“Terrific. I’ll probably see you around four,” Katherine said, writing down his address. “Is that okay?”
“Fine,” Cleveland said. “Bye now.”
“Good-bye.” Katherine hung up.
Dr. Lennox walked in. “I hope I didn’t interrupt anything important.”
Katherine smiled. “No.”
“Anyway,” the psychiatrist said, “there’s a new drug. It’s sort of a synthetic neurotoxin, not unlike some poisonous snake venoms. If you took enough of it at once, your neurological system would overload and you’d die. But if you took it in very small quantities over a period of time, it might cause your brain to sort of get excited, tense up, as it were. The result could be a psychotic reaction.”
“How do you get it?” Katherine asked.
“That’s just it. It’s used after certain kinds of brain surgeries,” Dr. Lennox told her. “It kind of excites the brain back into action. And a clever brain surgeon—they’re famous for their cleverness—could probably get his hands on some.” Dr. Lennox put his hands behind his head. “Dr. Eric Airie, for instance.”
“How would it be administered?”
“Easy,” Dr. Lennox said through a large smile. “You could put it in someone’s food.”
“Really?” Katherine said. “In food?”
He nodded. “There are probably other ways to do it.” Dr. Lennox folded his legs, leaning back. “But the thing about it is that the body produces something so similar naturally that it would never show up in a blood test. In fact, I don’t think you could detect it at all unless you were specifically looking for it, and even then…”
“It would be difficult to detect.”
Lennox nodded. “Extremely.”
I was outside an enormous discount bookstore in a strip mall, the kind where there would be nothing anyone would want to read. It was the only public telephone I could find anywhere. “Katherine,” I said. “It’s me.” I had left my father’s four-wheel drive idling at the curb with the door open.
“Pilot,” Katherine said, a bit surprised. “Are you back?”
“No, I’m still in Florida,” I said. “I just wanted to, just wanted to check in, you know, that’s all, see how things—” I stopped talking. A little boy with a blond crew cut waited for his mother outside the discount bookstore. He cupped his hands against the window and looked in, trying to locate her, I supposed. Wasn’t she keeping an eye on him? Wasn’t she watching him?
“I’m glad you called,” Katherine said. It was in the late afternoon, the time of day Katherine told me I could call because she didn’t have any patients. “How are you feeling?”
“Sane,” I told her. “Completely, totally—”
“Have you been taking—”
“Yeah,” I answered, “all the time.”
“That’s good.”
“The shoelace?”
“I took it to the police.” I thought I could see Katherine turning in her chair, looking at the trees across the highway, the yellow winter light filtering through a smoggy sky. “They’re going to examine it.” She brought her finger to her mouth and bit on a tattered piece of skin.
“Really?” I was surprised.
“And they’re having the files for the investigation sent down from Albany.”
“That’s excellent.” I imagined the stack of police files being removed from a cardboard carton in a huge warehouse somewhere, someone placing them in a handcart and pushing a trolley into the mail room.
“Are you enjoying yourself?” Katherine asked. “Are you having a good time with your father?”
“Given the circumstances,” I said. “Given that I’m watching football constantly, and constantly fishing, and so forth.” This phone was an old one. There were profanities written all over it—threats, slanders, propositions.
Katherine laughed, then asked, “Have you spoken to your mother lately?”
“I can call her from the house,” I said. “She’s the same. Still seeing ghosts.”
“And your brother?”
I let a moment pass by reading about the offers for sex written on the side of the pay phone. Then I said, “No, I haven’t talked to him in a while. Have you? I mean, besides sleeping with him.”
“Pilot,” Katherine said, letting it go, “do you remember the policeman, the detective, his name was Detective Cleveland, who investigated your sister’s—”
“I remember him.” I remembered a gray man in a gray suit with big gray features. I remembered the way he leaned down when he spoke to me, hands on his knees, the way he called me son. “What about him?”
“I’ve contacted him,” she said. “I want to ask him about the case, if there’s anything that he remembers, if anything has been bothering him about it all these years.”
“Not a bad idea,” I told her. “What does Eric think?”
“I just wanted to make sure it was okay with you.”
“It’s just fine with me.”
The little blond boy’s mother came out of the discount bookstore at this moment and said, “Talbot, comeer!” The little boy went to her, and she dragged him by the hand, never taking her eyes off me—a strange man at a public telephone in a strip mall.
I saw Talbot’s eyes turn toward me, too, a look of dim realization passing over his small, toothy face.
“So,” Katherine said heavily—and, I thought, a bit distractedly—“you’ve been feeling all right, then? No strange sensations? No voices? Nothing unusual?”
Hadn’t I told her this? “I’m perfectly sane, Katherine. There’s nothing wrong. There’s absolutely—”
“I have to ask you,” Katherine said. “When you came back from California, was Eric around a lot?”
“Yeah,” I said, “he was with me all the time, at my mother’s.”
“Did he come over to your mother’s for dinner?”
“Sometimes,” I said. “But mostly he was there in the mornings.”
I noticed that this little boy, Talbot, was on the other side of the bookstore window now, cupping his hands and looking out at me through the glass. Evidently, I fascinated him.
I stuck my tongue out.
“Describe it,” Katherine said.
“What do you mean?”
“What would happen, generally, in the mornings when Eric came over?”
Talbot’s mouth dropped open. His eyes grew wide.
“I’d wake up and Eric would be in the kitchen with our mother, making breakfast.”
“Did you eat anything?”
“Just coffee, mostly. Sometimes I’d let him make me some eggs.”
“Your mother—”
“—drinks tea,” I finished. “Why?”
Katherine didn’t answer, just as she didn’t respond to my questions about Eric. “Pilot,” Katherine said, “how many pills are you taking right now? I mean, how many a day?”
“Three,” I said. “But sometimes I miss one.”
“Do something for me,” she said. “Reduce it by half. You can cut those pills in half, right?”
“Sure,” I said. “They have a little notch in the middle.”
“From now on, take half a pill three times a day instead of three whole ones, all right?”
I realized how cold it was out here, even though it was Florida, and that I had forgotten to wear a jacket, and that there were few cars in the parking lot, and that the sky was more green than blue. “Okay,” I said. Talbot was making a funny face at me, stretching his mouth open with his fingers. Behind him, I could see his mother, a large-boned woman with mouse-brown hair, looking at whale calendars and Star Trek calendars. What month was it? I couldn’t remember. I couldn’t remember what month it was.
Jesus Christ, it was cold. Could I actually be in Florida? It was probably Blue Whale month. Or Klingon Battle Cruiser month.
“But if you start feeling strange,” said Katherine, “if you start feeling at all unusual, hearing voices, seeing things, fearing things, then please go back to you
r regular dosage right away.”
“Fine,” I said. “The medication just makes me groggy and stupid, anyway.”
“And call me.”
“Call you.”
“Pilot,” Katherine said, and I knew she was looking at her watch. “I have to go now. But will you call me in a few days?”
“Of course I will,” I said. “Don’t worry about me.”
“It’s my job to worry about you, Pilot.”
Talbot stuck his pink little tongue out at me from the other side of the glass. “Bye, Katherine,” I said. I could see his tongue flattening against the window. I remembered the taste of glass from my childhood, the sooty, filmy sensation of my tongue on a window.
“Good-bye, Pilot.”
I hung up the phone, taking a step toward Talbot, and he panicked and ran to his mother. November, I think. It had to be November. But he had no reason to be afraid of me.
Katherine followed Jerry Cleveland’s directions onto Sky Highway, scanning the numbers over the doorways. When she saw it, though, she thought she must have made a mistake. She pulled her sapphire-blue VW into the lot and looked around. Huge red, white, and blue streamers hung from wires that had been strung across high poles. Everywhere were banners advertising amazing deals on pristine-condition previously owned, reconditioned automobiles. An older black man wearing a plaid jacket and white pants walked up to her car window right away. She rolled it down. “We have some incredible things to show you, Miss, absolutely incredible things. Why don’t you pull right over there—” he pointed to an empty space “—and we’ll walk around and take a look at a few models that will absolutely blow your—”
She recognized his voice. “Detective Cleveland?” Katherine said. “I mean—”
“Miss Joy!” The old man laughed.
“You’re a used-car salesman?”
“I was an average detective,” he said smiling. “I’m a great used-car salesman.” He waved his whole arm. “Go ahead and pull in over there, then we’ll talk.”
Katherine pulled her car into the space he indicated, and Cleveland was right behind her, opening the door. “Thank you,” she said, stepping out. “It’s DeQuincey-Joy, by the way, with a hyphen.”
“Come right in and I’ll pour you a nice cup of coffee, Miss DeQuincey-Joy with a hyphen.”
Katherine followed him into the small dealership offices, where three other salesmen sat around a portable radio drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. Cleveland led her into the back office, the one that had a MANAGER plaque over the door.
“You’re the manager?”
“Nah.” He shrugged. “But that guy’s never around, so we use his office when we want some privacy,” he said. “Take a seat.”
Katherine took the old gray metal folding chair opposite the old gray metal desk in the center of the room. There was one other chair, and on the wall was a colorful poster of a burgundy-mist Mercury Cougar.
“Coffee?” Cleveland said.
Katherine shook her head.
Cleveland sat down, too. “Now,” he said, “I want you to explain to me once again what it is you’re after, young lady. I’m afraid I didn’t get everything that was going on with you on the phone there.” He spoke methodically and carefully. “Just that you’ve got some new information about that missing child. Is that true?”
“Well,” Katherine began, “her brother Pilot Airie is my client.”
“You’re a psychiatrist?”
“Psychologist,” Katherine said. “A counseling psychologist. I don’t have a medical degree.”
“Okay.”
“Pilot Airie, my patient—he claims to have some new evidence.” Katherine looked out the window. It was a bright day, and the chrome of hundreds of cars sparkled in the sun. “Well, not new, exactly, but evidence that he’s held on to since, since it happened.”
Cleveland was scratching the back of his head. “That was more than fifteen years ago, Miss DeQuincey-Joy.”
“Twenty.”
He sighed. “What kind of new evidence does he have, anyway? Do you have it?”
“I have part of it.” Katherine removed the half shoelace from her purse and placed it on the empty desk.
“A shoelace?” Cleveland picked it up. “This is from a shoelace?”
“Don’t you remember?” Katherine asked. “Pilot Airie found a single sneaker in the woods, and no one could find the other shoe.”
Cleveland nodded. “I remember the shoe. Is this the lace from that shoe?”
“No. This is the lace from the other shoe.” Katherine tried to pull the whole mass of her hair toward the back of her head. When she released it, though, it all just fell back into her eyes. “Pilot says he found both of them all those years ago, and that he found a knife as well. A bloody knife. He says he found them in his brother’s room and that he hid them.”
“The other brother,” Cleveland said. “What was his name?”
“Eric,” Katherine said. “He’s a doctor now.”
“Does he know about this?”
“Most of it.”
“Boy, that must make him feel good.” Cleveland dangled the half shoelace in front of his gray face. Then he said, “This has been cut in half—recently.”
Katherine smiled. Vettorello had noticed the same thing. “I did that,” she said. “The police have the other half.”
“It’s not going to tell them much.”
“That’s what I’m worried about.”
“They can probably verify if it’s the right age, but they can’t do much more.” He smiled and shook his head. “You’re going to need the rest of the evidence to confirm anything. The knife, for example. Do you have that?”
“That’s a problem,” Katherine said. “Pilot’s telling me he’s not sure where he put it.”
“I thought you said he’s had it for twenty—”
Katherine looked at her hands, which were small and white in her lap, the fingertips chewed beyond recognition. “Pilot had a psychotic episode, and he said he moved the evidence during that time.”
“I see.”
“And in the process he remembered having the evidence in his possession, but then he doesn’t quite know what he did with it.”
“This was recently?”
“Two and a half months ago.” Katherine cleared her throat. “He was discovered in the woods behind his mother’s house after a three-day search.” Katherine looked across the desk directly into the old man’s eyes. “What was your opinion at the time?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, that man—his name was Bryce—”
“Bryce Telliman.”
“Yes,” Katherine said. “He was the lead suspect?”
“According to the papers,” Cleveland said, “and that seemed to be what the family and most other folks wanted to believe.”
“Did you agree?”
“I thought he might have done it. There wasn’t any real evidence pointing to him, though. That man was a homosexual. Why would he be interested in a little girl?”
“Were there any other suspects?”
Cleveland shifted in his chair. “Everyone at that party was a suspect as far as I was concerned.”
“Anyone in particular?”
The older man rubbed his hands together, and Katherine could actually hear his rough skin. “I have to say I never really considered the boys,” Cleveland said. “Either one of them.” He paused for a moment and scratched the back of his head again. “I always thought it was the father.”
Katherine leaned forward. “What made you think that?”
“Bryce Telliman,” Cleveland said, his voice pitched high. “It was his theory.”
“Bryce Telliman had his own theory?”
“Sure he did. He said he saw the way the father looked at the little girl and he thought it was creepy. That was the word he used—creepy.”
“Creepy,” Katherine repeated. “Did you investigate the father at all?”
“We asked him some questions but, Miss DeQuincey-Joy, you’ve got to know, we didn’t have a lick of evidence. We never even found the girl’s body.” He smiled thinly. “No body, no murder charge, you know what I mean?”
Katherine nodded. “Pilot hasn’t spoken much about his father.” She said this more to herself than to the old detective.
Cleveland touched his chin. His eyes flickered back and forth.
My father kept going over checklists. “Propane stove?” he said. “Hibachi? Briquettes? Starter fluid? Matches?” We were packing.
Patricia only smiled, repeating, “Yes, yes, yes, yes.” She had thought of everything, of course, especially of the food we would eat. It seemed she always thought of everything, taking care of my father like a nanny. Patricia had even packed Christmas decorations.
It was my father’s job only to worry about the plane.
Only that.
I made certain, of course, to bring my medication, a backpack full of books, and the single blue canvas duffel bag I had brought with me from East Meadow.
The take-off went easily, as take-offs go. The truth is, I had never been flying with my father before and was a little more than nervous when we rose from the choppy water like a seagull, rushing forward on the surface until the wind caught our wings and lifted us into the air. That morning it had seemed to me it was getting cold out, but my father said it would be warmer out on the island. “It catches those Caribbean winds,” he said. “It’s different out there.”
“It’s beautiful,” Patricia reassured me, shouting over the engine. “You’ll really love it, Pilot. You really will.”
“Trust us.”
In the air I could see the coast of the United States falling away. There were no sailboats at all, only waves, slate blue and flat in the gray winter daylight. I sat in the front with my father, and Patricia sat in the back, where there was barely enough space for even her, we had brought so many supplies. Dad turned to me, though, not her, asking, “Are you all right, son? Are you comfortable?”
An overcast day, with a solid cloud stretching all the way to the horizon. “This is great,” I told him. “This is awesome.” I said this through clenched teeth. I could feel all those snakes beneath my skin coiling and slithering. I never could express enthusiasm—even when it was genuine.
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