Red Leaves

by Thomas H. Cook

  "And he was," I said, a response that struck me as wholly reflexive.

  Peak returned his attention to the deserted playground, held his gaze on the ghostly swings and monkey bars and seesaws. He seemed to see dead children playing there.

  "What if your son hurt Amy Giordano?" He looked at me very intently, and I saw that he was asking the deepest imaginable question. "I mean, if you knew he did it, but also knew that he was going to get away with it, and that after that, he was going to do it again, which most of them do, men who kill children. If you knew all that I've just said, Mr. Moore, what would you do then?"

  I would kill him. The answer flashed through my mind so suddenly and irrefutably that I recoiled from this raw truth before replying to Peak. "I wouldn't let him get away with it."

  Peak seemed to see the stark line that led me to this place, how much had been lost on the way, the shaved-down nature of my circumstances, how little I had left to lose. "I believe you," he said.

  ***

  Meredith was waiting for me when I got home, and the minute I saw her, I recalled the way she'd stood with Rodenberry, and all my earlier feelings rose up, hot and cold, a searing blade of ice.

  "He's dead," I told her flatly.

  Her hand lifted mutely to her mouth.

  "He shot himself in the head."

  She stared at me from behind her hand, still silent, although I couldn't tell if it were shock or simply her own dead center that kept her silent.

  I sat down in the chair across from her. "What did he say to you?"

  She looked at me strangely. "Why are you so angry, Eric?"

  I had no way to answer her without revealing the murky water in which my own emotions now washed about. "The cops will want to know."

  She bowed her head slightly. "I'm so sorry, Eric," she said quietly. "Warren was so—"

  Her feelings for Warren sounded like metal banging steel. "Oh please," I blurted. "You couldn't stand him."

  She looked stunned. "Don't say that."

  "Why not? It's the truth."

  She looked at me as if I were a stranger who'd somehow managed to crawl into the body of her husband. "What's the matter with you?"

  "Maybe I'm tired of lies."

  "What lies?"

  I wanted to confront her, tell her that I'd seen her and Rodenberry in the college parking lot, but some final cowardice, or perhaps it was only fear that if I broached that subject, I would surely lose her, warned me away. "Warrens lies, for one thing. Those pictures the cops found on Keith's computer. They were Warren's."

  Her eyes glistened slightly, and I saw how wracked she was, how reduced by our long ordeal, her emotions tingling at the surface.

  "Leo told me about it," I went on. "He said Warren had been caught watching kids play at the elementary school. He'd stand at the window of his little 'bachelor lair' and watch them. With binoculars. It was so fucking obvious the school complained about it. The principal went over and told Warren to stop it. So when this thing with Amy Giordano happened, somebody called the police hotline and told them about Warren."

  "So that's what it was," Meredith said. She seemed relieved, as if a small dread had been taken from her. She remained silent a moment, gazing at her hands. Then she said, "Warren couldn't have done something like that, Eric. He couldn't have hurt a little girl."

  Her certainty surprised me. She had never cared for my brother, never had the slightest respect for him. He was one of life's losers, and Meredith had never had any patience for such people. Warren's drinking and self-pity had only made it worse. But now, out of nowhere, she seemed completely confident that Warren had had nothing to do with Amy Giordano's disappearance.

  "How do you know?" I asked.

  "I know Warren," she answered.

  "Really? How can you be so sure you know him?"

  "Aren't you?"

  "No."

  "He was your brother, Eric. You've known him all your life."

  Peak had said the same thing, and now I gave the same reply. "I'm not sure you ever know anyone."

  She looked at me, puzzled and alarmed, but also alerted to something hidden. "Warren said you came over to his house. He said you had a quarrel."

  "It wasn't exactly a quarrel," I told her.

  "That's what he called it," Meredith said. "What was it then?"

  "I talked to him about the pictures."

  "What did he say?"

  "That they weren't really sexual." I shook my head. "He said he just liked looking at the pictures. That the kids were ... adorable."

  "And you didn't believe him?" "No."

  "Why not?"

  "Oh come on, Meredith, he fits the profile in every aspect. Especially the low self-esteem part."

  "If low self-esteem is a big deal, then you'd better mark Keith for a pedophile, too."

  "Don't think that hasn't crossed my mind."

  Now amazement gave way to shock. "You think that?"

  "Don't you?"

  "No, I don't."

  "Wait a minute," I yelped. "You're the one who first had doubts about Keith."

  "But I never thought it was a sexual thing. That even if he hurt Amy, it wasn't because of sex."

  "What then?"

  "Anger," Meredith answered. "Or maybe a cry for attention."

  A cry for attention.

  This sounded like the sort of psychobabble that would come from Stuart Rodenberry, and I bristled at the thought that Meredith was arguing with me through him, using his professional expertise and experience against me.

  "Oh, bullshit," I said sharply. "You don't believe a word of that."

  "What are you saying, Eric?"

  "I'm saying that from the minute Amy disappeared you thought Keith was involved. And I don't for a fucking second believe you thought a 'cry for attention' had anything to do with it." I looked at her hotly. "You thought it was in the family. Something he inherited. Connected to me. To Warren." I laughed brutally. "And you were probably right."

  "Right? You mean because you've decided that Warren was a pedophile?" Her gaze was pure challenge. "And what, Eric, makes you so sure of that? A few pictures on his computer? The fact that he liked to watch kids play? Jesus Christ, anybody could—"

  "More than that," I interrupted.

  "What then?"

  I shook my head. "I don't want to go into this anymore, Meredith."

  I started to turn away, but she grabbed my arm and jerked me around to face her. "Oh no, you don't. You're not walking away from this. You accuse Keith of being a pedophile, a kidnapper, and God knows what else. You accuse me of suggesting that something awful is in your family. You do all that, and then you think you can just say you're tired and walk away? Oh no, Eric, not this time. You don't walk away from an accusation like that. No, no. You stand right here and you tell me why you're so fucking sure of all this bullshit."

  I pulled away, unable to confront what I'd seen in Jenny's room that morning, then conveyed to Warren in a single glance, how, upon that accusation, he must have finally decided that the world was no longer a fit place for him.

  But again Meredith grabbed my arm. "Tell me," she demanded. "What did Warren or Keith ever do to—"

  "It has nothing to do with Keith."

  "So, it's Warren then?"

  I gazed at her desolately. "Yes."

  She saw the anguish flare in my eyes. "What happened, Eric?"

  "I thought I saw something."

  "Something ... in Warren?"

  "No. In Jenny."

  Meredith peered at me unbelievingly. "Jenny?"

  "The day she died I went into her room. She was trying desperately to tell me something. Moving all around. Lips. Legs. Desperate. I bent down to try to hear what she was saying, but then she stopped dead and pulled away from me and just lay there, looking toward the door." I drew in a troubled breath. "Warren was standing at the door. He'd been with Jenny that night and..." I stopped. "And I thought maybe he—"

  "Jesus, Eric," Meredith gasped.
"You said that to him?"

  "No," I answered. "But he saw it."

  She stared at me as if I were a strange creature who'd just washed up on the beach beside her, a crawler of black depths. "You had no evidence of that at all, Eric," she said. "No evidence at all that Warren did anything to your sister"—there was a lacerating disappointment in her gaze—"How could you have done that? Said something like that without ... knowing anything?"

  I thought of the way she and Rodenberry had stood together in the parking lot, their bodies so close, the cool air, the night, the rustle of fallen leaves when the wind touched them. "You don't always need evidence," I said coldly. "Sometimes you just know."

  She said nothing more, but I felt utterly berated, like a small boy whipped into a corner. To get out of it, I struck back in the only way that seemed open to me.

  "I saw you tonight," I told her.

  "Saw me?"

  "You and Rodenberry."

  She seemed hardly able to comprehend what I was saying.

  "In the parking lot at the college."

  Her lips sealed tightly.

  "Talking."

  Her eyes became small, reptilian slits. "And?" she snapped. "What are you getting at, Eric?"

  "I want to know what's going on," I said haughtily, a man who knew his rights and intended to exercise them.

  Fire leaped in her eyes. "Wasn't Warren enough for you, Eric?" she asked. "Isn't one life enough?"

  She could not have more deeply wounded me if she'd fired a bullet into my head, but what she said next was said with such utter finality that I knew nothing could return me to the world that had existed before she said it.

  "I don't know you anymore," she added. Then she turned and walked up the stairs.

  I knew that she meant it, and that she meant it absolutely. Meredith was not a woman to make false gestures, bluff, halt at the precipice, or seek to regain it once she'd gone over. Something had broken, the bridge that connected us, and even at that early moment, when I was still feeling the heat of her eyes like the sting of a slap, I knew that the process of repair would be long, if it could be done at all.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Warren was buried on a bright, crisp afternoon. My father had told me flatly that he had no intention of going to the funeral, so it was only the strained and separating members of my second family, along with a few people Warren had gotten to know over the years, regulars at the bars he frequented, who came to say good-bye to him.

  Meredith watched stiffly as the coffin was lowered into the ground, Keith at her side, looking even more pale and emaciated than usual. He'd reacted to Warren's death by not reacting to it at all, which was typical of Keith. Standing at the grave, so small a force beside the tidal wave of his mother, he looked incapable of weathering any of life's coming storms. I could not imagine him ever marrying or having children or adequately managing even the least complicated and demanding aspects of life.

  When the funeral was over, we walked out of the cemetery together, Merediths body so rigid, her face so stonily composed, holding down such sulfuric rage, that I thought she might suddenly wheel around and slap me.

  But she didn't, and so, as we all passed through the gate of the cemetery, I suppose we looked like a normal family, one whose members shared grief and joy, made the best of whatever life sent our way.

  At least that is certainly how we appeared to Vincent Giordano.

  He was standing outside his delivery van, its door oddly open, as if in preparation for a quick getaway. His eyes were no longer moist and bloodshot, not at all like the day he'd approached me outside the photo shop. He stood erect, rather than stooped, and there was nothing broken or beggarly in his posture. He pulled away from the van as we approached our car, his body rolling like a great stone toward us.

  I looked at Meredith. "Get in the car," I told her, then turned to Keith. "You, too."

  By then Vince was closing in.

  "Hello, Vince," I said coolly.

  Vince stopped and folded his large beefy arms over his chest. "I just came to tell you it won't work."

  "I don't know what you mean."

  "That brother of yours shooting himself," Vince said. "It's not going to get that son of yours off the hook."

  "Vince, we shouldn't be having this conversation."

  "You heard what I said."

  "Its in the hands of the police, Vince. And that's where it should be."

  "You heard what I said," Vince repeated. "That kid of yours is not going to get away with it. You can hire a fancy lawyer, do whatever else you want to, but that kid is not going to get away with it." His eyes flared. "My little girl is dead."

  "We don't know that."

  "Yes, we do," Vince said. "Two weeks. What else could it be?"

  "I don't know," I said.

  He looked over my shoulder and I knew he was glaring at Keith.

  "They found his cigarettes at Amy's window," Vince said. "Outside her window. He said he didn't leave the house. So, whose cigarettes are they, huh? Tell me that. Why did he lie, tell me that!" His voice rang high and desperate, reaching for heaven. "Tell me that. You or that fancy lawyer you hired to protect his fucking ass!"

  "That's enough," I said.

  "It's your whole goddamn family that's screwed up," Vince screamed. "A brother watches kids in the playground, looks at dirty pictures of little kids. That's where that son of yours got it from. The family. In their blood." He was seething now. "You should all be wiped out!" he cried. "Every goddamn one of you!"

  I felt his hot breath on my face, turned quickly, strode to my car, and got in. For a moment we locked eyes, and I saw how deeply Vince Giordano hated me, hated Keith, hated the neat little family he'd watched come through the cemetery gate, the kind of family he'd once had and which had been taken from him, he felt certain, by my son.

  We drove directly home, Meredith trembling all the way, terrified that Vince would follow us there. From time to time, she glanced at the rearview mirror, searching for his green van behind us. I had never seen her so frightened, and I knew that part of her fear was that the husband she'd once trusted had changed irrevocably.

  At home, she wanted me to call the police, but I had leaped to so many conclusions of late, that I refused to leap to another one.

  "He's just upset," I told her. "He has a right to be."

  "But he doesn't have a right to threaten us," Meredith cried.

  "He didn't threaten us," I reminded her. "Besides, the police won't do anything. They can't unless he does something first."

  She shook her head in exasperation, no doubt convinced that here again I was simply refusing to confront the obvious truth that Vince Giordano was a dangerous man. "All right, fine," she snapped, "but if anything happens, Eric, it's on your head."

  With that, she stormed down the corridor to her office and slammed the door.

  I built a fire and for a long time sat, staring at the flames. Outside, autumn leaves gathered and blew apart at the will of the wind. The gray air darkened steadily, and night finally fell. Yet Meredith remained in her room, and Keith in his.

  It wasn't until early evening that one of them, Keith, finally joined me in the living room.

  "So, are we not going to have dinner?" he asked.

  I drew my eyes from the fire and faced him. "Nobody feels like cooking, I guess."

  "So, what does that mean ... like ... we don't eat?"

  "No, we'll eat."

  "Okay."

  "All right," I said. I got to my feet. "Come on, let's go get a pizza."

  We walked out of the house and down the brick walkway, past the shadowy limbs of the Japanese maple.

  The drive to Nico's took only a few minutes, and on the way, Keith sat on the passenger side, looking less sullen than before, as if he were beginning to emerge from the tiresome irritation of his teenage years. A light played in his eyes, a hint of energy, or perhaps some spark of hope that his life might one day be less plagued with trouble. I recalled a li
ne I'd read somewhere, that we must be able to imagine redemption before we can achieve it.

  "I'd ask you how things are," I said. "But you hate that question."

  He looked over at me and a faint smile fluttered on his lips. "I was going to ask you that. I mean, Mom's really mad at you, right?"

  "Yes, she is."

  "What about?"

  "She blames me for being too suspicious."

  "Of her?"

  "Of everything, I guess," I answered. "I have to try harder, Keith. I have to get more evidence before I jump to conclusions."

  "What were you suspicious about?"

  "Just things."

  "So, you won't tell me?"

  "It's between your mother and me," I said.

  "What if I told you something. A secret."

  I felt a chill pass over me.

  "Would you tell me then?" Keith asked. "Like, an exchange? You know, father and son?"

  I watched him closely for a moment, then decided that where I'd gone wrong with Keith was in failing to recognize that despite his teenage aloofness, the sullen behavior that fixed him in an angry smirk, there was an adult growing inside him, forming within the brittle chrysalis of adolescence, and that this adult had to be recognized and carefully coaxed out, that it was time to confront not Keith's immaturity, but the fact that he was soon to be a man.

  "Okay," I told him. "An exchange."

  He drew in a long breath, then said, "The money. It wasn't for me. And what I told Mr. Price—about running away—that wasn't true."

  "What was the money for?"

  "This girl," Keith said. "We're sort of ... you know. And she has it really bad at home, and I thought, okay, maybe I could get her out of it. Get her away from it."

  "Am I allowed to know who this girl is?" I asked.

  "Her name is Polly," Keith said shyly. "She lives on the other side of town. Those walks I go on. At night. That's where we meet."

  "The other side of town," I repeated. "Near the water tower."

  He looked surprised. "Yes."

  I smiled. "Okay, I guess it's my turn. This thing with your mother. The things she's so mad about. It's that I accused her of having a lover." I felt a tight ball of pain release its grip on me. "I didn't have any evidence, but I accused her anyway."