You can lie with your possessions, of course. I suppose we all do this a bit, stash the Enya CDs in a drawer and leave the Chet Baker and the Louis Prima conspicuously on the coffee table. Jordan had lined his office bookshelf with the hundred-volume set from the Franklin Library of The Collected Stories of the World’s Greatest Writers, from Aesop to Thomas Wolfe. Each book had gold decor on leather boards, gilt page edges, silky end pages, and a ribbon bookmark. None of the spines had been broken; none of the pages in those volumes I checked had been thumbed.
The neatness of the office, the precise arrangement of items on Jordan’s desk — laptop computer, family photo, cherry wood and punched-black metal desk organizer, matching Rolodex and pencil cup, stapler, tape dispenser, wire mesh paper clip holder — told me that he was a man with a firm handshake, a pumper, not a wrist-grabber, a man who numbered his arguments, asked and answered his own questions, and was given to proverbial expression. Tucked into the side rail of his mocha desk pad, a note on pink “while-you-were-out” message paper, presumably to himself: Stumbling isn’t falling. I took a business card from the leather card holder. The “S” in “Succeedingly” was a dollar sign.
In the family photo, our four Delreeses are posed casually, sitting on a white rug against a white backdrop. They wear white, long-sleeved oxford shirts, white casual slacks, and white socks. Jordan’s in the middle, one hand on his leg, looking up at Darchelle, who smiles back at him. Caroldean — there’s that dimple again — has her arm around Davenport. His is the smile of a child about to drift away to sleep. You can always tell a happy marriage. People in love begin to acquire each other’s traits, each other’s styles — they begin to look and act alike. They want to please. They admire each other and, naturally enough, want to become what they esteem and cherish. That had not happened with the Delreeses.
Carlos handed me a sheet of lime-green stationery. “He left a note.”
Jordan’s writing was half-print, half-cursive; his words began with a flourish and ended with a flat line.
I killed the children. Five minutes of pain for a lifetime of suffering. I know that Jehovah will take care of my little ones in the next life. And if Jehovah is willing, I would love to see them again in the resurrection, to have my second chance. I don’t plan to live much longer myself, not on this earth. I have come to hate this life and this unreasonable system of things. I have come to have no hope. I give you my wife, Caroldean, my honey, my precious love. Please take care of her.
I told Carlos that no person who has ever tried to be honest for even one second of his life could think like this.
Carlos said, “He’s a deacon in his church.”
“Of course he is. And he’s probably a scoutmaster.”
“Soccer coach.”
“There you go.”
“So you think the volunteer work is pretense? You don’t think he’s sincere?”
I shook my head. “I think sincerity is his honesty. And I think you’d better find Mr. Delreese soon. He’s not finished. The family was just the flourish. He’ll kill again. My guess is he’s killed before.”
Back at the car, I nudged Dad awake, strapped him in his seat belt, closed the windows, cranked up the AC, and drove toward Federal Highway. I told Dad about the victims, omitting the gruesome details. He shrugged. “Life is nothing,” he said.
“But it’s all we’ve got.”
“Nothing’s plenty for me.”
“Did you finish your puzzle?”
“The zero was missing.”
“So what did you do?”
“Killed some time.” He picked up my script, fanned the pages, found a highlighted speech, and fed me my cue. “You want to lose her too?”
“A man belongs with his family, Arlis. Where we come from, the elderly are not discarded like old rags.”
“Are you listening to yourself?”
“That’s not in the script, Dad.”
“What was her name?”
“Who?”
“Your ex-wife.”
“Georgia. What about her?”
“On my mind is all. You lost her.”
“She found someone else.”
“So she’s dead to you.”
I dropped Dad at Clover House in North Miami, told him I’d pick him up on Sunday for the Marlins game.
On the way to rehearsal I took a chance. I checked Delreese’s business card and called his cell. I told him who I was and said I was hoping he could design me a piece of art I could hang in my office. What I had in mind was one of those Hubble shots of distant space, maybe the one of the eagle nebula or some radiant spiral galaxy, and it’ll say, I love the light for it shows me the way. I endure the dark for it shows me the stars. Something like that.
Jordan Delreese told his parents that the kids were swell, fit as fiddles, never been better. He asked his mother to pass the tabouli. She told him to leave room for dessert. Caroldean’s busy with her scrapbook project, he said. He told them that when he was at the beach earlier he saw this cloud that looked like an angel. Did they see it too? Like Michael the archangel. They hadn’t seen it. What do you think it means? he said.
Rain, his father said.
Jordan said, He makes the sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and the unjust.
Amen, his mother said.
Jordan’s BlackBerry played “You Are the Wind Beneath My Wings.” He checked the number and punched Ignore.
Emotions don’t lie, but you can lie about them. Of course, lying about them’s not so easy. You’re angry, but you say, I’m not angry, but then just for a moment, you draw your eyebrows down and together, flash those vertical wrinkles on your forehead, and press your lips together. Or maybe it’s your body that leaks the truth. Your natural-born liar understands that everyone is watching his transpicuous face, and he knows that an easy smile is the cleverest mask. Gestures, however, may belie that smile. He brushes a nonexistent piece of lint from his slacks, drums his fingers, leans forward.
You can’t command emotions to appear, but you can coax them, summon them. I learned that in acting class. Stanislavsky said if you move your hands in a tender way, you’ll begin to experience tenderness. You move with the quality of tenderness, in other words, and the movement will evoke the sensation of tenderness, and that sensation will lead you to the true emotion, and now you’re feeling it. No pretense. Change your expression and you change your nervous system. And you can use your own life experiences and your remembered feelings to help you understand your character. Work from an aroused emotion back to the source of it. In other words, to lie on stage, you need to be honest with yourself.
I was working on feeling Willis’s exhilaration, his joy about life after death and the promise of eternal salvation. Easy enough to slap on the brilliant smile, brighten the bountiful eyes. I stood on my toes like I couldn’t hold the good news inside, like I was bursting with beatific energy. I started hopping, pounding my fists in the air. Hiroshi, our director, asked me to take it down a notch, or several. “It’s only life everlasting, Wylie; it’s not a weekend with Madonna.” I wondered if I had any exhilaration in my past to call on. When had I ever been so deliriously excited? Maybe on my wedding day, but the failure of that whole enterprise got me sad like it always does. When I was five or six I ran everywhere. I ran to school, ran to the kitchen. I couldn’t wait to get to wherever I was going. And I was happy wherever I was. I ran down the stairs, over to the park. I ran to the swings. I ran to church. So what happened when I was seven? Hiroshi put his wrist to his forehead and told me he couldn’t take another interruption. I said, “I’m ready,” and then I saw Carlos backstage waving me over.