John Katzenbach - The Wrong Man

She paused, and for the first time I felt a bit of the same chill.

“I have to go,” she said. “We’ll speak again.”

“But-”

“Indecision. It’s a simple word. But it leads to evil things, does it not? Of course, so can being foolishly decisive. That’s more or less the dilemma, isn’t it? To act. Or not to act. Always an intriguing question, don’t you think?”

When Hope came through the front door of her house, she instinctively clapped her hands twice. She could already hear the sound of her dog’s paws as he rushed from the living room, where he spent much of his time staring out the front picture window, waiting for her to return home. The sounds were utterly familiar to her: first the thud, as he leapt down from the sofa that he wasn’t allowed on when there was an actual human around to tell him no, then the scrabbling noise that his toenails made against the hardwood floor, as he slipped and pushed the Oriental rug out of position, and finally the urgent bounding, as he headed to the vestibule. She knew enough to put down any papers or groceries in anticipation of the greeting.

There is nothing, she thought, in the entire world that is as emotionally unencumbered as a dog’s greeting. She knelt down and let him cover her face with his tongue, his tail beating a steady tattoo against the wall. It is a truism for dog owners, Hope thought, that regardless of what else is going wrong, the dog always wags its tail when you come through the door. Her dog was of oddly mixed parentage. A vet had suggested to her that he was the clearly illegitimate offspring of a golden retriever and a pit bull, which gave him a shortish, blond coat, a snubby nose, a fierce and unmitigated loyalty minus the nasty aggressiveness, and a degree of intelligence that sometimes astonished even her. She had acquired him from a shelter where he’d been shunted as a puppy, and when she asked the shelter operator what the pup’s name was, she’d been told that he hadn’t been christened, so to speak. So, in a fit of slightly devilish creativity, she’d called him Nameless.

When he was young, she’d taught him to retrieve wayward soccer balls at the end of practice, a sight that never failed to amuse the girls on whatever team she happened to be coaching. Nameless would patiently wait by the bench, silly grin on his face, until she gave him a hand signal, then would bolt across the pitch, rounding up each ball and pushing it with his nose and forelegs, racing back to where she waited with a mesh bag. She would tell the girls on the team that if they could learn to control the ball at speed the way Nameless did, then they would all be all-Americans.

He was far too old now, couldn’t see or hear as well, and had a touch of arthritis, and collecting a dozen balls was probably more than he could handle, so he went to practice less often. She did not like to think about his ending; he’d been with her as long as she’d been with Sally Freeman.

She often thought that if it had not been for Nameless the puppy, she might not have succeeded in her partnership with Sally. It had been the dog who had forced Ashley and her to find a common ground. Dogs, she thought, managed that sort of thing pretty effortlessly. In the days after the divorce, when Sally and Ashley had come to live with her, Hope had been greeted with all the impassiveness that a sullen seven-year-old could muster. All the anger and hurt Ashley felt had pretty much been ignored by Nameless, who had been overjoyed at the arrival of a child, especially one with Ashley’s energy. So Hope had enlisted Ashley in exercising the puppy with her, and training him, which they did with mixed results-he was adept at retrieving, clueless when it came to the furniture. And so, by talking about the dog’s successes and failures, they had reached first a détente, then an understanding, and finally a sense of sharing, which had broken through many of the other barriers that they’d faced.

Hope rubbed Nameless behind the ears. She owed him far more than he owed her, she thought. “Hungry?” she asked. “Want some dog food?”

Nameless barked once. A stupid question to ask a dog, she thought, but one they certainly liked to hear. She walked into the kitchen and grabbed the dog bowl off the floor, as she began to think about what she might prepare for Sally and herself for dinner. Something interesting, she decided. A piece of wild salmon with a fennel cream sauce and risotto. She was an excellent cook and took pride in what she made. Nameless sat, tail sweeping the floor, anticipating. “We’re the same, you and I,” she said to the dog. “We’re both waiting for something. The difference is, you know it’s dinner, and I’m not sure what is in store for me.”

Scott Freeman looked around and thought about the moments in life when loneliness appears completely unexpectedly.

He had slumped into an aging Queen Anne armchair and stared out the window toward the darkness creeping through the last October leaves on the trees. He had some papers to correct, a class lecture to prepare, some reading he needed to do-a colleague’s manuscript had arrived in the day’s mail from the University Press and he was on the peer-review panel, and there were at least a half dozen requests from history majors for advice on course selections.

He was also stymied in the midst of a piece of his own writing, an essay on the curious nature of fighting in the Revolutionary War, where one moment was endowed with utter savagery, and another, with a kind of medieval chivalry, as when Washington had returned a British general’s lost dog to him in the midst of the battle of Princeton.

Much to do, he thought. Out loud, to no one except himself, he said, “You’ve got a full plate.”

And in that moment, it all meant nothing.

He considered this thought and realized instead, it might all mean nothing.

It depended upon what he did next.

He looked away from the fading afternoon light and let his eyes scour across the letter that he’d found in Ashley’s bureau. He read each word for the hundredth time and felt as trapped as when he’d first discovered it. Then, he mentally reviewed every word, every inflection, every tone, in everything she had said to him when he’d called her.

Scott leaned back and closed his eyes. What he had to do was try to imagine himself in Ashley’s position. You know your own daughter, he told himself. What is going on?

This question echoed in his imagination.

The first thing, he insisted to himself, was to discover who’d written the letter. Then he could independently assess the person, without intruding on his daughter’s life. If he was skillful he could reach a conclusion about the individual without involving anyone-or, at least, not involving anyone who would tell Ashley that he was poking around in her private life. When, as he hoped was true, he discovered that the letter was merely unsettling and inappropriate and nothing more, he could relax and allow Ashley the freedom to extricate herself from the unwanted attention and get on with her life. In fact, he could probably manage all this without even involving Ashley’s mother or her partner, which was his preferred course of events.

The question was how to get started.

One of the great advantages of studying history, he reminded himself, was in the models of action that great men had taken through the centuries. Scott knew that at his core he had a quiet, romantic streak, one that loved the notion of fighting against all hope, rising to desperate occasions. His tastes in movies and novels ran in that direction, and he realized there was a certain childish grace in these tales, which trumped the utter savagery of the actual moments in history. Historians are pragmatists. Cold-eyed and calculating, he thought. Saying “Nuts” at Bastogne was remembered better by novelists and filmmakers. Historians paid more attention to frostbite, blood that froze in puddles on the ground, and helpless mind- and soul-numbing despair.