Red Leaves

Beyond the diner window, the streets are crowded. Families mostly, cameras hanging from their arms. You have served them by the thousands. They ask only the simplest questions. They pull out their little canisters of film and ask how much it will cost to have their pictures developed. You quote them a price and if they're satisfied with it, they ask when the pictures will be ready. You answer that question, too, and in most cases the deal is done. You walk to the developing machine, open the canister, take out the film, feed it into the machine, and wait. The rollers inside the machine turn, the chemicals disperse. The motor hums. The minutes pass. Then the pictures emerge, shiny, new. They fall into the tray like brightly colored leaves.

The years go by, old customers drop away and new ones appear. You wonder if one of these new ones will recognize you, remember what happened, and ask a different question. Then one Sunday morning the phone rings, and you realize that a past without a future is a corpse, and that for a long time you have been dead. You want to rise from the grave, wrench something good from all that darkness, and so you say yes and make the arrangements.

But what will you say, you ask yourself, what will you say when you confront it all again? You want to end with wisdom, but you must begin without rt because you had none when it began. You lived in a small town, lived a tidy little life. What you've learned since then, you've learned in increments, a treasure collected one coin at a time. And so you must chart the journey carefully, measure the pace, offer what you have gathered, and hope it will be accepted.

But first you must think it through again, return to that last moment, then double back to the days preceding it, how rt happened that in a few short days everything fell apart. Yes, you decide, that's the way to tell it.

The waitress has no suspicion. She has seen other men like you, alone on a Sunday morning, sitting in the back booth, with nothing but a mug of coffee.

And so you feel safe here. And why not? You could not bring them back to life, could not repair the damage, and so you decided to make the best of it. You thought of leaving Wesley, but you didn't. You stayed because you believed there was a reason to stay, and that, in the end, you would find that reason. But the years passed, and you had begun to believe that you would never find it. Then the phone rang, and suddenly the reason was clear. You realized that, if nothing else, you could give a few things back, draw them like dried bones from your own buried past.

And so you have come here, to this diner, in hope of doing that, offering the paltry gift of the few dark things you know.

NINE

Suspicion is an acid, that's one thing I know. Everything it touches it corrodes. It eats through the smooth, glistening surface of things and the mark it leaves is indelible. Late one night, I watched a rerun of one of the Alien movies. In one scene, the alien pukes up a liquid so corrosive it immediately eats through first one floor of the space station, then another and another. And I thought, it's like that, suspicion, it has nowhere to go but down through level after level of old trusts and long devotions. Its direction is always toward the bottom.

I knew that things had changed in my family, that Meredith had grown more volatile and Keith more defiant, but I wasn't aware of how much Amy Giordano's disappearance had affected other, seemingly neutral, people. She had been missing for three days by then, and there could be no doubt that everyone in Wesley now knew that Keith had been Amy's babysitter the night of her disappearance. Even so, I was totally unprepared for Mrs. Phelps's reaction.

She was in her early seventies and had been a regular customer since the shop opened. She had white or bluish hair, depending upon the competence of the beauty salon, and her teeth were false and thus unnaturally even and a bit too large for her mouth. She never came into the shop in anything but dressy clothes, usually with a silk scarf around her neck, her face fully made up down to the eye shadow.

She came into the store at just after ten. Neil was at the front counter, and she stopped to chat with him in that amiable way of hers. 'Neil's very nice,' she once said to me. But then, so was almost everyone, according to Mrs. Phelps. Her gardener was nice, for example, as was the Ecuadorian woman who cleaned her house. Summer was nice, but so were spring and fall. She'd never made particular mention of winter, but I had no doubt she could find some aspect of it that was nice, too.

She had come to pick up the large photograph of her granddaughter that she'd left for me to frame the preceding weekend, and the minute she came through the door I remembered that it wasn't ready. I'd begun framing it before closing on Saturday, and Neil had quite correctly taken the frame and photograph and placed them safely beneath the counter, where they'd remained, completely forgotten until now.

'I'm sorry, Mrs. Phelps,' I said when she walked up to the counter. 'I haven't finished the picture yet. I can have it for you later today.'

Mrs. Phelps smiled and waved her hand. 'Oh, don't worry, Eric,' she said. 'I'll come back for it later.'

'No, no,' I said. 'Its my fault for not having it ready. When Keith gets here, I'll have him deliver it to you.'

That's when I noticed an uneasy glimmer in Mrs. Phelps's eyes, a sudden, not very subtle wariness. I also knew the reason for it. Mrs. Phelps's granddaughter, the little girl in the photograph I had not yet framed, was staying with her. She was pretty, with long dark hair, and looked to be around eight years old, the same age and general appearance as Amy Giordano.

'Oh, you don't have to put Keith to that trouble,' Mrs. Phelps said. 'I'll drop by later this afternoon.' Her voice remained kindly and accommodating, a nice woman being nice, but there was a firmness in it, too, a clear refusal to allow my son ever to come near her granddaughter. I thought of the whales I'd read about, how the mother whale will place her vast bulk between the harpoon and her offspring. Mrs. Phelps was doing no more than that, protecting her granddaughter from the dark potential of my son.

'All right,' I said quietly. 'If that's what you'd prefer.'

'Yes, thank you,' Mrs. Phelps said politely. She took a step backward, her gaze now fleeing to any available object, the smile still on her face, but lifeless, frozen. She was embarrassed by what she'd just done but unwilling to take it back. After all, she must have thought, her granddaughter's safety was at stake.

'Around four then,' I said.

Mrs. Phelps nodded, turned, and walked rather hurriedly toward the door. She swept by Neil without nodding good-bye, and by the time she made it to the sidewalk I had the feeling that she was very nearly out of breath.

'Jesus,' Neil said to me. 'That was weird.'

I stared out the front window, watching as Mrs. Phelps walked to her car and got in. 'I don't think Keith should make deliveries anymore,' I said.

'It's just awful,' Neil said. 'Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty? And Mrs. Phelps, of all people. So nice, and all that, but...'

'It's fear,' I told him, though until that moment I hadn't realized to what degree suspicion was a form of fear. 'She's afraid of Keith. It's natural, I guess.'

'But there's no reason for her to be afraid of Keith,' Neil said.

I recalled the terrible vision I'd had a few days before, Keith moving down the shadowy corridor toward Amy's room. It was all I could do to keep from blurting the thought that came to me at that moment, Dear God, I hope you're right.

Neil seemed almost to have heard the grim prayer I'd managed not to utter.

'Keith couldn't have done anything to that little girl, Eric,' he said emphatically. 'He didn't have a car. Whoever took her, he had to have had a car. You don't just take a child from her house and walk away.'

I saw the twin beams of a car once again sweep across the undergrowth. 'I know.'

A stream of images sped through my mind, Keith slouching down the walkway, brushing past the low-slung limbs of the Japanese maple at its far end, moving stealthily up the stairs. I recalled the way he'd frozen at the sound of my voice, then stood facing the door, his rumpled shirttail hanging halfway outside his pants. For an instant, the thought of why his shirt had been pulled from his trousers was almost more than I could bear.

Neil touched my arm softly. 'Believe me, Eric, Keith's not a...' He stopped, considered his words, then said, 'Keith wouldn't ... hurt a little girl.'

I nodded silently because there seemed nothing else to do, no words I could safely say. Then I went back to