by Sam Reaves
Other Titles by Sam Reaves
A Long Cold Fall
Fear Will Do It
Bury It Deep
Get What’s Coming
Dooley’s Back
Homicide 69
Mean Town Blues
Cold Black Earth
Nonfiction
Mop Cop: My Life of Crime in the Chicago Police Department (Fred Pascente with Sam Reaves)
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2018 by Sam Reaves
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781542048002
ISBN-10: 1542048001
Cover design by Scott Biel
CONTENTS
AUTHOR’S NOTE
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
AUTHOR’S NOTE
There are towns called Lewisburg in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky and Ohio. As far as the author was able to determine, there is no Lewisburg, Indiana. The town, the college and the characters depicted in this novel are fictional, if suggested and informed by real communities and people. Any similarity between the characters and events of this story and any real persons and events is entirely coincidental.
Abby’s phone went off twice while she was running, buzzing angrily in the pouch at her waist. She ignored it. The phone was there for emergencies, not because she thought she owed it to the world to be accessible anywhere at any time. Her running time was hers and nobody else’s. Anybody with anything important to say would leave a message.
The heat had eased as the sun had gone down behind the West Side monoliths, and it was a perfect evening for running, a few high cumulus tinted faintly orange in a sky going slowly deep, deep blue over Manhattan. She’d set a good pace, and if she could sustain it she had a shot at knocking off the four-mile loop in under twenty-five minutes. The path was not too crowded and Abby didn’t have to weave too much to dodge the strollers, loiterers and miscellaneous humanity drifting through Central Park on a summer evening.
It was glorious to be moving, eating up ground with long smooth strides. Abby had once been able to cover six thousand meters in under twenty-three minutes, but graduate school had put an end to that; without the spur of competitive cross-country she had eased off to a fitness-maintenance level and had recently admitted to herself she would probably never claw back to top form again. But running was still her therapy, her centering technique, her refuge. What intense engagement with mathematical objects did for her mind, running did for her body.
She checked her watch and saw she was going to have to pick up the pace a bit. No matter how strong you felt, the stopwatch was ruthlessly objective, a harsh taskmaster. She dug deeper. Looping back south on the Bridle Path she skirted the reservoir, found enough strength for a bit of a kick and pushed hard to the end just past the tunnel under West Drive. Her watch read 24:53.
Panting, sweating, wrung out, elated, Abby made her way slowly over to the park exit at Eighty-First Street. It wasn’t until she was waiting for the light to change to cross Central Park West that she thought to look at her phone. Her heart sank as she saw the number.
Abby sighed and slipped the phone back into the pouch. She didn’t have the energy to deal with Evan right now; she wasn’t going to spoil her endorphin high. The light changed and she crossed, looking up into the darkening sky, thinking about the evening ahead. She had work to do, decisions to make, maybe even some preliminary packing. In three weeks she would be leaving for Amherst. Alone.
She reached Columbus and her gaze wandered down the avenue; she would miss all this. There was sadness in the prospect, but mostly there was a sense of freedom. A chapter was over, a new one beginning. With reluctance she reached for her phone. Deal with it now, she thought. Get it out of the way so you can enjoy your shower and supper. She tapped at her phone and put it to her ear to hear the voice mails.
“Abby, please, why aren’t you answering? I need to talk to you. I know I’ve been a pain in the ass, but I really need to see you now. Call me. Please.” Abby frowned. Evan’s voice in her ear had the strained, urgent tone that always set her on edge. She brought up the second voice mail. “Abby, I’m sorry. That’s all I have to say. I’m just really sorry. Good-bye.”
That was puzzling; Abby walked for half a block with the phone in her hand, just trying to decode it. There hadn’t been more than three or four minutes between the two calls, and that didn’t seem like enough time for Evan to have a change of heart. But the stressed-out tone had been gone; he had sounded subdued. He had sounded . . . resigned. Abby put the phone back in her pouch.
Resigned was good. The sooner Evan accepted what was happening, the better for everyone. Abby turned a corner and looked up at the windows of her apartment as she always did and was surprised to see the living room window glowing with light. She didn’t remember leaving the lamp on.
In the elevator the explanation occurred to her. Evan still had his key. She had hesitated to ask him for it, waiting for him to surrender it as a sign he accepted the new status quo. Her fears were confirmed when she pushed open the door of her apartment and saw Evan’s beat-up canvas low tops sitting on the mat where he always parked them. She pushed the door gently shut behind her and sagged against it, closing her eyes. I’m really, really not in the mood for this tonight, she thought. Not tonight. “Hello? Evan?” she called out.
There was no answer. Abby opened her eyes and pushed away from the door. She listened. She could hear the hum of the fridge in the kitchen; she could hear the vast muted rumble of Manhattan outside. There was no other sound. She took three steps toward the living room and stopped. Her heart began to beat wildly.
It was only a chair, one of her four wooden dining room chairs lying on its side in the middle of her living room, and only part of it, the ladder back poking into the visual field framed by the doorway. For a moment Abby could not think why the sight of a chair knocked over on her threadbare Persian rug should send a jolt to her heart like this.
And then her mind caught up and she knew what she was going to see when she stepped into the living room. “Oh, God, no,” she said out loud, and as she said it she knew that she was going to be paying for not answering her phone for a long, long time.
“I’m looking for a metaphor,” said Abby. “I’m looking for a mental model to help me cope with this, a way of thinking about it that lets me function.”
The therapist was squinting at her with that look that reminded Abby of nothing so much as the Orkin man peering under the
sink. “Metaphors can be very helpful.” The therapist was a woman of fifty or so, gray and spectral. “I’ve had people describe their depression as an endless amount of snow to shovel, or a tunnel where everyone but them can see the light at the end.”
“Terrific,” said Abby. “And this helps them how? Anyway, I’m not depressed. Until this happened I was always energetic, focused and happy. I’m still energetic and focused. I’m just not happy with this guilt impaling me. What I am is traumatized. I want to know how to recover from the trauma. It’s cost me a good job already and I don’t want it to cost me anything else.”
The therapist nodded slowly, sinking back in her chair. Abby realized suddenly she was through with the whole thing; there was no therapist in New York or anywhere else on earth, no matter how many thousands of dollars Abby paid, who could fix her. “Injuries heal with time,” the therapist said.
“Yeah.” Abby saw from the clock on the desk that the therapist owed her another seventeen minutes, but she stood up anyway. “I don’t want to waste your time.”
“Or your money,” the therapist said, achieving a genuine insight. She stood to face Abby. “Sometimes a change of scene helps,” she said. “Get away, go do something different.”
Abby nodded at her. “Exile,” she said. “They used to exile people who had committed crimes. Then after a few years they could come back. Maybe it would help.”
“Welcome to Lewisburg,” said the desk clerk. He was a pale ectomorph with bad skin and colorless hair. “I hope you enjoy your stay.” Judging from his tone, it was not an especially fervent hope.
“Me, too,” said Abby. She then flashed him a quick smile, not wanting to sound rude. “I hope I’ll just be here for a couple of nights. The college is supposed to have an apartment lined up for me soon.” That was no better, she sensed, but she didn’t bother with the smile this time.
The desk clerk shrugged, shoving her key card across the desk. “Stay as long as you want. You need help with your bags?”
“That would be great, yeah.”
From the second-floor walkway outside her room, Abby took stock of her position, fighting the feeling of dismay that had afflicted her ever since a garrulous elderly man driving a Tippecanoe College van had met her at the Indianapolis airport and brought her deep into the Indiana countryside. She could hear her mother saying, “Indiana? What on earth is in Indiana?”
What was in Indiana was this: the Booth Tarkington Motor Inn lying three blocks from the campus where she had accepted a two-year appointment, its twin wings framing two sides of a much-patched asphalt parking lot where a half-dozen vehicles were parked, three of them pickup trucks. The streets on the open sides of the lot were lined with shabby frame houses and trees stirring listlessly in the August heat. A door was open somewhere on the lower level and languid country music floated on the evening air.
Abby wandered back into her room. It was decent, a little down at heel but clean enough, and the college functionary had been apologetic about the need to stash her here. But having stashed her he had disappeared, leaving Abby to wonder if she had the courage to go out and forage for food.
Hunger prevailed, and she braved the steps at the end of the walkway and headed toward what she hoped was the center of town. The houses got a little larger and better kept; she passed a funeral home and a church. She reached a wide commercial street and there on the corner was a gas station with a minimart. Abby looked up and down the street and saw no sign of anything that looked like a restaurant. She went into the minimart and bought two chicken-salad sandwiches encased in plastic, an energy bar and a bottle of apple juice. She walked back to the motel by a different route, passing what looked like a supermarket that had been converted to a Salvation Army store.
“Maybe you can blog about it,” her mother had said. “‘Dispatches from Darkest Indiana’ or something.”
In the motel parking lot a party was going on. The country music was louder, and three men stood at the rear of a pickup truck, drinking beer. They were beefy, sunburned, ill groomed. They stared at Abby as she passed and she flicked them a fast smile, avoiding eye contact. She went up the steps to her room, resisting the urge to run.
Back in her room, having thrown the bolt and put on the chain, Abby sat on the bed and surfed the television channels while she ate. She found all the usual cable networks and local stations in Indianapolis and a town called Lafayette. She watched CNN for a while, unmoved by the world’s travails. She watched a recycled sitcom, trying not to think. She turned off the television, tried to call Samantha on her cell phone, got her voice mail, remembered the time zone difference. She texted Samantha: In darkest Indiana. In search of intelligent life.
Abby took a shower, lay on the bed in an oversized T-shirt, and listened to bad music and raucous laughter coming faintly through the door. Her room was close to the ice machine at the end of the walkway and two men were prolonging the noisy process of transferring ice into a cooler by holding a conclave, all too audibly, a few feet from her door.
“Gittin’ kinda drunk out, ain’t it?”
“Gimme a cigarette. Where’s Ricky?”
“Last I saw, he was suckin’ face with Crystal down in the room.”
“No shit? Wait’ll Cody hears about that.”
“Where the fuck is Cody?”
“In the hospital with a busted head. Rolled his truck.”
“Again? That sumbitch can’t drive worth shit.”
“Brand-new fuckin’ truck, too. Hey, Kyle’s out of jail, d’ja hear?”
I am on a different planet, Abby thought, marooned.
I am not going to cry, she told herself. I am an adult and I can handle a night of dislocation and loneliness. Things will be better in the morning. Somebody at the college will help me find a place to live. They will have to, they promised. Soon I will be busy and in the company of people who can read and this will turn out not to have been a hideous mistake.
Abby turned out the lamp and lay on her back, staring at the pattern of light across the ceiling. The men outside went away and now there was only the music and the outbursts of laughter, distant and muted. Tears crept down Abby’s cheeks and onto the pillow.
This is my punishment, she thought. This is what I have to suffer for my guilt.
“I’m a big-city girl,” Abby said. “I’ve never lived in a town that you couldn’t fly to.”
“Oh, you can fly into Lewisburg,” said Bill Olsen. “There’s an airstrip south of town. You just have to know somebody with a small private plane.” He smiled. Bill Olsen was head of the math department, bearded and imposing, tall and unkempt, the man who had brought Abby to Indiana.
Abby smiled back, a little sheepishly. Her morale had recovered with a change of surroundings, the day spent getting oriented on campus and undergoing an intense tête-à-tête with Olsen before winding up in this handsome oak-paneled room with high windows looking out onto a pleasant swatch of green. Two dozen people in the throes of a reception filled the room with the hum of conversation.
“Let me introduce you to some folks.” Olsen steered Abby by the elbow to a man who had just drifted into the room and stood looking about with his hands in his pockets and a vacant but receptive look on his face. “This is Philip Herzler, in classics. You need something translated from Latin or Greek, Phil’s your man. This is Abigail Markstein, from MIT. Our new recruit. She’s never seen a town this small and she’s feeling a little dazed.” They shook hands and Olsen promptly sheered off and left them.
Herzler was tall and slightly stooped in his rumpled suit, his unruly hair and patchy beard once black but now mostly gray. “MIT, did he say?”
“Yes. And a postdoc at Columbia. And I did my undergrad at NYU, after growing up in Manhattan. So actually, Cambridge was kind of a small town for me.”
Herzler threw back his head and laughed. “Oh, my. This will be a bit of an adjustment.”
A portly man in a blue sport jacket, sixtyish and bald, grabbed Abby’s el
bow, slopping a little sherry over the rim of her glass. “You must be one of the new hires,” he said.
“Um, yes, hi. I’m Abigail Markstein. Mathematics.” She fumbled a little with glass and napkin, wiping sherry off her hand, before extending it to shake.
“Jerry Collins, psychology. Welcome to Tippecanoe.”
“Thanks. I’m happy to be here.” So much for sincerity, Abby thought. “Just trying to get my bearings.”
“Well, if you can make Phil Herzler laugh, you’re off to a good start.” He cocked his thumb at the classicist. “Normally he’s so distraught over the decline and fall of the Roman empire that he just sulks in the corner at these things.”
“I don’t miss the Romans,” Herzler said, deadpan. “The decay of civilization started with the arrest of Socrates.”
“Civilization’s not all it’s cracked up to be anyway. Not that we have much of it in central Indiana, right, Phil?” Collins winked at Abby.
“Actually we were just discussing the question,” said Herzler. “Abigail’s a New Yorker, and I was trying to offer her a ray of hope.”
“You can reach New York by phone,” said a woman who had appeared at Collins’s elbow. “That may be the best we can do.” The woman was tall, thin, somewhere past fifty, with dark-eyed looks that might once have been striking but now were severe, the face deeply lined. Her brown hair was shorn close to the skull but the effect was slightly feminized by a pair of hammered silver earrings. She sounded like a smoker. The glass she was clutching held something over ice that wasn’t wine. “I’m Lisa Beth Quinton,” she said, sticking out her hand.
“My better half,” said Collins, beaming and putting a hand to the small of her back.
“I don’t think we’ll get an argument there,” said Quinton. “You’re Abby, is that right?”
Blinking at the notion that these two were a couple, Abby said, “That’s right. I’m new in the math department.”
“So we hear. Bill Olsen’s been raving about you. He told me what your area is, but it meant nothing to me.”
“I do combinatorics,” said Abby. “I wrote my thesis on hyperplane arrangements in finite fields.”
