I hear one of the cops at the end of the driveway say: “Sir?” At first I think he’s talking to me. “Sir, I need you to stop right there.”
That’s when I see Pete.
He’s come from his house, and now he’s almost to mine: head low, shoulders hunched, strides long across our adjoining lawns.
“Sir.” The cop holds out his palms. “Let’s just turn it around. Okay?”
A few feet from our driveway, Pete breaks into a steady jog. His eyes are bloodshot. Jets of frozen breath pulse from his nose and mouth. He looks like a bull hunkering down to charge.
Our cop stays with Sara. The new guy stays with the media crews. The remaining cop, the one who drove us here, takes several quick steps up the driveway, one hand still warding Pete off, the other drifting to the baton on his belt. “Sir.”
“Pete! Stop it!” It’s Melody, running down the sidewalk ten yards behind her husband, hugging her arms.
Another voice calls, “Pete. Go easy.” This time it’s Roger, on his way across the circle, hands in his coat pockets. He doesn’t appear to be hurrying.
Pete ignores them both. Or maybe he doesn’t hear them. He feints left and goes right, leaving the cop flat on his feet.
“All this time?” He’s four steps away from me when he says it, and I can practically see flames in his eyes. “All this time?”
No, I want to tell him. Pete, Jesus, no. But he’s closed the distance between us before I have a chance to say anything.
The next thing I see is hard gray sky. Then pavement.
I’m not even sure which is which. It’s as if all my organs just exploded; I feel like I’ve been hit by a car. Once upon a time, Pete played football for Iowa State. Middle linebacker, if memory serves. Now he’s pressing the side of my face into my own driveway with his forearm.
“All this time?” Flecks of warm spit hit my face. Pete lifts his arm, and at first I think he’s going to drag me to my feet. He drives his elbow down instead, and there’s a burst of color as my head bounces on the concrete. “All this fucking time?”
Somewhere on the distorted periphery, Melody is shouting for him to stop. Sara is shouting at the cops. Pete is shouting at me.
I see shoes. I hear grunts and curses. I feel the cops hauling Pete off me. When I open my eyes, I can’t see much at first. My eyes don’t seem to be working together.
I catch a gauzy glimpse of Sara, trying to get past the cop holding her back. My vision clears. I see Douglas Bennett; from somewhere he’s produced a small, handheld video camera, and he’s recording all of this, right alongside every major broadcast news outlet in Clark Falls. I see Roger, standing clear of the action, observing the scene quietly.
The last thing I see is Pete, eyes full of violence, face twisted by pure thwarted rage. He lashes out with his foot as they drag him away.
Five months after the fact, there’s still a small knot on my cheekbone left over from my tangle with our wolf the night we moved in. You can’t find it by looking, but you can feel it with your fingers. It’s smaller than a pea, but it hurts if you press on it.
By flailing luck, Pete manages to catch the faded injury dead- square with the toe of his shoe. The odds are ridiculous. I can’t imagine that he could have aimed a truer kick if he’d tried. Even through the blinding, lightning- strike pain, I feel vaguely embarrassed. There’s a sense of humiliation in being thrown to the ground and kicked like a dog.
But what choice is there? Even if I could marshal the will to defend myself against my friend Pete, I’m no fighter. Seeing his sneaker whistling toward me, I don’t even have sense enough to roll out of the way.
I’m not the guy from the paperback thrillers I’ve grown to enjoy. I’m certainly not the suburban everyman who fought off his wife’s attacker with a golf club, the way Maya Lamb’s previous news story portrayed me. Not really.
I’m an academic. A teenage book nerd in a grown man’s body. Before setting foot in Clark Falls, the closest I’d come to a physical confrontation in my adult life involved an attempt to shepherd Charlie Bernard out of a South Boston neighborhood bar we both should have known better than to patronize in the first place.
As it stands, I’ve now been kicked in the face on two separate occasions in five months’ time. By two different people. Both times in the same eye. On my own property, no less.
Being an academic, I have time to note the uncanny unity of these plot points before the sensation of falling carries me into the dark.
11.
I MARRIED A DANCER in my early twenties. Her name was Elinor, after her paternal grandmother, but everyone called her Ellie, which seemed a better fit. We met each other through a complicated network of roommates that extended from the East Village apartment I’d shared with four other guys to a brownstone on the Upper West Side, which Ellie’s parents rented for their only daughter and two of her Connecticut prep school friends.
I’d just begun course work on my master’s degree at NYU. She’d just been hired to play The Sister in an off- Broadway revival of The Catherine Wheel. She had terrific calves and a staggering smile. I told jokes that made her laugh.
Ellie and I dated each other for just under seven months, during which time, in a spectacular display of Manhattan natural selection, all six members of our combined roommate pool disappeared from the picture, for one reason or another, like houseguests in an Agatha Christie novel.
She’d invited me to move in, and I couldn’t afford anything else. When Marshall Lockhart, of the Bridgeport Lockharts, caught wind that his little girl had shacked up, he threatened to withhold further housing subsidy until such time as the matter had been resolved.
I’d proposed marriage almost as a joke. She’d accepted almost the same way. Our wedding cake had a waterfall in it; our divorce featured no waterworks to speak of. By the end, we’d wearily agreed to consider it a miracle that we’d lasted two years.
By the time the English department in Boston hired me as an associate professor in twentieth- century American lit, I was in my late twenties and divorced for half a decade. Sara, at my age, was already a full professor in the economics department, closing in on early tenure, and three years divorced herself.
If you ask Sara, she’ll say that she was too impetuous in her twenties, and that her marriage to Charlie Bernard is evidence in support of that claim. We met at Charlie’s annual intramural faculty softball kegger, both of us sweaty and streaked with infield dust, Economics having trounced Literature twelve runs to two. After driving a profoundly inebriated Charlie Bernard home that day, we’d ended up showering together.
Not even my mother understands how I can remain such good friends with my wife’s ex- husband. I’ve tried explaining that I was already pals with Charlie before I met Sara. That it was, in fact, Charlie, in his strangely sage way, who had done the matchmaking between us. None of this makes sense to people like my mother, and I’ve given up trying to explain it. The truth is uncomplicated: we were grown- ups when we met, Sara and I. We had histories. And we were nuts about each other anyway.
Tall. Intelligent. Impatient. Kind. Affectionate. Resolute. Vegetarian. All these words describe Sara, and there are more.
It’s been my favorite book since day one, this deepening concordance of our life together. I still love her the way people in sappy love stories love each other.
And now it’s time for me to tell the part of our story that has led us here, to this dark paneled office of an alcoholic Midwestern defense attorney, where we sit in a pair of matching leather chairs separated by a table with a lamp on it.
We came here directly from my new temporary home, the kitchenette suite at the Residence Inn downtown. I’ve refused a trip to the ER to make sure I haven’t sustained a concussion or something. Douglas Bennett has managed to avoid arrest, and has demonstrated something by risking it. Exactly what he’s demonstrated I still haven’t decided, but for the moment, Sara and I seem mutually content to accept his counsel. Part of me wishes I
were still unconscious in our driveway.
“A few weeks ago, Paul accused Roger of spying on us,” Sara says. “That’s what this is about. I’m certain of it.”
“Spying on you,” he says. “Spying on you how?”
“I caught him going through our garbage.”
“You saw Roger Mallory going through your garbage?” Bennett looks at me carefully. “When was this?”
“I didn’t actually see him,” I say. “I found one of our credit card statements inside his house. I always tear them up. He’d fished it out of our trash and taped it back together.”
“Roger claimed he’d found the pieces in his yard on garbage day,” Sara said.
“And taped them back together.”
Bennett puts one foot on the slate- top coffee table. “And you confronted him, Paul?”
“You could say that.”
“What happened?”
“I called the police,” I tell him. “They came, and they listened to both of us talk, and then they asked him if he wanted to press charges against me.”
“He’s not telling the whole story,” Sara adds quickly. “There were other things besides just our credit card statement. That’s why Paul called the police.”
Douglas Bennett says, “What other things?”
“Roger Mallory is a goddamned lunatic.” I lower the cold gel pack Bennett handed me when we arrived. Why does a defense attorney keep ice packs in his office? Why am I always the one needing them? “The guy’s got video cameras trained on all of our houses. He’s got whole file cabinets full of stuff in there.”
“When you say stuff…”
“I mean intelligence files. On our neighbors. On us.” I toss the gel pack to the table, where it lands with a slap. “He’s got background checks and phone records and photographs. He’s got fucking video footage. It’s all organized by address. Every body in the circle has their own little file. We’re under goddamned surveillance over there.”
The look on Sara’s face as I’m speaking is one of apprehension approaching embarrassment. As though she realizes how all of this sounds. As though she’s waiting for the same response from Douglas Bennett that I received from the police. The same response you’d expect from almost anybody.
But Bennett just listens. He sits and absorbs. After a moment, he tilts his head my way. “Back up a bit.”
“Back up where?”
“To the part where you found your credit card statement.” He leans back in the settee, deep brown leather creaking under his weight. “How did you come to find your credit card statement inside Roger’s house?”
“That’s the question I wish I’d asked myself before I’d called the police.”
“We know how crazy this sounds,” Sara says. “Roger managed to leave Paul looking…”
“Foolish?” Bennett says.
“Like an asshole,” I say. “Roger managed to leave Paul looking like a paranoid asshole.”
“Paul,” Sara says. “That’s not what I was—”
“With a grudge. A paranoid asshole with some kind of grudge.” I look at her and offer the closest thing to a smile that I’ve got. It doesn’t feel like much, so I offer my hand across the lamp table. Sara reaches out. We sit there awkwardly, elbows locked, fingers laced.
She looks at Bennett and sighs. “We know how crazy it sounds.”
But we haven’t even touched crazy yet. Even Sara knows that much.
How can I do this to her?
Bennett sits quietly. He seems to be looking at something in the distance.
After a long stretch of silence, he stands and crosses the office. In an alcove shelved to the ceiling with legal volumes sits a big walnut desk. Bennett stops at the desk and reaches toward a group of picture frames crowding one corner. He chooses one frame in particular, turns it over in his hands, and gazes at it for a moment. Then he returns to the sitting area.
“My son,” he says, handing the frame to Sara. “Eric.”
Sara takes the frame. Bennett lowers himself back into his chair.
“That’s out of date. He’s only thirteen, fourteen there. Probably just a little older than Brit Seward.”
“He’s very handsome,” Sara says.
“My wife says he looks like me. Maybe that’s why he’s been in and out of trouble since before that photo was taken.” Bennett watches Sara tilt the portrait my way, then place the frame carefully on the table, faceup. “Drugs especially.”
“I’m sorry,” she says. “That must be very difficult.”
“For the past five months he’s been serving time in a youth offender program in Colorado. One of those boot camps for teen agers. A last chance before prison, in Eric’s case. He’ll be eighteen soon, and I’ve pulled all the strings I can reach. Be lieve me.”
Sara glances at me, but I’m watching Douglas Bennett. Won dering why he’s chosen this moment to tell us about his son.
“Hard as nails,” Bennett says. “This place where we sent him. He wrote us hate letters for weeks.”
Sara nods politely. “Those couldn’t have been very pleasant to read.”
Bennett acknowledges Sara’s kindness with a nod. “Cheryl cried for two months straight. But we’re past that now. These last three months… We visited in September. He seemed to stand a little straighter. Look us in the eye. The instructors say he’s been studying, volunteering for things. Talking about college when he comes home. I don’t know.” He looks again at the outdated photo of the young boy with braces on his teeth. “Maybe they got him in time.”
I’m honestly glad for Eric Bennett. I’m not unhappy to listen to this story, which sounds like it has a chance to move into happier chapters. But I’m still waiting.
“Despite innumerable ways in which I may have failed as a parent,” Bennett says, “and in spite of whatever impressions I may have given the two of you in court this morning, the fact remains that I’m among the two or three highest- paid defenders in Clark Falls.”
Sara says, “Mr. Bennett—”
He holds up a hand. “Doug. And don’t mistake my meaning. I’m not sounding my own horn. I’m only providing context.”
Just then he seems uncomfortable with the photo staring up from the table in front of him. He returns it to its place on the corner of his desk. Then he comes back and sits down again.
“Being the son of a highly paid defense attorney, in a town the size of Clark Falls, Eric’s troubles are well- known in the legal circle here, as I’m sure you can imagine. The cobbler’s children go without shoes, et cetera.”
“I don’t mean to seem uncaring,” I finally say. “But why are you telling us this?”
“Twenty years ago—before Eric was even born—I successfully defended a client. The details of the case aren’t important, but during that trial, a patrol officer named Van Stockman delivered what was considered to be key testimony for the prosecution. Unfortunately for the prosecution, I was able to turn Stockman’s own procedural mistakes during the arrest, and the handling of evidence, into an acquittal for my client.” He waves his hand. “I only tell you this to explain how I first came to know Van Stockman. And how I know that Van Stockman’s training officer, in those days…”
“Was Roger Mallory.”
Bennett seems impressed to hear me say this.
Sara seems shocked. She looks at me. How did you know that?
At the mental image of Roger in his former life, decked in his patrol gear, just like the young cop who handcuffed me in front of my house last night—the skin tightens at the back of my neck.
“I’ve met him,” I tell her.
“When?”
I leave it there for now, except to explain that Stockman had been Clair Mallory’s maiden name. That Roger had married his patrol partner’s big sister, making Van Stockman not only his subordinate, but also his brother- in- law. Eventually, his son Brandon’s uncle.
“That’s right,” Bennett says.
“What does Stockman have to do…”
“Last night, after meeting with you at the jail, I was followed to within a mile of my home by a Clark Falls patrol unit.”
“Followed?”
“And eventually pulled over. On North River Road, where there are no streetlamps, and very little traffic at that hour. The officer who approached my window held a light in my eyes and asked for my license and registration.”
“You were followed.”
“After reviewing my license he apologized for the inconvenience. He indicated that he recognized me. He speculated that perhaps I’d just come from a late- night meeting with a client. He told me to drive home safely.” Bennett leans back in the chair. “Then, as I was raising my window, he asked about my son.”
I feel Sara pull her hand away and sit up a little.
“He turned off his flashlight, at which point I recognized him. Sergeant Van Stockman, now. He’s put on twenty years and forty pounds, and apparently he’s never moved out of a radio car in twenty years’ time, but I recognized him. Which I believe was his intent.”
“Jesus.”
“He said that he’d heard Eric would be home soon. He said, ‘I hope he doesn’t run into any more trouble.’ ”
“Jesus.”
“He told me that it would be a shame if some kiddie raper— his words—managed to end up roaming free while a young man like Eric somehow ended up in the state penitentiary.” Bennett folds his hands in his lap. “Then he asked me to have a good evening and strolled back to his car.”
“Jesus.” I look at Sara. All the color seems to have drained from her complexion. “You’ve got to be…”
“I was angry at first. Not angry. Enraged.”
“What happened when you filed the complaint?”
“The complaint?”
Is he kidding? “Jesus, Bennett, you can’t just let—”
“Let me ask you,” Bennett says to me. “What happened when you called the police after you found your personal documents in Roger Mallory’s house?”
I don’t bother answering the question. Bennett knows the answer already.
“So we agree,” he says, “that in spite of our respective educations, we understand the way the world actually works.”
Safer Page 8
