Red Leaves

he stood before me in the doorway.

'Hey, Bro,' he said softly. He lifted his hand, his finger tightening around a can of beer. 'Want a drink?'

'No, thanks.'

'What's up?'

'I need to talk to you, Warren.'

A gray veil fell over his eyes. 'The last time you had to talk to me, I didn't like it very much.'

'It's more serious this time,' I said grimly. 'Something the police found out. Something about you.'

I wanted the look in his eyes to be genuine surprise, because if I saw surprise, then I knew I would force myself to entertain the hope that it could all be explained, every detail of what Leo had told me as I stood, dumbstruck in his office. I wanted Warren to explain away the fact that school officials had reported him for staring out his window at the playground, to explain the pictures on Keith's computer, all of it miraculously a mistake. But I didn't see surprise. I saw resignation, a little boy who'd been caught at something disreputable. There was a hint of embarrassment, too, so that I thought he might actually come out with it without my asking, simply tell me to my face that he knew what I was talking about, and that, yes, it was true.

But instead of an admission, he simply shrugged, stepped back into the foyer of his house and said, 'Okay, come in.'

I followed him into the living room, where he switched on a standing lamp, plopped down on a cracked Naugahyde sofa, and took a quick sip of beer. 'Sure you don't want one?' he asked.

'I'm sure.'

He sucked in a long breath. 'Okay, shoot,' he said. 'What's on your mind, Bro?'

I sat down in the wooden rocker a few feet away, a relic from the grand house, probably an antique, but worthless now because Warren had taken no care to protect it from scrapes and cuts. 'They found pictures on Keith's computer,' I began.

Warren lowered his gaze, all the proof I needed that he'd done exactly what I suspected.

'They were of little girls,' I added. 'Naked little girls.'

Warren took a long pull on the beer, but held his gaze on the floor.

'Keith says he never downloaded any pictures like that,' I added. 'He absolutely denies that they're his.'

Warren nodded heavily. 'Okay.'

'The police checked on when the pictures were downloaded,' I said though I had no real proof of this. To this bluff, I added another. 'You can do that, you know. You can find out.' I watched Warren for any sign that he might come clean. 'The exact dates. Literally, to the minute.'

Warren shifted uneasily in his chair, but otherwise gave no hint that he could see where I was going with all this, how relentlessly I was closing in.

'They were all downloaded a year ago, Warren,' I said. I could not be sure of this, but in my dark world, a lie designed to expose other, darker lies seemed like a ray of light. 'Last September.' I looked at him pointedly. 'You remember where you were last September?'

Warren nodded.

'You were staying in Keith's room,' I told him. 'You were using Keith's computer. No one else was using it.'

Warren lowered the beer to his lap, cradling it between his large flabby thighs. 'Yeah,' he said softly.

I leaned back in the chair and waited.

'Yeah, okay,' Warren said.

Again, I waited, but Warren simply took another sip of beer, then glanced over at me silently.

'Warren,' I said pointedly. 'Those pictures are yours.'

One fat leg began to rock tensely.

'Little girls,' I said. 'Naked little girls.'

The steady rock grew more intense and agitated.

'And then I learned that some people at the school have complained about you,' I said. 'In the past, I mean. Complained about you watching the kids. Somebody reported that on the police hotline.'

'I just look out my window, that's all,' he said. The leg rocked violently for a few more seconds then stopped abruptly. 'I wouldn't hurt a little girl.' He looked lost, but more than that, inwardly disheveled, a crumpled soul, but for all I knew this was no more than a ruse.

'Then why do you watch them, Warren?' I demanded. 'And why did you download those pictures?'

Warren shrugged. 'They were pretty, the pictures.'

A wave of exasperation swept over me. 'They were little girls, for Christ's sake!' I cried. 'Eight years old. And they were naked!'

'They didn't have to be naked,' Warren said weakly, his voice little more than a whine.

'What are you talking about?' I barked. 'They were naked, Warren.'

'But they didn't have to be, that's what I'm saying.' He looked at me like a small child desperately trying to explain himself. 'I mean, I don't ... need them to be naked.'

'Need?' I glared at him. 'What exactly do you need, Warren?'

'I just like to ... look at them,' he whimpered.

'Little girls?' I fired at him. 'You need to look at little girls?' I bolted forward, my eyes like lasers. 'Warren, did you know those pictures were on Keith's computer?'

He shook his head violently. 'I didn't. I swear I didn't. I tried to—'

'Erase them, yes, I know.' I interrupted. 'The cops know it, too.'

'I can't help it, Eric.'

'Can't help what?'

'You know, looking ... at...' He shook his head. 'It's sick. I know it's sick, but I can't help it.' He began to cry. 'They're just so ... adorable.'

Adorable.

The word leaped in me like a flame. 'Adorable,' I repeated, all but shaking with the vision my mind instantly created, Warren coming out of Jenny's room that final morning, his face wreathed in what I had taken for exhaustion, but now saw as a scalding shame. 'You always said that about'—I saw my sister as she lay in her bed later that same afternoon, her eyes darting about frantically. She'd seemed desperate to tell me something, her lips fluttering in my ear, until suddenly they'd stopped and I'd glanced back toward the door and seen Warren standing there, head bowed, his hands deep in his pockets—'about Jenny.'

He saw it in my eyes, the searing accusation that had suddenly seized me.

'Eric,' he whispered. He seemed to come out of his stupor, all the day's accumulated drink abruptly draining from him. It was as if he'd been dipped in icy water, then jerked out of it to face a reality colder still. 'You think...?'

I wanted to howl no! no!, deny in the most passionate and conclusive terms that I had the slightest suspicion that he had ever harmed Jenny, that even his most desperate urge would have stopped at her bed, her helplessness, that as she lay dying, pale and wracked with suffering, he could not possibly have found her ... adorable.

But the words wouldn't come, and so I only faced him silently.

He stared at me a moment in frozen disbelief. Then he shook his head wearily and pointed to the door. 'I'm done with you, Eric,' he said. His wet eyes went dry as a desert waste. 'I'm done with everything.' He pointed to the door. 'Go,' he said, 'just go.'

I knew nothing else to do. And so I rose, walked silently out of the room and back to my car. As I pulled out, I saw the light flash upstairs in Warren's bachelor lair and imagined him there alone, sunk in this new despair, wifeless, childless, motherless, fatherless, and now without a brother, too.

I drove back home in a kind of daze, Meredith, Warren, Keith—all of them swirling around in my head like bits of paper in foaming water. I tried to position myself somehow, get a grip on what I knew and didn't know, the dreadful suspicions I could neither avoid nor address, since they were made of smoke and fog.

I pulled in the driveway a few minutes later, got out of the car, swept past the branches of the Japanese maple and headed on down the walkway to the front door.

Through the window, I saw Meredith clutching the phone. She seemed very nearly frantic, her eyes wide in an unmistakable look of alarm. I thought of the other time I'd come upon her abruptly, the way she'd blurted, 'Talk