by Peter Gadol
“That’s exactly what I think,” Carey said.
“But why not simply propose? Why bother with the stagers?”
“Maybe the guy thought the woman needed incentive. Maybe he wanted a story to tell.”
“How do you think one even goes about hiring stagers?” I asked.
“I’m not sure,” Carey said, “but I bet you it’s easier than you think.”
THEN IT WAS JUNE, A SATURDAY MORNING. THE JACARANDAS had lost their flowers en masse, leaving a layer of fetid purple blossoms everywhere. Light rain had made the air both cooler and more acrid, and before another storm moved in, Carey said he wanted to go out.
“Maybe a hike,” he said.
“A hike would be perfect,” I said.
“Actually.” He hesitated. “I was thinking of going alone.”
This took me by surprise. “Oh. Okay. I can’t come with you? I need the exercise.”
“It might be muddy,” he said.
“Only a little muddy,” I said.
Carey hesitated again, but then he said, “Okay, sure. Sure, come with. But we need to go now.”
When we stepped out of my house, we noticed my neighbors across the street standing in their driveway and talking to two police officers. I didn’t know these neighbors well (nor did I really know anyone on the block; most everyone had moved in within the last two or three years, displacing older people who had owned their properties for decades and decided to cash in on the real estate boom), but I walked over to make sure they were okay just the same. Carey hung back at first, then joined me. One of the officers told us that the house had been broken in to while the owners were out for a few hours, and that while there were a few crooked framed prints and a lampshade knocked awry, nothing appeared to have been taken. It appeared my neighbors’ home had been burgled for burglary’s sake. Had we seen anything or anyone suspicious casing the house? We had not.
Carey glanced at his watch. “There’s nothing we can do for them,” he said, and we expressed our condolences and concern and left.
Although he regularly played tennis in the park, Carey said he never ventured up into the canyon beyond the courts. I led the way. I took the slower ascent that wound around to a footbridge fording a ravine. Twice again I noticed Carey check his watch. Were we in a hurry? Did he have plans for us for after the hike? We passed almost no one else at the crest, and the path was a little more slippery than I’d counted on, making for a tricky descent. When we were on the western flank of the canyon with still a ways to go, Carey said he wanted to see the abandoned house. It was around the bend. It would rain again sooner than later. I didn’t think we had time for the detour, but he was determined.
“It should be this way, right?” he asked.
“Right,” I said and steered us down the side trail.
The house came into view, a brighter white in the cloudy weather. I nearly lost my footing but caught Carey’s arm before I fell.
“What’s your preferred rumor about what happened here?” he asked, and I was about to remind him about the article about the widow when we heard shouting.
It wasn’t clear at first if it was coming from the house. Noise could rebound around the canyon in odd ways, its origin not always clear. But then two men, both of them lanky and bearded with strapped cameras bobbing off their chests, ran out of the house and up the slope, pushed through the gate, and sprinted back up to the main trail and scurried down along the property wall until they were out of view.
“Damn it,” Carey muttered.
The sight of these two men plus more shouting sent him into action: he headed for the gate; I grabbed his elbow.
“Wait,” I said, withdrawing my phone from my pocket. “I can call someone.”
“You told me you couldn’t get reception up here,” he said and pulled free.
Had I given him that detail? He was already on the other side of the gate when I threw up my hands and headed down the path, too.
“Wait,” I called to him again, useless.
Then I heard a familiar low menacing voice: “You told me you were through with all that.”
And a woman: “I said, let go.”
Was it possible we were hearing the same stagers, the same routine? If so, we could relax: any distress was false distress, a hoax. No one was in trouble.
The man: “I trusted you. You swore it.”
“Carey?” I whispered.
He’d entered the house the way I did the first time. I followed him in and went down the corridor, darker on a gray day, but I couldn’t spot him in front of me.
“Where are you, Carey?”
I assumed he would be standing at the balcony and observing the two players for whom the scene was being enacted. In a few moments, our hero would leap into action.
The woman: “Why are you doing this? You stay there, you stay right there.”
However, Carey was not standing at the balcony overlooking the lower room, and it was hard to see much of anything. At the railing, I peered down: there was the fireplace on the left, and someone else—someone by himself?—over on the right with the vantage of the terrace below.
The man: “Where are you going? Come here.”
The woman: “I said, stay there.”
I was confused. I could only locate one silhouette: Where was the second player who didn’t know what was going on and would be impressed by her companion’s valiant intervention? Had that part been played by the two bearded men who had already run off—they’d run off to get help?
My eyes adjusted and I could see Carey standing at the top of the stairs down to the next level. He was staring at the solo player, too. When I made it to his side and started to whisper, he shushed me.
Then the woman stager howled.
The solo player bolted out to the terrace.
Carey headed down the stairs and would have kept going all the way out to the terrace as well had I not grabbed his arm again at the bottom step.
“They’re only stagers,” I whispered. “It’s theater.”
My eyes adjusted once again, and the expansive terrace beyond came into view: the two men—the stager, the bald guy in the tracksuit, and the solo player, a man with silver hair dressed all in black—looked like they were trying to wrestle each other to the ground. With both hands, the bald man gripped the player’s shoulders.
The woman—also the same stager with a ponytail, minus the wig—was moving away from the two men, who were locked in a peculiar two-step, one-two, one-two, moving gradually toward the edge of the terrace. It was drizzling now, everyone getting wet.
The woman said, “Wait, where’d they go?”
“They’re gone,” the bald man said. “This guy, this mother—”
The silver-haired player mumbled something inaudible.
“Stop,” the woman shouted. “That’s not what—” She didn’t finish the sentence.
All of this was happening so quickly; Carey made a move toward the terrace, and one more time I held him back, this time shouting his name. And when I spoke, the silver-haired player on the terrace turned in our direction and gazed into the house.
The bald man’s back was to us—he didn’t swivel around. I noticed he was wearing surgical gloves, as white as milk.
The woman screamed, “Watch it!”
Everything was mixed-up. I was trying to keep Carey from lunging into the fray, and the silver-haired man was trying to wriggle free from the grip of the bald man and searching the house for us, for help, and he and the bald man were rocking closer and closer to the edge of the terrace, where there was no wall, nothing to catch the silver-haired man when, with a minor height advantage, he was able to shrug free from the bald-haired man’s grip—or? Or the bald man released his hold on the silver-haired man. He pressed both gloved hands flat against the silver-haired man’s chest, and pu
shed, once, hard, fast. So long.
The silver-haired man swung his arms around twice in turn as if swimming the backstroke, and then he fell off the terrace into the ravine below.
The woman clutched her forehead with her hand: What had they done? The bald-haired man looked down the slope beyond the terrace and turned back. He was the first up the exterior stairs, the woman right behind him.
I took out my phone—no reception—and Carey ran out to the terrace, then right up the steps after the bald man and the woman. Was he going to chase after them, or was he going to try to scramble down the rocks to where the silver-haired man landed?
I went outside, too, taking careful steps when I made it to the edge of the terrace, and when I reached the spot where the silver-haired man fell, I knelt down and tried to find him on the cascade of rock and scrub, the drizzle turning to rain. I couldn’t see him. I scanned the lower trail for Carey—no sign of him either. Looking back down the ravine, I thought I spotted something now, a puddle of black fabric, flapping slightly in the wind like a broken umbrella. A body, a writhing body.
I ran up the steps, not seeing anyone: no stagers, no Carey, no other hikers to help me or go get help (and I could only hope the first two men who’d run from the house had reached the ranger’s station). I had to go all the way up the property, turning my ankle in the mud, through the broken gate, and out and around the property wall in order to get access to where the silver-haired man was lying in distress.
All the while I was yelling, “Carey!” and, “Help, help!”
I have no idea how much time it took me to reach a point down the trail parallel to where the man had landed in the ravine, but I could see him now, the man on his side like he was taking a nap. There was no way I could get to him—or I could, but it would take a lot of careful climbing across soaked stone, and it made more sense for me to try to find the park police to summon a rescue team. When I looked up at the house to trace how far he’d fallen, the house appeared, in the way the moon did if you stared at it long enough, to be crashing straight down the hill, too.
One quick decision I made was that it would be faster to go back up the trail rather than down to the parking area. If I went up past the house, there was a park exit, and beyond that a road where I stood a better chance of flagging someone down. But trying to run up the trail in the rain, I couldn’t get my legs to move fast enough. I had to pray that Carey hadn’t gone after the players—to do what, to try to pin them and defeat them all on his own?—and that he’d had the better thought to seek help, too.
I reached the top of the hill, and as I was moving toward the exit, I saw three police officers pouring out of a truck that came up the road, three cops sprinting toward me, their guns drawn, their guns trained on me—
I held my hands up high, but I also was trying to wave them down.
“Freeze. Stop right where you are,” one of them shouted.
I kept my hands in the air and shouted, “There’s a man down on the rocks who needs help.”
“On the ground,” a second officer yelled.
“There’s a man,” I said. “He fell—he was pushed from the house.”
“On the ground,” the officer shouted again. “Hands on your head.”
“Now,” the first officer said, and I did as I was told, my knees sinking into the mud, the rain coming down hard now, a cold spring rain, which in a land of drought was always so desperately desired.
ONCE THEY FRISKED ME AND UNDERSTOOD WHAT I WAS TRYING to tell them and radioed for support, they treated me well, with one officer escorting me down the trail because I explained that was where I thought Carey might be. Even wrapped in a blanket and sitting in the back of a squad car, I couldn’t stop shivering. Carey and I had driven up to the park in his car. His car was nowhere in the lot.
At the precinct house, I was allowed to exchange my soaked hiking clothes for a hoodie and sweatpants several sizes too big for me. The sergeant at the front desk volunteered to make me some instant ramen to warm me up, but I asked for tea. Meanwhile I told two officers everything I could about what I had witnessed and how I’d seen these stagers once before. I asked them how they knew to come to the house: Had Carey run down the trail to where he could get reception and called them? As far as they knew, the call came in from hikers who maybe had heard my screaming. Were they two men, two tall bearded men? The officers didn’t know. While we were talking, they received word that the silver-haired man had been successfully transported to a trauma center.
“He’s alive?” I asked, and they said he was, albeit unresponsive.
All I wanted to do was go home and take a hot shower and get in bed. The police, however, kept asking me to run through my account of what happened.
“You’re saying the bald guy shoved the victim off the terrace?”
“It looked that way,” I said. “If Carey was here...”
He’d offer his own version. It occurred to me that he might be in another room in the very same station. Would they tell me if he was? I asked; they said he wasn’t there.
After an hour, the two officers were replaced by a detective; his posture was entirely different. Detective Allagash wasn’t rude, but I wouldn’t call him friendly. His single long eyebrow ran parallel to his mustache, forming an equal sign across his face. It was only the two of us in the room, a room in which everything was bolted to the floor, the steel table, the steel chairs.
“Ms. Crane,” he said. “Rebecca, is it?” He pointed at a wall-mounted video camera behind him. “We’re being recorded. Are you okay with that?”
I nodded yes. I wasn’t told that they were recording our last conversation, so why was that happening now?
“Actually, Rebecca, I need you to say it aloud.”
“It’s fine,” I said.
He had me run through my story yet another time. I tried to be patient. Detective Allagash, too, kept returning to the question of whether the victim had been pushed. He stood up and asked me to show him how it went down. I stood next to him and hesitated.
“Go ahead,” he said.
I pressed my palms against the lapels of his ill-fitting herringbone jacket and said, “Like this.” I pushed gently, but the detective didn’t move, and I was the one who took a step back.
When we sat down again, Detective Allagash asked, “You were alone when you witnessed all of this?”
“No,” I said. Wasn’t he listening? “I was with my boyfriend.” This was the first time I’d called Carey my boyfriend.
“And where is he now?” Detective Allagash asked.
“I think I told you, I don’t know.”
“You don’t know.”
“No.”
“After something so traumatic—”
“He’ll turn up,” I said.
“Turn up?”
Where was he going with these questions? And then I pictured the bald man, his glowing surgical gloves flat against the victim’s chest—surgical gloves that one wore for surgery obviously or... Or to leave no fingerprints, no trace. This was the moment when everything began to crash in on me, all at once.
“Turn up,” Detective Allagash said, “like a lost cat—”
“Should I have a lawyer here with me?” I asked.
The detective leaned back in his chair. He stroked his mustache with his thumb and forefinger.
“Do you want a lawyer?” he asked.
“Do I need a lawyer?”
The detective started to say something, but I didn’t let him speak.
“Can I call anyone?” I asked.
I still had my phone, although I’d been asked to turn it off and hadn’t checked it since changing into the borrowed clothes.
“Would it be okay if I called another detective?” I asked. “Lisa Martinez, she’s at a different precinct.”
“Detective Martinez,” Detectiv
e Allagash said. “You want to call her?”
He thought about it. Was he trying to suppress a smile?
“That’s fine. Take what time you need,” he said, and shut the door behind him.
When I turned on my phone to make the call, I noticed there were three messages from an unidentified number. I assumed they had to be from Carey (finally) and that for whatever reason he was using a phone he didn’t normally call from. I didn’t bother to listen to the voice mail and tapped the call-back button. It was not Carey who answered.
“There you are.”
I couldn’t speak.
“Hi, Rebecca.”
I started shivering again.
“I’m sorry. I am so sorry—”
“Where are you?” I asked.
“Well, when I called earlier, I was visiting Madame B, but now I’m at the house—your house.”
I couldn’t hold it together. Too many thoughts. I started weeping.
“Ezra,” I said.
“Hi,” Ezra said, a small apologetic voice. “But wait. Rebecca. Where are you?”
3
INSTEAD OF SITTING ACROSS THE TABLE FROM ME, DETECTIVE Martinez carried a folding chair into the interrogation room and positioned it close enough for me to almost whisper what happened.
“I know you might still be in shock,” she said, “so I’m sorry to make you keep talking, but there are some things here I’m not understanding. Why would Carey drive off and not come back?”
“Detective Allagash seems to think I made him up.”
“Also we don’t know yet who called 911.”
“It might have been the two men who ran out of the house.”
“And you think they were players?”
I had said that was what I thought, but now I wasn’t sure. “But then who was the victim? Was he a player, too?”
“According to Allagash, the man didn’t have ID on him. We’ll check databases. We can try face recognition. As for the 911 caller, we have a cell we can track.”