"What is it, Meredith?" I asked.
She turned toward me abruptly, as if I'd caught her unawares. "I just hope he's here," she said. "Stuart." She seemed to catch something odd in my expression. "So we can talk to him about Keith," she explained. "We are going to do that, aren't we? That's what we decided."
"Yes."
Dr. Mays greeted us at the door. He was a short bald man, with wire spectacles.
"Ah, Meredith," he said as he pumped her hand, then looked at me. "Hello, Eric."
We shook hands, and he ushered us into a spacious living room where several professors stood with their wives and husbands, sipping wine and munching little squares of cheese. We all stood by the fireplace for a time, exchanging the usual pleasantries. Then Meredith excused herself and drifted away, leaving me alone with Dr. Mays.
"You have a terrific wife, Eric," he said, his eyes on Meredith as she approached a tall man in a tweed jacket who stood beside a thin woman with straight black hair.
"We feel very fortunate to have her with us," Dr. Mays added.
I nodded. "She loves teaching."
"That's good to hear," Dr. Mays said. He plucked a celery stalk from a plate of assorted cut vegetables and dipped it in the small bowl of onion dip that rested on the table beside him. "I hope she doesn't find me stodgy."
Across the room, Meredith laughed lightly and touched the man's arm.
"Not at all," I said. "She's always telling me some joke or story you've told."
Dr. Mays appeared surprised. "Really?"
I laughed. "She loved the one about Lenny Bruce."
He looked at me quizzically. "Lenny Bruce?"
"The one about the difference between men and women," I said.
Dr. Mays shrugged. "I'm afraid I don't know that one."
"You know, the plateglass window."
Dr. Mays stared at me blankly. "She must have heard that from someone else," he said.
There was another burst of laughter from across the room. I looked over to see Meredith with her hand at her mouth, the way she always held it when she laughed, her eyes bright and strangely joyful, so different from the way she'd been only a few minutes before. The man in the tweed jacket laughed with her, but the woman beside him only smiled quietly, then took a quick sip from her glass.
"Who are they?" I asked. "The people with Meredith."
Dr. Mays looked over at them. "Oh, that's Dr. Rodenberry and his wife, Judith," he said. "He's our college counselor."
"Oh, yes," I said. "Meredith has mentioned him."
"Brilliant man," Dr. Mays said. "And very funny."
He gave me a few more details about Rodenberry, that he'd been at the college for five years, turned a moribund counseling service into a vibrant school function. After that, Dr. Mays said he had to mingle and stepped over to another group of teachers.
I took the opportunity to make my way across the room, where Meredith still stood, talking to the Rodenberrys.
She glanced over as I approached her.
"Hi," I said softly.
"Hi," Meredith said. She turned to Rodenberry and his wife. "Stuart, Judith, this is my husband, Eric."
I shook hands with the two of them, smiling as warmly as I knew how. Then there was a moment of awkward silence, eyes shifting about, Rodenberry's back and forth between me and Meredith, his wife's eyes darting toward me, then quickly away.
"I've mentioned this situation with Keith to Stuart," she said.
I looked at Rodenberry. "What do you think?" I asked.
He considered the question briefly. "Well, Keith's certainly under a lot of pressure."
That seemed hardly an answer, so I dug deeper.
"But do you think he needs professional help?" I asked.
Again Rodenberry appeared reluctant to answer directly. "Perhaps, but only if he's willing to accept it. Otherwise, counseling would just add to the pressure he's already under."
"So how can we tell?" I asked. "If he needs help, I mean."
Rodenberry glanced at Meredith in what appeared a signal for her to jump in.
"Stuart feels that we should raise the subject with Keith," she said. "Not present it to him as something we think he should do, but only raise it as a possibility."
"And see how he reacts," Rodenberry added quickly. "Whether he's immediately hostile, or if he seems amenable to the idea."
"And if he seems amenable?" I asked.
Again, Rodenberry's gaze slid over to Meredith. "Well, as I told Meredith," he said, now returning his attention to me, "I'd be more than happy to provide whatever help I can."
I started to add some final remark on the subject, but Rodenberry's wife suddenly withdrew from our circle, her head turned decidedly away, as if shielding her face from view.
"Judith has been ill," Rodenberry said quietly once his wife was out of earshot. Again he looked at Meredith, and in response she offered a smile that struck me as unexpectedly intimate, which Rodenberry immediately returned.
"Anyway," he said, now returning his gaze to me. "Let me know what you decide about Keith." He drew a card from his jacket pocket. "Meredith has my number at school," he said as he handed me the card, "but this is my private number. Call it anytime."
I thanked him, and after that Rodenberry walked across the room to join his wife beside a buffet table. Once there, he placed his arm on his wife's shoulder. She quickly stepped away, as if repulsed by his touch, so that Rodenberry's arm immediately fell free and dangled limply at his side.
"I think the Rodenberry's have problems," I said to Meredith.
She watched as Rodenberry poured himself a drink and stood alone beside the window, where Dr. Mays joined him a few minutes later.
"Dr. Mays didn't remember that Lenny Bruce remark," I said.
Meredith continued to stare straight ahead, which was odd for her, I realized, since her tendency was always to glance toward me when I spoke.
"The one about the plateglass window," I added.
Her eyes shot over to me. "What?"
"You didn't hear it from Dr. Mays," I repeated.
Meredith glanced back into the adjoining room. "Well, I heard it from somebody," she said absently.
"Maybe from Rodenberry," I suggested. "Dr. Mays says he's very funny."
"Yes, he is," Meredith said. Her eyes glittered briefly, then dimmed, as if a shadowy thought had skirted through her mind. "He'll be good with Keith" was all she said.
We left the party a couple of hours later, driving more or less silently back to our house. The light was on in Keith's room, but we didn't go up or call him or make any effort to find out if he was really there. Such surveillance would only have struck him as yet more proof that I thought him a criminal, and his mood had become far too volatile to incite any such added resentment.
And so we simply watched television for an hour, then went to bed. Meredith tried to read for a while, but before too long she slipped the book onto the floor beside the bed, then twisted away from me and promptly fell asleep.
But I couldn't sleep. I thought about Keith and Meredith, of course, but increasingly my thoughts returned me to my first family—Warren's story of the insurance man with the odd questions, the strange remark my father had made, his bitter assertion that I had no idea about my mother.
Could that be true? I wondered. Could it be true that I had never known my mother? Or my father? That Warren, for all our growing up together, remained essentially an enigma?
I got up, walked to the window, and peered out into the tangled, night-bound woods. In my mind, I saw the car that had brought Keith home that night, its phantom driver behind the wheel, a figure who suddenly seemed to me no less mysterious than my son, my wife, my father and mother and brother, mere shadows, dark and indefinable.
"Eric?"
It was Meredith's voice.
I turned toward the bed but couldn't see her there.
"Something wrong?"
"No, nothing," I told her, grateful that I hadn't tur
ned on the light, since, had she seen me, she would have known it was a lie.
SIXTEEN
Leo Brock called me at the shop at eleven the next morning. "Quick question," he said. "Does Keith smoke?"
He heard my answer in the strain of a pause.
"Okay," he said, "What brand does he smoke?"
I saw the face of the pack as Keith snatched it from his shirt pocket. "Marlboro," I said.
Leo drew in a long breath. "And he told police that he never left the house, isn't that right?"
"Yes."
"For any reason."
"He said he never left the house," I told him. "What's happening, Leo?"
"My source tells me that the cops found four cigarette butts outside the Giordanos' house," Leo said. "Marlboro."
"Is that so bad?" I asked. "I mean, so what if Keith went out for a smoke?"
"They were at the side of the house," Leo added. "Just beneath Amy's bedroom window."
"Jesus," I breathed.
In my mind I saw Keith at the window, peering through the curtains of Amy's window, watching as she slept, her long dark hair splayed out across her pillow. Had he watched her undress, too? I wondered. And while doing that ... done what? Had he gone to the water tower in search of similar stimulation? Before that moment, I would probably have avoided such questions, but something in my mind had hardened, taken on the shape of a pick or a spade, prepared to dig.
"So they think he was watching her," I said.
"We can't be sure what they're thinking."
"Oh come on, Leo, why would his cigarettes be there, at her window?"
"Not his," Leo cautioned. "Just the brand he smokes."
"Don't talk to me like a lawyer, Leo," I said. "This is bad and you know it."
"It doesn't help things," Leo admitted.
"They're going to arrest him, aren't they?"
"Not yet," Leo said.
"Why not?" I asked. "We both know they think he did it."
"First of all, no one knows what was done," Leo reminded me. "Remember that, Eric. Whatever the police may be thinking, they don't know anything. And there's something else to keep in mind. Keith didn't have a car. So how could he have taken Amy from her house?"
I made no argument to this, but I felt the water around me rise slightly.
"Eric?"
"Yes."
"You have to have faith."
I said nothing.
"And I don't mean that in a religious way," Leo added. "You have to have faith in Keith."
"Of course," I said quietly.
There was a pause, then Leo said, "One final ... difficulty."
I didn't bother to ask what it was, but only because I knew Leo was about to tell me.
"Keith ordered a pizza for dinner that night," Leo said. "The pizza guy delivered it at just after eight. He said that when he arrived, he didn't see Amy, but Keith was there, and he was on the phone."
"The phone?"
"Did he call you that night?"
"Yes."
"When did he call?"
"Just before ten."
"Not before?"
"No."
"You're sure about that," Leo said. "You're sure that Keith only called you once that night."
"Only once," I said. "At around ten."
"And that's when he told you he'd be late and that he wouldn't need a ride, correct?"
"Yes."
"Because he had a ride?"
"No," I said. "He said that he could get a ride."
"But not that he had one?"
"No, not that he had one."
"Okay," Leo said.
"So who was he on the phone with?" I asked. "When the pizza guy was there."
"I'm sure the police have the number," Leo said. "So it won't be long before they tell us."
We talked a few minutes longer, Leo doing what he could to put the best light on things. Still, for all his effort, I could sense nothing but a spiraling down, a room closing in, slowly dwindling routes of escape.
"What happens," I asked finally, "if they never find Amy?"
"Well, it's awfully hard to convict when there's no body," Leo answered.
"I wasn't thinking of that," I told him. "I mean, Keith would have to live with it, wouldn't he? The suspicion that he killed her."
"Yes, he would," Leo answered. "And I admit, cases like that, without any definite resolution, they can be painfid to all concerned."
"Corrosive," I said softly, almost to myself.
"Corrosive, yes," Leo said. "It's hard, when you can't get to the bottom of something."
I had never known how true that was before that moment, how little whiffs of doubt could darken and grow menacing, urge you forward relentlessly, fix you in a need to find out what really happened. "Otherwise your whole life is an unsolved mystery," I said.
"Yeah, it's just that bad," Leo said. "You become a cold-case file."
A cold-case file.
I remember thinking that that was precisely what I was becoming, and that for the rest of that day, as I dealt with customers, framed a few pictures, I felt a fierce urgency building in me, a need to know about Keith, the life he might have hidden from me, the terrible thing I could not keep myself from thinking that he might, indeed, have done.
Just before I closed, I called Meredith and told her what Leo Brock had earlier told me. I expected her to be irritated that I hadn't called before, accuse me once again of refusing to confront things, but instead she took the latest development without surprise, as if she'd been expecting it all along.
"I have to work late tonight," she said. Her voice struck me as oddly wistful, like a woman who'd once lived in a perfect world, known its beauty and contentment, a world that was no more and would never be again. "I should be home by eleven."
I was on my way to my car a few minutes later when I noticed Warren's truck parked outside Teddy's bar. I guessed that he was probably drinking earlier and earlier, his usual pattern before plunging into a full-blown binge. In the past, I'd never been able to prevent his periodic dives, and because of that I had more or less stopped trying. But suddenly, faced with my own family problems, I found that I could see his more clearly. The contempt my father had so relentlessly heaped upon him had stolen away any shred of self-confidence he might otherwise have grasped, then the tragedy of Jennys death, and after that, my mother's fatal accident. Perhaps, I told myself, he was not so much one of life's pathetic losers, as simply a man who had lost a lot.
He was sitting in the back booth, his paint-spattered hands wrapped around a mug of beer.
"Hey, Bro," he said as I slid into the seat opposite him. He lifted the beer. "Want a frosty?"
I shook my head. "No, I don't have much time. Meredith's working late, so I have to get home, make dinner for Keith."
He took a sip of the beer. "So," he said. "How's tricks?"
I shrugged. "The same."
"And this thing with Keith?"
"I have the feeling the cops are focusing on him." I added no further details, and typically, Warren didn't ask.
Instead he said, "They jump to conclusions, the cops. It only takes some little thing." He laughed. "But, that's the way we all are, right? Obsessed."
"Why do you say that?"
"You know, the way some crazy idea won't stop nagging at a guy."
Warren often spoke of himself in the third person, as "a guy."
"What crazy idea is nagging at you, Warren?" I asked.
I thought it was probably something about Keith, but I was wrong.
"For some reason I keep thinking about Mom," Warren said. "You know, how upset she was toward the end."
"Well, why wouldn't she be?" I said. "She was losing her house."
"That wasn't it," Warren said. "She never liked that house."
"She never liked the house?"
"No, she hated it," Warren said. He took a sip of beer. "It was too big, she said, too much to take care of."
"I didn't know she felt that
way," I said.
"The house was for Dad," Warren said. "Part of the show. He wanted it because it made people think he was a big important guy." He glanced away, then back to me. "You seen him lately?"
"I see him every Thursday."
Warren smiled. "Dutiful," he said. "You've always been dutiful with Dad."
He made duty sound oddly disreputable. "I don't want him to feel abandoned, if that's what you mean."
Warren took a hard pull on the beer. "I dropped in on him this morning," he said. He looked at me with a bitter grin. "He said he never wanted to see me again."
"What? Why?"
"Because of what I told you, that insurance guy."
"Dad doesn't want to see you again because of that?" I asked unbelievingly.
"Yup," Warren said, now trying to make light of it. "Funny world, huh, Eric?"
I waved my hand. "He'll get over it."
Warren shook his head adamantly. "No, he won't. Not this time. I really pissed him off."
"But it was nothing," I argued.
"Not to Dad," Warren said. "He got in a real lather about it."
I recalled the look on my father's face when I'd broached the same subject with him, and suddenly I realized that the part of me that wished to avoid things, the part Meredith had long recognized, was dead. My suspicion had begun with a subtle itch, but now it was a raging affliction, a thousand bleeding sores I couldn't stop digging at.
"What's he hiding, Warren?" I asked bluntly.
Warren's eyes fell toward his hands.
"Warren?"
He shrugged.
I leaned toward him. "You were there that summer," I said. "What happened?"
Warren looked up shyly. "Dad thought she did something," he said. "Mom." He glanced about as if to make sure no one else was listening. "Something with this other guy. "You know what I mean."
"Mom?" I was astonished. "What other guy?"
Warren took a sip. "Jason Benefield. The family lawyer, remember? Used to come over with papers for this or that."
I recalled him as a tall, well-dressed, and very courtly man with a great shock of gray hair, handsome in the way of old boats, rugged, worn, but graceful.
Red Leaves Page 12
