Maybe Danny had his own neurotic tic. That might explain the piano lessons and the concerts and baseball…Why Danny’s e-mail came up clean. No, Jack knew better than that, that was just Danny, that came naturally.
It was dusk when Jack walked out of the theater, into the timid glow of the gaslights. Long gray shadows stretched across the quadrangle and up the brick sidewalk. Slight indications of activity on campus were apparent, as though an organism were coming back to life, one of those ancient fish that lives on the bottom of the ocean, all nervous system and impulse, scales like coral and barnacles, asleep all day, waking at night with the sluggishness of Eternity, it sticks out its whiplash tongue and swallows some unsuspecting school of krill, which in this case was time, faculty and the student body.
Windows that had been closed all summer were raised, scattering yellow rectangles of light backward into the recesses of offices and hallways. Out of the twilight, under brick arches, faces appeared. They were to be avoided, sidestepped, dodged down the alley, through the side entrance, up the stairs to the office, where it smelled of musty paper and warm sun stains, where it smelled of summer’s idleness. Where Time stood still, like in a diorama at the museum. If he turned on the light, Jack would see himself at his desk and it was early morning, the month was May, and nothing had changed.
The following afternoon, Jack was sitting at a booth in Paul’s waiting for Marty and reading the morning paper. The headline read: INTERNET PEDOPHILE PREYS ON GILBERT YOUTH. It was the story about Lamar Coggin’s murder. There was no mention of Danny by name, only an allusion to a suicide being “possibly related.” The piece was mostly about Hopewell and how he had “determined” that Lamar Coggin’s death was a homicide committed by “a perverted killer stalking young boys on the Internet.” According to the paper, “Little Lamar is the only known victim so far and Detective Earl Hopewell is close on the trail of the killer.” Hopewell was confident that he would soon make an arrest. The detective was quoted: “Keeping the children of Gilbert safe from these sick predators is my primary concern.” The Coggin family thanked God for bringing Hopewell to them, and were grateful for the detective’s efforts to avenge their son’s murder. “We know that Lamar is in heaven, looking down on us and feeling grateful, too.”
There was an editorial calling for stricter regulation of the Internet and admonishing parents to monitor their children’s Internet activities.
Marty came in and sat down. He pushed the newspaper aside and said unhappily, “I wish you hadn’t seen that.”
“Is there anything to it?”
Marty started to answer, but stopped when the waiter came over. They ordered lunch, and after the waiter walked away Marty said, “It has nothing to do with Danny.” He folded the newspaper and dropped it next to him on the banquette. “Believe me, Jack, Danny is so far out of this. You know that.”
“I’m not sure Hopewell agrees.”
The corners of Marty’s mouth sagged.
Jack said, “He wanted me to look through Danny’s e-mail and to keep checking it to see—well, to see if he’d been online with that pedophile.” Jack shook his head slowly. “Of course he wasn’t. I called Hopewell and told him so, but now he wants to look for himself and take the hard drive—there’s no way I’m going to let him look through Danny’s e-mail or anything else of Danny’s.”
“He doesn’t need your permission.”
“He can just come into my house and invade my son’s privacy?”
“If he gets a search warrant.”
“Like hell he can.”
“I wouldn’t worry about that happening. He has enough without having to read Danny’s e-mail.”
“Enough of what?”
Marty didn’t answer. He only looked around uneasily and it made Jack nervous to watch him. It made him wonder what Marty wasn’t saying, what he wasn’t telling him, and Marty must have known it. He told Jack, “I know I’m only making you think the unthinkable by not telling you everything, but you’ll just have to believe me.” A look of unhappiness deepened in his face. “This is Hopewell’s case and I have to respect that and how he chooses to go about it. Even if I don’t agree with it.” This was said so plaintively that Jack wanted to apologize for asking. He wanted to tell him: “I know that I’ve been leaning on you all summer. Maybe it’s time I backed off and took care of all this on my own now.”
But Marty spoke first. He started to say, “Look, Jack—” paused when the waiter brought over the sandwiches, and then, “I really don’t want to make things any worse for you than they already are, but I have to trust—I have to have your word that you’re not going to say anything about this to anyone.”
“Anything about what?”
“Hopewell’s got a suspect.” Marty spoke softly across the table. “He’s not ready to make an arrest. An elementary school teacher here in Gilbert. He lives with his two sisters. Really pathetic. Apparently he gets into chat rooms with young boys, gets them to talk dirty with him, in a clumsy, manipulative way, and tries to meet them. My captain sent me over to talk to the boys this guy was online with here in town. Some of these kids are pretty fragile to begin with, and once he gets started on them—it’s really twisted. Hopewell’s trying to get him airtight on using the Internet to talk to Lamar, then he’ll work the homicide.”
“And what about Danny?”
“Danny wasn’t murdered. Hopewell knows that and I want you to know that.” Marty looked past Jack. “Hopewell’s got his hands full trying to make Lamar’s case. The forensics are so iffy that without an eyewitness, a confession or finding Lamar’s personal effects on the suspect, he’ll have a hell of a time making the homicide stick.”
“You don’t sound like that’s such a terrible thing.”
Marty took a bite of his sandwich and chewed it slowly. He pushed a few stray crumbs around his plate before he answered. “I don’t see anything pointing to this guy being a murderer, if that’s what you mean.” His voice was no louder than a whisper. “Not that I doubt Hopewell’s ability to scare him so bad he’ll admit day’s night. But that’s not going to catch the killer.” He gave the sandwich a quizzical look, as though he didn’t know how it got into his hand. “It doesn’t take great police—you can pretty much profile these characters. This guy gets his kicks talking about sex to young boys. He’s not luring them into the woods and killing them.”
“Was that the only way he contacted them? Over the Internet?”
“That’s all we know so far.”
“Can’t you stop him? Hopewell, if you think he’s going to frame the guy.”
“I didn’t say he’s going to frame anyone. But unless someone, including me, can produce the real killer, and I’m not that good, or lucky—look, Jack, the guy’s still guilty of something. Most likely he’ll get a decent enough lawyer and either take his chances in court, which I doubt, or plead out. In any case, he’s going to wind up in prison and that will be the end of him.”
“And Hopewell’s going to make it public that Lamar was talking about sex over the Internet with this guy? He’s going to put Lamar’s parents through that?”
“Whatever it takes, I’m afraid.” Marty said most detectives would have thought twice before doing this kind of damage, to everyone involved. “And by the time Hopewell’s finished, he’ll have done some damage. But he’ll spin it so it looks like he’s put a psychotic killer away and saved the lives of young boys across the entire state of Indiana. And no one’s going to give a damn about anything else. It’s really depressing. And the capper is, there’s not one damn thing anyone can do about it.”
It was the tail end of the lunch hour and the place was starting to empty out, faculty mostly. There was an ease with which they moved, vacation-paced and relaxed, carrying the scent of faded suntan oil, giving the room the feel of a new season, a new semester, even if the semester was still a week away. Jack knew them by face only, they were not the friends who had sat with him in late May and talked the soft talk, and
yet these people, too, were a part of the living Danny, parents of children Danny had gone to school with, and they were seeing Jack for the first time since Danny’s death—there would be no hiding naked and sweating in the attic now. They approached carefully, they spoke cautious words, they told Jack how sorry they were, in their bedside voices, their faces sympathetic and pitying. Only after Jack nodded his hello, after they saw that it was safe, did their voices loosen, their faces relax, before they returned to their routines, to the familiar environs, where the brick sidewalks led to the same offices and classrooms they had last semester, where their books were on call and waiting for a starting time, where their lives were where they’d left them, as though nothing had changed.
But something had changed. Jack had changed. Sitting with Marty was not only proof of that, it was the result of it, and the result of what had changed him. He was the father of the boy who had killed himself. The man of summer compulsions, who had passed his vacation days with good cops and bad, seen the lid lifted and knew the machinations of detectives and their plans. Who knew their setups and what kept them awake at night. He was both an outsider and an insider, still in possession of all the academic credentials but no longer insulated by that community; privy to information Gilbert faculty couldn’t know, part of another community. The Community of Parents of Dead Children, where the Coggins thanked God for their avenging detective, and a sad detective’s conscience had him by the throat. It was a terrible thing to concede, this change.
Jack told this to Marty, after they’d left the restaurant and were walking down Main Street.
Marty only frowned and shook his head slowly, then he started back to work. But Jack stopped him. “Hey, Marty, which is more important, honesty or loyalty?”
“What?”
“That’s what Danny asked me a week before he died.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him it was a good question.”
“Did he ever say which he’d pick?”
“No, he didn’t.”
“It’s a good question.”
Jack went back to his screening room, where there were only more films to watch. And later, he went to his office, where the air held on to the scent of summer and sunlight. There was a message on his voice mail from Lois saying that she and Tim were back from Rome and, if Jack was in the mood, would he come out to their place for cocktails. But there were no messages from the only voice he wanted to hear and he didn’t need to call the house and leave a message of his own asking Danny if he and the guys were up for a catfish fry and the batting cages over by the fairgrounds. Or maybe just the two of them could have supper…
When he finished his work, he drove out to see Lois and Tim. They drank cocktails on the patio while Lois told Jack how glad she was to see him and gave him a strong hug and kissed him on the cheek. She said that he’d been on her mind all summer and she couldn’t get “a proper read when we spoke on the phone.”
Jack said there wasn’t much to read and Lois took her cue to wait until they were alone to find out what she really wanted to know.
And later still, Jack pulled up to his house that stood dark against a darker sky. There was no one inside waiting for him, he wasn’t used to that yet, and he sat on the porch steps, remembering the nights when he came home to the sound of the piano, of the television, to the sound of Danny. He tried to think about the work he had to do, the films he had to screen, the notes and preparations. And only after he went inside and looked at Danny’s picture on the night table, after he turned off the light, after he was in bed, unable to sleep, would he come to the discomforting realization that Danny wasn’t receding further away from him, after all; he was receding from Danny.
XVII
Lois sat at her desk, stockinged feet curled under her. There was a stack of unopened mail on her desk, more than a few textbooks were still in their shrink-wrap. The sunlight bent through the window and embraced the back of her head like an aureole. Now that she and Jack were alone he told her about his summer obsessions and the compulsions. He told her about the night at the Palomino. He told her all that he dared to admit.
Lois must have had questions, but she didn’t ask them. She only listened, at times looking worried, at times concerned. She said, “I can understand why you didn’t tell me any of this when I called this summer. I appreciate that you’re telling me now.”
Jack kept on talking, impelled forward by the sheer volume of words. He told her about the day at the barbecue shack, he told her “Marty’s been holding my hand all summer.” He did not talk about the murder of Lamar Coggin or Hopewell’s investigation. He did not talk about the despair worn on the faces of sad detectives.
He walked over to the window where he could see the back of the Fine Arts building, where Anne’s studio had been. He turned toward Lois and said, “I was thinking about Maggie last week.” Lois looked at him over the top of her glasses and said nothing. “It could have made a difference,” he told her. “For Danny. It could have made things easier for him.”
She said, “You can’t think like that,” in the way she might have back when she was his teacher and he thought he would make movies and would need to know something about the actor’s craft. Back when Lois spoke and he listened and learned. He wasn’t the young film student now but he still listened when Lois spoke, even if he didn’t learn but only inferred, and she didn’t instruct but only proffered, suggesting what he should and shouldn’t examine about his life. She was allowed to. She knew the play and the players. She spoke with authority.
Jack didn’t tell her this, although he must have years ago. What he said, as he walked to the door, was, “We still have a lot to talk about.”
“Yes, we do.”
“If you have time tonight, we’ll go out for a drink.”
“I’d like that.”
He went downstairs and out to the campus, where it was another morning humming with academic industry. The sleeping organism that had stirred in the night was fully awake and beginning to feed, converting human energy to the work of hands. But when he climbed the stairs to his office, Jack was not absorbed by the organism. He was not compelled to work. He was thinking that Lois might have been wrong about Maggie. He was thinking that he might have been wrong about Maggie as well.
They were sitting on the floor of the sunroom in Maggie’s house. It was her favorite room, the rattan furniture, the tan venetian blinds tinting the sun like the light in a British movie. She pulled two pillows off the couch, they rested their heads against them. They were kissing and the music was turned down low.
Jack said she looked beautiful. She said Jack looked beautiful, too, and smiled.
Jack told her, “Your hair has summer in it.”
Maggie said she was glad to see summer end. “I missed you very much.” She said she was happy to be alone with him.
He said he was happy to be alone with her.
He wasn’t afraid to tell her that. It was what she would say next that he was afraid of, and what would happen after she said it. He’d been afraid since before the night at Ambrosini’s, which meant he’d been afraid since the day they met and he went on seeing her anyway. He thought he could work around it. He never knew how afraid he really was until it finally happened.
If he’d kissed her, she wouldn’t have been able to say what she said. If he talked about the class he’d taught at Stanford that summer, if he’d turned up the music or got up to make coffee. He might have tried to change the subject, tried to put off the conversation, but he did nothing. He knew what she wanted to talk about and he’d been dreading it for so long, and wanting it, wanting what she was about to offer, afraid he wouldn’t turn it down, afraid that he would, and now he wanted it to be over with, and felt a calm relief when she said it.
“I don’t want to do this again next summer. And when Danny gets back from camp next week and you two go away, I’d like to go with you. We can all go somewhere together.”
“
You know how I feel about that.”
“Danny’s used to me now.” She said this neither defiantly nor argumentatively. She was stating a fact.
“He’s accepted you as my friend. I have lots of friends. They don’t go away with us over the summer.”
“You’re not thinking that I’m trying to interfere?”
Jack said no, he wasn’t thinking that.
“And I’m certainly not trying to come between the two of you.”
Jack said he knew that, too.
“And it’s not like I’m about to propose marriage,” she said lightly. “I just think that we’ve reached the point when it’s okay to all go away together and not make a big deal about it. We’ve spent weekends together, so why not a week or so?”
“I won’t let him get attached to someone and watch him get hurt all over again.” That wasn’t all there was to say, it was all Jack was willing to tell her.
“You’re not talking about Danny.”
“I’m talking about both of us.”
“But he is getting attached. So are you and so am I. So why shouldn’t we—”
“He might be getting too attached.”
“What if he is? What if we all are? All the more reason to go away together.”
Jack tried to explain it to her. “I don’t want to build up his expectations for something that isn’t going to happen.” But that didn’t explain it. “Or worry about something that is.” But that wasn’t it, either.
Maggie put her arm around his shoulder. He didn’t shrug it off. “There’s no reason why we have to miss each other, that’s all I’m saying.”
“The more time we spend together, the more time I’m going to want to spend with you.”
“I should hope so,” she said playfully.
“I can’t do it.”
“Can’t?”
“When Danny’s older. When he’s grown, there’ll be time for a serious relationship, not before.”
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