“Oh,” the woman said, her eyes brightening, “not at all.”
“Go right ahead,” her husband agreed.
Cleveland came toward Katherine then, his expression grim, his features as gray as his cigarette’s ash.
“Your daughter?” she whispered.
“It makes me seem kinder.” As before, he led her into the manager’s office.
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” Katherine said when the door closed behind them, “but I’m white.”
“You’re adopted.” He winked. “So what can I do for you today, Katherine DeQuincey-Joy with a hyphen?”
Katherine sat down on the metal folding chair, hands on her lap. “I just wanted to, to get your opinion.”
“What on?”
“James Airie.” She didn’t pause when she said, “He killed himself last week.”
“Oh.” Cleveland sat down, too. “Holy shit.”
Katherine looked at his face, the deep crevices, the worn lines, the colorlessness. “I need you to tell me why you thought he did it. Was there anything, any evidence—”
“That the father did it? There was certainly no proof.” Cleveland sighed. “And like I told you, it was Bryce Telliman’s theory more than mine. He just kept saying we should look closer to home, as if he knew something about Airie that he wasn’t telling.”
“Closer to home,” Katherine repeated. “Like what?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Hell, it was the seventies. It could have been anything… drugs, pornography, just about—”
“But you never found anything incriminating.”
Cleveland looked at his hands. He flicked his cigarette into the beanbag ashtray on the old desk. “No. We never did.”
“Telliman was never charged?”
“All we had was circumstantial. He was a suspect, that’s all.”
“Seems like there would have been circumstantial evidence for about two dozen people that night.”
“He was with the girl all evening. Everyone saw him, and his footprints were found in the woods.”
“You never went after the father?”
“There was nothing leading to him—nothing besides Telliman.”
“What do you think now?”
Cleveland crushed his cigarette in the ashtray and lit another one. He began, “I think—” and then he stopped, asking, “Was there a note?”
“No.”
“Did he know?” he asked. “Did he know you were investigating this?”
“I’m not investigating, I’m—”
“Young lady, you are investigating.”
Katherine gave in. “He was with Pilot, and Pilot is a talker. He probably told him.”
She was starting to know me. Katherine was understanding me more and more every day.
“Did Pilot find that evidence yet? The shoe or the knife? Or did you?”
She shook her head, curls quivering. “Not yet.”
He leaned back. “How’d he do it?”
“What?”
“The father. Did he shoot himself? Was it pills? Did he jump?”
“He flew out to sea, apparently,” Katherine said. “He had an airplane, a little one.”
“That’s right,” Cleveland said. “He was a pilot. That’s why he named the boy—”
“Pilot, yes.”
“Flew away, huh?”
“They still haven’t found the plane.”
“Or the body?”
“Or the body.”
“I’ll bet it connects the father,” Cleveland said, “the evidence, I mean.”
Katherine sighed. She tried to gather a bunch of her hair into her hands, but it slipped away. “It would mean I’ve been very wrong about, about this whole thing.”
“This kid has psychological problems.”
“Well…”
“Right?”
Katherine shrugged. “He does.”
“Always look to the parents for that stuff.”
Katherine laughed. “You’re a Freudian, too? Seems like everyone is these days.”
“I just know that if you’ve got a screwed-up kid, you’ve got screwed-up folks.”
“You’re mostly right.” Katherine nodded. “Mostly.”
“Did the police get the file from Albany?”
“The detective hasn’t called yet,” Katherine said. “I thought I’d give him a few more days.”
“Look at it. Read it. There’s bound to be something in there that’ll pop out, make you think of something you hadn’t thought of.”
“But why would he do it?”
“The father? He was a drunk.” Cleveland rubbed his hand over his face.
This had never occurred to Katherine. “How do you know that?”
“I was one, too.” Cleveland smiled. “We recognize each other, us drunks. People do strange things when they’re blacked out. Airie may not even remember what he did. He may have put that evidence somewhere and then totally forgot about it.”
“He wouldn’t set up his own son, would he?”
“After killing his own daughter?”
“Jesus Christ.” Katherine put a hand to her mouth.
“Yeah.”
There was a knock on the door. It was the young man Katherine had met in the parking lot. “Jerry,” he said, poking his head inside, “I think they’re ready to sign.”
Cleveland winked at Katherine again. “It was the daughter thing,” he said. “I owe you one.”
Katherine test-drove the idea: The father did it.
In an alcoholic rage, James Airie killed his daughter, she thought, and hid the evidence, thinking no one would find it. The next morning, waking from a nightmare of abuse, he had forgotten everything. Was that possible? She remembered a story she’d heard about someone in rehab who had dreamed of killing his parents. He was sure he had done it. There were too many details for it to be an actual dream. But his parents were fine. Later, it was discovered that in an alcoholic stupor he had gone to the wrong house and killed another couple, thinking the whole time they were his parents. He had never remembered until his memory cleared up.
Had James Airie suddenly remembered killing his own daughter?
Katherine wondered what it would do to me to understand this. She didn’t know that I already had thought of it a million times. Would I even believe it? she thought. Did she? Wouldn’t someone have known? That night, the night of the party, wouldn’t someone from the family—my mother, for instance—wouldn’t she have heard something? Katherine wondered what kind of cop Cleveland had been. He had admitted that he was a better used-car salesman. He admitted he had been a drunk. She imagined Fiona, seven years old. What else did he do to her? Did he rape her? Where was the body?
The father did it. It made things easier.
It certainly made Eric more attractive.
The simplest explanation, Katherine told herself, is usually the right one. Isn’t it?
She wanted to ask someone else. She needed another opinion. This had been Bryce Telliman’s theory. Cleveland had said that, too. Of course, Telliman was the accused. He’d say anything, accuse anyone. Anyone in his position would. Unless, of course, he really was innocent. The innocent are usually compelled to tell the truth, or at least their version of it.
She realized she’d been chewing her fingers, and a fresh oozing of blood appeared on two of them. Katherine turned off Sky Highway and into the hospital parking lot, swerving into the area reserved for the clinic. She got out of the Rabbit and walked to the glass entrance. She passed reception, strode down the hall, and finally reached her office door.
The father did it.
What had happened to Bryce Telliman? She walked across the room to her cluttered desk, took a slip of paper out of her purse, and dialed the phone. “Better-Than-New Auto World,” a voice said cheerfully.
“Jerry Cleveland, please.” When he got on the line, Katherine said, “What happened to him?”
“Who?”
She rea
lized she’d been inside her head for too long. “Bryce Telliman.”
“He moved away, I guess. I mean, where do those people go?”
“Those people?”
“You know.”
“What?”
“Homosexuals.”
Katherine laughed.
“By the time we gave up on the whole thing,” Cleveland said, “Telliman had an address in the city.”
“Thank you,” Katherine said.
Elizabeth was at the door. “Oh, there you are,” she said. “You have someone waiting.”
“One more minute.” On the phone again, Katherine dialed the number for Manhattan information. “Bryce Telliman, please,” she told the operator, “a residence.”
“B. Telliman?” the operator asked.
“That will do.”
Katherine wrote down the number. The recorded operator told her that the number could be automatically dialed by pressing one. She pressed one. After a few rings, a machine answered. “This is Bryce Telliman,” it said. “You can go ahead and leave a message, please. Thank you.”
“Mr. Telliman,” Katherine said into the phone, “my name is Katherine DeQuincey-Joy, and it’s very important that I speak to you.” She left both her office and home numbers. “If you don’t mind, please contact me as soon as possible.”
As soon as she put down the phone her intercom was buzzing. She picked up. “Hello?”
“Katherine,” Greg’s voice said. “I’m glad you’re here.”
“Hi, Greg.”
“I tried earlier but Elizabeth said you were out and she didn’t know where—”
“Can I ask you something, Greg?”
“Sure.”
“Did you know James Airie?”
“Did I know—”
“He’s dead.”
There was a pause. “No. I never met him.”
“Shit.”
“What happened?”
“He flew into the ocean in his little airplane.”
“Oh my God.”
“I’m getting very confused,” she admitted. “I’m wondering if—”
“Kate,” Greg said, “why are you getting so involved in this family? Is it Eric?”
“No, it’s Pilot,” she said, “he’s my—”
“I know he’s your client, Kate, but for Christ’s sake.”
“I need to know.” She looked around her office. It was a mess, she thought, such a terrible, stupid mess.
“Have you spoken to him about it—to Pilot?”
“We’re scheduled for tomorrow, a telephone session, but now I don’t know.”
“Are you thinking his father was confessing somehow?”
“I’m hoping,” Katherine said, “I’m hoping that’s what it was.”
“Why?”
“Knowing is better than not knowing, isn’t it?”
Greg didn’t answer. He just said, “Kate.”
“I’ve got a client, and I’ve got to get going. Did you want to ask me something?”
“Forget it,” he said. “It can wait.”
On the phone, Katherine asked immediately, “The man who lives in the tunnel beneath the highway, do you remember him?”
“The tunnel?” I had been in it a million times as a kid, running through to the highway island on the other side. There was something familiar about it. I remembered the feeling of being swallowed by the woods, the forest lashing out like an enormous tongue. The tunnel like a throat.
But there was a man, a man who lived inside it.
“I remember—” I looked around Patricia’s kitchen, as if I could find the answer written on the wall somewhere. “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not sure.” I remembered the concrete sides of the tunnel curling upwards and over me and around me. I remembered the light coming through the other side like the light of heaven beckoning people who have died and come back.
“There’s a man who lives out there,” Katherine said, her voice almost ashamed, “the kids call him the Tunnel Man. He’s homeless, an alcoholic—harmless, obviously. But, Pilot, he knows you. He knows your name.” She allowed a pause. “He knows about the evidence.”
“Jesus Christ,” I said, touching my forehead. “I was so incredibly deranged. How could I—”
“He knows what you did with the evidence, Pilot.”
I tried to picture him, the Tunnel Man, but there was nothing. “How does he know?”
“He says he’ll show me where it is. I’m going out there this afternoon to find him.”
I was still in Florida, waiting for the search for my father to end, for the coast guard to stop looking so we could simply get on with the memorial service. “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not sure if I remember the Tunnel Man.” As I said the words, though, they felt familiar, like words I had spoken before. I tried more of them. “The tunnel by the highway,” I said. “In a tunnel under the highway there’s a man.”
“Anyway,” Katherine said, a sigh in her voice, “how are you feeling?”
“I’m fine,” I told her. “I’m just, I’m just waiting.”
“They haven’t found it, the airplane?”
“No.”
Patricia had gone to her room and had started to weep. She hadn’t stopped, really. Sometimes she came out and put her arms around me, saying how sorry she was. I told her she had nothing to be sorry about, she had done nothing wrong. The sleeping bags, she said. She forgot them. No, I told her, it was him, he did it on purpose, he wanted this. It made her cry again, hearing me say it, and she’d go back into her room and weep some more.
“Things are tense,” I said to Katherine. “Patricia is very upset.”
“What about the medication?”
“I’m off it.” I hadn’t taken anything since we had come back. My mind was clear as the hurricane-swept Florida sky.
“And do you know when you’re returning to New York?”
“The service is soon,” I told her. “As soon as they stop searching, we’ll set it up. I’ll be back the minute it’s over.”
“I have things to talk about with you,” Katherine said.
“Good.”
“I have ideas about what you remembered, about what—”
“Excellent,” I said. “What is it?”
Katherine sighed. “Pilot,” she began. “I can’t—”
“I want to know.”
“You told your father?”
“About what?”
“About how you think Eric—”
“I told him,” I said, “yes. I told him everything.”
“That you had the evidence.”
“He didn’t believe me.”
“You told him exactly what it was?”
“About the shoe and the knife, yes.”
“Pilot,” Katherine said gently, “I don’t want you to get upset, but I want you to ask yourself if you think it is possible that your father, that it was him who might have—”
“Killed Fiona?”
She was silent for a full half minute. “It was a theory,” Katherine said. “According to Jerry Cleveland, it was, it was postulated that it might have been your father, at the time, you know. The police—”
“Oh,” I said.
“—believed it was possible that he might have… You should think about it, anyway, about what you remember from that night, if there was anything unusual about, about your father’s behavior, anything strange. If there was—”
“He was a different person.”
Katherine said, “I’m going to visit Bryce Telliman. Is that all right?”
“You are?”
“If nothing turns out from the Tunnel Man—”
“Oh shit,” I said. It was like a door opened up inside me and behind it I could see a face, the cloudy eyes under all that hair. I had sat with him inside the tunnel, given him all the money in my pockets.
“What?” Katherine said.
“I remember talking to him. I remember trying to make him understand me.”
“Trying to—”
“Just trying to get the words out,” I said. “His name is Billy.”
I had been almost catatonic, like an animal in the last moment before giving itself up to a predator, its body exposed, its mind cut off.
And then they found him. They found everything—the plane, his body.
Our mother wouldn’t come. She couldn’t see our father anyway, she said, so what difference did it make? She said it was Patricia he had loved.
And since I had no response for that, I let it go.
Throughout the service I stood between Eric and Patricia and imagined my father killing Fiona. I thought of his hands around her neck, squeezing the air out of her tiny body.
The service was conducted at a Presbyterian church Patricia had forced our father to attend every Easter and Christmas. One after another, his friends, mostly old pilots, airplane mechanics, fishing-tackle-shop owners, stepped up to the podium and said it was the way he wanted to go, old Jim loved flying so much. They all talked about how he was still flying somewhere out there. They actually believed this. But I saw in my mind our father’s body not flying, but floating, bloated beyond recognition, his eyes open to the sea floor. Here were all of Patricia’s friends, too. These were the wives of pilots and hunters. These were women more at home in blue denim than black nylon. Their sympathy was genuine, the expressions in their eyes far less maudlin, far more acknowledging of the disappearance, the deliberateness of it.
Patricia wept steadily, and I found myself crying a little bit, too, the tears at first like surprises on my face. Eric stood beside me, impassive. I remembered that he didn’t cry at the service for Fiona, either. I saw things with such clarity now that I thought I could see the obfuscation itself, my life’s bizarre catastrophe playing out:
A girl disappeared, one brother accused the other, the father—guilty by action or the lack of it—follows the girl into the void. It had a symmetry. Why else would he kill himself?
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