John Katzenbach - The Wrong Man

He had to find the right moment. Not this one, on the street where she’d grown up. It resonated her past. He was her future.

Easier, by far, he thought, to drink in her vision. He particularly liked watching her legs move. They were long and supple, and he wished that in their sole night together, he’d paid even more attention to them. Still, he was able to picture them, naked, glistening, and he shifted about in his seat as he felt the first heat of being aroused. He wished that Ashley would remove her knit cap, so that he could see her hair, and when he looked up and she did this, he smiled and wondered if he could send her all sorts of subliminal messages, directly from his thoughts to hers. It just reinforced in his mind how linked they were.

Michael O’Connell laughed out loud.

He could simply look at Ashley from afar and feel her warmth throughout his body. It was as if she energized him. He reached out, as if driven by passion, unable to sit still, and opened his door.

A short ways away, Ashley turned at that same moment and, without seeing the movement, filled with despair, stepped back into the house.

Michael O’Connell stood up, half in the car, one leg on the ground behind the door, staring at the spot where Ashley had disappeared. In his imagination, he could still see her.

Steal her, he said to himself.

It seemed so simple to him.

He smiled. It was just a matter of getting her alone.

Not exactly alone, he thought. But alone in his world. Not hers.

I am invisible, he thought, as he slid back into the car and pulled away from the curb.

He was wrong about this. From the window in her upstairs bedroom, Sally stood, watching. She gripped the window frame with white-knuckled fingers, close to breaking the wood, her nails digging into the paint. It was the first time she had seen Michael O’Connell in the flesh. When she’d first spotted the figure behind the wheel of the car, she had tried to tell herself that he wasn’t who she thought he was, but, in the same thought, knew she was deluding herself. It was him. It could be no one else. He was as close as he’d always been, right beyond their reach, shadowing Ashley’s every step. Even when she could not see him, he was there. She felt dizzy, enraged, and almost overcome by anxiety. Love is hate, she thought. Love is evil. Love is wrong.

She watched the car disappear down the street.

Love is death, she thought.

Breathing hard, she turned away from the window. She decided against instantly telling everyone that she’d spotted O’Connell on their street, only yards away from the front door, spying on Ashley. The family would be enraged, she thought. Angry people behave rashly. We need to be calm. Intelligent. Organized. Get to work. Get to work. Get to work. She turned back and found the pad of paper where she was making her notes. Notes for a murder. When she picked up her pencil, though, she noticed that her hand was quivering just slightly.

In the late afternoon, Sally went shopping for items she believed were integral to their task. It was not until early in the evening that she got back, checked once on Ashley, who appeared oddly bored, curled up on her bed reading, wondered where Hope was, as she listened to Catherine fiddle about in the kitchen, and then got around to calling Scott on the phone.

“Yes?”

“Scott? It’s Sally.”

“Is everything okay?”

“Yes. We got through the day more or less without incident,” she said without mentioning that she had seen O’Connell lurking about their street that morning. “How much longer that will be the case, I have my doubts.”

“I understand that.”

“Good. I hope so. Because I think you should come over here now.”

“All right…” He hesitated.

“It’s time to act.” Sally laughed, but without humor, as if pricked by some deep cynicism. “It seems to me that we’ve agreed more in the past few weeks than we ever did when we were actually married.”

Scott, too, smiled ruefully. “That is a strange way of looking at things. Maybe. But when we were together, well, there were times it wasn’t that bad.”

“You weren’t living a lie like I was.”

“Lie is a strong word.”

“Look, Scott, I don’t want to fight over past fights again, if that makes sense.”

For a moment they remained silent, then Sally added, “We’re getting sidetracked. This isn’t about where we were, it’s about where we can go or even who we are. And most important, it’s about Ashley.”

“Okay,” Scott said, feeling that some huge swamp of emotions was between them that was never spoken of and never would be.

“I have a plan,” Sally blurted.

“Good,” he said after taking a deep breath. He wasn’t sure that he meant that.

“I don’t know if it is a good one. I don’t know if it will work. I don’t know if we can pull it off.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“We shouldn’t be talking on the phone. At least not on these lines.”

“Right. Of course not. That makes sense.” He wasn’t at all sure why this made sense, but he said it anyway. “I’ll be over straightaway.” He hung up the phone and thought that there was something awful in the routines of life. Teaching, living alone with all the ghosts of statesmen, soldiers, and politicians that made up his courses, his existence was completely predictable. He guessed that that was going to change.

Hope returned to the house before Scott arrived. She had been out walking, trying without much luck to sort through all that was happening. She found Sally in the living room, poring over some loose sheets of paper, pencil stuck in her mouth. She looked up when Hope entered.

“I have a plan. I’m not sure it will work. But Scott’s coming over and we can go over it together.”

“Where are my mother and Ashley?”

“Upstairs. Not at all pleased with being banned from the conversation.”

“My mother doesn’t appreciate being excluded from things, which is a curious position for someone who has spent much of her adult life living in the woods in Vermont, but there you have it. That’s the way she is.” Hope hesitated, and Sally looked up as if she heard a catch in Hope’s voice.

“What is it?”

Hope shook her head. “I don’t know exactly, but try to follow me on this. She’s doing what we ask her to, right? Well, that’s just not her style. Not in the slightest. She’s always been a lone-wolf type, the I don’t give a damn what other people think sort of person. And her seeming compliance…well, I’m not sure that we should rely on her ever doing exactly what we ask her to. She’s just a bit of a loose cannon. It’s what my dad always loved about her, and me, too, except, upon occasion, growing up, it made things, well, difficult, if you catch my drift.”

Sally smiled. “Are you all that different?”

Hope shrugged, but laughed in response. “I guess not.”

“And don’t you think that I might have been attracted to those qualities, as well?”

“I never thought of stubborn and unpredictable as my best sides.”

“Well, just goes to show what you know.” Sally managed a small grin as she dipped her head to the paperwork spread out on her lap.

The two women were both silent. Oddly, Hope thought, it was the first affectionate thing Sally had said in weeks.

There was a knock on the door. “That will be Scott,” Sally said. She gathered her papers together as Hope went to let him in. In the second or two of solitude, she put her head back and took in a deep breath. Once you start this thing moving, there will be no going back.

Catherine fumed inwardly. She looked across at the younger woman, until finally Ashley dashed her book to the floor after reading the same page for the third time and said, “I don’t know if I can stand this much longer. I’m being treated like a six-year-old. Being sent to my room. Told to keep myself occupied while my parents map out my future. God damn it, Catherine, I’m not a baby! I can fight for myself.”