turning in the sky above him, and he was standing at the end of the Commons lawn, and his face was white and his stare was fixed on me and he was holding out his hand and I knew that if I took that hand it would be as cold as mine and his mouth moved and from where I sat I could hear the name he kept repeating, insistently escaping his lips.
Someone knocked on the door of the office and my father disappeared.
Donald Kimball looked tired and his inquisitive manner had changed since last Saturday; he was now defeated. After I let him in he regarded me casually and gestured at a chair, which he fell into as I nodded. He sighed and sat back, his bloodshot eyes scanning the room. I wanted him to make a comment about the wind—I needed someone to verify it for me so we could share a laugh—but he didn’t. When he spoke his voice was dry.
“I’ve never been up here,” he sighed. “To the college, I mean. Nice place.”
I moved over to my desk and sat behind it. “It’s a nice college.”
“Doesn’t working here interfere with your writing schedule?”
“Well, I only teach here once a week, and I’m canceling tomorrow’s class and—” I realized how careless that made me sound and so I began to make a case for myself. “I mean, I take my job seriously even though it’s not very demanding . . . I mean, it’s fairly routine.” I was just making noise. I just wanted to prolong everything. “It’s pretty easy.” I couldn’t sit still—I was too nervous—and I paced the office instead, pretending to look for something. I bent down to retrieve the stories when I suddenly froze: footprints stamped in ash trailed along the wooden floor.
The same footprints that had once been visible in the darkening carpet on Elsinore Lane.
I swallowed hard.
“Why?” Kimball was asking.
“Why . . . what?” I tore my eyes away from the footprints and stood up and placed the stories on a table that sat off to the side of the window overlooking the Commons.
“Why is it easy?”
“Because they’re impressed by me.” I shrugged. “They sit in a room and try to describe reality and they mostly fail and then I leave.” I paused. “I’m good at professional detachment.” I paused again. “Plus I don’t have tenure to worry about.”
Kimball kept staring at me, waiting for the lame interlude I imposed on us to reach its end.
I kept forcing myself to look away from the footprints.
Finally Kimball cleared his throat. “I got your messages and I’m sorry it took me so long to get back to you, but you didn’t sound too upset and—”
“But I think I may have some news,” I said, sitting down again.
(
“Yes, that’s what you said.” Kimball nodded slowly. “But, um . . .” He trailed off, distracted by something.
“Do you want something to drink?” I asked suddenly. “I mean, I think I’ve got a bottle of scotch around here somewhere.”
“No, no—that’s okay.” He stopped. “I’ve got to head back over to Stoneboat.”
“What happened in Stoneboat?” I asked. “Wait, that’s not where Paul Owen is?”
Kimball sighed heavily again. He seemed withdrawn, regretful.
“No, it isn’t where Paul Owen is.”
I paused. “But is Paul Owen . . . okay?”
“Yeah, he is, um . . .” Kimball finally breathed in and stared directly at me. “Look, Mr. Ellis, something happened in Stoneboat last night.” He sighed, deciding whether to continue. “And I think it changed the direction of the investigation that I talked to you about on Saturday.”
I asked, “What happened?”
Kimball looked at me flatly. “There was another murder.”
I took this in and nodded and then forced myself to ask, “Who . . . was it?”
“We don’t know.”
“I don’t . . . understand.”
“There were only body parts.” He unclasped his hands, opening them, revealing his palms. My eyes were drawn to Kimball’s fingernails. He bit them. “It was a woman.” He kept sighing. “I’ve been busy all day with this, and I didn’t want to bother you about it because the crime deviated from the theory we had.”
“Meaning . . .”
“It wasn’t in the book,” he said. “The homicides we investigated in Midland County starting this past summer—we thought—were ultimately connected to the book and, well, this one . . . wasn’t.” He looked over my shoulder and out the window. “This was a serious deviation.”
Immediately: I was cut off. I was on my own. Telling Kimball about Clayton wouldn’t mean anything. It didn’t matter now. It already seemed as if Kimball was dismissing me. It was obvious from the expression on his face that he didn’t trust the story line anymore.
The crime scene—the murder that shattered the pattern—at the Orsic Motel, just off the interstate in Stoneboat, was insanely elaborate. There were ropes and body parts positioned in front of mirrors; the head and the hands were missing, and the walls were splashed with blood; there was evidence that a blowtorch had been used at one point, and the bones in both arms had been broken before the skin had been peeled off, and a woman’s torso was found in the shower stall, and a huge drawing—in the victim’s blood—of a face adorned the wall above the gutted bed with the words—I’M BACK—also dripping in blood, scrawled below it. There were, again, no prints. “No one even knows how the room became occupied . . . The maid . . . she . . .” Kimball’s voice was fading.
It was getting dark in the office and I reached over and switched on the lamp with the green glass shade sitting on my desk, but it failed to illuminate the room.
As I listened to Kimball my heart was whirring erratically.
Though the crime scene had not been contaminated, the print man could not even come up with smudges or smears, and technicians found no signs of footprints or fibers, and serologists inspecting the spatter trajectories and the defensive wounds had found no blood samples other than the victim’s, which was exceedingly rare considering the brutality of the murder. The neighborhood had already been canvassed, and a psychic was now being consulted. And crushing everything was the fact that this crime did not exist in my book.
My armpits were damp with sweat.
I wasn’t relieved
(
because even though no crime like this was featured in the Vintage edition of
“. . . won’t have a positive ID for at least a week . . . maybe longer . . . maybe never . . . basically a wait- and-see situation . . .”
His stoicism was supposed to be comforting, and I realized he thought he was taking away something that was ruining my life and that I should be relieved. The more he spoke—in the soft voice meant to rid me of guilt and stress—the deeper my fear increased. Because what could I tell him at this point? Kimball waited patiently after he asked what it was I had called about, and he was unrewarded by my silence. My face actually reddened when I realized I had nothing to offer him—no proof, not even a name, just a young man who resembled me. And when he saw that I had nothing to give him—that I was hiding—he retreated back into trying to process what had hit him at the Orsic Motel earlier that day. He had no questions to ask me. I had no answers to give him. A train of futile incidence had led us here—that was all. Nothing was connected anymore. And while we both fell into our respective silences my mind started widening with possibilities I couldn’t share with the detective.
A boy was making a book come true. But I did not have the name of this boy.
He had been in my house. (He denied this.)
He had been in Aimee Light’s car. (But had you really seen him?)
He was involved with a girl I was involved with.
(Bring this up. Admit the affair. Let Jayne know. Lose everything.)
