What Comes Next (3 page)

He reminded himself that right before he pulled the trigger he should call 911 and report a shooting at his house. That would bring anxious policemen to the scene within minutes. He knew he should leave the front door invitingly wide open. These precautions would prevent weeks passing before someone found his body. No decomposition. No smell. Making it all as neat and tidy as possible. There was nothing, he thought, he could do about blood splatter. That couldn’t be helped. But the police were professionals, and he figured they were used to that sort of thing. After all, he wouldn’t be the first aging professor in the community to decide that a loss of the ability to think or reason or understand was a sufficient reason to end his life. He just couldn’t offhand recall any other suicidal colleagues. This bothered him. He was sure there were some.

For a moment he wondered if he should write a poem about his planning: “Last Acts Before the Last Act.”

That’s a good title,
he thought.

Adrian rocked back and forth, as if the motion could loosen thoughts stuck within him in blackened places he could no longer reach. There might be a few other small pre-suicidal tasks he needed to take care of—paying a few stray bills, shutting off the heating system or the hot water heater, locking up the garage, taking out the garbage. He found himself going over a minor checklist in his mind, a little like a typical suburbanite greeting Saturday morning chores. The odd notion occurred to him that he seemed to be afraid of making a mess of death and leaving it behind for others to clean up far more than he was scared of actually killing himself.

Cleaning up a mess of death
. Memories tried to burst past the wall of his organization. More than once he had to do precisely that. He fought off images of sadness that echoed within him and focused hard on the task at hand.

Adrian looked over at the pictures surrounding him on the bed and perched on a nearby table. Parents, brother, wife, and son.
Be there soon,
he thought. Distant sister, nieces, friends, and colleagues.
Meet you later
. He seemed to speak directly to the people looking out at him. Lots of grins and smiles, he realized: happy moments at barbecues, weddings, and vacations—all fixed in film.

He looked around quickly. The other memories were about to disappear forever. The awful times that had come far too frequently over the years of his life.
Pull the trigger and all that disappears
. He dropped his eyes and saw that he was still tightly gripping the pink hat.

He started to put it aside and reach for the weapon, but he stopped.
It will confuse people,
he thought.
Some cop will wonder,
What the hell was he doing with a pink Red Sox cap?
It might send them on some inexplicable murder mystery tangent
. He wanted to avoid any suspicions.

He held the hat up in front of him again, directly in his view, like one would hold a jewel up to light to try and see the imperfections within.

The rough cotton beneath his fingers felt warm. He traced the distinctive
B
. The pink color had faded a little and the sweatband was frayed. That would happen only if the blond girl had worn it frequently, especially throughout the winter, preferring it to a warmer ski hat. This told him that the cap—for whatever hidden reason—was a favorite article of clothing.

Which meant to him that she wouldn’t have abandoned it by the side of the road.

What had he seen?

Adrian took a deep breath and revisited each impression from earlier that evening, turning them over in his mind’s eye in much the same way he was rubbing the baseball cap with his hands.
The girl with the determined look. The woman behind the wheel. The man at her side. The brief hesitation as they pulled next to the teenager. The rapid acceleration and disappearance. The hat left behind.

What happened?

Flight? Escape? Maybe it was one of those cult or drug interventions, where the do-gooder types swept in and then harangued their target in a cheap rented motel room until the poor kid admitted to a change in attitude or belief or addiction.

He did not think that was what he saw.

He told himself:
Go over it again. Every detail, before they are all lost from your memory.

That was what he was afraid of: that everything he remembered and everything he deduced would dissipate in the shortest of orders like a morning fog after the sunlight starts to eat away at it. He got up, walked to a bureau, and found a pen and small leather-bound notebook. Usually, he had used the thick, elegant white pages to keep notes for poems, writing down the odd thought or combination of words or rhymes that might lend themselves to development later. His wife had given him the notebook, and when he touched its smooth surface it reminded him of her.

So he played it all out again, this time jotting down a few details on a blank page.

The girl
… She was looking straight ahead and he didn’t think she had even seen him when he drove past her. She was in the midst of something. That he could tell, just from the direction of her eyes and the pace of her walk. She had
a plan
—and it was shutting out everything else.

The woman and the man
… He had pulled into his driveway before the white van approached, he was sure of it.
Did they see him in his car?
No. Unlikely.

The brief hesitation
… They had seemed to shadow the girl, even if just for a few feet.
It was as if they were sizing her up. What must have happened then?
Did they talk? Was she
invited
into the van? Maybe they knew each other and this was just the friendly offer of a ride. Nothing more. Nothing less.

No. They departed far too rapidly.

What did he see as they went around the corner?
A Massachusetts license plate: QE2D
…

He tried to recall the other two digits but could not. He wrote down those he remembered. But what he really remembered was the sharp sound of the van accelerating.

And then the hat was left behind.

He had difficulty formulating the word
kidnap
in his imagination, and even when he did he told himself that this was a conclusion that simply
had
to be foolish. That sort of thing did not happen in the world he knew. He lived in a place devoted to reason, learning, and logic, with distinct sidelines of art and beauty. He was a member of a world of schools and knowledge.
Kidnap
—this ugly word belonged in some darker place unfamiliar in his neighborhood. He tried to remember
any
crimes that had taken place within the quiet rows of trim suburban homes that were spread out around him. Surely, he told himself, there had to be
some,
the hidden sorts of domestic abuses and disruptive teenage lives that were the stuff of television dramas. Sexual infidelities by adults and high school drug, booze, and sex parties had to have taken place in relative obscurity within blocks. Maybe folks cheated on their taxes or ran shady business practices—he could imagine those sorts of crimes taking place behind the veneer of middle-class life. But he could not ever recall hearing a gunshot or even seeing flashing police lights on any street nearby.

Those things happened elsewhere. They were confined to breathless evening news reports from nearby cities or to headlines in the morning paper.

Adrian looked down at the Ruger pistol. His brother’s legacy. No one knew he owned it. He had never registered it, aware peripherally that his faculty friends at the college would find his possession of the weapon deeply shocking. It was a no-nonsense, ugly weapon that left little debate as to what its purpose was. He wasn’t a hunter or an NRA type. He was contemptuous of the right-wing-get-a-gun-to-defend-yourself-from-terrorists mind-set. He was sure that over the years his wife had forgotten that it was in the house, if she had ever really known. He had never spoken of it with her, even after her accident when she had hung on but looked to him with longing for release.

If he’d been brave, he thought, he would have indulged her with the weapon’s finality. Now, that same question and answer were left to him, and he knew he was a coward for using it in the same way it had been used once before. He wondered for a second if when he placed the barrel to his temple or into his mouth and pulled the trigger it would be only the second time the weapon had ever been fired.

It had a black, metallic skin that seemed heartless. When he hefted the weapon in his hand it felt heavy and ice cold.

Adrian pushed the weapon aside and turned back to the hat. It seemed to speak as loudly at that moment as the Ruger did. It was like being caught in the middle of an argument between two inanimate objects, as they debated back and forth over what he should do.

He paused, taking a deep breath. Things seemed to grow quiet in the room, as if there had been some noisy racket associated with self-murder that was abruptly silenced.

The least I can do,
he thought,
is make a modest inquiry
. The hat seemed to be demanding that small amount from him.

He picked up his phone and dialed 911. He was aware there was a little irony in the idea that he was calling first about someone he didn’t know, and that later he would make more or less the same call about himself.

“Police, Fire, and Rescue. What is your emergency?” The dispatcher’s voice had a practiced calm to it.

“It’s not really an emergency,” Adrian said. He wanted to make sure that his voice didn’t waver or sound hesitant, like the old man he thought he’d suddenly become in the hours after visiting the neurologist. He wanted to sound forceful and alert. “I am calling because I think I may have witnessed an
event
that might have some police interest.”

“What sort of event?”

He tried to picture the person on the other end of the phone. The dispatcher had a way of clipping off each word sharply so that it was unmistakable in meaning. The tone of his voice had a toughened, no-nonsense timbre. It was as if the few words the dispatcher used were dressed in tight high-collared uniforms.

“I saw a white panel van… There was this teenage girl, Jennifer, it’s written in her hat but I don’t know her, although she must live in the neighborhood somewhere and one second she was there, then the next, she was gone.”

Adrian wanted to slap himself. All his intentions of being reasonable and forceful had instantly evaporated in a sea of choppy, ill-conceived, and deeply rushed descriptions. He wondered,
Is that the disease punishing my language skills?

“Yes, sir. And you believe you witnessed what exactly?”

The telephone line
beeped
. He was being recorded.

“Have you had any reports of missing children in the Hills section of town?” he asked.

“No current reports. No calls today,” the dispatcher said.

“Nothing?”

“No, sir. Very quiet in town all afternoon. I will take your information and forward it to the detective bureau should there be a later report. They will follow up if necessary.”

“I guess I was mistaken,” Adrian said. He hung up before the dispatcher had time to ask for his name and address.

None of it made sense to him.

He knew what he’d seen and it was
wrong.

Adrian looked up and out his window. Night had dropped and lights were clicking on up and down the block. Dinnertime, he thought. Families gathering. Talk about what happened that day, at work, at school. All very normal and expected. He suddenly burst out loud with a question that resonated in the small bedroom, as if it could echo in that small space like it would if he’d shouted above a canyon. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do now.”

“But of course you do, dear,” his wife insisted from the bed beside him.

4

The call came in shortly before 11 p.m. but by that time Detective Terri Collins was already thinking hard about heading to bed. Her two children were asleep in their bedroom, homework done, read to and tucked in. She had just made that last maternal visit of the night—where she poked her head in through the doorway, letting the wan light from the hallway toss just enough illumination onto the faces of the two children so that she could tell they slept soundly. No nightmares. Even breathing. Not even a sniffle that might signal an oncoming cold. There were some single parents she knew in the support group she occasionally frequented who could hardly bear to tear themselves away from sleeping children. It was as if during the night they were all vulnerable. All the evils that had created their circumstances seemed to have freer rein after sunset. A time that should have been devoted to rest and renewal had devolved into one filled with uncertainty, worry, and fears.

But all was right this night, she thought.

All was safe.

Everything was normal.

She left the door ajar just an inch or two and started to pad down to the bathroom when she heard the phone ring in the kitchen.

She glanced at a wall clock as she hurried to answer.
Too late to be anything but trouble,
she thought.

It was the night dispatcher at police headquarters.

“Detective, I have a distraught woman on the other line. I believe you’ve handled calls from her before. Apparently, we have another runaway.”

Detective Terri Collins knew immediately who it was that the dispatcher had on hold.
Maybe this time Jennifer actually got away
… But this was unprofessional and getting
away
was only callous shorthand for trading a familiar set of terrors for a wholly different and potentially worse type.

“I’ll be with you in a moment,” Terri said. She slipped easily from mother mode into police detective. One of her strengths was her ability to separate the different dimensions of her life into neat, orderly groups. Too many years of too much upheaval had created in her a driving need for simplicity and organization.