“I get it,” I said.
“Really? It doesn’t exactly sound like you do.”
We were seated in a small restaurant, near the front, where she could look through the plate-glass windows out onto the main street of the small college town we lived in. She smiled for an instant and turned back to me.
“We take a lot for granted, in our nice, safe middle-class lives, don’t we?” she asked. She didn’t wait for my answer, but continued, “Problems sometimes occur not only when we least anticipate them, but at moments when we are least equipped to deal with them.” The edgy decisiveness in her voice seemed out of place on the fine, mostly lazy afternoon.
“Okay,” I sighed, “so Scott’s life wasn’t exactly perfect, although, on balance, it wasn’t that bad. He had a good job, some prestige, a more than adequate paycheck, which should have compensated at least some for middle-aged loneliness. And Sally and Hope were going through a difficult time, but still, they had resources. Significant resources. And Ashley, despite being well educated and attractive, was in something of a state of flux, as well. That’s more or less the way life is, isn’t it? How does it-”
She cut me off, lifting one hand like a traffic cop, while the other reached for a glass of iced tea. She drank before replying.
“You need perspective. Otherwise, the story won’t make sense.”
Again, I remained silent.
“Dying,” she said finally, “is such a simple act. But you need to learn that all the moments leading up to it, and all the minutes afterwards, are terribly complicated.”
11
Sally was surprised that the front door was wide open.
Nameless was plopped down by the entrance, not exactly sleeping, not exactly standing guard, but more or less accomplishing both. He picked his head up and thumped his tail at Sally’s arrival, and she reached down and stroked him once behind the ears, which was pretty much the extent of her connection to the dog. She suspected that if Jack the Ripper had walked in, with a dog biscuit in one hand and a bloody knife in the other, Nameless would have locked in on the biscuit.
She could just hear the final words of a conversation as she set her briefcase down in the small foyer.
“Yes…yes. Okay, I’ve got it. We’ll call you back later tonight. Don’t worry, everything will be okay… Yup. Later, then.”
Sally heard the phone being returned to its cradle, then Hope exhale and add, “Jesus H. Christ.”
“What was that about?” Sally asked.
Hope spun about. “I didn’t hear you come in.”
“You must have left the door open.”
Sally eyed the running clothes and added, “Were you heading out? Or just coming back?”
Hope ignored the questions and Sally’s tone and said, “That was Ashley. She’s really upset. Turns out that she really has gotten sort of involved with some creep in Boston and she’s starting to get a little scared.”
Sally hesitated for an instant before asking, “What does sort of involved actually mean?”
“You should have her explain. But, as best as I understand it, she had a one-night stand with the guy, and now he won’t leave her alone.”
“Is this the guy who wrote the letter Scott found?”
“Seems to be. He’s making all sorts of We were made for each other protests, when they don’t make a damn bit of sense. The guy sounds a little out there, but again, you should have Ashley explain it to you. It will seem a lot more, I don’t know, real, maybe, if you hear it from her.”
“Well, my guess is this is really a mountain being made out of a molehill, but-”
Hope interrupted, “It didn’t sound that way. I mean, we both know she can be overdramatic, but she sounded genuinely disturbed. I think you should call her back right away. It will probably do her some good to hear from her mother. Reassure her, you know.”
“Well, has the guy hit her? Or threatened her?”
“Not exactly. Yes and no. It’s a little hard to say.”
“What do you mean not exactly?” Sally asked briskly.
Hope shook her head. “What I mean is that I’m going to kill you is a threat. But We’ll always be together might be the same thing. It’s just hard to tell until you hear the words for yourself.”
Hope was a little taken aback. Sally was decidedly cool and irritatingly calm about what she was being told. This surprised her.
“Call Ashley,” she repeated.
“You’re probably right.” Sally stepped to the telephone.
Scott tried Ashley on her regular phone, but the line was busy, and for the third time that evening he got the answering machine. He had already tried her cell phone, but that, too, had only produced the sound of her voice breezily requesting the caller to leave a message. He was more than a little bit put off. What, he wondered to himself, is precisely the point of all these modern forms of communication if one simply gets nowhere more efficiently? In the eighteenth century, he thought, when one received a letter carried over distance, it damn well meant something. By being closer, he thought, everyone had gotten much farther away.
Before his frustration built further, the phone rang. He seized the receiver.
“Ashley?” he asked rapidly.
“No, Scott, it’s me, Sally.”
“Sally. Is something wrong?”
She hesitated, creating just enough of a dark space in time for his stomach to clench and the world around him to darken.
“When we last spoke,” Sally said, employing all her lawyer’s sense of equanimity, “you expressed some concern about a letter you found. You may have been justified in your response.”
Scott paused, wanting to scream at the professional reasonableness in her voice. “Why? What’s happened? Where’s Ashley?”
“She’s okay. But she might indeed have a problem.”
Michael O’Connell stopped at a small art-supply store before heading home. His stock of charcoal pencils was down, and he slipped a set into the pocket of his parka. He picked out a medium-sized sketch pad and took it to the counter. A bored young woman who sported an array of facial piercings, and hair streaked with black and red, was sitting behind the cash register, reading a copy of an Anne Rice novel about vampires. She wore a black T-shirt that said FREE THE WEST MEMPHIS THREE on it in large, Gothic-style print. For a brief moment, O’Connell was mad with himself. He should have filled his pockets with many more items, given the lax attention the girl was paying to the comings and goings in the store. He made a mental note to return in a few days as he forked over a couple of worn singles for the pad of paper.
He knew the clerk would never think to examine the pockets of someone willing to pay for something.