The Trapdoor

by Andrew Peterson

  I glanced at Mrs. Summers. She was examining her hands. Holding them together, turning them this way and that. She seemed to see something in them, something far away. Her lips trembled slightly.

  Walter Summers sat back on the sofa. He looked up to the right, over my head, like a man with a vision. Or a man showing a reporter his best profile. He said: “I don’t pretend to understand it.”

  “Are you saying it might have been an accident?” I said.

  He lowered his gaze to me at once. “Well, I …” He smiled, sadly but wisely. “No. The medical examiner is a good man. Charlie Ratzinger. He said suicide. But let me put it to you this way: I’d like Charlie to come up with one good reason why an average Joe like Freddie—”

  The phone rang. Mrs. Summers began to rise from the sofa. Her husband gestured to her.

  “I’ll get it,” he said. “It’s for me.”

  He cut a fine figure as he strode from the room. He went down the hall. I heard him pick up a phone. He said, “Hello?” Then the door closed behind him.

  For a long, long minute, I sat there with Mrs. Summers. Mrs. Summers studied her hands with that distant trace of a smile. I shifted in my chair. I fiddled with my shirt pocket. Finally, I brought out a cigarette. I said: “Do you mind if I—”

  “None of it’s true, you know,” she said. Her voice cracked. Her eyes, all at once, were swimming. She stared at her hands. “Not a word of it.” She swallowed hard. “He couldn’t … compete, Freddie. It wasn’t … how he was. He couldn’t … live up to … all of it … do you understand?” She gestured vaguely at the trophies around her.

  I didn’t say anything. I wanted to, but I didn’t. I wanted to say: Shut up, lady. I’m a reporter. Whatever you say, I’ll put in the paper. And then whatever your husband does to you that makes you look so worried, he’ll do again. Just shut up. But I didn’t say it. I didn’t say anything. And maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe she already knew. Maybe she just didn’t give a damn anymore.

  “You see, Freddie just wasn’t like his father,” she went on. “He kept trying, he tried so hard … and Walter … Walter just treated him like he was a failure, a disappointment. But it was just, it was just … Freddie was trying to do all the wrong things. He didn’t belong on the football team. And hunting … he used to come back empty-handed. …” She laughed once, sharply. An unpleasant sound. “He thought he was a coward …. He thought … But he just wasn’t the sort of boy who could shoot a deer. Once, after the three of them came back from a hunting trip, I found him lying on his bed and crying. Sobbing, literally, with his head in his arms. And do you know what he said to me, Mr. Wells? He said, ‘Oh God, Mother. It was right in front of me, a perfect shot, and I threw a stone at it when they weren’t looking. To scare it off, to make it run away before they shot it. It was so beautiful.’ That’s what he said. And then … and then he begged me not to tell. He begged me. And then the day he was cut from the football team …”

  “Mrs. Summers,” I began.

  “Do you know he was positively brilliant at mathematics? Brilliant.” She was leaning toward me now, her eyes urgently searching mine. “But he purposely didn’t study because Walter—”

  “Mrs. Summers, you have to understand that everything you say is on the record. I mean—”

  “Print it!” Suddenly she was fierce. She pressed toward me even further. Her eyes blazed. Her voice roiled hoarsely deep in her throat. “Print all of it!” she said.

  A door opened down the hall. At once she bowed her head and fell silent. In another moment Walter Summers came walking across the room with his vigorous stride. He clapped his hands together.

  “Well,” he said, “where were we?”

  12 I stood by the pond in the backyard. The pond where Fred Summers had died. It was a small pool surrounded by little oaks and maples. Its clear water caught the reflection of the red and green and yellow leaves. The colors blended and spread out across the water’s rippling surface. I smoked a cigarette and watched the gentle shifting of pastels. I thought of Mrs. Summers, and of her fierce, angry eyes.

  In another moment I heard footsteps on the leaves behind me. I turned. There was Michael, a boy of about eighteen, coming from the house.

  “They told me you’d be down here,” he said. He held his hand out to me. I shook it. Michael had his father’s grin. His father’s muscular physique too—he wasn’t thin as his brother had been. As for his face, it was, if anything, even more handsome than that of Walter Summers. His features were nearly perfect. His eyes were a more piercing shade of blue. The intensity of his gaze made you feel as if his attention were yours alone for as long as you wanted it.

  “We can go back up to the house if you want,” I said. It seemed like the thing to say.

  “No,” said Michael quietly. “I can stand it here. I wanted to talk to you alone.”

  I glanced back at the water. “You were with him—here—just before he died, weren’t you?”

  “That’s right. I was.”

  “What did you talk about? That last time.”

  “He told me he was going to kill himself.”

  I let a lungful of smoke out slowly. I looked into Michael’s so-blue eyes. His gaze never wavered.

  “Why?” I said.

  He sighed, his cheeks puffed. He put his hands in his pockets and leaned back until he was looking at the sky.

  “That’s hard to explain exactly. He talked about a sense of failure. That everything he did would turn out wrong. That everything I did would turn out right. He talked about our dad. Dad—jeeze—he’s one of the greatest guys I know. He really is. But, maybe because of that, he’s a tough image to live up to. I don’t know. Maybe Fred tried too hard, and maybe Dad … well, Dad loved Fred, but he didn’t know him. He expected him to be different than he was.”

  He spoke quietly, with simplicity and candor. When he was done, he gave a sad little shrug. The rest, he seemed to be saying, is beyond words.

  I said, “You know, your father seems to think this happened without warning.”

  He smiled quietly. “You think he’s trying to avoid a scandal, don’t you?”

  “I’m a reporter, son. I never think.”

  His shoulders lifted in a gentle laugh. “Well, I’ll tell you. My father is going to be county executive here someday soon. Someday after that, he’ll probably be a state senator. Maybe governor, I don’t know. But he’s also a father. And he was always a father first. He didn’t always do the right thing, no. But he always had time for us. He was always there. So—maybe he is trying to avoid a scandal. But maybe concentrating on avoiding a scandal is his way of avoiding the pain. You might want to think about that.”

  “Fair enough,” I said. “And what about you? What do you do for the pain?”

  Again he sighed. His feet kicking the fallen leaves before them, he moved past me so that his back was toward me. He was at the pond’s edge.

  “You haven’t asked me why I walked away,” he said. I didn’t answer. “He said, ‘Mike, I wish I were dead.’ He had the shotgun right there beside him. Right there. We talked for a long, long time. I told him to cheer up, that it wasn’t so bad, it was all in his head. I told him there was plenty of stuff he was better at than me. Math. Jeeze, he was good at math. He said, you know, something like, ‘Yeah, I guess so.’ And then I said, ‘I’m going in to see what Mom’s got for lunch. Come on.’ And I walked away. I wasn’t even at the house when the shot went off.”

  For a few seconds then he was silent. For a few seconds there was no sound but the deep blurt of the frogs at pondside. For a few seconds, I knew, he was reliving the moment when that shotgun went off. It was probably echoing in his head, fading in his head, exploding in his head again and again. Like the sound of a trapdoor.

  Death, I thought suddenly. Death in the woods.

  He turned around to face me. His eyes had lost some of their intensity, were clouded almost, as if he were turning that burning gaze inward now.

  �
��You know, I can look in a person’s eyes and see if he’s ever grieved like I’ve grieved for Freddy,” he said. “And if they have, you know what I do?”

  I shook my head.

  “I try to see how they handle it. How they live with this much hurting inside. Dad—he tries to pretend it’s a political issue. Mom—she takes it out on Dad. Blames him for things he had no power over. The Scofields—have you talked to the Scofields?”

  “Yeah.”

  “They join their support groups and all that.” He paused. His gaze snapped clear suddenly. It was trained on me. “You work.”

  I didn’t speak. I felt the heat of the cigarette against my fingers.

  “You work, and you pretend you are your work,” he said. “You make out you’re some kind of walking question mark. No opinions, no desires …” He gestured at me. “No pain.”

  I dropped the cigarette on the autumn-hardened earth. I crushed it out with my foot. I took a good long time about it.

  He was quite a kid. His father, strangely enough, was the pale imitation: False, where the son was sincere; facile, where the son was thoughtful. I had made up my mind about a lot of things when I’d taken a walk down to the pond. I’d made up my mind that Walter Summers was lying, that Alice Summers was telling the truth. A lot of that had changed in the few minutes I’d been talking to their surviving son. The things he’d said made sense to me. The way he’d said them rang true.

  “So what about you?” I said, still looking down. “You still haven’t told me how you—”

  He made a noise. A terrible noise. I glanced up. His face shook as he fought for control. His eyes were dry, but filled with pleading and desolation. In another instant the fit passed.

  The boy took a few deep breaths. Then he said quietly: “Let’s go inside.”

  I nodded. I followed him silently to the house. I had no other questions.

  13 The Summers story wasn’t an easy one to write. I spent all Wednesday on the interviews, then returned to my hotel room to batter it out. It took the rest of the night. I pounded at the typewriter hour after hour. I smoked cigarette after cigarette. I sipped slowly at my glass of scotch. Every time I thought I was finished, I’d glance longingly at the bed. Then I’d glance from the bed to the page before me. And then I’d tear the page out. Crumple it, toss it across the room at the wastebasket. I’d watch it roll across the carpet. Then I’d start the thing one more time.

  I wanted, I guess, to get it from Michael’s point of view. To show that a kid’s upbringing could be messed up, but that maybe no one was to blame. To show the father’s deceptions as self-deceptions, the mother’s rage as grief in disguise. I wanted to show that some things can’t be helped, even when you do the best you can. That was the tack I wanted to take. That struck me as the right tack. But it was hard to get it down on the page.

  I had drawn the curtains across the picture window. The black slit where the curtains joined slowly grew violet. I typed. The violet space turned blue. I saw the tendrils of night mist fading under the cold morning sun. Finally, I rolled the last page out of the machine. I stacked the piece together, left it on the table, and went to bed.

  When I woke up, it was too late to get the story down to the office by mail, so I took the forty-five minute drive to White Plains. The bureau there isn’t much. Just a big second-floor room above a furniture store. A few old wooden desks, a lot of phones, two wire machines, and a couple of eager-looking kids trying to work their way south.

  I retyped the story onto computer paper and fed it into the faxing machine. It rolled in slowly as the machine sent it down to the city over the phone wires.

  I called the copy desk in New York. Alex answered.

  “You get it?”

  “Yeah, we got it. Looks good, Pops.”

  “Thanks, sonny-boy. Listen, is Lansing around?”

  “Right here, Pops. Hold on.”

  Pops held on.

  “Don’t talk to me,” Lansing said a second later. “I’m reading it.”

  “How’s it look?”

  “Ssh.”

  I lit a cigarette. Waited.

  “Boy,” she said softly then.

  “Good?”

  “Good.”

  “How’d Cambridge like the Scofield piece?”

  “It was everything you could’ve hoped for.”

  “He get that puckered, mottled look he gets whenever I do something decent?”

  “In spades.”

  “Just checking. What’s the word around on the Dellacroce trial?”

  “Tell me you haven’t been reading it.”

  “I wish I could.”

  “Did you see this morning’s paper?”

  “Yeah. Well, you can’t do much with jury selection.”

  “The Times did.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Yeah.” Lansing has a voice like a glass of red wine. It’s rich and deep and smooth. It was even deeper now, but I couldn’t tell if that was the sound of laughter or rage. “Dunlop over there had a piece on the fact that jurors in Manhattan federal court have been coming down with the flu in alarming numbers since the Dellacroce case started.”

  I cursed. “I told Carey to do that. I gave him the people to call.” I cursed again. “I even told him the Times was gonna run it.”

  “Ah, but Carey had a better idea.”

  I tried to imagine Carey having an idea. I didn’t get very far. I could see his fat, sweaty face straining behind his pencil moustache. I could see his cheap tie bobbing with the motion of his double chin. I could even see his tan polyester suit getting damp under the armpits. After that the mind boggled.

  “I’m afraid to ask,” I said.

  “He did a history of the courthouse.”

  I laughed, more or less. “If the mob has a medal, Cambridge’ll get it for this.”

  “Even he couldn’t run it. In fact …” She paused. I pictured her glancing over her shoulder to see who was listening. She spoke softly: “In fact, keep your guard up, okay? He’s been gunning for you for a long time. Now he’s made himself look bad doing it, and he’s really on the warpath. And this place wouldn’t be any fun without you.”

  “Sure it would. Lots of places are.”

  “No place I’ve been.”

  I let that pass. “Say, what’s he got against me anyway? Just because I’m not relatable enough …”

  “It’s not that. You know it’s not that.” Another pause.

  “Yeah?” I said.

  “It’s who you are. And who he’s not.”

  “Mm. I guess I can’t help him there.”

  She didn’t say anything. I took a long drag on my cigarette. She didn’t say anything some more.

  “Come on, Lansing,” I said. “What’s up?”

  “You didn’t have to do it this way, you know,” she said.

  “What way?”

  “You know. The profiles. The kids. The parents.”

  “That’s my angle. Don’t you like it?”

  “You don’t have to show Cambridge you can take it. He knows you’re a tough guy.”

  Now I was silent. I let her hear the hiss as I blew smoke into the handset.

  “Don’t push yourself too far, John,” Lansing said. “You’ve got a right to be human.”

  “Yeah, but why change now?”

  “I’m serious, Wells.”

  I thought it over. “I’m almost done, Lancer. I got one more to do. Michelle Thayer. If I can finish the interviews by tomorrow, I’ll come back and write the rest from there.”

  There was a pause. “It’ll be good to see you,” she said.

  “Don’t talk to me like that, Lansing.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Bye.”

  “Bye.”

  As I drove back up to Grant Valley, heading toward the Thayer place, I didn’t think about what Lansing said. I thought about Michelle. The last profile. When I was done with her, I’d do a facts-and-figures piece, and some kind of wrap-up. The easy p
art.

  But I still had to get through this one. And this one was going to be tough.

  She’d died ten days ago, no more. I hadn’t even thought her mother would speak to me. But when I called—and man, I hated making that call—she didn’t hesitate for a minute.

  “You want to do a story about my daughter?” she said softly. “Come on, then. I’ll give you a story.” Her name was Janet. She was divorced.

  Her daughter Michelle had been a straight-A student. Her daughter had been fifteen. Her daughter had walked into the woods behind her house one mild fall evening. She’d climbed up an oak tree and sat on a branch. She had a rope with her. She tied one end of the rope around the branch and the other around her neck. Then she jumped. So, yeah, I drove to the Thayer house thinking about Michelle.

  The way went through town, past the high school and onto the highway beyond. For a mile or so the going was easy. But when I hit the first exit, I turned off. I made another quick turn, and I was in the woods again, on a rutted road that twisted underneath my tires like it was trying to get away.

  It was a grim day. Big dark clouds had rolled over the sky on a wind with a touch of winter in it. On every side of me the forest pressed in, gray and gloomy. I noticed as I drove—as I drove and thought about Michelle—I noticed there were more For Sale signs here than on the other side of town. There were fewer bulldozers hiding away in the trees. I guessed this was not prime real estate. The few houses I saw bore that out. They were shabby, small, gray as the sky. There were some with small front yards that were piled high with car parts and busted-up furniture and garbage. There were trailers that seemed to have been parked behind the nearest tree and forgotten. There was even a moldering, abandoned schoolhouse of some sort, its clapboards rotting, caving in, its windows black and broken.