Last night they were with me and saying the same thing. Remember what he did. Remember pouring him the tea and how he’d look up at you, weeping. The cough syrup was never his idea, was it? You thought of it yourself.
My memory points me in different directions at once. Nothing is clear, no thought more than a fragment. I know I went to Roland’s the night after my panic attack in Linda Sue’s bathroom. I’ve never lost my memory of this because I knew what I was doing. I had to see him again.
I’d gone over it in my mind again and again. Had our kiss opened a door or had we tried something once and shut it again? The more I thought about it, the less I slept and the less sure I was. Why had he told me about his loneliness, the duty he felt to his children? The whole business left me foggy and distracted, not thinking properly about anything else. Instead of doing my work, I imagined different futures. Moving out of our houses, starting new lives where no one knew the people we once pretended to be.
I went to Roland’s door because I couldn’t stay away.
When I arrived, the door was open slightly, lights on and music playing. There was even half a glass of wine on the counter, every indication that he was enjoying the same sort of evening I’d interrupted five nights earlier. Except for one thing: He wasn’t there. I called softly from the doorway and then again, louder. I pushed the door open and walked inside.
I stayed for a half hour at least, hoping he’d miraculously appear with food from upstairs, or a bottle of wine. I arranged myself in various casual positions so he wouldn’t be alarmed when he walked in. Then I heard Marianne’s voice in the kitchen speaking in a whispered hush to someone else, and after that, two sets of footsteps on the wooden stairs. I couldn’t stay. I had my answer as clearly as I was likely to get it: He did visit his wife at night. Their marriage may have been moribund, but it wasn’t dead yet. I left his apartment when I saw the time—almost eleven-thirty—and knew he wouldn’t be coming back that night.
Now I understand that they must have been upstairs, dealing with the news of Trish’s pregnancy and her determination not to abort the baby.
I keep trying to remember what happened next.
As I walked out of his basement apartment, my breath went short at the thought of returning home to the bed I’d slipped out of hours earlier. I couldn’t go back, couldn’t lie down again beside a man I hardly knew anymore.
In that state of mind, why did I go over to Linda Sue’s house? I don’t remember except that a light was on downstairs and it seemed to offer a momentary alternative. Did I think I would find Geoffrey there? Did I consider peeking in the way I had that other time, walking home with Paul? I suppose I thought, I’ll just check and see if he’s there. Of course I hoped he wasn’t. I wanted some glimpse of her, awake and as alone as I was.
I went because I couldn’t think what else to do. My body was alternately sweaty and dry, my thoughts fragmented, my words slipping away. At work that day, I’d alphabetized forty request slips, and then, without thinking, dropped the batch in the wastepaper basket.
I’d had no choice, really. I had to push my life off the edge in one direction or another. I went to Linda Sue’s house because I couldn’t make my body go back home.
I wanted to find her alone.
Instead, I found her dead.
CHAPTER 27
The next morning I can tell right away that something is wrong.
Marianne and Roland are talking downstairs. The twin bed across the room where Trish slept last night is empty.
Last night when I came in, I stood over Trish for a while and asked myself again: Could she be a murderer? Could Trish have gotten out that night, climbed through the window, and crept back to Linda Sue’s house without her parents knowing? I don’t have a lot of evidence, just an unstable girl who has admitted to killing a cat, and a letter, written three years ago, imploring me to think about the cat. Any lawyer would tell me this doesn’t add up to much.
Downstairs, Marianne asks if I know where Trish is.
“I don’t know. It’s eight-thirty in the morning. Where could she have gone?”
“That’s just the point.” Marianne shakes her head. “You never should have brought her here. The timing was—just terrible.”
What timing? What is she talking about? “She’s your daughter, Marianne. You haven’t spoken in five years. I assumed you’d want to see her.”
“You involved yourself in something you shouldn’t have. She’s gone now. Let’s just leave it at that.”
Does this mean Trish has run away? That my suspicions are right? I go back across the street and find Finn looking as if he hasn’t slept at all. He tells me he hasn’t seen Trish, which worries me more. Has she taken a bus home? It’s possible, I suppose. More than possible, I fear, if she’d started to wonder about my suspicions. She may have written me that letter three years ago, may have wanted to confess and free herself from this prison of guilt, but when it comes down to it, no one is going to sit around and wait to be taken to a real prison.
I don’t blame her, really. In all the complicated, stormy mess of this, I don’t.
She was fifteen, mentally ill, and pregnant. Could voices have taken hold of her that night? Told her to go back and harm Linda Sue?
Last night, after I returned here and let myself in with the key Marianne had given me, I found Trish asleep and no one else home. I stayed up and read the rest of Trish’s book. I didn’t want it to end; I loved all of it, especially the details I’d never thought of: Shannon wishing for breasts, trying on lipstick; Peter wearing wide-wale corduroys his mother has bought, all wrong, so dumb-looking, it makes him wonder if his mother shops with her eyes closed. How can I not love the gift that Trish has given me?
“I have no idea where Trish is,” Finn says. “But I’ve found something interesting. You’ve got to look at this.” I follow him back to his office as he explains. “I worked with some of the elements you saw on Roland’s drawings, deuterium and palladium. Do you remember that business with cold fusion in the late eighties? Where the two scientists in Utah made this big announcement that they’d discovered a way to create nuclear reaction using nothing more than ocean water in a beaker with a cathode of palladium stuck in it?”
I do actually. I remember that Paul came home one night and talked about it excitedly.
“No one could believe it at the time. They’d financed their own research and done it all in a lab they set up in a basement. The whole thing was so simple that everyone was skeptical. They held a press conference about their results and it was all there, these beakers of ordinary water producing excess heat, tritium, and isotopes of helium-4, all by-products of nuclear fusion. They’d done it. They’d made ocean water a fuel source. The government had spent billions of dollars trying to do it with hot fusion and these guys did it in their basement. They were a sensation, on the covers of Time and Newsweek. Everyone said if it worked it would be the end of global warming.”
I remember some of what happened after that. The announcement that generated worldwide buzz was disproved six months later when no lab could replicate the same results the two scientists had gotten in their basement. A year later, they were the butt of jokes and scorned for their hubris. Finn tells me the rest: “The whole idea died, theoretically, except that if you hunt around a little bit, you realize that it didn’t. A few years later, there’s a scientist in Georgia saying he achieved intermittent bursts of spontaneous energy with palladium in ocean water. About three years after that, two groups, in Italy and Japan, did it again—a sustained elevation of temperature with tritium and helium by-products. It was finicky and unpredictable. The palladium had to be from a certain mine, cut a certain way, which explained the difficulty reproducing the results. But they came right out and said not only was this possible, but they’d gotten it to happen in one out of every thirty trials, which meant it had some reliability. Not enough yet, but some. After that, more people started to set up their own experiments. Privately funded, v
ery underground experiments.”
It finally occurs to me: the beakers of water, measuring temperatures. “You think this is what Roland’s working on?” I think back to the old days, when strange, expensive-looking cars drove up our street looking for Roland. Each time it happened, we’d wonder, Wait, could he be working on something significant? Finn shows me a printout of some of the early material, and as he speaks I flip through an old New York Times article with a rough drawing of a cold fusion prototype that is remarkably similar to the blueprint drawing I found on Roland’s desk.
“Here’s the strange part, though,” Finn continues. “I found a Web site dedicated to cold fusion research. It’s now gotten big enough internationally that they have annual conferences for scientists to get together and exchange updates on their research. I’m looking it over and in the back of my mind, I’m thinking maybe I’ll find Alocin Bell. That maybe Roland’s been using that name for his research. Sounds logical, right?”
“Right.”
“Except there’s no Alocin Bell, but there is, lo and behold, someone named Macias Bell. So I look through their archives of old newsletters, where you can find group photographs of award ceremony recipients, and here’s one where Macias Bell is listed in a photograph.”
He points to the photograph: a group of old men, standing in a row in front of a fountain. “Okay, so I look through the names and study them. After a while I can recognize a few. Here’s Martin Fleischmann, who started it all. Here’s Victor Foulard. But look at this. I was trying to count across the rows. Twelve names are listed but only eleven people are pictured. Macias Bell is meant to be standing between these two people, but look—he’s not there. If you look very closely you’ll see something that looks like it might be a shadow except that it also looks light colored. Do you see that?”
“Yes.”
“Couldn’t this be somebody’s shoulder behind Fleischmann?”
It’s a stretch, but it’s possible.
“Now look at this one.” He flips through to a newsletter dated three years later and points to another group photo, this one with twice as many faces and names. Or almost. Twenty names with nineteen faces. Macias Bell is listed but he is not in the photograph. This time, there’s a more blatant attempt at subterfuge. An outline of a head has stepped out of the light and looked down in time to let hair and shadow obscure the face. Someone is there, but it is impossible to see the face.
Finally we get to the newsletter and roster for 1996, the last year Macias Bell attended the conference, according to published rosters. And the same year as Linda Sue’s death. That year the news at the conference was all pretty troubling. The EPRI, Electric Power Research Institute, which was providing what little private funding there was for cold fusion research in the United States, announced the termination of all funds. During the same year, the Japanese Ministry of Trade and Industry also announced a pullout from all cold fusion research. “Most of the talks at the conference were about being on the cusp of finally putting together some reproducible working models, going into some experimental production, and suddenly all the money had dried up. Attendance fell off after that year. Bell stopped coming, along with a lot of others.”
“Are there pictures from that year?”
“Just one group shot—maybe fifty faces, impossible to identify anyone, I’d say.” He shows me the picture and he’s right. It looks like a blurry class reunion photo. I try anyway—count over on the row where Macias Bell is listed to see if it’s another shadowy blur, and this time, I’m surprised. It’s gray and indistinct, but this much is reasonably clear—Macias Bell is a woman.
CHAPTER 28
“I’ve called the police,” Marianne says when I get back to the house.
I The police, I think. She’s brought the police into this? “Why?”
“We had to. We had no choice.”
“Trish probably called a friend last night and asked to get picked up. I’m sure she’s fine, Marianne.”
“That’s what you think.” She sounds like a child. Certainly not like the scientist she’s been pretending not to be for twenty years. The more I studied the picture on Finn’s computer, the more certain I was. It was her hair, her jawline. I even recognized the shirt. I want to sit down at the table, grab her hands, and say, Why Marianne? Why were you pretending all these years to know nothing about what Roland did in the basement?
“We found blood in the bathroom,” she says. “A lot of it. And bloody towels. Like someone tried to clean up.”
My heart quickens. Blood? I left the bathroom at midnight, after I’d finished reading Trish’s book. There was no blood in there.
“The police are on their way over. They’ve asked that you stay here until they can talk to you.”
Hasn’t it occurred to Marianne the harm this could do? That the likeliest scenario right now is that Trish has had a breakdown of some kind or tried to kill herself last night?
That some part of her might want to confess but another part is—quite rightly—terrified of getting caught?
Last night I decided that I wasn’t going to tell Jeremy or anyone else what Trish said about the cat. Nor would I remind him of the cat letter. If Trish managed to get out of her house that night and returned to Linda Sue’s, where they got in an argument—over the baby, over the cat, something—that ended with Linda Sue’s death, what good will be served by sending Trish to prison at this point? I know all too well what prison does to its youngest inmates. Her gifts would be ignored, her weaknesses exacerbated, and in no time she’d be medicated into a shuffling state of mute compliance.
“Please don’t bring the police into this, Marianne. Think about it.” Surely Marianne knows what I mean by this. Surely the explanation for their silence all these years and the tension of this reunion is that she’s known or suspected her daughter’s guilt. “It could be a terrible mistake.”
I think about Trish yesterday, her perfect willingness to admit to all her mistakes, the confessions she made with such little prodding. I did some shitty things; I was a mess; I slept with too many boys. How long would it take before the police wrestled a murder confession out of her, too? Five minutes? Seven?
“You don’t remember what happened last night, do you?”
I try to read her face, but I can’t. “No.”
“You were up and roaming the halls. Screaming names—Shannon, Ben, Peter.”
I don’t know what to say. This happened occasionally when I first got to prison, but it hasn’t for years.
“The police want to know what you did to her when you were up in the middle of the night, screaming at everybody.”
Me? Screaming? I feel a cold chill rising up from the base of my spine. Has my subconscious ever been something I could control? Have I ever understood what prompted me to rise and wander darkened hallways in my sleep? I can’t imagine what I was thinking, or dreaming, or—God help me—doing, but suddenly I understand that anything’s possible.
“I didn’t do anything to Trish, Marianne.” I try to keep my voice calm. I think about the picture we found of Marianne on the Web site, hiding in the shadows, behind a false name. My tone says what my words don’t. We’ve all got secrets, okay, Marianne. Let’s not jump to any conclusions. I remind her that there’s no blood in the bedroom, and none on my clothes or hands or in my bed. “I didn’t touch her last night. I love Trish, I always have,” I say, which is true, though I’ve never said it out loud.
It’s more than that, though. What drove me to her reading and propelled me to invite her back here? If Trish was a child in search of attention, driven by a need she couldn’t name, for a love that would fill the void at her center, I understood her and I recognized pieces of myself. She wanted a baby to change her life and so did I.
I couldn’t have hurt her, I think, and then I imagine what I haven’t let myself think about yet. Trish had her baby, she got to hold him for a night, feel him breathing against her chest. I never got that much.
My whole life, I have waited for something that hasn’t happened.
Though it’s been twelve years, long enough that I don’t talk about it anymore, I still hate every pregnant woman I see, their hands cradling their backs or resting on their bellies. Once a prison counselor told me that most people learn how to reconcile themselves to loss eventually. This was the counselor who liked seeing me and talking about books we’d both read. She was younger than I was, and had done her clinical work on female psychosis and aggression. She told me about the cases she’d studied, and the results she’d gotten. “Why Women Kill” was the flashy title they gave her dissertation when it got published, which she hated. “The point was most women don’t kill. They do harm in other ways. For women, violence is a last resort in extreme circumstances.”
I assumed she told me all this forgetting what I was in for.
Or maybe she didn’t. Her words got me thinking about my innocence again. They stayed with me for months. Most women don’t kill. They do harm in other ways. Later I asked her to elaborate a little. “It’s not appropriate really. I shouldn’t be talking to you about my work.” I wondered then if our sessions were being watched somehow. If she had higher-ups waiting to chastise her. Later, she gave me a copy of one of her articles, in which she wrote: “Women assume responsibility as a way of taking control over a situation. They will admit guilt more readily, find fault with themselves. They confess to crimes they’ve only imagined committing, believing that this alone seals their culpability. For other women, killing is the completion of entering a man’s world. To participate, to belong fully, one must act in every way like a man and this is the final and ultimate test.”
I think of this and it occurs to me: Which woman among us has been trying all this time to enter a man’s world?
CHAPTER 29
I go back upstairs and search around Trish’s bedroom for any sign of what might have happened last night. I remember slipping into the darkened room and standing over Trish in the bed. After that, nothing. No dreams of my children, no nightmares that might have propelled me out of bed, afraid for their safety, crying out in search of them.
Neighborhood Watch (v5.0) Page 20
