What Comes Next (39 page)

Adrian once again looked hard across the space to the favorite Queen Anne chair where Cassie should have been but wasn’t.

He was only vaguely aware that his house was showing the same wear that he was. He knew the dishes were piling up in the sink. He knew soiled clothes were stacked in the laundry. He knew the vacuum cleaner and the mop were calling out to him, although he didn’t exactly know what sort of language appliances might use. Some sort of disembodied metallic voice, like an announcement in a train or bus station.

Adrian told himself that he had to keep his mind functioning, and so, after abruptly standing up in the center of his living room and shouting,
Look, damn it, Cassie, you need to help me remember this crap!
he located a broom and started sweeping. He couldn’t find a dustpan so he pushed some of the debris under the carpet. This made him laugh, and he sensed his wife’s disapproval. A ghostly nagging
Oh, Audie, how could you
seemed to echo around him, but she didn’t appear, and he felt like a young child who had managed to get away with some small infraction of the household rules.

Then he set the broom aside, dropping it onto the floor, where it made a banging sound against the worn wood. He went into the kitchen. He managed to get one load started in the dishwasher, and then he began the washer and dryer. He was exceptionally pleased with himself that he was able to measure out detergent, put it in the proper receptacle, and then punch the right series of buttons to start the washing machines.

It was extraordinarily mundane, irrepressibly lonely work.

This was all unfair, he argued with himself. He needed them and they weren’t here.

And then, as the washing machine began its
pocketa-pocketa
noises, filling with water and suds and cleaning his clothes, he realized they were.

He was never alone.

All the people he loved and cared about were beside him.

In that second, he understood that hearing them wasn’t about
them,
it was about himself. He turned around sharply, pivoting as if he’d been surprised by a noise. Cassie was behind him. He broke into a wide smile; it was the young Cassie. She was wearing a loose-fitting summer dress, and he saw that she was pregnant—far along, maybe only days, or
minutes,
from Tommy’s announcement that he was arriving in their world. She stood next to the wall, leaning up against the door of the kitchen. She smiled at him, and when he eagerly took a step forward, reaching out for her, she shook her head and wordlessly pointed to the side.

“Cassie,” he said. “I need you. You’ve got to be here with me to help me remember…”

She smiled again. She continued to gesture to the side. Adrian didn’t quite understand what she was pointing at, and he moved closer, reaching out with his hands widespread.

“I
know
it wasn’t always perfect. I
know
there were arguments and sad times and frustrations and you used to complain about being stuck in a little college town where nothing ever happened and that you deserved to be a prominent city artist and that I held you back. I
know
all that. And I remember it was hard, especially when Tommy had his rebellious times and we fought about him and what to do. But now all I want to remember is what was great and wonderful and ideal…”

She pointed again to her side, and he could see exasperation in her eyes, as if his long self-serving speech wasn’t important. She flashed with demand. Black eyes, he saw, that could resonate like thunder when she wanted.

“What is it?” he asked.

She smiled and tossed back her head again, shaking her long hair as if he were a child that couldn’t quite grasp something pathetically simple in a classroom, like two plus two or the shape of the state of Massachusetts.

“What,” he started, and then he saw what she was pointing at. The telephone attached to the kitchen wall.

Adrian listened carefully and, slowly, like the volume on a stereo being adjusted, he heard a distant ringing becoming louder and louder. He seized the receiver and held it to his ear.

“Hello?”

“So, professor, been waiting for me to call? You want to get together? I’ve made some progress.”

It was the sex offender. Unmistakable tone of voice. Like thick oil bubbling up out of the earth, he thought.

“Mister Wolfe.”

“Who’d you expect?”

“Did you find her?”

“Not exactly. But.”

“Well, what is it?”

Adrian thought his voice had a no-compromise toughness to it. He wondered where that came from.

“I think, professor, you might want to help out now. I’ve found a few…” He stopped. Wolfe hesitated. “Well, I’ve found some things worth seeing,” he said. “And I’m thinking you might be the person who needs to see ‘em.”

Adrian looked over at his wife. She was stroking her enlarged stomach, her hand making round circles across the swollen belly. She looked up at him and nodded eagerly.

She did not need to say
Go, Adrian.

“All right,” he said. “I will come over.”

He hung up the telephone. He wanted to embrace his wife, but she made a gesture toward the door. “Hurry,” she finally said in her singsong voice. He was overjoyed to hear her speak. The silence had scared him. “Always hurry, Audie.”

He looked over at her stomach. What he remembered were the last days before their only son was born. She was hot, uncomfortable, but all the things that should have made her short-tempered and impatient seemed to be shunted away into some hidden box. She sweated in the summer heat and waited. He would bring her ice water and help her when she launched herself from her chair. He would lie beside her at night pretending to sleep, listening to her roll and shift trying to find a comfortable position. There was no way to express sympathy back then, because there really was nothing to be sympathetic about and it would just have made her angry. She was already working overtime to keep her emotions in check.

Adrian took a step forward.

“You can’t just remember the good things,” Cassie said. “There were lots of troubles too. Like when Brian died. That was bad. You were drinking heavily for weeks, and blaming yourself. And then, when Tommy…”

She stopped.

“Why did you…” He started to ask her the question that had lingered over the last weeks of her life but he could not. He saw that Cassie had dropped her eyes to her waist, as if she could see everything that was to come, and it made her both joyful and irrepressibly sad all at once. And then, Adrian thought, that must be what
he
felt, every second of every day, both in his sanity and in his madness.

He thought that he had been wrong to go on with life after Tommy and Cassie died. That had been his time. He should have followed them immediately, without any hesitation. Living had been the coward’s way out.

When he looked back at Cassie, she was shaking her head.

“What I did was wrong,” she said slowly. “But it was right too.”

This made no sense at the same time that it made perfect sense. As a psychologist, he understood how grief could trigger a near-psychotic, suicidal state. There was significant literature in his field on this subject. But when he looked across the room at his wife and she seemed so young, so beautiful, and she reflected all the possibility that they had in their lives together, all the clinical studies in the world didn’t help him to understand why she had done what she did.

Adrian squeezed his eyes tight. He wanted to ask her why she had left him alone, and then he thought he must have spoken the words, because her voice penetrated past his reverie. “When Tommy died, I became a shadow,” she said. “I knew you were strong enough to see something left to living. But I was weak. I couldn’t be in a house where there was so much pain and memory. Everything reminded me of him. Even you, Audie. Especially you. I looked at you and saw him and it was like something was torn from inside me. So I drove the car too fast one night. It seemed right.”

“It was never right,” Adrian said. He slowly opened his eyes, drinking in the vision of his young wife. “It could never be right. I would have helped. We would have found something together.”

Cassie touched her stomach. She smiled.

“I forgive you,” Adrian blurted loudly. He wanted to cry. “Oh,
Possum,
I forgive you.”

“Of course you do,” Cassie replied, matter-of-factly “But you cannot waste these moments on me. You have a more important job. Don’t you think there is another mother somewhere, Jennifer’s mother, who feels like I did?”

“But,” he started.

“Get cleaned up. You can’t go out looking like this,” Cassie said.

Adrian shrugged and went into the bathroom, lathered his face and grabbed his razor. He brushed his teeth and washed his face. Then he hurried into their bedroom. He rummaged through drawers until he came up with a clean pair of corduroys, fresh underwear, and a pullover that passed a quick nose test. He pulled on the clothes rapidly, knowing that Cassie was watching him.

“I’m hurrying,” he said.

He could sense her laugh. “Adrian, moving quickly was never your forte,” she said.

“All right, all right,” he replied, a little exasperated. “The man makes me feel dirty, Cassie. It’s hard to hurry to go see him.”

“Yes, but he’s the closest thing you have to an answer. Who knows better how to start a fire, Audie, the arsonist or the fireman? Who’s the better killer, the detective or the assassin?”

“Your point,” Adrian said, as he grunted, tying his shoelace, “is well taken.”

“Puzzles. Mazes. Games. Brainteasers. Mental twisters. Adrian, see it all the way you saw
everything.
Pieces that add together and tell you something. Work hard, Audie. Make your imagination work for you.”

Adrian thought his wife was clearly right. He sighed, wishing to stay longer, get more answers to all the questions that he already knew the answers to, instead of heading off into the night to try and find answers that were hidden. He trudged to his door, pulling on a tweed jacket, and exited into bright midmorning sunshine, momentarily surprised that the midnight darkness he’d expected seemed to have been strangely misplaced.

It was against departmental policy but it was the sort of rule that was frequently broken and rarely enforced. Terri Collins had brought the Jennifer Riggins case file home for the weekend, hoping that an examination of all the disparate details accumulated on various pages might lead her in some positive direction. She sat with it all collected on her lap while her children played outside with friends, making an acceptable racket, background banging and shouting, and, so far, she thought blissfully, no tears of conflict.

Her own frustration had redoubled. The technicians at the state police had managed to enhance the security video just enough so that some facial details were recognizable, but only in the most limited way.
If
she knew the man’s name, it
might
prove helpful in a court of law. It
possibly
might have allowed her to ask some hard questions, if she had the man in a seat across from her. But so far as identifying who he was and what he was actually doing in the bus station and whether it had some real connection to Jennifer’s disappearance was relatively impossible. Maybe if she had access to sophisticated antiterrorist software and banks of computers, it might have meant something. But she did not.

She recognized the classic cop’s dilemma. If something else has provided a suspect, with a name and a link to a crime, backtracking into accumulating evidence was a tricky, though manageable, process.

But stare at a fuzzy, barely focused still frame ripped from a security video and try to guess if this anonymous individual had anything to do with a disappearance in another part of the state, and who it might be, and why he was there…

Terri stopped staring at the picture and shoved it aside.

Impossible,
she thought.

She looked down at her file.

Dead ends and unlikely connections.

There was little enough to go on, and what little she had made little sense. She shook her head and wished that she had the professor’s single-mindedness.

Terri thought,
He might be right but it’s still impossible.

Serial killers in Britain in the sixties. A couple in a panel truck on a suburban street. And then an impossible crime. A random nightmare. A milk carton disappearance.

She imagined that her career was about to be as dead as Jennifer Rig-gins. This was a terrible thing to predict—equating her paycheck with a sixteen-year-old’s life—but it still rose into her imagination.

Maybe the professor’s right about everything,
she told herself.
But it still doesn’t mean I can do anything about it.

For a second she was angry. She wished she had never heard of Jennifer Riggins. She wished she hadn’t responded to the teenager’s first attempts to run away from home so that her name was linked to the official record of the teenager’s misadventures. She wished she had refused to take the dispatcher’s summons calling her to the scene of the latest flight. She wished she’d had nothing to do with the family that was about to undergo all the terrible uncertainties that the modern world can deliver.

Closure
is a word that gets bandied about, she told herself, as if it somehow puts things right. We learn what happened to our child, we understand a disease, we comprehend the flag-draped coffin coming back from Iraq or Afghanistan. Someone says we have closure and that’s like a get-out-of-jail-free card—except it isn’t. Nothing is ever quite that compact and simple.

Terri clenched her hand into a fist. She discovered that she was staring at the Missing Jennifer flyer.

She abruptly dropped the file to the floor and almost kicked at it. Absolutely no leads to follow up, she thought. No telltale indicators of one thing or another. No obvious path to follow. No subtle trail to examine.

She sighed and stood up. She went to the window and stared out, idly watching the children at play. Everything, she believed, was utterly normal for a weekend morning.