Her eyes glistened slightly, and I saw how wracked she was, how reduced by our long ordeal, her emotions tingling at the surface.
"Leo told me about it," I went on. "He said Warren had been caught watching kids play at the elementary school. He'd stand at the window of his little 'bachelor lair' and watch them. With binoculars. It was so fucking obvious the school complained about it. The principal went over and told Warren to stop it. So when this thing with Amy Giordano happened, somebody called the police hotline and told them about Warren."
"So that's what it was," Meredith said. She seemed relieved, as if a small dread had been taken from her. She remained silent a moment, gazing at her hands. Then she said, "Warren couldn't have done something like that, Eric. He couldn't have hurt a little girl."
Her certainty surprised me. She had never cared for my brother, never had the slightest respect for him. He was one of life's losers, and Meredith had never had any patience for such people. Warren's drinking and self-pity had only made it worse. But now, out of nowhere, she seemed completely confident that Warren had had nothing to do with Amy Giordano's disappearance.
"How do you know?" I asked.
"I know Warren," she answered.
"Really? How can you be so sure you know him?"
"Aren't you?"
"No."
"He was your brother, Eric. You've known him all your life."
Peak had said the same thing, and now I gave the same reply. "I'm not sure you ever know anyone."
She looked at me, puzzled and alarmed, but also alerted to something hidden. "Warren said you came over to his house. He said you had a quarrel."
"It wasn't exactly a quarrel," I told her.
"That's what he called it," Meredith said. "What was it then?"
"I talked to him about the pictures."
"What did he say?"
"That they weren't really sexual." I shook my head. "He said he just liked looking at the pictures. That the kids were ... adorable."
"And you didn't believe him?" "No."
"Why not?"
"Oh come on, Meredith, he fits the profile in every aspect. Especially the low self-esteem part."
"If low self-esteem is a big deal, then you'd better mark Keith for a pedophile, too."
"Don't think that hasn't crossed my mind."
Now amazement gave way to shock. "You think that?"
"Don't you?"
"No, I don't."
"Wait a minute," I yelped. "You're the one who first had doubts about Keith."
"But I never thought it was a sexual thing. That even if he hurt Amy, it wasn't because of sex."
"What then?"
"Anger," Meredith answered. "Or maybe a cry for attention."
A cry for attention.
This sounded like the sort of psychobabble that would come from Stuart Rodenberry, and I bristled at the thought that Meredith was arguing with me through him, using his professional expertise and experience against me.
"Oh, bullshit," I said sharply. "You don't believe a word of that."
"What are you saying, Eric?"
"I'm saying that from the minute Amy disappeared you thought Keith was involved. And I don't for a fucking second believe you thought a 'cry for attention' had anything to do with it." I looked at her hotly. "You thought it was in the family. Something he inherited. Connected to me. To Warren." I laughed brutally. "And you were probably right."
"Right? You mean because you've decided that Warren was a pedophile?" Her gaze was pure challenge. "And what, Eric, makes you so sure of that? A few pictures on his computer? The fact that he liked to watch kids play? Jesus Christ, anybody could—"
"More than that," I interrupted.
"What then?"
I shook my head. "I don't want to go into this anymore, Meredith."
I started to turn away, but she grabbed my arm and jerked me around to face her. "Oh no, you don't. You're not walking away from this. You accuse Keith of being a pedophile, a kidnapper, and God knows what else. You accuse me of suggesting that something awful is in your family. You do all that, and then you think you can just say you're tired and walk away? Oh no, Eric, not this time. You don't walk away from an accusation like that. No, no. You stand right here and you tell me why you're so fucking sure of all this bullshit."
I pulled away, unable to confront what I'd seen in Jenny's room that morning, then conveyed to Warren in a single glance, how, upon that accusation, he must have finally decided that the world was no longer a fit place for him.
But again Meredith grabbed my arm. "Tell me," she demanded. "What did Warren or Keith ever do to—"
"It has nothing to do with Keith."
"So, it's Warren then?"
I gazed at her desolately. "Yes."
She saw the anguish flare in my eyes. "What happened, Eric?"
"I thought I saw something."
"Something ... in Warren?"
"No. In Jenny."
Meredith peered at me unbelievingly. "Jenny?"
"The day she died I went into her room. She was trying desperately to tell me something. Moving all around. Lips. Legs. Desperate. I bent down to try to hear what she was saying, but then she stopped dead and pulled away from me and just lay there, looking toward the door." I drew in a troubled breath. "Warren was standing at the door. He'd been with Jenny that night and..." I stopped. "And I thought maybe he—"
"Jesus, Eric," Meredith gasped. "You said that to him?"
"No," I answered. "But he saw it."
She stared at me as if I were a strange creature who'd just washed up on the beach beside her, a crawler of black depths. "You had no evidence of that at all, Eric," she said. "No evidence at all that Warren did anything to your sister"—there was a lacerating disappointment in her gaze—"How could you have done that? Said something like that without ... knowing anything?"
I thought of the way she and Rodenberry had stood together in the parking lot, their bodies so close, the cool air, the night, the rustle of fallen leaves when the wind touched them. "You don't always need evidence," I said coldly. "Sometimes you just know."
She said nothing more, but I felt utterly berated, like a small boy whipped into a corner. To get out of it, I struck back in the only way that seemed open to me.
"I saw you tonight," I told her.
"Saw me?"
"You and Rodenberry."
She seemed hardly able to comprehend what I was saying.
"In the parking lot at the college."
Her lips sealed tightly.
"Talking."
Her eyes became small, reptilian slits. "And?" she snapped. "What are you getting at, Eric?"
"I want to know what's going on," I said haughtily, a man who knew his rights and intended to exercise them.
Fire leaped in her eyes. "Wasn't Warren enough for you, Eric?" she asked. "Isn't one life enough?"
She could not have more deeply wounded me if she'd fired a bullet into my head, but what she said next was said with such utter finality that I knew nothing could return me to the world that had existed before she said it.
"I don't know you anymore," she added. Then she turned and walked up the stairs.
I knew that she meant it, and that she meant it absolutely. Meredith was not a woman to make false gestures, bluff, halt at the precipice, or seek to regain it once she'd gone over. Something had broken, the bridge that connected us, and even at that early moment, when I was still feeling the heat of her eyes like the sting of a slap, I knew that the process of repair would be long, if it could be done at all.
TWENTY-FIVE
Warren was buried on a bright, crisp afternoon. My father had told me flatly that he had no intention of going to the funeral, so it was only the strained and separating members of my second family, along with a few people Warren had gotten to know over the years, regulars at the bars he frequented, who came to say good-bye to him.