door open, Amanda came out and headed over to me. I watched her through the glass, struck by how much she looked like Karen. They both walked in the same brisk manner, as though they were always on a mission to accomplish something decidedly important. Amanda pulled her sweatshirt tighter across her body as she walked, protection against the rising of the chilly wind. Her hair blew across her face, and she brushed it away before opening the door and settling in the passenger seat.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?” I asked.

  Her cheeks were flushed, her breathing faster than normal. “I’m fine. I guess. And Henry’s perfectly fine. My parents are undoing any routine and structure we’ve established. But I guess that’s what grandparents do.”

  “They do know something about raising kids, don’t they?”

  “Yes, they do.”

  “So, what is going on that I had to rush back here?”

  I’d wondered the whole way if someone had tracked Amanda and Henry to her parents’ house. Had it been someone like Dawn, jumping the gun on her own deadline?

  But Amanda still didn’t answer my question.

  “Where’s Blake?” she asked. “Did he show up?”

  I couldn’t lie. I just couldn’t. The thought of not telling the truth made me feel tired. “He’s at our house.”

  “Doing what?”

  “He needed to use my computer.”

  “He’s in our house?”

  “You called me away, so I left him there. It’s a long story. It was the easiest thing to do in the moment. At least Henry isn’t there. If anyone hits their head on a lamp, it will be Blake.”

  “Why does he— Never mind. I don’t need to know. I can tolerate you being friends with him, but there are limits.”

  “What is so urgent here?” I asked. “I thought everything would be quiet.”

  Amanda fumbled around and brought out her phone. She entered the pass code and clicked around. Then she extended the phone to me, almost pressing it against my face.

  “Who is that?” she asked.

  It took me a moment to take the phone from her hand and hold it in such a way that I could actually see the screen. Amanda seemed frantic, her energy odd and rushed. It felt like being in the car with a nervous cat.

  I recognized the face on the screen. Immediately.

  “That’s Kyle Dornan. So?”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course. I saw him up close at Blake’s house. I stood face-to-face with him while he waved a broken liquor bottle at me. You saw him too.”

  Amanda shook her head, her cheeks still flushed. Her eyes were wide and searching. Scared, I realized. She was scared. Rattled.

  “What?”

  “Ryan, that is not the guy who came to the house this morning. Whoever came to our door and said he was sorry the girl got killed, it was not Kyle Dornan.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

  The wind picked up even more outside the car. It gently rocked the vehicle from side to side. A storm brewed, the clouds darkening behind the jagged rooflines of the houses.

  “You’re wrong,” I said. “You’re just remembering it wrong.”

  “You’re telling me how I remember something?”

  I shifted my body to better face her. I handed the phone back. “You were under stress. You had this man, this maniac, pushing against the door. You thought you were fighting for your life. For Henry’s life. You said that yourself. Your brain was flooded with adrenaline and cortisol. How can your memory be reliable?”

  Her lips parted. A little disbelief. A little anger. “His face was six inches from mine. I felt spi
t hit my face when he was talking. I thought this man who came to the door, whoever he was, was going to come in and hurt Henry. You better believe I imprinted his face on my mind’s eye. I wanted to be able to describe him to the police. I wanted to make sure of that.”

  “But when Rountree came to the house, when we talked about him, you agreed with the description. Short hair. My height. Clean-cut.”

  “Hell, Ryan, that’s half the men on the planet. He was unremarkable looking. Unremarkable in general. Except he wanted to tear the door down and get at me for some reason. He was foaming at the mouth. Other than that, yeah, he looked like a regular guy. I thought we were talking about the same person. It seemed that way.”

  Rain splattered against the windshield. I stared out through the speckled drops.

  “This doesn’t make sense,” I said. “You’re saying someone else came to the house looking for me. Or Blake. Someone else said it was a shame the girl got killed. I don’t get it. . . .”

  “I don’t either.”

  “You didn’t see anybody with him, did you? You didn’t mention anyone. But are you sure he was alone? Could there have been a woman with him?”

  Amanda’s face went cross with suspicion. “Why do you keep asking me about a woman? Ryan, you’re acting like you know something I don’t. What woman would be coming to the house?”

  The front door opened, distracting both of us, and then Karen came out. She strode down the sidewalk and over to our car, holding an umbrella above her head.

  “What the hell does she want?” I asked.

  “Easy, Ryan,” Amanda said. “I’ll deal with her. She’s my mother and she’s worried. She’s worried about you too.”

  Karen went around to the passenger side, and Amanda powered down the window. “What is it, Mom?”

  “I didn’t know you were coming out here. It’s about to pour.”

  “We needed to talk about something,” Amanda said.

  Karen’s eyes roamed over me and then back to her daughter. “Well.” She wanted an explanation but didn’t want to be seen as the kind of mother who asked for such things. She wanted one offered to her without having to ask. “Henry seems to be getting tired. Is it okay if he goes to sleep?”

  “It’s fine. Thank you.”

  But Karen stayed in place. Rain started to fall in through the open window, landing on the doorframe and Amanda’s jeans.

  Karen leaned over more. “Are you staying for dinner, Ryan?”

  “I don’t know, Karen.”

  “Okay. Well, you’re welcome. You’re both always welcome.”

  “Mom, really. Thank you, but can we just have a minute alone?”

  Karen nodded, looking a little hurt, and walked away, finally allowing Amanda to roll the window back up. I watched her cross in front of the car and up the sidewalk to the door. She disappeared into the house.

  “What are we going to do about this, Ryan?”

  Amanda brought me back into the present moment, to our exchange in the car. Her voice always did that. Everything about her did that. She tethered me to the ground, which lately seemed to constantly be shifting. She was doing one of the things she did best—stepping back, focusing, trying to see things with the clearest eye.

  “What did this guy look like?” I asked. “If he wasn’t Kyle, then what did he look like? And we need to have more than ‘average height.’”

  Amanda folded her hands in her lap while she spoke in a calm voice. “He had brown eyes. Pretty eyes, really, which seemed incongruous while he was trying to attack me. He looked clean-cut, like I said, not like a homeless guy or anything.” She pursed her lips while other details came back to her. “His teeth.” She lifted her hand and pointed at her mouth. “They weren’t as nice as the rest of him. Not white. Not like someone who regularly went to the dentist. In fact, I think he had one missing, along the side and near the back of his mouth. That seemed strange. Everything else about him looked well maintained, but not the teeth.”

  “Tattoos? Accent? Anything?”

  “No. He sure seemed strong, pressing against that door. But maybe he wasn’t as strong as he seemed. I held him off.”

  “You’re pretty strong. Remember what you did to that woman at the soccer match.”

  “My crowning glory. Knocking down another woman.”

  Amanda appeared to be lost in thought, likely trying to summon other details of her encounter with . . . whoever he was. But my mind started down a darker tunnel, one with little light at the end. Amanda had been curious enough to look at my Facebook messages. Curious and insecure during her pregnancy. She spoke about feeling cornered, recognizing that sensation on Samantha’s face.

  And she’d gone out the day before when I was supposed to be coming home from work. And hadn’t mentioned it to me until I asked.

  Had all of it driven Amanda to pay a visit to Jennifer? And had it gone wrong?

  Something hot and choking burned at the back of my throat. I swallowed, cracking the window a little to let some fresh air in.

  “Are you hot?” she asked.

  “I’m fine. It’s stuffy.”

  Amanda studied me, her eyes narrowing with concern and curiosity. Had she read my mind and understood what I’d been thinking? If she had, she didn’t let on. She went ahead, trying to solve the problem.

  “I can’t really remember anything else about him,” she said. “You’re right. It was stressful. And fast. But I know what I saw.” She tapped her phone. “Kyle Dornan was not at our door. Not unless he went out and bought some kind of Mission: Impossible mask to hide his identity. We have to tell Rountree,” she said. “We don’t have a choice.”

  “You’re right.”

  The rain started to fall with greater strength. The wipers were off, and soon the view was obscured by water.

  “We didn’t do anything wrong, Ryan,” she said. “It was a misunderstanding. We all just assumed that man was Kyle Dornan. And the police believe he killed Jennifer. This doesn’t mean he didn’t do it. He was involved with her. It’s always someone who was involved with the victim. We have to remember that. The suspicion always falls on those men who are involved with the murder victim.”

  “Usually it works that way.”

  “That’s because usually it’s some idiot man doing something to a woman. Usually.”

  We still didn’t even know exactly how Kyle had died. What he had done to bring down the wrath of the police. Where he’d been or why. But I felt acutely responsible for his death.

  I felt the urge to take out my phone and check Twitter, but I knew Amanda would find that rude.

  “If we hadn’t said he was at our house, the police might not have been so hot to talk to him,” I said. “Maybe he would have just left town. Or surrendered.”

  “He broke into Blake’s house too. He threatened you. You just said he used that broken bottle. He had a record. And you know that was Kyle Dornan. They can still close the case against him.”

  Her words made complete sense. As much sense as anything else. But they brought little comfort.

  “This means someone else came to our house,” I said, working through the crazy news. “Someone else wanted to break in and do us harm. Someone else said it was a shame the girl was killed.”

  “It’s terrifying.” Amanda held the phone out to me. “Do you want to call Rountree? Or should I?”

  I took out my phone and called the detective.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

  It took fifteen minutes to get ahold of Rountree. We sat in the car while we called her and left messages. Karen came out only one more time, an umbrella opened over her perfectly coiffed short hair, and received a firm but polite brush-off from Amanda. When Rountree finally answered, and Amanda told her about the man at the back door not being Kyle Dornan, the detective promised she would come over to Karen and Bill’s house as
soon as she could.

  But as soon as she could might turn into an hour or more.

  So we waited inside the house. While Henry slept, we sat around the dining room table, the remains of lunch long gone, and Amanda filled her parents in on the latest about Kyle Dornan, that he wasn’t the man who had come to the house looking for Blake and me.

  Karen and Bill listened to the new information with their hands raised to their chests. While it didn’t take Amanda long to tell them, they both managed to gasp and exclaim three or four times as she spoke.

  When she finished telling them, Karen asked, “Does that mean there’s another maniac on the loose? Could he have followed you here?”

  “He’s not following us,” I said. Although I really didn’t know. I didn’t know anything for sure. “If he was following us around, he would have been here already. And you have different last names than we do, so how could he associate you with us?”

  “It’s not hard to do,” Bill said. “You look someone up on the Internet, and you see all the people they’re connected to. He could do that.”

  Bill sounded so practical. Just like his daughter. I’d hoped for words that would bring greater peace of mind. But those words weren’t coming.

  “Okay,” I said with less confidence, “but he hasn’t yet. And the police are on their way.”

  “Maybe we should go to a hotel,” Bill said. “We could take Amanda and Henry there, get them out of harm’s way. If the cops want to talk to them, they’ll have to call me, and I can tell them where we are.”

  “Ryan,” Karen said, “why would this man want to come after you this way? Do you have any idea?”

  Three sets of eyes turned to me. Had Henry been awake and bouncing in his seat, waiting for his next meal, his likely would have joined them.

  “I really don’t know. I can’t think of who this man is.”

  “Could it be someone from work?” Bill asked. “Someone you fired or someone who feels they got cheated out of something?”

  The same thing had started racing through my mind when Amanda gave me the news out in the car, and it continued to run beneath my conscious thoughts like an underground stream. Given a moment to sit and think about it, even with my wife and in-laws present before me, I brought those thoughts to the surface of my mind. I scanned through the catalog of recent events at work and at the Pig, hoping, really, that something would jump out. A disgruntled employee or client I could blame. A vendor who had walked away from work feeling cheated or misused.