by Allen Eskens
I screamed his name as he disappeared into the murky water. I screamed twice more before he popped to the surface, grabbing for the boat, his hand missing the edge by the width of a penny. His second attempt wasn't even close. The current had him, and it pulled him away from me as I sat there holding on to that stupid anchor rope, never realizing that if I had let go of the rope, the boat would have floated downstream alongside my grandpa, at least for twenty feet or so. By the time he righted himself, he had moved well beyond the reach of the boat, even if I had released the anchor rope.
I yelled and prayed and begged for him to swim. It all happened so fast.
Then everything soared to a whole new level of bad. Grandpa Bill began to thrash around in the water, his arms flailing, clutching at the surface of the river, his leg pinned in place by something hidden in the wet darkness. Later, the sheriff would tell my mother that his boot caught on the branch of a dead cottonwood tree just beneath the surface of the river.
I watched him struggle to keep his face above the water as the current pushed him under. He didn't have his lifejacket zipped shut. It pulled at his arms, tangling them above his head, his upper body tugging against the trapped boot. It was only then that it dawned on me to release my rope. I let it go and paddled with my hand until the rope snapped tight about thirty feet upstream of my grandfather. I could see him scratching and tearing to pull free of the life jacket. I couldn't move. I couldn't think. I just stood there and watched and yelled until my grandfather stopped moving and floated limp in the current.
I told Carl my story, choking back my tears, pausing repeatedly to let my chest settle. It wasn't until I finished that I noticed that Carl had laid his hand on my arm in an attempt to comfort me. To my surprise, I didn't pull away from him.
“You know, it wasn't your fault,” he said.
“I don't know that at all,” I said. “That's the big lie I've been trying to tell myself for the past ten years. I could have put the bottle in the trash bag. I could have let go of that rope when he fell in. I had a knife in the tackle box; I could have cut the boat loose and saved him. Believe me, I've gone over it a million times. I could have done a hundred things differently. But I didn't do anything.”
“You were just a kid,” Carl said.
“I could have saved him,” I said. “I had the choice to try or to watch. I chose wrong. That's all there is to that.”
“But—”
“I don't want to talk about it anymore,” I snapped.
Janet tapped me on the shoulder and I turned with a jerk. “I'm sorry, Joe,” she said, “but visiting hours are over.” I looked at the clock on the wall and saw that it was ten minutes past eight. I had been talking for the entire visit, and I felt drained. My mind spun as the memory of that terrible day swirled and bounced unfettered in my head, cut loose from its moorings by Carl Iverson. I felt cheated because we had never gotten around to talking about Carl. And, at the same time, I felt a sense of relief for having told my secret to someone.
I stood and apologized to Janet for overstaying my permitted time. Then I nodded to Carl in place of saying goodbye and made my way out. As I walked out of the lounge, I paused to look back at Carl. He sat motionless, facing his reflection in the dark glass, his eyes closed tight as though holding back a deep pain, and I found myself wondering if it was the cancer again or if this time it was something else.
To calm down, I cranked rock classics from my car's beat-up speakers on the drive home. I sang along with a string of one-hit wonders until I managed to force the dark thoughts out of my head, replacing them with thoughts of the puzzle that Carl had mentioned. Sure, the idea of a puzzle intrigued me, but it was the notion that I had another excuse to spend time with Lila that made me feel better about things. When I got back to the apartment, I dug through the box and found two files that held pictures taken of the burning shed. I spent half an hour making sure I had the right pictures then I packed the files under my arm and headed to Lila's apartment.
“You like games?” I said to Lila.
“That depends,” she said. “What ya got in mind?”
Her response caught me off guard, and for a second there I thought that I detected a flirty smile. It nearly made me forget why I came. I smiled back and stumbled over myself. “I got some pictures,” I said.
She looked a bit confused, then showed me to her dining-room table with a nod of her head. “Most guys bring flowers,” she said.
“I'm not most guys,” I said. “I'm special.”
“No argument there,” she said.
I spread out a series of photographs, seven pictures in all. Of the seven, the first three showed the fire raging out of control with no firefighters on the scene yet. Those pictures were poorly framed, haphazard in the use of lighting, and one of them was terribly out of focus. The second set of photos showed the firefighters working the blaze and had been taken by a better photographer. The first of these showed the firefighters pulling a hose off the truck, the shed burning in the background. Another showed the water from the fire hose as it first hit the shed. Two more showed the firefighters spraying water on the fire from two different angles. One of these last two pictures was the one I'd seen in the newspaper article at the library.
“So what's the game,” she said.
“These pictures here…” I said, pointing at the first three pictures. “They came from the file of a witness named Oscar Reid. He lived across the alley from Carl and the Lockwoods. He saw the flames and called 911. While he waited for the cavalry to arrive, he grabbed an old instamatic and snapped a few pictures.”
“Instead of—oh, I don't know—grabbing a water hose?”
“He told the detective that he thought he might be able to sell a picture to the newspaper.”
“A real humanitarian,” she said. “And these?” She pointed at the other four pictures.
“These were taken by an actual newspaper photographer, Alden Cain. He heard the fire call over a scanner and ran over there to get some shots.”
“Okay,” she said. “So what am I looking for?”
“Remember in grade school, the teachers used to give out pictures that looked alike but weren't? And you had to spot the differences between them?”
“That's the game?” she said.
“That's it,” I said, lining the pictures up side by side. “What do you see?”
We studied them carefully. In the early photos, flames shot out of a shed window that faced the alley and the photographer. The roof of the shed was intact, and thick black smoke rolled out of spaces where the two-by-four rafters rested on the walls. In the later photographs, the fire rose in a twisting swirl, like a whirlwind from a hole in the roof. The firefighters arrived and had just started dousing the flames with water. Cain stood in pretty much the same spot as Reid because the angles and backgrounds of the pictures were very similar.
“I don't see any anomalies,” I said, “other than the firefighters moving around.”
“Me neither,” Lila said.
“Carl said to look at things that should be the same in each picture, so don't look at the fire because that changes as it grows.”
We looked more carefully at the pictures, examining the background for any slight alteration. Other than an increase in light from the growing flames, Carl's house looked the same in every photo. Then I looked at the Lockwood house in the Reid photos: a standard two-story, blue-collar home with a small back porch, a set of three windows on the top floor, and a window on either side of the back door. I looked at the Lockwood house in the Cain photos. Again, it was brighter because of the flames, but otherwise nothing had changed. I went back and forth from one picture to another, wondering if Carl had played a joke on me.
Then Lila saw it. She lifted two pictures off the table, one by Cain and one by Reid and inspected them. “There,” she said, “in that window to the right of the back door of the Lockwood house.”
I took the pictures from her and looked at the window,
going back and forth between the Reid photo and the Cain photo until I finally saw what she saw. The window to the right of the back door had a set of mini-blinds covering it from top to bottom. In the Reid picture the blinds fell to the bottom of the window. In the later picture, the one taken by Cain, the blinds had been lifted a few inches. I pulled the image closer and saw what looked like the shape of a head and maybe a face peering through the gap.
“What the hell?” I said. “Who is that?”
“That's a good question,” she said. “It looks like someone peeking out the bottom of the window.”
“Someone was in the house?” I said. “Watching the fire?”
“That's what it looks like to me.”
“Who?”
I could see Lila reaching back into her memory to conjure up the testimony of the Lockwood family. “There're only a handful of possibilities.”
“More like a shop teacher's handful,” I said.
“A shop teacher's handful?” Lila asked, looking puzzled.
“You know…he's missing some fingers…so there're fewer options.” I forced a chuckle.
Lila rolled her eyes and went back to work. “Crystal's stepfather, Douglas Lockwood, said that he and his son were at his car dealership that evening. He was doing paperwork and Danny was detailing a car. He said that they didn't get home until after the fire had been put out.”
I added what I remembered. “Crystal's mom worked the late shift at Dillard's Café,” I said.
“That's right,” Lila added, as if showing off her superior grasp of the details. “Her boss, Woody, confirmed it.”
“Her boss, Woody? You're making that up.”
“Look it up,” she smiled.
“That leaves the boyfriend, what's-his-name?”
“Andrew Fisher,” she said. “He testified that he brought Crystal home after school, drove through the alley, dropped her off, and left.”
“So where does that leave us?” I said.
Lila thought for a minute and then counted on her fingers. “I see four possibilities: first, that's not really someone peeking out the window, but I have to believe what I see, so I'm discarding that one.
“I see a peeker, too,” I said.
“Second, it's Carl Iverson—”
“Why would Carl kill her at his house and then watch the fire from the Lockwood house?”
“I didn't say these were probabilities—just possibilities. It is possible that Carl went to the Lockwood's house after he started the fire. Maybe he knew about the diary and wanted to find it. Although it makes no sense for him to start the fire before looking for the diary.”
“No sense at all,” I said.
“Third, there's a mystery man, someone who the police never thought about, someone who isn't anywhere in this box of files.”
“And fourth?”
“And fourth, someone lied to the police.”
“Someone like…Andrew Fisher?”
“It's a possibility,” Lila said with a defiant exhale. I could tell that she wanted to hold firm to her belief that Carl Iverson murdered Crystal Hagen, but I could also see her trying on these new clothes, slipping into the possibility that something had gone terribly wrong thirty years ago. We sat in silence for a while, unsure of what to make of this revelation, neither of us mentioning the tremor we felt pulse through the ground beneath our feet. It was as though we both saw the crack in the dam take shape, but we didn't understand its ramifications. It would not be long before that crack gaped open, releasing its torrent.
By the time I returned to Hillview, I had fully recovered from my confession about my grandfather's death, and I felt rejuvenated by the mystery of the photographs. Carl owed me a confession—at least that is how I saw it. I beat myself up telling him my story, and now he had to answer some real questions.
He looked healthier than I had ever seen him look. He wore a red flannel shirt in place of the dull blue robe, and his hollow cheeks sported a fresh shave. He smiled a tepid smile, the kind of smile you put on when you run into an ex-girlfriend at a party. I think he knew where we were going to go. It was his turn to open up. My writing assignment had a mid-term paper coming due; I had to write about a major turning point in Carl's life, and I needed to have it to the professor in a week. The time had come to unbury his dead, and he knew it.
“Hello, Joe.” Carl waved me to the chair beside him. “Look at that,” he said, pointing out the window. I scanned the random balconies of the apartment across the way, seeing nothing had changed.
“What?” I asked.
“Snow,” he said. “It's snowing.”
I'd seen the snow falling lightly on my drive down, but I'd taken no notice other than to wonder if my car would last through another Minnesota winter. My car's body had gotten so perforated from decay that water from the wet street soaked the carpeting in the trunk after every rain, filling the car with the smell of stale washcloths. Luckily for me, there hadn't been enough snow to accumulate yet. “You're happy because it's snowing?” I said.
“I spent thirty years in prison, much of that time in segregation. I rarely got to watch the snow fall. I love snow.” He followed individual flakes as they floated past the window, rose in a curving breeze, and then fell again, disappearing into the grass. I gave him a few minutes of peace and allowed him to enjoy the snowfall for the moment. Eventually, it was Carl that started our conversation.
“Virgil stopped by this morning,” he said. “He tells me you and he had quite a talk.”
“We did.”
“And what did Virgil have to say?”
I pulled the small recorder out of my backpack and placed it on the arm of my chair, close enough to pick up Carl's voice. “He says you're an innocent man. He says you didn't kill Crystal Hagen.”
Carl pondered that statement for a moment and then asked. “Do you believe him?”
“I read your court file,” I said. “I read the trial transcript and Crystal's diary.”
“I see,” Carl said. He stopped looking out the window and instead stared at the dingy carpet in front of him. “Did Virgil tell you why he believed so strongly in my innocence?”
“He told me the story of how you saved his life in Vietnam. He said you ran headlong into a barrage of enemy bullets—knelt down between him and the people trying to kill him. He said you stayed there until the VC were pushed back.”
“You gotta love that Virgil.” Carl chuckled under his breath.
“Why?” I asked.
“He'll go to his grave believing that I'm innocent because of what happened that day, even though he's got the story all wrong.”
“You didn't save his life?”
“Oh, I suppose I did save his life, but that's not why I charged that position.”
“I don't understand.”
Carl's smile turned a shade more melancholy as he thought about that day in Vietnam. “I was Catholic back then,” he said. “My upbringing forbade suicide. It was one of those sins that could never be forgiven. The priest said that if you killed yourself you went straight to hell, no questions asked. The Bible also says that there's no greater sacrifice than to give one's life for one's brother. And Virgil was my brother.”
“So when you saw Virgil go down that day—”
“I saw it as my chance. I would get in front of Virgil and take the bullet that was meant for him. It was kind of like killing two birds with one stone. I could save Virgil's life and end mine all at the same time.”
“It didn't quite work out, did it?” I said, prodding him on.
“That's the messed up part of it all,” he said. “Instead of getting my head shot off they gave me medals, a Purple Heart and a Silver Star. Everyone thought I was being brave. I just wanted to die. You see, Virgil's belief in me, his loyalty to me, is based on a lie.”
“So the only person who believes that you are innocent is wrong?” I asked, sliding into my intended conversation with an easy subtlety. The snow outside had grown from a light
flurry into a snowfall worthy of a snow globe, large wet flakes the size of popcorn kernels swirling in circles. I had asked the question I wanted to ask and received silence instead of an answer. So I watched the snow, determined not to speak again, giving Carl the time he needed to sort through his thoughts and find my answer.
“You're asking me if I murdered Crystal Hagen,” he said finally.
“I'm asking if you murdered her, or killed her, or in any way caused her to no longer be alive. Yes, that's what I'm asking.”
I could hear a clock somewhere behind me ticking away the seconds as he paused again. “No,” he said, his voice barely more than a whisper. “I didn't.”
I dropped my head in disappointment. “The day I met you—the day you preached all that bullshit about being honest—you told me you were both a killer and a murderer. Remember? You said killing people was not the same as murdering them and you had done both. I thought this was your dying declaration, your chance to come clean. And now you're telling me that you didn't cause her death in any way?”
“I don't expect you to believe me,” he said. “Hell, no one's believed me, not even my own lawyer.”
“I read the file, Carl. I read the diary. You bought a gun that day. She called you a pervert because you were always watching her.”
“I am well aware of the evidence, Joe,” he said, speaking his words with the patience of a glacier. “I know what they used against me in court. I've relived the telling of that story every day for the past thirty years, but that doesn't change the fact that I didn't murder her. I have no way to prove that point to you or anyone else. I'm not even going to try to prove it. I'm going to tell you the truth. You can believe it or not. It doesn't matter to me.”
“What about the other story from Vietnam?” I asked.
Carl shot me a look of faint surprise, then, as if to call my bluff, he said, “What story would that be?”