Byron's Lane

by Wallace Rogers

  After a few seconds’ pause she went on. “My grandparents always talked about how it was the responsibility of every Serbian family to protect each other. Nobody else would. You had to depend on your family. Blood is thicker than water, they said. When someone in your family is harmed, the family has to hit back. No bad act can go unpunished. I’ve done my duty.”

  Her words, dripping in my best friend’s blood, chilled me. I know she saw me shiver.

  Tradition and history—Adams romanticized them. He often lamented their loss among us rootless souls born and raised in America. Tradition and history stalked him from Ohio to Indiana to Minnesota. Tradition and history killed him. I was jolted to my core. Guilt was overtaken by an equally irrational sense that absolutely nothing could ever have been done to stop it.

  How did she know that we were in the woods when her grandfather died? Why did Adams have to be the one to pay for what the four of us did—or didn’t do? In my shaken state, I was becoming convinced that something much bigger than me had brought this down upon Adams. I couldn’t lie to this woman and tell her that we hadn’t been there that day. Lying wouldn’t bring Jonathan Adams back from the dead. I was small and insignificant, bobbing helplessly in an ocean of karma that had already drowned him.

  Mary Rose felt no guilt for what she had done. She hadn’t exactly told me yet, in so many words, that she had killed Adams. That indicated to me the inconsequence of the act in her twisted mind. For Mary Rose, the most important aspect of what she had wrought was that she had done what her family and her traditions expected of her. Somewhere in heaven they were looking down at her, smiling and nodding approvingly. In the process, she also laid claim to her fifteen minutes of fame. She was involved in the assassination of a politician—a famous person. For the first time in her life people would be paying attention to her. Whatever happened from that point was of no real concern to her. Her life had been a steady, persistent ache since we moved to Maplewood. The pain was gone now.

  As she continued to talk, my questions began to be answered.

  Mary Rose told me that everyone touched by Victor Pavletich’s death, including the police, knew the day he died that Adams, Wright, Kearney, and I had witnessed his heart attack and done nothing to help save him. She and her family were sure that we had caused it. Margaret Fillmore, her future and former mother-in-law, lived on Shelley Drive and had seen the four of us run out of the woods that day, an hour before Mary Rose’s grandmother found her husband unconscious at the edge of his cornfield.

  At the family’s insistence, a police officer was assigned to follow up on Margaret Fillmore’s report. The Maplewood Police Department’s first and last stop was Greg Kearney’s house. His father, the mayor, persuaded the officer and police chief who knocked on his door that it was impossible to prove that his son and his friends caused the old man’s heart attack. At worst, we were guilty of trespassing and not being good Samaritans. If the Pavletich family wanted to pursue it, Kearney’s father was prepared to ask tough questions in a very public way about whether protecting property from juvenile trespassers justified shooting a shotgun at them. These were All-American boys doing what all American boys our age do. The man was eighty-three years old and had died of natural causes.

  Mary Rose presumed that Jonathan Adams was the one most responsible for her grandfather’s death. Her grandfather wouldn’t have had his heart attack if we hadn’t surprised him Even if he did, he wouldn’t have died if we had helped him. She figured it was Adams who told us to run away. After all, he was a leader. Everything Adams did and accomplished before and since showed that leadership was his most prominent characteristic. So he was responsible. “Everybody in high school knew that when something had to be done, Jonathan Adams was always in the middle of it,” she said.

  She stopped talking and yanked at the handcuffs that bound her to her seat. The act confirmed that the lock on the cuffs had engaged itself. She quickly lost her expression of defiance. She was enjoying her dominance of our conversation. “I guess I took your breath away.”

  I had had all I could take that interminable day. I caught the deputy’s eye as he glanced in the small window in the room’s only door; he’d looked in when he heard the table scrape against the tile floor. I told Mary Rose that I wanted to talk to her more the next day. I asked her if I could. Her dead eyes showed signs of life. She finally had a date with a Maplewood High classmate.

  “Of course you can, Tom. I look forward to it. I’m not going anyplace. I’ll be here.” She laughed at her joke as the deputy un-cuffed her from the table, turned her around, and led her back to her jail cell. I didn’t react to her laugh. She looked over her shoulder at me as they disappeared through the doorway.

  Alone in the room, I held my arms out over the table.

  My hands were still shaking.

  *

  I briefed the sheriff and a state police detective about most of my conversation with Mary Rose Fillmore. I told them about her connection to Jonathan Adams. I made no reference to her grandfather, and I didn’t share my suspicion that she acted alone. I mentioned how close she came to a confession. I wanted a second meeting with her—I had more questions to ask. I figured the possibility of me coaxing a confession from

  Mary Rose would guarantee me one.

  When I finished the briefing I called Christina Peterson again. No answer. I needed to see her. Deputy Walker drove me to her house.

  It was a very different place than it had been when I was last there—dark and uncomfortably quiet. No one came when I knocked repeatedly and loudly on Christina’s front door and rang her bell.

  When we passed Adams’s house next door, lights inside and outside were on. Two police cars were parked near his detached garage. Yellow tape had been tacked to the two pillars on his front porch and blocked the entrance into his house.

  Admirers, friends, and neighbors had built a makeshift memorial near his mailbox at the foot of his driveway. A mound of flowers was rising from the grass. A small jam of cars had formed on the narrow county road, and a dozen people were busy staring up the driveway at Adams’s hexed house. Others were adding flowers, pictures, stuffed animals, and handwritten notes to the growing pile at the end of his driveway. The scene deeply impressed me. Adams would have been shocked at all this. He never was able to appreciate his impact on people and how extraordinarily well he did his job.

  When we returned to the sheriff’s office around half past eight, Todd Walker gave me a number to call where I might reach Richard Hunter. I was sure he would know where Christina was. A woman from his answering service said Hunter was out of town for a few days and couldn’t be contacted. I assumed he had left with Christina. A call to her dress shop, open late that Thursday night, confirmed my suspicion. I left my number with the woman who answered the phone. It was Christina’s responsibility to contact me now.

  At first I was bothered that she hadn’t made herself available to grieve with me and help me handle the responsibilities for which she had volunteered me to the sheriff. But disappointment quickly gave way to empathy. I knew who Christina was now. As I thought about the tragedy with which we were both trying to cope, I grew sure that her absence shouted her love for Jonathan Adams. If only her sweet, soft voice could have whispered it in his ear that summer, maybe he never would have been alone in his house.

  Large parts of me hadn’t accepted the fact that Jonathan Adams was gone forever. I was still looking for signs in Christina’s actions that told me she was in love with him—evidence that I could joyfully report to my dear friend and tell him “I told you so.” Even then, I wanted to make him whole. But the game was over. I was alone in the dark.

  I was sitting at an empty desk deep in these thoughts when Deputy Walker tapped me on the shoulder and passed me a note from Sheriff Michaels. The note said he had arranged a car and a hotel room for me for as long as I needed them. I was the only person Mary Rose Vukovich would talk to. That
made me important and Michaels potentially famous. The FBI, the state police, and the sheriff’s department were mesmerized by the possibility of uncovering a terrorist connection to Adams’s murder. As long as authorities pursued it, cable news and the national networks would cover the story.

  From the inside pocket of my rumpled blue blazer I pulled the list of things to do I had made on the plane that afternoon. I was anxious to get to my hotel room and finish them. My most immediate task was my most difficult one. I had to tell Adams’s sisters what had happened to their older brother. I had to tell them before the story made the morning network news shows. His sisters were all that was left of his immediate family. Although I remembered where two of them lived, I couldn’t recall their married names. But I knew that I needed the contact information of just one of them to do what I had to get done—Sharon’s.

  The first time I saw Sharon was in the shadow of El

  Capitan, when I’d first met Adams. She was five years old on the spring day our families came together to view newborn Byron’s Lane. Even then, she exhibited all the characteristics of a mother hen. As I watched in amazement, a person smaller than me told everyone it was time to get back in the car. She assigned each of them seats. All of them followed her orders without a whimper of protest. Sharon, living in Houston, was the person with whom I could partner. Whatever she told me to do, I would do. To reach her, I needed Adams’s black book. It surely contained her contact information.

  I went looking for Deputy Walker again. Then it occurred to me that his shift might be over. Fortunately, I found him sitting on a bench in the police officers’ locker room. He had changed from his uniform into a sweatshirt and jeans. Before I could ask, he offered to drive me anywhere I wanted to go.

  *

  By the time he and I arrived at Adams’s house, it was dark inside. The police cars were gone from his driveway. Two young women loitered near the mailbox, tending the pile of flowers. One of Walker’s fellow deputies sat in a squad car parked on the road’s shoulder. The car’s interior dome light shone on the police officer inside. She was using the time assigned to guard the crime scene to finish paperwork. The deputies nodded at each other as Walker turned his car into the driveway and drove us up to the house.

  I ducked under the yellow tape barrier across the front porch and used a spare key Adams had given me years ago to unlock the front door. Pushing it open just wide enough to wedge myself in, I flipped on the light switch, an arm’s reach away.

  One of the switches inside the door turned on the chandelier that hung above the foyer. The other turned on the outside porch light. I switched them both. The front door’s threshold was filled with light from the porch. Light from the chandelier bounced off the shiny marble floor and instantly illuminated it. Its light reflected everywhere except where I was about to take my second step.

  A large rose-colored circle thinly covered most of the floor area just beyond the reach of the opened door. This was where it had happened. The bloodstain on the marble floor stopped my entry into Adams’s house as effectively as if it had been the Great Wall of China. Deputy Walker discretely pushed his way around me as I stood frozen in the open doorway. Once inside, he silently urged me to follow him into the house.

  I walked my weak knees into Adams’s study and retrieved his black book from exactly the place I assumed it to be—sitting very visibly on the top of his desk.

  I passed by the kitchen on my way out. A faint smell of cinnamon lingered there. A half-eaten roll lay on the counter next to the refrigerator. Adams’s overnight bag, still unpacked from Saturday morning, had been moved from the foyer to the closest edge of the living room.

  I had no desire to be in his house a minute longer than I had to be. But an opened Federal Express envelope and a handwritten letter lying on the kitchen counter caused me to linger there two minutes longer. Deputy Walker watched me stop and pick it up. He told me that the signature slip that had been attached to the envelope was evidence used to help determine the approximate time Adams was shot. It was apparently delivered minutes before Adams answered the door and confronted his killers. Adams was probably reading what was inside the envelope when they rang his doorbell.

  I picked up the opened letter next to the empty envelope. It was from Lisa Chandler.

  In the first page, she apologized for sending the letter by way of Federal Express. She wrote that regular mail would have been more appropriate for something like this, but she wanted assurance that he had received it, and she wanted it delivered to him as soon as possible. If he was married or living with someone, she wrote, he could say that the FedEx envelope contained business correspondence if asked what was in it. Lisa ended her letter telling him that she had left her husband a month ago. She wondered if it might be possible to meet Adams for lunch sometime soon. She signed the letter “Love Always, LC.”

  The second page was a poem she had written:

  I have played this moment over and over in my mind

  These last two months

  Staring at your picture each night

  Memorizing all of your features, and every one of your quirks

  Knowing and remembering these things

  More clearly than my own

  Deep inside, under layers of skin and dust

  I know our destiny is written somewhere

  Our next page is whispering in my ear these days

  Loud enough to make me smile, too quiet for anyone else to hear

  And I wonder

  As I remember your warmth

  Your breathing, your touch, your smell

  Your life against my own

  How I can go forward from here

  Without feeling you against my bare skin

  My fingers struggle to feel you again

  I asked Deputy Walker if I could have Lisa’s letter. He said the Fed Ex envelope’s only use in the investigation involved the delivery slip; the sheriff’s office had taken it. I folded the letter and the poem and put them in my coat pocket. I tried to guess what Adams was thinking in his last moments. He must have had a smile on his face when he opened the door.

  As we drove down the driveway, I asked Todd

  Walker to stop for a minute at the memorial to Adams that was growing next to his mailbox. I stepped out of his police car and pulled Lisa’s letter and her poem from my pocket. I slid them beneath a scanned picture of Adams shaking hands with one of his anonymous admirers that was pinned to a bouquet of daisies. I stood there for what Todd Walker must have thought was a very long time.

  We stopped at a liquor store on our way to the hotel, a Holiday Inn on the other side of town. When Deputy Walker dropped me off at the hotel he gave me his card and told me call him if I needed anything. Forty minutes and three drinks later I was sitting on the edge of one of the twin beds in my room, on the telephone, telling Adams’s sister, Sharon, very bad news. From a thousand miles away, I felt her crumble.

  I ended up handing off the ball to Adams’s brother-in-law. We divided what had to be done between the two of us. By two o’clock in the morning all the items on my list were crossed off, or names had been written to identify who was responsible for following up on the matter.

  Every bit of energy and emotion had been pressed from me. I had only enough left to pull a bedspread over my fully clothed body. My carry-on bag lay unopened on the unused bed next to mine.

  In spite of my exhaustion, Adams’s black book kept me awake for a few more minutes. The sacred Cummings poem shared space in the inside pocket with Adams’s well-used passport. A neatly written worn page that described locations of important papers and legal documents was the first page in the section where I had written the Lawrence of Arabia quote the Saturday before. About half of the pages in the section were blank. Eight plastic inserts held room enough for forty-eight business cards. All the sleeves were filled. Half the cards belonged to famous people with whom I had no id
ea Adams had dealings. Cell phone numbers and e-mail addresses were written in ink on several of them.

  I had found his sisters’ names, addresses, and phone numbers in an alphabetized address book in the Day Runner’s mid-section. As I was surveying the names, I began to drift off. I was temporarily shaken awake when a folded blue envelope fell out of the book onto my chest. I recognized it as having come from Adams’s office at the university. It was among the mail that had been pushed under his door on Friday.

  The envelope contained a piece of plain white stationery on which a message written in newsprint cutouts had been taped. Six words were glued to the paper: “Your time is up. It’s payday.”

  The mystery of the UM threat letter was solved.

  *

  I awoke at seven the next morning when the telephone on the nightstand next to my bed rang. The opened black book rested face-down on my chest; the letter and the blue envelope lay beside it. It was the hotel clerk calling to tell me a car had been delivered for my use and the keys could be collected at the front desk. I found a pair of slacks and a shirt inside my bag that were slightly less wrinkled than the clothes I had slept in. I showered and shaved, skipped breakfast, and checked in with Sharon in Houston. She told me that she and her two sisters, accompanied by their husbands, would be in Minneapolis late that afternoon, and asked me to reserve rooms for them at my hotel.

  My date with Mary Rose Vukovich was at nine o’clock. I called the office in New York to tell them where I was. I barely made it to the courthouse in time.

  Sheriff Michaels was in a bad mood when I met him in his office. His confidence and the prospect of celebrity had been replaced by barely concealed anger and frustration as he introduced me to an FBI agent named Hutchinson. When Agent Hutchinson saw me enter the room, he got up from a desk behind Michaels and stood next to him. The sheriff announced that the FBI would be assuming responsibility for the rest of the criminal investigation of the Adams case.