The Wrong Man (9 page)

6

A Taste of What Was to Come

S
he waited until midday, unable to move from her bed, until sunlight came pouring through the windows and the city streets beyond her apartment walls hummed and buzzed reassuringly. She spent a few moments staring out through a streaked pane of glass, as if to tell herself that with all the normal ebb and flow of another typical day, nothing much could be out of order. She let her eyes follow first one person, then another, as people walked up the sidewalk into her field of vision. She did not recognize anyone, and yet, everyone was familiar. They all fit into easily identifiable types. The businessman. The student. The waitress. There seemed to be a world of purpose just beyond her reach. People moved about with determination and destination.

Ashley felt like an island in their midst. She wished for an instant that she had a roommate or a best friend. Someone to confide in, who would sit on the other side of the bed, sipping tea, ready to laugh or cry or voice concern at the most modest of prompts. She knew a million people in Boston, but none she would trust with a burden, and certainly not a Michael O’Connell burden. She had a hundred friends, but no Friend. She turned to her desk, littered with half-finished papers, art history texts, a laptop computer, and some CDs. She rummaged around until she came up with a small piece of scrap paper with some numbers on it.

Then, with a single deep breath, Ashley dialed Michael O’Connell’s phone number.

It rang twice before he picked it up.

“Yes?”

“Michael, it’s Ashley.”

She let silence fill the line. She wished that she had mapped out what she was going to say in forceful phrases and unequivocal statements. But, instead, she let emotions overcome her.

“I don’t want you to call me anymore,” she blurted out.

He said nothing.

“When you called this morning, I was asleep. It scared the hell out of me.”

She waited for an apology. An excuse, perhaps, or an explanation. None came.

“Please, Michael.” It sounded a great deal as if she were asking him for a favor.

He did not reply.

She stammered on, “Look, it was just one night. That’s all. We had some fun, and a few drinks, and it went a bit farther than it should have, although I don’t regret it, that’s not what I mean. I’m sorry if you misunderstood my feelings. Can’t we just part as friends? Go our own ways.”

She could hear his breathing on the other end of the line, but no words.

“So,” she continued, aware that everything she said was sounding more and more lame, increasingly pathetic, “don’t send me any more letters, especially like the one you sent the other week. That was you, wasn’t it? It had to be. I know you have a busy life and a lot on your mind, and I’m wrapped up with my work and trying to get this graduate school thing going, and I just don’t have time for a serious relationship now. I know you’ll understand. I just need my space. I mean, we’re both involved in so many different things, it’s just not the right time for me, and I bet it’s not really the right time for you. You can see that, can’t you?”

She let this question hang in the air, surrounded by his silence. She grasped at the quiet as if it were an acquiescence on his part.

“I really appreciate your listening to me, Michael. And I wish you the best, really, I do. And maybe, sometime in the future, we can be better friends. But not right now, okay? I’m sorry if this disappoints you. But if you really love me like you say, then you’ll understand I need to be on my own and can’t be tied down right now. You never can tell what the future might hold, but now, in the present, I just can’t handle it, okay? I’d like to end this as friends, okay?”

She could hear his breathing on the other end of the line. In and out. Regular, unhurried.

“Look,” she said, exasperation and a little desperation creeping into her words, “we don’t really know each other. It was just once and we were both a little drunk, right? How can you say you love me? How can you say these things? We’re perfect for each other? That’s crazy. You can’t live without me? That makes no sense. None. I just want you to leave me alone, okay? Look, you’ll find someone else, someone who’s just right for you, I know. But it’s not me. Please, Michael, just leave me alone. All right?”

Michael O’Connell didn’t say a word. He simply laughed. It came across the phone line as something alien and distant when nothing she’d said was in the smallest way funny or even ironic. It chilled her completely.

And then he hung up the telephone.

For a few seconds she stood, staring down at the receiver in her hand, wondering whether the conversation had actually happened. For a moment she wasn’t even sure that he
had
been on the other end of the line, but then, she remembered his one word, and that was unmistakable, even if he was almost a stranger. She carefully hung up the phone and looked around the apartment wildly, as if expecting someone to jump out at her. She could hear the muted sounds of traffic, but it did little to lessen the sensation of total and complete solitude that crept over her.

Ashley slumped down on the edge of her bed, suddenly exhausted, tears welling up in the corners of her eyes. She felt incredibly small.

She had no real grasp of the situation, other than the feeling that something was just starting to pick up speed, moving dangerously forward—not yet out of control, but on the verge. She dabbed at her eyes and told herself to get a grip on her emotions. She tried to layer a sense of toughness and determination over the residue of helplessness.

Ashley shook her head hard. “You should have planned what you were going to say,” she said out loud. Hearing her own voice bounce around the narrow space of her small apartment unsettled her. She had tried to come across as forceful—at least, that was what she had wanted—but instead had seemed weak, pleading, whining, all the things that she thought she wasn’t. She forced herself up off the edge of the bed. “God damn it to hell,” she muttered, adding, “What a goddamn fucking mess.” She followed this with a wild torrent of obscenities, spewing every nasty, harsh, and inappropriate word she could recall into the still air around her, a waterfall of frustrated anger. Then she tried to reassure herself. “He’s just a creep,” she said loudly. “You’ve known creeps before.”

This, Ashley knew inwardly, was untrue. Still, she felt better hearing her own voice speaking with determination and ferocity. She searched around, found a towel, and walked purposefully into her small bathroom. Within a few seconds, she had the shower running hot, and she’d stripped off her clothes. As she stepped under the steaming stream of water, she thought to herself that the conversation with Michael O’Connell made her feel dirty, and she scrubbed her skin red, as if trying to remove some unwanted smell, or deep stain, that lingered despite all her efforts.

When she stepped from the shower, she looked up into the mirror and dabbed away some of the steam from the glass, looking deep into her own eyes. Make a plan, she told herself. Ignore the creep and he’ll just go away. She snorted and flexed the muscles in her arms. She let her eyes linger over her body, as if measuring the curve of her breasts, her flat stomach, her toned legs. She was fit, trim, and good-looking, she thought. She believed herself strong.

Ashley walked into her bedroom and got dressed. She had the urge to wear something new, something different, something that wasn’t familiar. She shoved her computer into the backpack, then checked to see if she had cash in her wallet. Her plan for the day was more or less the same as always: some studying in the library wing of the museum amid the stacks of art history books, before heading over to her job. She had more than one paper that needed massaging, and she thought to herself that immersing herself in texts and prints and reproductions of great visions would help get her mind off Michael O’Connell.

Certain that she had everything she needed, she grabbed her keys and thrust open the door to the corridor.

Then she stopped.

She looked down and felt a sudden, awful coldness creep through her. Ice seemed to choke her throat.

Taped to the wall opposite her door were a dozen roses.

Dead roses. Wilted and decrepit.

As she stared, a bloodred petal almost blackened by age dropped off and fluttered to the floor, as if driven there not by a breath of wind, but by the mere force of Ashley’s gaze. She fixed her eyes helplessly on the display.

Scott sat at his desk in his small office at the college, twiddling a pencil between the fingers of his right hand, pondering how one intrudes on the life of one’s nearly grown-up child without being obvious. If Ashley were still a teenager, or younger, he could have used a natural blustery forcefulness, demanding her to tell him what he wanted, even if he caused tears and insults and all sorts of standard parent-child dynamics. Ashley was right in that half age between youth and adulthood, and he was at a loss precisely how to proceed. And every second that he delayed doing something, his sense of concern doubled.

He needed to be subtle, but efficient.

Surrounding him were history texts on shelves and a cheaply framed reproduction of the Declaration of Independence. At least three photographs of Ashley rode the corner of his desk and the wall across from where he sat. The most striking was of her in a high school basketball game, her face intense, her red-blond ponytail flying, as she leapt up and seized the ball from two opponents. He had one other photo, but he kept it in the top drawer of his desk. It was a picture taken of him when he was just twenty years old, just a little younger than his daughter was now. He was sitting on an ammunition box, next to a glistening stack of shells, right behind the 125-millimeter howitzer. His helmet was at his feet, and he was smoking a cigarette, which, given the proximity of so much explosive ordnance, was probably a poor idea. He had an exhausted, vacant look on his face. Scott sometimes thought the photo was probably his only real remembrance of the time he’d spent in the war. He had had it framed, then kept it secret. He did not even think that he’d ever shown the picture to Sally, even when Ashley was due and they thought they were still in love. For a moment, he wondered if he could remember a time when Sally had ever asked him about his time in the war. Scott shifted about in his seat. Thinking about his past made him nervous. He liked considering other people’s history, not his own.

Scott rocked back and forth.

In his imagination, he began to replay the words of the letter. As he did so, he had an idea.

One of the both good and bad qualities that Scott possessed was an inability to throw away cards and slips of paper with names and phone numbers. A slight pack-rat-type obsession. It took him nearly a half hour of rummaging about in desk drawers and file cabinets, but he finally found what he was seeking. He hoped the cell phone number was still accurate.

On the third ring, he heard a slightly familiar voice. “Hello?”

“Is this Susan Fletcher?”

“Yes, who is this?”

“Susan, this is Scott Freeman, Ashley’s father…you remember from freshman and sophomore year…”

There was a momentary hesitation, then a brightening on the other end. “Mr. Freeman, of course, it’s been a couple of years.”

“Time really passes fast, doesn’t it?”

“Sure does. Gosh, how’s Ashley? I haven’t seen her in months and months.”

“Actually, that’s why I’m calling.”

“Is there a problem?”

Scott hesitated. “There might be.”

Susan Fletcher was a whirlwind sort of young woman, always balancing a half dozen ideas and plans between her head, her desktop, and her computer. She was small, dark-haired, intense almost to a fault, and endlessly energetic. She had been scooped up by First Boston as soon as she had graduated and worked in their financial planning division.

She stood in front of her cubicle window, staring out, watching as airplane after airplane descended into Logan Airport. She had been a little unsettled by her conversation with Scott Freeman and wasn’t precisely sure how to proceed, although she had reassured him that she would take charge of the situation.

Susan liked Ashley, although it had been nearly two years since they’d actually spoken. They had been tossed together as roommates freshman year in college, a little astonished at how different they were, then even more astonished when they discovered they got along quite well. They’d stuck together for a second year, before each had moved off campus. This had resulted in significantly less contact, though when they had managed to get together, it had been marked by a singular sense of comfort and laughter. They now shared little in common; if she used the bridesmaid’s test—would she choose Ashley to be in her wedding party?—the answer was no. But she felt a great deal of affection for her onetime roommate. At least, she thought she did.

She glanced over toward the telephone.

For some reason that she couldn’t quite determine, she was uneasy about what Ashley’s father had asked of her. On the simplest level, it was more than a little like spying. On the other hand, it could be nothing more than some misguided paternal concern. She could make a phone call, be reassured, call Scott Freeman back, and everyone could get on with whatever they were doing. And the added benefit would be getting in touch with a friend, which was rarely a bad idea.