She glanced toward the blocked door, then back at Nolan. “Okay. So what else do you want to know?”
We wanted to know why there hadn’t been a single mention of the robbery on the radio or television. We wanted to know how it could be that nobody knew of her disappearance.
As she answered our questions, it was the closest we all ever came to talking like regular people. We began to understand why the police hadn’t yet pounded down the door. No other customers or employees had been in the store when she’d left. The store’s surveillance camera hadn’t worked since she’d taken the job.
And what about her replacement, we wondered, arriving at eight o’clock to find Marie nowhere on the premises?
“I’m not really known as the most reliable employee,” she explained. “It wouldn’t be the first time I ducked out before my shift ended.”
“But someone must be expecting you at home,” I said. “A boyfriend?”
She shook her head. “I meant it earlier when I told you I could keep this secret. I know you thought I was just a kid then, but now you know I’m not a kid. And I don’t have anyone to tell. So I hope you can believe me.”
I wanted badly to do just that. Probably if at that moment Nolan or Jeffrey had said, “Sure, Marie, we believe you,” I’d have helped to move away all the stuff blocking the door and, despite any feelings of trepidation, bade our hostage farewell. I’d have hoped for the best.
But as I’d told Marie earlier, it didn’t matter whether she could keep our secret. All that mattered was if we could imagine keeping it ourselves if we were in her shoes. How much, in other words, did we trust ourselves?
Nolan’s answer came when he stood up, walked over to the drum set, lifted up a cymbal in its stand, and hurled it across the room. It was a large cymbal, an eighteen-inch crash, and crash it did—violently so, before skidding toward the wall. I jolted in my seat. Marie gasped.
“i don’t know what the fuck to do!” he shouted.
These were words I thought I’d never hear come out of Nolan’s mouth. Like the cymbal crash, they echoed crisply off the wooden floor and then were sucked out of the air and into the panels of soundproofing foam mounted on the walls.
Nobody moved or spoke for a few seconds, and in this silence the plan came to me fully formed. I became, for an instant, the quarterback able to visualize the entire field and all the players on it.
“Nolan,” I said, “please sit down for a minute.” He seemed not to mind taking instruction for a change. “Good. Now—Jeffrey, Nolan—I have an important question for you both. A simple question.” They were looking at me intently. “Do you believe her?”
She’d lied to us once; there was no reason why she wouldn’t do it again. And yet I found myself believing her. I did. And I wondered if the others did, too.
Jeffrey studied her a moment. “Yeah,” he said.
“I don’t know,” Nolan said. “Sure, why not.”
Hearing this, I went over to the door leading to the hallway and, trusting that I was doing the right thing, began to remove the equipment we’d stacked there.
“What are you doing?” Jeffrey asked. “Hey, wait a minute.”
“Will?” Nolan said, but that was all. He didn’t get up to stop me. Good. I didn’t want to stop. Didn’t want to second-guess myself or have Nolan or Jeffrey try to talk me out of what I was doing—because they probably could have.
When there was nothing blocking the door any longer, I returned to my chair.
“Please, Marie,” I said, “would it be all right if I asked you just a couple more questions?”
She stayed where she was, though she was clearly eyeing the door.
“How much money do you make, working at the Milk-n-Bread?” I asked.
“Six-fifty an hour,” she said.
I did some quick calculations. “So that’s, what, about fifteen thousand a year?”
“Before taxes. Yeah, that’s about right.”
“And you say we can trust you.”
Another glance toward the door. “Yes. Absolutely.”
One last deep breath, as I tried to come to terms with the inevitable fact of Marie’s existence in our lives. Nolan and Jeffrey were watching me closely. “Okay, then there’s our answer.” I gestured toward the door. “You can go.” But before a single one of them could do or say anything, before they could catch a breath or even blink, I added: “However, Nolan would like to give you twenty thousand dollars first.”
Marie’s eyes widened, then narrowed. “What for?”
“And Jeffrey—he’d like to give you twenty thousand dollars, as well.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Jeffrey asked.
I explained that Jeffrey and Nolan would each give Marie a check for twenty thousand dollars. Marie would deposit the money into her bank account. “You have a bank account, don’t you?” I asked.
Still looking suspicious, she nodded.
“Good,” I said. “You’ll endorse the checks and deposit them into your account.”
“News flash, Will,” Jeffrey said. “I don’t have twenty thousand at my immediate disposal.”
“Then sell a car.” This was my plan, and I didn’t have any time for bullshit. “Do what you need to do. In the meantime, Nolan will loan you what you need.”
“I don’t get it,” Marie said. “What am I supposed to do with all that money?”
Nolan’s icy expression was beginning to melt. “Whatever you want,” he said.
“That’s right,” I said. “Quit your job, and go back to school. Move out of your grandmother’s house. Take a vacation. It’ll be your money. Yours to use however you want.”
As we explained the offer to Marie, her continued presence in that chair filled me with gratitude and hope. It seemed nearly impossible that we weren’t hearing echoes of her footfalls, the door shutting behind her. Yet here she remained.
“Forty thousand dollars.” She said the words slowly, as if trying to imagine the sum. And even though this was my idea, I couldn’t help thinking about where those forty thousand dollars had been allocated only hours before and silently mourning the brief financial solvency of Long-Shot Records.
“You told us you can keep a secret,” I said. “Well, this will give you some incentive to be true to your word. If you ever tell the police about us, it’ll be hard to explain away all this money you’ve willingly accepted from us. There will be a money trail, and any story you might tell about a kidnapping will be complicated by that fact.”
“It’s not an ideal plan,” Nolan added, “but everyone will make out okay this way. It’s a lot of money, Marie, and it sounds like you could really use it.”
She closed her eyes a minute. She must have been imagining all the ways that money would make her life easier. “Just say for a minute,” she said at last, “that I agreed to this. How will I know for sure you’ll keep your word?”
Nolan removed his wallet from his pants pocket and handed her a business card.
“Because the three of us want nothing more than to forget any of this ever happened. Because I’m a state senator running for national office, and I know you hold all the cards in this relationship, and I believe that you know it, too. This money isn’t a gift, it’s insurance. And for that insurance, you’ll be earning more than two years’ salary. Not a bad day’s work.” Marie looked at Nolan’s card and put it into her back pocket. “So what do you say?” he asked.
She said, “This is crazy.”
“You’re considering it, though, aren’t you?” When she didn’t answer, Nolan said to Jeffrey, “Checks won’t work, though. My checkbook’s in Missouri. I assume yours is in California. But we can wire money directly to her bank account.”
“There won’t be any endorsed checks that way,” I said.
“Still, the money will be in her account
,” Nolan said. “There will be an electronic record of the transaction. That’s the best we can do. I think it’s good enough.”
“And if I don’t agree to this,” Marie said, “I can just get up and leave?”
“That’s right,” I said. “It’s completely up to you.”
She nodded. “But if I do agree—then what happens?”
“We’ll drive you to your house,” Nolan said, “so that you can get your account information, and then we’ll go to a Western Union office and wire the money to your bank.”
“Or,” I said, “in the spirit of trust you can leave on your own, go home, and then call us here with your account information.” I looked at my friends for any objections.
“Forty thousand dollars,” she said.
“Forty thousand,” I said. It was a sleazy deal we were making, and I would have to find a way to live with that. Incredibly, though, it seemed like we were all going to agree. Marie would sleep in her own bed tonight, and so would I, and then tomorrow we could all begin to pretend that none of this had ever happened.
“And there’s no catch?” she asked.
“No catch,” I said.
“That’s right,” Nolan said.
There was a beautiful silence, the silence of a decision nearly made. Jeffrey seemed to find no joy in breaking it.
“Actually,” he said, “if we’re going to do this right, then there is one catch. And it’s a big one, and nobody’s going to like it.”
PART TWO
CHAPTER 15
I awoke because of the pain in my shoulder. I rolled onto my back, but that also ached. In fact, I seemed to hurt just about everywhere. The hard floor underneath me reminded me of yet another reason why, in my experience, camping was better imagined than experienced. And this floor lacked even the earth’s slight give; nor was there a soft sleeping bag anywhere in sight.
It was dark—I had dimmed the overhead hours earlier—and very quiet. I lifted my head (there was one comfort, at least—an old sweatshirt I’d been using for a pillow) and saw the lack of activity around me. Earlier, we had carried the sofa from the control room into the main recording room. The sofa was only a loveseat, but Marie was small and seemed comfortable on it, curled on her side underneath the blanket that, if everything went according to plan, would soon return to its designated place inside the bass drum. Closer to me on the floor, Jeffrey was lying on his back, eyes closed, using his jacket for a pillow. His breathing was deep and even and, it appeared, peaceful.
I tilted my watch to catch the room’s dim light: 4:10 am. I’d been asleep for nearly an hour. I’d thought I would only rest my eyes for a while, as I’d done the nights before Cynthia and I fled New York, when I used to sit by the window and worry one hour into the next.
And yet when I’d lain down tonight, I’d felt as tired as I’d ever been in my life. In a recording studio it is difficult to tell day from night, but apparently not impossible—eventually the body takes over. Evidently my exhausted body knew that night had come. Then again, for millennia human beings have fallen asleep in more perilous circumstances than ours—with tigers on the prowl, in frigid temperatures. Right now, how many people were sleeping exposed to the elements in Bayonne or New York or Detroit? And how many others, across the globe, were right now in dreams while around them war threatened to gut them or blow them to pieces? We call ourselves human, think we’re rational beings, but we’re animals first with animal needs. We can’t help risking the big sleep for the little one. It seemed absurd, lying there in the studio, that I’d ever stayed awake all night long for something as monumentally trivial as a term paper.
Nolan was awake. He lay propped up on an elbow, looking at the television, which flickered silently and gave the room a slight strobe effect.
Earlier, I had wanted to run out briefly for essentials. Now that everyone’s stay here was more or less voluntary, I began to feel a little like their host. I thought we ought to have toothbrushes, for instance, and contact lens solution. There was a twenty-four-hour supermarket a couple miles down the road, and I didn’t believe that it would be a risk for me to go there. But I was persuaded otherwise. Better to stay here. Stay unnoticed. For one night we could do without the comforts of home.
The plan—the catch—was to give Marie’s story twelve hours. First she tells us that her grandmother will practically notify the White House if she isn’t home promptly at eight o’clock, then she tells us that her grandmother actually lives in a nursing home. First our arrest seems imminent, then she tells us that not a single person knows she’s missing. We believed the second story because it filled the holes in the first one. It explained why we were not yet in custody. But there could be other reasons, other explanations that we simply hadn’t thought of.
So before going through with my plan, a plan that would irrevocably tie us all together, Jeffrey had proposed—insisted, really—that we wait. That we stay right here in the studio, where we’d be insulated from the outside world, and continue to watch TV and see if the kidnapping story broke. If after twelve hours—by ten thirty tomorrow morning—there was no word of any robbery/kidnapping at the Milk-n-Bread or anybody reporting Marie missing, then we could assume that she was telling us the truth: that there was no surveillance tape at the store, and nobody to report her missing at home. In that case, the deal was on. In the meantime, the door leading from the recording room to the hallway remained unlocked and unobstructed. If at any time she wanted to abort our agreement, she was free to walk out the door. Of course, if she was telling the truth, then there’d be no need to.
Jeffrey was right. We didn’t like this. It seemed foolish to maintain our proximity to Marie a minute longer than necessary, let alone for twelve more hours. But Jeffrey had insisted, and Nolan soon came around to his way of thinking.
“It’s better for all of us in the long run,” he said to me. “We need to know for sure that we can trust Marie, and she needs to know for sure that she can trust us.”
“We’re only talking twelve hours,” Jeffrey added, “and for most of them we’ll be asleep.”
Fat chance of that, I thought. And yet, amazingly, I had dozed. And beside me Jeffrey was dreaming of flying, maybe, or dunking a basketball, or perhaps he was reliving his first date with Sara in the reserve room of Firestone Library, sipping their coffees and whispering back and forth, their whole future still tantalizingly ahead of them.
As I lay on my back, trying to ignore the hard floor beneath me, I thought about what Jeffrey had said earlier. I knew that Nolan once had a thing for Sara, but I assumed it was short-lived. I remembered the cold, rainy afternoon of our sophomore year when Nolan stopped by my dorm room and asked if we could go for a walk. Never mind the freezing rain—he needed to talk through a problem he was having, and he preferred to do it on the move. He was always on the move.
I needed to return my car to the parking lot at the edge of campus, so we drove there together and then walked back toward the dorms. But he wasn’t talking. He was kicking a rock in front of him, until it rolled into the gutter. Then he said, “So I’m sort of in love with Sara.”
I nearly laughed. “Oh, is that all? Come on, we all are.” Jeffrey had a habit of telling Sara that she was the prettiest girl in the room. This wasn’t mere flattery. We had all become friendly with her by then, and despite the various imperfections that had come to light—like how, despite her high grades, she seemed to require constant reassurance from her professors; like how one of her front teeth wasn’t real, having been knocked out by a field hockey stick in high school gym class—I nonetheless continued to view her as someone on whom the Great Sculptor had worked overtime.
Unlike many women her age, Sara seemed to recognize the power of her body, of her beauty. She hadn’t yet learned this lesson that day of freshman year in our modern European authors class. She hadn’t imagined just how threatening her sexuality might seem, even to a
n internationally renowned academic like Professor Rinehart. But this was a lesson she came to learn, and in the three years I’d known her she had changed in subtle ways, toning down the makeup, dressing a little more like it was 1994 in Jersey and the trend in fashion was to obscure rather than reveal. She had changed just enough to make her time at Princeton easier.
Except at parties. Then the hair came down and the cowboy boots came out, and, in her words, her “inner Texas” got unleashed onto an unsuspecting campus.
Yet even then she was no flirt. Guys would seek her out, laserlike, standing too close, shouting over some band playing Pearl Jam or Nirvana and toasting her plastic cup of beer with their own. She would slip away gracefully and go over to Jeffrey and put her arm around his waist—or, in his absence, she’d come over to one of us and say, “Save me.” So you’d engage in the easy banter particular to a guy and his buddy’s girlfriend. And you couldn’t help feeling proud, knowing that you were the one that the prettiest girl in the room had chosen as her knight in flannel armor.
At one of these parties, when intoxication had sufficiently lowered my inhibitions, I asked her what exactly she saw in Jeffrey. Simple curiosity. He was my friend, but she seemed out of his league.
“I know he won’t beat the shit out of me,” she said with little hesitation. Then, as if basing her next words on my reaction, she grinned. “I’m kidding. I mean, books.” Before Princeton, she went on to explain, she’d never met a guy who read books outside of class. Then, as if unsatisfied with literature as an answer, she went on to mention his smile, his sense of humor, his intellect. Then her face lit up again, as if just remembering something. “And he loves me.”
But now Nolan was telling me that he, too, loved her. “I’m being serious,” he said. “I’ve thought about this for a while. I think I’m in actual love with her. I’m talking about we-can-be-together-forever kind of love.”
Nolan’s romantic exploits rarely included the same woman for very long. He wasn’t looking for love, and—the way he told it, anyway—he seemed remarkably candid about this fact with the women he dated. He believed that his liaisons were in fact far more honest and respectful than most long-term, monogamous relationships, which, as he described them, were typically nothing but cauldrons of manipulation and hurt feelings. My own theory was that his philosophy came second to his actions. He was a good-looking guy with a magnetic personality. He found romantic partners easily.
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