“He will do what he has to.”
“I know. At least, I think he will. But you must admit, Megan, that my experience with Duncan does not automatically lend itself to confidence.” She laughed bitterly. “Especially where banking is concerned.”
“Say what you mean.”
“You know what I mean. He screwed up before. People died. He screws up again. People die. It’s that simple.”
Megan heard one of her daughters gasp, but she wasn’t certain which. She shut her eyes and nodded her head.
“We understand that.”
“Good. I thought it might be helpful if the twins understood it as well. Girls?”
“We heard you,” Karen said quietly.
“I understand,” Lauren added.
“Good,” said Olivia.
“You’ll never be happy, will you?” Lauren whispered.
“What?” Olivia asked sharply.
The girls were silent. Olivia was about to press them, but then decided to let it slide. It bothered her, but she forced herself to concentrate on the task that had prompted her phone call.
She fingered the small black box in her left hand. It was cold in the telephone booth outside the convenience store where she was calling. She watched as a car with a young-looking, but harried, man pulled up sharply to the curb, and he rushed inside. Probably needs milk for the baby, or diapers. She felt a disquieting sense about the conversation.
“All right,” she said. “Listen carefully.”
She lifted the small tape recorder up to the receiver and pushed the Play button.
Megan could hear the judge’s voice, coming as if from some great and unattainable distance.
“. . . Hello, Megan, Duncan, and the girls, too, if they can hear this. We are both fine. We are being treated adequately. Tommy is okay, except he misses all of you. So do I. He had one bad spell, but he seems to be over it now and is fine. We would like to come home. She hasn’t told us what she wants you to do, but we hope you will do whatever it is and we can come home . . .”
There was a small pause on the tape, then Megan could hear her father snap, “. . . All right. Is that it?” and she heard Olivia’s reply: “That was sufficient. Tommy?”
Another brief delay followed, before her son’s voice scratched through the receiver.
“Hello, Mom and Dad and Karen and Lauren, too. I really miss you guys and I want to come home. Please, I want to come home because I miss you all so much. Grandfather is fine and I am okay. We play some games, but it isn’t like home up here and I want to be home . . .”
She could hear her son’s voice shake slightly and it was as if black ropes were thrown around her own heart and head.
“. . . So bye for now and I really love you and I hope I’ll see you soon because I miss you so much . . .”
On the tape, she could hear Olivia say, “That’s fine, Tommy. That’s enough now. Thank you.”
She heard a clicking sound and then there was a small silence before Olivia came back on the line.
“Did that hurt, Megan? Was that painful?”
She did not reply.
“Girls?”
Karen and Lauren each had the sense to keep their mouths shut.
“I thought it might,” Olivia said.
Megan took a deep breath.
“You’ve made your point,” she said. “Let’s get on with it.”
“Tell Duncan,” Olivia whispered. “Make him understand.”
“When will you call?”
“When I know he has the money.”
“How will you know that?”
“I’ll know.”
“But—”
“Goodbye, Megan. Goodbye, girls. Think about this, won’t you: They’ve only been in prison for forty-eight hours. But I was there for eighteen years.”
Olivia hung up the telephone, crashing the receiver down onto the hook.
Damn! she thought. Dammit to hell! She had a wretched feeling that she had done something wrong and she was at a loss to figure out what. She walked slowly through the early evening black and cold to her car, replaying everything in her head and thinking: I must keep control.
Megan held the telephone for an instant, listening to the emptiness before replacing it on its cradle. Her son’s voice echoed through her and she could hardly stand. She slammed a fist onto the table in anger. She pictured him sitting alone in a tiny room and she desperately wanted to be able to reach out her hand to him. She had an odd memory, one that leaped unexpected into her head. It was of learning from her physician that she was pregnant, as she suspected. The news had arrived with a mixture of excitement and consternation; her life with Duncan and the girls had been so settled and ideal, and she was afraid that a baby would disrupt the magic symmetry of the family. She wanted to smile, thinking how naive she had been. She had had no idea what a disruption Tommy would prove to be. But the girls were the children of my youth, she thought, as the twins walked back into the kitchen. Tommy was the child of my maturity. He is the one who signaled my real beginning. He was the product of a steady, solid adult love, not the heady, wild passion Duncan and I had when we were electric young lovers. And if I lose him, I lose all I’ve built.
She turned toward the girls, who both seemed pale, but unbowed. She nodded to them, then put her arms around them.
Megan felt as if something within her had cracked and broken, like an eggshell, only to reveal something different inside.
She hugged her two daughters close to her and let black murderous ideas fill her to bursting.
8
FRIDAY
Shortly before dawn, Duncan sat on the floor in Tommy’s room and for the hundredth time went over his checklist. The house around him was quiet, save for the ordinary clicks and creaks of darkness, the heating system starting up, the wind rattling some tree branches against a window, a sigh from the twins’ bedroom, where their sleep seemed edgy and out of synchronization with the waning night rhythms.
“I can do this,” he whispered to himself.
Duncan placed the list on Tommy’s bed and stood up. The last hours before morning are always the most difficult. He remembered moments with his son, rocking him through the pre-dawn blackness, holding him in a wrestler’s grip, as if all the boy’s problems tugged and pulled at him, threatening to carry him away to some unreachable spot. Sometimes it had felt like a physical battle, holding off the stresses that clawed at his son.
Duncan’s eyes drifted to his son’s bureau top. He picked up a spotted brown and white turtle shell and held it in his hand, turning it over and over, rubbing his fingers across the dry, rough exterior. Where did he get this? he wondered. What does it mean to him? He put the shell down and picked up a rock that seemed cut in two, exposing a quartz-like purple and white interior. And what secret does this hold? Two dozen toy soldiers had been lined up in opposing rows, knights mingled with Civil War figures and army commandos in some historically preposterous confrontation. Which side were you on, Tommy?
Duncan felt all the tensions and exhaustions of the last few days gather within him—then just as suddenly recede, like a wave running across the sand. He held his hands out in front of himself and asked, Who are you?
I am a banker.
No, you’re not.
I am. I am a businessman and a father and a husband.
And?
That’s it.
And?
That’s it!
Liar.
Right. I’m lying to myself.
He looked down at the sheet of paper on the bed with his checklist. He examined all the details of the crime that he’d planned. I am a criminal, as well. I have been since that day in Lodi. It has always been within me, waiting to come out.
Then he shook his head. The
y’ve stolen my child. It is up to me to get him back. Why should I let anything stand in my way?
He thought of his own mother, then of Megan, and finally of Olivia. The three women in my life. My mother was impersonal and distant, ordered, spinsterish, without enthusiasm. Megan was filled with color and art and spontaneous, vibrant. She was everything my mother wasn’t. And Olivia, what was she? Danger, rebellion, fury, direction.
Duncan remembered seeing her for the first time at a campus demonstration against Central Intelligence Agency recruitment. She had led a phalanx of students down a street, chanting slogans, waving banners, then finally breaking into a rush and throwing themselves forward, filling the lobby of the administration building, disrupting secretaries, admissions officers, and university personnel with screamed imprecations. Vials of sheep’s blood were splashed across desktops. Papers were strewn about in the hurricane force of the takeover. Chaos littered the scene, then redoubled with the arrival of the police. She had been driven, possessed, he thought. Everything that she touched seemed to burst into flame, as if she were some combustible liquid. And I was drawn to her, irresistibly, at meetings for the SDS, antiwar teach-ins, demonstrations, concerts, and finally, at smaller, clandestine gatherings, in post-midnight darkness, grouped around wine bottles and Marxist tracts, the air filled with cigarette smoke and revolution.
Duncan sat back hard on Tommy’s bed, thinking about the simplicity of that time. There was right and there was wrong. We were our parents’ worst nightmare come true. Then he shook his head. Wrong. This is a parent’s worst nightmare. He thought of the first time he’d seen Megan. He’d been wandering through the art department at college, looking for a quiet place to read through a physics text, when he walked past a life drawing class. Megan had been posed at the front, naked except for a towel thrown across her lap in minimal modesty, her breasts jutting outward as if in defiance, daring anyone to snicker or laugh. The students were sketching her silently. He had stood in the doorway, stricken, eyes locked onto her, until the professor went over and closed the door in his face. The class had tittered, but instead of fleeing in embarrassment, he’d waited outside, waylaying her as the students flooded out. He tried to apologize, but instead stammered something silly and disjointed, which she had listened to with a half-smile that spoke partially of invitation and which caused him to bluster and trip on his tongue until he was thoroughly ashamed and confused, more naked in his desire to meet her than she had been without her clothes.
He warmed with the memory. He was always amazed at her interest in him. It always seemed to him that she was a hundredfold more exciting, that his work, his academics, his doggedness, was dull and boring. His head was forever filled with theorems and figures; hers with colors and bold pen strokes. She was filled with confidence, he with doubt. He had never quite believed her devotion to him, the way she had followed him through his own academic wanderings, steady in her love, while he searched miserably for something elusive.
I would never have been brave enough to take off my clothes in front of a drawing class. I never had that freedom. I had to hunt for what was missing inside me.
He took a deep breath.
Instead, I found Olivia.
He settled back on the bed. She is right about one thing. It is a debt. You thought you would escape. But you were wrong. You have never escaped. A part of you has been waiting for this day for eighteen years.
All right, Olivia, he said silently. You’ve come for your pound of flesh. I will steal it for you. And then we will end this.
Duncan understood that after this night, nothing would ever be the same for him. It did not bother him nearly as much as he thought it would.
He rose up, overcome by a need to see the twins. He maneuvered through the darkened house to their doorway, peered in, and saw them flung into their beds, clothes strewn about the floor. There was just enough early morning light filtering through the window for him to make them out. For an instant he simply admired the way their hair fanned across the pillowcases, the way their limbs seemed supple, yet relaxed. He wondered if they had any idea the joy they had brought to his life. Probably not. Children do not understand what they are until they become parents themselves. Joy, terror, worry, and delight all wrapped together into an impossible knot of emotions. He shook his head, took one last look at the sleeping forms, remembered them, in that moment, as babies, as toddlers, as children, and now, as the near-adults they were. He made his way through the darkened house to his bedroom, and saw his wife where she had tossed herself in exhaustion a few hours earlier. He walked to her side and gently stroked her arm. Megan’s eyes fluttered open and she reached out for him, still half-asleep. They embraced, and she blinked herself awake.
She said nothing, but surprised herself by pulling him down on top of her, forgetting, if only for a few seconds, everything that had happened, everything that would happen.
At breakfast Duncan announced that this day was going to appear completely routine: The twins were to go to school, Megan to her real estate office, him to the bank. Karen and Lauren squealed their objections immediately.
“But, Dad! Suppose something happens?” Karen said.
“We won’t be home. No one will!”
“That’s the point,” Duncan said. “Go to school. Talk to your friends. Act as if nothing out of the ordinary has happened. Come home at your regular time. Do everything just as if it were a regular Friday.”
“That’s going to be impossible,” Lauren muttered.
“No,” Megan said, after getting over her initial surprise at her husband’s request. “Your father’s right. Today we must act as if nothing unusual is happening. I’ll go to work. I’m going to smile and act just as if I hadn’t a care in the world. We’ve got to keep what’s happening to ourselves, and the best way to do that is to do nothing out of the ordinary.”
The girls looked dismayed, and Duncan tried to cheer them up: “Look, we’re going to be over this soon enough. I know you two can act it out for a day. You’ve fooled me enough times—”
“Dad! We haven’t!” Karen said.
“At least not that often,” Lauren added.
“You two have always said you wanted to be actresses—” Duncan said.
“But not like this!” Lauren interrupted.
“I don’t see what this has to do with acting,” Karen said.
“It has everything to do with acting,” Megan replied swiftly. “We’re all performers throughout this whole thing. So far, we’ve been acting like the victims we are. Well, starting today, we’re going to begin behaving a little different. We’re doing something, for goodness’ sakes! That’s different, right there.”
The twins nodded slowly.
“You know,” Lauren said suddenly, brightly, “there’s a dance at the gym tonight. The annual Winter’s Here/Mukluk and Parka dance . . . I think Teddy Leonard is expecting me to be there. And I know that Will Freeman has been trying to hit on Karen—”
“Lauren! He has not! We just were both interested in the same physics problem and got to talking.”
“Well,” Lauren drawled, “he is on the basketball team, and he is handsome and he does follow you around everywhere, and he does call every chance he gets, so I must be completely insane if I think he’s interested . . .”
“Well, what about Teddy? Wanting to drive you home every day? What’s that all about?”
The twins weren’t bickering as much as teasing each other. Megan let them continue as they volleyed back and forth. She smiled over at Duncan, who shook his head in mock consternation. When there was a momentary lull, Megan interrupted.
“Karen. Lauren. I don’t think going to a dance is the right idea right now.”
“Oh, Mom, I didn’t really mean it. I just was, well—”
“She was just being a bother,” said Karen quickly, sticking out her
tongue at her sister, who frowned at her.
“Well, it’s okay. Just tell those boys that you’ve been grounded.”
“They’ll believe that,” said Lauren.
“And remember: Be careful.”
“How?”
“I don’t know,” Megan continued. “Just be alert. Anything out of the ordinary, even a little bit. Stick together and keep quiet, and be aware of what’s going on around you.”
Duncan broke in. “If you’re scared, come home. Or call me or your mom. Or stick with some friends, but don’t tell them what’s going on. Use your judgment.”
The girls nodded.
Megan wondered for an instant whether she was making an awful mistake. She fought against the urge to turn to Duncan and refuse to let the twins from her sight. But she understood the strength in what he was suggesting, and she forced herself to go along.
She watched them get ready and her doubts pulled her to the front door after them. She waited outside in the cold while they climbed into their car and pulled away from the curb. She continued to stare after them as they disappeared around the corner. She could see Lauren waving from a half-block away, and then they were out of her sight.
Olivia Barrow sat in an overstuffed armchair in the small living room of the farmhouse, burrowing about, trying to find a comfortable group of lumps. For a moment or two she remained staring out the window, across the back field, down to the woodline, in the direction where she had parked the judge’s car, just beyond her sight. She made a mental note to go down to the hollow where she had stashed it and turn the engine over a few times, just to make absolutely certain that it was in good operating condition. A shaft of sunlight burst through the windowpane, bathing Olivia in a warm glow, and she shut her eyes and contemplated her design. For an instant she felt the heat of satisfaction, but then, as the light faded, shut off by a passing gray cloud, so did her sense of accomplishment, replaced by her own doubts. What did I do wrong? she asked herself.
She went over the conversation with Megan, in her head.
Day of Reckoning Page 23
