Rough Draft

by James W. Hall

  Frank leaned back in his chair. He seemed to be fighting off a grin.

  “I didn’t know what was going to happen, Frank.”

  “Well, well,” he said.

  “I’m going.” But she didn’t move from the sink.

  Frank pushed his chair back, stood up.

  As he approached, he raked a hand through his hair, got some of it unsnarled.

  Even as tired as she was, as emotionally wrenched from seeing the film of her mother and dad, it wasn’t an unpleasant prospect, cuddled with Frank Sheffield in that queen-size bed filling the adjoining room. Except for the gnawing uneasiness, something about Frank that kept bothering her, a series of slightly off-key notes that kept jangling the air between them.

  “So, what you’re saying is, there’s really no reason you need to go home.” His eyes were on hers. He tilted his head to the side with an easy grin.

  She reached out and pressed her palm flat against his chest. About to grab a handful of his shirt and draw him to her or fend him off, she wasn’t sure. He looked down at her hand, trying to read this moment, the ambiguous heat of her gesture.

  Then he reached up with his right hand, gripped her wrist and slowly drew her hand down his chest, smoothed it across his flat stomach. Eyes on hers. At waist level, Frank hooked his right arm behind his back, like some ballroom dancer’s slinky move, tugging her into his embrace.

  His head tilted to the side, tipped down, lips softening against hers, finding the mesh. She kept her eyes open, looking at his lids and his cheek, trying in this way to stay aloof, but her lips betrayed her, the kiss deepening, mouths coming slowly apart, resettling. And she shut her eyes and gave herself to this moment, the hunger and urgency. His hands rising to cup her head, guide the pressure of the kiss, and Hannah could feel the distance melt, the breathless merger begin.

  But she couldn’t let it happen. She wasn’t sure why. She snaked her right hand up, pressed her palm against his chest, and pried herself away. He relaxed, let go of her head. He blinked at her like a man emerging from a pleasant sleep. For a second or two his hands still held the airy shape of her skull, then he let that go as well.

  She took a deep breath, tried to hide her gasping.

  “What is it?” His whisper was hoarse. “What’s wrong?”

  She stepped back, got another foot of distance between them.

  “Would you tell me something, Frank?”

  “If I can, sure.”

  A shy smile flickered on his lips as if he were reliving the kiss a few seconds more. Hannah’s hand wandered in the air between them, fumbling for the right gesture, something emphatic, something to snap him out of his erotic drowse. She pointed a finger in his face. It was all wrong, but she held it there. Stubborn, on the edge of inexplicable tears.

  “Tell me, Frank. Why the hell should it take so long for your FBI computer geeks to trace a Web site back to its source? Is it really that complicated?”

  His quiet smile dissolved. Hannah, the mood killer.

  She said, “Here we are, we’re playing ring-around-a-rosy with the bastard who killed my parents. I’m getting shot at. We were almost drowned out there tonight. When all we need is for your computer people to do their job and we could get off this merry-go-round, go arrest this son of a bitch, and be done with it. Why’s it taking so long, Frank? Can you answer me that?”

  He shook his head, nothing to say. His smile was in ruins.

  “Whose side are you on, Frank?”

  “Yours,” he said. “Yours, Hannah.”

  “That’s not how it feels, Frank. I’m sorry, but that’s not how it feels.”

  And the sexual tension that had been gathering in the air vaporized.

  Ten minutes later Hannah was on her way back across the Rickenbacker Causeway, headed home. Her face flushed, her lips still plump with blood.

  Misty lay on her bed in a pair of white panties and one of her old Hooters shirts watching Hal circle the room, then come over to the bed and sit down on the edge. She sat up, puffed the pillow, and leaned back against it.

  “I didn’t know if you were coming back.”

  She’d set the lights low, just the one in the bathroom with the door mostly closed, a dim halo surrounding them.

  Hal took a break and let it out like he had something to say but didn’t know how to begin. His hands were in his lap. He was looking at a place on the wall just above her head.

  “What is it, Hair?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “You don’t know what?”

  He brought his eyes down and gave her a thin smile. She was getting used to him now, seeing him better than the first couple of times. He wasn’t like anyone she’d met, Jesus from work, the dozen other guys who’d been in her bed, mauling her, using her body roughly like it was some kind of gym equipment.

  Hal was calm and quiet and serious. A guy who actually saw her when he looked, glimpsing some of what lived behind her eyes. That’s how it felt anyway. She might be wrong. But the fact was, she’d never experienced that before, a guy looking at her, penetrating a few inches below the surface.

  “I came back because I wanted to give you something.”

  Misty was quiet, not moving. He kept studying her but she didn’t feel invaded or violated or any of that male-pushy stuff. A guy trying to force his advantage. None of that. Just his eyes prowling around inside her, seeing some of the stuff she kept hidden there.

  “What?” she managed to say. “What did you want to give me?”

  Hal looked off at the wall, his eyes getting fuzzy. A moment passed, then he looked back at Misty, blinking as if to clear the vision. He leaned forward, dug his hand into his pocket. He came out with something in his closed fist.

  He gazed at her, making up his mind, then he opened his fist.

  Lying flat in his palm was a shiny brown glass marble with a black dot in its center.

  “What is it, Hal?”

  “It’s all that’s left. An eye. One eye. I wanted you to have it.”

  She watched as Hal took another long breath, then another.

  “I don’t understand, Hal. You’re going to have to talk to me.”

  Hal shook his head, swallowed a couple of times. When he spoke again, his eyes were hazy, and the words seemed awkward in his mouth, like he was uttering a language he’d never used before. Having to work hard to fit the clumsy words together into complete sentences.

  “I see you in my head,” said Hal. “I close my eyes and I can see you. When I’m driving around, when I’m off somewhere else.”

  “Well, that’s good, Hal. That’s a good thing. I’ve been seeing you like that too. Shut my eyes and you’re there. Same thing.”

  He looked at the wall again. He blinked a couple of times, then he spoke.

  “From when I was little till I was fifteen years old and went off on my own, I lived in one place after another. Different houses, different parents. Some of them were okay, some weren’t. It didn’t matter either way, because I knew they’d get sick of me eventually, ship me to the next place. On to the next, then the next, then the next after that. The only thing I managed to hold onto all those years was some stupid stuffed animal. I had it from the time I was a little kid. I always figured it was something my real mother stuck in my crib when she sent me off to the orphanage. It was a little toy animal. A silver wolf.”

  Misty reached out and rested a hand on his thigh.

  “Sometimes, I talked to the thing. I told the wolf what I’d dreamed the night before, which bully at school was pushing me around, what I was going to do to him, stupid stuff like that. During the day, when I left for school, I’d stuff the wolf under the mattress. At night I’d get it out and I’d talk to it some more. And sometimes the wolf talked back to me.”

  “Jesus, Hal.”

  He flicked a look her way, then slid his gaze back to the far wall.

  “Then the wolf started falling apart. The seams split, the stuffing started leaking out. I di
dn’t know how to fix it and I couldn’t ask any of the women to sew it back together because I didn’t want anyone to know I had the thing. They might take it from me or make fun of me, use it against me somehow. I got so I didn’t want to touch the thing anymore. More I touched it, more stuff leaked out. I tried to break the habit, just stop touching it. But I couldn’t. Until finally all the stuffing was gone. It was just a rag with glass eyes.”

  Misty looked again at the brown half-marble in his palm.

  “Now that’s all that’s left.”

  With her breath tight in her chest, Misty said, “And you want to give it to me?”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  He handed it to her and Misty took it and let it lie in her palm.

  “Why, Hal? Something means so much to you, why would you give it away?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I think you do know, Hal.”

  “I do?”

  “Yeah, I think you know. But I think it’s hard for you to say the words.”

  She reached out with her right hand and trailed her fingers across his cheek. Hal’s breathing smoothed out, deepened. She felt the bristles of his heavy beard and the muscles in his jaw starting to relax.

  Misty traced the outline of his lips.

  “You know the two of us, we have something in common, Hal.”

  “We do?”

  “Yeah, think about it. We’re orphans, both of us. Abandoned by the ones who were supposed to love us. No wonder we’re so fucked up. So needy and lost.”

  “I never felt like this,” he said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. It’s like I’m sick. Dizzy and weird.”

  “It’s okay. It’s just a new thing, a new feeling. It’s normal for it to feel weird. You’ve always been a lone wolf. Like your toy animal. A loner, going your own way. So it’s a little strange to be thinking about someone else, seeing them in your head, including them in things.”

  “It is. It’s strange.”

  “But perfectly natural,” Misty said. “Two people, a man and a woman, having these feelings. It’s the natural way.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It feels weird.”

  “How about animals? You know all about animals. Aren’t there some that take mates, stick with them? Like a family.”

  “Some.”

  “Well, see. It’s natural.”

  “It’s called pair bonding,” Hal said. “Most birds just do it for one season, then the next spring they have to start all over again, do the whole mating thing. All the dancing around, special songs, fighting the other males.”

  “But there are some, aren’t there, they take a mate and never let go?”

  “Swans and cranes,” Hal said. “Gibbons too. And macaws.”

  “Macaws, they’re what, like parrots?”

  “Parrot family, yeah. They fly in pairs. You see an odd number of macaws, it’s because one of them has lost its mate and won’t ever remarry. Swans, cranes, gibbons, macaws. There’s a few others too, but I can’t remember them right now.”

  Misty watched the steady rise and fall of his chest. She could hear the air filling his lungs, hear it leaving.

  “There’s something else,” Hal said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Something I need to ask you, something you could help me with if you were willing.”

  Misty leaned back against the pillows.

  “I know,” she said. “You want me to help you kidnap the boy.”

  He looked at her for a long moment.

  “How’d you know that?”

  “Because that’s how it is between people like us. We can read each other’s mind. We’re blending together, becoming one.”

  “You’ll help me, then?”

  She looked again at the glass wolf eye, cold in her palm.

  “Just tell me what to do, Hal. Just tell me what to do and I’ll do it.”

  “Hannah Keller wants to quit. She’s going to give up trying to find your father, and just walk away. But I can’t let her do that.”

  “So we steal her kid,” Misty said. “Then she has to do what we say.”

  “That’s right,” said Hal. “You’re very smart.”

  Misty looked him deep in the eye to see if he was being ironic. But he looked back at her, a hundred percent dead-on sincere. Hal Bonner didn’t know how to be ironic. And Misty liked that. Misty liked that a lot.

  “Thanks,” she said. “You’re sweet to say it. You’re very sweet.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Back on the mainland, Hannah took Old Cutler Road south through the Gables and South Miami. The narrow road meandered along the coast, mirrored its irregular contours, just two lanes cutting through a tunnel of overhanging banyans and oaks, past the big pink Mediterranean mansions. It was one of the first roads in Miami, the one the settlers had used to push farther south, hacking another mile and another after that through palmetto and buttonwood and black mangroves, tying bandannas over their mouths to keep from choking on the clouds of mosquitoes, all the while looking out for Indians and alligators and con men. Hannah’s mother loved that road, describing again and again its marvelous history, an anecdote at every crook, how it looked when she was a girl growing up in Miami, a twisty path fringed with gumbo limbo and the snarl of mangroves. Tonight it was haunted, eerily empty, so late, so dark. That Easter home movie replaying as she drove. Her father’s smile, her mother’s shy voice. Hannah standing primly in her new dress and hat and purse, the unbearable serenity of that place and time.

  Hannah passed the Gables fire station, turned onto Red Road, only five minutes from home. A mile farther on, she suddenly gripped the wheel hard and veered off Old Cutler Road, an impulsive left into Gables by the Sea. Drawn down the darkened streets, the very neighborhood she’d avoided for years. Going slow, she turned left again and headed up the narrow lane along the edge of Biscayne Bay, the street where her parents lived. The place where everything started to go wrong.

  When she came to the end of the cul-de-sac, she put two wheels up on the shoulder across from the old house. She lowered her window, switched off the lights, turned off the motor.

  She drew a long breath and released it. She listened to the wind sifting through the pines. A spectral moan. From the nearby canal she could hear the slosh of water, and halyards clinking, and she could smell the sulfurous decay wafting off the tidal flats. A child’s bicycle lay in the front yard of the house across the street.

  Drawing the scented night air into her lungs, Hannah slipped back into a flutter of ancient images. Seeing a girl in Bermuda shorts learning to ride her first bicycle on this same street while her father and mother followed Hannah’s orders not to watch or embarrass her in any way as she mastered the birthday gift. The two of them out in the front yard pretending to obey. Ed mowing the lawn and Martha clipping sprigs of bougainvillea, purple and yellow blossoms fluttering across fresh cut grass. Both of them sneaking glimpses of their daughter, smiling at her success, holding themselves back when she tipped over, tumbled to the asphalt, then stood up, dusted off her scuffed knees, and climbed back on that bike. Then another image replacing that. Six-year-old Randall with a blond mop, cranking his spinning rod out on the seawall. And then the loop of film she’d watched a thousand times began to play—three men dressed as house painters walking into the kitchen door. One tall, two short.

  Hannah closed her eyes, opened them again, blinked away the vision.

  She looked across at the dark house. Strangers lived there now. She didn’t know their names, and they probably knew nothing of the history of that house. The horrors that happened there.

  She craned forward, peered down the driveway.

  Then she opened the door and got out. She walked slowly into the middle of the street, stood there lining up the angle, then stepped a few feet to the right, a few more feet.

  “Christ!”

  She marched down the brick driveway and opened the chain-link gate and stepped into the backyard. For all she knew
the current owners could be heavily armed paranoids with a flesh-eating Doberman. This was, after all, Miami. But she pushed on, stepping lightly across the back lawn toward the seawall. No dogs barked, no sirens went off. On the seawall she turned and looked back at the house. She moved left until the seawall ended in a heap of boulders, then went all the way to the right perimeter until she reached the neighbor’s fence. Nowhere along the entire path could she see the driveway.

  If Randall had been fishing on the concrete seawall like he claimed, he couldn’t possibly have seen three men going into the kitchen door. His view was blocked by the east wing of the house. There’s no way he would have been able to describe the men as thoroughly as he did. House painters. Two short, one tall.

  But no one had thought to check out that part of his story. No one had done the simple, skeptical, routine thing. To stand where Randall said he’d stood and look back at the driveway to see if what he described could actually be seen from that vantage point. No one bothered to double-check, or to question the boy because he was so badly traumatized. He was mute and withdrawn, under psychiatric care. And what’s more, he was the son of one of their own. He was a cop’s only child, so he got that extra leeway. They left him alone. Didn’t double-check his story.

  For after all, the boy had absolutely no reason to lie about what he’d seen.

  No reason at all.

  It was nearly four in the morning by the time Hannah sat down in front of Randall’s computer and switched it on. Alone in the house, still she was feeling guilty, as though he would walk in any second and find her snooping on him. She had never done it before, never prowled through his drawers or poked in the back corners of his closet. She trusted her son completely. And even now, with this troubling revelation pulsing in her mind, she felt deeply uneasy about invading his privacy.

  All she really wanted to do was get Stevie’s address. His E-mail friend. A boy, according to Randall, who was a world-class computer prodigy. Someone she might be able to enlist to trace Fielding’s broadcast back to its origin, the exact location of his hospital room.

  Of course, this whole thing could wait till daylight. Hannah should go to bed, try to get a little rest, then after Randall got home from school tomorrow she could simply ask him for a way to reach his friend. But as Hannah navigated through the opening screens, then began to prowl the folders Randall had created to store his files, she felt the pang of guilt subside. Apparently her son had misled the police and her about what he’d seen. Something horrifying had sent him into shock back then and now that she had begun a fresh investigation of the events of that morning, Randall was suffering another wave of torment. If that wasn’t permission enough to do all the snooping she wanted, she didn’t know what was.