CHAPTER 30
I’M BACK AT MY DESK THE NEXT DAY, BROWSING THE EXTENSIVE police interviews with the Cogans. Since the discovery of the tainted blankets, the Cogans have become increasingly uncooperative: whenever someone has contacted them from the police department, they’ve threatened to name that person in their lawsuit. They have, according to the file, been in touch with several private detectives, and Erin Cogan has appeared on morning shows in Syracuse and Buffalo, pleading for information on the killer. There’s even a transcript from the Buffalo broadcast in which Erin (sounding like she’s been worked over by a media coach) tells the show’s host: “I come from a wealthy, illustrious family, and I believe with all my heart that we’ve been the target of an organized act of terrorism. It’s the action of depraved people against honorable American values and the sanctity of the family. And these terrorists are still very much at large. I’ve heard there could be dozens of poisoned blankets in the mail right now to unsuspecting families. There’s no telling where and when they’ll strike next.”
Frank and then Alyce stop by my desk. He tells me that the fingerprints I collected from the Abernathy crib are a match with the Cogan crib prints.
Alyce looks peevish. She’s just gotten off the phone with a new group calling themselves Mothers for Safe Children—spearheaded by Erin Cogan—who want the Lab to run regular toxicology checks on baby blankets across upstate New York. Alyce sits on the edge of my desk, rubbing at the side of her neck.
“You look like you could use a nap,” I say.
“I could use a new job,” she mutters. “I don’t know who’s more of a pain these days, Erin Cogan or Margo.” She tells me that Margo has filed a formal complaint against me—stating that I’ve missed most of the department meetings and should be formally “reprimanded” and placed on notice. Alyce’s voice is bright with indignation.
It’s a drab, filmy morning—through the angle of the office window, I can see a sort of rain, light and silty as confectionery sugar. Frank tells me not to be concerned. The light pierces the surface of his corneas, so his irises look translucent. “It’s fine,” he says, looking deeply worried. “It’s going to be all right. Just focus on the fingerprints. Everything’s going to work out just fine.”
THAT EVENING, AFTER WORK, Keller and I are watching the news when the phone rings. Keller says, “I—I’m sorry—I don’t understand. Could you repeat that?” Then he says, “Lena? Are you asking for Lena?” He stands in the kitchen, holding the phone and looking at me. He doesn’t say anything, just shakes his head.
I take the phone, thinking, for one breathless moment, that perhaps Erin Cogan has decided to cooperate; that she’s called to tell me the meaning of the tooth.
I place the receiver to my ear: it seems that I can hear a small, expectant lilt of breath. I hold the receiver with both hands and bend down into it. “Hello?”
There’s a pause in which it seems the other party is startled—the caller hadn’t quite expected me to answer—and the pulse of the breath changes. A man’s voice says, “Uh—uh—eeh—na—uh—”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I don’t understand.”
“Uh—uh—uh—eeh—na! Ant—oo—ak—it—oo!”
They are like words turned into breath, a sublanguage. The speaker barely sounds human. He becomes louder, more explosive: “Ah, ah, ha! Eehna! Eehna!” The voice rises, honking. Keller leans in toward the phone as well, trying to listen. He holds out one hand, offering to take the phone.
I cling to it a moment longer. “Eehahnamah!” The voice stretches, weirdly elastic, speaking in tongues. I hold the phone away from my ear and it prattles in my hands. I say tentatively, “I’m sorry, but I just don’t understand you.” I wait a moment, then add, “You must have a wrong number.”
I hand the phone back to Keller—there’s a muted wail—as if the caller senses he’s about to be disconnected.
Keller and I look at each other: the kitchen seems bigger and quieter. I sink into a chair at his kitchen table and he sits on the other side of the corner. “What was that?”
I let my head sink down onto my crossed arms on the tabletop. “Crank call?” I shake my head. “I don’t know.”
He places his hands on the table, they’re square and blunt, their shape reminds me of my foster father’s hands. “I don’t like this. Those sounds—some kind of fucking psycho. It was a guy, right? Was he saying your name?”
“I don’t want to start thinking everything is a death threat.” I try to smile.
Keller’s mouth is a pressed, unhappy line.
IN AN ATTEMPT not to jump at every sound and shift in the house, we spend the night in front of the television, side by side on the couch. There’s a talk show with several women, including a famous reporter, and the guest is a movie star with lemon-pale hair, straight as a mirror, a translucent, wraithlike beauty who talks about her new movie, Seahorse, and how wonderful, unbelievable, the director is. Then there are news shows—a local broadcast that makes me tense, anticipating some new shock. After a segment on a “racial profiling” incident involving an attack on a convenience store in north Syracuse, there’s an update on the “Crib Terror” case, including an interview with Erin Cogan, “bereaved parent” and “founder of Mothers for Safe Children.” Aside from a trace of redness along the rims of her eyes, Erin looks like one of the newscasters, dressed in an elegant black suit with subtle, expertly done hair and makeup. She reiterates her belief that her baby son was a “sacrificial lamb,” also mentions that she’s been consulting with the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force, who believe the “Blanket Killers” are preparing for a nationwide attacks. She closes by saying that she’ll be on Larry King Live later this week, where she’ll discuss what they’ve come to learn about this new “environmental terrorism.” Then we’re looking at weather graphics. “Well, folks, it’s going to be cold, cold, cold! Don’t go outside unless you have to. Over at Hancock Airport, the wind chill factor is supposed to hit negative thirty-five.”
Keller mutes the commercial and says, “I think that Erin Cogan is losing it.”
“What if she’s right?”
He peers at me through the artificial blue light of the set. “Why do you say that?”
“She just seems so sure. Like she knows something we don’t know.”
Keller props an arm along the back of the couch. “Yeah, but that’s how these people always seem.”
When Keller finally turns off the set around midnight I sit for a few moments, gazing at the screen. Keller helps hoist me up from the couch. It feels as if all the blood has settled in the lower half of my body. I’m somehow exhausted yet not ready to sleep, my mind buzzing with TV images, the bright snap of Erin Cogan’s statements.
THAT EVENING, KELLER offers me his bed again.
“It’s okay,” I say. “I’ll go back to my guest room. I like it there.”
He gives me this rueful smile. “Please don’t go back there—I’ll even take the floor—if you want. If I want a bed, I’ll go to the guest room.”
I lift my eyebrows.
“If you don’t mind . . .” he begins. He clears his throat. “If you don’t mind, I like the floor. In here.”
“Why?” I ask brashly, with a sudden laugh that I realize is somehow rude.
His face is flushed and angled toward the floor. “I’d just feel better about it—keeping an eye on you,” he says, with an unconvincing smile. “And it’s good for my back.” He arches his shoulders. “The floor, I mean.”
“Is this still about that silly phone call?” I say and realize, to my dismay, that I sound like Pia. Then I consider that I like the thought of staying in the room with Keller.
So I return to his bed that night. He’s changed the pewter-colored sheets for freshly laundered ivory ones, but I can still pick up molecules of his scent lingering beneath the soap.
I decide not to wonder about the possible significance of sleeping in Keller’s bed (without Keller). But then I lie awake gazing at the blue moonlight, filling the room like water. My thoughts are free-associational, released by the late hour. Keller breathes in a ragged snore.
Alyce used to warn me that, when it came to women, all men really wanted was sex. Yet beyond our one night, Keller hasn’t pressured me (much) for more than that, so the one evening we did share now seems dreamy and accidental. And it strikes me that making an offer like this—to sleep chastely side by side—tender though it might be, might also suggest a certain erotic indifference—on both our parts. Which would certainly simplify things.
But I still can’t sleep. Instead, I shed the covers and step silently around Keller. I slip through the bedroom door where the hallway is grayly lit by a single brass lamp Keller leaves on. The whole house seems altered: The hallway looks dull and spectral. The outlines of things—a cane chair, a shelf of books, a seashell—are blurry, as if everything is slightly vibrating. I creep to my guest room lair at the back of the house. There, I close the door, take off the soft pajamas, and look at myself in the full-length mirror tilted against the wall.
I study the prominent bar of my sternum, the well at the base of my throat, the slope of my breasts and belly, the soft thatch of pubic hair, the flare of my hips. To accommodate babies, I think. But there have been no babies. And is it very strange that, so far, I have never wanted any?
Now, as I study myself in Keller’s guest room mirror, I think about the way the killer eludes me—how it seems I can no more see the path to the crucial evidence than I can find the key to my own past. And I worry that I’m simply not able to see what I need to see—sort of like the way Mr. Memdouah talks about his own sanity. I wonder if it’s possible that I could have a madness or absence or blankness inside me deep and sharp enough to do such a thing as murder a baby. Do all crime workers choose this employment because they themselves are so close to the criminal mind? Do we carry it inside ourselves?
I pull my pajamas back on, and as I’m turning to go, I notice the clothes I was wearing the other day folded neatly on the dresser. There’s a bit of something white visible from the jeans front right pocket. I extricate it, two-fingered. It’s a scrap of notebook paper.
CHAPTER 31
WE PULL INTO THE DRIVEWAY FLANKED BY ITS SQUARED-OFF mulberry bushes. The two-story colonial, pretty maple-colored roof and green shutters, all of it as straight and neat as a made bed. I sit in the car, staring out at it a moment, before Keller says, “You ready?” There’s a bit of paper in my pocket scrawled with the words, COME BACK.
I peek in the garage to make sure the car isn’t there, then go to the front door and press the bell. And when Henry opens the door, I know as soon as I see him that my hunch was right. “Hey, Dad.”
He smiles broadly, opening his arms.
Then I pause and say, “So Dad . . . that was you on the phone yesterday?”
He looks delicately over my shoulder and up the street, then for a moment at Keller, assessing him. In the daylight, Henry’s skin looks fragile and onion-clear. He waves us in and then pulls the door shut behind him. Keller and I install ourselves side by side on the couch. Henry isn’t surprised to see us at all. He sits across from me in his armchair, hands gripping the padded arms soberly. He nods and closes his eyes, his sparse hair feathered over the top of his head, the skin under his brows loose and crepey, his mouth rolled in on itself. And I regret, as I have a hundred times over the course of my childhood, that I don’t share a blood link with him.
After a moment, Henry sighs, picks up the small pad beside the chair, and puts his pen to it. He bunches his mouth with concentration. I move from the couch to the side of his chair and watch the words form.
His penmanship is rough but quite legible. It says, “Was me on phone.”
Keller comes to my side as well and reads over my shoulder. He says, “Damn.”
“Dad, you’ve been pretending you can’t write?”
He gestures for the pad. He writes, “Your mother said she couldn’t read. I tried but—stopped.” He nods, taps the pen on the paper, then writes, “Glad you can read.”
Instinctively, I look up the stairs—the place where Pia would always emerge, silently, when you least expected her to.
Henry writes, “At doctor.” He presses one finger to his lips and I nod—our old collusion. I sink beside him onto the wide arm of his chair, press my face against his shoulder, put my arms around him, some terrible feeling wells up, a thing trembling with surface tension—grief and anger and shame. Henry was never very physically affectionate—that wasn’t our arrangement. So I feel quickly tentative and start to loosen my arms, not wanting to embarrass him. But he puts his hand on my wrist and holds it there, against his chest for a moment, then lets go. He slides back in his chair as if he is physically relinquishing something, opening his hands and letting slip—what? He rubs his soft lower jaw, which looks reddened with razor burn. His eyes are still frank and clear with intelligence. He takes up the pad and stubby pencil, and mouths words as he writes. I read: “I wanted to tell you. Please don’t be angry.”
“Why should I be angry?” I ask. A fearful sensation gathers in my stomach.
“Your mother,” he writes, then scratches it out. The breath pools in the bottom of my lungs. I press my lips inward, inhale without speaking.
He writes and I read: “You had another mother before us.”
He shows the pad to me, but I’ve already read it. My vision is glassy. He takes the pad back. I don’t want to read more, but I can’t look away. “Pia loves you. Always so afraid—of hurting you—of you going away—losing you.”
For a moment, everything around me trembles—something scrabbles across the ceiling. “You don’t have to tell me,” I say, out of breath.
One of his hands rests on my arm. He squeezes, then writes, “Name Myrtle.” He pauses and immediately senses what I will ask him. He shakes his head slightly. “Also foster. Not blood.”
Keller is sitting across from us, but his form seems murky. It’s almost impossible to make out the features on his face. I just sense his concentration.
Henry puts his hands on his armrests and pushes himself up to his feet. He walks across the room to the small island of “classic” books that Pia allows him to keep on the narrow shelves between the living room and kitchen. These are thick, hardbound books, all faded to a similar shade of dust. Reader’s Digest, condensed versions of books, a few of which I’d idly leafed through during high school: The Old Man and the Sea; From Here to Eternity; The Mill on the Floss; The Great Gatsby; U.S.A.; The Naked and the Dead.
Henry pulls U.S.A. down from its spot, his hands trembling with the effort. A puff of dust rises from the top of the book—though the spine is carefully dusted. He returns to his armchair, places the book on the wide chair arm, and eases himself back down with both hands. Then he takes the book in his lap and opens it, spine arching, to a spot three-quarters through the book, and he extricates a piece of paper. It’s creased and aged to the color of old ivory. He hands this to me, nodding. I take it carefully, sensing that this is a venerable old relic. On it, a sloping unfamiliar cursive: 735-2881, 426 3rd Ave., Liverpool.
He writes on his pad: “Pia doesn’t know I kept this. She wanted—no evidence—no past. For you to be her baby. Only—” he underlines only and looks at me, eyebrows raised.
I look at Keller. “This is the foster mother who had me before Henry and Pia,” I tell him. My voice has a sheer tremor. I must concentrate: the paper ripples in my fingers like milk. I try to let out my breath; I make my voice clear and casual. “When was the last time you spoke with her?”
He shakes his head, holds up his hands. Finally he writes, “You were three. Got you—from her 30 years ago.”
I see Keller roll forward i
n my peripheral vision. “Thirty years ago?” he says. “This address is thirty years old? She might not even be there. She probably isn’t there anymore.”
Henry writes: “We needed special person—after Pia breakdown. Help to adopt.”
I’m not sure what this means, but when I ask Henry to explain, he just looks confused—as if there’s no way to put it all in words.
Instead, I try for a different question: “Dad, there’s something else. I need you to try to remember.” I pull the envelope out of my pocket and dangle the tooth on a string. “Do you remember this thing at all? It might’ve been something I brought with me when I first came here?”
Henry examines it, then hands it back, his face blank.
“The thing is, Dad . . .” I take a breath. “I’ve had this tooth—ever since I can remember. And there’s some new evidence linking that sort of tooth—that I have—to the case I’m investigating—to the baby murder case. And if you have any thoughts or associations—anything at all . . .”
He shakes his head a bit hopelessly, as if embarrassed, and writes: “No memory.”
“It’s all right, Dad.” I touch his knee. “Really, that’s fine.”
Henry looks at me, his gaze eloquent and liquid. This address is what he has to offer me, and even this, I can see, has cost him a great deal to turn over. He writes: “Maybe she knows,” and points to the address. His face has a whitish gray cast; his hands curl in on themselves. A rattling noise outside—an icicle breaking from the eave—startles Henry. He looks at the window, a sharp brick color in his cheeks and throat. He’s breathing hard and his skin looks damp. He tries to write, but his hands flutter and the pen doesn’t connect to the page.
“Henry—Dad—that’s okay.” I put my hand over his. “That’s okay. I know. You’re worried about Pia coming back.”
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