by Bill Floyd
Then came the nitpicking and jealousy and the vague, nebulous dissatisfactions, followed in short order by concrete manifestations: screaming fights, cheap, reflexive verbal barbs, and then drunken, maudlin reconciliations. Late night phone calls and weepy confessions. The two girls who shared my apartment advised me in no uncertain terms to drop-kick the fucker. Eventually came the strenuously resisted realization (on my part, at least) that it was never going to be good again, that those first heady four or five months were long gone, and what was left was only cinders turning to ash. Brad was obviously an adolescent at heart, a romantic who would likely zero in on a romantic’s dissolution. The probability was that sooner or later we’d do something severe, and perhaps even permanent, to one another.
It took another couple of months to break up, including several attempts at rapprochement that grew increasingly halfhearted on my part, increasingly desperate on his. I looked him up on the Internet a few years ago, during one of those early spells right after we’d moved to Cary, when I was still afraid of losing my entire history. (And at some point I did, but by then I’d realized that it isn’t so hard to let go—there are advantages.) Brad has a wife and two children, and he teaches at a community college in Nebraska. I wish him the best; I hope he still thinks of me from time to time, and feels that same twinge I feel. Not exactly nostalgia, but more than fondness. The best kind of hurt, if there is such a thing.
So let’s say you’re me, only a year from graduation with a BS in Marketing and no real idea of where to go from there. Given to fits of impulsive behavior, drunken onenighters with jocks or dropouts, I didn’t make much distinction. They always left me feeling worse than before, emptier somehow.
Then, in swept Randy Mosley, at first simply another eye-lock across the bar and some sloppy kissing, an exchange of numbers, but he kept calling and so I went on a couple of dates, and what do you know? Turned out he was resourceful, commanding, self-assured, and seemingly knowledgeable on an array of subjects. On our third date, he brought me a pencil-shaded sketch he’d made of me, just a facial portrait, something in my eyes lacking and somehow unfinished, which I chalked up to his being artistically inept but touching in the effort he’d spent on it—and an aspect of him I’d have never suspected. Most important, perhaps, was his reaction when I got a little too tipsy and went all confessional on him, a mere two months into the relationship. I’d been acting as though Brad had been more of a fling than an actual love affair, but halfway through the second bottle of wine one night it all came flooding out. Randy didn’t jump ship or quit calling. Instead, he said all the awful things about Brad that I really needed to hear. He never questioned what I’d been doing with such a loser; he simply passed judgment and moved right along. Before I knew it I was sleeping over at his place, borrowing his clothes, letting him pay for just about everything.
Once I’d breached the dam with the Brad saga, I found myself confiding all sorts of shit to him that I’d never shared with anyone else, not even my girlfriends. We went away to a chalet in the mountains one weekend, and, while we lay naked on the overstuffed mattress, I told him about a friend of mine who’d died while we were still in high school. “I remember when my mom told me that Jessica was gone. It was so typical, Mom didn’t even refer to her as Jessica, she called her ‘Kay Flythe’s daughter,’ as in ‘Mrs. Stancil just called and said Kay Flythe’s daughter got killed in a wreck on Old Bridge Road. You knew her pretty well, didn’t you, baby?’ Like she hadn’t met Jessica like ten times already.” I’d actually been sneaking smokes with Jessica and her boyfriend, Greg, out behind the youth center just the day before. Greg lost control of his Jeep and flipped it, and Jessica wasn’t wearing her seat belt. “Mom mentioned that, too, ‘she wasn’t wearing a seat belt,’ like she had to make sure I got a lesson from it.” Randy stroked my hair and didn’t interrupt until I was done.
He didn’t offer much about his own past, only random anecdotes that could just have easily come from any adolescent history: a best friend who’d betrayed him for a girl; other kids who’d picked on him because he was smarter than most, which drove him more deeply into solitude; the way his favorite dog had disappeared and then turned up dead, the victim of some sadistic neighbor. He mentioned an early abandonment, a series of foster homes, some abusive. And with a detail here and a detail there—Christmases where all his gifts turned out to be secondhand, a story about how he’d had to do a book report in front of his sixth-grade class with his eye still swollen from a smack his foster mother had administered—he intimated enough to let me know that he’d had it harder than most, so I didn’t pry. I was amazed that he’d come out of it all so stable.
Jessica Flythe. That was my first taste, the first time mortality reared up and I understood how fast it can all go away. It was too real at the same time that it wasn’t real at all, like a switch had been thrown and there was this lowfrequency buzz in the back of my head all the time, blocking me from quite accepting that this girl would never again let me bum a smoke or help me adjust my top so that Greg’s friend Zac would be most admiring. She had ceased; she was never going anywhere again, never getting any older, never resolving her issues with grades or knowing if she would be accepted into college.
My dad found me crying in our garage the day after Jessica’s funeral. He sat down and patted me awkwardly on the back while I sobbed. He didn’t offer any platitudes. He bummed one of my smokes, and said he wouldn’t tell Mom if I wouldn’t.
3.
Victor Haddock was an RA, one of the guys who oversees freshman in their dormitories when they first get to college. He was twenty years old when a seventeen-year-old named Randy Mosley moved into Freedom Hall on the Oregon State campus. Randy was there on a hardship scholarship, which he’d applied for following the deaths of his last foster parents, who’d been killed in a house fire a year earlier.
By all accounts, Victor was a friendly, capable mentor, who assisted several kids in adjusting to the pressures of university life. He was an outdoorsman, an avid kayaker and hiker who spent his summers in places like the Snake River Gorge or the Utah Badlands. The year before Randy came into his life, Victor had spent a month hiking the hinterlands of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska.
One of the first reporters who tracked me down after Randy’s arrest, during that first week while I was still living at our home in El Ray, before Mom swept me back to enforced isolation in Tapersville, was a guy my age, who was kind and respectful and asked his questions politely instead of shouting them. So I let him into the house and spoke earnestly with him for nearly an hour before Mom came back from the grocery store and ran him out. I’d let the reporter take along a family album with some photographs. My reasoning was that we hadn’t been married but a few years, and there weren’t many photos in there anyway, and I didn’t want them any longer. I was on a lot of sedatives at the time.
Randy’s Alaska picture was in there, and apparently it struck the same sort of chord with the newspaper staff then as it had with me, several years earlier. Just the sort of effect Randy calculated it to have. So the paper published it as part of a background story on Randy, and by chance the CNN affiliate picked it up and ran the image nationally.
Victor Haddock’s parents saw it and called the police. They confirmed that they had a copy of the very same picture, and that the figure shown in it wasn’t Randy at all. Victor had gone missing during the summer school session the year after Randy lived on his hall. He’d been scheduled to fly out to Denver and spend a month with some friends, but he never showed up. Randy was enrolled in summer school at the time. The local police searched for Victor after his parents called them; for a few weeks there were copies of his student ID photograph papering campus, with MISSING PLEASE HELP written underneath, and contact information. But then the students returned in the fall and there was a whole new class of freshmen and the police soon had other priorities, like drunk drivers and date rape and the myriad dangerous and reckless behaviors of yo
ung people on their own for the first time. A file remained open. The Haddocks never gave up. But Victor’s body was never recovered. To this day, no one knows what became of him. Randy never mentioned it during any of the interviews police conducted with him prior to or following his trial.
Dark up there, at the top of the world. Where Randy had only ever been in his mind.
CHAPTER SEVEN
1.
I wasn’t answering the phone most days. It rang and I listened to messages and then deleted them. It was sort of sad and funny at the same time, since I used to almost jump out of my skin when the ringer went off, and then stare anxiously at the caller ID on my machine, hoping for a familiar name. For the past few years, it almost always came up as UNLISTED, which meant telemarketers or consumer surveys. Often I’d pick up and talk to the rep for a while, even if I had no intention of signing on to whatever they were offering, just to hear an adult voice. Those people didn’t mind wasting your time, but they sure did get pissy when they realized you’d wasted theirs.
Now, the messages wouldn’t stop coming. The newspaper called, and the TV stations. They wanted my side of the story. I could have told them very concisely that my side of the story was FUCK YOU, although I didn’t think that would help my cause. Jim phoned from work, twice, “Just checking in. Just wanted to let you know you don’t have to go through this alone.” It both tweaked my dependencies and infuriated me; after all, what did he really have to offer? A patient ear and some awkward sex? Like he could even begin to understand. Then I remembered what he’d endured, with his sick child and his faithless ex-wife, and I got angry with myself. But I didn’t call him back.
And then, Thursday morning:
“Hello, Ms. Wren? My name is Carolyn Rowe. My husband Duane and I run a private investigation service here in the area, and I’m sorry to have to tell you that we’re the ones who located you for Mr. Pritchett. We were subcontracted by an affiliate company Mr. Pritchett had retained in California, and they turned out to be less than forthcoming about the reasons you were being sought. I’m calling you to offer our sincere apologies. We thought we had a pretty decent screening system in place to keep ourselves from getting into this kind of trouble, but it seems to have failed us in this instance, and you’re bearing the brunt. I understand completely if you don’t want to speak with us, but we have some information on Mr. Pritchett that we’d like to share with you, a few choice tidbits that might help get him off your back. We’re just really, really sorry about what’s happened to you and … well, that’s all I can say, I guess. Here’s our number—” I recognized the prefix for Clayton, a small bedroom community on the east side of Raleigh.
To tell the truth, I was curious as to exactly how Pritchett had tracked me down. He’d mentioned the private firm in LA during his interview, and I’d had visions of men in black sunglasses with walkie-talkies and satellite data. But that was bullshit. It wasn’t as though I’d taken any extraordinary precautions against being discovered, aside from the name change and moving across the country: I only wanted Randy not to find us, and I had thought of his means as being limited. Now I realized that someone could track me by spending half an hour navigating the right Internet sites.
The message might have been a con, another draw from people who didn’t particularly have my best interests in mind.
I looked in the phone book under Private Investigators (who knew they actually advertised?) and sure enough, there was the number, alongside a listing for ROWE INVESTIGATIONS. They didn’t have an ad, just their title. I rested a little easier, but didn’t know what would be the point of contacting them. Pritchett had money, recent history, and a valid grudge on his side. I had to let this pass over me like a storm, and then peak my head back out when it was clear.
If I didn’t lose my mind first.
Then Hayden came home after school, and things changed again. He wasn’t crying, but his face was screwed up so tight I could tell it was coming soon enough. I hugged him, and sighed. “Honey, I thought you were supposed to be going over to Caleb’s.”
“His mom won’t let me come over anymore,” he said, his poor eyes filling with rejection, that ugliest of hurts. “She says he can’t be friends with me anymore.”
Something in me went still and then hardened. I spent the next few hours trying to cheer him up, with little success. I thought of calling Gabby McPherson and telling her my exact opinion of her son, her house, her husband, and her shitty excuse for interior design. Instead, I picked up the phone and dialed the number Carolyn Rowe had left on the machine.
2.
We met at Pullen Park in Raleigh, on a Saturday afternoon. It was a public recreation area with playgrounds and ponds and a merry-go-round, and the day turned out to be sunny and bright, the sky that hard clear blue of late winter, with temperatures in the low fifties. Lots of people had decided to take advantage of the weather, and the park was busy. I got a table with an umbrella near the slides and swing sets, so I could keep an eye on Hayden. The Rowes, when they arrived, mentioned that they didn’t have children of their own, which I soon surmised was their way of explaining why they got jumpy every time a group of kids exploded into screams or laughter. I’d forgotten how shrill large groups of kids could be to the unattuned ear. Duane Rowe joked that it was like a flashback to his days as an uniformed cop, busting parties.
He was a short man, stocky and thick, with a wrestler’s kind of build. He wore a Durham Bulls baseball cap, which he removed to shake my hand, and then promptly placed back on his head. I was left with an impression of a prematurely gray halo of hair, cut short and patchy in places; I guessed the cap was a routine fixture. A corduroy jacket and faded blue jeans made him seem both instantly affable and indistinguishable from half the middle-aged men in the park. His wife was his physical opposite, slim and athletic, bleached blond and well preserved, although her eyes gave her away as slightly older than she was trying to look. Still, I could imagine her being pursued by men in their twenties and men in their fifties alike; a trick not many of us could pull off. She managed to sport the low-cut jeans worn by girls half her age, without coming across as tacky. Several fathers were loafing in our vicinity, ostensibly keeping watch over their children, and more than one of their heads swiveled in her direction more than once. Duane seemed not to notice.
Carolyn was also one of those Southern ladies who seems uncontrollably compelled to act a bit overly familiar; instead of shaking my hand, she hugged me quickly. “Oh, honey, I can’t begin to tell you how sorry we are,” she gushed, her eyes sparkling like she might cry right here in front of everybody. “You can slap each one of us in the face, pour a drink on our heads, whatever you want.”
“Not necessary,” I said. We sat at the table and I made a mental note of Hayden’s location. He was playing with some kids near the swing set; a couple of them were talking amiably to him and they were all laughing. I reminded myself that they probably didn’t recognize him, or know who his mother was.
“I like what you did with your hair,” Duane said.
“Thanks.” Yesterday, while Hayden was at school, I’d had it cut short and darkened a few shades. I was also wearing big sunglasses, and had yet to draw any untoward stares. “So …”
Carolyn sat beside me and brought a folder out of a worn leather tote bag that looked like she’d been carrying it around with her since she was a teenager. “Right off, let me tell you a little about us. Duane was a police officer in Baltimore for six years, then in a town called Reston, Virginia, for eight more. I was a reporter for the paper in Reston, and that’s where we first met. When he decided to leave the force we moved down here, because I grew up here and my mom was sick at the time. She’s better now, but we decided we liked it and we started up our business. Now we mostly do things like divorce, insurance fraud, those sorts of jobs.”
“Following people around,” I said.
Duane laughed.
“That’s exactly right,” Carolyn said. “It’s less rom
antic than most people think, but I can see we don’t have to disabuse you of that notion. Which is good. Now, as relates to you, we got a call from another investigative firm on the West Coast about five months ago—”
“You mentioned that in your message.”
“I think Ms. Wren would appreciate it if you cut to the chase, darling,” Duane observed.
“No, that’s all right,” I said. “It’s just that it’s all still kind of surreal.”
“Well, anyway, Duane and I usually collect enough background information that we can screen out people who want us to locate someone for the wrong reasons. We don’t assist stalkers, and we don’t even work for insurance companies if they have a bad record.”
“Which narrows the field a bit,” Duane said with a smile.
Carolyn slapped his arm. “I’m trying to tell her what she needs to know.” She looked at me. “Didn’t he just tell me to hurry it up?”
I nodded, amused despite my best intentions.
“See?” she told her husband. “Now shut up until I’m finished. Okay. So Duane had a partner when he was still in Reston, a fellow who eventually moved out West. This guy works for this firm I mentioned, it’s a lot bigger than our operation, obviously, I mean they’ve got like twenty investigators and a huge budget and all. Well, this guy called Duane and he made out like you were the target in a civil case and you’d skipped out and changed your identity in order to duck a subpoena. They already had your new name and everything, even your address. They just wanted us to establish if it was actually you, and get your routine down and let them know. We’d done some research on the Internet, so we knew a little something of your history, and I can tell you I was kind of conflicted about it already at that point, but by then we’d taken the job. And I figured that maybe you’d done something wrong in the time since what happened with your husband. Then Mr. Pritchett showed up and we gave him our records and I suppose he used them to sneak up on you. I heard he came after you while you were shopping?”