Thomas Cook - Red Leaves

"What'll you have?" Peg asked as she plopped two paper coasters before us.

We ordered two beers, grabbed the frosted bottles and headed for the booth at the back.

Warren took a long swig, then, before talking, decided on another. After that he put the bottle down on the table. "Hits the spot," he said.

"What did the cops want to know?" I asked.

"What I saw."

"You mean, Amy?"

"Amy, yeah, and Keith."

"Keith?"

"What he looked like." Warren took another swig from the bottle. "How he was acting. You know, like was he strange or anything that night. The short one was real interested in that."

"Peak," I said. "What did you tell him?"

"Like you told me, Eric. The truth."

"Which was?"

"That he was in a mood."

I stared at my brother, appalled. "Jesus, why did you say that?"

Warren looked at me, astonished. "Say what?"

"That Keith was in a mood. What the hell does that mean, anyway, that he was in a mood?"

Warren looked the way he did when he was twelve, and I was eight, his younger brother berating him for some stupid blunder.

"I figured I needed to tell them something," he said lamely. "You know, give them something. You always got to give them something, right?"

"Why do you think that?"

Warren didn't answer, but I knew he'd gotten the idea from television or the movies.

I slumped forward and ran my fingers through my hair. "All right, listen to me," I said wearily. "What exactly did you say?"

"Just what I told you," Warren answered.

He looked vaguely frightened, like a little boy who'd screwed up his part in the class play, and I remembered how cruelly my father had dismissed him, and how, to please my father, and to feel in league with him, I'd often adopted the same attitude toward my brother, exaggerating his failures, mocking his small successes. I couldn't help but wonder if in some way I was still locked in that adolescent pattern.

"Listen, Warren," I said, now trying for a less scolding tone. "A little girl is missing. This town is small, and this thing is getting bigger and bigger. You've seen her picture all over. There's even one on the door of my shop. And ribbons now. Yellow ribbons all over town. That means the cops are under a lot of pressure. Their jobs are on the line. So they have to find Amy, dead or alive, and then they have to find whoever did this. See what I mean?"

Warren stared at me blankly.

"What I'm saying is that if they begin to think that Keith had something do with this, they'll hone in on him. They won't look anywhere else. They have to close the case."

Warren nodded slowly, his big soft eyes blinking languidly.

"Which means that Keith being 'in a mood' gives them something to think about, turn over in their minds, and so they start thinking, okay, we got this kid, a little weird, no friends ... in a mood that night."

"So things start to add up to the cops," Warren said.

"Yes."

He took another sip from the beer, then nodded toward my bottle. "You not having any?" he asked, immediately shuffling off my warning, as well as any responsibility he might have for sinking my son deeper into police suspicion.

I pushed the bottle away. "What else did you tell them?" I asked sternly.

Warren stiffened, like a lowly private at an officer's approach. "Just that I drove Keith to the Giordanos' house," he said. "Amy was in the front yard. She came running up to the car. Then Keith got out and the two of them went inside." He hesitantly took another sip of beer. "Oh, and that I said hi to her."

"Anything else?"

"They wanted to know how she looked with Keith."

"Looked?"

"Like was she glad to see him, or did she act different when she saw him, like afraid, or backed away, stuff like that."

"What did you say?"

"I told them I didn't notice how she looked. Then they asked me if he touched her, you know, in a funny way, like maybe he shouldn't have, that kind of touch."

I dreaded the question but asked it anyway. "Did he?"

"No."

"Did he touch her at all?"

"He took her hand," Warren said. "He took her hand and led her inside."

"And that's it?"

"Yeah."

"Nothing else about Keith's mood?"

"No."

"You're sure you didn't say anything else, Warren."

"No, nothing," Warren assured me. Another swig. "What would I say?"

"I just need to know if there was anything else."

Warren shook his head with childish exaggeration. "Not a word, Eric." He lifted his hand. "I swear."

"Okay," I said, "Okay, that's not too bad then, I guess."

Warren took a swig and smiled like a little boy briefly in trouble but relieved now, all the burden lifted from him.

He chuckled. "But I got to admit, they made me nervous, those cops." He threw his head back, as if peering upward into the heart of some distant memory. "People like that always make me nervous."

I took a sip from my bottle, my own relief not all that different from Warren's, satisfied that he'd said nothing damaging about Keith.

"They all have the same look in their eyes, those guys," Warren added. "You know, suspicious."

I glanced at my watch, anxious to get home.

"Like that guy who came by the house after Mom's accident," Warren said. "The one we had, you know, when we lived in the big house."

He meant the house we'd lost, the one Dad had mortgaged to the hilt in his failed effort to regain financial ground, the one the bank had finally taken from us.

"I loved that house," Warren added. "Remember how we used to sail on the pond?"

"Yeah," I said.

"We'd already lost it when this guy came," Warren said. "I was packing boxes and he..."

"What guy are you talking about?"

"Some insurance guy."

"I don't remember any insurance guy coming to the house," I said.

"That's because you were with Aunt Emma."

I had been twelve years old the summer of my mother's death, and I recalled how my father had driven me across town to stay with his sister until, as he put it, "things calmed down."

"I stayed with Dad, remember?" Warren said. "Helping him pack."

My father had often enlisted Warren to do such heavy work, so it didn't surprise me that he'd used him as a kind of packhorse when he'd had to clean the house out before its repossession.

"Where was Dad when this guy came to the house?"

Warren shrugged. "You know Dad. He could have been anywhere." He looked at the empty bottle, then raised his hand and ordered another. "Anyway," he said. "With Dad not around, I didn't know what to do. But I figured, okay, this is just some guy from the insurance company, so, if he wants to talk to me, so what? I didn't see any harm in it."

"So you talked to him."

"Yeah. I was just a kid. He was a grown man. Big guy. You know, an adult. You don't say no, right?"

Peg arrived, plopped down Warren's beer then glared at me. "You?"

"I'm fine," I said.

She turned heavily and lumbered back up toward the front of the bar. "Besides, he was just asking about general stuff," Warren added. "Like how things were." He rolled the bottle between his hands, getting jumpy again, as if he suspected that I was laying some kind of trap for him. "You know, was Mom okay. Stuff like that. Family stuff. I didn't think much about it then, but it sort of gives me the creeps now."

"Why?'

"Because he seemed, you know, suspicious."

"Suspicious of what?"

"Us. I guess. Things in the family. Between Mom and Dad. Like, were things okay between them."

"He asked you that?"

"No, it was more a feeling I got, you know, like he was wondering if things were okay with them."

"What did you tell him?"

"That everything was fine," Warren said. "Which is why I couldn't understand why Dad got so pissed when I told him about this guy. Told me to keep my mouth shut, not let this guy in if he showed up again." He took a sip from the beer and wiped away a residue of white froth from his mouth with the back of his hand. "I guess he told the guy the same thing, because he never came back after that one time." He shrugged. "So whatever it was, it got settled, right?"