Raveling (56 page)

Sometimes I try to gather these memories all together in my head in an attempt to remember her whole. But something always
slips away, and I’m left with an incomplete picture. I would do anything to know where the photographs of her are, where Hannah
put them, just so I could see her again.

Exhausted from the long drive into the city—why had she moved so far away? what was she thinking?—Katherine knocked on the
door of the fourth-floor West Village walk-up and waited with her arms folded, fingers hiding beneath her jacket. From inside
the apartment came the sounds of someone turning the television off and running to the door. “
Just a minute
.” It was the same voice from the telephone, a man’s voice, but feminine. It was Bryce Telliman’s voice. “
Just a minute,
” he said again. Katherine heard the door unlatching, the familiar New York sound of lock after lock after lock disconnecting.
“Are you Katherine?” It was open now.

She put her hand out. “Nice to meet you, Bryce. Thank you very much for letting me come.”

He was as thin as the dying, with long, wavy gray hair and gray three-day stubble. “Well,” he said, “it’s all right.” His
skin hung off his neck like loose fabric.

“It’s probably not easy for you to talk about this stuff, anyway.” She stepped into his little apartment, noticing the dozens
of oil paintings hung on every wall, small abstract canvases made of thick, colorful smears of paint. Katherine looked around
smiling.

“My paintings,” Telliman said. Then he motioned to a chair. “Please, sit. Would you like something? Water? Tea? I have beer.”

“I’m fine,” she said. “Thank you.” She took the canvas director’s chair nearest the door. It was covered with flecks of paint.

Telliman took the one opposite. He sat for a moment, just looking at her, then shifted nervously. “Where do we begin?”

Katherine took a deep breath. “Like I said on the phone, I’m a psychologist, and Pilot Airie is my patient. He’s asked me
to help him rediscover what happened to his little sister twenty years ago.” Katherine hadn’t taken her jacket off, and she
still hid her fingers in the folds of her sleeves. “And I know, believe me, I know that must have been a very painful experience
for you, and I don’t mean to dig up old injuries but—”

“I understand,” the man said. “You want to know what I remember about that night.”

“Yes.”

“You want to know if I did it.”

Katherine shook her head. “Pilot doesn’t think you did it. Neither do I, if it means anything.”

“He doesn’t?”

“He never thought it was you.”

“But he was just a kid.”

Katherine shrugged.

“And you?” Telliman said.

“It’s all very difficult to understand.” Katherine heard the sound of steam hissing from a radiator in the next apartment.
It made her miss the city. “I don’t have a theory or an opinion that I can really talk about yet.” She leaned forward a bit,
asking, “But why were you even at the Airie house that night?”

“I was a physical therapist in those days—a friend of a friend of a friend. It was the seventies. People just went to parties.
It didn’t matter.”

Katherine nodded. “Was it a good one? I mean, apart from the, from what happened?”

“There was a great deal of drinking, I remember. I remember doing a lot of that myself.”

“You played with her.”

“They seemed like nice kids.”

“Yes,” Katherine said, “they probably were.”

“I’ve always loved children. I wanted to have them, myself, wanted to be a father, you know.”

“But—”

He sounded disappointed. “But I’m gay, and I could never have that kind of relationship with a woman, so I’ve had to enjoy
children here and there. I’ve been more careful, though, since—”

Katherine nodded. She didn’t know what to say.

“The little girl, Fiona, she was outgoing. She sat on my lap and talked, you know the way kids do, telling me her little secrets.”

Katherine thought she detected a southern accent in his voice, but she wasn’t sure. “Secrets?”

“She had a sip of someone’s drink. She saw someone kissing someone. And the mother was okay with all of this.” Telliman’s
eyes were downcast. “I mean, she saw me and the little girl and made a joke about Fiona being a flirt. But the father—”

“James Airie.”

“James.” Telliman shook his head. “He kept telling her to leave me alone, you know, and by the tone of his voice I could tell
that he meant for
me
to leave
her
alone.”

“Did you?”

“She went upstairs at some point.”

“And what happened next?”

“Just drinking. And I started to feel like I’d been drinking too much, you know, way too much.” It was the exact language
from the police report. This had the sound, to Katherine,
of something rehearsed, of something Telliman had said a million times. His voice was becoming monotonous, like he was singing
a funeral dirge. “So I walked around to the other side of the pool,” he continued. “Fiona wasn’t in there anymore, you know,
I don’t know where she was, and I walked down to the trees they had in their backyard.”

“You went into the trees.”

“I thought I was going to throw up.”

“Why not use the bathroom?”

He sighed. “I was embarrassed. I thought it would be more private in the woods. Besides, when you’re drunk—”

“Okay, and that’s why your footprints were out there.”

“Obviously.”

“And was that it?”

The old man paused for a moment, his eyes glassy and wide. “There was someone else out there, too.”

“James Airie?”

“No.” He smiled a bit. “It was a kid, a teenager.”

“Did you ever tell the police about that?”

“I told my lawyer. I don’t remember if we—”

“What was the kid doing?”

“He was just sort of hiding, I think. Lurking around.” Telliman rolled his eyes. “Anyway, I walked back out of the woods,
and I think—I mean, I know people saw me do that. And I guess the little girl had either disappeared by then or something,
because two days later I had the police at my door.”

“Jerry Cleveland.”

“What a moron.”

“He said you thought the father did it.”

Telliman chuckled, the gray skin of his neck jiggling slightly. “Yeah.”

“What made you say that?”

“He never came after me.”

“What do you mean?”

“He never tried to threaten me, kill me, beat me up. I would have, I mean, if it were my daughter.”

“Which means—”

“Which means a couple of things. One, that he knew I didn’t do it. And two, that he knew she was gone forever. Think about
the way people act when their kids are missing. It’s different from when they’re dead. I’m telling you. You see it all the
time on television, the hope in their eyes…”

Katherine nodded. “Jerry Cleveland agreed with you about the father.”

“Really?”

“And James Airie has killed himself.”

Bryce Telliman sighed. His slapped his hands on his knees. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like something to drink, Katherine?
I have lots of different kinds of tea.”

“I’m sure,” Katherine said.

“How’d he do it?”

“He flew his little airplane into the ocean.”

“His little airplane,” Telliman repeated.

Katherine realized now that she hadn’t taken her jacket off. It was getting warm in here. “Did you say you had beer?” she
asked.

It almost never rang. She was in her Rabbit on the way back from the city when her cell phone rang. It was Dr. Lennox, saying,
“There is something, Kate.”

Expectantly, Katherine asked, “What? What is it?”

“I thought it was nuts,” Greg said, “I thought I was nuts, but I took a second look at the blood test we gave Pilot Airie
when he came in here.”

“And?”

“And naturally, we only check for certain things.”

“And?”

“And I had the lab take a look, at great expense, mind you, but it’s there in the test. It’s in there.”

“Are you serious?”

“This stuff is not easily available. It’s new. It’s not entirely tested, as far as I know.”

Katherine held the phone to her ear and gripped the steering wheel tightly with her other hand. She had known it was possible,
had known, in fact, that it was even likely. But now that it was true, she didn’t know how to feel. She took a deep breath.
“This is getting weirder and weirder every second,” she said into the phone.

She could hear Greg Lennox sucking his teeth. “I’m going to check and see if any of this stuff was given to Eric Airie. I
know a sales rep from the pharmaceutical company that makes it.” Dr. Lennox was grim. “We have to remember, Katherine, it’s
not the kind of drug that would kill someone, even if he did—”

“It’s worse,” she said. “It’s the kind of drug that makes you psychotic.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’ll wait.” Katherine pulled up to a light. “Remember the shoelace?”

Dr. Lennox was quiet.

“The one Pilot said was from the shoe he found, from the evidence?”

“I guess so.”

“It’s not real.”

“So?”

“So I don’t know if he has any actual evidence or not. In other words, Eric may have been successful in making Pilot crazier
than he meant to. He may have made Pilot so crazy it came back to haunt him.”

Dr. Lennox asked, “Are you going to see Eric?”

“I’m going to avoid him, if I can.”

“There’s nothing to worry about, Kate.” Dr. Lennox’s tone was unconvincing. “Don’t be frightened. This is between the family,
and Eric wouldn’t, I’m sure—he wouldn’t do anything, of course. He’s a doctor.”

“Maybe there really isn’t any evidence at all,” Katherine said, more to herself than to Dr. Lennox. “Maybe Pilot’s using it
as a story to flush his brother out, to make him do something—”

“That would be pretty—”

“Sane,” Katherine said. “Wouldn’t it?”

“Yes,” he said. “In a way, I guess it would.” He paused, then said, “I’ve never seen a family unravel like this.”

“They started unraveling twenty years ago,” Katherine said. “Now it looks like everything’s raveling back.”

Amazingly, it was Christmas Eve.

Eyes wide open, I was lying in bed. The only light coming in was a sliver of yellow driveway light through the mini-blinds,
and these sheets were too fucking new, I guess, or simply hadn’t been washed enough, because they felt like sandpaper against
my skin, abrasive as a scrubbing sponge. I lay awake listening to the irritating forced air hum of the central-heating system.
It had become bitterly cold outside, a deep chill setting in, even invading my body in bed, insinuating itself under the covers
the way Halley the Comet did when I was a kid. I usually slept perfectly, the sleep of the successful, deep and dreamless.
I usually placed my head on my soft down pillow and one-thousand-thread-count sheets and miraculously discovered myself awake
the next morning, the
classical radio on, violins chattering, standing in front of the bathroom mirror, the shower filling the room with steam,
my face full of recognition, razor in hand. That night, however, I was lying in bed staring at the tiled ceiling and I couldn’t
let go. Whether it was because of the sheets or the forced air hum or the light I don’t know, but I was wondering, couldn’t
stop wondering, where it could be, where the evidence was hidden, the fucking evidence—an old plastic Wonder-bread bag, a
little girl’s red sneaker, a hunting knife, black handled—when I saw it. In a fraction of a second millions of neurons fired
across my cerebellum, creating that single charge of realization, the burst of electricity that is a conscious thought, and
I knew where it must be, had to be.