'Jesus, Meredith, Keith's not a monster.'
She continued to slice the tomato. 'That's what I just said.'
I sat down at the kitchen table. 'The cops talked to Warren. He told them Keith was in a mood that night.'
Meredith spun around, the knife frozen in her hand. 'What a fucking idiot,' she snapped.
'Yeah.'
'Goddamn it!'
'I know. I told him the next time to think before he spoke.'
'As if he could,' Meredith said hotly. 'In a mood, Jesus Christ!' She seemed to smolder as she stood, knife in hand, glaring at me. 'What's wrong with him, anyway? Is he just stupid, or is it something worse?'
'Something worse?'
'I mean, is he
'Why would he do that?'
'Oh, come on, Eric.' She put down the knife. 'He's jealous of you. He always has been. You've always been the favorite. To your mother, but not just her. I mean, to this day, your father doesn't care if Warren comes by to see him. He never thinks about Warren. And then there's the fact that you have a wife, a son, a real family. What does Warren have? Absolutely nothing.'
All of this was true, but I had never considered its corrosive effects before, the terrible possibility that all the years of feeling small and unsuccessful, of living in a tiny rented house alone, might have corrupted some aspect of my brother's heart, poisoned him against me so that he secretly reveled in my current troubles, perhaps even sought to deepen them.
'Do you really think Warren would deliberately try to implicate Keith in this thing with Amy?'
'Yes,' Meredith answered bluntly.
The sheer force of her reply, the world of bitter envy it unearthed, was more than I could accept. 'I just can't believe he'd do something like that, Meredith,' I said.
Her gaze was withering, and beneath it I felt like a hopelessly clueless child. 'You don't have any idea how malicious people really are, Eric,' she said. 'And I don't think you ever will.'
There was no way to answer such a charge, and so I merely shook my head, walked into the living room, and turned on the television. The local news was just beginning. The lead story, once again, was about Amy's disappearance.
There'd been no developments in the case, the reporter said, but the police were busy following a few 'promising leads.'
I glanced back to where Meredith stood at the entrance of the kitchen, her eyes fixed on the television screen.
'Promising leads,' she repeated sarcastically. 'I wonder how many of them came from dear old Warren.'
I turned back to the television. By then, the report had gone live, with Peak and Kraus before a bristling array of microphones, Peak out front, Kraus standing stiffly behind him. For the next few seconds, Peak brought reporters up to date. The police, he said, were following a number of leads. A hotline had been established, and some of the information gained from callers appeared 'credible.'
'Credible,' Meredith scoffed as she sat down on the sofa beside me. 'Not if it came from Warren.'
'Please, Meredith,' I said quietly.
Peak ended his update by saying that the Giordanos were being fully cooperative, that they absolutely were not suspects in Amy disappearance, and that they'd recently turned over the family computer so police could see if Amy might have been contacted by 'suspicious individuals' on the Internet.
With that, Peak turned, and started to go back into police headquarters.
'Do you have a suspect?'
The question had come from the crowd of reporters gathered on the steps of the building, but when he turned, Peak appeared to recognize the reporter who'd asked it.
'We're looking at several people,' Peak said.
'But do you have one suspect in particular?' the reporter asked.
Peak glanced at Kraus, then faced the camera. 'Were building a case,' he said. 'That's all I can tell you.'
Then, almost like an apparition, he was gone.
'Building a case,' Meredith said. She looked at me worriedly. 'Against Keith.'
'We don't know that,' I told her.
She looked at me again in the way she'd looked at me when I'd denied my brother's ill intent. 'Yes, we do,' she said.
We had dinner an hour later, Keith slumped mutely in his chair, toying with his food, barely eating it. Watching him, I could not imagine Peak and Kraus building a case against him. In some sense, he appeared too pale and skinny to be considered a threat to anyone. But more than his physical weakness argued against his having done anything bad to Amy Giordano. Brooding silently at the table, aimlessly picking at his food, he gave off a sense of being innocuous, far too listless and desultory to have summoned the sheer malicious impetus required to harm a child. My son could not have hurt Amy Giordano, I decided, because he lacked the galvanizing energy necessary for such an act. He was too drab and ineffectual to be a child killer.
And so I forced myself to believe that the phantom suspect against whom the police were building their case had to be thick and burly, with a muscular body and short powerful legs. I wanted him to be a drifter or some visitor from another town. But barring that, I would have settled for anyone, as long as it wasn't Keith.
'How's school?' I asked, then regretted it since it was
'It's okay,' he answered dully.
'Just okay?'
He plucked a single green bean from the rest of them as if he were playing a solitary game of pick-up-sticks. 'It's okay,' he repeated, his tone now somewhat sharp, like a felon impatient with interrogation.
'Is there anything we need to know about?' Meredith asked in her usual no-nonsense tone.
'Like what?' Keith asked.
'Like about Amy,' Meredith answered. 'Are you having any trouble over Amy?'
He drew another green bean from the stack, peered at it as if he thought it might suddenly begin to squirm, then let it drop back onto his plate. 'Nobody says anything about it.'
'At some point they might,' Meredith said.
Keith picked lazily at a red pimple, but said nothing.
'Keith?' Meredith said insistently. 'Did you hear me?'
His hand dropped abruptly into his lap. 'Yeah, okay, Mom.'
He remained silent for the rest of the meal, then excused himself with an exaggerated show of formality and returned to his room.
Meredith and I cleared the table, put the dishes in the dishwasher, and finally returned to the living room where we watched television for a time. Neither of us had much to say, nor did either appear uncomfortable in the silence. There was, after all, nothing to talk about but Keith, and that was a subject that could not be raised without heightening the general level of anxiety, and so we simply avoided it.
A few hours later we went to bed. Meredith read for a while. I knew she was trying to lose herself in a book. That had always been one of her ways of coping. During her mother's illness, she'd read continually, but never more than at her mother's hospital bedside, where she'd devoured book after book in a frantic effort to keep her mother's approaching death at bay. Now she was using the same tactic to keep from dwelling on the grim possibility that our son might be in very deep trouble.
Before she finally turned out the light, it was clear that this time the tactic had failed.
'Do you think Keith should see a counselor?' she asked. She turned toward me and propped her head up in an open palm. 'There's one at the college. Stuart Rodenberry. Kids come to him with their troubles. People say he's very good.'
