Outside, I thought at first. Something, or someone, was outside, perhaps in the woods, suffering. I got out of bed, willing lightness out of my heavy body, slowing myself nearly to motionlessness. Five minutes until one foot touched the floor, five more for the other. Five minutes to cross the room and another five to open the window. I thanked myself for having sanded down the frame and replaced the sash: the pane slid up smoothly, without rattling or creaking. I leaned forward, poking my head out into the cool air, and listened.
Nothing but the slow and heavy wind, flowing through the trees. Had the crying stopped? I carefully pulled my head back in: no, there it was. It was in the house.
I paced across the room like a glacier, my bare feet sticking to the boards, then peeling off again. I reached the door, turned the knob, and pulled.
There. I could hear it more clearly now. A long, high, mournful wail, followed by a pause, as if to draw breath. I opened the door far enough to admit my body, then lifted my left foot and took a single step into the hall. In the deep quiet of the house, the creak the floorboards made was like a rifle shot. The crying stopped. I froze.
I remained frozen for five, ten, fifteen minutes. The sound did not resume. I let out breath. Where on earth had it come from? It was in the house, to be sure. I repeated my room-to-room search and again found nothing. The house was empty, and against all reason, I was more awake than I had been in days. What was more, I felt dirty again, my mouth sour and sticky, my underarms redolent of sweat. I went to the bathroom and took another bath, then brushed my teeth a second time. Afterward I returned to my bed, anticipating a sleepless night, and even reached out to turn on the bedside lamp. But my hand never made it. My body, evidently, had overruled my mind, and I dropped off to sleep without difficulty, and dreamed of nothing all night long.
NINE
The first thing I found when I came downstairs the next morning was yesterday’s mail, scattered on the floor in the hallway. I remembered now that, frightened by the furnace, I had dropped it there the night before. Raising my eyebrows at my own foolishness, I gathered it up, then went to the thermostat and turned the heat back on. The furnace clanked to life. The sound was identical to the one that had so terrified me, but now of course it was no more alarming than the birds singing outside. I went to the kitchen, put a pot of coffee on to brew, and sat down at the table with my letters.
My credit card bill had arrived, bearing the costs of my home renovation. I was pleased to find them to be below my budgeted estimate. There were some papers from the bank, and tucked with them into the envelope, a promotional refrigerator magnet. I was surprised to see an official-looking letter from out of town, and after examining it for a moment, I chose to set it aside for the time being. There was also what appeared to be a card from my sister, and though I felt my face tense up as I took it in hand, I went ahead and tore it open.
The card bore a fairly innocuous reproduction of a painting of a twelve-point buck, backlit by a rising run, perched on a rock outcropping, majestic mountain terrain all around. As far as I knew, deer did not tend to stand high upon rocks—this was the purview of mountain goats and bighorn sheep, I thought—but the image was pleasant enough and enabled me to take a neutral stance to the card’s contents.
Interestingly, though, it was not the substance of my sister’s message that struck me most powerfully. The message itself was not noteworthy—she apologized for her cavalier attitude during her brief visit to my house and offered her emotional support and friendship for “dealing with your troubles,” whatever that was supposed to mean—but the handwriting made me sit up and pay attention.
With the coffee maker burbling quietly behind me, I remembered the last time I had seen my sister’s rushed, angular scrawl. It had been in her diary, which I had read when I was thirteen. There was a period of time when Jill had seemed to be sleeping somewhere different every night—at the homes of friends, no doubt so that she could have free access to the boys and men she was known to be having relations with at the time. I admit that I would often snoop in her bedroom when she was gone, in the precise hope that I would find her diary there. But until this particular night, she had always taken it with her to her sleepovers.
This time, however, she had forgotten, and I sat on the edge of her un-slept-in bed, reading as quickly as I could. And I had been right to rush, because she actually came home to get it, launching herself from the back of a car out of which loud rock music was blaring, and stomped up the stairs to snatch it from my hands as I read. She actually struck me, as I remember, and I struck back, and it took my exhausted mother to pull us apart. In fact I seem to recall my mother ending up on the floor, weeping, and me helping her up and leading her to bed.
But it was the diary itself that truly rankled, as it contained all manner of lascivious fantasy about my father, horrible desires and distasteful proclivities that she had invented for him, clearly to satisfy some deep, childish need to blame others for her own failings. Even at thirteen I understood this—Jill was always rather transparent, pathetically so, and God forbid that someone close to her should suggest that her actions were motivated by self-deception, or a need to relieve herself of responsibility for unfortunate things she had done. Of which, as I have said, there were many.
This is not to suggest that I regarded my father as a paragon of virtue. He was not—indeed, I would be the first to admit that he was deeply flawed, emotionally stunted, and of course extremely careless. But to make the insinuations my sister did in her diary was simply wrong, even if they were, ultimately, for her own private consumption.
Sitting there at my kitchen table, I was not especially happy to revisit these memories. I have already established that I am not one to live in the past, and I feel that the anger which results from recalling past injustices is among the most impure of emotions, and damaging to heart and soul. But it was not my sister’s fault that her handwriting happened to bring these recollections to mind, and I had to admit that, misguided as they may have been, the words of her apology and offer of friendship were sweet, almost touching. And so I took the unusual step of affixing the card to the refrigerator with the magnet from the bank, if for no other reason than to inoculate myself against the effect her handwriting imposed upon my mind.
By now the coffee was finished, and I poured myself a cup. All that was left of the mail, aside from the official-looking letter, was a thin white envelope without any return address. My own address was neither typed nor printed, but written, in a neat, precise hand. I carefully opened it, and unfolded the single sheet of paper within.
The paper bore only three words, in the same hand as that on the envelope: Doctor Avery Stiles.
I had no idea who had sent me this cryptic message, but the sight of those words caused my stomach to turn over. I sipped my coffee, in order to calm it.
The handwriting was not one I recognized, and I cast about in my mind for whose it might be. There were very few people who knew where I lived—my sister, the employees of the real estate agency, the lawyer’s office. Heph the electrician, Randall from the hardware store, Jeremy Pernice. And, of course, whomever those people might have told about me—though it seemed unlikely that my purchase of the house and land would qualify as gossip worthy information.
I studied the envelope and paper once more, and determined that the handwriting was liable to be a woman’s. And after a few moments, I had it, or thought I did: it must be the girl from the law office, the one who had insisted that my land’s previous occupant could not be identified. Perhaps she meant to indicate that Doctor Avery Stiles was that occupant! I got up, retrieved my land-purchase folder, and located the office’s number.
“Barris and Haight.”
“Hello, Andrea?”
“Yes?”
“This is Eric Loesch.”
There was the slightest hesitation before she said, “Yes, hello, sir!”
“Andrea, I’m calling about Doctor Avery Stiles.”
A
gain, a pause. “I’m afraid I don’t know who you mean.”
“I realize that you don’t wish for your employers to know that you told me his name. But perhaps you could answer yes or no to a few questions.”
The pause this time was longer, and when she spoke, her voice had changed. It was more pliant now. “All right,” she said.
“This is the man whose name was blacked out on the title abstract?”
“Yes,” came the muted reply.
“Do you know who this man is?”
“No…”
“Do you know why your employers wanted to keep this information secret?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Will you meet me,” I asked, “to discuss this further?”
She sighed. “I don’t know if that will be necessary…”
“You’ll need to eat lunch. May I treat you?”
“No, I don’t…”
“Or coffee. Or just a moment of your time. I’ll tell you what. Meet me at 12:30 at the end of Jefferson Street, by the abandoned football field. You may stay in your car. I’ll just pull up beside you. I just want to ask you some questions.”
The wait for a reply was very long, this time, but her voice, when it returned, was resigned. “All right.” And then, as if someone were walking by, she said brightly, “That will be no trouble at all!”
“I can’t thank you enough, Andrea. I’ll see you then.”
“Goodbye,” she said, and hung up.
Her car was there, a little red Volkswagen with a crooked front fender. She had parked on the side of the road just before it turned to mud, and was facing south, toward town, presumably to reserve the possibility of a quick getaway. Frankly, I was surprised. I had assumed that she had no good reason to meet with me, and expected to have to stop by the law office to draw the information out of her. I pulled up slowly, giving her a friendly wave as I approached. As if by reflex, she waved back.
We rolled our windows down. Her car was filthy from the April mud and rain, though the sun shone today, as it had during my adventure on the rock. Having the taller vehicle, I was forced to lean down to speak to her, and she to tip her face up.
By any standard, she was a lovely girl, with wispy blond hair framing a face the shape of an ash leaf. Her eyes were gray, and her small pursed mouth betrayed her nervousness, and perhaps a fierceness that I had not, to my surprise, detected over the phone. She was dressed for work in a silk blouse and woolen skirt, but was huddled inside a ski jacket, despite the warm weather. A small diamond glinted on her ring finger, and I wondered what kind of man had managed to catch her. I smiled and thanked her for coming.
“I don’t have anything to tell you, really,” she said.
I merely nodded, remaining silent. It is the rare interlocutor who can bear to leave a silence uninterrupted.
She let out breath and trained her gaze out the windshield of her car. A pop station was playing quietly on her car radio. “So yeah,” she said.
I offered a gentle prompt. “Doctor Avery Stiles?”
She spoke without turning back to me, her voice full of resolve. “He was some kind of weirdo in the sixties,” she said. “Like a psychologist? He taught at the college but then got kicked out. That’s what they said anyway. I never heard of him.”
“Who’s ‘they’?”
“My boss, Mark.”
It was clear by her tone that she didn’t like this Mark—her presence here, I could see now, was an act of rebellion against him. I chuckled gently, as though to suggest that we all knew a Mark or two, and that it was right to stick it to them.
“Why didn’t he want me to know?” I asked.
Andrea turned to face me, a sour look on her face. “Beats me what his problem is,” she said. Her voice, freed from the constraints of the workplace, was very different from the one she used on the phone—casual, and a bit crass. “I asked why it was blacked out on the abstract, and he looked at me like I ought to just keep my little mouth shut and mind my own business. He just said, ‘Mr. Loesch doesn’t need to know that.’ So now I was curious, right? So I asked him why you didn’t need to know. And he said, ‘I’m sure he’s well aware that the land used to belong to Avery Stiles.’ And when I kept looking at him, he said, ‘I don’t know what Eric Loesch thinks he’s doing out there, and I don’t want to be involved in it.’ And that’s all he would say.”
“Interesting.”
It was she who remained silent now, gazing at me with annoyed anticipation. “So you don’t know who this guy is?” she said, finally.
“No, I don’t,” I said.
“And you’re not doing something weird out there?”
“No,” I answered, though I was unsure what, in Andrea’s view, would constitute weirdness. “Tell me something, Andrea,” I went on. “Did it seem to you that your boss knew something about me? That he had some prior knowledge about my life?”
She thought about it a moment. “I guess so.”
“But you don’t know what, exactly?”
A note of anxiety had begun to creep into her voice. “What,” she said. “Are you some kind of crazed killer?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say crazed,” I joked.
Andrea, however, didn’t find it funny, and her face betrayed a moment of real fear before she shifted, quite deftly, to her previous sour expression. “So can I go now?” she asked, feigning nonchalance. “Honestly, that’s all I know about this.”
“Yes, of course,” I said. “You were good to come. Thank you, Andrea.”
She wasted no time rolling up her window and driving away.
I allowed my car to idle while I considered her words. Her employer must have remembered the drama my family experienced when I was a young man, or perhaps he had heard something—doubtless something incorrect—about the more recent events I had been involved in. Either way, his suspicion of me was unjust, and his desire to distance himself puzzling. This was not the first time I had been unjustly accused, however, and it was unlikely to be the last. I decided to put this affront behind me, and see what more I could learn about the “weirdo” whose name Andrea had uncovered.
I drove to the Gerrysburg Public Library and parked in the lot beside it. I remembered the library well—when I was a boy, it had also housed a museum of local history, which had eventually been eliminated to make room for more books. The parking lot had been expanded at some point in the past, but the asphalt was cracked and patched now, with bits of it scattered around, heaved up by winter.
Inside, the library was much as I had remembered it, except that the card catalog was gone, replaced by a bank of computers. This transition had clearly taken place some time ago, however, because the computers were old, and two of the four bore handwritten placards readingOUT OF ORDER. There were also a pair of newer computers, above which hung a sign markedINTERNET. A dirty-looking man sat at one, playing video chess; at the other a teenage mother typed furiously while her baby slept in a nearby stroller.
I strode up to the circulation desk, where an old woman was using the telephone. She appeared to be calling patrons who had books on hold. I waited patiently for her to finish her conversation, and when she did, she looked up with an inquiring expression. She appeared energetic for her age—which I estimated to be about seventy—and her gaze was bright and clear.
“Good afternoon,” I said. “I’m trying to find out information about a particular local resident, whom I’m told lived here in the 1960s.”
“I’ve lived here all my life,” the old woman said. “Perhaps I know this person.”
“He was a psychologist named Avery Stiles.”
The old woman’s expression didn’t change, but her focus seemed to deepen, as if she had ceased looking at my face, and was now trying to see what lay behind it. “I see,” she said. “I do think I remember such a person. A bit of a radical, maybe? I seem to remember some trouble.”
“I’m told he taught at the college.”
“That may be so. Have yo
u tried an internet search?”
When I said I hadn’t, the librarian suggested I go wait for a computer to free up. Meanwhile, she would do a bit of low-tech sleuthing for me. I thanked her, then walked over to the computer area. A lone wooden chair appeared to have been designated the internet-waiting seat. Beside it stood an easel, and propped up on it, a hand-lettered list of rules. 30 MINUTES PER PERSON, read one. SILENCE MUST BE OBSERVED. NO OBJECTIONABLE INTERNET CONTENT.
I waited several minutes before the teen mother noticed me. She had been typing furiously, working on what appeared to be an e-mail, and peered furtively over her shoulder. Her expression was grim, her complexion wan and blotchy. On her cheek was a brown patch of the sort commonly associated with addiction to certain illegal drugs. I offered up a small smile, which the girl rebuffed, or perhaps didn’t see.
A few minutes later, the girl closed the browser, got up, and grabbed the handles of the stroller. She stalked past me, her lips moving. I took her seat and reopened the browser.
Avery Stiles psychology, I typed into the search box. A list of hits scrolled down the screen. Most of these appeared to be false matches—someone named Avery, someone named Stiles, a mention of psychology somewhere nearby. But a few did indeed seem to be the Avery Stiles I was looking for. These were mostly class lists—archived information about graduates of various schools. Stiles evidently had attended the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Pennsylvania, where he received his doctorate in 1958. Another entry had him as an assistant professor at SUNY Milan the following year. Still another referred to “the sad story of Dr. Avery Stiles.”
I clicked on this one and brought up the entire article. It was part of a recent paper written by a sociologist, a woman named Lydia Bulgakov, also of the local SUNY. The paper seemed to be a study of academia itself as a social system, and the various ways that students and professors could find themselves marginalized within it. The section that mentioned Avery Stiles was near the end, and was something of a summary; “the sad story of Avery Stiles” was alluded to casually, and without explanation, as if the reader was expected know what story Professor Bulgakov was referring to. There was no other such reference in the paper.
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