Safer

by Sean Doolittle

  It’s cold, but not brutal. A few snowflakes drift in the air, floating gently toward the bare ground. The weatherpeople say it looks to be a white Christmas.

  “Hey.” Josh nods toward my hybrid as he pulls his camera gear from the back of the Explorer. “How many miles you get on that, anyway?”

  “I’ve never kept track,” I tell him. “You?”

  “Put seventy bucks in the tank back there.”

  “Long drive.”

  “The station pays for the gas,” Maya says. “Now shut up, you guys. It’s work time.”

  We move up the sidewalk, toward Timothy Brand’s undec-orated rental house. The blue glow of a television bleeds through one of the curtains upstairs.

  “Watch but don’t talk,” Maya tells me. “Okay?”

  “You’re the professional.”

  “Hey, Josh, throw the hood over the camera.”

  Josh looks at the sky. “Just flurries.”

  “I don’t care about the snow, I want you to cover our call sign. And turn your hat backward, huh?”

  Josh shrugs, turns his Channel Five cap backward, and pulls a black canvas shroud from the bag on his shoulder.

  We head up the steps, onto the front porch. Maya signals with her hand, and Josh veers to her left, stepping lightly, settling his camera on his shoulder as he moves. We could be a small liberal arts and communications SWAT team getting ready to smash down the door. I decide to move back down the steps and wait at the bottom.

  “Here we go,” Maya says. “Ready?” Josh gives a thumbs-up and nestles his eye against the viewfinder. Maya rings the doorbell.

  Nothing happens. We stand around.

  Maya rings the bell again and a dog barks somewhere in the house. In a moment, the porch light comes on, sudden and blinding. Curtains move. For at least a minute, nothing else happens.

  Then comes the sound of locks tumbling.

  Everyone seems to pause at the sight of the guy who opens the front door. Josh actually moves his eye away from the viewfinder. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen Maya Lamb hesitate. There’s a brief hiccup in her rhythm while she finds her smile and puts it on. “Mr. Brand?”

  “Yes?”

  Maybe I expected some greasy- haired bogeyman. Brit’s seventh- grade volleyball coach appears to be about my age. He appears to have been a handsome, athletic guy.

  He also appears as though he may be recovering from an airplane crash. He holds the door with one hand, which is encased in some kind of orthopedic brace; his other hand supports his weight on the handle of a four- legged cane. A medium- sized mutt stands guard by his ankle, watching us.

  But it’s his face we’re all looking at. Timothy Brand is a mess, bitten all over by what look like relatively fresh scars. The area beneath one of his eyes has a buckled appearance, the cheekbone dented in like a soda can. The eye itself seems to wander independently. In one spot, matching scars on his top and bottom lips make one side of his mouth appear sewn together, as though cinched by heavy thread.

  “Can I help you?”

  Maya finally finds a voice to go with the smile. “We’re sorry to bother you so late. I’m with Channel Nine Iowa City, and we’re covering reports of a—”

  “Hey, don’t I recognize you?” He looks closer, moving stiffly. His bathrobe hangs open, showing an old T-shirt, faded gym shorts, bony legs, and house slippers. I see thick, wormy surgical scars on both knees. “You’re Maya Lamb, aren’t you?”

  “That’s right,” she says. “I’m flattered. You must be a regular viewer.”

  “I usually watch Eleven.” Brand smiles. “But I used to see you all the time in Clark Falls. Channel Five, right? How long have you been here?”

  “Actually, this is my very first story,” she says.

  “Wow. I guess I’m the one who’s flattered.”

  What the hell kind of bushwhack is this? I expected an overpowering barrage of questions. After a five- hour drive, I figured we’d be going Mike Wallace on this guy. Shocking and awing. Getting the goods. Maya Lamb seems off her game.

  But she keeps right on smiling. “You lived in Clark Falls?”

  “I taught school there,” he says. “Until this past June.”

  Something about Brand’s smile seems off to me. His front three or four teeth seem whiter than the others. A little too square. In the porch light, I catch a glint of metal in the corner of his mouth and figure out the oddity: he’s wearing a partial denture. I try and imagine him without it. In my imagination, his smile has a wide ragged hole in the middle.

  Brand shifts his weight to his other leg. As he props himself against the open door, the stretched neck of his T-shirt sags to reveal another pink scar in the pit of his throat. A horizontal line with a pucker in the middle.

  I’ve seen this kind of scar before. One of the poets back at Dixson acquired one after a dicey bout with viral meningitis, and my first wife’s grandmother had one for some reason I’d never learned. This kind of scar means that at some point in fairly recent history, Timothy Brand was connected to a breathing machine.

  The dog barks once, from his throat, as though reminding his owner it’s late to be having visitors, then disappears into the house.

  “I’m sorry,” Brand says. “What’s your story, again?”

  “Reports of vandalism in the neighborhood,” Maya repeats. She sounds distracted.

  “I haven’t heard anything about—”

  “Listen, Mr. Brand, as long as I’m here, would you mind if I asked you something completely off the subject?”

  Honestly, she sounds like an amateur. And Timothy Brand is beginning to seem suspicious.

  “I’m working on a new feature series,” she tells him, obviously making this up as she goes along. It’s almost embarrassing. “Survivor stories. For the Living segment. Forgive me for being opportunistic, but I can’t help noticing that you’ve been through something quite serious yourself.”

  “I was involved in a car accident,” he explains, by rote, as though he can’t get through the line at the grocery store without answering this question. “Shortly after I moved here.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Maya says. “Would you mind if I asked—”

  “It was a hit- and- run, I spent three weeks in the hospital, I still have physical therapy six days a week, and no, I don’t think I’m interested in being the subject of a survivor story.”

  “My gosh,” Maya says.

  I catch movement in the curtains from the corner of my eye. In the front window, the dog now stands with its front paws on the back of a sofa, watching us.

  Bark bark.

  Each time the dog sounds off, Timothy Brand’s guard seems to rise. “Why is he still filming me?”

  “Did they catch the guy who ran you down?”

  Brand’s smile is gone, and his eyes have gone wary. “How do you know my name? I haven’t heard about any vandalism in the neighborhood. Why do you know my name?”

  I’m getting cold standing here. Timothy Brand has told this hit- and- run lie so many times that it fits like an old pair of jeans. Of course, there’s no evidence to back up what I know, in my gut, really happened to this guy.

  “We have reports,” I say.

  “Who are you?”

  Maya glares at me.

  As I climb the steps, she tries to call me off with her eyes. When she sees me reaching into the inside pocket of my coat, she gives her head a very small, very hard shake.

  “We have reports that this man has been defacing property in the neighborhood.” Defacing property. A good line, if I do say so. “Ever seen him around?”

  I hand him the portrait I’d printed from the Clark Falls PD Web site on my way to meet Maya Lamb at the brewpub earlier this afternoon. The laser printer in the business suite of the Residence Inn was low on toner, so the photo fades out toward the bottom, and you can’t see the badge. But Van Stockman’s face is perfectly legible.

  It didn’t have nearly the impact on Maya Lamb when I showed it
to her that it seems to have on Timothy Brand. It’s as if I’ve handed him a coiled and deadly snake. His eyes go wide. His whole body seems to tense. When he looks at me over the top edge of the paper, I see the printout trembling at the corners.

  I nod. “Guess you have. How’d you sell that hit- and- run story to the doctors, anyway? He beat you with a car bumper or something?”

  I’m starting to become familiar with the look I’m seeing in Brand’s eyes. It’s the same one I saw in Darius Calvin’s eyes, when he woke on his own couch, after a long shift at work, to find a softball bat aimed at his head. It’s a version of the same thing I remember seeing in Sara’s eyes, the night Darius Calvin covered her mouth with his hand.

  Timothy Brand is scared shitless. One look at a copy of a computer scan of an outdated portrait of a cop named Van Stockman is all it takes.

  “I almost forgot,” I tell him. “Roger Mallory says Merry Christmas.”

  “Please go away.” He hobbles back and closes the door.

  The dog disappears from the window.

  The porch light goes dark.

  I turn to Josh. “Did you get that?”

  Something sharp slams into the meaty part of my arm. It’s Maya Lamb’s fist. Her eyes are blazing. “What the hell?”

  “You said supervise.”

  She punches me again. Same place. It hurts more the second time. “Watch and don’t talk. How hard is that?”

  “Come on, he was onto us. I had to do something.”

  “You can be a real asshole,” she says.

  We regroup in the warmth of an all- night diner off Dubuque Street. There’s hot coffee and six kinds of pie, Chet Baker doing “Winter Wonderland” on the jukebox, and a few other late-nighters scattered about.

  As a man with costly training in American fiction I’m aware of my immediate geography here in Iowa City, gravid as it is with academic significance. As it happens, many notable Americans have concocted stories in this little university burg over the last century or so. O’Connor, Irving, Roth, Vonnegut, Timothy Brand—the list is long and interesting.

  “I am so pissed off at you right now,” Maya Lamb says. She scowls at her cell phone. “Midnight, and we’re eating goddamned pie.”

  I wonder if Raymond Carver ever tried the pie at this place. For a moment, I think Maya is going to reach across the table and punch me again.

  She drops her fork and says, “I forged my assignment editor’s signature to get the car. Do you realize that? And I’m on the air tomorrow. No, wait.” She consults her phone. “I’m on the air today.”

  “I thought this was a mistake in the first place,” I remind her.

  “Oh, it was definitely a mistake. Letting you come along was definitely a mistake.”

  As far as I’m concerned, our bet has paid out both ways. I know everything I need to know about Timothy Brand. Every thing else is Douglas Bennett’s job. Maya Lamb still has reams of information that no other reporter has yet. Her job hasn’t changed.

  She spits out a laugh. “Know what I find interesting?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Here you are, claiming you’ve been set up. Claiming you’ve been falsely accused of diddling some thirteen- year- old girl.”

  “ ‘Diddling,’ Maya?” I pause with my fork halfway to my mouth. “‘Claiming’?”

  “Ever stop and think that this guy Brand is in the same situation you are?”

  “Come on.”

  “What? Where’s your evidence against him? A thirteen-year- old girl told you a story?” She smirks. “Different girl, different story. That’s all.”

  “You saw his face when I showed him Stockman’s photo.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “And you know what’s going on here. Same as I do.” I finish my last bite and drink my coffee. I might get another piece of this pie. “You were right all along, Maya. Roger put the fear of God into him, all right. And then he sent his one- man goon patrol to make sure it stuck.”

  “You don’t have any idea what I’m talking about, do you?”

  “Roger might have wanted to protect Brittany from shame and scandal, but he couldn’t just let some ‘diddler’ off the hook, could he? That wouldn’t be making the world a safer place.”

  “Forget it.” Maya climbs out of the booth. “I’m going to check my messages.”

  Once she’s gone, I look at Josh. He’s leaning over his empty plate, eyes bleary. “Long drive back,” I say.

  He sighs. Rubs his eyes with his knuckles.

  “Think you guys will get in trouble?”

  “Fired, probably,” he says. “If it was anybody else.”

  “Anybody else?”

  “That girl can talk her ass out of anything.” Josh shrugs. “Me, I just go where I’m told.”

  As long as Maya Lamb is checking her messages, I dig in the pocket of my coat and pull out the phone Douglas Bennett gave me. I turned the ringer off hours ago, tired of hearing it. I’ve missed a long list of calls, mostly from Bennett & Partners.

  At the very top of the list, there are a few out- of- town numbers. No caller IDs attached, but I recognize them all.

  Sara called from her mother’s an hour ago. Twice. Ap parently, she’s passed this number along to my folks; they called from New Jersey around the same time Sara did. In their time zone, it’s past one o’clock in the morning.

  There’s even a Boston number on the list, also around the same time. The number belongs to my friend Charlie Bernard.

  What’s so important?

  That’s what I’m wondering when Maya Lamb returns to the table. Her demeanor has changed. Either she’s not mad at me anymore, or she’s in bigger trouble than she expected.

  I finish my coffee. “What’s wrong?”

  She looks at me with an expression I can’t quite interpret.

  “Come on,” she says to Josh. “We need to get back.”

  “Now?”

  “Right now.”

  She’s already put on her coat by the time I stand up. I sense that her purpose has been renewed. But it’s not the same sort of energy I felt on the sidewalk in front of Timothy Brand’s house. A bad feeling settles in my stomach.

  “What’s going on?”

  She opens her mouth to say something, and then she does the last thing I expect. She touches my arm, near the spot where she punched me earlier.

  Then she leaves me with the bill for the coffee and pie, grabs her bag, grabs Josh, and heads for the door.

  37.

  BY THE TIME I LEAVE THE DINER, I’ve checked my voice-mail messages.

  Neither Maya nor Josh responds when I key the walkie-talkie, which I still have in the glove compartment of my car. I scan the Interstate ahead of me for a Channel Five Ford Explorer, but I never quite manage to catch up with them.

  Fifteen miles north of Clark Falls, the Decatur toll bridge takes Highway 175 across the Missouri River.

  Dawn is still two hours away when I get there. I don’t get closer than the state police barricades a quarter- mile away. Beyond a cordon of road flares, the bridge is crawling with people. Police and emergency vehicles crowd the scene. The skeletal crisscross of beams and girders casts long strobing shadows in the swirl of red and blue lights.

  From the side of the highway, I can see news trucks from Clark Falls and Sioux City. In the middle of the bridge, I can see a familiar silver Lexus SUV parked askew, doors open.

  A helicopter circles overhead, scanning the swift dark water with a blinding column of light. Flashlight beams move along the banks downstream.

  No, I keep thinking, but that doesn’t change anything.

  38.

  THEY FIND HER a little over twelve miles downriver, just north of the Loess Hills Observatory.

  Divers finally pull Brit Seward’s unclothed body from the frigid water just after daybreak. It’s said to be a stroke of luck for the rescue operation that she snagged on an underwater deadfall just off the main channel. Given the strength of
the current, the temperature of the water, and reports of heavy snow on the way, they say there’s no telling whether they’d have found her at all.

  Maya Lamb is on the scene, bundled in a North Face parka and earmuffs, strands of dark hair blowing wild in the dawn breeze off the river. You’d never know she’s been up all night. Behind her, in the distance, rescue workers load a white plastic body bag onto a bright yellow stretcher.

  It doesn’t seem real, watching this on television. Two hours ago, I was at the same river that I see on the screen. Standing beside my car, on the side of the highway, I could smell the water, hear the whop- whop- whop of the rescue chopper, feel the heavy sense of disaster in the air. Now I’m sitting up in bed drinking bourbon, and all of it seems like anything else you’d watch on the news.

  These facts are known, according to Maya Lamb’s ongoing field report:

  On December 19, Clark Falls residents Peter and Melody Seward had reported their daughter, Brittany Lynn, age thirteen, missing.

  The family had spent most of the day at the office of a Clark Falls attorney. Late in the afternoon, Brittany had excused herself to the restroom. After a noticeable amount of time had passed without her return, Melody Seward had gone to check on her. Mrs. Seward had found the restroom empty, her car keys missing from her purse, and the family vehicle gone from the parking lot.

  At approximately 5:30 p.m., the Clark Falls Police De part ment issued a lookout bulletin for a silver Lexus RX 350. Ap proximately five hours later, a motorist called the state patrol’s emergency number to report an abandoned vehicle and a pile of winter clothing on the Decatur toll bridge.

  By approximately 10:45 p.m., the responding trooper had matched the license plate on the vehicle to the bulletin out of Clark Falls.

  Ice floes made search conditions treacherous. Teams had worked through the night.

  I like the funny ones, she told me once. But the sad ones seem more real.

  Read the funny ones, I’d advised her. You’ve got plenty of time for the sad ones.

  Which book had she taken from my library that day?