Red 1-2-3 (41 page)

“He had to come,” Jordan interrupted again, speaking with all the determination of an athlete and the self-confidence of a teenager who was absolutely 100-percent certain about something. The other two Reds were older and therefore more accustomed to doubts. “I mean, come on. How could he not show up at the service for what
he
created?

He’s been all over us in every fucking kind of way, so how could he stay away? It would be like winning a big lottery prize and not showing up to claim it.”

Karen, of course, imagined a million reasons the Wolf would stay away.

Or one reason, anyway,
she thought but did not say out loud.
Because he’s
smart and he didn’t need to be there. Because he’s waiting for us outside. Or
close by. Or around the goddamn corner, or at my house or in my office or
somewhere I don’t expect it and that’s where I’m going to die.
She shook her head, not necessarily in reply to anything Jordan had said, but more in answer to her own ricocheting fears.

Karen had an odd thought, a memory culled suddenly from a college literature course, years before organic chemistry and statistics and physics 297

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and the interminable months of medical school training. It was a course on existential writing, and she hadn’t thought about it in decades.

Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can’t be sure.

She wanted to scream.

Karen dies tomorrow. Or maybe the next day;
I can’t be sure.

Jordan looked up from punching buttons on the computer. “Hey, it’s working. It’s show time!” She laughed harshly. “All we need is some popcorn.”

The three women leaned across the desk and watched as the computer screen filled with the images of people coming through the door to the memorial service. The canned solemn music played in the background.

There was little other sound, as people were quiet and respectful as they shuffled unknowingly into the camera’s vision and then out.

“Keep watching,” Karen continued. “Sarah, you should identify everyone you can.” She opened the remembrances book that the funeral home had provided, where folks had written short statements or merely signed their names.

Sarah stared at the first person to approach the book on the video.

“Okay, that’s my neighbor and his wife, and their two sons. The red, white, and blue superpatriot whose backyard you used the other night,”

she said to Karen.

Karen took a pencil and made a notation in the margin of the book.

“And those people are parents of one of my students. And that’s their child. She was in my last classroom before I quit. She’s grown in the last year.” Sarah nearly sobbed. “She’s becoming beautiful,” she whispered.

Another notation went into the margin.

“Keep going,” Karen said stiffly. Faces, sometimes names, often contexts leapt out of the computer screen at the three Reds. Jordan used the computer mouse to slow the flow down, and once or twice to stop the picture as Sarah paused to place a person. The connections came to her hesitantly or instantly; it was a little like watching a strange sort of theater presentation, where there was no dialogue and no plot, but each separate image created a distinct and profound impression. Several times Sarah 298

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had to stop and walk around the room, as she delved deeply into memory to recall who someone was. The three Reds were alert to each man who entered the line, stopped by the book, seized the pen provided by the funeral home, and then passed out of the camera’s eye.

“Come on, goddammit,” Jordan whispered. “I know you’re here.” The flow of people dwindled and finally stopped. “Shit, shit, shit,” Jordan cursed again. The image on the screen was the remembrances book idly waiting on the table. The music ceased, and they could hear the first words of Karen’s eulogy. “Motherfucker,” Jordan added.

“Let’s watch it again,” Karen said calmly. She had to fight to keep her voice from rising in panic.

“He didn’t come,” Sarah said. She felt herself plummeting. It was as if she’d lost a fingerhold on the side of a mountain and was suddenly tumbling through space.

Karen saw Jordan clench her fists and punch out in the air, trying to smash the face of the Wolf that was both with them and not with them.

“Watch it again,” Karen said, a little more softly, but with insistent fury.

“We’ve missed something.”

But she was filled with fear—because maybe they
hadn’t
missed anything. She could feel anxiety threatening to crack every word she spoke, and her heartbeat increased.
This has to work,
she cried to herself. It wasn’t as if she had any other ideas. She wanted to burst into tears, and it took an immense effort to will herself not to. “Start from the beginning. And Jordan, this time stop the image on
everyone.
”

It was painstaking work. Slow and deliberate. With every person who wasn’t the Wolf, the tension in the room grew. None of them knew exactly what they were looking for. They were being driven by the cockeyed idea that something would seem completely obvious—when each of the Reds secretly believed the opposite might be true.

Jordan wanted to grab something and smash it. Karen wanted to scream loudly and then continue screaming. Sarah, who felt like she was letting the other two Reds down, was near tears.

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Jordan stopped the image on a family group that lingered at the remembrances book. “Okay,” she said, frustration littering her voice, “now who the hell are they?”

“The man is an EMT who worked out of the fire station where my husband was shift commander. I think he’s the one who was called to . . .”

She stopped, unable to say the word
accident
. Sarah stood up and paced about the room a few haphazard feet, as if scared to view the pictures on the screen for a second time.

Karen understood instantly what had upset Sarah. She filled in, trying to coax Red Two back into the process. “Okay, so he worked with your husband, and the people with him are who?”

Sarah stopped her pacing and returned to the images. But she stayed a few feet back, as if the distance would somehow keep her safe from memories. “That must be his wife, the one with the toddler hanging on and the baby in her arms. They came to dinner once or twice. And I guess the woman right behind them is the mother-in-law. I remember that. They had a mother-in-law living with them. I think my husband said he was growing tired of hearing about all the complaints—”

“Okay. Moving on,” Jordan said. “Unless you think an EMT is the Wolf.”

Karen raised a hand. There was something that bothered her that she couldn’t quite put a finger on. “No,” she said carefully. “Just roll it back a little, and then forward real slowly.”

She watched the family again. The husband was wearing a blue suit.

It was a little too tight for him and he moved stiffly as he approached the signing table and book. He wore a tie that seemed to strangle him and a look that spoke of loss. The wife—Sarah’s age, pretty, but with hair that seemed not quite combed and makeup that seemed haphazardly applied—wore a nice flowered dress and an overcoat with a baby bag slung over one shoulder, undoubtedly containing bottled milk, diapers, and rattles. She struggled to both hold a squirming child in her arms and control a toddler by the wrist so that he wouldn’t sprint away from her.

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It was an all-too-common mother-child choreography, one of too many items, too many responsibilities for the narrow situation they were in—an adult moment not suited to small kids.

“That’s not right,” Karen said.

Sarah shook her head. “No, I know him. I mean, he’s dedicated to his job. He saves lives. He’s no killer.”

“You can’t know that for certain,” Jordan said in frustration. “The Wolf could be anyone.”

This wasn’t what bothered Karen about the image. She leaned forward, staring intently. “Just inch it forward,” she said.

Jordan manipulated the computer mouse.

The mother-in-law came onto the screen, but she was partially obscured by the wife, husband, and children as she bent to the book.

“That’s not right,” Karen repeated.

“What?” Sarah asked.

“The mother is struggling with the kids. Why wouldn’t she hand one of them to her mother when she signs the book? But she doesn’t. I mean, isn’t that what the mother-in-law is there for? Another set of hands? And clearly, she’s needed . . .” Karen stopped.

They all craned forward.

“I can’t see her face clearly,” Sarah said. “Damn it, turn this way!” she almost shouted at the figure on the computer screen.

“Did you ever meet the mother-in-law?” Karen suddenly asked.

“No.”

“Then we don’t know for sure that—”

She stopped. She twisted her body, as if moving herself would make the image of the woman clearer. Jordan advanced the picture just slightly, moving her face closer to the computer screen.

“Do you know who that is?” Karen asked abruptly.

“No,” Sarah answered.

Karen took a deep breath. A gasp of sudden recognition.

“I do,” she said.

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There was silence in the room. She thought:
A woman who comes to a
funeral who doesn’t know the deceased.
The three Reds could all hear the heating system hissing in pipes concealed in the ceiling above them.

“So do I,” Jordan said quietly. All her teenage bravado had fled her, and her face had paled.

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She wrote down everything she could remember in a cheap notepad that she’d purchased at a local drugstore. She was excited, like a teenager waiting for a prom date. For the first time, she actually felt like she was a genuine part of the mysterious process. She described the other mourners in detail when she pictured them in her head:
This older man wore a gray suit
that didn’t fit him and a lime-green tie; this woman was at least seven months
pregnant and really uncomfortable.
She quoted every word and phrase she could recall from the doctor’s eulogy: “No one except Sarah knows why she made her final choice . . .”
She identified the pieces of music that she recognized—Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring
”
and a sonata by Men-delssohn. She put down every banal snatch of conversation she had managed to overhear in the line of people filing into the small chapel-type room: “I hate funerals,”
and
“This is so sad,”
and
“Hush, kids, this is quiet time . . .”

At the very bottom of her report, Mrs. Big Bad Wolf added:
I’m certain
that Doctor Jayson didn’t recognize me. I averted my eyes and kept hidden
behind other people. I sat in the very back, and ducked out as soon as she
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finished speaking.
Then I waited across the street from the funeral home parking lot until everyone left, including the doctor. She didn’t even look my way.

She added one other note:
There was no sign of Jordan at any point. If she
had come to the service, I would have spotted her immediately.

Mrs. Big Bad Wolf had always believed that her nondescript, mousy features were a hindrance. She never stood out in a crowd, and all the years of her life she had been jealous of the popular girls—then women—who did. She was even a little irritated that her doctor hadn’t seemed to notice her, even though she had taken steps to avoid being seen. But this sense of mild anger was replaced by the notion that her appearance—her very ordinariness and the way she blended seamlessly into any crowd—was suddenly an advantage. She did not know that her husband, had made nearly the same point early in his book.

I was a fly on the wall,
she thought,
seeing everything and hearing everything and noticed by nobody.
She looked down at the pages filled with her report: clear, legible, concise handwriting, all in a secretary’s precise style.

It was, she imagined, a totally different way of standing up and being counted.
You don’t have to make a loud noise or be extra-special beautiful,
she told herself.
You don’t have to be six feet tall, or have red hair like the women
going into the book. When you have words at your disposal, it automatically
makes you special.
It was wildly seductive for her, magical and utterly romantic. She looked at the notations stretched across the lined pages in front of her and hoped that her language was descriptive and accurate.

She suddenly realized that her husband had never asked her to write something for him before. This made it even more special. That she had been trusted with the task of attending the service was deeply satisfying.

“It’s crucial for everything that’s going into the new book,” her husband had said as he watched her get ready, picking out a simple, nondescript gray jacket, dark slacks, and a pair of tinted glasses—not quite sunglasses, but just dark enough to obscure her eyes. “I can’t be there, but I need to know everything that happens.”

She had not asked why or questioned him when he’d told her that she had to avoid being recognized at all times. Instead, she had fixed her hair, 304

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combing it in a completely different style than usual. She had been surprised when she looked in the mirror at how the woman staring back at her wasn’t her.

He had also coached her on what to say if someone did recognize her.

“Just act surprised, and say that you knew Sarah’s husband from some years ago, when he was a student. That will work. No one will ever ask a follow-up question.”

Smiling, he had told her what school the dead husband had gone to and where he’d done his undergraduate work before joining the fire department. He also told her that Sarah’s husband had been taking some night school graduate writing courses at the local community college. “Just say that’s where you met him,” he told her. “A shared interest sadly cut short by accident.”

She had followed every instruction to the exact letter, and, she believed, done it better than he could ever have hoped for. She congratulated herself.
You should have been an actor. A performer. This may have been your first
time on a stage, and you nailed it.