Second Chance

by Jonathan Valin

  “I did call. You weren’t here.”

  “I was with Kirsty,” she cried. “That’s why I wasn’t here. I was with Kirsty!”

  The girl was almost shouting and very close to tears.

  I edged her out of the hall and into the apartment, closing the door behind us. “Easy, Marnee. I’m a friend, remember?”

  She gave me a wet-eyed look of frustration. “It’s just that I spent a couple of hours, driving around with her in this beat-up car, trying to talk her into staying with me. But she wouldn’t listen! I’m so afraid . . . I’m afraid she’s going to die.”

  Marnee Thompson stamped her foot and started to cry. She ran into the living room, curled up in the armchair, and cried—with her hand over her eyes and her knees tucked against her chest.

  I went into the tiny kitchen, found a kettle in the cabinet, and started boiling water for coffee. It wasn’t just for the girl. I was afraid that if I didn’t wake myself up, I’d miss something important—or lose my concentration completely. And then I was pissed off at my bad luck. If I’d stuck around the apartment, I would have found Kirsty in time to stop her and Ethan. Instead, she’d slipped away. For a moment I felt as if fate really was conspiring toward her death, just as Kirsten herself believed.

  There was a can of instant on top of the refrigerator. When the kettle started to shriek, I mixed two cups and took them back into the living room.

  The girl was still sitting in the chair, stiffly now, her feet planted on the floor as if they were weighted with chains. I handed her a cup and sat down across from her on the desk stool.

  “Let’s start again,” I said. “Kirsty came back here around . . . ?”

  “Eight, I think,” Marnee said in a dull, cried-out voice. “Maybe a little after.”

  “She wanted the manuscript?”

  “Not just the manuscript. She wanted to say good-bye to me. To tell me . . . ” Her voice started to tremble again, but she caught herself before she broke down, crossing her arms and squeezing tightly as if she were physically holding herself together. “To tell me she loved me and to say goodbye.”

  “Did she tell you where she was going?”

  “All she said was that she was going away. That she’d made a decision. The right decision, she called it.”

  “What was this decision?”

  “To kill herself, I think,” the girl said with a hopeless look.

  I didn’t want to give her the chance to brood about it, so I raised my voice a little, startling her. “Was Ethan with Kirsty?”

  “Yes. He didn’t come into the apartment. But when I went out to the car with Kirsty, he was sitting in the backseat. Kirsty dropped him off at The Eagle while we drove around and talked. I guess she must have picked him up later.”

  “What did she talk about in the car?”

  “Jay, her dad, her mom, her breakdown—everything. She said she’d been confused for so long about her past and that she was just now beginning to see what it meant her to do. She talked like that—like her past was this guiding light. She said she thought, at first, that Jay was her destiny. But now she knew that was wrong. Her destiny was with her family. The way she talked about her mom . . . it scared me.”

  “What did she say about Estelle?”

  “She said she was just like her.”

  “You mean, suicidal?”

  “More than that, I think. She said that for years she’d hated her mother and never understood why. She used to feel terribly guilty about it, as if she had driven her mother crazy. She’d punished herself for that. She talked as if Jay and the breakdown were somehow part of the punishment. But this summer, when she was in therapy, her shrink gave her Pentothal and she remembered something about her mom. She wouldn’t tell me what it was, just that it had terrified her at first. But now she said it didn’t scare her anymore. Now she understood that she’d been punishing the wrong person.”

  “Who was the right person?”

  Marnee Thompson shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  ******

  We sat in the living room for a while, drinking coffee. Marnee slowly calmed down, and once she got her bearings back she started asking me questions.

  “How did you know that Ethan was with Kirsty?”

  “Stein said Kirsty planned to see him this weekend.” I gave Marnee a monitory look. “You knew that, didn’t you?”

  She ducked her head. “I knew a lot of things,” she said in a whisper. “I just couldn’t . . . I was afraid to tell you. Except for Jay, I mean.”

  The girl looked up guiltily. “Did you talk to him? To Jay?”

  “We had some words.”

  “What did he say about me? Something ugly?”

  She flushed as if she already knew what Stein had said, as if he’d said it before and it had come back to her.

  “Don’t worry about him, Marnee. Guys like Stein aren’t worth the time.”

  “I’d like to believe that.” She stared at me for a long moment. “Are you going to stay here tonight?”

  “I’ll probably get a motel room by the airport. I have to fly back to Cincinnati tomorrow, early.”

  “You could stay,” the girl said shyly. “I want you to stay. I could use the company.”

  “I can’t, Marnee. I’d like to, but I can’t.”

  She ducked her head. “Okay,” she whispered. “I understand.”

  But she didn’t understand. She thought I was rejecting her because of what Stein told me, and there was no way short of spending the night to prove that I wasn’t.

  It was a sad way to end it. But she had the resources to survive. Her friend didn’t.

  As I went out the door I told her that I’d call her, when I had some news about Kirsty.

  10

  I CAUGHT a cab to O’Hare and checked in at the airport Hilton. If the bars had been open, I might not have bothered with the room. But the lounges were shut, and I needed a place to sit and think. I also needed a phone.

  The room was clean and featureless, with a view of the snowy runways, still busy with mail and parcel traffic even at that hour of the night. I took a hot shower, ordered some coffee up from room service, then phoned Delta reservations and booked a seat on their first flight to Cincinnati at seven in the morning. After the busboy arrived with the coffee, I called Phil Pearson.

  Pearson must have been used to late-night calls. Either that or he was expecting trouble, because he sounded fully alert when he answered the phone. There was no easy way to break the news, so I just told him outright—at least as much of it as I understood. He didn’t say a word as I went through his kids’ bizarre history—his own history. When I finished, the silence at the other end was so profound that I thought he’d gone off the line.

  “Pearson?” I said. “Are you still there?”

  “I’m here,” the man said in an awful voice.

  “Look, I know this is a terrible shock. But there are some things that have to be done immediately if we’re going to prevent a tragedy.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Ethan and Kirsten were still in Chicago as of early last night. I’m not completely sure where they’ve headed, but it’s possible that they’re going to Cincinnati.”

  “To find this man, this convict?”

  I said, “Yes. They’ve had at least four or five hours on the road, which would put them south of Indianapolis, almost to the Ohio line. If we alert the Ohio State Patrol and the Cincinnati police, we might be able to stop them before they get in trouble.”

  “Stop them, how?” the man said in the same deadened voice. “With guns?”

  “Of course not. We could arrange to have them detained as missing persons.”

  “You said my son had a pistol, didn’t you? What makes you think he’ll stop for anyone?”

  He had a point, but he’d also made one. “Someone will have to stop him,” I said.

  “I don’t want the police!” Pearson said, his voice rising. “My children aren’t crimina
ls. I’m not a criminal.”

  It was an odd thing to say under the circumstances. But he was badly upset, and it was already clear that he felt personally responsible for his children’s problems. And more than a little embarrassed by them.

  “I don’t want Kirsten or Ethan hurt,” he said in a cooler voice. “I don’t want anyone hurt.”

  “Then let me notify the police.”

  “What exactly would you say?”

  “Standard missing persons reports. I don’t have to go into detail.”

  It was precisely what he wanted to hear.

  “Do it, then,” he said resignedly. “But don’t volunteer anything more than necessary. If Kirsty and Ethan are going to survive this—if the family is going to survive this—it’s essential that they know I still love them.”

  He said it with great feeling. But he was saying it to the wrong person. At least that’s the way it sounded to me—like a plea for approval.

  ******

  After finishing with Pearson, I made the necessary calls to a friend I knew with the State Police and to Al Foster at the CPD. I phoned Brandt Scheuster, too, leaving a message on his machine. By then, it was almost three.

  I lay down on the bed and tried to sleep, but the coffee had kicked in. Anyway I knew I was going to have to get up again in a few hours. Clicking on the reading light above the bed I picked Ethan Pearson’s manila folder up from the nightstand. The clippings fell out on the bedclothes. A dozen of them, yellowed with age.

  I gathered them together, sorted them by date, and read through them one by one. The first clipping was from the September 5, 1976, edition of the Enquirer. It was a short article, two paragraphs long, detailing Estelle Pearson’s disappearance.

  INDIAN HILL WOMAN REPORTED MISSING

  Estelle Pearson, of 3 Woodbine Lane, Indian Hill, has been reported missing by her husband, Dr. Philip Pearson. Mrs. Pearson disappeared on the afternoon of September 3, after failing to show up for a doctor’s appointment in Clifton.

  Mrs. Pearson has been ill for some time, and it is feared that she may have overmedicated herself or is in some way incapacitated by her illness . . .

  A brief description of the woman followed, along with a number to call if Estelle Pearson was found.

  The next article appeared two days later. It was considerably more detailed and its tone was grim.

  INDIAN HILL WOMAN FEARED DEAD

  Indian Hill police have launched an extensive search for Estelle Pearson, wife of Dr. Philip Pearson. Mrs. Pearson, 34, was reported missing by her husband on September 3, when she failed to return home after missing an appointment with Dr. Sheldon Sacks, a Clifton psychiatrist.

  Mrs. Pearson has a long history of emotional problems and has been recently hospitalized for depression. It is feared that she may have taken her own life . . .

  There was a small photo of the woman with the article. It was difficult to tell much from the newspaper halftone, but she looked like a pretty woman with bee-stung lips and a thin, angular, careworn face.

  There were several more paragraphs over the next week, reporting the lack of progress in the Pearson case. And then the big one—the front-page story—on September 14.

  INDIAN HILL WOMAN FOUND DEAD ESTELLE PEARSON, APPARENT SUICIDE

  The body of Estelle Pearson, of 3 Woodbine Lane, Indian Hill, was discovered late last night in the Great Miami River by two fishermen, Claude Carter of Delhi and Sam Livingston of Terrace Park. Mrs. Pearson, wife of Indian Hill psychiatrist Dr. Philip Pearson, has been missing since September 3.

  The fishermen found Mrs. Pearson’s body floating in an estuary of the Miami River, east of Miamitown. She had been in the water for at least ten days, according to Hamilton County Assistant Coroner Dr. Jeffrey Hillman. Pending an inquest, the Cincinnati Police Department is reserving comment on the cause of death. Foul play is not suspected.

  Mrs. Pearson was first reported missing on September 3, after she failed to show up for an appointment with her psychiatrist, Dr. Sheldon Sacks of Clifton. There was concern at the time that she might have taken her own life. Dr. Sacks has indicated that Mrs. Pearson was hospitalized for depression in June and on several other occasions over the past ten years.

  Mrs. Pearson, née Estelle Frieberg, was 34 years old, a Cincinnati native, and a graduate of Miami University and the University of Cincinnati Medical School. She is survived by her husband, Dr. Philip Pearson, a psychiatrist, and her two children, Ethan, 10, and Kirsten, 6.

  There was a death notice the following day, an obit with a large picture of Estelle, taken when she was younger and less troubled. And about a week later one final paragraph detailing the findings of the coroner’s inquest. Not surprisingly the coroner had ruled Estelle Pearson’s death a suicide by drowning. There was no hint that she might have been murdered.

  Ethan’s drawing was the last item in the folder. After I’d read the brief history of his mother’s life and death, the line sketch looked less like an anonymous bogeyman to me and more like a picture of how the kid himself must have felt following the suicide—jagged, frightened, full of rage.

  Skimming through his chapbooks only confirmed that feeling. I didn’t read all four of them—the poems were mostly of a piece, anyway. Sentimental elegies for his mother and his lost childhood. Angry jeremiads about social ills, full of violent adolescent gripes and not so veiled references to his father and other father figures—men who said they knew best but constantly let Ethan down. There was a love poem dedicated to his wife, and one very odd poem called “The Anniversary.”

  When we meet again, as we will

  We’ll talk about that last fall day

  And the smell of burning leaves

  The sunlight on the lawn

  The sound of the wind in the trees

  Where I met you.

  Seeing is a meeting, after all

  Even from a high window

  Myself a child of ten taking leave

  Of her in the smell of burning leaves

  The sunlight on the lawn

  The sound of the wind in the dark trees

  Where you waited

  We’ll meet again where you waited

  In the trees, in the burning,

  in the darkness, in the sound of the wind

  And the child will be there too

  In the darkness where you waited

  A knife blade in the darkness where he’s waited

  To commemorate this anniversary.

  I wouldn’t have bet money on it, but I had the feeling that the poem was addressed to Estelle Pearson’s murderer. Even if it wasn’t, it had a nightmarish resonance to it. Just the thing to drowse over.

  11

  I DIDN’T get much sleep, maybe three hours. Enough to leave me logy on the flight back to Cincinnati. In a way it was a blessing to be that tired. I didn’t have enough energy to get scared about the plane ride.

  We landed at Cincinnati International around nine, having lost an hour on the way back. After a cup of coffee at the airport cafeteria I picked up the car in short-term parking and drove to town.

  It was a mild, blue December morning. A bit of snow from the previous day’s storm still laced the hillsides along the expressway, in the crannies that the sun hadn’t yet touched. It would melt within the hour. The day was that warm, like false spring.

  I stopped at the office first—to phone the State Patrol and Al Foster at CPD. The grey Volare hadn’t been spotted, although Al had managed to get a Kentucky plate number and registration. The car was registered to Hedda Pearson. The address she’d given was 1245 Hidden Fork Road, in Ft. Thomas, Kentucky. There was a phone number on the registration.

  I dialed the number and got the manager at The Bluegrass Motel and Motor Court. The name Bluegrass Motel rang a bell, but it wasn’t until after we’d begun talking that I remembered that the last of Ethan’s postcards was addressed from the place.

  The manager, a man named Wilson, was officiously polite in the bow-and-scrape
tradition of southern hospitality. I asked him if Ethan Pearson had checked in or out, and he said neither. The Pearsons had left town, but their room was paid up through the end of the month and he expected them back soon. I told him who I was, gave him my phone number, and asked him to call immediately if Ethan did come back. I made it sound important, so Wilson would feel important. He said he would surely call.

  I called the Pearsons next—to see if they’d heard from their wandering children. Louise Pearson answered the phone.

  “We haven’t heard a word, Mr. Stoner.” She sounded exhausted, but then she and her husband had had a rough night. “Phil’s worked himself into quite a state. This business about the police . . . it would help if you could come out and talk to him. Give him a sense that he’s participating in the process and not just sitting back and letting it happen around him. It’s the feeling of helplessness that’s getting to him—getting to all of us. It . . . well, it stirs up bad memories.”

  I’d read about those memories the night before. Up to that moment it hadn’t hit me that Pearson had been down this road before—waiting for the police to discover what had happened to someone he loved, someone self-destructively crazy. The woman didn’t make the connection explicit, but the change in her tone of voice—the change from the backbiting bitterness of the previous day to genuine concern for her husband—was itself telling.

  “All right,” I told her. “I can make it out there in about an hour.”

  “Bless you,” she said.

  ******

  There were several Mercedeses parked in the Pearson driveway, when I pulled up around ten-thirty. Two of them had physician’s plates. The other one had a bag from Saks in the backseat. I walked around to the front of the house and knocked on the door.

  A smart-looking woman with snow-white hair answered. She was in her sixties, immaculately dressed in a Chanel suit and pearls.

  “Yes? What can I do for you?” she said coolly.

  “My name is Stoner. I’m here to see Dr. Pearson.”

  Her blue eyes lost their “No Vendors” look. “You’re the detective, aren’t you?”