The Wrong Man (61 page)

I didn’t answer. I thought she wasn’t really looking for a response, but she persisted.

“I mean, how would you characterize it? You’re the writer. Was this wise? Were they taking steps that were difficult, but necessary? Or were they acting foolishly? What were the odds of success? Or of failure? They were all such
reasonable
people, about to embark on the least reasonable of courses.”

I said nothing as she stifled a sob.

“I have a name for you,” she said quickly, taking me by surprise. “It will, I suspect, bring you a little closer.”

I waited, pen ready, saying nothing, imagining everything.

“The end,” she said. “Can you see it? Let me put it to you this way: do you think they were prepared for the unexpected?”

“No. Who ever truly is?”

She laughed, but then the sound seemed to turn to tears. It was hard to tell over the phone line.

41

Unfolding

S
ally looked across at Hope. They were in their bedroom, and only a single bedside table lamp threw wan yellow light across the room.

“I can’t let you do this,” Sally said.

“I’m not sure you have a choice,” Hope said with a small shrug. “I believe the decision has been made. And anyway, it’s probably the least dangerous part of the whole enterprise.” This was a lie, but how much of one, Hope was unsure.

“Enterprise?”

“For lack of a better word.”

Sally shook her head. “A bomb goes off in a marketplace, and we call it
collateral damage.
A surgery goes wrong, we call it
complications.
A soldier gets killed, he becomes a
casualty.
Seems to me that we live on euphemisms.”

“And what about us?” Hope asked. “What word would you choose for the two of us?”

Sally frowned. She walked over to a mirror. Once upon a time she had been beautiful. Once upon a time she had been vibrant. She barely recognized the person staring back at her. “I guess the two of us don’t know what the next day will bring.
Uncertainty.
There’s a word.”

Hope felt a crease of emotion. “You could say you loved me.”

“I do. It’s just myself that I no longer love.”

They were quiet while Sally looked down at her sheets of paper.

“We do this, you know, and everything will be different.”

“I thought the point was to restore everything to the same as it was before.”

“Both,” Sally said stiffly. “I think it will be both.”

She picked up a handwritten series of instructions from the top of the pile. “This has to go to Ashley and Catherine. Do you want to come with me when I speak with them? Actually, no, don’t. If you’re not there, they can’t ask you any questions.”

“I’ll wait for you here.” Hope lay back on the bed, crawling beneath the comforter, feeling a shiver run down her back.

Sally found Ashley and Catherine in Ashley’s room.

“I have some requests for you guys. Can you do the things listed here—it’s not too much—without asking any questions? I need to know.”

Catherine took the list from Sally’s hand, read it through rapidly, then handed it over to Ashley.

“I think we can do that,” she said.

“I wrote out a script and I’m giving you a disposable cell phone that I’d like you to lose after you contact him,” Sally said. “You can ad-lib, of course, but you need to get the main point across. Do you see that?”

Ashley stared at the words on the page and nodded. “Do you think—”

“Sounds like the start of a question,” Sally said with a wry smile. “The point is, you must, I repeat, you must, sell O’Connell on this trip. He has to be made to do this. And, it seems to all of us, anger and jealousy and perhaps a little indecision is precisely the concoction that will encourage him. If you can find a better set of words, by all means use them. But the end result absolutely must be the same. Do you get that? Hope, your father, and I will be counting on that. Can you act this part, Ashley, honey? Because much will ride on your powers of persuasion.”

“Much of what?” she asked.

“Ah, another question. And it won’t get answered. See there at the bottom. Bunch of phone numbers. I don’t expect you to be able to memorize them all, but it is essential that by the end of the day, this paper, and everything else, be destroyed. That’s it for now.”

“That’s it?”

“You’re being asked to play a part. Just like you requested. But what the final act is, you are not being told. And what you are being asked to do limits, shall we say, your
exposure.
Catherine, I’m counting on you to see this through. And to accomplish the other elements on that list.”

“I don’t know that I like this,” Catherine said. “I don’t know that I like acting in the dark.”

“Well, we’re all in uncharted territory here. But I need to be one hundred percent sure about our roles.”

“We will do what you ask. Although I don’t see—”

“That’s the point. You don’t see.”

Sally paused in the doorway. She looked over at Catherine, then to her daughter. “I wonder if you understand how much people love you,” she said cautiously. “And what people might be willing to do for you.”

Ashley didn’t reply, other than to nod her head.

“Of course,” Catherine injected, “the same might be said for Michael O’Connell, which is why we’re all here.”

Scott sat in the Porsche and dialed O’Connell’s father on the cell phone that Sally had provided for him. The line rang three times before the man picked it up.

“Mr. O’Connell?” Scott said with a businesslike tone.

“Who’s this?” The words were slightly slurred. A two-beer, maybe three, tone.

“This would be Mr. Smith, Mr. O’Connell.”

“Who?” A momentary confusion.

“Mr. Jones, if you prefer.”

O’Connell’s father laughed. “Oh, yeah, hey, sure. Hey, that e-mail you gave me didn’t work. I tried it and it came back undeliverable.”

“A slight change in procedures precipitated by necessity, I assure you. I apologize.”

Scott assumed that the only real reason that O’Connell’s father had a computer in the first place was to easily access pornographic websites.

“Let me give you a cell phone number.” He quickly read off the number.

“Okay, got it. But I ain’t heard shit from my boy, and I’m not expecting to.”

“Mr. O’Connell, I have every indication that things might change. I believe that you might hear from him. And, if so, please call that number immediately, as we discussed previously. My client’s interest in speaking with your son has, shall I say, increased in recent days. His need has, shall we say, grown more urgent. Therefore, as you can easily see, his sense of obligation to you, if you were to make that call, would be substantially more than I initially guessed. Do you understand exactly what I’m saying?”

O’Connell hesitated, then said, “Yeah. I get lucky, the kid shows up, and it’s gonna turn out even better for me. But like I say, I ain’t heard from him and I ain’t likely to.”

“Well, we can always hope. For everyone’s sakes,” Scott said as he disconnected the line. He leaned his head back and reached for the electric window switch. He felt as if he were choking. He was almost overcome with nausea, but when he tried to vomit, he could only cough dryly.

He breathed in rapidly and looked down at the yellow sheet of paper that Sally had given him, with its list of tasks. There was something deeply terrible about her ability to organize, and to think with mathematical precision about, something as difficult as they were about to do. For a moment, he could feel his temperature rising again, and a vile, bilious taste in his mouth.

All his life, Scott believed, he had performed on the periphery of importance. He had gone to war because he knew it was the defining moment of his generation, but then he had stepped back and kept himself safe. His education, his teaching, were all about helping students, but never himself. His marriage had been a humiliating disaster with the sole exception of Ashley. And now, here he was in middle age churning his way through the days of his life, and this threat was the first moment when he was being asked to do something truly unique, something outside all the careful boundaries and limitations he had placed on his life. It was one thing to act like a boisterous father and say, “I’d kill that guy,” when there was really little chance of that happening. Now that their plan to cause a death was in place and starting to grind its gears inexorably forward, he wavered. He wondered whether he could do more than merely lie.

Lying, he thought. That I’m good at. Plenty of experience.

Again he looked at the list. Words were not going to be enough, he knew.

Another wave of nausea threatened his stomach, but he fought it off, put the car in gear, and headed first for the hardware store. He knew, later, perhaps at midnight, he had to make a trip to the airport. He did not expect to sleep much in the hours to come.

It was midmorning, and Catherine and Ashley were the only people remaining in the house. Sally had departed, dressed as she would for her office, other clothing stuffed into her briefcase. Hope, as well, had left the house as if nothing were out of the ordinary, her backpack thrown jauntily over her shoulder. Neither of the two women had said anything to Ashley and Catherine about what the day held.

And both Catherine and Ashley had seen a furtiveness in their eyes.

If Sally and Hope had slept much the night before, it was lost in their tense gestures and short-tempered words. Still, they had both moved with a singleness of purpose that had almost set Ashley back. She had never seen either of the two women behaving with such steel-eyed and iron movement.

Catherine came in, breathing hard. “Something is clearly afoot, dear.” She held her yellow legal paper with instructions in her hand.

“That’s putting it mildly,” Ashley said. “God damn it. I can’t stand being outside, trying to look in.”

“We need to follow the plan. Whatever it is.”

“When has any plan that my parents have come up with ever really worked out?” Ashley said, although she realized she sounded a little like a petulant teenager.

“I don’t know about that. But Hope generally does exactly what she says she’s going to do. She’s as solid as a rock.”

Ashley nodded. “Thick as a brick. After the divorce, my dad used to play that for me on his tape deck and we would dance around the living room. Common ground was hard to find, so he would start blasting all his sixties rock and roll. Jethro Tull. The Stones. The Dead. The Who. Hendrix. Joplin. He taught me the Frug and the Watusi and the Freddy.” Ashley suddenly looked out the window, unaware that her father had recalled the same memory days earlier. “I wonder if he and I will ever dance again. I always thought we would, you know, just the one time, when I got married, when everyone was watching. He would just swoop in and we’d do a turn or two and everyone would clap. Long white dress for me. Tuxedo for him. When I was little, the only thing I wanted was to fall in love. Not a sad, angry mess, like my mother and father. Something more like Hope and my mother, except there would be a really, really good-looking, smart guy involved. And you know, when I would say this to Hope, she was always the first to tell me how great it would be. We would laugh and imagine wedding dresses and flowers and all the little-girl things.” Ashley stepped back. “And now, the first man to say he loves me and truly mean it is a nightmare.”

“Life is strange,” Catherine said. “We have to trust them that they know what they’re doing.”

“You think they do?”

Catherine saw that in Ashley’s right hand she held the revolver.

“If I get the damn chance…” Ashley said.

Then she pointed at the list. “All right. Act one. Scene one. Enter Ashley and Catherine, stage right. What’s our opening line?”

Catherine looked down at her list. “First thing is the trickiest. We have to make sure that O’Connell isn’t here. I guess we’re taking that walk outside.”

“Then what?” Ashley asked.

Catherine looked down at the paper. “Then it’s your big moment. It’s the bit your mother underlined three times. Are you ready?”