What Comes Next (30 page)

She steered the car to a stop in front of his house.

“Door-to-door service,” she said.

“Thank you,” Adrian said as he exited. “Perhaps you will call me with any information you might acquire…”

“Professor, leave the police work to me. If there is something I think you can help with, I’ll be in touch.”

She thought the old man looked crestfallen.

Jennifer is gone,
she thought,
and he blames himself.

There is a distinction between the police—who find the deepest tragedies to be a part of their daily routine—and the people who feel they have been made special by the sudden engagement with a crime. It is so beyond their ordinary existence that it not only fascinates but can be obsessive. But to a cop like Terri it was nothing more than normal. Tragic, but normal.

Adrian stepped away from the car and watched as it disappeared down the road.

“She’s a good cop,” Brian said. “But she’s limited. The super-clever, innately intuitive, quasi-intellectual detective is a trick of mystery writers. Cops are really straightforward problem solvers. Tic-tac-toe, not ‘The Lady or the Tiger.’”

Adrian trudged toward the front door. “Was that you in the house?” he asked.

“Of course,” Brian admitted. He sounded coy, as if inviting another question. Adrian turned to his dead brother. It was lawyer Brian, fiddling with his silk tie, working the tight crease in his two-thousand-dollar suit. Brian looked up. “You learned something.”

“But the detective said—”

“Come on, Audie, from square one this hasn’t been about finding someone culpable. At least, not yet. It’s about finding where to look for Jennifer. The only way to do that is to imagine who took her. And why.”

Adrian nodded. “Yes.”

“And that sure as hell isn’t the way a nice little college town detective thinks, even if she seems pretty competent.”

This seemed true to Adrian. It was chilly. He wondered where the warmth of spring was hiding. The air seemed deceptive, as if it might promise one thing and deliver something different. Untrustworthy time of year, he thought.

“Audie!”

He turned back to Brian. “It’s getting harder,” he said. “It’s like every hour, every day, a little more of me slips away.”

“That’s why we’re here.”

“I think I’m too sick.”

“Hell, Audie,” Brian laughed. “I’m
dead
and that’s not slowing me down.”

Adrian smiled.

“What did you see in the creep’s house?”

“An old woman who suffers…” What did he
see?

“I saw a man who acted compliant, as if he had nothing to hide, who probably wants to hide everything.”

Brian grinned and clapped his brother on the back.

“What does that mean?”

“It means I missed something.”

Brian put his hand to his forehead, right to the spot where he must have placed the barrel of the gun that Adrian now had inside on his bureau top. He made a shooting motion but didn’t seem to think this was ironic.

“I think we both know what to do,” Brian said.

Adrian scrunched down in his car seat, hoping that his prior visit hadn’t made Mark Wolfe more alert to the idea that someone might be watching him. There were morning shadows carving out spots of shade where the rising sun was blocked by trees just starting to fill out with leaves. The world outside his window seemed to Adrian to be not quite naked, but not clothed either. Sometimes he thought the change in seasons had moments where some natural force was awaiting permission, a go-ahead, to gather momentum and turn the day from winter to spring.

He did not know how many changes he had left. Nor did he know how much longer he would be able to perceive them.

He shifted in his seat, to ask Brian, but his brother was no longer with him. He wondered why he couldn’t conjure up his hallucinations when he needed them. It would be reassuring to have someone to speak with and he wished his brother’s confident tones would help his own resolve.

He thought what he intended to do was borderline illegal. If it wasn’t against the law, it ought to be. Immoral, as well, which his brother the big-time lawyer would be particularly helpful with. Lawyers were always more comfortable with moral shades of gray.

“Brian?”

Silence. He expected this.

He peered up over the lip of the doorsill. Mark Wolfe should be coming out soon, he told himself, as he shivered.

He thought about his brother. When they were little it had always surprised him that Brian was so fearless. If Adrian and his friends were doing anything—swimming, playing ball, making trouble—Brian was always tagging along, and first to volunteer for whatever mischief was in store. Adrian remembered a moment where they had been called on the carpet by their parents. After being admonished, Brian had been sent off to his room. He had been called out further.
You’re supposed to watch out for your little brother
and
Adrian, how could you let him
… He had been unable to explain that even with their difference in age it was Brian who seemed to be the leader.
Backwards,
he thought.
Our growing up was backwards.
But then, he said out loud, “But that still doesn’t tell me why you shot yourself.”

Adrian thought that everything in his life was a mystery except his work. Why did Cassie love him? Why did Tommy die? What was wrong with Brian that he hadn’t been able to see what he was going to do?

He thought his disease had one thing going for it. All these questions and all the sadness that had stalked him were going to disappear in a fog of loss. He breathed out.
I’m dead already,
he thought.

He heard a car door shut.

A quick glance and he saw Mark Wolfe pulling out of his driveway, just as he had the day before. The sex offender drove off.

Adrian looked down at his watch. It had been a gift from his wife on their twenty-fifth anniversary. Waterproof—although he rarely went into the water. Shockproof—although he never dropped it. A lifetime battery—
Well,
he said to himself,
pretty good chance it will still keep time after I’m gone.

Adrian planned to wait fifteen minutes. The second hand was almost hypnotic as it swept relentlessly around the clock face.

When he was certain that Mark Wolfe had headed off to his job at the home store, Adrian exited his car and walked quickly up to the trim house.

He knocked on the door loudly, then pushed a doorbell buzzer.

When the door cracked open and the slightly vacant eyes of the mother peered around the edge, Adrian stepped up.

“Marks not here,” she said immediately.

“That’s okay,” Adrian replied. He pushed against the door insistently. “He told me to come and spend some time with you.”

“He did?” Confusion. Adrian took advantage. He thought he knew the woman’s disease better than he knew his own.

“Of course. We’re old friends. You remember now, don’t you?”

He didn’t wait for an answer. He just pushed his way into the house and immediately went to the living room, standing almost in the same spot as he had the night before.

“I don’t remember you,” she said. “And Mark doesn’t have many friends.”

“We spoke before.”

“When?”

“Yesterday. You remember.”

“I don’t…”

“And you said to come back because there was so much to talk about.”

“I said to…”

“We were talking about so many things. Like your knitting. You wanted to show me your knitting.”

“I like to knit things. I like to make mittens. I give them to the neighborhood children.”

“I bet Mark takes them around for you.”

“Yes. He does. He’s a good boy.”

“Of course he is. He’s the best boy there could possibly be. He likes to make the kids happy.”

“With mittens in the winter. But now…”

“It’s spring. No more mittens. Not until next fall.”

“I forget, how are you friends with Mark?”

“I wish you would make me mittens.”

“Yes. I make mittens for the children.”

“And Mark takes them around. What a good boy.”

“Yes. He’s a good boy. I forget your name.”

“And he watches television with you.”

“We have our shows. Mark likes special shows. We watch together all the funny shows, early, and we laugh, because they get into such trouble on all those shows. And then he makes me go to bed because he says his shows come on later.”

“So he watches your shows with you, and then he watches his shows on the nice big television.”

“He got that for us. It’s like having real people here visiting. Not many friends come over.”

“But I’m your friend and I came.”

“Yes. You look old like me.”

“I am. But we’re friends now, aren’t we?”

“Yes. I suppose.”

“What are his shows like?”

“He won’t let me watch.”

“But sometimes you can’t sleep, isn’t that right. And you come down here.”

She smiled. “His shows are…” She laughed out loud. “I shouldn’t say the words.”

She had a coy, childish look on her face. Adrian watched her bounce between old and sick and childlike. He knew he had learned something, and he was struggling inwardly to sort it out himself. He could feel his wife, his son, his brother, all surrounding him, there but not there, trying to tell him what it was, tugging at his ability to perceive. He looked over at the woman.
Two crazed people,
he thought.
I can understand her but she can’t understand me.

Adrian thought it was all a foreign language and this made him think of Tommy, who died in a place that was so distant he could barely think of it in anything other than images coming across a screen. And this made him turn toward the big-screen television set and recall something that the woman had said and something that he remembered his son had told him, except it wasn’t really his son but his son’s ghost.

Knitting,
he thought.
She knits.

“Where is
your
computer?” he asked. “Do you keep it with the knitting?”

The woman smiled. “Of course.” She went over and grabbed the bag with yarns and swatches of material that was next to the recliner, just where Adrian had seen it the night before. She brought it over to him. Beneath a skein of pink and red yarn was a small Apple laptop. There were computer wires attached.

He looked over at the television.
He runs the computer through that big television screen after his mother has been sent to bed.

“I’m going to take this to Mark,” he said. “He needs it at work.”

“He leaves it here,” she said. “He always leaves it here.”

“Yes, but the policewoman who came will want it, so he should take it to her from his work. That’s what he wanted.”

Adrian knew all his lies would work, even if the old woman seemed reluctant. It was perverse. The childhood phrase
taking candy from a baby
leaped into his mind.

He took the computer and started toward the door.

It will be protected.

Password?
Mark Wolfe hadn’t struck Adrian as stupid. And he remembered the contemptuous look that Detective Collins had on her face when she’d taken the computer that the sex offender had offered up so easily.
Candyman.
How obvious, he thought. A password so pregnant with associations that anyone examining the machine would have to believe it would lead to incriminating evidence, when all it traveled was some innocent dark and dead end.

The computer in his hands—the mother’s computer—that was the one. He looked over at the gray-haired, wild-eyed woman.

“Did Mark ever have a pet, growing up…”

“We had a dog named Butchie.”

Adrian smiled.
Butchie. That was one possibility.

“Mark had to put him down. Butchie liked to hunt things and he bit people.”

So does your son.

The old woman suddenly looked as if she was going to cry. Adrian thought for a moment, and then he carefully asked another question. “And what was the name of the neighbor’s daughter, you remember, the one that lived next door, or was it just down the street when Mark was a teenager?”

The old woman’s face changed in an instant. She scowled. “This is like a memory game, isn’t it? I can’t remember very many things anymore and I forget stuff…”

“But that girl, you remember her, don’t you?”

“I didn’t like her.”

“Her name was…”

“Sandy.”

“She was the one that got Mark into trouble for the first time, right?”

The woman nodded.

Sandy.

Adrian started toward the door once more, the computer under his arm, but he paused as he reached for the handle and asked, “What’s your name?”

She smiled. “I’m Rose.”

“Like the beautiful flower?”

“I used to have the reddest cheeks when I was young and married to…”

She stopped. She put her hand to her mouth.

“Where did he go?”

“He left us. I don’t remember. It was bad. We were alone and it was hard. But now Mark takes care of me. He’s a good boy.”

“Yes. He is. Who left you?”

“Ralph,” she said. “Ralph left us. I was always Ralph’s Rose and he said I would be in bloom forever, but he left and I don’t bloom no more.”

Ralphsrose,
Adrian thought.
Maybe.

“This has been so much fun, Rose. I’ll come back and we can talk about knitting again. Maybe you will knit me those mittens.”

“That would be nice,” she said.

26

Jennifer was singing softly to Mister Brown Fur when the door opened. It was not a specific song as much as she was blending together every lullaby and children’s ditty she could remember, so that “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” and “Itsy Bitsy Spider” joined with “The Bear Went Over the Mountain” and “I’m a Little Teapot.” She mixed in the occasional Christmas carol, as well. Any lyric, any verse, any thread of music she could recall was hummed and sung quietly. She stayed away from rap and rock and roll because she couldn’t imagine how they would comfort her. She caught her breath when the sound of the door interrupted her, but just as swiftly she kept going, raising her voice, increasing volume. “God rest ye merry gentlemen, let nothing you dismay, remember Christ our Savior was born on Christmas day…”