Christopher Bohjalian - The Double Bind

“It’s possible.”

“And eventually he wound up in Vermont?”

“So it seems. Seven or eight years ago. But by the time Bobbie returned two years ago, he must have been long gone. Bobbie never mentioned going to see him.”

“There were two men who…”

“Go on.”

She shook her head; she couldn’t. She was surprised that she had even begun to reveal what had happened to her seven years earlier, and guessed that she had spoken only because Shem was such a wondrous and unexpected resource, and because his face was so unthreatening and kind. Even the deep lines around his lips were patterned like the ridges on a scallop seashell. Still, she had to know if Bobbie’s son was indeed one of the two men who had attacked her, and-if so-which one.

“Do you believe his son might be in jail?” she asked instead. “Jordie thought he might have been a criminal.”

“If he was, he was no petty thief. Bobbie spent serious time on the street, too, remember. He wouldn’t have cut his kid off for stealing a sandwich or because he had a substance-abuse problem. It woulda had to have been something much worse.”

She gathered herself. Then: “Rape? Murder?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Is rape really a possibility? Or attempted rape?”

She felt him studying her intently, sympathetically, a grandfather’s anxious gaze. “I guess anything’s possible,” he said after a moment.

“Did Reese know?”

“About the son? Or the possibility that the boy may have grown into a very bad person?”

“Either.”

“He knew Bobbie had a son. But not much else. Don’t forget, it’s not as if Bobbie was a great father himself. He had his own devils, his own mental illness. He told Reese and me that the boy’s mom had kept him away from the child when he was growing up. Didn’t want Bobbie to have anything to do with him. Maybe this saddened Bobbie. Maybe he just wrote it off to one of the many conspiracies that surrounded him. Maybe he understood he couldn’t help the boy. Who can say? Reese probably thought this was a wise course of action on the part of the mother. He knew Bobbie’s limitations.”

“But he liked Bobbie…”

“Very much. Oh, very much. Years ago-before you were born-he made it clear to Bobbie that if he ever needed anything, he shouldn’t hesitate to ask. And so one day, decades later, Bobbie did. That would have been a little more than two years ago now,” Shem said, his voice growing rueful. He explained that Bobbie had come to the Green Mountains in search of Reese. He was old and out of options. But he didn’t find Reese right away. First, there was an incident of some sort in Burlington, and Bobbie was brought to the Vermont State Hospital. It was from there that he asked a member of the staff to track down his old editor; two months later, he was released into Reese’s care. Bobbie’s attention span had diminished to the point that he could barely sit through a half-hour sitcom on the TV Land channel, and Reese had the impression that Bobbie had been in and out of state hospitals in New York and Florida and North Dakota. But he no longer drank. And, properly medicated, he was the same good-natured, well-intentioned, not wholly presentable misfit he’d been thirty-five and forty years earlier.

“What are you gonna do with those pictures?” Shem asked when he had finished this part of the story. He was staring at the print of Julie Andrews as Guinevere and seemed startled by the image, even touched. “I saw this show. It was 1960. The Majestic Theater. I was a newlywed. Has Julie Andrews ever looked prettier?”

Laurel assured him that she hadn’t. And she added that unlike most women her age, she actually knew the words to “The Simple Joys of Maidenhood.” Then she told Shem of her boss’s plan for a retrospective, the idea of giving Bobbie Crocker the show that he had never had in his life.

“Oh, I’ll bet his sister will just love that,” Shem said, a small wary chuckle punctuating his remark. “She still living? Or did she pass, too?”

“She’s still alive. But she tells people her brother died when he was a teenager-at least that’s what she told me. She even dared me to fly to Chicago to see where he was buried. Do you think she knows about Bobbie’s son?”

“I doubt it,” he said. “You know, she won’t be happy about your show. I got the impression from Bobbie that she was very loyal to her mother and father. Very loyal. Not just a daddy’s girl and not just a mommy’s girl. Both. Bobbie and Reese thought it was a stitch the way she worked so hard for so much of her life to rehabilitate her parents’ reputation. She’ll go to her grave telling anyone who will listen that all those stories about her mom and Jay Gatsby were a lot of malarkey-and all completely unprovable.”

She laced her fingers together on the table before her and thought about this. “What are you suggesting? Do you think there’s a picture in this pile that somehow proves Jay Gatsby was Bobbie’s father?”

“Maybe not in this pile, but in some pile! Absolutely! That’s what our paranoid schizophrenic was doing, don’t you see? View those pictures like a crazy man’s Post-it notes. Post-it notes in a code. Those pictures Bobbie kept with him? They’re like a treasure map.”

“Or an autobiography.”

“Exactly! You remember that old program, This Is Your Life ? Actually, you probably don’t. It was way before your time. It was an old TV show. From the 1950s. Ralph Edwards was the host. Guests would be paraded out-Nat King Cole, maybe, or Gloria Swanson-and friends and family would come out one by one to surprise them. Well, Bobbie was sort of doing his own This Is Your Life with his pictures. He was taking photos of the Gatsby side. Reese told me it was like an obsession with Bobbie.”

“Did Bobbie himself ever tell you he was doing this?”

“No. But I do know this: You know that day back in 1939 when Bobbie found the picture Jay gave his mom? The one where Jay’s decked out as a soldier boy? Bobbie took it with him. Reese saw it many, many years ago, when he and Bobbie were still working at Life. Said Bobbie was still young enough that you could see the resemblance. It was unbelievable. After that, the photos Bobbie took are like the clues in a scavenger hunt. At least some are. You know, maybe you find the house. Then maybe you find the bureau. Then you open the drawer. And there it is-the picture.”

“There what is? The photo of Jay from Camp Taylor?”

He put out his hands, palms up. “Oh, I don’t know for sure what’s in the drawer. I don’t even know if it is a drawer. Or a bureau. Or a box. I was just using that as an example. But Bobbie told Reese and Reese told me that it’s all in the pictures. That’s why he took them with him, no matter where he went or how bad things got for him. They were the proof of who he was, the proof that his old man was that good old sport we’ve heard all about-better than the whole damn bunch on the other side of the cove.”

“I have some snapshots Bobbie had with him at the end. There’s one of Bobbie and his sister, and there’s one of Jay beside a flashy car. But that photo you told me about-the one of Jay in his uniform. I don’t have that one.”

“Maybe the boy knows where it is,” Shem said. “Or maybe the boy knows how to find it. Maybe that’s the real reason why Bobbie came here seven years ago. To plant that final clue.”

Laurel knew where the two men were serving their time. The more violent of the pair, the one who had murdered a schoolteacher in Montana, was in the maximum security compound of the state prison forty miles northwest of Butte. The other, a fellow with no previous criminal record, was still in Vermont, at the correctional facility just outside of Saint Albans. She hadn’t anticipated ever seeing either of them again once they had been escorted from the courtroom after their sentencing, one to a prison in Vermont and one to be tried next for a murder in Montana.