Red Leaves

by Thomas H. Cook

"How about friends? He doesn't seem to have any friends."

  Neil shrugged. "He's never mentioned anyone."

  "Okay," I said. "How about the people he delivers to. Have you ever heard any complaints?"

  "What kind of complaints?"

  "Anything about him, anything he did that seemed ... strange."

  Neil shook his head violently. "Absolutely not, Eric. Never!"

  I looked at him pointedly. "You're sure?"

  "Yes, I'm sure."

  I nodded. "Okay," I said. "I just thought he might have come to you. I mean if—"

  "If what?"

  "If he had any ... problems he wouldn't know how to deal with."

  "What kind of problems?" Neil asked. He looked genuinely baffled. "I mean, he wouldn't talk to me about girls, right?"

  "I guess not."

  He looked at me curiously. "It bothers you, doesn't it? That Keith doesn't have a girlfriend?"

  I nodded. "Maybe a little. Meredith says it does, but I'm not so sure. I mean, what if he doesn't have a girlfriend. He's just a kid. That doesn't mean he's—"

  "Gay?"

  "No," I said. "Not just that."

  Neil heard the awkwardness in my voice, the sense of trying to weasel out of the truth. "Do you think Keith's gay?"

  "I've thought about it," I admitted.

  "Why? Has he said anything?"

  "No," I answered. "But he seems angry all the time."

  "What does that have to do with being gay?" Neil asked.

  "Nothing."

  No one had ever looked at me the way Neil did now, with a mixture of pain and disappointment. "Yeah, okay," he said softly.

  "What?"

  He didn't answer.

  "What, Neil?"

  Neil laughed dryly. "It just seems like you thought maybe if Keith was gay, he'd have to be angry. Hate himself, you know, that sort of thing. A lot of people have that idea. That a gay guy would have to hate himself."

  I started to speak, but Neil lifted his hand and silenced me.

  "It's okay," he said. "I know you don't believe that."

  "No, I don't," I told him. "Really, Neil, I don't."

  "It's okay, Eric," Neil repeated. "Really. It is." He smiled gently. "Anyway, I hope everything works out all right for everyone," he said quietly. "Especially for Keith."

  He turned back toward the front of the shop.

  "Neil," I said. "I didn't mean to..."

  He didn't bother to look back. "I'm fine" was all he said.

  ***

  For the rest of the day, customers came and went. Neil kept himself busy and seemed determined to keep his distance from me.

  At five the color of the air began to change, and by six, when I prepared to lock up, it had taken on a golden glow.

  The phone rang.

  "Eric's Frame and Photo."

  "Eric, they're coming here again," Meredith told me.

  "Who?"

  "The police. They're coming to the house again."

  "Don't panic," I said. "They were there before, remember?"

  I heard the fearful catch in her breath. "This time they have a search warrant," she said. "Come home."

  PART III

  You stop now. You take a sip of coffee. You are halfway through the story you intend to tell. You realize that you have reached the moment when the lines you thought ran parallel begin to intersect. You know that from hens on the telling will become more difficult. You will need to speak in measured tones, make the right connections. Nothing should blur, and nothing should be avoided. Particularly the responsibilities, the consequences.

  You want to describe how the history of one family stained another, as if the colors from one photograph bled onto another in an accidental double exposure. You want to expose this process, but instead you stare out at the rain, watching people as they stand beneath their soaked umbrellas, and consider not what happened, but how it might have been avoided, what you could have done to stop it, or at least to change it in a way that would have allowed lives to go on, find balance, reach the high wisdom that only the fallen know.

  But the wheels of your mind begin to spin. You can feel them spinning, but there is nothing to do but wait until they find traction. Then, without warning, they do, and you understand that all you can do is go on, start at exactly where you left off.

  FOURTEEN

  Come home.

  I often repeat the words in my mind. I recall Meredith's caught breath each time I repeat them, hear the icy dread in her voice.

  I hear other things, too—a whispery voice, a gunshot—and with those sounds I recognize that I've gone through all of it again, reliving every detail from that first night when Keith and Warren strolled down the walkway and disappeared behind the Japanese maple to the moment when I passed under that same tree for the last time. In retrospect, I suppose, everything seems inevitable, the whole course of events summed up in the grim irony of that line of poetry I read while I waited for Keith to come home from Amy Giordano's house that night— "After the first death, there is no other."

  But there was.

  ***

  I drove home quickly after Meredith's call. The sun was just setting when I pulled into the driveway, the air beneath the spreading limbs of the Japanese maple already a delicate pink. Meredith met me halfway up the walkway.

  "I sent Keith into town. Because I needed to concentrate on writing a lecture. That's what I told him. He knows not to come back for a few hours." There were tiny creases at the sides of her eyes, as if she'd aged several years during the brief time between her phone call and my arrival. "I didn't tell him the police were coming over. I was afraid he might do something. Hide something."

  I looked at her quizzically.

  "It could be anything," she added. "Some dirty magazine, pot, anything he wouldn't want them to see. And if he did that, you know, not even thinking about it, it would still be obstruction of justice."

  "I see you've talked to Leo."

  "Yes," Meredith said. "I told him I was going to send Keith to the store, keep him out of his room. He thought it was a good idea."

  "Because he doesn't trust Keith," I said. "That's why he thought it was a good idea."

  Meredith nodded. "Probably."

  "Is he coming over?"

  "Only if the cops want to question Keith." She looked at me worriedly. "I don't want to talk to them, either. Especially Kraus. On the phone, he sounded hard—like we're the enemy?" She looked at me pleadingly. "Why would he act like that, Eric?"

  "Maybe he doesn't think we're exactly ordinary," I said cautiously. "Did Leo mention the hotline? Things people might have said?"

  "Said about what?"

  "About us," I told her. "He has a source somewhere. With the police, I guess. And this source, whoever it is, told him that the police had gotten the idea that there was something wrong. Those were his words—something wrong. He thought somebody might have called on the hotline, told the cops something about us."

  Meredith looked stricken, helpless, a small creature caught in a vast web.

  "Leo has no idea what might have been said," I added. "But with the police under all this pressure, he's worried they'll believe just about anything they hear about us."

  Meredith remained locked in grim silence, but I could see her mind working.

  "Maybe someone saw that car pull into our driveway."

  "Maybe," Meredith muttered.

  "And there's something else they might have seen," I told her. "Remember when Leo asked Keith if he'd ever been around the water tower? I'm not sure Keith told the truth when he said no."

  "What makes you think he didn't tell the truth?"

  "Just the look in his eyes," I said. "It was the same one he had when he told the cops he came home alone." I shrugged. "Anyway, the water tower, it's sort of a meeting place ... for men and ... prostitutes—or at least I think they're prostitutes. She was putting something in her bag. My guess is it was money."

  Meredith looked dazed.


  "I went there," I said. "To the water tower. Leo brought it up, and then the way Keith looked when he said he'd never been there, I just got curious."

  "And you saw all this?" Meredith asked. "These men and—"

  "Yes," I answered. "I don't know why Keith goes there. I mean, if he does. Maybe he just watches. Maybe that's his ... outlet."

  For a moment. Meredith seemed unable to deal with the tawdriness of what I'd just told her. "Okay, so there's this place and people go there. But why are you so quick to believe that Keith goes there ... to watch ... or for any other reason?"

  I had no answer, and she saw that I had no answer. "Oh, Eric," she said exhaustedly. "What's happening to us?"

  Meredith had put on her tightly controlled, professorial face by the time Peak and Kraus arrived. They brushed past the limbs of the maple and strode down the walkway at a leisurely pace, chatting to each other like two men on their way to the local tavern.

  I met them at the door, and the instant I opened it, I noticed that their easy manner changed to one of cool professionalism. Now they stood erect, with somber faces, hands folded in front of them.

  "Sorry to trouble you again, Mr. Moore," Peak said.

  Kraus nodded to me, but said nothing.

  "How do we do this?" I asked. "I've never had my house searched."

  "We have a warrant for the house and grounds," Peak explained. "We'll try not to disturb anything unnecessarily."

  "So I just let you in, is that it?"

  "Yes."

  I stepped back, swung the door open, and let them pass into the living room where Meredith stood, her body completely rigid, eyes not so much hostile as wary.

  "Keith isn't home," she said. "We haven't told him about this."

  "We won't be long," Peak said with a weak smile.

  "Where do you want to start?" I asked.

  "Keith's room," Peak said.

  I nodded toward the stairs. "Second door on your left."

  Meredith and I walked into the kitchen while Peak and Kraus searched Keith's room. Meredith made a pot of coffee, and we sat at the table and drank it silently. For that brief interval, we merely waited, held in suspension, staring at each other briefly, then drawing our gazes away. We might have been figures in a pantomime of a couple who'd been together too long, knew each other too well, and so had fallen into a final muteness.

  Over the next few minutes, other officers arrived, all of them in uniform.

  From our place in the kitchen, we watched as they poked about the yard, as well as the conservation forest that stretched for several acres behind our house. Two hours passed before Peak and Kraus came back down the stairs. Two young uniformed officers trailed behind them, carrying sealed bags stenciled in black letters: EVIDENCE.

  I had no idea what the bags contained until Peak handed me a slip of paper on the way out. "That's the inventory of what we took from Keith's room," he said. "And of course we'll bring back anything that has no evidentiary value."

  Evidentiary value, I thought. Evidence against Keith.

  I glanced up the stairs and saw a uniformed officer coming down, carrying my son's computer.

  "The computer in Keith's room," Peak said. "Is that the only one in the house?"

  "No," I said.

  "I'm afraid we'll have to look at them all," Peak said.

  "There's one down the hall, in my office," Meredith said. "And I have a computer at college. Do you want to seize that, too?"

  "Nothing is being seized, Mrs. Moore," Peak answered mildly. "But to answer your question, no, we have no need to take your computer." He paused, then added significantly, "At least, for now."

  The police left a few minutes later, just as Keith was coming down the drive on his bike. He pulled over to the side, got off the bike, and watched the cars go by.

  "What did the cops want this time?" he asked as he came into the house.

  "They searched your room," I told him. "They took a few things." I handed him the inventory.

  He scanned the list with surprising lack of interest until suddenly his eyes widened. "My computer?" he cried. "They have no right—"

  "Yes, they do," I interrupted. "They can take anything they want."

  He looked at the inventory again, but now with a sense of helplessness. "My computer," he muttered. He slapped the paper against the side of his leg. "Shit."

  Meredith had been standing silently a few feet away, observing Keith no less intently than I was. Now, she stepped forward. "Keith, it's going to be okay." Her tone of sympathy surprised me, as if she somehow understood his fear, knew what it was like to be threatened with exposure. "It really is."

  Now it seemed up to me to state the hard facts of the case. "Keith?" I asked, "is there anything on that computer? Anything ... bad?"

  He looked at me sourly. "No."

  "Have you been in touch with Amy?"

  "In touch?"

  "E-mail."

  "No," Keith said.

  "Because if you have, they'll find that out," I warned.

  He laughed almost derisively. "They would already know that, Dad," he scoffed. "They took the computer from Mr. Giordano's house, remember?"

  I realized that Keith could only have known that the police had taken a computer from Amy's house if he'd actually been following news reports of the investigation. That the police had taken the Giordanos' computer had been mentioned on the evening news the night of her disappearance, and appeared only once in print, a brief notation in the local paper. From the beginning, he'd feigned indifference, even boredom, with the police. But clearly he had been keeping an eye on what they were doing.

  "I asked you a question," I said sharply.

  "That's all you ever do," Keith shot back. "Ask me questions." His eyes glittered angrily. "Why don't you just get to the one question you really want to ask. Go ahead, Dad. Ask me."

  My lips jerked into an angry frown. "Don't start that, Keith."

  "Ask the question," Keith repeated insistently, offering it as a challenge. "We all know what it is." He laughed bitterly. "All right, I'll ask it." He cocked his head to the right, and switched to a low, exaggeratedly masculine, voice. "So, Keith, did you kidnap Amy Giordano?"

  "Stop it," I said.

  He continued in the same mock fatherly tone. "Did you take her someplace and fuck her?"

  "That's enough," I said. "Go to your room."

  He didn't move, save for his fingers, which instantly crushed the inventory "No, Dad, not until I ask the last question."

  "Keith..."

  He cocked his head back and pretended to suck on an imaginary pipe. "So, my boy, did you kill Amy Giordano?"

  "Shut up!" I shouted.

  He stared at me brokenly, his tone now soft, almost mournful. "You believed it from the very first, Dad." With that, he turned away and walked slowly up the stairs.

  I looked at Meredith, noticed that her eyes were glistening. "Is he right, Eric?" she asked. "Did you believe it from the beginning?"

  "No, I didn't," I told her. "Why would I?"

  She turned my question over in her mind, working it silently until she found the answer. "Maybe because you don't like him," she whispered. "Oh, I know you love him. But maybe you don't like him. It's what people do in families, isn't it? They love people they don't like."

  I heard footsteps on the stairs, then the front door closed loudly.

  "He's going for one of those walks, I guess," I said.

  Those walks—Peak's words soured in my mouth, sounding suspicious, vaguely ominous, as they had when I first heard them.

  "He's just trying to deal with it the only way he can," Meredith told me. "Which is alone, I guess."

  Keith was already at the end of the walkway, moving swiftly, shoulders hunched head down, as if against a heavy wind.

  "We'll never be normal again," Meredith said quietly.

  It was a dark pronouncement, and I refused to accept it.

  "Of course, we will," I said. "All of this will go awa
y once Amy Giordano is found."

  She kept her eyes on Keith, watching intently as he mounted the small hill and moved on up toward the main road. "We have to help him, Eric."

  "How?"

  "Get someone for him to talk to."

  I thought of all my first family must have held secret, of its legacy of drink, unhappiness, and an old mans bitter cackle. Anything seemed better than that. "What was the counselor's name?" I asked. "The one at the college?"

  Meredith smiled softly. "Rodenberry," she said. "He'll be at the party tomorrow."

  FIFTEEN

  Dr. Mays lived in an old sea-captain's house only a few blocks from the home in which I'd grown up and which had seemed happy to me, at least until Jenny's death. After that my mother had sunk into a deep gloom, while my father's financial losses grew more and more severe, so that within the year the house itself had gone on the block. But none of that dreary history returned to me as we swept past the old house that evening. Instead, it was my father's dismissive outburst that played upon my mind—You have no idea.

  He'd said it as an accusation but adamantly refused to clarify what he meant. Perhaps, I thought, my father was merely grasping for attention, his undefined charge against my mother was only his way of asserting himself when faced by her hallowed memory. If this were true, he'd chosen a crude method of gaining ground. But he'd always been reckless with his words, prone to vicious insult, and so it was perfectly in character for him to lift himself by bringing my mother down. And yet, for all that, I couldn't help wondering what he'd meant in saying that my mother hadn't been devoted to him. I'd seen nothing but devotion—patient and abiding. She had overlooked all his faults, stood by his side as his little empire shrank and finally disappeared. She had defended him no matter how outrageous his actions or negligent his fatherhood. How could it be that through all those years I'd had no idea of her?

  "We'll just act normal," Meredith said as I pulled the car up in front of Dr. Mays's house.

  I offered a quick smile. "We are normal," I reminded her. "We don't have to act."

  She seemed hardly to hear me. Her gaze was fixed on the house, the guests she could see milling about inside, her expression intense and oddly searching, like a woman on a widow's walk, peering out into the empty sea, hoping for the first fluttering glimpse of her husband's returning ship.