Red 1-2-3 (9780802192844)

by Katzenbach, John

  Sarah turned from the window and stared through the living room to the front door where the pile of mail was bunched up on the floor. Never answer the door, she said to herself. Never answer a ringing doorbell, or a hard knock. Don’t pick up a telephone when someone unknown calls. Just stay where you are, because it just might be a young state trooper with his Smokey the Bear hat in his hands, looking embarrassed and stammering, “There’s been an accident, and I hate to have to tell you this, Mrs. Locksley . . ..”

  She sometimes wondered why her life had been ruined on such a fine day. It should have been a raining, sleeting, miserable, gloomy wintry mix, like this day was. But instead, it had been bright, warm, an endless blue sky, so when she fell to the floor that morning, her eyes had scoured the heavens above her, trying to find some shape that they could fix on, as if they could tether her to even a passing cloud, so desperate was she to hold on to something.

  Sarah shrugged at the injustice of it all.

  She looked outside the window. No one passing by. No naked sideshow this day. She ran her hands through her mane of red hair, wondering when it was that she’d showered, or taken a comb to the tangled thatch. A couple of days, at the least. She shrugged. I was beautiful once. I was happy once. I had the life I wanted once.

  No more.

  She turned and looked at the pile of envelopes by her front door. Reality intrudes, she told herself. She wished she were drunker or more stoned, but she felt totally sober.

  So, she walked over to the pile of dunning letters. Take it all, she said. I don’t want to have anything left.

  The nondescript letter with the New York postmark was resting on top. She didn’t know why it grabbed her attention, but she reached down and picked it up from the pile. At first, she imagined this was a really clever way some creditor had devised to get her to respond. Putting Second Notice in large red letters on the outside was really designed to have her ignore whatever the notice was demanding pretty rapidly. But not putting anything—well, she thought, that was smart. Her curiosity was pricked. Reverse psychology.

  Okay, she told herself, as she idly tore open the envelope, I’ll give you this one. You won this round. I’ll read your threatening letter requiring me to pay money I don’t have for something I no longer want or need.

  She started reading, and swiftly realized that whatever she had had to drink earlier and whatever pills she had taken that morning, it might not have been enough.

  By the time she’d finished the message, for the first time she actually felt naked.

  It was just after her last morning class when Jordan Ellis became Red Three, and she was utterly miserable. She did not know about her new role immediately because she was preoccupied with her latest in a yearlong series of failures: American history. She was staring at her most recent essay in the required course, which was emblazoned with a cryptic note from the professor See Me and a desultory grade: D-plus. She crumpled the sheets of typing in her fist, then sighed deeply and smoothed them out again. The grade had little to do with her ability; this she knew. Words, language, ideas, details—all of it came naturally to her. She had been an A student in the recent past, but she was no longer sure that she would ever be again.

  Jordan felt a surge of anger. She knew that everything was tied together, all knots pulled tight. She was failing math, barely passing history, on the cusp of flunking Spanish and science, and just creeping along in English literature—and college applications hung over her head like a sword. She could no longer concentrate, no longer focus. No longer do the work that had once been so pleasant and had come to her so easily. The school psychologist had sat across from her a week earlier and glibly talked about acting out and behaving self-destructively in order to gain attention and wrapped up every failing grade with the easiest of emotional equations: “You were delivered a blow, Jordan, when your parents announced their divorce. You need to rise above it.”

  It hadn’t been anywhere near that simple.

  She hated trite psychology. The school therapist had made it seem like life was little more than hanging on to a rope and swinging back and forth above some abyss and that Jordan had allowed her grip to slip loose.

  She felt like she had no home any longer, that everything in her life was a lie, that the two people closest to her were nothing more than illusion and deception. She had decided that she would never love anyone. Not anymore. And as angry as she was, she could not shake loose from the sensation that she was somehow to blame for something terrible, something that had ripped her life apart as casually as one might tear a shred of worn cloth into a rag.

  When she surveyed the landscape of her senior year of school, she could see nothing but rocks and crevasses strewn across dirt and mud. Boys she’d once happily experimented with sexually now mocked her. Girls she’d once thought were her friends now spent all their time trashing her behind her back. Her life had become so entwined, so knotted, that she didn’t know where to turn. Jordan’s typical day, she imagined: A miserable grade on a test in the morning; fumble the ball during basketball practice in the afternoon so often that the coach yells at you and then removes you from the starting lineup; eat alone in the dining hall at dinner because no one will sit with you.

  She wished she could hide somewhere, but even this was impossible. Her damn red hair—she hated it—made her stand out in every crowd, when all she wanted was to fade away into anonymity. She even tucked it up beneath a knit ski cap, but this hardly helped.

  She was walking along a pathway between the art studio and the science labs, head down, her parka scrunched up, her backpack jammed with books tugging at her shoulders. Cold rain dripped from the ivy that covered the dormitory buildings at her exclusive private school. At least, she thought, the weather fits my mood. Jordan plowed along, a little glad that the weather was driving everyone along the black macadam trails that crisscrossed the campus with the same rapid pace. It was early in the afternoon, although the dark gray skies made it seem like night was about to tumble down. She had basically skipped lunch, only ducking into the cafeteria for an orange, a hunk of French bread, and a small milk carton, which she stuffed into her parka pocket to eat in the solitude of her room.

  As a senior, she had managed to get a single—no roommate—in one of the smaller, converted houses that rimmed the campus. A regular New England white clapboard home built a century earlier, it had a wide front porch and a stately mahogany center stairwell. It had once been home to the school’s chaplains, and had a ghostly smell of religious devotion inside. Now it housed six upper-class girls and the women’s lacrosse coach and Spanish instructor, a Miss Gonzalez, who was supposed to act as a dorm parent and confidante, but who spent most of her free time meeting with the assistant football coach, young and married with two little children. Their sounds of their unbridled—and the girls thought sporting—passion penetrated the walls and gave the girls in the dormitory something to laugh about and secretly envy.

  Thinking about the squeals, moans, and sighs of cheating that came from Miss Gonzalez’s suite actually brought a grin to Jordan’s lips. Letting go like that must really be wonderful, she imagined. It didn’t seem at all like her fumbling, self-conscious experiments with boys.

  She shook her head and slowly all her troubles crept back onto her shoulders and into her heart, as if the jammed backpack that weighed down on her neck was filled with far more than books. For the first time since the day she’d finished packing for school and her parents had interrupted her with a Jordan, we need to speak with you . . .” summons, she truly wondered whether continuing was at all worthwhile. She knew nothing was truly her fault, and yet it felt as if everything was her fault.

  Filled with confusion about seemingly everything in her life, Jordan stepped inside the vestibule of her dormitory. She shook some of the dampness from her head and scooted some from her parka. She tugged off her ski cap, letting her hair
fall loose because no one was around. Everyone was still at lunch and there was a little time left before the afternoon sports activities took over the private school routine. The quiet calmed her, and she padded over to the table where the dormitory’s mail was sorted into six different trays. She saw there were three letters in hers.

  The first two were in familiar hands: her father’s tight, barely readable scribble and her mother’s more flowery, expansive script. That these two letters arrived simultaneously made perfect sense to Jordan. There was some new excessively dramatic dispute, some new and overblown bone of contention between the two of them. Since their announcement hardly a week had gone by without some new bickering back and forth. This had allowed their lawyers to posture and threaten like the blowhards they probably were. Her parents both considered Jordan to be the ultimate emotional battlefield, the Waterloo over which they could compete like Bonaparte and Wellington. She knew what was inside each letter: an explanation of each one’s latest nonnegotiable position, and why Jordan should side with the letter writer’s interpretation of events. “Wouldn’t you really rather live with me, darling, and not your father?” Or: “You know how your mother can’t think of anyone except herself, honey.”

  Her parents had only recently taken to communicating with her through the formality of the U.S. mail. Both had realized that she simply ignored e-mail and allowed her cell phone to go straight to voice mail when they called. But the tactile presence of the written word on her mother’s pink-hued, expensive stationery, or her father’s business-weight bond, seemed harder for her to shunt aside. But, she thought, I’m learning.

  She shoved the two letters into her backpack. Ignoring whatever falsely urgent dispute between her parents that needed her immediate attention gave her a small sense of satisfaction.

  The third letter surprised her. Other than her name and a New York postmark, she could not tell what it was about. Her first thought was that it was from one of the many attorneys handling the divorce, but then she realized that wasn’t the case, because those folks all had very fancy stationery emblazoned with their names and addresses so there was no doubt of the importance of whatever was contained within. This letter was slender, and as she walked to her room, pushed open the door, and stepped inside, she turned the envelope over two or three times, inspecting it. She was reluctant to open any mail. It was never good news.

  She dropped her coat to the floor and dumped her backpack on her bed. She took out the orange for her lunch and started to peel it, but stopped midway through and, shrugging, tore open the letter.

  She read the message slowly, then read it again.

  After she finished, Jordan looked up, as if someone had entered the room beside her. Her lip quivered.

  This has to be a joke, she thought. Someone is playing a trick. It can’t be real.

  It was the only explanation that made sense, except she could feel a lurking darkness deep within her telling her that making sense wasn’t really what was important to whoever had written this letter.

  Earlier that morning, she had not thought that she could possibly feel more alone, but suddenly, right at that moment, she did.

  3

  Panic One.

  Panic Two.

  Panic Three.

  After reading their letter, each Red panicked in her own unique way. Each Red mistakenly thought she was maintaining control over emotions that seemed suddenly explosive. Each Red imagined she was reacting to the threatening words appropriately. Each Red believed she was taking the right steps. Each Red felt that she—and she alone—could keep herself safe, if safe was what she actually wanted to be. Each Red assessed the stated threat to her life and reached a dizzyingly different conclusion. Each Red was unsure whether she was truly in danger or just ought to be annoyed, although neither alternative made complete sense. Each Red struggled to grasp the truth of her situation, only to be stymied. Each Red slid into confusion without knowing that was what she was doing.

  None of them were completely right about anything.

  Karen Jayson’s first instinct, after absorbing the shock delivered by the words on the page, was to call the local police.

  Sarah Locksley’s initial impulse was to find the handgun that her dead husband had kept locked away in a steel box, hidden on a top shelf in the small room that had doubled as his home office.

  Jordan Ellis did nothing except flop down and curl up on her bed, doubled over as if cramped and sick.

  Karen’s conversation with the detective was brutally unpleasant. She had read the letter thoroughly twice, and then slapped it down on the kitchen table and angrily seized her telephone from a hook on the wall. Her imagination reeled with barely contained fury. She was not accustomed to being threatened and she hated the coy fairy-tale underpinnings of the letter, so the officious, determined, well-educated I’m not scared of anything or anyone side of her rapidly took over. So, who are you, some big bad fucking wolf? she thought. We’ll see about that. Without really considering what she would say, she dialed 911.

  She expected the dispatcher who answered to be helpful. She was wrong.

  “Police. Fire. Emergency,” he said.

  She thought the voice sounded very young, even with the curt words.

  “This is Doctor Karen Jayson over on Marigold Road. I believe I need to speak with a detective.”

  “What is the nature of your emergency, ma’am?”

  “Doctor,” Karen corrected him. She instantly wished that she hadn’t.

  “Okay,” the dispatcher responded instantly, “what is the nature of your emergency, Doctor?” She could hear a tired end-of-shift contempt in the way he forced out the word.

  “A threatening letter,” she answered.

  “From who?”

  “I don’t know. It wasn’t signed.”

  “An anonymous threat?”

  “Yes. Precisely.”

  “Well, you better speak with someone in the detective bureau,” the dispatcher said.

  That’s what I said, Karen thought but did not say.

  She was put on hold, presumably while the phone line was switched. The local police force was small and occupied a stolid brick building in the center of the closest town, just off the main common, adjacent to the town’s only ambulance and fire station and across from the modest town hall. She lived in the countryside at least five miles away and the only time she passed the police headquarters was when she took her weekly Saturday morning trip to the Whole Foods Market nearby. She guessed that most of the police work was dedicated to keeping the highways safe from bored and speeding teenagers, stepping between husbands and wives who had come to blows, and working with the nearby bigger city forces on drug investigations, because many dealers had come to understand that being out in the rural sections allowed them considerable peace and quiet while they cooked up crystal meth or chopped up rock cocaine for distribution on much harder urban streets and nearby colleges. Karen wondered whether there were more than ten actual police officers on duty at any time in her town and if any had even the smallest amount of sophisticated training.

  “This is Detective Clark,” a sturdy, no-nonsense voice came over the line. She was relieved to note that this policeman at least sounded older.

  She identified herself and told the detective that she’d received a threatening letter. She was surprised that he did not ask her to read it to him, but instead launched into a series of questions, with the most obvious first.

  “Do you know who might have sent it to you?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Does it have any identifying marks that might indicate—?”

  “No,” she interrupted. “A New York City postmark, that’s all.”

  “You have no idea who the writer is?”

  “None.”

  “Well, have you been through any per
sonal issues—”

  “No. Not in years.”

  “Have you made any enemies at work?”

  “No.”

  “Have you recently had to fire an employee?”

  “No.”

  “Have you had any run-ins with neighbors? Like maybe a nasty dispute over a property line, or your dog got out and chased their cat, or something like that?”

  “No. I don’t have a dog.”

  “Has there been anything out of the ordinary in the last few days or weeks that you noticed, like telephone hang-ups, or vehicles following you on your way to or from work?”

  “No.”

  “Have you had any recent thefts, or a break-in either at your home or office?”

  “No.”

  “Have you lost your wallet or a credit card or some other type of personal identification?”

  “No.”

  “How about Internet? An identity theft, or—”

  “No.”

  “Can you think of anyone, anywhere, for any reason who might want to harm you?”

  “No.”

  The detective sighed, which Karen thought was unprofessional. Again, she did not say this out loud.

  “Come on, Doctor. Surely there’s somebody out there you might have crossed, maybe even inadvertently. Did you ever misdiagnose some patient? Fail to provide some medical service that caused someone to get ill, or even to die? Ever been sued by some unsatisfied customer?”

  “No.”

  “So you can’t think of anyone . . . ?”

  “No. That’s what I told you. No.”

  The detective paused before continuing. “How about someone who might want to play a practical joke?”

  Karen doubted this. Some of the other performers she met at comedy clubs had what she considered pretty far-out senses of humor—and there was a style of punking other comedians with pranks that verged on the sadistic and cruel—but a letter like the one on the kitchen table in front of her seemed way beyond any comedian’s idea of good fun, no matter how twisted he or she was. “No. And I don’t think it’s very funny.”