The Scapegoat

by Sara Davis

  After these few moments of contemplation, I picked up the book again. When the character was first introduced, I felt only impatience. I could not understand what a vagrant former soldier had to do with anything, and I dismissed him as another one of the author’s attempts at “atmosphere.” And yet, several pages later, this vagrant had been fingered for the crime. Surely a red herring, I thought. An eleventh-hour distraction. But then a full-scale manhunt for the vagrant was underway. Still, I thought, it couldn’t possibly be. It was unacceptable; you could not introduce the murderer some forty-odd pages from the end. I held out hope until it was clear that there would be no alternative: the vagrant ex-soldier and the murderer were one and the same. He had been in need of money, of course, and suffered from “psychological disturbances” from the war. Passing at random through town, he had had the good fortune to discover, also by chance, that the victim was despite appearances quite a wealthy woman, and so had called later that night to murder her on the floor of her barn.

  I turned to the back of the book to have a look at the author photo—a smug man with a prominent jaw and a dark sweater stood, arms folded, against a backdrop of suitably Scandinavian snow. Well, I thought, addressing the photo, what a complete waste of time this has been. I do not appreciate this at all. Technically, there were a few chapters remaining, but I, for one, would not be reading them. Instead I tossed the book to the floor beside the bed, turned out the light, and fell headlong into what would prove to be another strangely relevant dream.

  22

  In my dream I was walking across campus on a brisk morning, the sun behind a cloud cover. This is pleasant, I thought to myself, and I put my hand in my pocket and began to whistle. I seemed to be heading in the direction of the Oval, though I had a difficult time judging how far away that was. The trees and sidewalk, although familiar, were devoid of any distinguishing characteristics. I had put my left hand in my pocket, because with my right hand I was carrying the briefcase. It seemed to have grown much heavier overnight. There was something in it, definitely; I could hear it knocking around, and it seemed as though what was inside was a heavy but not particularly large object, as if I were carrying an ingot of gold, or a candy bar made of lead.

  In my dream, I was unperturbed by this. A thought arose: Might it be possible to look inside and see what the object was? But the dream version of myself did not seem interested in this question, and only kept on walking, whistling an unidentifiable tune. What a pleasure it was to walk alone, on campus, early in the morning, the dream-me thought. Why didn’t I do it more often?

  “Excuse me,” said a deep and familiar voice. I turned in its direction. Sitting on a bench, amid a profusion of shrubbery, was Gerry Van Gelder, looking large and uncomfortable. When he spoke, he seemed ill at ease.

  “Excuse me,” he said again. “Do you know what time it is?”

  “Of course,” I said. Although I could not, in truth, say that I was happy to see him (he would delay me somehow, I felt, though from what I could not have said), I could certainly do him this service; I was brimming with goodwill. I transferred the briefcase to my left hand, and rolled back my shirtsleeve.

  But when I looked down at my watch’s face, I saw to my surprise that it was completely blank. Not only were there no hands, there were also no numbers. I gave it a little shake.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “It looks like my watch has stopped.”

  I pointed the watch face in Gerry’s general direction, though there was no way he could have seen it from where he sat. As it was, he barely glanced at it.

  “That’s too bad,” he said, a strange, false note in his voice. “Don’t you think you’d better stop, then?”

  I stared at him. He really looked enormous sitting there on that little bench, among the overgrowth of vines. There was star jasmine all around him, and behind him a grassy lawn. Droplets of sweat were beading on his pasty, freckled temples.

  “I don’t think it will be a problem,” I said coldly. I switched the briefcase into my other hand and kept walking; I didn’t give Gerry another glance.

  * * *

  Time seemed to speed up in my dream, so that I encountered the second set of people very soon after I left Gerry, though they appeared to be in a completely separate location, standing on a sandy stretch of ground: a man, a woman, and a small boy, grouped together as if posing for a family portrait.

  “Wait,” said the little boy, and I stopped. I did not really feel like stopping, but I thought it would be impolite to simply ignore them. When I looked more closely at the little family arranged before me, it was apparent that they were from a different time. The man wore a dark old-fashioned suit with a waistcoat and a gold watch chain braced across his torso; the woman, who was considerably younger, wore a high-necked, somber-colored dress. The boy was in an elaborate white blouse, short pants, and black boots. He was not well, I saw at once. His eyes were shiny and feverish, each of his cheeks marked by a too-vivid pinprick of red.

  “Won’t you stay with us?” said the little boy, and then he was wracked by a fit of coughing. His mother held a white handkerchief to his lips that, with his next cough, was immediately stained with blood.

  “Our son,” she said, lowering her voice. “Our son has typhoid. We leave for Florence tonight. We think the doctors will be better in Italy. We’ve chartered a boat, and we think it would be best if you came with us.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “That’s very kind, but I’m in the middle of something.”

  She looked pained at my reply and cast a questioning look at her husband, who remained stony-faced.

  “What you are planning to do,” she said. “Please reconsider. We know that place.”

  Here she looked at her husband again. “Don’t we know that place?”

  He nodded, but just barely; he seemed determined to stay out of it.

  “It’s…” she said. “There has already been so much death there—” Here she was interrupted by her child, who, gripping at her skirts until she bent down to attend to him, began to whisper something furiously in her ear.

  “Hush,” said his mother. A new fit of coughing from the little boy distracted them both, and I took the opportunity to withdraw from view.

  * * *

  The dream scene was closing in on me now; I had the sense that I would have to pick up the pace considerably if I wanted to reach my destination in time, but I found myself veering off the sidewalk I’d been walking on, drawn by some current into a thick and wooded area. The ground was covered in a layer of old strips of eucalyptus bark that crunched underfoot.

  Now I entered a clearing in the trees, where a young man with sunlit golden hair was reclining in a leisurely attitude on top of a large raised rectangular object that I recognized, after a moment’s reflection, as a tomb. Then I saw that the young man was, in fact, Mr. Reinecke.

  “Oh,” I said, startled, “I wasn’t expecting you.” Self-consciously I ran a hand through my hair; I positioned the briefcase just out of his line of sight.

  “No?” said the dream-Reinecke. “I was expecting you, though.”

  He spoke slowly, lazily, and with not a hint of interest in my arrival. He was dressed differently than he had been when we’d met in the break room, in a white knit sweater that emphasized the glacial blue of his eyes, which were ringed with thick blond lashes. Suddenly I felt very conscious of the sunlight dappling the scene; it had settled in a large, yolk-like arrangement on his thigh.

  “Wouldn’t you like to stay?” he said.

  “I—I’m afraid I can’t,” I said nervously, fingering the handle of my briefcase. The dream-Reinecke did not seem troubled by this. He merely picked an invisible piece of lint off his sweater and stretched his long legs so that they draped across the tomb. Just when I thought he would not speak again, he said:

  “Of course, it’s a big decision, it’s understandable that you wouldn’t want to stop. It’s true what the lady said, though; it isn’t a nice place. A lot of pre
cedent there for that kind of thing, unfortunately.”

  Before I could ask what he meant, he—along with the tomb, the sunlit glade—disappeared from view. Now I was kneeling in the undergrowth, looking out through an opening in the manzanita at a dirt path winding my way. In the distance came the sound of feet hitting the earth. Someone was coming down the path, I thought, not just coming—running. She would be here any second now, I thought.

  I am lying in wait, I thought. I looked down and saw that I had opened the briefcase. Am I? I thought. Am I lying in wait?

  23

  I woke with an unsettled feeling. The leather briefcase sat innocuously on the chair in the corner, as banal and impenetrable as ever. What had been inside it, in the dream? But already the “plot”—Gerry Van Gelder, I thought, Mr. Reinecke!—was fading from memory.

  * * *

  Later that morning I was in the hallway outside my office when some movement outside the window caught my eye. It was a group of graduate students one level below me—walking along the parking lot heading toward the center of campus. One of them had apparently just said something very funny; the whole merry little band was convulsed with laughter. They would be heading to the coffee shop connected to the museum, I assumed, and I was grateful not to have encountered them in the hall on their way out, as they could be loud and boisterous when they traveled like that in packs.

  In the break room I noticed that a copy of the weekly paper was lying on the small white plastic table in the corner—the same paper in which I’d read the notice for my father’s open house, the same paper in which, in what felt like a lifetime ago, I’d inadvertently read my own horoscope. But this was a new edition, of course, this week’s edition, and I slid it toward me and began to flip through its pages.

  This time is different, I thought. This time there is no Kirstie to disturb me; I can do whatever I want—I can read whichever part of the paper pleases me. If it’s the horoscope I want to read, I can read it. I found the page and watched as my index finger slid along the little pictures of animals until it came to rest on the silhouette of the goat, with its slender, curving horns. I could feel my pulse beating faintly in my fingertip.

  Dear Capricorn, the text beside the goat read. This new moon will be in graceful angle to your ruler, so it’s safe to expect that a happy romantic surprise is due. With that in mind, circulate! Be open to meeting new people—and in the meantime, this would be a good week to focus on getting in peak physical shape: So go ahead and join that gym you’ve been curious about. Sign up for that fitness class you’ve been considering.

  The coffee maker clicked itself off just then, and I turned to look at it as though it had just spoken aloud.

  What?

  What meaningless garbage was this?

  Was this the same weekly paper I’d read before? I turned back to the front page. It was.

  Well, I thought, pushing the paper away from me. Well. Unable to complete the thought, I stood, retrieved a mug from the cabinet, and poured myself a cup of coffee.

  There’s no reason to be so derailed by this, I admonished myself. So you read a horoscope recently, a horoscope that led you to believe you were on the right track looking into your father’s death. Today you have read a horoscope in the same paper with no bearing on anything, a horoscope filled with gibberish, nothing to do with you. So what? It changes nothing.

  “Get ahold of yourself,” I said quietly, and gripped the edge of the counter until I winced in pain.

  Just so, I thought. The last thing you need is for someone to surprise you in the break room in a bizarre pose, muttering to yourself. I released my grip on the counter, wiped my forehead with a paper napkin, and went out into the hallway. I moved quickly, giving myself up to the thoughts that came.

  Could it be? The idea growing in me now unchecked—could I have been wrong about everything? But, I protested, there had been that feeling, upon returning from my father’s house, when I’d sat at my kitchen table to watch the fog roll in from the sea, the feeling that I’d set something in motion. That sense—I’d had it so clearly. Was it so extraordinary to think? But—I stopped short, and some coffee from my cup sloshed onto the ground. Could my recent activities truly be called “looking into my father’s death”? What had I unearthed, exactly? I had read two horoscopes, one relevant, one not. I’d gone to a hotel, a restaurant, an open house; under a pseudonym, I’d acquired an empty leather briefcase. I’d declined to have intercourse with a mature and willing woman, and made myself god knew how many open-faced salmon sandwiches. Really, it could make a person weep.

  When I reached the end of this last thought, I found myself at the door of my office. I eased it open, careful not to spill any more of my coffee, and sat down at my desk. There it was again, I thought with a shudder: in my excitement I had forgotten all about the red eye on the telephone—the envelope I had propped against it yesterday had slipped, and the light was pulsing on and off patiently, biding its time like a watchful cat. Not now, I thought, replacing the envelope, not this distraction.

  Maybe it would be nice to do something more tangible, I thought, to take a little break from musing on the two horoscopes, on the dreams, on how to position myself with respect to my father’s death. Perhaps I should engage in some of my actual work, the activities I had recently heard so unceremoniously described by Alex Foss. But instead of settling down at my desk, it seemed that I was now pulling my chair over to the shelves on the wall, and reaching for a cloth-covered box I kept in the highest cubby. It had sat there, untouched, for years, and was covered in a layer of gray-brown dust, which now floated in unattractive clumps down to my desk. I sifted through some of the detritus of years past until I found one piece of paper, yellowing with age, folded in three.

  Had a very bizarre phone call this morning. A man calling to say you’d drowned yourself in the Ottawa River. I don’t know if he meant to gain entry with shock value, but he soon changed his story to say that you’d only tried to, and that you’d survived thanks to a curious passerby. He used all kinds of fancy psychological phrasing, but on the subject of how you two knew each other, exactly, he was quite vague.

  On his name, too. “A friend,” he said he was. Well.

  As I have not had any news from the school I will assume you were unsuccessful in your attempt to end your life. It would be a very selfish thing to do, so I hope you got it out of your system. I gave him a good idea of how little I would welcome another telephone call, and I must say that if you find yourself tempted to give out my telephone number to any other of your “friends,” please reconsider.

  In other news, we’d hoped to have puppies this spring, but Jack did not take a liking to the neighbor down the road’s bitch as much as we’d thought. I can’t say I blame him. Write and tell me how you are.

  Mother

  24

  An obscenely loud noise turned out to be the telephone on my desk.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Hello,” said a female voice. “This is Linda.”

  “Linda,” I repeated, my mind a blank.

  “In Professor Pindar’s office,” she said. “Are you free today? He’d like to see you.”

  I struggled to grasp these new and unwelcome concepts. What could I possibly say? “Today?”

  “Yes, today,” said Linda. “Would three work? That would be best for him.”

  A long pause followed.

  “Three will work,” I said finally.

  “Perfect,” she said. I could hear her fingernails clickety-clacking on the keyboard through the line. “I’m putting you down now.”

  I hung up the phone and held myself very still in the silence. Then I pushed a short burst of air out through my teeth. I no longer wanted to be in my office, I thought as I rose to my feet, at the mercy of whatever memorabilia and the telephone. If I wanted to be alone with my thoughts (and why Professor Pindar wanted to speak to me was one thought that, from the looks of things, circumstances behooved me to address), I
would have to go elsewhere. That, and my coffee was now lukewarm. I would have to go and get another one, I thought, and then a movement outside my window caught my eye. It was a group of figures, heading back from the direction of the quad.

  That group of graduate students, I thought, once again grateful not to have encountered them in the hallway.

  But on second glance I saw that I was wrong. It was not, as I had previously imagined, a “group” of students, but two people walking side by side, and only one of them was a student. The second person was none other than the chair of my department, whom I was due to meet with at three: Professor Pindar. He was gesticulating wildly, his gray curls blowing in the wind. The other person—her substantial thighs clearly outlined in black running pants, her ponytail streaming behind her like a small, bright flag—was Kirstie.

  25

  It was just like me, I thought, to think the worst of things, to go over every minor thing with a fine-toothed comb. There was no reason to think that whatever conversation Kirstie and Professor Pindar had been having outside was anything but benign. There was no reason at all to believe it had anything to do with me.

  * * *

  Linda was on the phone again at three, but she cupped one hand over the receiver and cast a glance at the closed office door, then she pantomimed knocking, and mouthed, contradictorily, Go right in.

  Professor Pindar was bent over a stack of papers on his desk but motioned me into the room with one hand. He was more tired, less vital-looking than he’d appeared when I’d seen him through the window.

  “Sit down,” he said, indicating the chair across from him. “I’ll just be a minute. You can move all that onto the floor.”