Thomas Cook - Red Leaves

"Yes," I said quietly.

"Some ditch where ... animals can ... where—" He suddenly staggered forward, leaned into me, buried his face in my shoulder, and began to sob. "Oh, Jesus," he cried. "I got to have her back."

I draped a single arm over his shoulder, and he drew away quickly, as if stung by an electric charge. "You tell him that, okay?" he said. "Keith." His eyes were dry now, a desert waste. "You tell him that I got to have her back."

"Keith doesn't know where Amy is, Vince," I said.

His gaze fixed on me like two hot beams. "Just tell him," he said.

I started to speak, but he spun around and made his way to his truck, his short powerful arms sawing the wind mechanically, like a furious wind-up doll.

"Keith doesn't know anything," I called after him.

Vince didn't turn, and when he reached his van, he yanked open the door and pulled himself in behind the wheel. For a moment, he sat, head dropped forward, eyes downcast. Then he turned toward me, and I saw the depth of his pain and knew beyond doubt that his world had shrunk to the dark, pulsing nucleus of Amy's loss. All that had mattered to him before no longer mattered. Nor did all that still mattered to others touch him now. I heard his words again, fraught with desperate warning, I got to have her back. Beneath the anguish, there was a festering rage. Vince would level cities, vaporize oceans, burn all the fields of earth to hold Amy in his arms again, hold her dead or alive. For him, all existence weighed no more than sixty pounds, stood no higher than four feet. Everything else was dust.

***

I didn't want to go into the shop after that, didn't want Neil to see how shaken I was. He'd ask questions I didn't want to answer. And so I walked to the other end of the mall and dialed Leo Brock.

"I had a little ... confrontation with Vince Giordano," I told him.

"When?"

"Just now."

"Where?"

"In the parking lot outside my shop."

"What did he say?"

"That he wants Amy back," I answered. "He told me to tell that to Keith."

I see.

"He thinks Keith did something, Leo," I added. "He's convinced himself of that."

There was a pause, and I could almost hear the tumblers of Leo's brain.

"Listen, Eric," he said at last. "The police seem to think that there's something wrong. Something somebody isn't telling."

"What do you mean?"

"That's the most I could get out of my source," Brock said. "Nothing concrete. Just a feeling that something's wrong."

"With Keith?"

"With something," Leo said. "The guy who tells me these things, he just gives hints."

"Something wrong," I repeated. "Where would they come up with an idea like that?"

"I don't know. Maybe they got a tip."

"A tip? From whom?"

"It could be anybody," Leo answered. "It could have come from that hotline they've set up. You know how that works. Anonymous. Anybody can call in, say anything."

"But the cops don't have to believe it, do they?"

"No, they don't," Leo said. "But if it has any credibility, then they're apt to look into it. Especially in a case like this. Missing girl. They're under a lot of pressure, Eric, as I'm sure you know." He paused, like a priest in the confessional, using silence as a spade, digging at me. "So, if you know of something ... wrong."

I choked back the reflex to tell him about the car. "This isn't enough," I said. "This isn't enough for me to go on, this business of something being wrong. Jesus Christ. It could be anything. Something 'wrong.' Jesus, could they get more vague?"

"Which is why I'm asking," Leo said.

"What exactly are you asking, Leo?"

"Eric, listen," Leo said evenly. "This business of Vince Giordano, don't worry about that. I can get a restraining order in two seconds. But understand, on this other matter, the police are going to be looking into things."

"What things?"

"Whatever looks promising from their point of view," Leo said. "They don't have to go in only one direction. If something comes in, like on that hotline, they can run with it. It could be anything. Some rumor. This is a police investigation, Eric, not a trial. The rules aren't the same."

I shook my head. "Hotline. Jesus Christ. Just something somebody says over the phone, and—"

"That's right," Leo interrupted. "So let me ask you this, is there any reason why someone out there might want to hurt you or Meredith?"

"By doing what? Blaming this whole thing on Keith?"

"Perhaps that. Or maybe just by planting stories."

"What kind of stories?"

"Any story that might get the attention of the police."

I laughed coldly. "Like we're drug dealers ... or Satanists?"

Leo's tone was grave. "Anything, Eric."

Suddenly I felt drained, all my energy dissipated, my earlier optimism flattened like an animal on the road. "God," I breathed. "My God."

"I don't know what this 'something wrong' is," Leo said. "My guess, it's probably nothing. But they don't need much, the cops. Not in a case like this."

I lifted my head slightly, like a battered fighter rallying before the next bell. "Well, the answer is no," I said. "There is nothing wrong."

After a pause, Leo said, "All right." He cleared his throat roughly. "Do you want me to take action regarding Mr. Giordano?"

I saw Vince's stricken face bury itself in my shoulder, felt the tremble of his sobs. "No," I said. "Not yet."

"All right," Leo said again, his tone the same as seconds before, carrying a hint of disappointment. "But let me know if he approaches you again."

"I will," I assured him.

He hung up with no further word, but a mood continued to reverberate around me, weird suggestions about "someone out there" who might want to hurt me or Meredith or Keith, strike at our little family circle, rip it apart. I heard a whispered voice, anonymous and malicious, recorded on the police hotline, mouthing accusations of incest, abuse, all manner of deviance, but the longer the list became, the more I dismissed the dark accusing voice. Charges had to be proved, after all. Suspicion alone could not destroy anything.

Or could it?

Suddenly another question sliced through my brain, one directed not toward Keith or Meredith, as should have been expected, but to the mysterious man who'd shown up at the house, asked Warren questions, come on an insurance matter only a week or so after my mother's car had shattered the guardrail of the Van Cortland Bridge and plunged into the icy stream below.

What, I wondered with an inexplicable sense of dread, had he been looking for?

TWELVE

For the first time in years, I didn't want to go home that night, though even then, despite my anxiety, I had no idea that before long I would be leaving my home for good.

I saw it for the last time on a chill October day. The closing was set for that afternoon, and the new owner, an attorney with a young wife and two small children, was anxious to move in. I walked through the swept and empty rooms one by one, first the kitchen and living room, then upstairs to the bedroom Meredith and I had shared for so long. I looked out its frosted window to a carpet of fallen leaves. Then I walked out into the corridor where I'd faced Keith that night, passed through the door he'd slunk behind, and stared out the window over which he'd once hung a thick impenetrable shade, the one I'd finally ripped down in a fit of rage, my words at that moment once again echoing in my mind, No more fucking lies!

Perhaps I'd actually begun to sense that steadily approaching violence the evening I decided not to go home directly after work, but called Meredith instead, told her I was going to be late and tried to lose myself in the repetitive labor of safely enclosing idyllic family photographs within neat square walls of perfectly stained wood and painted metal. Or perhaps I'd begun to feel that the protective walls that had once surrounded my own family, both the first and the second, were beginning to crumble, and that if I could simply ignore the leaks and fissures, then it would all go away and Amy would be returned to Vince and Karen and I could return to Meredith and Keith and by that means escape the ghosts of that other family, Dad and my mother, Jenny and Warren, who'd already begun to speak to me in the same suspicious whisper I imagined as the voice on the police hotline, sinister, malicious, ceaselessly insisting that something at the heart of things was wrong.