Undone

by John Colapinto

  Informed of this result, Stubbs, at the Department of Children and Families, notified Mrs. Barnes, who in turn telephoned Chloe at the home of her foster family. Mrs. Gaitskill, hearing the news, clapped her hands excitedly and chanted, “You’re going to know your father! You’re going to know your father!” Her husband began playing a plunging, triumphal rendition of “O Sons and Daughters, Let Us Sing!” on the piano, and Mrs. Gaitskill lifted her voice in song:

  On this most holy day of days

  Our hearts and voices, Lord, we raise

  To Thee, in jubilee and praise.

  Alleluia! Alleluia!

  When the last ringing chord died away, Chloe excused herself—saying she “just needed to be alone for a minute to process everything”—and ran up to her room. There, she called Dez and told him the tidings. He was, to understate the case considerably, relieved. A slight chance had existed of Maddy’s sample being contaminated or damaged in transit, thus yielding a result known, in DNA testing, as an “exclusion,” which required a second test—a do-over. This had seemed cold comfort to Dez, who doubted he would ever again be able to talk his way into Ulrickson’s home to collect a new sample from Maddy. How much sleep had he lost lately, tossing and turning on the Tartarus’s narrow bed, trying to dream up alternate methods of collecting a new sample in case of an exclusion (enroll, briefly, as a teacher at the brat’s preschool?). But he could forget about all that now and concentrate on the plan’s next phase—a phase to which he had devoted several even more stubborn insomnias.

  9

  It was an unpleasant detail, a dangling loose end the removal of which he had deliberately not focused on in advance, lest the enormity of the act prevent him from undertaking the entire project in the first place.

  Whatever faults of character Dez possessed, he was not a violent man. He had not, for instance, been able to fight back against that father who collared him at the bus stop all those years ago. In those episodes of “self-blinding” during Geld’s aversion therapy, no imagery could more reliably dampen desire than imagined scenes of torture, maiming and murder. And at the heart of his contempt for his father had always been the cavalier way Judge Dezollet consigned those sad killers, mental defectives and abuse victims to the gas chamber, electric chair and lethal injection—where death (Dez knew, from an ill-advised glimpse into one of the execution reports prepared for his father) came not with the clinical efficiency fondly imagined by proponents of capital punishment, but with writhing and cries, whimpers and pleadings, tears, vomit, blood, smoking scalps and pitiful loosened bowels.

  Yet for the plan to go forward from this point, he must rise above that physical and moral squeamishness; he must behave like a good soldier; he must commit the act whose name he could not even pronounce to himself. No use pretending that Ames could remain forever a silent partner; once apprised of the crime he had been inveigled in (and a splashily public denouement was virtually the scheme’s main point), that silence was something Dez would have to pay for dearly, in blackmail payments. No, no. No point trying to delude himself that a cash-strapped father of three would fail to return to the money well. Not that money was the problem. Dez would happily pay off forever, if it meant avoiding the act he was now obliged to commit. It was the inevitable, ongoing contact between blackmailer and black-mailee that had to be avoided. Such contact would perforce open up dangers of accidental exposure—an unacceptable risk.

  God knew, he had tried to avoid this—tried to devise a plan that involved no one but himself and Chloe. In the early stages of planning, he had considered taking the six months’ training necessary to earn his own phlebotomy credentials—a scheme he soon discarded, since the requisite background check would as a matter of course turn up his compromised legal past. He toyed, mentally, with enrolling in classes on sleight-of-hand magic so that he might, while posing as Chloe’s lawyer, accompany her to the clinic and somehow accomplish an act of sample switching. But Dez, for all his mental agility, was notoriously fumble-fingered. The notion of him performing a Ricky Jay–like bait and switch under the eye of a watchful trained professional … well, that was clearly hopeless, and Dez abandoned that plan too.

  There were other imagined strategies (Chloe feigning a seizure so that Dez might gingerly remove the sample envelope from the phlebotomist’s distracted grip and switch it for Maddy’s; or Dez himself mimicking an exploded appendix while Chloe accomplished the switch). But he had, eventually, reluctantly, faced the fact that there was one way, and one way only, to beat the chain-of-custody safeguards—and that was to enlist a short-term accomplice, a paid pawn who, owing precisely to his very ignorance of the larger chess game, must, once his role in the combination was complete, be removed from the board. How precisely that “removal” was to be accomplished, Dez had not allowed himself to look at squarely. There were so many nearly insuperable obstacles that he was first obliged to clear—that risky masquerade as the furnace repairman chief among them—that this later erasure had seemed comfortably hypothetical. Now, it was anything but.

  For weeks, he had imagined that a timed-release poison (slipped into a Coke or a beer?) was the best method, allowing Dez time to get away before the retching and coughing and convulsions. But a little Internet research on toxic compounds had brought up a news story from the St. Louis Dispatch about a female murderer undone by investigators who combed her computer and found Web searches for “instant poisons,” “undetectable poisons” and “fatal digoxin dose.” Dez instantly shut down his search and abandoned all further thought of poison.

  He ruminated on luring his prey to the top of one of the blue-misted mountains that loomed over Sayer’s Cliff, and using an almost accidental elbow nudge to send his man sailing into the void—but abandoned this dream upon recalling the sheer size of his would-be victim (Dez would have to take a run at him, like a defensive tackle—and even at that, he might fail to topple him, the man turning, windmilling his arms, reaching out to grasp Dez, pulling him down too). Only after wasting time over these, and countless other, unworkable plots had he finally gotten serious and arrived at the sole strategy that could conceivably have a chance of success: that of the violent surprise attack during the man’s routine, daily rounds. For some days now, Dez had been planning to bus into Newport to make a visit of inspection at the future scene of the crime, and to gather some necessary intel in order to implement it. He could delay no longer.

  On the bus ride into Newport, on a dull gray morning the day after receiving the DNA result, he tried to empty his mind of the violent visions that were trying to breed there. Best not to visualize, too clearly, the act in advance.

  At noon, he found himself standing outside the G-Tek Clinic. He kept his face averted as he strolled past the big plate glass window (so as not to draw premature attention from the weirdly observant receptionist), then ducked down the alley that separated the building from the adjacent nail parlor. At the end was a weedy lane bounded on one side by the backs of the buildings and on the other by a wooden fence. Ames had mentioned the other day that he always parked “out back.” There was no way of knowing which of the four automobiles stowed there now was his victim’s, but he could settle that in a minute. The main thing was to establish whether there was a suitable place for Dez to lie in wait, lug wrench or baseball bat at the ready.

  Running vertically up the wall of the building, a few feet from the back door, was an immense duct, chipped and over-painted many times. Dez experimentally fitted himself into the nook formed where the pipe met the wall. Yes. Yes, this would do admirably. He would hide here this evening, then creep out, on tiptoe, as his unsuspecting prey emerged from the clinic’s back door and took the five or six paces over to his car. Shimmer out from the shadows, weapon raised.

  He could see and feel how that first blow would stove in the back of the head with a sensation of heavy iron sinking into soft watermelon. He must be careful to land the blow squarely lest he simply graze the head, cleaving away an ear or opening a sa
nguineously spurting, but not fatal, scalp wound, allowing his victim to swing around and begin to fight back. He would take the time to aim that first blow at the place where Ames’s hair whorled in a spiral from the thinning crown, he would smack that sweet spot in a two-handed downward chopping motion, felling the man. Then he would deliver a series of added blows, to ensure that his victim was well and truly dead, pound the brain and face and eyeballs and tongue and hair to a consistency resembling steak tartare. At the thought, he grew light-headed, and nausea fluttered his guts. He bent at the waist, dry-retching briefly.

  Still woozy, he walked back up the alley to the sidewalk in front of the building. He was now obliged to enter the establishment, to drop in, unannounced, on Ames, invite him out to lunch and, under the pretext of friendly conversation, draw him out on the make of his car and what time he left work each day. A difficult task, especially given that his victim might, for good reason, be suspicious of such attentions from Dez. Still, there was nothing for it. He needed this information and, short of trying to pry it casually out of the receptionist (could he do that?), Dez could not figure out how else to get it. He squared his shoulders, pasted on his face what he hoped looked like a friendly, innocent smile, then pushed in through the glass door.

  Advancing toward the desk, and seeing the odd expression on the receptionist’s face at the sight of him, Dez instantly knew something was wrong. Had Ames already blabbed about his sample-switching exploit to his coworkers? But no, that did not seem to be it. For when Dez stepped up to the desk and boldly asked to see Mr. Ames, the woman, instead of looking at him with suspicion or accusation, gave him a melting look of commiseration.

  “Oh—then you haven’t heard,” she said.

  And that is when she told him, between sniffles and dabbings at her eyes with a crumpled napkin, about the accident. Just a week ago now. So terrible. On that Italian-made motorcycle that Duncan was so proud of, that he saved so carefully for. And on his debut outing! Simply lost control—apparently those things are so much more powerful than the American-made bikes Dunc was familiar with. The cops later estimated that the poor man was doing about eighty when he hit the bridge abutment. He was wearing a helmet, for all the good it did him. Split the plastic like a nutshell. Killed instantly—which was, she guessed, a blessing of sorts. “He didn’t suffer.”

  Disbelief was the primary sensation that assailed him, disbelief that gave rise to a floating, hovering sensation of hushed, eerie, cosmic solemnity and then to a widening, spreading sense of expanding incredulity that fate or luck or destiny or Providence was so allied with him as to effect the necessary removal in so timely a manner and entirely without his agency. For Dez had no way of knowing that the motorcycle in question, a Ducati Monster 620 Dark, had been purchased with the money Dez himself had paid to the deceased. Nevertheless, he did feel sufficiently spooked by the synchronous happenstance as to wonder if his visions, seconds ago, about splitting open the man’s head had, through some infolding of the space-time continuum, retroactively catalyzed the accident.

  Dez said how sorry he was, that he had dropped in to see if old Duncan wanted to grab some lunch, that it was a dreadful tragedy—think of those three kids and his widow; he must send them some money! It was all so horrible, so incomprehensible, the fragility of life, how everything just hung by a thread. Backing toward the door, Dez cast an eye over the table where, not so long ago, he had studied that fascinating teen fashion magazine and that ever-so-stimulating advertisement. He thought about pausing to dig through the strewn periodicals and discreetly rip out the page for inclusion in his “files,” but decided, under the circumstances, to let it pass.

  10

  “Dad?” Maddy said. “What’s a Ella Menno?”

  She was sitting on the living room floor, a few feet across the carpet from Jasper, at the foot of Pauline’s wheelchair, paging through a book made of felt, with Velcro-backed, removable bits of cloth that depicted various items—a violin, a lion, a cat—each item to be matched with the corresponding letter of the alphabet sewn onto each page.

  Jasper was on the sofa, laptop open on his knees, working on his Bannister mystery. In the weeks since first conceiving of his plot concerning a villainous psychopath posing as the illegitimate son of a dead patriarch, Jasper had made great strides. He had honed the backstory of deprivation and abuse that had warped his villain’s mind. He had further fleshed out in vivid scenes the wealthy, noble Gutterson family and its ancestral home in the leafy reaches of Princeton, New Jersey. All had gone with surprising smoothness.

  The thorniest problem, as Jasper had foreseen, was that of the DNA test that his villain would be obliged to undergo to convince the Guttersons that he was the illegitimate son of Lemuel Gutterson. How to get around the chain-of-custody safeguards?

  It seemed obvious that the only way for an impostor to pass a paternity test would be to use a sample taken from someone who was the biological offspring of the father. Jasper had, accordingly, created for these purposes a child—youngest scion of the late lamented Lemuel—from whom his antihero could steal some cheek cells. Because Jasper’s criminal was male, and would have an XY chromosome makeup, the child had to be male too, but young enough so that the sample could believably be stolen from him without his awareness. This suggested a preschooler, a kid Maddy’s age, or younger. He had duly written such a character into the story—which had required him (in the infernally difficult business of composing fiction) to backtrack and weave seamlessly into the story a second wife for the octogenarian Lemuel, a woman young enough to bear a child but not so young as to suggest that Lemuel (who was meant to be an admirable character) was a predatory old cradle robber. Jasper had created a forty-one-year-old female nurse (modeled in no small part on Deepti) who had faithfully seen Gutterson’s first wife through a long, fatal bout of cancer, and to whom Lemuel, alone and grieving, had turned for support after his wife’s death. In an act applauded by his older children, Lemuel had married his wife’s former nurse and sired the little DNA provider so crucial to Jasper’s plot.

  But now he was wrestling with the problem of how, exactly, his villain could extract a cheek sample without anyone being the wiser. He had been struggling with the conundrum for days and at the moment was asking himself if his villain might not pose as a dentist who visits the boy’s preschool to give the children a lesson about dental hygiene, thereby managing to collect a cheek sample while pretending to inspect the boy’s teeth. But even as he began, excitedly, to tap this into his laptop, he felt that the plan could never be made to seem believable; the teachers would surely notice his villain poking the swabs into the child’s mouth. Besides which, the reader would inevitably wonder why the child would not speak up, asking why the dentist was scraping away at the inside of his cheeks. Which raised the question: could the child somehow be unconscious? Perhaps asleep! Napping! His villain need only dream up a ruse, an imposture, to infiltrate the home—pose as a repairman or contractor? Jasper began to type this inspiration, when Maddy’s indignant voice drew him back to the here and now.

  “Dad?” she said. “What does it mean?”

  “Sorry, honey,” he said, looking up from his screen and blinking away the fictional visions that clouded his eyes. “What does what mean?”

  “Ella Menno.”

  “Ellamenno?” he said. “Not a clue. Where did you hear that word?”

  “At preschool. We were singing the ABCs.”

  “Oh, I see!” He chuckled. “Ellamenno. It’s not a word. It’s part of the alphabet. The letters L-M-N-O. It’s funny, because when I was a kid, I also used to think exactly the same—”

  The phone, on the table beside the sofa, rang. Jasper checked the caller ID. It read: “Law Offices, Pollock.”

  His heart jumped in his chest. It had been several weeks since he donated his sample. This must be Pollock, finally, with the results.

  Deepti called from the kitchen: “Do you want me to get that?”

  “No, no,”
Jasper said. “I’ve got it.”

  He glanced at Pauline. She was staring at him. Her eyes had a hooded, haunted look, the same look they had had for weeks—a look he had, until her recent change in mood, never seen before.

  Dr. Carlucci had warned Jasper that many locked-in patients suffered “emotional lability”—marked mood swings—and at first Jasper had tried to convince himself that the sudden change in Pauline, a few weeks ago, could be chalked up to that. But the dramatic shift in Pauline’s emotions, he was finally obliged to admit to himself, was no temporary thing: it was part and parcel of a dramatic reversal on the subject of the paternity claim. From her earlier ready acceptance, Pauline had, overnight, adopted a stance of rigid opposition to, and disapproval of, anything touching on Holly and the child. She refused even to respond to Jasper’s efforts at engaging her on the subject. His attempt, the other day, to talk about what room they would put the child in, should she turn out to be his, had made Pauline shut down completely—closing her eyes to indicate her refusal even to consider the subject.