The Fates Will Find Their Way (14 page)

21

I
t was two counties over, so we didn’t take notice when bones were found during the construction of a new high-rise on the bank of the river.
River Bank Condominiums
. The name was uninspired.
If you lived here
,
you’d be home now
. A stupid slogan, but they had a point. If we
did
live there, we
would
be home by now. The problem is that the investors hadn’t done their research. They were banking on home-buyers who didn’t exist. They were looking for early retirees who wanted a small town with a great view. But the amenities didn’t exist two counties over, not yet. And so the building probably would have stopped eventually, regardless of the bones they found. The bones simply provided an excuse.

Marty Metcalfe’s construction crew had been hired for the build-out. And if Marty hadn’t been fired for public drunkenness (and his entire crew fired along with him), he would have been there on the Tuesday they discovered the bones and called the police, and we all might have heard about them sooner. We all might have been able to accept the real possibility of Nora, a Catalina, a stranger, and a struggle in the woods. Might have been able to. But Marty had been fired—he said he’d been laid off when they ran out of funding, but one article we
had
taken notice of in the local paper that year was in regard to a police report, a prostitute, and Marty’s public intoxication—and so it took two years from the time the bones were found for us to finally hear about them.

W
e were forty-four, nine years after Minka Dinnerman’s funeral, when Gail Cummings, an overambitious journalist—who wasn’t even from our hometown—did some research, put two and two together, and suggested to her editors that the bones, when they were tested, might belong to the missing Nora Lindell. The police were less impressed by Ms. Cummings’ research skills than perhaps they should have been, but she pursued the connection on her own.

What’s funny is that she came to us for contact information for the Lindells. “Do you know where I can find Mr. or Mrs. Lindell?” she asked when our wives passed us the receiver, after she’d introduced herself and her purpose.

“The Lindells,” we said. “The name sounds familiar. But no, no, I definitely don’t know what happened to that family.” Our wives shook their heads and left the room. We reasoned we were being protective. “A missing girl? It’s been so long. Was that the Lindells?” What kind of journalist wouldn’t have known Mr. and Mrs. Lindell were dead? We reasoned that if we were going to help someone, it wouldn’t be someone so decidedly uninformed.

It was Danny Hatchet who refused to play along. In spite of the phone tree the rest of us had put into place in order to foil the journalist—Chuck Goodhue calling Winston Rutherford calling Stu Zblowski calling Marty Metcalfe calling Drew Price calling Danny Hatchet—Danny disregarded our request and agreed to talk to her.

“The Lindells, the parents, are dead,” Danny told her. “And Sissy, Nora’s sister, lives out West now.”

“Tell me more,” said Gail Cummings, and he did.

O
f course, what we didn’t know—how could we?—was that Danny was the only one of us with any real information. Any one of us could have told her the parents were dead. Any one of us could have told her that Sissy Lindell was living out West with a gaggle of girls. Any one of us could have told her that Nora Lindell went missing when she was sixteen and that she looked best in her uniform with her jean jacket rolled up at the cuffs and her knee socks not quite evenly pulled up. Any one of us could have told the journalist these things. But Danny—Danny was the only one who could, and did, tell her where and how to find Sissy.

What he said was this: “Listen, I’ve got to ask Sissy first. I need to make sure it’s okay I give you her number.”

“You mean you’re in direct contact with Sissy Lindell?”

“Not at the moment,” said Danny. “But I’m capable of it. Give me your number. Either I’ll call you back or she will.”

“Thank you, Mr. Hatchet. Thank you, thank you.”

S
issy must have driven straight through the night to get back here, because within two days of Danny Hatchet’s phone call with Gail Cummings, she was spotted by Jack Boyd’s second wife at the coffee shop at the end of Sycamore.

Sissy wouldn’t have recognized Jack’s wife because they’d never been introduced, but Jack’s wife recognized Sissy from the photographs and the stories she’d seen and heard. Molly Boyd wasn’t due to pick up her kids from the sitter for another few hours and so rather than get her coffee to go that day, she sat down at the table next to Sissy Lindell, it turns out, sitting across from Gail Cummings, who was attempting, unsuccessfully, to interview Sissy.

“They were talking about DNA,” Molly told us as she put away the groceries the following Sunday. Jack had concocted a brunch the following weekend in order to get us over to his house to learn what Molly had heard. “The police want a sample. Sissy doesn’t want to give it. That’s pretty much all they talked about. The journalist wanted a reason.”

“But what else?” asked Jack. “There must have been more.” He prodded her as a sort of show-and-tell. We didn’t mind.

“She’s not nearly as pretty as everyone says,” said Molly.

“Who isn’t?” we asked.

“That Sissy woman. She looks older than she should, you know? Wrinkly.”

We winced, thankful our wives were in the next room.

“But what else did they talk about?” Jack said. “Stay on topic.”

“I told you. The reporter wanted to know why Sissy wouldn’t give them a DNA sample. I don’t know whose. Sissy’s? Her sister’s? They want to test some bones.”

“It’s Danny’s fault,” said Drew Price. “He ruined everything.”

“Where is Danny, anyway?”

“Business trip,” said Jack.

“Business trip?” we asked. “Since when? What does that even mean? A business trip to buy weed?”

“Beats me,” said Jack. “He said he was headed someplace warmer for the weekend. Didn’t ask.”

“Warmer?” Drew said. “Like Arizona?” We ignored him.

“I don’t see what the big deal is,” said Molly. “Who cares if the journalist talks to Sissy?”

“You don’t get it,” said Jack Boyd. “You just don’t get it.”

“Guess not,” said Molly, backing out of the kitchen through the swinging door, balancing a platter of mimosas for our wives in the next room.

A
nd Molly Boyd didn’t get it; it’s true. But we couldn’t articulate why we didn’t want Sissy Lindell talking to Gail Cummings or why it felt like a betrayal that Danny had put them in touch. We couldn’t articulate the
why
; we just knew it felt like we were being stolen from. It felt like something that was ours alone, and always had been, was slowly slipping away and, with it, our sense of security. We had earned our fantasies about Nora Lindell; we had kept her legacy alive. Who was this Gail Cummings to think she could barge in out of nowhere?

“You know where they found the bones, right?” It was Marty Metcalfe talking. Since the whole Trey Stephens fiasco, our wives had been pretty staunch about the no-single-childless-people-allowed rule. But we were at Jack Boyd’s house and Molly, being so much younger, was hardly a woman who put her foot down. There was also the hope that Marty might be able to provide some unprinted details about the site.

“The journalist told us,” we said. “Next to the riverbank, where your awful high-rise was going up.”

“Yeah, well, one of my guys got hired onto the new crew, and do you know that they found two sets of bones? Dog bones and human bones?”

“What’s your point?”

“It’s just that—” But Marty stopped talking. It’s like he couldn’t say it out loud. For once we had all been silenced. There was no right way to talk about Trey and Danny and that dead dog. There were no good phrases to describe that memory or the story they had once told us so long ago about driving a couple counties over and covering the thing with leaves. We looked at the ceiling. We looked at the floor. We looked at our watches. We waited for words to return.

“Holy shit,” Winston Rutherford said finally, and we all breathed out a little, relieved that at least one of us had recovered his voice. Winston was still one year away from learning that Maggie Rutherford had made a cuckold out of him. “The Wilsons’ dog. Holy shit.”

We were quiet after that, contemplative. Of course, even if the bones did belong to the Wilsons’ dog, this didn’t mean anything or prove anything, nor did it have any bearing on whether the human bones belonged to Nora Lindell or whether or not Sissy would provide Gail Cummings with the necessary DNA. The bones meant nothing.

And yet.

And yet, after a very long time of us feeling nothing, those bones definitely felt like something.

22

M
arty Metcalfe, of course, was the kid whose mom—the year her husband divorced her, our senior year of high school—made him steal his own dog back from his father’s house. It’s a strange story, involving Mrs. Metcalfe, one incredibly scared Marty, and a giant Saint Bernard.

The way we imagine it is this: Mrs. Metcalfe—prematurely silver-haired, tall, wiry-thin, angry as hell about Marty’s dad and his tennis pro, Denise Comfort, only a few years older than Marty—drove one Saturday morning to her former home, parked across the street, left the car running, and ordered Marty to get the dog.

Marty never talked about it. It’s not the sort of thing—if it had happened to us and not to Marty—we’d have been anxious to share with the others. So we don’t blame Marty for keeping the details to himself.

We heard bits and pieces from Mrs. Metcalfe herself, one of the counselors hired by the school after Nora went missing. Blame the divorce, blame anything you want, but Mrs. Metcalfe was probably unfit for counseling that year. More often than not, she’d get off topic and—we think in an effort to relate to us, we truly don’t believe she was
trying
to be inappropriate—tell us stories about her ruined marriage or her strained relationship with her son, our friend, Marty.

It’s not like she’d ever come right out and say, “Well, this one time, Marty and I were sitting in the car and . . .” It’s more like, on occasion, she’d stop us mid-sentence, mid-thought about Nora Lindell and where she might be, and say something like, “Have you ever stolen a dog, Winston? Tell me that. Have you ever thought about stealing a dog?” Or, to Paul Epstein, she might say, “Tell me what you would do if your mom parked outside your dad’s house and told you to break in. What would you do?” To which Paul Epstein might have said, “My mom’s house
is
my dad’s house?” Or, to Chuck Goodhue, as Chuck was exploring aloud the possibility of the man in the Catalina as described by Drew Price and Winston Rutherford, she might simply have asked, “What I want to know is this, have you ever had something that you loved more than anything? An animal, maybe, it doesn’t have to be a human being? What I’m trying to ask is, do you really even understand love, Mr. Goodhue? Do you?”

In this way, during these mandatory counseling sessions following the months of Nora’s disappearance, we were able to piece together the fabulous post-divorce dog-theft story involving Marty, his mom, their idling ancient Volvo, and the Saint Bernard.

I
t was Chuck Goodhue—provoked perhaps by her constant interruptions of his daytime reveries involving Nora Lindell—who started responding with questions of his own. If Mrs. Metcalfe asked about the worst thing his mother had ever wanted him to do, Chuck might retaliate with: “Well, I don’t know, but tell me this. What would you say about a seventeen-year-old high school student and a, say, thirty-five-year-old journalist making out in a closet? What would you say about that?”

“That’s a very interesting question, Mr. Goodhue. One I’d be more than happy to give some thought to.”

“Because, um, Mrs. Metcalfe, what I’m wondering is, how messed up do you think, like, I would be if I were taken advantage of by, you know, an older woman? Do you think I’d still have a shot at normalcy?”

“Mr. Goodhue,” said Mrs. Metcalfe. “Is there something you want to tell me? Have you been compromised? Is there something I should know?”

“Whoops,” he might say. “Time’s up.”

O
ver the course of our senior year, we all took a cue from Chuck and, here and there, during our time with Mrs. Metcalfe, began working into our conversation ostensibly hypothetical but actually exact details of Marty’s tryst with the news anchor. Probably, by the time we graduated, she believed an entire class of boys had been molested by a single older woman, whose identity we’d sworn to keep secret.

C
huck Goodhue might have been joking when he posed the question about a boy and an older woman and the potential for normalcy later in life; he might have been joking, but we can’t help occasionally reflecting on that question now as adults, as men with wives and with vulnerable children of our own. Because isn’t it possible that—though we thought of it then as a sexy story, as something to be jealous of—an older woman preying on a young boy is just as dangerous as an older man preying on a young girl? Why didn’t we consider that at the time?

Instead, we were jealous when Marty told us the story about him and the news anchor on New Year’s Eve. A few of us truly believed that if we’d attended the party, it might have been us in the closet with the anchor instead of Marty.

In the weeks following the incident, we developed a keen interest in local events and politics. Our mothers thought we were growing up; they thought an interest in local news was the first step to really broadening our horizons. They imagined that, in college, we’d read the newspaper, subscribe to all the right journals. This was an important first step, they thought, which is why they were so disappointed when, sometime around spring break, we abruptly lost our interest in the news in favor of football or tennis.

Of course, Marty never lost his interest. Where we grew tired of the fantasy—finally admitting that it hadn’t happened to us and probably never would no matter how many times we tuned in to her show—Marty grew obsessive, unwilling or unable to believe it wouldn’t happen again.

W
hat happened was this: Trish Bowles, an older cousin of Tommy and Franco Bowles, had been asked to attend the Metcalfes’ annual New Year’s Eve bash. She was a local up-and-comer, one of our town’s forty-under-forty types. The Metcalfes were looking to expand their own horizons. They were looking to make new friends (of course, what Mrs. Metcalfe would understand by the end of the school year is that Mr. Metcalfe was not looking to expand his repertoire of friends so much as he was hoping to replace them entirely, starting first and foremost with his wife).

Trish Bowles was happy to attend; it was a chance to hobnob with the bigwigs. Likely she was already a little tipsy when she got there. Marty hadn’t meant to still be at home when the adults-only party started, but when Trish mistook him for a guest and not the Metcalfes’ son, he decided to stick around. It was fun to pretend, he said. He brought her glass after glass of Chablis. But at some point, he slipped up and referred to Mrs. Metcalfe as his mother. Trish was embarrassed. Her face turned crimson. She was afraid people had seen her flirting with a seventeen-year-old. She bowed out of the conversation, choosing instead to spend the rest of the night talking with Denise Comfort and her friends.

“So when did the make-out session happen?” Drew Price asked. “Sounds like there was a lot of talk and that’s about it.”

“I’m getting there,” Marty said. This was in Trey Stephens’ basement, the night after the Metcalfes’ party. Marty had secured a bottle of Wild Turkey, and we were passing it around while he was talking. “There’s a buildup. That’s what women like, anyway. The buildup.”

What happened is that Trish didn’t stop drinking Chablis while she was talking to the tennis pro and by the time she was ready to go, she’d forgotten why she’d been avoiding Marty Metcalfe and, surprising even herself, when no one was looking, she pulled him into the coat closet, giggling, and put his hand in places it had never before been on a woman’s body.

When it was over, when they could hear people filing down the stairs headed for the coat closet, Trish—even as Marty could still taste the sticky white wine on his tongue—said in a panicked whisper, “You can’t tell anyone. Oh, oh. This won’t happen again. Oh, I’m sorry. Oh, what have I done?”

O
f course he told us and, at the time, woozy with Wild Turkey, it seemed so decidedly unfair that she’d chosen Marty. We were the ones who should have learned so early what women wanted and how they wanted it. We deserved that knowledge, not Marty.

But what we wonder now sometimes, sitting at the pool, watching our girls take turns on the diving board, is whether or not we’d even have a family—whether or not these girls doing backflips not twenty feet away from us would even exist—if we’d gone into a coat closet with Trish Bowles or some other older woman.

And it’s at times like these when we cannot help but shudder at the things adults are capable of. Why didn’t we know better then? And what things are happening already that our own children don’t know better about now? We cannot help looking at those wiggly, giggling girls splashing about in the pool just in front of us, their skin tanning, bordering on burning, and wonder what’s taking place in their lives—in their strange and alien brains—that they’re already keeping from us. What, right now, is taking place that we should be stopping but that we can’t even see?