Dead Time

by Stephen White

  She took Amy’s hand and led the way to the barn/house.

  FORTY-NINE

  The barn was on the downhill edge of what had been the Burroughs Family’s grand estate. In the part of the twentieth century before L.A. required suburbs, the ranch must have enjoyed a spectacular vista over the undeveloped valley below.

  A narrow asphalt driveway led back thirty or forty yards from the road, opening onto a rectangular lot of more than half an acre. A contemporary house adjacent to the driveway screened the barn from the street. The shell of the barn had not been rebuilt during its transformation to accommodate human occupants. Other than the addition of midcentury windows and doors, the old building was an anachronism. I couldn’t decide if the nearby Mormon edifice and the neighboring mini-mansions mocked the barn, or vice versa.

  I consciously forced one foot in front of the other as I followed Mel around to the front door, which was down a narrow path on the opposite side of the house from the driveway. The ground cover along the way was ivy and ice plant.

  I was aware that my errand had changed. I’d driven to Tarzana to be in a position to help Wallace’s daughter deal with her roommate’s apparent emotional meltdown. I had just been invited to become a silent partner in a family subterfuge about an adult child’s sexual orientation. And I was steps away from engaging with a group of people that Merideth hoped held clues to the location of her missing surrogate and child.

  I was at least as wary about becoming part of the Grand Canyon group’s reunion as I was about doing an unofficial assessment of Kanyn’s emotional condition.

  Mostly, I feared I was too drained to adjust my footwork to the complexities of all the fresh choreography.

  Amy came up behind me and whispered, “I’m sorry for lying to you about the boyfriend thing. Mel wants us to do that with anyone from…back home.”

  “I understand,” I said.

  Jules greeted us at the door.

  The décor didn’t match the rustic architecture of the barn. Jules’s grandparents had been a couple with modern tastes. The living room was decorated like the showroom of a cutting-edge contemporary furniture retailer from the late forties.

  Kanyn was curled into a ball at one end of a well-preserved midcentury sofa. Her face was turned away from me. I wasn’t convinced she was awake. Amy was sitting on the scratched floor, leaning against a wall that separated the living room from the dining room.

  Mel seemed to have been energized by her skip, however abbreviated, from the closet, and was in the mood for continued revelations. She took a deep breath before she announced, “I have something to say.” Everyone but Kanyn looked at her. “I’m the one who called Lisa in New York,” she said. “Jack had told me what she was doing for Eric and…his fiancée. He gave me her phone number.”

  A couple of hours earlier, Mel had led me to believe that my story about Lisa’s surrogacy for Eric and Merideth was news to her. It was increasingly apparent to me that the kid did a lot of dissembling.

  Mel’s pronouncement piqued Amy’s interest. She stood, walked across the room, and sat on the sloping arm of the upholstered chair where I was sitting. Almost immediately she slid toward me. I scooted over to give her some space.

  With Amy almost in my lap I was officially more uncomfortable than I’d already been—something I hadn’t considered possible.

  I waited for someone else to ask the obvious question. No one did. I said, “Why? Why did you feel a need to call Lisa?”

  Mel seemed to think her answer was obvious. “After I saw the clip that Jack’s partner had posted on YouTube, I felt Lisa should know”—Mel flicked a glance at Jules—“exactly whose baby she was carrying. I would want to know.”

  Jules’s face remained serene as her partner revealed her role in the recent events. Mel’s story about calling Lisa wasn’t news to Jules.

  I didn’t know Eric’s story. Or Lisa’s. I didn’t even know all of Merideth’s. I didn’t know what was best for any of them. When I was Mel’s age, though, I’d felt some certainty about other people’s lives. Looking back, it turned out that I’d been wrong a lot. Someday Mel would discover that she was wrong a lot too.

  It had been only hours earlier that Sam was explaining to me that people are complicated, but usually in uncomplicated ways. For even more uncomplicated reasons. Getting to the point where I accepted my ignorance about people and their complications had taken a lot of experience. Mel was still young. She had plenty of time to get there.

  “What’s on YouTube?” Amy asked.

  I was wondering the same thing. I suspected that I was about to hear a version of the story that Merideth was so eager to tell me concerning the dark video I’d seen before I’d been summoned to the Valley.

  Mel explained the story of how the video vignette from the Grand Canyon ended up on YouTube. The tale wasn’t nefarious. Jack had recently been seeing a guy who was fascinated by an old collection of video clips from what Jack called his “brief, tortured docudrama phase.” Jack’s romantic partner had thought the world should have a chance to see the archive of nearly a year of his lover’s life. He called them “Jack’s short films.” The guy had uploaded almost twenty clips to YouTube from half a dozen different old SmartDisks he’d discovered in the cabinet in Jack’s condo where he kept his DVDs.

  The boyfriend had dumped Jack about a week after the uploads.

  When Jack saw the clips from the Grand Canyon, he asked Kanyn and Mel to look at them too. Mel had called Lisa.

  Before Mel got any further along in her story, we heard crisp footsteps coming from down the hall. The person was not trying to sneak up on us.

  Mel flashed a look at Jules. She whispered, “Who else is here?”

  Jules shook her head. Her eyes got big.

  The footsteps grew louder until Eric appeared at the near end of the hallway that led back toward the bedrooms. The suit jacket was gone. His sleeves were rolled up.

  He did a little dance step. “Hello,” he said. “Jules, hi.” He smiled warmly at her. “Long time. You look great. I like your hair. Sorry about the intrusion. I remembered where you keep the key to the back door.”

  “You could have knocked,” Jules said. She wasn’t angry. “I would have let you in.”

  It was evident there was a whole lot of backstory between Jules and Eric that I didn’t know. From the vibe in the room, I suspected that much of what had happened in the past was good.

  Eric said, “I’m looking for Lisa. If she’s here, I didn’t want to give her time to hide. I want to know where my baby is. I want to know that Lisa is okay. That’s it.” His demeanor impressed me. His voice was level. He’d bullied Amy and Mel earlier. He’d just broken into Jules’s house. He had to be aware that among this group he was the designated bad guy. All in all, the man was playing well to a hostile crowd.

  Mel said, “I don’t know where Lisa is, Eric. But I bet Jack knows. Help us find Jack. Then maybe you’ll find Lisa.”

  “I wish I knew where he was,” Eric said. “I’m as worried about Jack as you are.”

  Mel rolled her eyes.

  Jules said, “How do you know what’s going on with Jack, Eric? Are you in touch with him?”

  “No,” he said. “I’m not.”

  Mel hooked a thumb to point at Kanyn and raised her eyebrows. Mel’s message was clear—she was wondering if Kanyn had told Eric that Jack was missing. Kanyn didn’t budge.

  Has Kanyn been in touch with Eric? I didn’t know where to slot that data.

  “You mind if I take a quick look around, Jules?”

  “Knock yourself out,” she said. “Nothing’s changed since the last time you were here. Oh—the toilet doesn’t work upstairs. Don’t know what’s up with that.”

  Eric said, “You’re gay, Jules. That’s a change.”

  Eric had been hoping for a retort, but Jules’s expression remained serene. He shrugged before he began to climb the stairs, two at a time. We heard the footfall of every step he took on the secon
d floor. In less than a minute, he came back down to the living room. He pulled a chrome-and-vinyl kitchen chair away from the dinette set and spun it around. He straddled the chair, facing us.

  “I just came from your place in Mt. Washington, Carmel. Cops said someone had been hurt. I thought it might be Lisa. I went to the hospital. Wild-goose chase.”

  “You thought Lisa was staying with us?” Mel said.

  I was still waiting to see some emotion from Jules. Earlier, when she had greeted me graciously at the front door, she’d demonstrated a self-possessed quality and tranquility that I’d found soothing. I wondered if the presence of her old male lover, Eric, and her current female lover, Mel, in the same room was causing her to withdraw.

  I said, “Would someone please tell me what is going on with Jack? Why everyone is so worried about him?”

  Eric turned to me. In a slightly affected tone, he said, “Dr. Gregory. You get around, don’t you? You hang with my fiancée in New York. Make yourself at home at our condo. And now you’re slumming with my old friends in the Valley.”

  Mel said, “I invited him. Do you have a problem with that?”

  It was clear that Mel had a chip on her shoulder about something with Eric. Was it merely the fact that he was her girlfriend’s old boyfriend? I didn’t know.

  She turned to me. “Jack was coming up here from San Diego,” Mel said. “Was that just last night? He wanted us to talk this out, as a group. The clip. Jaana. Lisa. The bad feelings. He wanted to clear the air. That’s Jack.” Mel looked around the room. “I think he’s the only one of us Lisa’s been in touch with. After he found out she left New York, he felt he had to do something to settle all this. He thought he might have come up with something that might convince her to…come out of hiding. Some solution. That’s why he was coming to L.A.”

  I recalled that Sam had said that Nick Paulson had spoken with Jack sometime during the past few days. I wondered if that was when Jack had learned the something that might convince Lisa to come out of hiding. But I still didn’t understand what had happened to Jack. I said, “What exactly happened? Jack didn’t show up for a meeting? Is that it?”

  Mel said, “There wasn’t a set time for him to come. He called or texted Kanyn from the road—he was someplace near San Juan Capistrano, on his way to meet with Lisa. After he saw her he was going to come here, to Tarzana. That’s the last anybody’s heard. He stopped answering his phone. Hasn’t called any of us. Isn’t responding to texts.”

  “The meeting with Lisa was going to be where?” I asked.

  Mel said, “Lisa didn’t want him to say. L.A. someplace.”

  Eric said, “Lisa is in L.A., then?”

  I waited to see if anyone would respond. No one did. I suspected that Jack had not told his friends that he’d been in touch with Nick Paulson. I wondered what that meant, and I wondered whether Jack had discovered something that someone in the group might not want him to know.

  “Does anyone know if Jack ever met with Lisa?” I asked.

  No one knew. Or at least no one was saying.

  “When was the call or text to Kanyn? What time?” I asked.

  Mel looked at her wrist, seemed surprised to discover that she wasn’t wearing a watch. “Last night. Two nights ago.” She shook her head. “Day before yesterday. God, I need some sleep.”

  I understood completely. I said, “So…about thirty-six hours ago?”

  “Less,” Mel said.

  “That’s not much time to be out of touch,” I said. I’d had a version of this conversation with Merideth about Lisa’s disappearance. I reminded myself how wrong I’d turned out to be about that. “Jack could still be with Lisa, right?”

  Mel wasn’t buying it. “That’s not like him. He would have been in touch.”

  Jules said, “You don’t know that. She may have told him not to call anyone. She can be pretty…controlling.”

  Eric said, “You should know about that, Jules.”

  She fluttered her eyes at him like an ingénue.

  There was a little murder in the air, after all.

  “I haven’t seen this clip you’re all talking about,” Eric said. “What’s so special?”

  If Eric was bluffing about the video—either lying about not having seen it or pretending there couldn’t possibly be anything damning involving him in it—I didn’t want to play poker with him. The man could act.

  In a hell-I’ll-call-your-bluff tone, Mel said, “Jules? You have your computer? Is there a network here?”

  Jules sighed. She said, “It’s in my bag. The neighbor kid’s network isn’t secure. You can log onto it.”

  Mel looked at Eric. “I’ll show you what Jack took.” She retrieved Jules’s laptop, booted it up. In a couple of minutes we were staring at YouTube.

  Mel searched for “grand canyon floor” and selected the “HEAD and shoulders” clip from the choices that popped up. It was the same clip that Merideth had sent to my phone hours before.

  Eric leaned forward as the clip began to load. He read the name of the person who had posted it. He said, “Who is ggifttm?” He pronounced it “g-gift-t-m.” “Anyone know?”

  “God’s gift to men. Jack’s old boyfriend, Reginald,” Mel said.

  Jules said, “Before you play that—before everybody sees it—I want to know what everyone thinks happened to Jaana. Mel?”

  Mel said, “I thought she was lost in the Canyon. Now I think she ended up in the river.”

  “You think she’s dead?” Jules asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Eric?”

  “After we left the canyon I didn’t follow the story. I don’t know.”

  Jules didn’t ask Kanyn her opinion. Lisa wasn’t around. Neither was Jack. I said, “Jules? What about you? You have a theory?”

  “I think somebody…hurt her. I thought it that morning. I still think it.”

  Mel started the clip. It was the dark version.

  Five seconds in, Eric said, “I don’t get it. What is this supposed to be?”

  “Wait,” Mel said.

  At nine seconds, a male voice—Eric’s?—said, “Oh no. No. No.”

  Mel paused the clip. She said, “Remember now? Ring any bells?”

  Eric said, “Who is that?”

  Mel restarted the video.

  I didn’t know if Eric wasn’t recognizing himself, or if he wasn’t recognizing the animated Rorschach that, to me, was a woman on her knees in front of him. A woman whose head was moving fore and aft.

  “Please, please, please. Oh, please,” cried the female voice.

  Mel said, “Does that help?”

  Eric didn’t speak. He scooted to the front of his chair to get closer to the screen. “Shhh,” he said to the room.

  Seconds later the clip ended with another male voice saying, “Shush.” It wasn’t Eric’s voice.

  “That was Jack,” Kanyn said. “At the end. That was Jack’s ‘shush.’”

  Well, hello, Kanyn.

  Amy said, “Hey, babe. How you doing?” She moved to Kanyn’s side.

  “I’m okay,” Kanyn said.

  She scanned the room. She skipped over Eric. When her eyes got to me she seemed stumped.

  I said, “I’m Alan. We met tonight at the restaurant. You were kind enough to find us a table. Thank you.”

  She nodded. I noted that her left hand was hooked in the waistband of her shorts. Four fingers in, her thumb out. Kanyn was fighting an urge—maybe an intense urge—to track down an errant pubic hair, give it a good tug, and pluck it. You can pick your friends, but you can’t pick your… I was curious to see how long she could postpone the craving. I expected that at the point her anxiety became intolerable to her, she would excuse herself to the bathroom.

  Eric said, “Jack took that? On that damn camera of his?”

  Jules said, “It took video clips.”

  “Not very well,” Eric said.

  Eric either didn’t understand what he had just seen, or he did understand a
nd was unconcerned about the fact that it was public. I had trouble imagining the second option could be true.

  Mel said, “That’s you, Eric. Jules and I were with Jack when he took it. You were off the trail. Almost down to the river. Near the boat beach. Hiding.”

  Jules said, “Eric? Do you still maintain you didn’t see Jaana that night?”

  I thought her tone was tender. I found the tenderness surprising.

  “What? That clip doesn’t show anything,” he said. “It’s just darkness. Voices. I’m not even sure who’s in it.”

  I was disappointed. I was hoping for some progress. And then some sleep. I was hoping for some sleep even if there wasn’t any progress.

  “I wasn’t hiding. It doesn’t matter if I saw her that evening,” Eric said.

  He looked around the room, searching faces. He skipped over Kanyn.

  Why won’t they look at each other?

  “Why did you lie?” Jules asked. “To all of us? To the shirtless guy that morning? About not seeing her?”

  Eric said, “Apparently Jack saw her. Why did Jack lie? Apparently you saw her, Jules. And you too, Mel. Why did you lie?”

  Mel said, “Jules lied because I asked her to. Jaana had seen us…knew we were…I wasn’t ready for anyone to know…then.”

  Jules said, “I wasn’t ready either, Eric. I was confused.”

  Eric wasn’t buying. He said, “So you threw Jaana in the river to shut her up?”

  I hoped he intended it as a joke.

  Eric hadn’t answered Jules’s question about why he had lied. With a that’s-all-you-got tone, he said, “Is that it?” He asked Mel, “Any more videos to show me?”

  He wanted to see all the evidence they had against him.

  Before Mel answered, I said, “I have a better version of the first one. It’s on my phone. The video and audio are…much clearer. I think I can forward it to Jules’s computer.” I held up my phone.

  I thought I sounded like a techie. My wives, ex and current, would laugh. Jonas would be proud of me.