“OK,” she said. She tapped the phone against the palm of her hand for a second, and then she said, “What about J.T.?”
J.T. seemed like a gossip and a flake, the sort of person who would use Ilya’s life for conversational gain without thinking twice, but when Ilya told Sadie this, she said, “He’s known about my mom all this time and he’s never told anyone. Not a single soul.”
They found J.T. at his mom’s apartment on Leffie’s old main street, which, Sadie said, had been the center of town way back in the day before Route 21 enticed Leffians east with a Super Walmart and a Cracker Barrel. J.T. sat on his stoop, wearing a gray sweatshirt and smoking a cigarette.
“Sick day,” he said, when Sadie asked why he hadn’t been at school.
He finished that cigarette and then another as they told him about Vladimir and Gabe and the girls.
“Fuck,” he said, “that is some fucked-up shit,” and for a second Ilya thought that this was his way of saying that he didn’t want to be involved, but he pulled his cell out of the front pouch of his sweatshirt. Ilya had written Gabe’s home phone number on his palm, and he held it out to J.T., and J.T. dialed and put the phone on speaker mode.
“So you think this guy murdered people,” J.T. said, as the ring tone sounded.
Ilya nodded and Sadie put her finger to her lips and J.T. rolled his eyes.
It rang three times before a woman answered.
“Hey,” J.T. said, “I’m calling for a Mr. Gabe Thompson.”
There was a thick pause. The woman’s voice, when it came again, was weary. “He can’t come to the phone right now.”
J.T. looked at Ilya, and Ilya nodded, and J.T. continued with the script: “I’m calling because Mr. Gabe Thompson left a personal item on his flight.”
“Oh,” she said. “OK. You need our address then?”
“Well is Mr. Gabe Thompson there?” J.T. said.
“He is—” she said.
“Who is it, Ida?” another voice said in the background. It was a man, older, and audibly aggrieved.
There was the stethoscopic thwump of a hand covering the receiver, but they could still hear Ida, her voice like the buzz of an insect in the heat. “The airline,” she said. “Gabe left something on the plane, and they want to send it to us.”
“The plane?” the man said. “His flight was six months ago.”
Ilya could feel the skin tighten at his temples. Lana’s body had been found in March.
“What does it matter, Frank.” The woman sighed. “They just want to mail it to us.”
“Fine,” Frank said. “Has he had lunch yet? He’s saying he’s—”
“They’re still on the phone, Frank. I’ll give him lunch in a second.”
The hand was removed from the receiver, and the woman’s voice was clear again as she gave J.T. the address that Ilya had read in the library a half hour earlier.
J.T. thanked her, and just as he was about to hang up, she said, “Wait a second.” She lowered her voice to a whisper, but still Ilya could feel the hunger of the question: “What was it that he left?”
J.T. hesitated. “A hat,” he said, fingering the brim of his own hat, which featured the fluorescent outline of a naked, supine woman.
“A hat?” the woman said. “What kind of hat?”
“It’ll be in the mail tomorrow, ma’am,” J.T. said, and ended the call.
“Those were his parents,” Ilya said. He had not expected Gabe to be living with his parents, but it was a stroke of luck. This meant that Ilya did not necessarily have to be alone with Gabe.
Sadie nodded. “Frank and Ida,” she said.
“Can I borrow your car?” Ilya said, and in his mind he was already in the car, was pulling up at the house. He could see Gabe at the door, standing between his parents, and when Gabe saw him there would be a look of recognition, of anger, hatred, a look like the one he’d given Ilya through the glass at the Minutka.
“Do you even know where Pennsylvania is?” J.T. said.
Ilya did not, but soon they were crouched around J.T.’s laptop, tallying the time it would take to drive through the five states between Leffie and Warren. It was nineteen hours away.
“So basically a day with stops,” J.T. said. “What are you going to tell Cam and Jamie?”
Ilya had not thought of this—the enormity of finding Gabe had eclipsed whatever punishment the Masons might dole out for Sadie and him going missing—but apparently Sadie had.
“I’m going to Kayla’s for the weekend, and Ilya’s going fishing with you at your dad’s camp. A real bayou experience.”
“A bayou experience,” J.T. said. “Shut the fuck up. Like you’re not bayou to the bone.”
“I’m telling you, they’ll eat that up,” Sadie said. She was laughing, but Ilya’s body felt suddenly clammy, as though fear were a virus he was coming down with.
“Will you come too?” Ilya asked J.T., because he could imagine Sadie following him into Gabe’s house, refusing to stay on the sidelines. J.T. wouldn’t let her—he hadn’t ever told a soul about Sadie’s mom; he would protect her.
Sadie looked at J.T., and J.T. shrugged. “I’ll drive you fools, but I’m not going in a fucking murderer’s house. Haven’t you all ever seen a horror movie?”
“I guess we should talk about the plan,” Sadie said.
Ilya had had plenty of time to think about what exactly he’d do if he ever found Gabe Thompson: he’d imagined peering in a dingy window to a room papered with pictures of Lana and Yulia and Olga; he’d imagined digging through Gabe’s drawers and finding the knife, the knife that he and his mother had asked the police about over and over, the knife that they knew had not been in Vladimir’s possession at the clinic; he’d imagined finding Gabe doing something so completely sane—mending a gutter or washing his car—that it would be instantly clear that he was insane, for how else could one person contain such disparate selves? But none of these imaginings were realistic. They were the sorts of things that happened in movies, so that people could feel the satisfaction of a story stitched shut. And life was not like that. Life was a constant unraveling. “Neither of you is going into his house,” he said. “I’ll go alone, and I’m going to ask him what he knows about Lana and see what he says.”
That night, after dinner, Ilya dug his tape player and his Michael & Stephanie tapes out of the dresser drawer where he’d stashed them when he first arrived. He wanted to record Gabe, hoping to get something concrete enough that he could use it in court. The tapes were coated in a fine layer of dust. He picked up the player, his hand curling around its familiar heft. It was still missing its batteries, courtesy of the Leshukonskoye baggage department. He popped the battery slot open and pressed a finger against one of the springs, felt the tiny insistence of the spring pushing back. The batteries had been Russian 286s. It seemed unlikely that the United States and Russia might have reached some agreement on battery size when they could agree on so little else, but perhaps, Ilya thought, there was an exact translation.
Upstairs the den was abandoned. As Ilya searched between the couch cushions for the TV remote, he heard the murmur of voices in Papa Cam and Mama Jamie’s bedroom. Light from beneath Sadie’s door fanned the hallway. She’d told him that she drew before bed. She said it emptied her out, made it easier for her to sleep, and he could almost hear the scratch of her pencil, could see the way her tongue sometimes traced her bottom lip. Ilya reached under the couch, and his hand closed on the remote. He popped open the back. Four batteries slid out. They clacked, cool as stones in his palm, and he could feel that they were right.
Back downstairs, he opened up the player and took out the tape, which was the first one, Level I, Volume 1. He hadn’t listened to the tapes since Vladimir had stolen them from his crate under the couch, since he’d found them in Vladimir’s room at the Tower. He’d have to record over one of them, but he didn’t want it to be this one. Vladimir might have listened to this one, and so he wanted to save it, wanted the chance to listen to it and hear the same words that Vladimir had, as though this might allow him to be there with Vladimir in that moment. Ilya closed his eyes and plucked a tape off the pile on the dresser. It was Level II, Volume 4, in which Michael and Stephanie tackled prepositions and their usage. As Ilya clicked the player shut, there was a light knock on the basement door.