Second Chance (7 page)

"
Because they're dangerous. They make each other
dangerous. And Ethan . . ." Her head dropped to her chest and
she began to cry. "Ethan has a gun!"

8
IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII

Ten minutes passed before Heldman returned with food
and coifee. By then the woman had stopped crying and settled back
into her strange waiting state. She woke the boy and fed him a
hamburger and some milk. She didn't eat anything herself at first,
but after a while she began to eat, just chewing and swallowing
automatically.

Heldman hovered over her, trying to help with the
boy—trying to help. While he busied himself with Hedda Pearson and
her son, I scanned the newspaper clippings on the bureau, looking for
the one that had apparently set Ethan Pearson off. As far as I could
see, it might have been any of them, for they were all the same.
Two-inch columns cut from the back pages of newspapers, the pages
with the court news—each column detailing the arraignment,
conviction, or release of a murderer. The name of the paper and the
date of the article was written in pen at the bottom of each
clipping.

Willie Johnson, 42, is to be released this
afternoon from Joliet penitentiary, after serving seven years of a
10-20 year term for homicide in the death of his common-law wife . .
.
Chicago Sun-Times 8/26/83

Arthur Braddock, 35, of 4609 Winton Terrace
has been arraigned on the charge of felony homicide in the death of
Leona Smith . . . '
Cincinnati Enquirer
11/18/76

Stanford Isaiah Lewis, 45, convicted slayer
of Moira Hamill, has been granted probation after serving ten years
of a life sentence in Lima State Penitentiary . . .
Dayton
Daily News 3/7/86

Calvin "Beebee" Jackson, 34, of
8567 Prospect has been convicted of aggravated homicide in the death
of LaQuicha Morgan, also of 8567 Prospect . . .
Cleveland
Plain Dealer 12/2/76

There were twenty of them on the bureau. Twenty
homicides, twenty murderers. I couldn't be certain on the basis of
their names alone, but I had the feeling that they were all black
men. They were all about forty-seven or forty-eight years old, all
from the Midwest, and all of them had killed a woman.

It took me a while longer to spot it, but the
criminals had something else in common. Judging by their dates of
release and dates of conviction, it appeared that each of them had
committed a murder in the latter part of 1976. I didn't know what
that meant, but it clearly had some significance for Ethan Pearson.

As I was sorting through the last of the clippings I
noticed that Hedda Pearson had begun to watch me. I could see her
face in the bureau mirror. She looked more curious than concerned, as
if she wanted to compare notes about her husband's odd collection of
killers.

"He started cutting them out after his mother
died," Hedda Pearson said into the mirror.

I turned to face her. "Would that have been in
1976?"

"Yes. You're sharp, Mr. Stoner. Estelle died in
September of 1976." The woman pointed to the manila folder on
the lamp table by the door. "It's all in there, all the details.
At least the ones that the reporters could dig up. They missed the
real story, though."

"And what is the real story?" I asked.

"What happened afterward. How it changed the
family. Ethan most of all. Kirsty was deeply affected by Estelle's
death, too. But she was closer to her father. And, of course, Phil
was there to look after her. Ethan wasn't close to Phil. He blamed
his father for Estelle's breakdowns. He still does. He had no one to
lean on once Estelle was gone. No one to console him, to help him
channel the anger and frustration from such an enormous tragedy. His
mind couldn't handle it. Gradually he went . . . a little crazy. You
saw for yourself. All those men in the newspapers. All those men."

"What does he do with the clippings?" I
asked the woman.

"He keeps track," she said. "Keeps
looking, hunting, searching for the reason Estelle died, for a reason
that makes sense to him. His logic is simplicity itself: my mother
couldn't have committed suicide and still have loved me, therefore
she didn't commit suicide, she was murdered. By one of them—one of
the faceless men in the newspaper clippings."

"Was he this . . . obsessed when you married
him?" Heldman asked.

The woman smiled. "You mean, why did I marry him
if he was so crazy?"

She was a smart woman, when she had her wits about
her.

"Yes," Heldman said. with a blush. "I
guess that's what I did mean."

"
I didn't care that he was crazy," Hedda
Pearson said simply. "I didn't see him that way. He was only
nineteen—a sophomore at Oberlin. And I was just eighteen."

Hedda Pearson lightly touched her bruised lip, her
swollen eye, down her cheek, as if the bruises didn't matter, as if
they weren't there. Then her face changed.

"If I hadn't gotten pregnant, it might have
worked. But I did get pregnant. Ethan wasn't ready for fatherhood,
for a job and a family. That's when this craziness started in
earnest—at least, that's when it started to have an effect, that's
when we started to move from city to city."

"Has he ever gone after one of these men
before?" I asked.

Hedda Pearson smiled. "No. He never wanted to
confront any of them—he wanted to get away from them. He said it
was because none of them was the right man—that he had to keep
moving until fate delivered the right one to him. But I always told
myself that that wasn't the real reason. The real reason was that he
didn't ever want it to end. He wanted to keep looking forever, to
keep Estelle alive forever. At least that's what I thought until last
week."

The woman shuddered, slopping a little coffee on her
robe.

"What happened last week?" I asked. "We
were in Ft. Thomas, Kentucky. I'd been working there at NKSU for a
couple of months. Ethan was writing an article on the campus. But he
started having trouble with the piece. Then he got a rejection on one
of his poems. I knew the signs by then, so I could see what was
coming. And sure enough on Wednesday morning he marched into the
department office and pulled me away from the desk. In front of
everyone, he pulled me away.

"He took me out to the car. David was already in
the backseat. Our bags in the backseat. He took off', driving
straight through to Chicago. To this godforsaken place."

"He came to see Kirsten?"

She nodded. "He had this clipping from a
Kentucky paper. A small photograph. He thought she would look at it
and remember."

"Did she recognize the man in the photo?"

The woman laughed derisively. "Of course not.
There's nothing to remember. There never has been. That isn't the
point. Kirsten didn't have to recognize the man. All she had to do
was come here and talk to Ethan. Just talk." Hedda Pearson got
an ugly look on her face. "She does weird things to him. She
always makes him worse, and he makes her worse. It's horrible to see.
Like they're having some kind of vicious sex."

"Kirsten came here on Thursday morning?"

"I think it was Thursday. I know they spent the
weekend here. The two of them in this room with David and me . .
.telling tales about the past, talking baby talk, crying about
Estelle as if she'd just died a day or two ago. They just kept
getting crazier and crazier, until they were ready to . . ."

The woman dropped her head.

"When did they leave?" I asked.

"Late this afternoon." She touched her
bruised face.

"You tried to stop him?"

"He had a gun," she said with horror. "They
went and bought one yesterday. When I tried to take it away from
Ethan, he . . ."

"He beat you up." I said it for her.

She nodded.

"Where was the boy?" Heldman said, looking
sick.

"Where was David when this happened?"

The woman waved her hand around the tiny room.

"
Where do you think?"

"
He saw?"

"Kirsty held her hands over David's eyes."

"She didn't try to stop it?" Heldman asked.

"
She watched," Hedda Pearson said coldly.

9
IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII

I tried to get the woman to describe the man in the
Kentucky newspaper—the man that Ethan claimed had killed his
mother. But Hedda said she'd never actually seen the newspaper
photo—Ethan had only told her about it. If the picture was
something more than Ethan's fantasy, he'd taken it with him when he
and Kirsten had left that afternoon in the grey Plymouth Volare,
heading south to finish their lives in an act of murder.

"There is another picture," the woman said,
almost as an afterthought.

"Of this man?"

"Of the man Ethan says killed his mother. He
drew it right after Estel1e's death. He even tried to show it to the
police, but of course no one believed him. Not even Ethan's father.
It's one of the things that Ethan has always held against Phi1."
She pointed to the lamp table by the door. "The drawing's over
there, in the manila folder on the table. The folder with the
clippings about Estelle."

I went over to the table and picked up the folder.
Heldman crowded beside me, eager to take a look.

I didn't bother with the
clippings. The picture was in the back. It was a surprisingly
skillful pencil drawing of a black man in his mid-to-late thirties
with lumpy skin, peppery hair, and a thin, mean, frightening-looking
face—all sharp bony points from brow to cheekbone to chin. The boy
had drawn what I took to be a pointed goatee at the V of the chin,
which only added to the man's devilish appearance. I had the feeling
that the drawing was more metaphor than anything else-the portrait of
the bogeyman who had robbed a ten-year-old child of his mother. And
yet, metaphor or not, the search for the bogeyman had become quite
real. Ethan and Kirsten were out there looking for him—looking to
kill him. And they had a seven—hour head start on me.

* * *

The woman wouldn't take charity, so I ended making a
trade. Two hundred dollars for the manila envelope with the clippings
and Ethan's drawing of Estelle Pearson's murderer. And another fifty
for four chapbooks of Ethan Pearson's poetry. The woman had a
suitcase full of the damn things, like a brush salesman.

As I walked across the deserted motel lot to
Heldman's car, holding that pile of yellowed clippings and Ethan's
chapbooks in my hands, I had the disturbing feeling that none of what
had occurred was real.

Art Heldman had the same feeling. "It's so damn
weird," he said in a bewildered voice. "What are we going
to do?"

I told him the truth. "I don't know."

Snow began to fall again on the way back to Hyde
Park—a needle spray of snow, fierce and fine as icy rain. Through
the driver side window I could see it falling on the lake, windblown
above the dark water. The only sound in the car was the whisper of
the snow beneath the tires.

"I owe you an apology, Stoner," Heldman
said after a time. He thought I was still angry from the scene in the
parking lot. I wasn't—I wasn't thinking about him.

"You were right. Something has to be done. I
guess it should have been done long before   Heldman
glanced over at me quickly. "If you still need my help . . ."

"Thanks. I'll let you know."

"Will you go back to Cincinnati?"

"It seems like the place to start."

"Perhaps the police should be . . . informed."

"They already have been—in Chicago. I'll take
care of the rest of them tonight."

"You have somewhere to stay?"

"Just drop me at Kirsty's apartment. I'll see if
I can get an early flight in the morning."

"I am sorry," the man said again. "Sorriest
of all for Kirsty."

"Her life isn't over yet, Professor. We still
have a shot to change things."

I said it, but I wasn't
sure I believed it. And neither was he.

* * *

Heldman dropped me at Kirsten's apartment at half
past twelve. The freshly fallen snow along 54th caught the
streetlight, turning the dismal brownstones the pale, low-wattage
yellow of gaslamps. I watched Heldman's car disappear down
Blackstone, then looked up through the falling snow at Kirsten's
second-floor apartment. There was a light in the front room, which
might have meant that Marnee Thompson was back. That is, if I hadn't
left the light on myself when I'd stopped there earlier that night. I
went into the foyer and pressed the intercom on the side wall,
thinking I'd use the keys if no one answered. But Marnee Thompson
buzzed me through.

As I climbed the stairs to the second-floor landing,
the apartment door opened and the girl came out. Although she was
wearing a terry robe over men's-cut pajamas, she didn't look as if
she'd been sleeping. On the contrary, her face was wide-awake and
frightened-looking. For a second I was afraid she was going to tell
me that Kirsten Pearson was dead.