“What’s the matter?”
Scott Freeman hesitated. He wasn’t precisely sure how to put what was troubling him into words.
“I found a disturbing letter among her things,” he said.
Sally also hesitated. “Why were you going through her things?”
“That’s really irrelevant. The point is, I found it.”
“I’m not sure it is irrelevant. You should respect her privacy.”
Scott was instantly angered, but decided not to show it. “She left some socks and underwear behind. I was putting them in her drawer. I saw the letter. I read it. It troubled me. I shouldn’t have read the letter, I guess, but I did. What does that make me, Sally?”
Sally didn’t answer this question, although several replies jumped to her mind. Instead, she asked, “What sort of letter was it?”
Scott cleared his throat, a classroom maneuver to gain himself a little time, then simply said, “Listen.” He read the letter to her.
When he stopped, they both let silence surround them.
“It doesn’t sound all that bad,” Sally finally said. “It sounds like she has a secret admirer.”
“A secret admirer. That has a quaint, Victorian sound to it.”
She ignored his sarcasm and remained quiet.
Scott waited for a moment, then asked, “In your experience, all the cases you handle, wouldn’t you think this letter had overtones of obsession? Maybe compulsion? What sort of person writes a letter like that?”
Sally took a deep breath and silently wondered the same thing.
“Has she mentioned anything to you? About anything like this?” Scott persisted.
“No.”
“You’re her mother. Wouldn’t she come to you if she was having some sort of man trouble?”
The phrase man trouble hung in the space in front of her, glowing with electric anger between them. She didn’t want to respond.
“Yes. I presume so. But she hasn’t.”
“Well, when she was here visiting, did she say anything? Did you notice anything in her behavior?”
“No and no. What about you? She spent a couple of days at your place…”
“No. I hardly saw her. She was off visiting friends from high school. You know, off at dinner, back at two a.m., sleep to noon, and then paddle around the house until she started all over again.”
Sally Freeman-Richards took a deep breath. “Well, Scott,” she said slowly, “I’m not sure that it’s something to get all that bent out of shape about. If she’s having some sort of a problem, sooner or later she’s going to bring it up with one of us. Maybe we should give Ashley her space until then. And I don’t know that it makes much sense to assume there’s a problem before we hear that there is one directly from her. I think you’re reading too much into it.”
What a reasonable response, Scott thought. Very enlightened. Very liberal. Very much in keeping with who they were and where they lived. And, he thought, utterly wrong.
She stood up and wandered over to an antique cabinet in a corner of the living room, taking a second to adjust a Chinese plate displayed on a stand. A frown crossed her face as she stepped away and examined it. In the distance, I could hear some children playing loudly. But in the room where our conversation continued, there was nothing other than a ticktock of tension.
“How, precisely, did Scott know something was wrong?” she asked, repeating my question back to me.
“Correct. The letter, as you quote it, could have been almost anything. His ex-wife was wise not to jump to conclusions.”
“A very lawyerly approach?” she demanded.
“If you mean cautious, yes.”
“And wise, you think?” she questioned. She waved her hand in the air, as if dismissing my concerns. “He knew because he knew because he knew. I suppose you might call it instinct, but that seems simplistic. It’s a little bit of that leftover animal sense that lurks somewhere within all of us, you know, when you get the feeling that something is not right.”
“That seems a little far-fetched.”
“Really? Have you ever seen one of those documentaries about animals on the Serengeti Plain in Africa? How often the camera catches a gazelle lifting its head, suddenly apprehensive? It can’t see the predator lurking close by, but…”
“All right. I’ll go along with you for a moment. I still don’t see how-”
“Well,” she interrupted, “perhaps if you knew the man in question.”
“Yes. I suppose that might help. After all, wasn’t that the same problem facing Scott?”
“It was. He, of course, at first truly knew nothing. He had no name, no address, no age, description, driver’s license, Social Security card, job information. Nothing. All he had was a sentiment on a page and a deep-seated sensation of worry.”
“Fear.”
“Yes. Fear. And not a completely reasonable one, as you point out. He was alone with his fear. Isn’t that the hardest sort of anxiety? Danger undefined, and unknown. He was in a difficult situation, wasn’t he?”
“Yes. Most people would do nothing.”
“Scott, it would seem, wasn’t like most people.”
I remained quiet, and she took a deep breath before continuing.
“But, had he known, right then, right at the beginning, who he was up against, he might have been…” She paused.
“What?”
“Lost.”
2
The tattoo artist’s needle buzzed with an urgency that reminded him of a hornet flying around his head. The man with the needle hovering over him was a thickset, heavily muscled man, with multihued, entwined decorations creeping like vines up both arms, past his shoulders, and swirling around his neck, ending in a serpent’s bared fangs beneath his left ear. He bent down, like a man considering a prayer, the needle in hand. He stooped to the task, then hesitated, looking up and asking, “You sure about this, man?”
“I’m sure,” Michael O’Connell replied.
“I never put a tat like this on anybody.”
“Time for a first, then,” O’Connell said stiffly.