Raveling (54 page)

Her mind blank, Katherine walked back to the car which she had parked in the junior high lot. Inside it, she dialed the number
for the police.

“Detective Vettorello,” she said.

The receptionist asked her to wait.

“Vettorello.”

“Detective Vettorello,” Katherine said. “This is Katherine DeQuincey-Joy.”

“I was going to call you,” he said. “The file just arrived from upstate. We’re ready to go. I talked to Cleveland, too. I’m
glad he could help you. I wasn’t sure if—”

Katherine broke in, “I need your help in an entirely different way right now, at this moment—”

“What can I do for you?”

“I discovered a, a dead body,” she stammered, “and I didn’t want to just call the police, I mean, I wanted to call you—”

“Where is it?” Vettorello’s voice contained within it an edge of calm, a tone belying a nearly untraceable undercurrent of
thrill.

She said, “It’s in a concrete tunnel under Sky Highway. It’s just past Exit nine.”

Vettorello shouted something across the office. “Stay on the phone,” he told her. “Where are you right now?”

“In my car,” Katherine told him. “I have a car phone, but—”

“Did you move the body? Did you touch it at all?”

“No,” she said, “I don’t think so.” Did she touch it? She couldn’t remember.

“Good. Now I want you to tell me exactly how you found it.” He was laughing a bit. “What the hell were you doing in the concrete
tube beneath Sky Highway?”

“It’s complicated,” Katherine said. She looked at her hand. She had just torn a large piece of skin off her ring finger and
a globule of blood was forming. She closed her eyes to the delicious feeling and placed her finger in her mouth.

“I’m listening.”

“The other day I was out walking around in the woods, in the woods where they found my client, Pilot Airie, just because I—well,
because I was trying to get inside his experience, you know, and, and I met these girls, just kids from the junior high.”
She sat in her sapphire-blue VW Rabbit with the black car phone to her ear and watched a boy, ten or eleven years old, walking
across the junior high football field into the woods. It could have been me twenty years ago. It
could have been Eric, too. “And I asked them if they knew about Pilot, if they had seen him, and they had heard about a man
found raving out there and they also told me about the Tunnel Man.”

“The Tunnel Man.”

“I was curious,” Katherine said. “So I went into the tunnel. And there was this man, an alcoholic, hopelessly deranged.” She
was exaggerating, she knew. “No,” she said. “He wasn’t so deranged, I guess. Just a drunk.”

“Okay.”

“He said he knew Pilot, though. I think he might have helped him. I think they shared, shared something, something probably
meaningless, but nevertheless—”

“Get to the part about him being dead,” Vettorello said.

“He told me he knew where Pilot put the evidence.”

“The shoe?”

“And the knife.”

“Excellent. Go on.”

“He told me to come back in three days, and that was—”

“Today, and you came back to find him and—”

“And it looks like he drank too much and his head fell into the water,” Katherine said. “And he drowned. That’s what it—”

“We’ll figure out that part,” Vettorello said. He was smiling over the phone. She could hear him. “I’ll come out there, too,”
he said now. “There’s a team on its way to you.”

“I’m in the parking lot at the junior high,” Katherine said. “Should I return to the tunnel?”

“No, stay where you are,” Vettorello said. “Stay right where you are.”

Katherine was smiling, too. It was stupid that she was smiling about this, she thought, a dead man—even terrible. But she
couldn’t help it. A man was dead, and she was smiling,
a professional counseling psychologist, and she couldn’t stop herself.

Instead of taking me back to the airport, Patricia gave me the keys to our father’s car, the rugged four-wheel drive he had
picked me up in just a few weeks ago, the day I arrived. She didn’t want to see it, she said, sitting in the driveway. So
I drove it all the way back to New York in one steady blast of memories, stopping only for gas and Pepsi. I remembered everything—my
whole life. I remembered Fiona, my little sister, and pulling her cool limbs in full cinematic motion from the wet pool behind
the house, beads of glimmering water flying off her hair. I remember her smiling as I pulled her out, the bright little-girl
giggle. This was a fully formed human being I remembered, not just a still photograph, an image from a catalog. I remembered
Eric stalking me, the threats of death, the anticipation of violence. On each side of the highway that leads up the east coast
of the United States, the thirteen colonies, I remembered my life. I remembered that he never carried them through, my brother,
that his threats were just threats, that his violence was largely verbal.

Perhaps our father had remembered his life this way, too, his hands on the controls of the seaplane. Thinking of this, I wanted
to turn the car off the highway, pedal pressed hard for the trees, my teeth clenched and my eyes closed. I didn’t, though.
That’s what he did. I listened to the radio instead, finding country music stations, the kind my father liked, the guitars
all twangy and sharp, forcing myself to listen with his ears. I watched the sleek black sports cars of bachelors materializing
in front of me. I crept by the old people in luxury sedans and college students in economy models returning home for the holidays.
I examined the treeline, now moving
by at sixty-five miles an hour, the cruise control set for easy driving, and saw how meaningless it had become, just a blur.
When I got back, I thought, I would locate the evidence, I would have the police test it for fingerprints, blood, DNA, and
then I would know. After twenty years, I wondered, would blood and fingerprints and DNA still exist? Would anything be detectable?
Maybe not. It didn’t matter. If I learned nothing, then nothing had changed. If I learned that it was my father who, in a
fit of alcoholic rage, killed my little sister, then I would know everything I needed to know.

So I arrived at Hannah’s house feeling tired but not numb, feeling sad but not morose—

This would be over soon, I was thinking.

—feeling sane.

It was late afternoon, but her light was on upstairs. She knew I was coming, and I knew she would wait for me. As soon as
I opened the door, in fact, I heard her voice. “Pilot?”

“I’m coming,” I called out. “I have to unload the car.” I brought my luggage into the house, and also the boxes of photographs
Patricia had given me, pictures our father had taken from the seaplane, the faraway terrain of Florida he loved so much, the
little island and white waves off the coast. When I was finished, I walked into her room. “I’m here,” I said finally. “Here
I am.”

She sat in front of the window, an old woman in a chair, the radio playing softly, the air stuffy as the inside of a closet.
“Pilot,” she said. She’d been crying, of course. She reached out for me and I took her hand. “I’m so glad you’re back.”

“How are you?” I had asked her this every day on the telephone, but that was a different how-are-you, a telephone how-are-you.
This one was real.

“I’m blind as a bat,” she said, a slight laugh in her voice.

“But you can see—”

“I can see your sister,” she said. “During the day, and then sometimes even at night she comes and sits beside me.” She was
laughing at herself, saying this. She knew she’d been hallucinating. She knew she was going crazy. “I’m afraid if I tell anyone,”
she said, “they’ll give me powerful medication of some kind and Fiona will disappear and I’ll have to go years without seeing
her again, and I couldn’t—”

“It’s just your memories, Mom.”

“I know, but they’ve been reborn.”

“You can see Fiona anytime you want. Just think of her, and then you can—”

“No,” she said. “Not like this.”

“Is she happy?” I asked.

“She’s a girl. She’s as happy as girls ever are.”

“I have to ask you something,” I said.

“Pilot, please—”

“I have to,” I said.

“—I don’t want to—”

“It’s very important.”

She knew what it was.

“—talk about it now.”

“Did you ever think—”

“No.”

“—that Dad had anything to do with it—”

“Your father?”

“—with Fiona’s disappearance?”

Hannah had been holding my hand. She let go of it now. “Is that what you think?” she said. “Have you given up blaming your
brother? And what about Katherine DeQuincey-Joy?”

“Did you ever suspect him?”

Hannah turned her face to the window, eyes open and unfocused. “Your father knew you were opening it all up again, knew you
found the, the
things,
” she said now, “didn’t he?”

“I told him.”

“He either didn’t want to learn the answer,” Hannah said, “as I don’t. Or he already knew the answer, and didn’t want to be
around when you learned what it is.”

“I know.” I walked to the bed and sat down. “I know those are the options. I’m just not sure what they mean.”

“Are you happy with either of them?”

“This is my life.”

“What about your sanity?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I keep doubting that. I doubt it every minute.”

“I have gone blind,” my mother said. “And now my husband is lost, too.”

“I’m going to give the shoe to the police.”

“Pilot,” she said.

“Mom, I have to.”

“Pilot.”

“And the knife.”

“Pilot—” But she didn’t finish. Her hand came to her mouth, and it seemed like she couldn’t say anything.

Shivering, Katherine waited in her car, her fingertips raw and scabby in her mouth. When the police arrived, she opened her
door and stepped out. She had managed to stop herself from smiling, at least—smiling about a dead man. The cops seemed unhurried,
serious but relaxed, doing something they did every day. Katherine introduced herself, hand extended, like a guest at a cocktail
party, then led the two young police officers down the path into the woods she had taken just a half hour earlier.

Inside the tunnel, one of the cops pulled the Tunnel Man out of the water, propping his head against the curvature of
the concrete wall. “Old Billy finally bit the big one,” he said with a grim smile.

“Billy,” Katherine repeated.

“He’s been around for years,” the cop said sadly. The young policeman had introduced himself a moment ago, but now she couldn’t
remember his name. He had a fine mustache, dark skin, and large, feminine eyes.

“You knew him?”

“He used to live in the dump site behind the Grand Union a few years ago,” the cop said, nodding toward the highway. “Then
he moved into the tunnel.”

“Miss DeQuincey-Joy?” It was someone behind her.

“Detective Vettorello?”

He stretched out his hand from the backlit darkness. “How are you?”

“I’m, I don’t know,” she said. “This is pretty weird.”

Vettorello wore a blue windbreaker over a yellow dress shirt and gray polyester pants. He wore big black rain boots and sloshed
through the water in the tunnel. “You’ll have to fill out a report about finding the body out here, and, and I’ll help you
with that, so don’t worry.” He was smiling, too. “It shouldn’t take too long.”

“Thank you.”

“Why don’t you come out to my car for a moment?”

As Katherine followed, her feet got wet again, soaking her socks with the filthy water. She couldn’t avoid it. The other night
she’d thrown her things into the hamper and the chemical smell simply wouldn’t go away.

Vettorello opened the door of an old red, boxy Volvo. “Get inside,” he said. “Go ahead.”

Katherine got into the passenger seat and watched Vettorello walk around to the driver’s side. He got in, too, and shut the
door hard. He turned to her now, saying almost teasingly, “So can you tell me why the hell you were out here, again?”

Katherine pushed her hair away from her face. “I know it’s weird,” she said, “but, but the evidence I told you about, what
I’m looking for—”