by David Bell
“You did ask me to move out,” I said.
“But you were never really there. You were always hung up on Marissa.”
It sounded strange to hear her name in Gina’s mouth. I thought back over the time Gina and I spent together, going back as far as when we started dating. I knew I mentioned Marissa from time to time, and certainly during the inevitable litany of our previous lives and relationships. But I didn’t think I’d dwelled on her.
“Did it really seem like I was hung up on her?” I asked.
“You didn’t talk about her . . . too much,” Gina said. “It’s the way you talked about her.” She sipped her drink. “You never talked about me that way. And I know you kept that little box of memories of her in the closet. I know that watch came from her, the one you used to take to the jeweler for a tune-up every once in a while.”
“I don’t see how you can hang all of our problems on a girlfriend I had in college, even if she did die.”
“You’re right,” she said. “I can’t put all our problems on her. But she didn’t help.”
“I’m sorry if you felt that way.” A silence descended between us, if the word “silence” applied when Irish fiddles were squealing overhead like tortured animals. I wished I’d never listened to Laurel and I wished I’d never contacted Gina. I took a couple more drinks of my beer and looked at her. “I’ll just go.” I started to get up and then remembered something. “Wait a minute. You said you had something to tell me. What is it?”
“It’s not important,” she said.
“You can’t say that,” I said. “You said you wanted to talk. Is it something about Andrew? Is something wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” she said, “and Andrew’s fine.” She reached up and ran her hand through her thick brown hair. “I was just going to tell you . . . I was going to say I didn’t blame you for any of the troubles we’ve been having lately. I know you’re not stalking me or Andrew or doing anything weird.”
“Why the sudden change of heart?” I asked.
“It’s not sudden.” She tapped her neatly manicured nails against the tabletop. She always did that when she was thinking of the right words to say. “I’ve never doubted you in any real way.”
“But?”
“But I’ve been thinking about Andrew’s future a lot. What will he think when he looks back at this time in his life? Will it just be chaos? His parents never got married. I divorced the next guy I was with. I just wanted his life to be orderly, and you got caught up in that. I see that it wasn’t fair.” She stopped tapping. “So is that okay?”
“It’s good. Thanks.” It looked like there was something more on her mind, so I asked. “What else?”
“To be honest,” she said, “I was going to talk to you about figuring out a way for you to see Andrew again. To spend a little time with him.”
My heart almost jumped out of my mouth. “That’s great.”
But Gina was shaking her head. “I don’t think I can do it now. The fact that you’re asking me to do this for you. I was willing to give you the benefit of the doubt on the other stuff. But this—”
“Come on, Gina. Don’t be that way. You know I love Andrew. You know his happiness is all I want.”
She finished her glass of wine and stood up.
“It’s funny,” she said. “All these years I was in competition with a dead girl. I lost back then, and I’m still losing now.”
She walked out and didn’t look back.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I spent that Friday night with the guys from my basketball league, including Laurel’s husband, Tony. One of the guys on our team, a real estate agent, had recently become engaged, so we all met at a local bar for drinks, darts, and food. Emily Russell didn’t come up once, and I was happy to have the distraction.
On Saturday, I volunteered at the shelter, making calls on behalf of their spring fund-raising campaign. Someone brought in doughnuts, and we all cracked lame jokes about donors’ silly names and bonded over the variety of rude ways people told us to get lost. That afternoon, Riley and I took a long walk through the community park, and I managed to give my apartment a much-needed cleaning and vacuuming. We walked again on Sunday, and then I spent a leisurely morning lounging around, reading the paper and catching up on work e-mail. I spoke to Laurel once and told her I’d reached a dead end with Gina, and Laurel actually acted surprised that my ex-wife—who had twice called the police on me—didn’t want to assist me with an unethical search of my deceased ex-girlfriend’s college records.
Some people never lose their optimism.
“You haven’t heard anything from the cops?” Laurel asked.
“Nothing,” I said. I’d read the local paper from cover to cover that weekend, and the news about Emily’s death seemed to be slowing to a trickle. What else was there to say? She’d been murdered, but they didn’t know who was responsible. Her parents were preparing to bury her back home in Kentucky. Everyone was at a loss.
“Keep your chin up,” Laurel said.
“Thanks, coach.”
“Do you want to come over to the house tonight?” Laurel asked. “It’s cold, but we’re grilling out. Hamburgers and hot dogs. You and Tony can talk about basketball or beer or whatever it is you guys like to talk about.”
“I’m stuck on something else here. You? Hamburgers and hot dogs?”
“Do you think I’m a total killjoy? I let the kids indulge sometimes.”
“You don’t mind having your single friend along for the ride?” I asked.
“Of course not.” She paused. “Plus, Sally’s working on a term paper for her history class. And I just happen to know you minored in history in college.”
“So you’re using me.”
“She’s writing about the Kennedy assassination. Didn’t you write a paper about that once?”
“I did,” I said. “I still have dreams of arresting Fidel. Didn’t I help her with a paper on D-day last year?”
“She likes you. She thinks you’re smart. I haven’t told her otherwise. You know, sometimes the kids refer to you as Uncle Nick.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
Pride swelled in my chest. “That’s pretty cool. Okay,” I said. “I’ll help the kid. And eat your food as payment.”
“Great. And I’ll keep working on this Emily Russell stuff when I have the time.”
“I don’t know if it’s worth it,” I said.
“I’ll keep trying,” she said. “We’ll see.”
After we hung up, the reason I wanted her to stop echoed in my head like a clarion call: It’s too painful. It’s just too painful.
* * *
Then I stepped out my door on Monday morning, and it all came back to me. Hoping for a quick walk with Riley before I went to work, I opened the door and someone called my name.
“There he is. Mr. Hansen?”
I spun toward the sound of the voice. The morning air felt warmer than I’d expected, and I had stepped out in a pair of gym shorts and an oversized sweatshirt. Riley was peeing near my foot when I saw a vaguely familiar blond woman approaching me with a microphone, followed closely by a guy with a huge camera mounted on his shoulder.
I froze in place. The red light on the camera glowed, meaning it was recording.
“What?” I asked. “What’s this?”
“Katherine Pettis, Local Twenty news. How do you feel about being named a person of interest in the murder of Emily Russell?”
The camera moved close enough to my face to reveal every pore and twitch. I’d seen Katherine Pettis on the local news many times, and this was her forte. She liked to go out into the field, stick a microphone in someone’s face, preferably someone in trouble, and ask them tough questions. If no one was in trouble, she stood outside in thunderstorms and hail and extreme heat. She once spent
the night in a cell at the state prison to show what the conditions were like. Up close, her makeup looked thick, her cheeks bright red, and her eyebrows drawn on with a dark pencil.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.
Riley finished his work and started sniffing Katherine’s high-heeled shoe. I hoped they’d get a shot of him, since he would obviously make me look more humane. How could he have murdered someone when he loves his dog so much?
“Sources at the police department have named you a person of interest in the murder of Emily Russell,” Katherine Pettis said, undeterred. “Would you care to comment? Did you know Emily Russell? Is she a friend of yours? Was she, I mean.” She frowned a little when she added that, making sure to let the viewers know she was a really sensitive reporter.
I started backing toward my apartment door. The camera tracked me, its red eye following my every movement.
“Any comment, sir?” she asked. “Anything at all?”
I went back inside, but before I closed the door I said, “Leave me alone.”
Only when Riley and I were on the safe side of the door did I look down at him and realize my heart was pounding.
“What the hell was all that about?” I asked. “Do you know, boy?”
He started wagging his tail, oblivious and hungry for his breakfast.
* * *
I called Mick Brosius but reached an answering service. I tried three more times with the same result. It then took me one try to get Detective Reece on the phone, but he sounded harried and distracted, not at all interested in talking to me.
“Is something wrong, Mr. Hansen?” he asked. It sounded like he was chewing his breakfast while we spoke.
“Do you know what just happened to me?” I asked.
“I don’t.” Chew-chew-chew.
“That Katherine Pettis fool from the local news just stuck a microphone in my face outside my door. She called me a ‘person of interest’ in the death of Emily Russell.”
“And?” he asked.
“Come on,” I said. “You really think I did it?”
“You’ve known all along we’re wondering why your name and address were in that girl’s pocket.” He spoke to someone else in the room, his voice distant, then came back on the line. “I guess I don’t know what you want me to do for you right now. I’m sorry if the media invaded your privacy. It happens in cases like this.”
“Did you send them here?” I asked.
“No. I don’t talk to Katherine Pettis,” he said, sounding almost offended by the question, as though Katherine Pettis were a much lower class of person than he was. “But we have an election coming up in the fall. Everyone wants to make sure they look like they’re doing their due diligence. Somebody leaked your name to the media, probably out of the sheriff’s office. They like to do that. It happens.”
I expected him to say more, to say . . . anything. But then I understood how naive it was to think he’d have something helpful to offer me. I was a big boy in the middle of a big-boy problem. I couldn’t count on soothing words from the detective investigating the crime. And even if he did have soothing words, they couldn’t erase the images I carried around in my head. That girl in the grocery store, looking at me with such fear on her face. And then the image I could create only in my mind: her young body, twisted and bent on the floor of some cheap, ugly motel room. She was somebody’s daughter, somebody’s child. Somebody’s friend.
Why?
I pulled a chair out from the table and sat down. Riley wandered into the kitchen, his leash still trailing after him. He sniffed his empty food bowl and looked back at me. I held up one finger, telling him just a minute. He knew what I meant.
“So do you have any idea what happened to this girl yet?” I asked. “Or why?”
“You know I can’t talk to you in any great detail about this case,” Reece said. “And I’ve already heard from your attorney, Mr. Brosius, a couple of times. He has your best interests in mind. But I can assure you of one thing—we’re going to do everything we can to answer those questions about Emily Russell.” He paused for a moment, his chewing completed. “Everything. We’ll follow every trail we find.”
His words seemed to be directed at me. But I also knew what he was really saying. We have no idea what happened to Emily Russell.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
News traveled fast. Before I was even out the door again, showered and clean, my supervisor from work, Olivia Bloom, called, asking me what was going on and did I need to take some time off to figure it out.
“How did you hear?” I asked.
“Twitter,” she said. She was sixty-three and happily played the role of mother hen to her younger employees. I kind of liked it. It felt good to have someone treating me that way.
“Oh, God,” I said.
“Do you need anything, Nick? Help? Advice? A lawyer?”
“I have one of those already.” And then I told her everything was fine, that it was all a misunderstanding and soon enough the police would be clearing me of everything. I tried to sound as confident as Detective Reece when I said, “It’s just election-year politicking.”
“You’re probably right,” Olivia said. “But since your job requires you to interact with the public so much and go into their homes, maybe you need to take a day . . .”
I got the point.
She was giving me a day off, whether I wanted it or not.
Then Mick Brosius called. He sounded like a man who’d woken up with a migraine.
“Did you talk to Reece?” he asked.
“Yes.” I felt guilty, like I’d gone back on a solemn vow.
“What did I tell you about that?” His voice rose higher. “Let me handle Reece. You stay out of it.”
“What am I supposed to do about what they’re saying on the news?” I asked.
“Ignore it,” Brosius said. “It doesn’t mean anything.”
I wasn’t sure he sounded convinced.
“But everybody’s going to hear that stuff. My boss already did. And then there are my friends, my clients at the housing authority.”
“It was bound to be made public sooner or later,” he said. “Just ignore it. When this all blows over, if you want to pursue a civil case, we can look into it.”
“It’s not that,” I said, but he cut me off.
“Remember, not a word to the cops. Not without talking to me.”
He hung up.
* * *
I waited for Laurel to check in, but she didn’t. She had a job and a family. I couldn’t expect her to tend to my problems twenty-four hours a day. I worked from home a little, which always felt like playing hooky to me. I made plans with one of the guys from my basketball team to meet that evening and practice our shooting. When it was time to take Riley for an afternoon walk, I peeked through the closed blinds first. The coast looked clear, and indeed it was. No reporters ambushed me that time, so Riley could take a whiz in peace. On the way back, my phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number, so I decided to ignore it. Then the exchange registered in my brain. Someone from the Eastland campus was calling, so I answered.
“Is this Nick Hansen?” a man’s voice asked.
“It is.”
“I’m calling from the office of the registrar at Eastland concerning the information you requested,” he said.
“Information I requested? What information . . . ?” Then it dawned on me. “Oh, right. The information I requested.”
“Are you available to meet with me this afternoon?” he asked.
“Strangely, I am.”
“Do you know where Hammond Park is, just off campus?”
“Of course,” I said. “I know it well.”
“I’ll see you there at three,” he said. “I’m wearing a blue Eastland polo shirt.”
“Okay. Thanks.”<
br />
But he was already off the line.
* * *
Hammond Park occupied two blocks on the west edge of campus. It wasn’t much of a park. It was some green space with trampled grass and a few benches where students sometimes congregated to protest the government or big business by handing out flyers and chanting while the rest of the world went on with their lives. Most of the time the park sat empty. People passed through. Occasionally an old man stopped and fed birds or a mother with a stroller rested her feet.
I took Riley with me, and we arrived early. The day was warmer than expected, the high reaching the mid-fifties. Two students, a boy and a girl, sat on one side of the park, their thin legs in their tight jeans intertwined on a bench beneath a bare maple tree. The girl held a book of poetry by Pablo Neruda and appeared to be reading the boy passages and making overly dramatic gestures while she did so. The boy kept laughing. Then they’d stop and make out for a while, then go back to the book. Young love.
Marissa and I had spent a little time there. One semester we both had classes on that side of campus, and we’d meet in Hammond Park beforehand. We probably didn’t look much different from the kids in the park that day. We were young, thin, naive, and horny. We’d hold hands on a bench and tell each other what we’d been doing with our day, which was usually nothing important. Then we’d part, each going our own way, but not before kissing and kissing some more and then kissing good-bye as though we’d never see each other again. But I never really worried about that possibility back then. I figured we had forever, years and years stretching before us until infinity. Who didn’t think that at such a young age?
I looked down at Riley. His muzzle and feet were getting grayer by the day. He walked slower. He slept more. Time marched on.
The man with the Eastland polo shirt showed up five minutes after three. He looked younger than me, maybe thirty-five, and he walked with his hands in the pockets of his khaki pants in a way that made him seem not to have a care in the world. He noticed me and acted like he recognized me, nodding his head and walking over, still as nonchalant as anything. I had no idea who he was.