simplicity. Live paycheck to paycheck. Take pleasure in basic routine. Redefine himself. Take up fishing or hunting or even just reading. Connect with as few people as possible. Live life with monklike style and a hermit’s solitude. Turn his back on fifty-three years of life, and say that it all started anew from the day he’d set fire to his home on the Cape and gone forward from there. It was almost Zenlike and tantalizing. Ricky could evaporate from the world like a puddle of water on a hot, sunny day, rising into the atmosphere.
This ability was almost as frightening as the alternative.
It seemed to him that he had reached the moment where he had to make a choice. Like Odysseus, his screen name, the route lay between Scylla and Charybdis. There were costs and risks with each selection.
Late at night, in his modest rented room in New Hampshire, he spread out on his bed all the notes and connections he had to the man who had forced him to erase himself from his life. Bits and pieces of information, clues and directions that he could follow. Or not. Either he was going to pursue the man who’d done this to him, risking exposure. Or he was going to toss it all and make what life he could out of what he’d already established. He felt a little like some fifteenth-century Spanish explorer, standing unsteadily on the pitching deck of a tiny sailing ship, staring out at the wide expanse of deep green ocean and perhaps a new and uncertain world just beyond the horizon.
In the center of the pile of material were the documents that he’d taken from the old man Tyson on his death bed at the VA Hospital in Pensacola. In the papers were the names of the adoptive parents who had taken the three children in twenty years ago. That, he knew, was his next step.
The decision was: take it-or not.
A part of him insisted he could be happy as Richard Lively, maintenance man. Durham was a pleasant town. His landladies were nice enough folks.
But another part of him saw things differently.
Dr. Frederick Starks did not deserve to die. Not for what he’d done, even if wrong, at a time of his own indecision and doubt. There was no denying that he could have done better for Claire Tyson. He could have reached out and perhaps been the hand that helped her find a life worth living. He couldn’t debate that he’d had that chance and that he had missed it. Rumplestiltskin was right about that. But his punishment far exceeded his complicity.
And this thought infuriated Ricky.
“I didn’t kill her,” he said out loud, but whispering the words.
The room around him was as much a coffin as it was a life raft, he believed.
He wondered if he could ever take a breath of air, without it tasting of doubt. What sort of safety was there in hiding forever? Of always suspecting the person behind every window of being the man who had driven him to anonymity. It was an awful thought, he understood: Rumplestiltskin’s game would never end for him, even if it had ended for the elusive Mr. R. Ricky would not know, never be certain, never really have a moment’s peace, free from questions.
He needed to find an answer.
Alone in his room, Ricky reached for the papers on the bed. He rolled the rubber band that held the adoption documents together off the sheaf so quickly that it snapped.
“All right,” he said quietly, speaking to himself and to any ghosts who might have been listening in, “the game starts up again.”
What Ricky learned swiftly was that social services in New York City had placed the three children into a succession of foster homes for the first six months after their mother died, until they were adopted by a couple who lived in New Jersey. There was a single social worker’s report stating that the children had been difficult placements; that except for their last and unidentified foster home, they had proven to be disruptive, angry, and abusive in each group setting. The social worker had recommended therapy, especially for the oldest. The report was written in plain, bureaucratic cover-your-butt English, without the sort of detail that might have told Ricky something about the child who was to grow into the man who had tormented him. He did learn that the adoption was handled by the Episcopal Diocese of New York, under their charity wing. There was no record of money changing hands, but Ricky suspected some had. There were copies of legal documents relinquishing any claims on the children signed by old man Tyson. There was another document, from Daniel Collins, signed while he was in jail in Texas. Ricky noted the symmetry of that element: Daniel Collins had rejected the three children while in prison. Years later, he is returned to prison under the rough guidance of Rumplestiltskin. Ricky thought that however the man who was once a rejected child managed this feat, it must have given him terrific satisfaction.
The couple who took in the three abandoned children was Howard and Martha Jackson. An address in West Windsor, a semisuburb, semifarmland locale a few miles away from Princeton, was given, but no other detailed information about the parents. They had taken all three children, which interested Ricky. There were questions in how they’d managed to stay together that were as potent as why they weren’t separated. The children were listed, as male child Luke, twelve years; male child Matthew, eleven years; and female child Joanna, nine years. Biblical names, Ricky thought. He doubted that these names had remained connected to the children.
He made several computer sorties, but drew blanks. This surprised him. It seemed to him that there should have been some information available floating around in the Internet. He checked the electronic white pages, found many Jacksons in central New Jersey, but no name that dovetailed with those he had on the meager sheaf of papers.
What he did have was an old address. Which meant that there was a door he could knock on. It seemed his only alternative.
Ricky considered using the priest’s garb and fake leukemia letter, but decided they had served their purpose once, and were best saved for another occasion. He ceased shaving instead, rapidly growing a spotty beard, and ordered a mock identification card from a nonexistent private detective agency over the Internet. Another late-night inspection of the drama department’s wardrobe room provided him with a fake stomach, a pillow-type device that he could strap beneath a T-shirt and which made him appear to be perhaps forty or fifty pounds heavier than his lean figure actually was. To his relief, he also found a brown suit that accommodated the extra girth. In the makeup cases, he also uncovered an extra bit of help. He slipped all the necessary items into a green garbage bag and took it home with him. When he got to his room, he added his semiautomatic pistol and two fully loaded clips to the bag.
He rented a four-year-old car that had seen better days from the local Rent-A-Wreck, which generally provided for students, and seemed more than willing to take his cash with few questions, the clerk dutifully taking down the information from the phony California driver’s license that he provided, and the following Friday evening, when he’d finished his shift in the maintenance department, started driving south toward New Jersey. He let the night surround him, allowed the miles to hum beneath the tires on the rental car, and drove rapidly but steadily, a constant five miles per hour above the posted speed limit. Once he rolled down the window, feeling a breath of warm air slide into the car, and he thought that it was quickly approaching summer once again. If he’d been in the city, he would have begun trying to steer his patients toward some recognition that they could hold on to when his inevitable August vacation rolled around. Sometimes he could manage this, sometimes not. He remembered walking in the city in the late spring and early summer and how the flowers in the park and the burst of greenery coming forth seemed to defeat the canyons of brick and concrete that were Manhattan. It was the best of times, there, he thought, but elusive, replaced quickly by oppressive heat and humidity. It lasted just long enough to be persuasive.
It was well past midnight when he skirted the city, stealing a glance back over his shoulder as he cruised across the George Washington Bridge. Even in the dead of night, the city seemed to glow. The Upper West Side stretched away from him, and he knew that just out of his sight was Columbia Presbyterian Hospital and the clinic where he’d worked so briefly so many years earlier, oblivious to the impact of what he was doing. A curious blend of emotions slapped him, as he swept past the tolls, and arrived in New Jersey. It was as if he was caught in a dream, one of those unsettling, tense series of images and events that occupied the unconscious, that bordered on nightmare, just stepping back from that edge. The city seemed to him to be all about who he was, the car that rattled as he steered it over the highway represented what he’d become, and the darkness ahead, what he might be.
