Red Leaves

by Thomas H. Cook

  I turned and headed for the door. "The woods" was all I said.

  In Frost's famous poem, they are lovely, dark, and deep, but the sun had not yet set on the woods that evening, and so every detail of the undergrowth was visible to me, save its function, which was to hide whatever lay beneath it.

  There were no trails in the woods behind the house, no route through the bramble, so I made my way slowly, cautiously, pushing aside low-slung limbs and clinging vines.

  I remember the things that came to mind as I walked: Amy's disappearance, Keith's interrogation, the trouble I feared might be ahead. But more than anything, when I think of that last lone walk, I consider not the bare facts I knew at the time, nor the problems I reasonably anticipated, but the darker currents I knew nothing of, nor could have imagined.

  Now, so many years later, as I wait in the corner booth of a diner on a rainy autumn afternoon, I review the long course of my unknowing. Then the words return again, I'll be back before the news, and my body stiffens as if against a crushing blow, and I am once again in woods without a trail, and darkness is closing in, and there is no way to get back home.

  PART II

  Beyond the diner window, the streets are crowded. Families mostly, cameras hanging from their arms. You have served them by the thousands. They ask only the simplest questions. They pull out their little canisters of film and ask how much it will cost to have their pictures developed. You quote them a price and if they're satisfied with it, they ask when the pictures will be ready. You answer that question, too, and in most cases the deal is done. You walk to the developing machine, open the canister, take out the film, feed it into the machine, and wait. The rollers inside the machine turn, the chemicals disperse. The motor hums. The minutes pass. Then the pictures emerge, shiny, new. They fall into the tray like brightly colored leaves.

  The years go by, old customers drop away and new ones appear. You wonder if one of these new ones will recognize you, remember what happened, and ask a different question. Then one Sunday morning the phone rings, and you realize that a past without a future is a corpse, and that for a long time you have been dead. You want to rise from the grave, wrench something good from all that darkness, and so you say yes and make the arrangements.

  But what will you say, you ask yourself, what will you say when you confront it all again? You want to end with wisdom, but you must begin without rt because you had none when it began. You lived in a small town, lived a tidy little life. What you've learned since then, you've learned in increments, a treasure collected one coin at a time. And so you must chart the journey carefully, measure the pace, offer what you have gathered, and hope it will be accepted.

  But first you must think it through again, return to that last moment, then double back to the days preceding it, how rt happened that in a few short days everything fell apart. Yes, you decide, that's the way to tell it.

  The waitress has no suspicion. She has seen other men like you, alone on a Sunday morning, sitting in the back booth, with nothing but a mug of coffee.

  And so you feel safe here. And why not? You could not bring them back to life, could not repair the damage, and so you decided to make the best of it. You thought of leaving Wesley, but you didn't. You stayed because you believed there was a reason to stay, and that, in the end, you would find that reason. But the years passed, and you had begun to believe that you would never find it. Then the phone rang, and suddenly the reason was clear. You realized that, if nothing else, you could give a few things back, draw them like dried bones from your own buried past.

  And so you have come here, to this diner, in hope of doing that, offering the paltry gift of the few dark things you know.

  NINE

  Suspicion is an acid, that's one thing I know. Everything it touches it corrodes. It eats through the smooth, glistening surface of things and the mark it leaves is indelible. Late one night, I watched a rerun of one of the Alien movies. In one scene, the alien pukes up a liquid so corrosive it immediately eats through first one floor of the space station, then another and another. And I thought, it's like that, suspicion, it has nowhere to go but down through level after level of old trusts and long devotions. Its direction is always toward the bottom.

  I knew that things had changed in my family, that Meredith had grown more volatile and Keith more defiant, but I wasn't aware of how much Amy Giordano's disappearance had affected other, seemingly neutral, people. She had been missing for three days by then, and there could be no doubt that everyone in Wesley now knew that Keith had been Amy's babysitter the night of her disappearance. Even so, I was totally unprepared for Mrs. Phelps's reaction.

  She was in her early seventies and had been a regular customer since the shop opened. She had white or bluish hair, depending upon the competence of the beauty salon, and her teeth were false and thus unnaturally even and a bit too large for her mouth. She never came into the shop in anything but dressy clothes, usually with a silk scarf around her neck, her face fully made up down to the eye shadow.

  She came into the store at just after ten. Neil was at the front counter, and she stopped to chat with him in that amiable way of hers. "Neil's very nice," she once said to me. But then, so was almost everyone, according to Mrs. Phelps. Her gardener was nice, for example, as was the Ecuadorian woman who cleaned her house. Summer was nice, but so were spring and fall. She'd never made particular mention of winter, but I had no doubt she could find some aspect of it that was nice, too.

  She had come to pick up the large photograph of her granddaughter that she'd left for me to frame the preceding weekend, and the minute she came through the door I remembered that it wasn't ready. I'd begun framing it before closing on Saturday, and Neil had quite correctly taken the frame and photograph and placed them safely beneath the counter, where they'd remained, completely forgotten until now.

  "I'm sorry, Mrs. Phelps," I said when she walked up to the counter. "I haven't finished the picture yet. I can have it for you later today."

  Mrs. Phelps smiled and waved her hand. "Oh, don't worry, Eric," she said. "I'll come back for it later."

  "No, no," I said. "Its my fault for not having it ready. When Keith gets here, I'll have him deliver it to you."

  That's when I noticed an uneasy glimmer in Mrs. Phelps's eyes, a sudden, not very subtle wariness. I also knew the reason for it. Mrs. Phelps's granddaughter, the little girl in the photograph I had not yet framed, was staying with her. She was pretty, with long dark hair, and looked to be around eight years old, the same age and general appearance as Amy Giordano.

  "Oh, you don't have to put Keith to that trouble," Mrs. Phelps said. "I'll drop by later this afternoon." Her voice remained kindly and accommodating, a nice woman being nice, but there was a firmness in it, too, a clear refusal to allow my son ever to come near her granddaughter. I thought of the whales I'd read about, how the mother whale will place her vast bulk between the harpoon and her offspring. Mrs. Phelps was doing no more than that, protecting her granddaughter from the dark potential of my son.

  "All right," I said quietly. "If that's what you'd prefer."

  "Yes, thank you," Mrs. Phelps said politely. She took a step backward, her gaze now fleeing to any available object, the smile still on her face, but lifeless, frozen. She was embarrassed by what she'd just done but unwilling to take it back. After all, she must have thought, her granddaughter's safety was at stake.

  "Around four then," I said.

  Mrs. Phelps nodded, turned, and walked rather hurriedly toward the door. She swept by Neil without nodding good-bye, and by the time she made it to the sidewalk I had the feeling that she was very nearly out of breath.

  "Jesus," Neil said to me. "That was weird."

  I stared out the front window, watching as Mrs. Phelps walked to her car and got in. "I don't think Keith should make deliveries anymore," I said.

  "It's just awful," Neil said. "Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty? And Mrs. Phelps, of all people. So nice, and all t
hat, but..."

  "It's fear," I told him, though until that moment I hadn't realized to what degree suspicion was a form of fear. "She's afraid of Keith. It's natural, I guess."

  "But there's no reason for her to be afraid of Keith," Neil said.

  I recalled the terrible vision I'd had a few days before, Keith moving down the shadowy corridor toward Amy's room. It was all I could do to keep from blurting the thought that came to me at that moment, Dear God, I hope you're right.

  Neil seemed almost to have heard the grim prayer I'd managed not to utter.

  "Keith couldn't have done anything to that little girl, Eric," he said emphatically. "He didn't have a car. Whoever took her, he had to have had a car. You don't just take a child from her house and walk away."

  I saw the twin beams of a car once again sweep across the undergrowth. "I know."

  A stream of images sped through my mind, Keith slouching down the walkway, brushing past the low-slung limbs of the Japanese maple at its far end, moving stealthily up the stairs. I recalled the way he'd frozen at the sound of my voice, then stood facing the door, his rumpled shirttail hanging halfway outside his pants. For an instant, the thought of why his shirt had been pulled from his trousers was almost more than I could bear.

  Neil touched my arm softly. "Believe me, Eric, Keith's not a..." He stopped, considered his words, then said, "Keith wouldn't ... hurt a little girl."

  I nodded silently because there seemed nothing else to do, no words I could safely say. Then I went back to work. I framed Mrs. Phelps's photograph, then another and another as the hours passed and customers came and went, sometimes glancing in my direction, sometimes avoiding me altogether, both of which I found uncomfortable. It was a form of discomfort I didn't want Keith to experience, I decided, so at noon I called Meredith and told her that I thought it best that Keith go directly home after school until the matter of Amy Giordano was settled.

  "I don't want him being looked at the way people are looking at me," I said. "Like an animal in the zoo."

  "Of course," Meredith agreed. "Besides, with him the look would be even worse."

  "What do you mean?"

  Her answer chilled me with its unflinching starkness. "Like the cage door is unlocked," she said.

  Warren arrived just as I was closing. He was dressed in coveralls, white cotton, dotted with paint. Bits of dried paint also clung to the wispy orange strands of his hair and dotted his hands and lower arms.

  "Thought we might grab a beer, Bro," he said.

  I shook my head tiredly. "It's been a long day, Warren. I think I'll just head home."

  Neil swept by, said hello to Warren, then made his way toward the old green Dodge he'd more or less inherited from his mother.

  Warren laughed. "Jesus, what a pansy," he said. He looked at me, the smile now gone. "I'd really like to have a beer, Eric." He didn't wait for me to refuse a second time. "The cops came by this house I was working on. Earl Bannister's place. They came right up to Earl and asked for me. Two cops. The ones that talked to you, I guess."

  "Peak and Kraus."

  "Sounds right," Warren said. "Anyway, that's not good, them coming up to Earl that way. I can't have cops coming around, asking for me while I'm on a job. Asking questions. Making it look like I'm ... involved in something." His tone grew more tense and even a little resentful that he'd been drawn into circumstances he had not created but now knew no way to avoid. "I'm a housepainter, for Christ's sake. In and out of people's houses. You got to be trusted in this business, not be on the job and a couple of cops show up." His face reddened slightly. "It's got to stop, Eric," he said with sudden urgency. "I mean, I can't let this go on. We have to talk about it, you know?"

  He was working himself up, getting more and more agitated. It was one of Warren's traits, a continual escalation until his emotions peaked and he either started sobbing, as he did when he was drunk, or fell asleep, as he did when he was sober.

  "All right," I said. "Let's go over to Teddy's."

  Teddy's was a small bar just a few doors down from my shop. Teddy Bethune, the owner, had died several years before, so that it was now run by his middle-aged daughter, a frowsy, irritable woman who had never made a secret of the fact that she actually preferred tourists to the boozy regulars who liked to sing old Irish songs, tell dirty jokes, and who continually regaled her with tales of how much more fun the bar had been before her father died.

  "What'll you have?" Peg asked as she plopped two paper coasters before us.

  We ordered two beers, grabbed the frosted bottles and headed for the booth at the back.

  Warren took a long swig, then, before talking, decided on another. After that he put the bottle down on the table. "Hits the spot," he said.

  "What did the cops want to know?" I asked.

  "What I saw."

  "You mean, Amy?"

  "Amy, yeah, and Keith."

  "Keith?"

  "What he looked like." Warren took another swig from the bottle. "How he was acting. You know, like was he strange or anything that night. The short one was real interested in that."

  "Peak," I said. "What did you tell him?"

  "Like you told me, Eric. The truth."

  "Which was?"

  "That he was in a mood."

  I stared at my brother, appalled. "Jesus, why did you say that?"

  Warren looked at me, astonished. "Say what?"

  "That Keith was in a mood. What the hell does that mean, anyway, that he was in a mood?"

  Warren looked the way he did when he was twelve, and I was eight, his younger brother berating him for some stupid blunder.

  "I figured I needed to tell them something," he said lamely. "You know, give them something. You always got to give them something, right?"

  "Why do you think that?"

  Warren didn't answer, but I knew he'd gotten the idea from television or the movies.

  I slumped forward and ran my fingers through my hair. "All right, listen to me," I said wearily. "What exactly did you say?"

  "Just what I told you," Warren answered.

  He looked vaguely frightened, like a little boy who'd screwed up his part in the class play, and I remembered how cruelly my father had dismissed him, and how, to please my father, and to feel in league with him, I'd often adopted the same attitude toward my brother, exaggerating his failures, mocking his small successes. I couldn't help but wonder if in some way I was still locked in that adolescent pattern.

  "Listen, Warren," I said, now trying for a less scolding tone. "A little girl is missing. This town is small, and this thing is getting bigger and bigger. You've seen her picture all over. There's even one on the door of my shop. And ribbons now. Yellow ribbons all over town. That means the cops are under a lot of pressure. Their jobs are on the line. So they have to find Amy, dead or alive, and then they have to find whoever did this. See what I mean?"

  Warren stared at me blankly.

  "What I'm saying is that if they begin to think that Keith had something do with this, they'll hone in on him. They won't look anywhere else. They have to close the case."

  Warren nodded slowly, his big soft eyes blinking languidly.

  "Which means that Keith being 'in a mood' gives them something to think about, turn over in their minds, and so they start thinking, okay, we got this kid, a little weird, no friends ... in a mood that night."

  "So things start to add up to the cops," Warren said.

  "Yes."

  He took another sip from the beer, then nodded toward my bottle. "You not having any?" he asked, immediately shuffling off my warning, as well as any responsibility he might have for sinking my son deeper into police suspicion.

  I pushed the bottle away. "What else did you tell them?" I asked sternly.

  Warren stiffened, like a lowly private at an officer's approach. "Just that I drove Keith to the Giordanos' house," he said. "Amy was in the front yard. She came running up to the car. Then Keith got out and the two of them went inside." He hesit
antly took another sip of beer. "Oh, and that I said hi to her."

  "Anything else?"

  "They wanted to know how she looked with Keith."

  "Looked?"

  "Like was she glad to see him, or did she act different when she saw him, like afraid, or backed away, stuff like that."

  "What did you say?"

  "I told them I didn't notice how she looked. Then they asked me if he touched her, you know, in a funny way, like maybe he shouldn't have, that kind of touch."

  I dreaded the question but asked it anyway. "Did he?"

  "No."

  "Did he touch her at all?"

  "He took her hand," Warren said. "He took her hand and led her inside."

  "And that's it?"

  "Yeah."

  "Nothing else about Keith's mood?"

  "No."

  "You're sure you didn't say anything else, Warren."

  "No, nothing," Warren assured me. Another swig. "What would I say?"

  "I just need to know if there was anything else."

  Warren shook his head with childish exaggeration. "Not a word, Eric." He lifted his hand. "I swear."

  "Okay," I said, "Okay, that's not too bad then, I guess."

  Warren took a swig and smiled like a little boy briefly in trouble but relieved now, all the burden lifted from him.

  He chuckled. "But I got to admit, they made me nervous, those cops." He threw his head back, as if peering upward into the heart of some distant memory. "People like that always make me nervous."

  I took a sip from my bottle, my own relief not all that different from Warren's, satisfied that he'd said nothing damaging about Keith.

  "They all have the same look in their eyes, those guys," Warren added. "You know, suspicious."

  I glanced at my watch, anxious to get home.

  "Like that guy who came by the house after Mom's accident," Warren said. "The one we had, you know, when we lived in the big house."