The Ninth Step (16 page)

“I can’t even imagine you being drunk.”

“Well, I was. But I still had to find a way to live with myself knowing the pain and suffering I’d caused.”

“So you found me.”

“So I found you. And I saw firsthand the damage I’d caused.”

“You were drunk, yes. It could have just as easily been my fault.”

“Even if it was you, if I hadn’t been drunk I could have swerved—”

“I could have swerved.”

“I’m just so sorry.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

“So you found me. And you created this relationship with me.”

“No. It’s real, not created. I do love you. I love every neurotic bone in your body.”

“I don’t want to lose my wife and child. Not twice. I still want you. Us. Our baby. Our life.”

Helen nodded, and the tears came again. She knew there was just one last bit of poison left in the wound. If they could clean it out, they might stand a chance.

Helen went and got the note. She’d never thrown it away. She handed it to Edgar.

“Somebody knows. He wants money.”

During his free period, Edgar sat at his desk in the empty classroom.

The book,
Chaos and Crime
, sat unopened in front of him like a meal he was too full to eat, but knew he must.

He opened the book to the page he had marked. He had used the ugly little blackmail note as a place marker.

DOES HE KNOW YOU KILLED HIS WIFE?

Edgar read:
It takes but a small change in everyday factors to bring about victimization. The victim may desire to not be a victim. Remember, chaos cannot be predicted, but it can be controlled to an extent.

Edgar looked up from the book to find Martin Kosinski standing in front of him.

The boy’s nose was bloodied.

Edgar picked up the note on his desk and hid it away in a drawer.

“I can’t help you. I’m sorry, but I can’t help you right now. You’re going to have to help yourself. It’s better that way.”

Martin turned to leave without saying a word. Edgar stared at the boy’s retreating back.

“Wait.”

Martin stopped and turned around.

“Listen. Listen to this, Martin. Just listen.”

Edgar picked up the book and read aloud: “A victim of crime might take note that this crime has transformed him. This is a nonlinear transformation. These transformations move the crime victim from highly organized behavior to seemingly complete chaos.”

Edgar closed the book and laid it down.

“You see what that means, don’t you? For you and me? Complete chaos. We’re lost.”

Edgar looked down at the book in front of him as though it had turned into a ticking bomb. He slung the book across the room. The pages fluttered frantically in the air, and the book crashed into the aluminum window blinds. It seemed unnaturally loud in the empty room, unspeakably violent coming from Edgar.

“No. Not lost,” Martin said. “We’re fucked.”

Edgar took Friday off from school to run errands with Helen. And sort out what they were going to do about their little problem. Not one for dressing down, Edgar wore his usual white button-down shirt with a colorful tie. The skies had been overcast, so he added his London Fog overcoat as well.

First stop was the OB-GYN. In the waiting room, Helen thumbed through a
Woman’s Day
magazine, and Edgar fiddled with his Rubik’s Cube. He wasn’t really thinking about the puzzle. He was thinking about nothing. The cube seemed to calm him—a baby’s pacifier. It kept his mind blank. And the act of not focusing was giving him focus. Almost like an outside observer, Edgar could see himself manipulating the cube, and he vaguely realized that he was actually starting to get the hang
of it now. His movements sped up, and the colors on one side of the cube had started to converge and line up. Pretty simple, Edgar thought, when you just looked at it as a whole. Front and back. Right and left. Up and down. All at the same time. But really, he now saw, that wasn’t quite right either. The trick was not to color in each of the six faces of the cube, no, you had to look at it like a cake.
Layers
. The secret was layers. He was coming out of himself now, actively participating. He was manipulating the puzzle frantically, his fingers a blur, and the colored squares continued to line up, one after another.

Yes, like putting together a layer cake. Blue, orange, green, and red built in layers. Yellow on the bottom. White icing on top. Puzzle solved.

The nurse called them back to the exam room.

The image was fuzzy and black-and-white, but it was clearly a fetus.

The obstetrician slid the ultrasound paddle in small circles through the conducting gel smeared on Helen’s swollen middle. She and Edgar watched with breathless interest.

“Everything looks fine. I don’t see anything to give me concern. Perhaps you should stay away from swimming pools until after the delivery.”

“You’re positive?”

“Positive. She’s fine.”

Edgar tossed the solved Rubik’s Cube into the glove box before pulling the car out of the parking lot.

“I have my retirement, the 401(k),” he said.

“It’ll never be enough.”

“I’ll sell the house.”

“It’ll never be enough. I’ll go to jail. It’ll never be enough and I’ll go to jail.”

“Maybe not. I told you—”

“No, I left the scene. It was hit-and-run. No matter what you tell them, it was hit-and-run. I was driving drunk. I can’t lie about that. I was involved in an accident that resulted in a death. I fled the scene. End of story.”

Even though he was driving, Edgar found himself wanting to grab the Rubik’s Cube back out of the glove compartment. He wanted to just hold it. It would calm his nerves.

“Are you sure you don’t have at least some idea as to what this man’s name might be?”

“No. If I ever knew it, it’s gone now.”

“I can find him. I know I can. I can find him and I can—”

“And you can what?”

“I can find him and… I don’t know what. I’ll fuck him up.”

“You’ll fuck him up? Edgar, when did you start using the word
fuck
?”

Edgar shrugged. “It’s chaos. Mad fuckery.”

The businesses along the main strip were starting to thin out as they approached the residential section and their neighborhood. Off to the right Helen saw the Walgreens that she frequently used because of its proximity.

“That day. That day at the drugstore. I think they arrested him for shoplifting. There would be a record of that.”

The librarian sat Edgar and Helen at a microfiche terminal and gave them a thick little packet of microfiche sheets. Edgar told her that he already knew how to use the machine.

The
Mantissa Cove Lighthouse
, the local paper, published a daily police blotter. The police blotter was somewhat notorious in that it published mug shots with the crime blurbs. Many folks felt that it unjustly painted the innocent-until-proven-guilty as very much guilty in the court of public opinion. The publisher had doubled circulation in the first month of providing this somewhat unwholesome public service.

The blotter archive was fully searchable online for a modest registration fee, but Edgar felt that it was perhaps wiser to not leave electronic footprints. He was old school, so to speak, and knew that there were ways other than the Internet.

But old school was a great deal more time-consuming. However, since they essentially knew the time frame, it should have been a quick task. But it wasn’t. Helen clearly remembered the date, and they thoroughly scanned each item two weeks before that date and two weeks after. There was nothing that struck Helen as a possibility.

“Maybe shoplifting isn’t a big enough offense to make the paper,” Edgar said. Indeed, the vast majority of the reported arrests were associated with DUI or drug possession and selling, with a smattering of domestic violence thrown in.

“Let’s keep looking. We don’t have anywhere else to look.”

And so Edgar scrolled through the endless parade of local miscreants and their misdeeds. The microfiche film had to be manually changed every ten minutes or so. And it was easy to scroll too fast, causing the images to streak and blur. It was giving Helen a headache. And her back hurt. She just wanted to go. And was about to tell Edgar so when something caught her eye. He had gone back three years when an image struck a chord.

“Stop. Back up a little.”

Helen leaned in and studied a photograph of a man alongside a paragraph listing his DUI charge. The man in the photograph had blond hair, not black. There was no scar on his forehead. And he was displaying a tooth-filled smile for the camera as though this were a yearbook photo rather than a mug shot.

But it was him. She was certain. Mr. Slick-Back.

The brief paragraph next to the photo identified him as Cornell Smith of Mantissa County, gave his age, and the charge against him. Driving under the influence of alcohol.

Edgar printed out a copy of the page. Helen folded it and put it in her purse.

Back in the car, headed for home. Helen took off her sweater, balled it up, and placed it between the seat and her lower back to ease the discomfort she was feeling. She settled in and studied the photograph of Cornell Smith. Edgar looked over to her and saw a faint discoloration on her arm where her shirtsleeve had ridden up. He reached over and pushed the sleeve farther up,
and saw that her upper arm was dotted with dime-size smudges. Fingertip-shape bruises. They were now faded to a weak rusty orange color.

Helen jerked away, pulling her sleeve back down, and her shame told him everything.

Anger contorted Edgar’s face. He snatched the photo of Cornell out of Helen’s hand and crumpled it in his fist. He tossed it on the floorboard.

Something on the other side of the street caught Edgar’s attention. He twisted the steering wheel and did a quick U-turn. He pulled the car into a parking space in front of the same pawnshop where Helen had sold the ring and he had later met the detectives.

“Just wait here a minute, okay?”

“Fine. What are you doing?”

“I just need for you to wait here. Will you do that?”

Helen nodded her acquiescence, and Edgar got out of the car.

Helen retrieved the balled-up printout from the floorboard—with the considerable effort of bending over her protruding belly. She uncrumpled the paper and studied the photo, willing her mind to remember more about the night she met Cornell Smith. All she could retrieve were flashes of broken images.

She looked out the window trying to see what Edgar was up to, but the reflection was too strong to see inside the pawnshop.

She directed her attention back to the photo, again willing her mind to remember, but it wasn’t working. She opened the glove box and saw Edgar’s completed Rubik’s Cube, and couldn’t help but smile. She pushed it to the side and found a black ballpoint
pen in what was quite possibly the only well-organized glove box in America.

Lightly at first, Helen stroked the pen over the light hair in Cornell’s mug shot photograph. She liked the effect and began coloring the hair in heavy dark strokes. The results made the man look more like the Cornell she remembered but didn’t jog any additional memories.

She looked around again for any sign of Edgar, but there was none. She smoothed and folded the printout and got out of the car.

From the sidewalk, Helen peered through the window of the pawnshop and saw Edgar standing at the sales counter. He was holding a gun, admiring it. It was huge, looked like a movie prop. Like something Dirty Harry would carry. Edgar nodded in approval and handed the weapon back to the pawnbroker.

A flurry of images swirled through Helen’s mind. Of Edgar the puzzle solver, of Edgar the Christmas tree topper, of Edgar the neat freak. And now this gentle man was buying a gun to perpetrate violence. And, at the heart of it all, the knowledge that it was she who had brought him to this point. She was responsible.

When Helen walked inside, Edgar was filling out paperwork and the pawnbroker was saying, “License, permit, background check. You’re gonna—”

Helen spoke over him in a calm but final voice. “No. No. No.”

She reached over gently but firmly and took the permit application away from Edgar.

“No.”

The creased and drawn-on printout of Cornell’s police blotter photo was taped to a sheet of chart paper over Edgar’s desk. Edgar had started three columns on the chart:

Helen stared at the chart. Charts she could handle, but where would this lead them? Back to the pawnshop for a gun?

She scrolled through the contacts list on her cell phone but remembered that she had deleted that number long ago. It didn’t
matter. She dialed the number from memory. It rang five times, then went to voice mail.

“I need you. I’m not going to drink, but I need you. I need your help. Edgar is… Oh Martha… Edgar… He tried to buy a gun. Edgar. A gun. And I hope you do break people’s fingers. I hope you are a criminal. Please be a criminal and help us—”