Raveling

by Peter Moore Smith

  “Come on.” Katherine shook her head. “I don’t think anything of the sort.”

  “Then tell me why you’re asking Dr. Lennox those questions about, about—”

  “Eric,” Katherine said, “I have to find these things out for Pilot. He’s my client. He asked me these questions, and I have to provide him with the answers, all right? As a doctor you should understand that. Of course you didn’t drug your brother. That’s ridiculous. I have to prove it to Pilot, though, okay? He’s a smart guy. He’ll know if I’m telling the truth or if I’m just feeding him a line of bullshit.”

  Eric shook his head. “Pilot is paranoid,” he said flatly, dismissively. “Schizophrenic.”

  “I know he is, Eric. I mean, well—he’s paranoid, anyway.” And almost more as an aside, she said, “Schizophrenic I’m not so sure about. Besides—” Katherine walked up to him, placing a calming hand on his chest, unbuttoning the top button of his overcoat—“Don’t you think I trust you? Haven’t I demonstrated that by now?” She kissed his chin. She gave him her most imploring expression. She could feel something inside her recoiling from the lie, like an animal backing away from a trap.

  “Did you go to the police yet?”

  “I’ve decided to take your advice,” she said, “and when Pilot gets back I’ll ask him to produce the whole shoe or the knife or whatever he says he has, and if he can—which I doubt—then I’ll go to the police, and only then.” She rubbed his shoulder. “Okay? Is that all right?”

  Eric let out a breath. “All right.”

  “Plus,” she said smiling, “I don’t really feel like tracking down some old crotchety detective.”

  Still wearing his gray overcoat, he walked away from Katherine, sat down on her mattress, and put his hand to his forehead. “It’s not that I don’t want you to help Pilot,” Eric said, “because I do. I really do. It’s just that you don’t have any idea what it would do to my mother to open up all those things again. They’d have to question her all over again, you know, about what happened. I don’t think she could take it.”

  “I know.”

  “She’d lose it completely.”

  “How is she?”

  He looked at the ceiling, hands back on the bed. “The weird thing is, she doesn’t seem to mind going blind.” He was shaking his head in disbelief. He closed his eyes against the overhead light.

  “Is she actually losing her eyesight? I mean, is she—”

  “She says things are very blurry. She can’t really get around outside of the house anymore. She goes out into the yard, you know, and that’s about as far as she can make it. She can’t drive. She can’t even take a walk in the neighborhood.”

  “Any luck in convincing her to see a psychiatrist?”

  He shook his head.

  “Does she know Dr. Lennox?”

  “I think she does, actually.”

  “Maybe she’d talk to him.”

  There was someone at the door, and this time it was the pizza guy.

  “You like black olives?” she asked Eric.

  “Do you have any wine to go with it?”

  “Sorry, only water.” Katherine paid for the pizza, put it on the floor, and sat, legs folded.

  He looked around at the small empty room. “When are you going to get furniture?”

  Katherine laughed. “What was he like?”

  “Who?”

  “Detective Cleveland. What was he like, do you remember?”

  “He was a detective, you know. Not that smart.”

  “Rumpled overcoat, skinny black tie, used the word situation a lot?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Was he nice?”

  Eric said, “I don’t remember him being especially nice. He was black.”

  “Do you remember if Pilot liked him?”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “I’m thinking that Pilot may have manufactured this new evidence because he wants to, because he wants to reconnect with the past, you know what I mean? I have a feeling what he’s doing is trying to bring, to bring Fiona back somehow. He wants the search to keep going.”

  “That actually makes sense.” Eric was sitting across from her now, still in his overcoat, eating a slice of greasy pizza. He seemed placated for the moment. Maybe she wasn’t such a bad liar after all. Or maybe the Airie family was rubbing off on her. She felt that thing inside her, deep in the chest, slipping deeper in. The way to get good at lying, she realized, was to surround herself with liars.

  And when they went to bed together that night Katherine closed her eyes and saw those imaginary photographs of Fiona that I carry around in my head. She could almost hear the shutter click. She saw a little girl standing against the background of a bright blue, shimmering pool, wearing a red bathing suit and red high-top sneakers. Katherine saw Fiona’s eyes glinting red and silver in the glare of the camera flash. She saw the woods in the background, and did she see them moving almost imperceptibly closer to Fiona, the shadows encroaching? Eric slid his large hand behind Katherine’s back, reaching, it seemed, inside her, touching that thing inside her, something alive, and the pushing, insistent motion he made, the hips thrusting up, hers pushing down, made Katherine imagine a knife being thrust with the same motion into Fiona’s little-girl body, somewhere deep in those woods, the party torches flickering yellow in the distance of the yard. Katherine saw the earth turning up as if under a plow. Katherine saw Fiona being buried somewhere, placed inside the earth. She felt Eric’s sinewy, brain-surgeon hands pulling her closer to him as he thrust himself again and again into her, and she saw those hands, as I have seen them so many times, cupping the dirt into the grave of my sister.

  And Katherine came. She came thinking of this little girl’s body being covered by a last handful of blackness, and the sound Katherine made when she came was a very soft one, a very small one, the same sound she might have made if a long knife had been going into her and there was no use screaming.

  Sometimes I’ll be driving or watching a baseball game or doing anything and I remember her. I remember her from some vantage point I never knew I had. I’ll see her from above, for instance, our whole family together—at the lake, maybe, the picnic blanket spread out, our mother making sandwiches. Sometimes I just see her face, wide open, a slight smile telling me her emotions. Sometimes I see her from the woods, a little girl worming her way through all those adults crowded onto the flagstones. Or I see her in her bed, face turned to the side, cheek squashed against the pillow, eyes shut tight, and I just want to lean over and wake her up.

  In the large, empty parking lot of the East Meadow County Police Headquarters, Katherine used a pair of old nail clippers she kept in her purse to cut the shoelace in half. She didn’t want to give Detective Vettorello the whole thing because she knew she wouldn’t be getting it back. So she put one half of the shoelace in her purse, then she placed the other half in the glove compartment. She took a deep breath. She was nervous, evidently, although even she couldn’t understand why. The police had always made her nervous. Katherine opened the door and lifted herself out, then walked steadily toward the double glass doors of the suburban institutional building.

  Before entering, she smoothed the fabric of her skirt and made sure she didn’t have too much hair in her face.

  Inside, she was greeted by a long empty corridor lined with unmarked doors. To her left, a single receptionist, a heavy girl no older than twenty-one, sat at a tidy counter. “Can I help you, miss?” she said.

  It was eight in the morning. Katherine hoped she wasn’t here too early. “I’m here to meet with Detective Vettorello,” she said. She smiled at the receptionist, who had a ring through her eyebrow.

  “One minute,” the receptionist said, her finger poised in the air. With her other hand, the receptionist dialed an extension and waited. Then she said into the phone, “There’s someone here to see you, Dave—someone very attractive.” Smiling, she held her finger up at Katherine, a gesture that mean
t Wait, don’t go until I say.

  “Katherine DeQuincey-Joy,” Katherine said.

  “Katherine DeQuincey-Joy?” The receptionist put the phone down. “It’s six doors down on the right,” she said. “There’s a big room and he sits right in the middle of it. He’s the goofy-looking guy—you can’t miss him.”

  “Goofy,” Katherine said. She turned away and walked down the corridor, her heels clacking on the green tiles. When she was halfway down the hall, a door opened and a big man with short, dark hair and bad skin came forward to greet her.

  “Miss DeQuincey-Joy?”

  “Hi,” Katherine said. “You must be—”

  “Detective Vettorello.” He offered his hand. “Dave Vettorello. Come on in.” He led her into a large room filled with cubicles. Only a few people were there, and they mostly seemed to be eating breakfast. Over his shoulder, Detective Vettorello asked, “Did you, did you bring the evidence?”

  “I did.” Still walking, she reached into her purse and pulled it out. “It’s only half a shoelace, really.”

  “Half a shoelace?” Detective Vettorello stopped. He was a large man, built like a football lineman, with broad shoulders and a gut that protruded over his belt. He wore a blue short-sleeved shirt. His wool tie, in black-and-white stripes, hung outward over his stomach, the skinny end longer than the short end. He took the shoelace and held it up in front of his pink acned face. “This thing is over twenty years old?”

  “Something like that.”

  “It was cut recently.” He brushed his finger over the newly cut end.

  She nodded. “That’s the way it was given to me.”

  The detective continued to lead Katherine into his drab, brown cubicle. It was orderly and unkempt at the same time, with tattered bits of paper stuck everywhere and little notes written to himself on yellow and pink stickies. The big man sat down hard on a small, squeaky office chair. He pulled another one forward for Katherine. “Sit down,” he said, “please.” When she sat, she heard the squeaking of the wheels just like she had heard over the telephone. “I’m still waiting for those files to come from Albany, you know, but they’re on order, and I talked to a few of the older guys about this case, guys who knew Cleveland, and they told me they had a suspect back then, a known sex offender—”

  “Do you know his name?” Katherine asked.

  “Bryce Telliman, but remember, I’m not supposed to tell you stuff like that.”

  “He was the man accused of abducting the little girl, Fiona—”

  “—Airie, right,” Vettorello said. “They just couldn’t find enough evidence to make anything stick.”

  “He was a sex offender?”

  “He had been arrested once before, apparently, for soliciting an undercover officer in a public rest room.”

  Katherine sighed. “You guys have got to stop arresting people for that.”

  “Yeah,” Vettorello said laughing. “I know.” He held the time-blackened shoelace up to his face again. “So what the heck is this thing, anyway?”

  “It’s the lace from one of Fiona Airie’s sneakers,” she said. “My client, his name is Pilot Airie—”

  “Odd name.”

  Katherine smiled. “He said he found it in his brother’s room, years ago.”

  “I’m not sure what to do with it,” Vettorello said. “I mean, I’m not sure what it will prove.”

  “If it matches the original evidence, I thought it might at least prove that Pilot isn’t lying.”

  “What is Pilot trying to say?”

  “He’s saying it was his brother, Eric.”

  “That his brother killed his sister?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is the brother still around here?”

  “Eric Airie is a neurosurgeon with East Meadow Hospital.”

  Vettorello sighed and shook his head. “The evidence is probably long gone. There will be pictures of it, sure, but we won’t be able to match it except by sight.”

  “What about testing it for blood or DNA?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Vettorello said. “It’s so old” He looked at it. “And I can’t see anything on it. I mean, it looks like it could be twenty years old all right, but a shoelace like this could come from anywhere.” He contorted his face. “And the fact that your patient is psychotic—”

  “Pilot had a psychotic episode. He’s not psychotic. In fact, he’s very much improved.”

  “Well,” Vettorello said, “it still doesn’t make it any easier getting people to take him seriously, you know what I mean?” Vettorello dropped the shoelace into a little plastic bag. “But it’s not up to me.” He sealed the little bag with his huge, stubby fingers.

  “Whose decision is it?”

  “It has to go up the chain of command.” The detective smiled, pointing to the ceiling. “But,” he said, “I’ll send it over to the lab and ask them what they can figure out about it.”

  “There’s more coming,” Katherine said. She realized that this was just teasing him, but she wanted to be taken seriously.

  “What’s that?”

  “Pilot says there’s more.”

  “More?”

  “More evidence. He claims to have the shoe that goes with the shoelace, and also, he says, a bloody knife.”

  “A bloody knife?” Vettorello laughed. “Now we’re talking.”

  “But Pilot is, he’s away right now, visiting his father, and I have no way of finding these things without him.”

  “So,” Vettorello said, “right now we’ll just see what we can find out about this shoelace.”

  Katherine worried that Vettorello’s good-natured smile was designed to humor her—the way Dr. Lennox smiled at everyone, vague and deceitful—but she smiled back. “I have to get to work.”

  “I’m sure you do,” Vettorello said, his chair squeaking loudly. “A lot of crazies out there.”

  I sat in my father’s living room and watched old movies with Patricia, dutifully taking my medication as indicated. She’d bring me a glass of orange juice, in fact, whenever it was time, a nervous smile on her face. I tried to imagine her with children, but I couldn’t. She was someone’s girlfriend. Even at forty-five or however old she was, Patricia had the look of a girl you take to a restaurant, the one who will go home with you, not the one you go home to. “Thank you,” I said, taking the glass of juice and reaching across the coffee table for the plastic amber bottle with the child-resistant cap. Her face asked me how I was feeling. But I turned to the television, not answering.

  Outside, there were palm trees, long fronds drooping over the warm Florida winter.

  Later, Katherine dialed the listing she had found in the white pages for Jerome and Carla Cleveland. It rang for a few moments, and just as she was about to hang up, an older woman’s voice came on the line and said brightly, “Carla speaking.”

  “Hello,” Katherine said, almost startled. “May I speak to Jerome Cleveland, please?”

  “May I ask who’s calling?”

  “My name is Katherine DeQuincey-Joy.”

  “One minute, please, Miss Joy,” the woman said pleasantly. Katherine heard her put the telephone down and then the words, “It’s your mistress.”

  Now a man’s voice came on the line. “Hello.”

  “Detective Cleveland?”

  “Used to be Detective,” he laughed. “Now I’m just Jerry.”

  “My name is Katherine DeQuincey-Joy,” Katherine said. “I’m, uh, I’m—”

  “We really can’t buy anything, Miss Joy, I’m sorry—”

  “Oh, I’m not trying to sell anything.” Katherine laughed. “I’m a psychologist.”

  “A psychologist? It’s a psychologist.”

  “Yes,” Katherine said, “and I wanted to ask you about a case, one you had a long time ago.”

  “A case? Oh, I’m completely retired from police work—”

  “I know,” Katherine said. “That’s what they told me at the station, but I have a patient who, it turn
s out, has been withholding evidence for over twenty years, evidence you should have had, and I thought you might like to know about it.”

  Katherine heard a long, sad sigh. “What case was it?”

  “There was a little girl named Fiona Airie. She was abducted. Do you—”

  Jerry Cleveland cleared his throat. “Oh, yes,” he said. “I remember her very well.”

  “Do you remember the details of the case, sir?”

  “Yes,” he said, “yes I do.”

  “My patient is Pilot Airie,” Katherine said. “Fiona’s brother. Do you remember that he found one of her sneakers in the woods?”

  “The sneaker, I remember. The boy found the sneaker in the woods.”

  “And no one could recover the other one.”

  “Never found it, no.”

  Katherine turned to the window. There they were, the treetops rustling in the fall breeze. “Pilot claims to have the other sneaker.”

  “Says he’s got the other one?”

  “And a knife,” Katherine said. “A bloody knife.”

  “That kind of evidence would have made all the difference back then,” Cleveland said laughing. “All the difference.”

  “I was wondering if I could meet with you,” Katherine said, “talk about the case. My patient is, is a very troubled person. He had a psychotic episode recently, and a lot of his thoughts are very, well, they’re disorganized.”

  “I can imagine.”

  Just at that moment, Dr. Lennox popped his head in Katherine’s door. “Kate,” he said smiling, “I have some possible answers to your question from yesterday,” he said. “You got a minute?”

  Katherine held her finger up to Greg Lennox the same way the receptionist at the police station had done to her this morning. “Can I speak to you later, Jerry?” Katherine said into the phone. “I have a visitor right now.”

  “Why don’t you meet me at my office?” Cleveland said. “Come by five-fourteen Sky Highway, the Oak Road exit. I’ll be there all afternoon.”