Among the Missing (5 page)

And Tobe was gone more than usual now, working late at night, preparing for Wendell’s appeal. They had hired a new lawyer, one more experienced as a defense attorney, but there were still things Tobe needed to do. He would come home very late at night.

She hoped that he wasn’t drinking too much, but she suspected that he was. She had been trying not to pay attention, but she smelled alcohol on him nearly every night he came to bed; she saw the progress of the cases of beer in the refrigerator, the way they were depleted and replaced.

What’s wrong? she thought, waiting up for him, waiting for the sound of his car in the driveway. She was alone in the kitchen, making herself some tea, thinking, when Wild Bill spoke from his cage.

“Stupid cunt,” he said.

She turned abruptly. She was certain that she heard the words distinctly. She froze, with the kettle in her hand over the burner, and when she faced him, Wild Bill cocked his head at her, fixing her with his bird eye. The skin around his eye was bare, whitish wrinkled flesh, which reminded her of an old alcoholic. He watched her warily, clicking his claws along the perch. Then he said, thoughtfully: “Hello, sexy.”

She reached into the cage and extracted Wild Bill’s food bowl. He was watching, and she very slowly walked to the trash can. “Bad bird!” she said. She dumped it out—the peanuts and pumpkin seeds and bits of fruit that she’d prepared for him. “Bad!” she said again. Then she put the empty food bowl back into the cage. “There,” she said. “See how you like that!” And she closed the cage with a snap, aware that she was trembly with anger.

It was Wendell’s voice, of course: his words. The bird was merely mimicking, merely a conduit. It was Wendell, she thought, and she thought of telling Tobe; she was wide awake when he finally came home and slid into bed, her heart was beating heavily, but she just lay there as he slipped under the covers—he smelled of liquor, whiskey, she thought. He was already asleep when she touched him.

Maybe it didn’t mean anything: Filthy words didn’t make
someone a rapist. After all, Tobe was a lawyer, and he believed that Wendell was innocent. Carlin was a policeman, and he believed it, too. Were they so blinded by love that they couldn’t see it?

Or was she jumping to conclusions? She had always felt that there was something immoral about criticizing someone’s relatives, dividing them from those they loved, asking them to take sides. Such a person was her father’s second wife, a woman of infinite nastiness and suspicion, full of mean, insidious comments about her stepdaughters. Cheryl had seen the evil in this, the damage it could do.

And so she had chosen to say nothing as Wendell’s possessions were loaded into her house, she had chosen to say nothing about the macaw, even as she grew to loathe it. How would it look, demanding that they get rid of Wendell’s beloved pet, suggesting that the bird somehow implied Wendell’s guilt? No one else seemed to have heard Wild Bill’s foul sayings, and perhaps the bird wouldn’t repeat them, now that she’d punished him. She had a sense of her own tenuous standing as a member of the family. They were still cautious around her. In a few brief moves, she could easily isolate herself—the bitchy city girl, the snob, the troublemaker. Even if Tobe didn’t think this, his family would. She could imagine the way Karissa would use such stuff against her, that perky martyr smile as Wild Bill was remanded to her care, even though she was allergic to bird feathers. “I’ll make do,” Karissa would say. And she would cough, pointedly, daintily, into her hand.

Cheryl could see clearly where that road would lead.

•   •   •

But she couldn’t help thinking about it. Wendell was everywhere—not only in the sayings of Wild Bill, but in the notes and papers Tobe brought home with him from the office, in the broody melancholy he trailed behind him when he was up late, pacing the house. In the various duties she found herself performing for Wendell’s sake—reviewing her own brief testimony at the trial, at Tobe’s request; going with Tobe to the new lawyer’s office on a Saturday morning.

Sitting in the office, she didn’t know why she had agreed to come along. The lawyer whom Tobe had chosen to replace him, Jerry Wasserman, was a transplanted Chicagoan who seemed even more out of place in Cheyenne than she did, despite the fact that he wore cowboy boots. He had a lilting, iambic voice, and was ready to discuss detail after detail. She frowned, touching her finger to her mouth as Tobe and his brothers leaned forward intently. What was she doing here?

“I’m extremely pleased by the way the appeal is shaping up,” Wasserman was saying. “It’s clear that the case had some setbacks, but to my mind the evidence is stronger than ever in your brother’s favor.” He cleared his throat. “I’d like to outline three main points for the judge, which I think will be quite—quite!—convincing.”

Cheryl looked over at Karissa, who was sitting very upright in her chair, with her hands folded and her eyes wide, as if she were about to be interrogated. Carlin shifted irritably.

“I know we’ve talked about this before,” Carlin said gruffly. “But I still can’t get over the fact that the jury that convicted him was seventy-five percent female. I mean, that’s something we ought to be talking about. It’s just—it’s just wrong, that’s my feeling.”

“Well,” said Wasserman. “The jury selection is something
we need to discuss, but it’s not at the forefront of the agenda. We have to get through the appeals process first.” He shuffled some papers in front of him, guiltily. “Let me turn your attention to the first page of the document I’ve given you, here …”

How dull he was, Cheryl thought, looking down at the first page, which had been photocopied from a law book. How could he possibly be more passionate or convincing than Tobe had been, in the first trial? Tobe had been so fervent, she thought, so certain of Wendell’s innocence. But perhaps that had not been the best thing.

Maybe his confidence had worked against him. She remembered the way he had declared himself to the jury, folding his arms. “This is a case without evidence,” he said. “Without
any
physical evidence!” And he had said it with such certainty that it had seemed true. The crime scenes had yielded nothing that had connected Wendell to the crimes; the attacker, whoever he was, had been extremely careful. There was no hair, no blood, no semen. The victims had been made to kneel in the bathtub as the attacker forced them to perform various degrading acts, and afterwards, the attacker had left them there, turning the shower on them as he dusted and vacuumed. There wasn’t a single fingerprint.

But there was this: In three of the cases, witnesses claimed to have seen Wendell’s pickup parked on a street nearby. A man matching Wendell’s description had been seen hurrying down the fire escape behind the apartment of one of the women.

And this: The final victim, Jenni Martinez, had been a former girlfriend of Wendell’s. Once, after they’d broken up, Wendell got drunk and sang loud love songs beneath her window. He’d left peaceably when the police came.

“Peaceably!” Tobe noted. These were the actions of a romantic, not a rapist! Besides which, Wendell had an alibi for the night the Martinez girl was raped. He’d been at Cheryl and Tobe’s house, playing cards, and he’d slept that night on their sofa. In order for him to have committed the crime, he’d have had to feign sleep, sneaking out from under the bedding Cheryl had arranged for him on the living room sofa, without being noticed. Then, he’d have had to sneak back into the house, returning in the early morning so that Cheryl would discover him when she woke up. She had testified: He was on the couch, the blankets twisted around him, snoring softly. She was easily awakened; she felt sure that she would have heard if he’d left in the middle of the night. It was, Tobe told the jury, “a highly improbable, almost fantastical version of events.”

But the jury had believed Jenni Martinez, who was certain that she’d recognized his voice. His laugh. They had believed the prosecutor, who had pointed out that there had been no more such rapes since Jenni Martinez had identified Wendell. After Wendell’s arrest, the string of assaults had ceased.

After a moment, she tried to tune back in to what Wasserman was saying. She ought to be paying attention. For Tobe’s sake, she ought to be trying to examine the possibility of Wendell’s innocence more rationally, without bias. She read the words carefully, one by one. But what she saw was Wendell’s face, the way he’d looked as one of the assaulted women had testified: bored, passive, even vaguely amused as the woman had tremulously, with great emotion, recounted her tale.

Whatever
.

•   •   •

That night, Tobe was once again in his study, working as she sat on the couch, watching television. He came out a couple of times, waving to her vaguely as he walked through the living room, toward the kitchen, toward the refrigerator, another beer.

She waited up. But when he finally came into the bedroom he seemed annoyed that she was still awake, and he took off his clothes silently, turning off the light before he slipped into bed, a distance emanating from him. She pressed her breasts against his back, her arms wrapped around him, but he was still. She rubbed her feet against his, and he let out a slow, disinterested breath.

“What are you thinking about,” she said, and he shifted his legs.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Thinking about Wendell again, I suppose.”

“It will be all right,” she said, though she felt the weight of her own dishonesty settle over her. “I know it.” She smoothed her hand across his hair.

“You’re not a lawyer,” he said. “You don’t know how badly flawed the legal system is.”

“Well,” she said.

“It’s a joke,” he said. “I mean, the prosecutor didn’t prove his case. All he did was parade a bunch of victims across the stage. How can you compete with that? It’s all drama.”

“Yes,” she said. She kissed the back of his neck, but he was already drifting into sleep, or pretending to. He shrugged against her arms, nuzzling into his pillow.

•   •   •

One of the things that had always secretly bothered her about Wendell was his resemblance to Tobe. He was a younger, and—yes, admit it—sexier version of her husband. The shoulders, the legs; the small hardness of her husband’s mouth that she had loved was even better on Wendell’s face, that sly shift of his gray eyes, which Wendell knew was attractive, while Tobe did not. Tobe tended toward pudginess, while Wendell was lean, while Wendell worked on mail-order machines, which brought out the muscles of his stomach. In the summer, coming in from playing basketball with Tobe in the driveway, Wendell had almost stunned her, and she recalled her high school infatuation with a certain athletic shape of the male body. She watched as he bent his naked torso toward the open refrigerator, looking for something to drink. He looked up at her, his eyes slanted cautiously as he lifted a can of grape soda to his lips.

Stupid cunt
. It gave her a nasty jolt, because that was what his look said—a brief but steady look that was so full of leering scorn that her shy fascination with his muscled stomach seemed suddenly dirty, even dangerous. She had felt herself blushing with embarrassment.

She had not said anything to Tobe about it. There was nothing to say, really. Wendell hadn’t
done
anything, and in fact he was always polite when he spoke to her, even when he was confronting her with his “beliefs.” He would go into some tirade about some issue that he held dear—gun control, or affirmative action, et cetera, and then he would turn to Cheryl, smiling: “Of course, I suppose there are differences of opinion,” he would say, almost courtly. She remembered him looking at her once, during one of these discussions, his eyes glinting with
some withheld emotion. “I wish I could think like you, Cheryl,” he said. “I guess I’m just a cynic, but I don’t believe that people are good, deep down. Maybe that’s my problem.” Later, Tobe told her not to take him seriously. “He’s young,” Tobe would say, rolling his eyes. “I don’t know where he comes up with this asinine stuff. But he’s got a good heart, you know.”

Could she disagree? Could she say, no, he’s actually a deeply hateful person?

But the feeling didn’t go away. Instead, as the first snow came in early November, she was aware of a growing unease. With the end of daylight savings time, she woke in darkness, and when she went downstairs to make coffee, she could sense Wild Bill’s silent, malevolent presence. He ruffled his feathers when she turned on the light, cocking his head so he could stare at her with the dark bead of his eye. By that time, she and Tobe had visited Wendell in prison, once, and Tobe was making regular, weekly phone calls to him. On Jodie’s birthday, Wendell had sent a handmade card, a striking, pen-and-ink drawing of a spotted leopard in a jungle, the twisted vines above him spelling out, “Happy Birthday, sweet Jodie.” It was, she had to admit, quite beautiful, and must have taken him a long time. But why a leopard? Why was it crouched as if hunting, its tail a snakelike whip? There was a moment, going through the mail, when she’d seen Jodie’s name written in Wendell’s careful, spiked cursive, that she’d almost thrown the letter away.

There was another small incident that week. They were sitting at dinner. She had just finished serving up a casserole she’d
made, which reminded her, nostalgically, of her childhood. She set Evan’s plate in front of him and he sniffed at the steam that rose from it.

“Mmmm,” he said. “Smells like pussy.”

“Evan!” she said. Her heart shrank, and she flinched again when she glanced at Tobe, who had his hand over his mouth, trying to hold back a laugh. He widened his eyes at her.

“Evan, where on earth did you hear something like that?” she said, and she knew that her voice was too confrontational, because the boy looked around guiltily.

“That’s what Wild Bill says when I give him his food,” Evan said. He shrugged, uncertainly. “Wild Bill says it.”

“Well, son,” Tobe said. He had recovered his composure, and gave Evan a serious face. “That’s not a nice thing to say. That’s not something that Wild Bill should be saying, either.”

“Why not?” Evan said. And Cheryl had opened her mouth to speak, but then thought better of it. She would do more damage than good, she thought.