Safer

by Sean Doolittle

  “Oh?”

  “No telling where Wessie might have ended up.” Roger looked at the officers. Then he looked at me. He was still looking at me when he said, “I’m just glad somebody was paying attention.”

  32.

  AN HOUR AFTER THE POLICE HAD GONE, Sara returned home from campus to find me in our driveway, in full view of Roger’s house, demolishing a wireless security camera with a hammer from the garage. She watched awhile, then said, “Bad day?”

  “Hi, honey.” I gave her a kiss. “There’s a stew on in the house.” Then I went back to work on the camera.

  Everyone in the circle knew they had these damned things pointed at their houses? And they’d actually signed up for it? My first instinct was disbelief, but logic suggested strongly that Roger wouldn’t have claimed such an easily verifiable fact if it weren’t true. I just couldn’t believe that during all the nights I’d spent walking the neighborhood with Pete, or Michael, or even Barry Firth, not once had anybody expressed any qualms or concerns regarding this neighborhood surveillance feed. Was I the only one who found such a thing intolerable?

  As I thought about it, I decided it wasn’t surprising that I hadn’t received any complaints from Barry, who clearly hungered for Roger’s approval. It seemed that Pete Seward had withdrawn a bit since that first day we’d spent on the golf course, when I’d overheard his conversation with Roger on the clubhouse deck. But Pete had his own reasons for that. The truth was, ever since that night I still wished I could unspend with Melody, I’d withdrawn more than a little myself.

  I decided I’d go over to Michael’s after he got home from the restaurant. If I was overreacting to any or all of this, I could count on Michael to tell me so.

  Meanwhile, I hadn’t finished reacting yet. While I took a certain amount of satisfaction in mangling the camera, this was ultimately kid stuff, and the feeling didn’t last for very long after I was through.

  I considered walking over and leaving the camera shrapnel on Roger’s doorstep. Then I got a better idea, went inside, and looked up the street address for Sentinel One, Incorporated. I kissed Sara again on my way out, told her I’d be back for dinner, and drove to Sentinel One’s office building on Dewberry Street.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” the receptionist told me. She had a wide mouth and lank brown hair, and I believe there was something about my demeanor that scared her a little. “Mr. Gardner is gone for the day.”

  “Is that what he told you?” I nodded at her phone, which she’d just hung up. “Call back and tell him it’s Paul Callaway. One of Roger’s neighbors.”

  “I told him your name, sir.”

  I smiled. “I thought you said he’d left for the day?”

  The receptionist blanched. Her eyes darted to one side, then the other. There was nobody else in the reception area. It was only her and me.

  “All right,” I said. Even with my temper up, I felt a little sorry for her. She was only doing her job. I raised the plastic SaveMore bag, which contained the remains of our backyard camera. “Tell Mr. Gardner that we’ll be discontinuing the special service at 34 Sycamore Court.”

  The receptionist recoiled slightly when I dropped the sack on the desk in front of her with a clatter. She blinked at me. She looked at the sack. She took up a pen and began scribbling on a memo pad. I turned and walked out the door I’d come in.

  The days had grown shorter. It was already dusk outside, fading by the minute. On my way through the customer parking lot behind the Sentinel One office building, I felt a familiar tingle at the back of my neck and glanced over my shoulder.

  In a lighted window, behind open blinds, I saw a figure watching me. I could discern the shape of a bald head from where I stood. Almost as soon as I turned, the light in the window went dark. The glass turned flat, reflecting the indigo sky.

  Gone for the day, my ass.

  Sara sighed when I finished describing the events of the afternoon. “Paul,” she said.

  “Me? What me?” I pointed over my shoulder, generally indicating the neighborhood beyond our door, specifically meaning Roger’s house on the other side of the circle. “Him.”

  She shook her head, poured us each a glass of wine. “I just don’t know.”

  On the table between us sat our Sentinel One service contract, which I’d found upstairs. Sara picked up the contract, folded the pages back, and reread the video security clause. We’d found the provision together, along with my initials, right where Roger had claimed they would be.

  Gently, she said, “Weren’t you here with the installers that day?”

  Of course I’d been here. I’d gotten the hell out of the way, tried to ignore the racket, and when the guys from Sentinel One were finished, I’d signed where the guy told me, thanked him for all the work, and closed the door behind him. Which was all, as far as I was concerned, completely beside the point.

  “Cameras or no cameras.” I flicked the contract with the back of my finger. “Nothing in here changes the fact that Roger’s got a filing box full of our personal information hidden away over there.” I drank half my wine in a gulp. “The son of a bitch probably knows more about us than I do off the top of my head.”

  She frowned. “What was his explanation?”

  “Who, Roger?”

  “What did he say when you talked to him?”

  “I wasn’t interested in Roger’s explanation,” I told her. “There is no explanation.”

  Sara tilted her wineglass back and forth on its base. She chewed her lip the way she did when she was thinking hard about what to say next.

  I waited as long as I could, then finally said, “What?”

  “Nothing,” she said. Then she shrugged. “I was just thinking of Larry Anders for some reason.”

  I couldn’t help rolling my eyes. Larry Anders had been our next- door neighbor back in Newton. “This isn’t even remotely the—”

  “Remember the time he came over and recommended that lawn service?” She seemed vaguely nostalgic, as though watching the memory replay in her wineglass. “He gave you their business card. And a coupon, as I recall.”

  “Sara…”

  “You told him to get bent,” she reminded me. “In so many words. And then you let the yard go for the rest of the summer.”

  “Larry Anders was a jackass,” I reminded her. “You never liked him either.”

  “True,” she said. “But I didn’t make him my personal sworn nemesis.” As soon as I opened my mouth to argue, she waved the comment away. Withdrawn, Your Honor. “What did the police say?”

  “I told you, they just stood there agreeing with everything Roger—”

  “Not about the cameras,” she said. “I mean this box of stuff you found.”

  “I didn’t tell them about any of that.”

  She looked at me. “Should I even bother to ask why not?”

  “What was I supposed to say? Officers, I was poking around in Roger’s attic and I found this?” I knocked back the rest of my wine. “Believe me, they were already pretty sure that I was the problem.”

  I caught Sara glancing toward the service contract on the table, a seemingly accidental gesture, which she covered quickly. She said nothing.

  Little by little, I began to recognize how unconvincing my reasoning must have sounded to Sara—in part because I hadn’t told her the full scope of my feud with Roger. And now I was forced to stop and consider my position.

  I couldn’t tell Sara everything. Not without telling her everything.

  And in telling Sara only part of the truth, I knew that I was telling her a lie. Just as surely as I’d been lying to her for weeks now: by pretending that what had happened between me and Melody Seward, that one irredeemably rotten- headed night, hadn’t really happened at all.

  The same way I was lying to myself: by telling myself that one thing had nothing to do with the other. By telling myself that I was, in some way, protecting our marriage by pretending as if I hadn’t betrayed it.

  “I
haven’t told you everything,” I said.

  She smiled a little. “You mean there’s more?”

  I felt as though I were flying low with a full payload. I nodded at her wineglass. “You’d better have some of that.”

  She gave me a stern look.

  So I told her about the paperwork I’d found. Employment history records, duplicate copies of photo ID cards, even a copy of birth certificate, all filed neatly away in Roger’s box labeled 34 Sycamore Court. All about a man named Darius Calvin. Our wolf.

  I watched Sara’s face as this piece of heavy ordnance drifted toward her, suspended on my carefully constructed parachute of narrative. By the time I’d stopped talking, she wasn’t looking at me anymore.

  “Four months,” I said, reaching across the table. “Four months, and the cops don’t even pretend to have any leads.”

  Her hand felt stiff in mine.

  “How is it,” I said, “that Roger Mallory has a whole damned dossier on this guy, whom the cops can’t seem to find, in a box with our name on it?”

  Sara looked down at her wine. While I’d finished mine, she still hadn’t taken the first sip of hers.

  I waited.

  After a long minute of silence, she pulled her hand away casually and said, “Paul, I don’t know what you saw over there.”

  “I’m telling you what I saw.”

  “What you’re telling me doesn’t make any sense.”

  “That’s exactly my point.”

  More silence. I couldn’t read the expression on her face. I said, “Say something.”

  She swirled her wine carefully in her glass. At last, she met my eye.

  I held her gaze. “What?”

  “You said it yourself.” She sighed. “It happened months ago.”

  “And?”

  “And we were both out of our wits. And it all happened so fast.”

  I saw where this was going. It felt like something wilting in my chest.

  Sara said, “Can you be sure you’d even recognize him? If you saw him now?”

  Without pausing to check myself, I said, “Would you?”

  Her expression hardened. She straightened her spine, placed her wineglass on the table. Folded her hands in front of her.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “But I think we both remember that night pretty clearly.”

  “I don’t know what you saw over there,” she said. Unlike me, she appeared to be measuring her words carefully. “I wasn’t with you. I didn’t see it for myself.”

  “But you think that I don’t—”

  “I think that this isn’t about Roger,” she said. “And it’s not about the cameras. Or a box. Or the neighborhood patrol, or any of it.”

  “No?” My voice had acquired a peevish tone that even I didn’t like. “Then what do you think this is about? I mean, tell me. Because I can’t—”

  “I know you’re not happy here,” she said, and now I did recognize her expression. Sadness. “I know that you resent me a little bit for taking this job, even if you’ve done a good job hiding it.”

  I think it was the look on her face, more than her words, that set me back on my heels. But the words still landed like a blind punch. When had Sara formulated this theory? I hadn’t seen it coming. I had no defense.

  I said, “What?”

  “I can’t even say that I blame you,” she said. “I certainly can’t blame you for being frustrated. Neither of us have been ourselves since we left home. Especially since the baby.”

  “Sara.”

  “You’ve been distant,” she said. “I’ve been distant. I’m not blaming either one of us.”

  “Just stop a minute.”

  She held up a hand, stopping me instead. “I don’t know what’s going on with you and Roger. You never gave me a straight answer about why you dropped out of the neighborhood watch, and for now that’s fine. I don’t know what he did to make you his enemy, and that’s fine for now too.” She took a long sip of her wine. “I don’t know what you found over there.”

  I tried to take her hand again. She moved beyond my reach. “Sara, please.”

  “All I know,” she said, “is that we need help.”

  I pulled my hand back and looked at her.

  She looked at her wine.

  “You’ve got finals,” she finally said. “I’ve got a million things. We’ve got the party to plan.” She took another sip, then placed her wineglass down on the table. “But once this godawful semester is finally over and done with, I want us to find a good marriage counselor.”

  How had this conversation brought us here?

  “Maybe sometime after that,” Sara said, “we can worry about Roger.”

  I was out of words.

  She was too.

  We sat and looked at each other.

  Later that night, I received an e-mail from Roger. I’d never given him my e-mail address, but there it was:

  Paul,

  You left your jacket here. Sorry about Wes, and thank you again. I sent the jacket to the cleaners and will pick up the bill. They say it will be ready December 16.

  RM

  I sat upstairs at my computer for a long time, imagining Roger across the circle, sitting at his.

  I finally bent over the keyboard and carefully drafted several good, subtle counterthreats regarding my soiled jacket, particularly with regard to its December 16 availability. I sat awhile longer, trying to decide which reply I liked best. I finally scrapped them all and typed:

  Roger,

  Get bent.

  Paul

  Still later—long after Sara had double- checked all the doors and windows and collapsed into bed, after I was sure she’d fallen asleep—I went back upstairs and printed an Internet map. I went downstairs and found my old duffel bag under the stairs in the basement.

  Then I went out to the garage, got in my car, and drove to a medical supply warehouse on the south side of town.

  33.

  ACCORDING TO THE RECORDS I’d found in Roger’s files, Darius Calvin worked swing shift on the shipping and receiving dock at Missouri Valley Medical Shipping & Warehousing Incorporated.

  From my spot across the service road, in the dark lot of an abandoned auto parts store, I could see the entire loading bay and most of the employee parking area.

  I dug around in the glove box, found my penlight, and read a book while I waited. I’d just picked up the latest paperback in the series about the ass- kicking drifter; it seemed like just the inspiration I needed. I pretended it was a self- help book.

  By the time the 5-2 shift at the warehouse ended, the hero in the novel was on his way to a gunfight at the countryside enclave of the underground militia group, who ran a giant meth lab to generate funding for their various domestic terrorism projects. I cornered the page and started the car. Waited.

  Darius Calvin eventually stepped out onto the well- lighted loading dock with a thermos in one hand, a canvas work coat in the other. I’d only seen him once before, and under duress at that. But even at a hundred yards, I recognized the man who’d attacked Sara in our bedroom.

  He rolled his shoulders and cracked his neck. He seemed to look right at me for a moment, though I knew there was no way he could see me in the dark. Was there?

  Then he nodded to some guys and headed in the other direction, toward a rusted Ford Tempo in the employee parking lot.

  I followed him to a peeling, sagging little one- story house near the railroad tracks. It wasn’t a Safer Places neighborhood.

  Darius Calvin didn’t have an alarm system from Sentinel One Incorporated. He didn’t have an alarm system from anybody. He didn’t even have curtains on his windows.

  He was asleep on a moth- eaten couch, in front of an old Barney Miller repeat on the rabbit- eared television, when I kicked his foot. He jerked awake—still in his work clothes—to find some crazy white intruder standing over him with an aluminum softball bat.

  “What the fuck?” he said.

  “You don’t lock y
our front door?” It was actually exhilarating, in a dry- heave sort of way. Being there. Having the upper hand. I tried to talk like the hero from the novel I’d been reading. “That doesn’t seem very safe.”

  Calvin rubbed his eyes, looked at me closely. Recognition seeped into his eyes. He said, “Aw, hell no.”

  “So you do remember me? I wasn’t sure if you would.”

  He started to sit up on the couch. At his first flinch, I drew the bat back, slugger style. My heart was pounding in my throat. I felt a little dizzy. The bat hadn’t been out of my duffel bag since the Dixson English department softball team broke up.

  I pulled myself together and said, “Fair warning. I was a better softball player than I am a golfer.”

  Darius Calvin closed his eyes and sighed like a punctured tire.

  34.

  HE TOLD ME EVERYTHING. About his run- in with a cop named Stockman. About his arrangement with Roger Mallory. About $1,000 in cash, which Roger apparently had paid him later as hush money.

  Looking back, I could see all the ways our tender new roots in Clark Falls had been fertilized by this single harrowing experience: the night I’d found Darius Calvin in our bedroom, covering Sara’s mouth with his hand. But of all the things Darius Calvin told me that night, one thing stuck in the front of my mind:

  I could tell they were beefin’.

  “Beefing?” I’d put away my softball bat by then. “What does that mean? Beefing?”

  “Like maybe they weren’t exactly on the same page,” he’d said. “The cop and what’s- his- name.”

  “Roger?”

  “That’s the dude from TV?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yeah, well.” Darius shrugged. “It was him runnin’ the show, not the cop. Matter of fact, that cop seemed nervous to be there, you ask me.”

  “Beefing,” I’d said, and then asked him, “What were they saying to each other?”

  “Man, I stayed outta that shit.”

  The next morning, I spent a half hour on the Internet, then an hour in the microfiche room at the Clark Falls Telegram. In that time I’d pieced together an engagement notice and a wedding announcement for Roger Mallory and Clair Stockman. I found obituaries for Brandon and Clair Mallory. I found enough news coverage of the Brandon Mallory abduction to identify the overlaps between Darius Calvin’s story, Roger’s family photographs, and the Clark Falls Police Department. I was certain that the cop Darius had known only as “Stockman” was a patrol sergeant named Van Stockman. Brandon’s uncle, Clair’s brother. Roger’s best man.