Vanishing Acts (5 page)

A minute later she runs out the door and into the woods, Greta bounding off at her heels. We both know enough to let her go.

“This is all my fault,” Fitz says.

“I think Andrew might be a little more to blame.”

He shakes his head. “I didn't know her name ... her real name. After I saw the obituary on Cordelia Hopkins, I started thinking of who might steal an identity, and why. Delia mentioned some weird memory about a lemon tree ... so I narrowed down my search by figuring out where they'd grow.” Fitz starts counting off on his fingers. “Florida. Southern California. Arizona. Only one of them had a well-publicized kidnapping case in 1977. I called the number in the article for the Scottsdale Police, and asked about Bethany Matthews. It took a while to find someone who knew what I was talking about–all of the officers who'd worked on the case had retired. They asked me where I was calling from.”

“And you told them?”

Fitz grimaces. “I had to say I was a journalist, didn't I? The thing is, Eric, I never told them Delia's new name.” He gets up from the chair and faces the window, scanning the woods as if he might be able to see her. “My guess is that someone from Scottsdale heard the words New Hampshire Gazette, did a little digging on the Internet. Andrew's a town councilman, you know how many times his picture's been in the paper? Not to mention Delia's?”

“He hid in plain sight,” I murmur. It seems remarkably fast for a law enforcement agency to have connected the dots–and yet, I know that it's an illusion. A warrant for Andrew's arrest has been sworn out for nearly thirty years; the police just didn't know where he was so they could serve it.

Fitz turns away, his hands in his pockets. “You have to go find her.”

“You go. You're the one who brought in the cops.”

“I know,” Fitz admits. “But I'm not the one she wants.” By the time the end of sixth grade rolled around, boys had mustered up the nerve to ask girls out. This meant absolutely nothing, except that the duo would sit next to each other at lunch in the cafeteria, and occasionally talk on the phone. By this criterion, Delia and I were practically married–we spent far more time together than any couple in the Wexton Middle School–that is, until Fitz officially asked Delia to go out with him.

I knew it meant nothing-rumors about who liked whom flew around like gypsy moths in August–but all the same, I spent too much time wishing that I was Fitz, holding on to Delia's hand when we balanced on the railroad tracks or lying next to her on the damp grass when we tried to look at the solar eclipse through a pinhole in a Shoe box. After a while, Fitz stopped calling me, and then Delia; and I tried to convince myself that I'd never needed either of them.

I went stag to the end-of-school dance. I was listening to the boasts of Donnie DeMaurio, a twelve-year-old who had a mustache and a pack of bootleg cigarettes, when Delia appeared, crying. “Fitz broke up with me,” she said. I couldn't imagine why; later he told me the truth. I'd rather have both of you, he said, in that easy way of his, than just one. But at that moment, Fitz was absent and Delia was so close that the hair on my arms was reaching toward the heat of her. “I guess I could go out with you,” I said.

“You guess you could go out with me?” she repeated. “Gee, thanks for making the sacrifice. Don't do me any favors.”

I knew her well enough to understand that when Delia pushed you away, it was her way of making sure she didn't get shoved first. I grabbed her arm before she could run away. “I would very much like to go out with you,” I said more carefully.

“Is that better?”

“Maybe.”

“So what do we do?” I asked.

She chewed her bottom lip. “We could dance. If you want.” I had never danced with a girl before, and even though Delia and I had grown up skinny-dipping in ponds and sleeping so close in a pitched tent that we had to share each other's air, it felt unreasonably new. My hands skimmed over Delia's spine to settle on her hips. She smelled like peaches, and beneath her knit dress I could feel the thin elastic of her underwear.

She talked for both of us. She talked about how, on the phone one night, Fitz had asked her out, and how she didn't know whether to say yes or no and yes had just slipped out. She talked about how she fully intended to get back her Dwight Evans baseball card, which she had given to Fitz as a way of saying she really liked him. When the song ended, Delia didn't pull away. She stayed there, maybe even moved a tiny bit closer. “You want to keep talking?” I asked.

“No,” she said, smiling into my eyes. “I think I'm done.” When I find her, she is ten feet above my head, in the scarred elbow of an oak tree. Greta sits at the bottom, whining. “Hey,” I say, pushing aside some of the smaller branches and leaves. “You okay?”

Above me, the stars are coming out, a bright-eyed audience. “What if this was all my fault?” Delia asks.

“How could it be?” I reply. 'You don't even remember it happening.“ ”Maybe I do and I've blocked it out. Maybe my father hid that from me, too.“ I hesitate. ”I'm sure he's got an explanation for what happened.“ Delia drops down from the tree, landing like a cat beside me. ”Then why didn't he give it to me?“ she says, her voice striped with scars. ”He had twenty-eight years. Don't you think that's long enough to mention, maybe, that Delia Hopkins is a dead girl from Missouri? You know, 'Delia, honey, can you pass the Cheerios, and did I ever tell you that when you were four I stole you away from your mother?'“ Suddenly, Delia's face goes white. ”Eric,“ she asks, ”do you think I still have a mother?"

“I don't know,” I admit. “We'll find out once we get to Arizona.”

“Arizona?”

“After your father is arraigned on fugitive charges in New Hampshire, he'll be extradited to Arizona. That's where the . . . crime allegedly occurred. If it goes to trial, you'll probably be called as a witness.”

She seems horrified by this. “What if I don't want to be one?”

“You may not have that choice,” I admit.

She takes a step closer to me, and I fold my arms around her. “What if I wasn't meant to grow up here ... like this?” she says, her voice muffled against my shirt.

“What if there was a different cosmic plan for Bethany Matthews?”

“What if there was a different cosmic plan for Delia Hopkins, one that got ruined because of a car crash?” I search my mind frantically for the right thing to say. I try to think of Fitz, of what he would tell me to tell her. “You could have been Bethany Matthews, Delia Hopkins, Cleopatra–it wouldn't matter. And if you'd grown up with a thousand lemon trees in the middle of the desert, with a cactus instead of a Christmas tree and a pet armadillo ... well, then, I would have gone to law school at Arizona State, I guess. I would have defended illegal aliens crossing the border. But we still would have wound up together, Dee. No matter what kind of life I had, you'd be at the end of it.”

She smiles, just a little. “I'm pretty sure I was never Cleopatra.” I drop a kiss on her forehead. “Well,” I reply. “That's a start.” We were fifteen and drunk and in the bell tower of Baker Library at Dartmouth, watching a meteor shower that, the newscasters said, would only be this vivid once in our lifetimes, although that was hard to believe, feeling as we did that we'd live forever.

We played games to pass the time: I Spy, and Twenty Questions. Anyone who didn't get the answer had to chug. By the time our corner of the world turned to face the meteor shower, Fitz was snoring with his mouth open and Delia was having trouble zipping up her sweatshirt. “Here,” I said, and I did it for her, just as a fireball chased the moon across the sky.

Delia watched the midnight show, and I watched her. Sometimes she smiled, or laughed out loud; mostly her mouth just made a wondrous 0 as the night changed before her eyes. When some of the activity died down, I leaned forward until our lips touched.

She drew back immediately, stared hard at me. Then she wrapped her arms around my neck and kissed me back.

I remember that we didn't really know what we were doing, that I felt two sizes too big for my skin, that my heart was beating so hard it moved the denim of my shirt. I remember that for one moment, I believed I was hitchhiking on one of those comets, falling so fast that I'd surely burn away before I ever hit the ground. At nine o'clock the next morning, Delia and I take a seat close to the defense table at the Wexton District Court, It is a rotating habitat for public defenders and hired guns like myself, a new one warming the chair each time the judge calls for a new case. Arraignments are a rubber-stamp process, the prosecutor riffling through a big box of files as defendant after defendant is brought in. We watch a woman get arraigned for stealing a toaster oven from Kmart, a man brought in for violating a restraining order. A third defendant, one I recognize as a hot dog stand vendor in town, has been arrested for the felonious sexual assault of a minor. It reminds me that there are people in this world who have done worse things than Andrew Hopkins.

“Do you know the prosecutor?” Delia whispers.

Ned Floritz was the leader of my AA meeting yesterday, but recovering alcoholics are always in the business of keeping one another's secrets. “I've seen him around,” I say.

When our case is called, Andrew is brought in wearing a bright orange jumpsuit that says grafton county department of corrections on the back. His hands and legs are shackled.

Beside me, Delia gasps; her father's incarceration is, after all, still new to her. I stand up and button my jacket, carry my briefcase down to the defense table. Andrew's eyes roam the courtroom. “Delia!” he yells out, and she stands up.

“Sir,” the bailiff says, “please face front.” I can feel sweat breaking out on my forehead. I have been in court before, but not for a case of this magnitude. Not for a case where I have a personal stake in the outcome.

Beside me, Andrew touches my arm. “Make them take the chains off. I don't want her to see me like this.”

“It's inmate policy in the courtroom,” I answer. “I can't do anything about it.” The judge is a woman relatively new to the bench. She comes from a public defender's background, which is a plus for Andrew, but she is also the mother of three small children. “I have before me a complaint alleging that you are a fugitive from justice with kidnapping contrary to the laws of Arizona. I see that you have an attorney with you, so I'll address my remarks to him. You have two options today. One is to waive extradition and go to Arizona to meet the charge. The other option is to contest extradition and require the State to seek a Governor's Warrant.”

“My client chooses to waive extradition, Your Honor,” I say. “He's looking forward to dealing with this charge quickly.”

The judge nods. “Then bail won't be an issue. I assume you're going to allow us to incarcerate Mr. Hopkins until he can be transferred to Arizona.”

“Actually, Judge, we'd like bail to be set,” I say. The prosecutor is out of his seat like a shot. “Absolutely not, Your Honor!” The judge turns toward him. “Mr. Floritz? Is there something you'd like to add?”

“Your Honor, the two primary considerations for bail are the safety of the community and risk of flight. The defendant is just about the biggest flight risk you could ask for-look at what already happened.”

“Allegedly happened,” I interject. “Mr. Hopkins is a valuable member of the Wexton community. He has served for five years as a town councilman. He's almost single-handedly responsible for the creation of the current senior center, and he has been nothing less than an exemplary parent and grandparent. This isn't a man who's a menace to society, Your Honor. I urge the Court to consider the admirable citizen he has been before rushing to any hasty judgment.” Too late, I realize what I've done wrong. You never, never, ever infer that a judge might be hasty in his or her decision-making; it is like pointing out to a wolf that it has bad breath while it is considering ripping out your carotid. The judge looks coolly at me. “I believe that I have more than adequate information to make a legitimate ruling here ... swift though it may be,.Counselor. I'm setting a one-million-dollar cash-only bail.” She bangs her gavel. “Next case?” The bailiffs haul Andrew out of the courtroom before he even has a chance to ask me what happens next. The seniors erupt in a slow-motion flurry of activity, crying foul and then being shuffled by another bailiff into the hallway. The prosecutor gets up from his seat and walks toward me. “Eric,” he says, “you sure you're ready to get involved in something like this?”

He isn't questioning my legal abilities but my tolerance for stress. Although he's been dry for twenty years, I'm a neophyte. I give him a tight smile. “I've got it under control,” I lie. Recovering alcoholics are good at that, too. I relinquish my table to a public defender who is getting ready for the next arraignment. I'm not looking forward to Delia's disappointment, now that she knows Andrew will have to stay overnight in jail again, that I have already failed. Resigned, I turn to the spot where we were sitting, but she's disappeared. Six years ago I drove my car off the road while I was trying to open a bottle of Stoli and steer with my knees. By some miracle the only casualty was a sugar maple. I walked to a bar, where I had to consume a few drinks before I felt calm enough to call Delia and tell her what had happened. The next week, I found myself waking up in places I had no recollection of going to: the living room of a fraternity on the Dartmouth campus; the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant; the cement divider of the Wilder Dam. It was after one of these benders that I found myself in the backyard at Delia and Andrew's house, asleep in their hammock. What woke me was the sound of crying; Delia was sitting on the ground beside me, shredding pieces of grass with her hands. “I'm pregnant,” she said. My head was swimming underwater, my tongue was as thick as a mossy field, but immediately, I thought: She's mine, now. I stumbled out of the hammock and onto one knee. I tugged the ponytail elastic out of Delia's hair and doubled it up, then reached for her hand. “Delia Hopkins,” I said, “will you marry me?” I slid the makeshift ring onto her finger, and turned up the wattage on my smile. When she didn't answer-just curled up her knees and buried her head against them-I began to feel the butterfly beat of panic in the pit of my stomach. “Delia,” I said, swallowing. “Is it the baby? Do you want to ... to get rid of it?” The thought of a part of me taking root in her was miraculous to me, like finding an orchid growing in the cracks of a broken tenement sidewalk. But was willing to give that up in return for Delia. I would do anything for her.