What Comes Next

by John Katzenbach

  He glanced at her face as he rolled past her.

  She was young, barely more than a child, but beautiful in the way that all children on the verge of change are, or at least that was what Adrian thought, although it had been many years since he’d actually tried to get to know someone so young other than in a classroom setting.

  She was staring ahead, fiercely.

  He did not think she even noticed his car.

  Adrian pulled into his driveway but did not get out from behind the wheel. He thought the girl—was she fifteen? sixteen?; he could no longer accurately judge the ages of children—seemed to wear a single-­mindedness that spoke of something else. This look fascinated him, jolted his curiosity.

  He watched her in his rearview mirror as she walked briskly to the corner.

  Then he saw something else, which seemed just slightly out of place in his quiet, determinedly normal neighborhood.

  A white panel van, like a small delivery truck but wearing no insignia on the outside advertising an electrician or a painting service, cruised slowly down his street. He glanced inside and saw that a woman was driving and a man was in the passenger seat. This surprised him. It should have been the other way around, he thought, but then he considered he was merely being sexist and clichéd. Of course a woman can drive a truck, he told himself. And even though it was getting late and the evening darkness was dropping rapidly through the trees, there was no reason to think that this truck was anything other than ordinary.

  But as he watched he saw the van slow down and seem to shadow the marching girl. From his spot inside his car, he saw the van stop across from her. Suddenly, he could not see the girl—the van had blocked his view.

  A moment passed, and then the van accelerated sharply around the corner and disappeared into the few twilight moments remaining before night.

  He looked again. The girl was gone.

  But left behind on the street was the pink baseball cap.

  2

  As soon as the door opened she knew she was dead. The only questions she had were: How long do I have? How bad will it be?

  It would be some time before she got those answers. Instead, the first minutes were filled with a fierce terror and uncontrollable panic that obscured everything else.

  Jennifer Riggins had not immediately turned as the panel truck crept up next to her. She was totally focused on quickly getting to the bus stop slightly more than a half mile away on the nearest main road. In the careful way she had designed the scheme of her escape, the local bus would carry her to the center of town, where she could connect with another bus that would take her to a larger terminal in Springfield, some twenty miles away. And, once there, she imagined she could go anywhere. In her jeans pocket she had more than $300 that she had stolen slowly but surely—five here, ten there—from her mother’s purse or her mother’s boyfriend’s wallet. She had taken her time, collecting the money over the past month, hoarding it in a box inside a drawer beneath her underwear. She had never taken so much at one time that they would notice it, just small amounts that were immediately forgotten. When she’d hit her target number, she had known that it was enough to get to New York or Nashville or maybe even Miami or LA, and so, on her last theft early that morning, she had only taken a twenty-dollar bill and three ones, but she’d added to her stash her mother’s Visa card. She wasn’t sure yet where she was going. Someplace warm, she hoped. But anywhere far away and far different was going to be all right with her. That was what she had been thinking about when the truck pulled to a stop next to her. I can go anywhere I want . . .

  The man in the passenger seat had said, “Hey, miss, could you help me out for a second with some directions?”

  This question had made her pause. She had stopped walking and faced the man in the truck. Her first impressions were that he hadn’t shaved in the morning and that his voice seemed oddly high and filled with more excitement than his ordinary question required. And she was a little annoyed, because she didn’t want to be delayed; she wanted to get away from her home and from her smug neighborhood and from her small boring college town and from her mother and her mother’s boyfriend and the way he looked at her and some of the things he’d done when they were alone and from her awful school and from all the kids she knew and hated and who taunted her every single day of the week. She wanted to get away before it got too dark, but it was still just dark enough so that no one would notice her leaving. She wanted to be on a bus heading somewhere that night because she knew that by nine or ten her mother would have finished calling all the numbers she could think of, and then she might actually call the police, because that was what she had done before. Jennifer knew that the police would be all over the bus terminal in Springfield, so she had to have made her move by the time all that was set in motion. All these jumbled thoughts flooded into her head as she considered the man’s question.

  “What are you looking for?” Jennifer responded.

  She saw the man smile.

  That’s wrong, she thought. He shouldn’t be smiling.

  Her initial guess was the man was going to make some vaguely obscene, sexist remark, something insulting or belittling, a Hi, good-lookin’, you wanna have some fun lip-smacking nastiness. She was ready for this and ready to tell him to go screw himself and turn her back and keep walking but she was a little confused, because she looked over the man’s shoulder and saw a woman in the driver’s seat. The woman had a knit watchman’s cap pulled down over her hair, and even though she was young there was something harsh in her eyes, something very granite-hard that Jennifer had never seen before and which instantly scared her.

  In the woman’s hand was a small HD video camera. It was pointed in Jennifer’s direction. This confused her.

  Jennifer heard the man’s answer to her question and it confused her further. She had expected he was asking for a neighborhood address or a direct way to Route 9, but that was not what came out.

  “You,” he said.

  This made no sense. Why were they looking for her? No one knew about her plan. It was still too early for her mother to have found the false note she’d left stuck with a magnet to the kitchen refrigerator . . .

  And so she’d hesitated at the very second in time when she should have run furiously hard or screamed loudly for help.

  The truck door opened abruptly. The man vaulted out of the passenger seat. He was moving much faster than Jennifer had ever imagined someone could move.

  “Hey!” Jennifer said. At least, later, she thought she had said hey but she was uncertain. Maybe she had just frozen. The only idea that went through her head was This can’t be happening and that was followed by a dark, icy sense of dread because she knew in that second, as she saw something coming at her, what it truly meant.

  The man had clubbed her across the face, staggering her. The blow had exploded in her eyes, sending a sheet of red hurt right through her core, and she had felt dizzy, almost as if the world around her had spun on its axis. She could feel herself losing consciousness, reeling back, and crumpling when he grabbed her around the shoulders, holding her from falling to the ground. Her knees felt weak, her shoulders and back rubbery. If she’d had any strength anywhere it vanished instantly.

  She was only vaguely aware of the panel truck door opening and of the man bodily rushing her into the back. She could hear the noise of the door slamming shut. The sensation of the truck accelerating around the corner drove her into the steel bed. She could feel the weight of the man crushing her, holding her down. She could barely breathe and her throat was nearly closed with terror. She did not know if she was struggling or fighting, she couldn’t tell if she was screaming or crying, she was no longer alert enough to tell what she was doing. She gasped as a sudden great blackness came over her, and at first she thought she was already dead, then she thought she was unconscious before she realized that the man had p
ulled a black pillowcase over her head, shutting out the tiny world of the truck. She could taste blood on her lips, and her head was still spinning and whatever was happening to her she knew it was far worse than anything she had ever known before.

  Odor penetrated the pillowcase: a thick oily smell from the floor of the truck; a sweaty, sweet smell from the man pinning her down.

  Somewhere within her, she knew she was in great pain, but she could not tell precisely where.

  She tried to move her arms and legs, pawing at nothingness like a dog dreaming of chasing rabbits, but she heard the man grunt, “No, I don’t think so . . .”

  And then there was another explosion on her head, behind her eyes. The last thing she was aware of was the woman’s voice, saying, “Don’t kill her, for Christ’s sake.”

  With those words echoing within her, Jennifer slid out of control, tumbling swiftly into a deep, dark fake death of unconsciousness.

  3

  He held the pink hat gently, as if it were alive, turning it over carefully in his hands.

  On the inner part of the brim he saw the name Jennifer scrawled in ink, followed by a funny drawing of a smiling ducklike cartoon bird and the words is cool as if they were the answer to a question. No last name, no phone number, no address.

  Adrian sat on the edge of his bed. Resting starkly beside him on the hand-crafted, multihued coverlet his wife had purchased at a quilt fair shortly before her accident was his 9mm Ruger. He had gathered a large collection of photographs of his wife and family and spread them throughout the bedroom where he could look at them as he prepared himself. To make his intentions absolutely clear, Adrian had taken the time to go to his small home office, where once he had labored over lectures and lesson plans, click on his computer, and find a Wikipedia entry for Lewy body dementia. He had printed this out and then stapled it to a copy of the receipt for his bill from the neurologist’s office.

  All that remained, he told himself, was to write a proper suicide note, something heartfelt and poetic. He had always loved poetry and dabbled in writing his own verse. He had filled bookcase shelves with collections, from the modern to the ancient, from Paul Muldoon and James Tate, ranging back in time to Ovid and Catullus. A few years back, he had privately published a small volume of his own poems, Love Songs and Madness—not that he thought they were any good. But he loved writing, either free form or in rhyme, and he believed it might help him express the hopelessness he felt and the reluctance he had to try to face down his disease. Poetry instead of bravery, he thought. For a moment, he was distracted. He wondered where he’d placed a copy of his book. He thought it belonged on the bed, beside the pictures and the gun. Things would then be totally clear to whoever arrived at the scene of his self-murder.

  He reminded himself that right before he pulled the trigger he should call 911 and report a shooting at his house. That would bring anxious policemen to the scene within minutes. He knew he should leave the front door invitingly wide open. These precautions would prevent weeks passing before someone found his body. No decomposition. No smell. Making it all as neat and tidy as possible. There was nothing, he thought, he could do about blood splatter. That couldn’t be helped. But the police were professionals, and he figured they were used to that sort of thing. After all, he wouldn’t be the first aging professor in the community to decide that a loss of the ability to think or reason or understand was a sufficient reason to end his life. He just couldn’t offhand recall any other suicidal colleagues. This bothered him. He was sure there were some.

  For a moment he wondered if he should write a poem about his planning: “Last Acts Before the Last Act.”

  That’s a good title, he thought.

  Adrian rocked back and forth, as if the motion could loosen thoughts stuck within him in blackened places he could no longer reach. There might be a few other small pre-suicidal tasks he needed to take care of—paying a few stray bills, shutting off the heating system or the hot water heater, locking up the garage, taking out the garbage. He found himself going over a minor checklist in his mind, a little like a typical suburbanite greeting Saturday morning chores. The odd notion occurred to him that he seemed to be afraid of making a mess of death and leaving it behind for others to clean up far more than he was scared of actually killing himself.

  Cleaning up a mess of death. Memories tried to burst past the wall of his organization. More than once he had to do precisely that. He fought off images of sadness that echoed within him and focused hard on the task at hand.

  Adrian looked over at the pictures surrounding him on the bed and perched on a nearby table. Parents, brother, wife, and son. Be there soon, he thought. Distant sister, nieces, friends, and colleagues. Meet you later. He seemed to speak directly to the people looking out at him. Lots of grins and smiles, he realized: happy moments at barbecues, weddings, and vacations—all fixed in film.

  He looked around quickly. The other memories were about to disappear forever. The awful times that had come far too frequently over the years of his life. Pull the trigger and all that disappears. He dropped his eyes and saw that he was still tightly gripping the pink hat.

  He started to put it aside and reach for the weapon, but he stopped. It will confuse people, he thought. Some cop will wonder, What the hell was he doing with a pink Red Sox cap? It might send them on some inexplicable murder mystery tangent. He wanted to avoid any suspicions.

  He held the hat up in front of him again, directly in his view, like one would hold a jewel up to light to try and see the imperfections within.

  The rough cotton beneath his fingers felt warm. He traced the distinctive B. The pink color had faded a little and the sweatband was frayed. That would happen only if the blond girl had worn it frequently, especially throughout the winter, preferring it to a warmer ski hat. This told him that the cap—for whatever hidden reason—was a favorite article of clothing.

  Which meant to him that she wouldn’t have abandoned it by the side of the road.

  What had he seen?

  Adrian took a deep breath and revisited each impression from earlier that evening, turning them over in his mind’s eye in much the same way he was rubbing the baseball cap with his hands. The girl with the determined look. The woman behind the wheel. The man at her side. The brief hesitation as they pulled next to the teenager. The rapid acceleration and disappearance. The hat left behind.

  What happened?

  Flight? Escape? Maybe it was one of those cult or drug interventions, where the do-gooder types swept in and then harangued their target in a cheap rented motel room until the poor kid admitted to a change in attitude or belief or addiction.

  He did not think that was what he saw.

  He told himself: Go over it again. Every detail, before they are all lost from your memory.

  That was what he was afraid of: that everything he remembered and everything he deduced would dissipate in the shortest of orders like a morning fog after the sunlight starts to eat away at it. He got up, walked to a bureau, and found a pen and small leather-bound notebook. Usually, he had used the thick, elegant white pages to keep notes for poems, writing down the odd thought or combination of words or rhymes that might lend themselves to development later. His wife had given him the notebook, and when he touched its smooth surface it reminded him of her.

  So he played it all out again, this time jotting down a few details on a blank page.

  The girl . . . She was looking straight ahead and he didn’t think she had even seen him when he drove past her. She was in the midst of something. That he could tell, just from the direction of her eyes and the pace of her walk. She had a plan—and it was shutting out everything else.

  The woman and the man . . . He had pulled into his driveway before the white van approached, he was sure of it. Did they see him in his car? No. Unlikely.

  The brief hesitation . . . They had
seemed to shadow the girl, even if just for a few feet. It was as if they were sizing her up. What must have happened then? Did they talk? Was she invited into the van? Maybe they knew each other and this was just the friendly offer of a ride. Nothing more. Nothing less.

  No. They departed far too rapidly.

  What did he see as they went around the corner? A Massachusetts license plate: QE2D . . .

  He tried to recall the other two digits but could not. He wrote down those he remembered. But what he really remembered was the sharp sound of the van accelerating.

  And then the hat was left behind.

  He had difficulty formulating the word kidnap in his imagination, and even when he did he told himself that this was a conclusion that simply had to be foolish. That sort of thing did not happen in the world he knew. He lived in a place devoted to reason, learning, and logic, with distinct sidelines of art and beauty. He was a member of a world of schools and knowledge. Kidnap—this ugly word belonged in some darker place unfamiliar in his neighborhood. He tried to remember any crimes that had taken place within the quiet rows of trim suburban homes that were spread out around him. Surely, he told himself, there had to be some, the hidden sorts of domestic abuses and disruptive teenage lives that were the stuff of television dramas. Sexual infidelities by adults and high school drug, booze, and sex parties had to have taken place in relative obscurity within blocks. Maybe folks cheated on their taxes or ran shady business practices—he could imagine those sorts of crimes taking place behind the veneer of middle-class life. But he could not ever recall hearing a gunshot or even seeing flashing police lights on any street nearby.

  Those things happened elsewhere. They were confined to breathless evening news reports from nearby cities or to headlines in the morning paper.