Raveling

by Peter Moore Smith

  It was never suggested at the service that he committed suicide, of course, that he would have even considered taking his own life. And the official police finding was Death by Misadventure.

  I would leave Patricia here in Florida in the little cottage she had shared with him. More than likely, I would never see her again. She’d send me cards on all the right holidays, and I would call her on the anniversary of his fading away, just to make sure she was all right. Old soldiers never die, the saying goes. It’s the same for pilots. They don’t die, they only get lost. Our mother had clouds in her eyes as long as I can remember. Perhaps that is what he saw in her, all those years ago.

  But there I go falling into the same trap as those old veterans.

  Afterwards, Eric stood outside with his hands in his pockets and compared the weather to New York. “It isn’t frozen yet,” he said. “It is colder, though, up there.”

  It was already the Christmas season. I had completely lost track. I wore only a black sports coat and old black corduroys. They were our father’s, in fact, everything somewhat too big.

  “I’ve been worried about how you were taking this,” Eric said. “But I can see now that you’re all right.”

  “I’ve been crying a lot,” I admitted.

  “You always cried a lot.”

  “I spoke to Katherine.”

  “Katherine DeQuincey-Joy.” It was odd the way he said it, just repeating her name.

  “Are you still seeing her?”

  He looked at the sky, which was blue and ignorantly bright. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  I said, “She’s looking into things.”

  “Yeah.”

  “She has a theory.” I wanted to be cautious, but at the same time I wanted an ally, and his opinion. “She thinks Dad, thinks he did something—” I was whispering now “—something to Fiona.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “She thinks that’s why he—”

  “Did you say anything to him?”

  “I told him the truth.” I had to look away.

  “You wouldn’t know the fucking truth,” Eric said, “if it fell on you.”

  “Eric,” I said, my head shaking, my hands trembling, “I’m sane now.”

  “Pilot—”

  “I need to know what you think about that.”

  My brother turned to me, the look of righteous conviction in his eyes I remembered from childhood, and in a way it frightened me and in a way it consoled me. “It’s what everyone always thought all along, you idiot.”

  I shook my head.

  He laughed. “Pilot, you are so crazy. You have no idea how crazy you are.”

  “Katherine believes me.”

  “Katherine is looking for the reason you’re crazy. Katherine is nurture. I am nature. Do you understand?”

  “There’s no such thing as crazy,” I said. “You’re a fucking neurosurgeon, you should—”

  “Then there’s no such thing as you, little brother.”

  “Then there’s no such thing as an old rusty knife with dried blood still on it and a red sneaker, either.”

  “You don’t have those things.”

  I had been standing at the door, shaking the hands of these old pilots and mechanics. I only smiled at Eric now. I had been crying for so long, and now I smiled. I had been crying, I thought, all my life. “Yes, I do.”

  “Where?”

  “Where is the last place, Eric, that you would look?”

  “Do you want to disgrace our father’s memory? What is the point of this, Pilot?”

  “But what if he—”

  “He took his own life, for Christ’s sake. You don’t think that’s enough proof?”

  I wasn’t sure about the truth anymore. But I was sure about what I had done with the evidence. “Eric,” I said, “where is the last place you would look?”

  “What the fuck are you talking about, Pilot?”

  I said, “You tell me.”

  The same day, but colder, a Saturday afternoon, the woods rustled and strained against a wind that came off the highway from the north. The thin branches of the trees were black as Chinese calligraphy against the too-blue winter sky. Katherine hugged herself, not dressed for this in a light jacket and jeans. Three days earlier the weather had been completely different. Katherine had always loved winter in the city. Out here in the suburbs, though, there was no comfort in it. She moved steadily along the path that followed the highway toward the concrete tube where the Tunnel Man lived. Would he remember her? She thought he was less crazy than his act indicated. He would remember her. The real question was, did he have the evidence? One seven-year-old girl’s red drugstore sneaker, one hunting knife, both of these things gone in memory twenty years, fingerprints intact.

  Katherine prayed those fingerprints belonged to my father.

  She saw the tunnel up ahead of her, its mouth dark, water trickling like drool out into a puddle, bigger now than it had been three days ago. It had been raining that day. Did he know she was coming? Could he hear her walking down the path? When she rounded the corner and stood in front of the pool of filthy, cold water, she saw through the tube all the way to the highway island’s daylight on the other side. Where the Tunnel Man’s house had been was now only scattered debris, pieces of wood, a couple of crumpled, soggy blankets. There was a large piece of blue plastic sheeting stuck in the flow of the water.

  “Hello?” Katherine said. It was a stupid thing to say, she thought. Clearly, no one was there.

  Clearly, the Tunnel Man had left.

  She trod across the edges of the pool and, her feet dry this time, stepped into the tunnel. It echoed, of course, announcing her aloneness. She found the plastic sheets and pulled them back. Underneath was an old shopping cart, a wet pile of rags and packing blankets. There was a smell emanating from it that was almost sweet, like an orchard of rotting apples. There were odd bits and pieces of things left behind. A few books, a Bible, some Stephen King novels, a Metropolitan Home magazine. He had taken off, Katherine realized. He had gone. Had he left the evidence? No, he was probably using the knife, gutting road-kill raccoons and roasting them over a fire. Katherine pulled the edge of the wet packing blanket back, and beneath it, the Tunnel Man’s face was clearly visible, eyes closed as if sleeping. His skin was made whiter, cleaner, actually, by the water washing over it. The dead man’s image was presented to Katherine with the same banality as any inanimate object in the tunnel. She pulled the wet blanket back more and saw that he was fully dressed, his body deep in the mire of junk and dead leaves and garbage that flowed through. There were empty bottles all around him. He had killed himself by drinking, Katherine thought. She wondered if she should say anything to the police. What would be the point? Then she imagined those girls from the junior high discovering the body. She could hear them shrieking. No, she would report it. She’d call that Vettorello guy. He would help.

  Her mind blank, Katherine walked back to the car which she had parked in the junior high lot. Inside it, she dialed the number for the police.

  “Detective Vettorello,” she said.

  The receptionist asked her to wait.

  “Vettorello.”

  “Detective Vettorello,” Katherine said. “This is Katherine DeQuincey-Joy.”

  “I was going to call you,” he said. “The file just arrived from upstate. We’re ready to go. I talked to Cleveland, too. I’m glad he could help you. I wasn’t sure if—”

  Katherine broke in, “I need your help in an entirely different way right now, at this moment—”

  “What can I do for you?”

  “I discovered a, a dead body,” she stammered, “and I didn’t want to just call the police, I mean, I wanted to call you—”

  “Where is it?” Vettorello’s voice contained within it an edge of calm, a tone belying a nearly untraceable undercurrent of thrill.

  She said, “It’s in a concrete tunnel under Sky Highway. It’s just past Exit nine.”


  Vettorello shouted something across the office. “Stay on the phone,” he told her. “Where are you right now?”

  “In my car,” Katherine told him. “I have a car phone, but—”

  “Did you move the body? Did you touch it at all?”

  “No,” she said, “I don’t think so.” Did she touch it? She couldn’t remember.

  “Good. Now I want you to tell me exactly how you found it.” He was laughing a bit. “What the hell were you doing in the concrete tube beneath Sky Highway?”

  “It’s complicated,” Katherine said. She looked at her hand. She had just torn a large piece of skin off her ring finger and a globule of blood was forming. She closed her eyes to the delicious feeling and placed her finger in her mouth.

  “I’m listening.”

  “The other day I was out walking around in the woods, in the woods where they found my client, Pilot Airie, just because I—well, because I was trying to get inside his experience, you know, and, and I met these girls, just kids from the junior high.” She sat in her sapphire-blue VW Rabbit with the black car phone to her ear and watched a boy, ten or eleven years old, walking across the junior high football field into the woods. It could have been me twenty years ago. It could have been Eric, too. “And I asked them if they knew about Pilot, if they had seen him, and they had heard about a man found raving out there and they also told me about the Tunnel Man.”

  “The Tunnel Man.”

  “I was curious,” Katherine said. “So I went into the tunnel. And there was this man, an alcoholic, hopelessly deranged.” She was exaggerating, she knew. “No,” she said. “He wasn’t so deranged, I guess. Just a drunk.”

  “Okay.”

  “He said he knew Pilot, though. I think he might have helped him. I think they shared, shared something, something probably meaningless, but nevertheless—”

  “Get to the part about him being dead,” Vettorello said.

  “He told me he knew where Pilot put the evidence.”

  “The shoe?”

  “And the knife.”

  “Excellent. Go on.”

  “He told me to come back in three days, and that was—”

  “Today, and you came back to find him and—”

  “And it looks like he drank too much and his head fell into the water,” Katherine said. “And he drowned. That’s what it—”

  “We’ll figure out that part,” Vettorello said. He was smiling over the phone. She could hear him. “I’ll come out there, too,” he said now. “There’s a team on its way to you.”

  “I’m in the parking lot at the junior high,” Katherine said. “Should I return to the tunnel?”

  “No, stay where you are,” Vettorello said. “Stay right where you are.”

  Katherine was smiling, too. It was stupid that she was smiling about this, she thought, a dead man—even terrible. But she couldn’t help it. A man was dead, and she was smiling, a professional counseling psychologist, and she couldn’t stop herself.

  Instead of taking me back to the airport, Patricia gave me the keys to our father’s car, the rugged four-wheel drive he had picked me up in just a few weeks ago, the day I arrived. She didn’t want to see it, she said, sitting in the driveway. So I drove it all the way back to New York in one steady blast of memories, stopping only for gas and Pepsi. I remembered everything—my whole life. I remembered Fiona, my little sister, and pulling her cool limbs in full cinematic motion from the wet pool behind the house, beads of glimmering water flying off her hair. I remember her smiling as I pulled her out, the bright little-girl giggle. This was a fully formed human being I remembered, not just a still photograph, an image from a catalog. I remembered Eric stalking me, the threats of death, the anticipation of violence. On each side of the highway that leads up the east coast of the United States, the thirteen colonies, I remembered my life. I remembered that he never carried them through, my brother, that his threats were just threats, that his violence was largely verbal.

  Perhaps our father had remembered his life this way, too, his hands on the controls of the seaplane. Thinking of this, I wanted to turn the car off the highway, pedal pressed hard for the trees, my teeth clenched and my eyes closed. I didn’t, though. That’s what he did. I listened to the radio instead, finding country music stations, the kind my father liked, the guitars all twangy and sharp, forcing myself to listen with his ears. I watched the sleek black sports cars of bachelors materializing in front of me. I crept by the old people in luxury sedans and college students in economy models returning home for the holidays. I examined the treeline, now moving by at sixty-five miles an hour, the cruise control set for easy driving, and saw how meaningless it had become, just a blur. When I got back, I thought, I would locate the evidence, I would have the police test it for fingerprints, blood, DNA, and then I would know. After twenty years, I wondered, would blood and fingerprints and DNA still exist? Would anything be detectable? Maybe not. It didn’t matter. If I learned nothing, then nothing had changed. If I learned that it was my father who, in a fit of alcoholic rage, killed my little sister, then I would know everything I needed to know.

  So I arrived at Hannah’s house feeling tired but not numb, feeling sad but not morose—

  This would be over soon, I was thinking.

  —feeling sane.

  It was late afternoon, but her light was on upstairs. She knew I was coming, and I knew she would wait for me. As soon as I opened the door, in fact, I heard her voice. “Pilot?”

  “I’m coming,” I called out. “I have to unload the car.” I brought my luggage into the house, and also the boxes of photographs Patricia had given me, pictures our father had taken from the seaplane, the faraway terrain of Florida he loved so much, the little island and white waves off the coast. When I was finished, I walked into her room. “I’m here,” I said finally. “Here I am.”

  She sat in front of the window, an old woman in a chair, the radio playing softly, the air stuffy as the inside of a closet. “Pilot,” she said. She’d been crying, of course. She reached out for me and I took her hand. “I’m so glad you’re back.”

  “How are you?” I had asked her this every day on the telephone, but that was a different how-are-you, a telephone how-are-you. This one was real.

  “I’m blind as a bat,” she said, a slight laugh in her voice.

  “But you can see—”

  “I can see your sister,” she said. “During the day, and then sometimes even at night she comes and sits beside me.” She was laughing at herself, saying this. She knew she’d been hallucinating. She knew she was going crazy. “I’m afraid if I tell anyone,” she said, “they’ll give me powerful medication of some kind and Fiona will disappear and I’ll have to go years without seeing her again, and I couldn’t—”

  “It’s just your memories, Mom.”

  “I know, but they’ve been reborn.”

  “You can see Fiona anytime you want. Just think of her, and then you can—”

  “No,” she said. “Not like this.”

  “Is she happy?” I asked.

  “She’s a girl. She’s as happy as girls ever are.”

  “I have to ask you something,” I said.

  “Pilot, please—”

  “I have to,” I said.

  “—I don’t want to—”

  “It’s very important.”

  She knew what it was.

  “—talk about it now.”

  “Did you ever think—”

  “No.”

  “—that Dad had anything to do with it—”

  “Your father?”

  “—with Fiona’s disappearance?”

  Hannah had been holding my hand. She let go of it now. “Is that what you think?” she said. “Have you given up blaming your brother? And what about Katherine DeQuincey-Joy?”

  “Did you ever suspect him?”

  Hannah turned her face to the window, eyes open and unfocused. “Your father knew you were opening it all up again, kn
ew you found the, the things,” she said now, “didn’t he?”

  “I told him.”

  “He either didn’t want to learn the answer,” Hannah said, “as I don’t. Or he already knew the answer, and didn’t want to be around when you learned what it is.”

  “I know.” I walked to the bed and sat down. “I know those are the options. I’m just not sure what they mean.”

  “Are you happy with either of them?”

  “This is my life.”

  “What about your sanity?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I keep doubting that. I doubt it every minute.”

  “I have gone blind,” my mother said. “And now my husband is lost, too.”

  “I’m going to give the shoe to the police.”

  “Pilot,” she said.

  “Mom, I have to.”

  “Pilot.”

  “And the knife.”

  “Pilot—” But she didn’t finish. Her hand came to her mouth, and it seemed like she couldn’t say anything.

  Shivering, Katherine waited in her car, her fingertips raw and scabby in her mouth. When the police arrived, she opened her door and stepped out. She had managed to stop herself from smiling, at least—smiling about a dead man. The cops seemed unhurried, serious but relaxed, doing something they did every day. Katherine introduced herself, hand extended, like a guest at a cocktail party, then led the two young police officers down the path into the woods she had taken just a half hour earlier.

  Inside the tunnel, one of the cops pulled the Tunnel Man out of the water, propping his head against the curvature of the concrete wall. “Old Billy finally bit the big one,” he said with a grim smile.

  “Billy,” Katherine repeated.

  “He’s been around for years,” the cop said sadly. The young policeman had introduced himself a moment ago, but now she couldn’t remember his name. He had a fine mustache, dark skin, and large, feminine eyes.

  “You knew him?”

  “He used to live in the dump site behind the Grand Union a few years ago,” the cop said, nodding toward the highway. “Then he moved into the tunnel.”

  “Miss DeQuincey-Joy?” It was someone behind her.