Second Chance

by Jonathan Valin

  The woman dropped her head like a prisoner being sentenced. “They’ve gone and left us here alone.”

  ******

  A young boy with the solemn, big-eyed face of a refugee was sitting on one of the double beds inside the motel room. He couldn’t have been more than three or four, dressed in pajamas and furry slippers. He hopped up and ran over to the woman as we came through the door, hiding his face in her robe. She hugged him to her and sank down on the bed.

  “Maybe we should call an ambulance?” Heldman said, staring aghast at the woman’s battered face.

  She looked up quickly. “No. There’s no need. I’m all right.” Her voice was queerly placid.

  “You don’t look all right,” Heldman said.

  “Nevertheless, I am.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hands. “Who did you say you were?”

  “My name is Harry Stoner. This is Professor Arthur Heldman. We’re looking for Kirsten Pearson. She’s been missing for several days.”

  The woman nodded as if she already knew that Kirsten was missing. “She’s been here with Ethan. Since Thursday, I think. They left this afternoon. Left me here with David.”

  “You’re Ethan’s wife?”

  The woman nodded again. “Hedda Pearson.” She laughed suddenly. “I guess I’m still his wife.”

  “He did this to you?” I asked.

  Hedda Pearson didn’t answer me. She sat on the edge of the bed and stared at her frightened son. “Are you police?”

  “No. I’m a private investigator. I was hired by Kirsten’s father—Ethan’s father—to find Kirsty.”

  “I’ve never met Ethan’s father,” the woman said matter-of-factly. “Ethan’s told me about him, but we’ve never met.”

  The woman stopped talking for a moment. I took that moment to look quickly around the room. There was a lamp table to the right of the door, with a manila folder on it. The folder was open, and I could see a pile of newspaper clippings inside. There were more loose clippings on a bureau across from the beds. And a handful of bloody Kleenex.

  “What am I going to do?” Hedda Pearson asked, calmly stroking the boy’s head. “Ethan took all our money, the credit cards, the car.”

  “I can get you money,” I told her.

  The woman reacted angrily. “I couldn’t leave here if I wanted to. I can’t go anywhere. Where would I go?”

  “Don’t you have relatives? Parents?”

  “We don’t talk since I married.”

  From where I was sitting I could see why. But the woman obviously didn’t.

  “I’ll simply wait here until he comes back.”

  “From where?”

  “From where he went of course. From the searching . . . from the hunting.” The woman shook her head suddenly, violently. Her voice rose to a near-hysterical pitch: “Madness!”

  The little boy began to moan softly, as if he’d been infected by his mother’s hysteria. The woman glanced down at him guiltily, and her face slowly resumed its queer look of resignation.

  I glanced at Heldman, who was standing just inside the door. “Maybe you could get some coffee?”

  He nodded. “Of course.”

  “Do you want some coffee, something to eat?” I said to the woman.

  “Some milk for David, please,” she said softly. “He hasn’t had anything since this morning.”

  I had the feeling that neither one of them had eaten in hours.

  “I’ll get the food,” Heldman said, and turned to the door eagerly, as if he were only too glad to escape the scene in the bedroom.

  He went out, leaving me alone with the woman and her son. The boy, David, stopped crying and crawled up on the bed beside his mother. Frightened or not, he was sleepy and his eyelids kept drooping down over his solemn brown eyes. He didn’t look as if he’d been hurt, but I couldn’t be sure.

  “Is the boy all right?”

  “Of course he’s all right!” the woman said with outrage. “Ethan would never hurt David.”

  “What caused the fight?”

  “The same thing that always causes our fights,” Hedda Pearson said wearily. “He’ll read something in the paper. See some anonymous two-inch column, and it starts up again.”

  “What starts up?”

  But Hedda Pearson didn’t hear me. “I didn’t know about it when I first met him. If I had, I’m not sure what I would have done. Probably the same things. Just like he does.” She stared sadly at the sleeping boy. “Only this time . . . I’m frightened for him. I’m frightened he won’t come back.”

  “Why are you afraid for him, Mrs. Pearson? Where have Ethan and Kirsty gone?”

  “To look for him—the man in the newspaper.” Her eyes got very large, as if she’d suddenly remembered something terrifying. “You’ve got to find them!”

  “Why?”

  “Because they’re dangerous. They make each other dangerous. And Ethan . . . ” Her head dropped to her chest and she began to cry. “Ethan has a gun!”

  8

  TEN MINUTES passed before Heldman returned with food and coffee. By then the woman had stopped crying and settled back into her strange waiting state. She woke the boy and fed him a hamburger and some milk. She didn’t eat anything herself at first, but after a while she began to eat, just chewing and swallowing automatically.

  Heldman hovered over her, trying to help with the boy—trying to help. While he busied himself with Hedda Pearson and her son, I scanned the newspaper clippings on the bureau, looking for the one that had apparently set Ethan Pearson off. As far as I could see, it might have been any of them, for they were all the same. Two-inch columns cut from the back pages of newspapers, the pages with the court news—each column detailing the arraignment, conviction, or release of a murderer. The name of the paper and the date of the article was written in pen at the bottom of each clipping.

  Willie Johnson, 42, is to be released this afternoon from Joliet penitentiary, after serving seven years of a 10-20 year term for homicide in the death of his common-law wife . . .

  Chicago Sun-Times 8/26/83

  Arthur Braddock, 35, of 4609 Winton Terrace has been arraigned on the charge of felony homicide in the death of Leona Smith . . .

  Cincinnati Enquirer 11/18/76

  Stanford Isaiah Lewis, 45, convicted slayer of Moira Hamill, has been granted probation after serving ten years of a life sentence in Lima State Penitentiary . . .

  Dayton Daily News 3/7/86

  Calvin “Beebee” Jackson, 34, of 8567 Prospect has been convicted of aggravated homicide in the death of LaQuicha Morgan, also of 8567 Prospect . . .

  Cleveland Plain-Dealer 12/2/76

  There were twenty of them on the bureau. Twenty homicides, twenty murderers. I couldn’t be certain on the basis of their names alone, but I had the feeling that they were all black men. They were all about forty-seven or forty-eight years old, all from the Midwest, and all of them had killed a woman.

  It took me a while longer to spot it, but the criminals had something else in common. Judging by their dates of release and dates of conviction, it appeared that each of them had committed a murder in the latter part of 1976. I didn’t know what that meant, but it clearly had some significance for Ethan Pearson.

  As I was sorting through the last of the clippings I noticed that Hedda Pearson had begun to watch me. I could see her face in the bureau mirror. She looked more curious than concerned, as if she wanted to compare notes about her husband’s odd collection of killers.

  “He started cutting them out after his mother died,” Hedda Pearson said into the mirror.

  I turned to face her. “Would that have been in 1976?”

  “Yes. You’re sharp, Mr. Stoner. Estelle died in September of 1976.” The woman pointed to the manila folder on the lamp table by the door. “It’s all in there, all the details. At least the ones that the reporters could dig up. They missed the real story, though.”

  “And what is the real story?” I asked.

  “What
happened afterward. How it changed the family. Ethan most of all. Kirsty was deeply affected by Estelle’s death, too. But she was closer to her father. And, of course, Phil was there to look after her. Ethan wasn’t close to Phil. He blamed his father for Estelle’s breakdowns. He still does. He had no one to lean on once Estelle was gone. No one to console him, to help him channel the anger and frustration from such an enormous tragedy. His mind couldn’t handle it. Gradually he went . . . a little crazy. You saw for yourself. All those men in the newspapers. All those men.”

  “What does he do with the clippings?” I asked the woman.

  “He keeps track,” she said. “Keeps looking, hunting, searching for the reason Estelle died, for a reason that makes sense to him. His logic is simplicity itself: my mother couldn’t have committed suicide and still have loved me, therefore she didn’t commit suicide, she was murdered. By one of them—one of the faceless men in the newspaper clippings.”

  “Was he this . . . obsessed when you married him?” Heldman asked.

  The woman smiled. “You mean, why did I marry him if he was so crazy?”

  She was a smart woman, when she had her wits about her.

  “Yes,” Heldman said with a blush. “I guess that’s what I did mean.”

  “I didn’t care that he was crazy,” Hedda Pearson said simply. “I didn’t see him that way. He was only nineteen—a sophomore at Oberlin. And I was just eighteen.”

  Hedda Pearson lightly touched her bruised lip, her swollen eye, down her cheek, as if the bruises didn’t matter, as if they weren’t there. Then her face changed.

  “If I hadn’t gotten pregnant, it might have worked. But I did get pregnant. Ethan wasn’t ready for fatherhood, for a job and a family. That’s when this craziness started in earnest—at least, that’s when it started to have an effect, that’s when we started to move from city to city.”

  “Has he ever gone after one of these men before?” I asked.

  Hedda Pearson smiled. “No. He never wanted to confront any of them—he wanted to get away from them. He said it was because none of them was the right man—that he had to keep moving until fate delivered the right one to him. But I always told myself that that wasn’t the real reason. The real reason was that he didn’t ever want it to end. He wanted to keep looking forever, to keep Estelle alive forever. At least that’s what I thought until last week.”

  The woman shuddered, slopping a little coffee on her robe.

  “What happened last week?” I asked.

  “We were in Ft. Thomas, Kentucky. I’d been working there at NKSU for a couple of months. Ethan was writing an article on the campus. But he started having trouble with the piece. Then he got a rejection on one of his poems. I knew the signs by then, so I could see what was coming. And sure enough on Wednesday morning he marched into the department office and pulled me away from the desk. In front of everyone, he pulled me away.

  “He took me out to the car. David was already in the backseat. Our bags in the backseat. He took off, driving straight through to Chicago. To this godforsaken place.”

  “He came to see Kirsten?”

  She nodded. “He had this clipping from a Kentucky paper. A small photograph. He thought she would look at it and remember.”

  “Did she recognize the man in the photo?”

  The woman laughed derisively. “Of course not. There’s nothing to remember. There never has been. That isn’t the point. Kirsten didn’t have to recognize the man. All she had to do was come here and talk to Ethan. Just talk.” Hedda Pearson got an ugly look on her face. “She does weird things to him. She always makes him worse, and he makes her worse. It’s horrible to see. Like they’re having some kind of vicious sex.”

  “Kirsten came here on Thursday morning?”

  “I think it was Thursday. I know they spent the weekend here. The two of them in this room with David and me . . . telling tales about the past, talking baby talk, crying about Estelle as if she’d just died a day or two ago. They just kept getting crazier and crazier, until they were ready to . . .” The woman dropped her head.

  “When did they leave?” I asked.

  “Late this afternoon.” She touched her bruised face.

  “You tried to stop him?”

  “He had a gun,” she said with horror. “They went and bought one yesterday. When I tried to take it away from Ethan, he . . . ”

  “He beat you up.” I said it for her.

  She nodded.

  “Where was the boy?” Heldman said, looking sick. “Where was David when this happened?”

  The woman waved her hand around the tiny room. “Where do you think?”

  “He saw?”

  “Kirsty held her hands over David’s eyes.”

  “She didn’t try to stop it?” Heldman asked.

  “She watched,” Hedda Pearson said coldly.

  9

  I TRIED to get the woman to describe the man in the Kentucky newspaper—the man that Ethan claimed had killed his mother. But Hedda said she’d never actually seen the newspaper photo—Ethan had only told her about it. If the picture was something more than Ethan’s fantasy, he’d taken it with him when he and Kirsten had left that afternoon in the grey Plymouth Volare, heading south to finish their lives in an act of murder.

  “There is another picture,” the woman said, almost as an afterthought.

  “Of this man?”

  “Of the man Ethan says killed his mother. He drew it right after Estelle’s death. He even tried to show it to the police, but of course no one believed him. Not even Ethan’s father. It’s one of the things that Ethan has always held against Phil.” She pointed to the lamp table by the door. “The drawing’s over there, in the manila folder on the table. The folder with the clippings about Estelle.”

  I went over to the table and picked up the folder. Heldman crowded beside me, eager to take a look.

  I didn’t bother with the clippings. The picture was in the back. It was a surprisingly skillful pencil drawing of a black man in his mid-to-late thirties with lumpy skin, peppery hair, and a thin, mean, frightening-looking face—all sharp bony points from brow to cheekbone to chin. The boy had drawn what I took to be a pointed goatee at the V of the chin, which only added to the man’s devilish appearance.

  I had the feeling that the drawing was more metaphor than anything else—the portrait of the bogeyman who had robbed a ten-year-old child of his mother. And yet, metaphor or not, the search for the bogeyman had become quite real. Ethan and Kirsten were out there looking for him—looking to kill him. And they had a seven-hour head start on me.

  ******

  The woman wouldn’t take charity, so I ended making a trade. Two hundred dollars for the manila envelope with the clippings and Ethan’s drawing of Estelle Pearson’s murderer. And another fifty for four chapbooks of Ethan Pearson’s poetry.

  The woman had a suitcase full of the damn things, like a brush salesman.

  As I walked across the deserted motel lot to Heldman’s car, holding that pile of yellowed clippings and Ethan’s chapbooks in my hands, I had the disturbing feeling that none of what had occurred was real.

  Art Heldman had the same feeling. “It’s so damn weird,” he said in a bewildered voice. “What are we going to do?”

  I told him the truth. “I don’t know.”

  Snow began to fall again on the way back to Hyde Park—a needle spray of snow, fierce and fine as icy rain. Through the driver side window I could see it falling on the lake, windblown above the dark water. The only sound in the car was the whisper of the snow beneath the tires.

  “I owe you an apology, Stoner,” Heldman said after a time. He thought I was still angry from the scene in the parking lot. I wasn’t—I wasn’t thinking about him.

  “You were right. Something has to be done. I guess it should have been done long before this.” Heldman glanced over at me quickly. “If you still need my help . . . ”

  “Thanks. I’ll let you know.”

  “Will yo
u go back to Cincinnati?”

  “It seems like the place to start.”

  “Perhaps the police should be . . . informed.”

  “They already have been—in Chicago. I’ll take care of the rest of them tonight.”

  “You have somewhere to stay?”

  “Just drop me at Kirsty’s apartment. I’ll see if I can get an early flight in the morning.”

  “I am sorry,” the man said again. “Sorriest of all for Kirsty.”

  “Her life isn’t over yet, Professor. We still have a shot to change things.”

  I said it, but I wasn’t sure I believed it. And neither was he.

  ******

  Heldman dropped me at Kirsten’s apartment at half past twelve. The freshly fallen snow along 54th caught the streetlight, turning the dismal brownstones the pale, low-wattage yellow of gaslamps. I watched Heldman’s car disappear down Blackstone, then looked up through the falling snow at Kirsten’s second-floor apartment. There was a light in the front room, which might have meant that Marnee Thompson was back. That is, if I hadn’t left the light on myself when I’d stopped there earlier that night. I went into the foyer and pressed the intercom on the side wall, thinking I’d use the keys if no one answered. But Marnee Thompson buzzed me through.

  As I climbed the stairs to the second-floor landing, the apartment door opened and the girl came out. Although she was wearing a terry robe over men’s-cut pajamas, she didn’t look as if she’d been sleeping. On the contrary, her face was wide-awake and frightened-looking. For a second I was afraid she was going to tell me that Kirsten Pearson was dead.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “An hour or two after you left, Kirsty came to the apartment,” the girl said breathlessly. “Mr. Stoner, she was . . . crazy.”

  Marnee Thompson wrung her hands, as if she’d been infected with some of the same craziness. “I didn’t know what to do. After she left I just waited here. I didn’t know what else to do.”

  I put a hand on her shoulder. “Calm down. This could be important.”

  Marnee Thompson shrugged my hand off. “I know it’s important! Don’t you think I know that? I wanted to tell you, but I didn’t know where you were. Couldn’t you have called?”