Thomas Cook - Red Leaves

"And that's all you know about them?"

"Them?" I asked.

"We traced the call," Peak said. "I'm sure your lawyer has told you about it. The one the pizza deliveryman saw Keith making at the Giordanos'. It was placed to Delmot Price."

I started to speak, then stopped and waited.

"He knows Keith quite well," Peak added significantly.

I saw the car draw into the driveway as it had that night, its twin beams sweeping through the undergrowth, then Keith as he made his way down the unpaved road, brushed past the Japanese maple, and came into the house.

"Were they together that night?" I asked.

"Together?"

"Keith and Delmot Price."

"What makes you think they were together?" Peak asked.

I couldn't answer.

"Mr. Moore?"

I shook my head. "Nothing," I said. "Nothing makes me think they were together."

Peak saw the wound open up in me. I was a deer and he was an archer who knew he'd aimed well. I could almost feel the arrow dangling from my side.

"Did you know Keith had a relationship with this man?" Peak asked.

"Is that what he has?"

"According to Price, it's sort of a father-son thing."

"Keith has a father," I said sharply.

"Of course," Peak said softly, "but he talks to Price, you know, about himself, his problems. That he's not happy. Feels isolated."

"You think I don't know that about him?"

Peak seemed to be peering into my brain, looking through its many chambers, searching for the clue to me.

"I'm sure of one thing," he said. "You want to help Keith. We all want to help Keith."

It was all I could do to keep from laughing in Peak's face because I knew it was an act, scripted, a carefully laid trap to get me to incriminate my son; Peak had been moving at just the right pace, dropping little bits of information, then holding back, waiting. Which he was doing now, his eyes very still until he blinked slowly, released a small sigh, then said, "Did you know that Keith steals?"

I drew in a quick breath but did not reply.

"Price caught him stealing money from the cash register in his shop," Peak said. "Keith begged him not to say anything, and that's how they started talking."

I pretended to scoff at the outrageous nature of this latest charge. "That's ridiculous," I said. "Keith has everything he needs. And in addition, I pay him for the work he does at the shop."

"Not enough evidently."

"He has everything he needs," I insisted. "Why would he steal?"

Again, Peak waited for just the right amount of time before releasing his next arrow. "According to Price, he's trying to get enough money to run away."

"Run away? To where?"

"Anywhere, I guess."

Meaning, anywhere as long as it was away from me, from Meredith, from the burden of our family life.

"When was he going to do it?" I asked icily.

"As soon as he got enough money, I suppose." Peak leaned back and raked the side of his face.

"Unless this whole thing about Keith stealing isn't true," I said quickly. "Have you thought of that? Maybe Price is lying. Maybe Keith never took anything."

"Maybe," Peak said. "Why don't you ask him?"

He was setting me up, and I knew it. He was setting me up to do his work for him, interrogate my son.

"What have you asked him, Mr. Moore?" Peak said. "Have you asked him directly if he hurt Amy Giordano?"

He saw the answer in my eyes.

"Have you asked him anything about that night?"

"Of course, I have."

"What?"

"Well, for one thing, I asked him if he had any reason to think that Amy might have run away," I said. "Or if he'd seen anything suspicious around her house. A prowler, something like that."

"And he said no, right?"

I nodded.

"And you believed him, of course," Peak said. "Any father would." He leaned toward me slightly. "But Keith's not exactly who you think he is," he said gravely.

It was all I could do not to sneer. "Yeah, well," I said, "who is?"

NINETEEN

Y eah, well, who is?

I had never said anything so disturbing, and for the rest of the morning, as it echoed in my mind, I recalled similar sentiments I'd heard of late: Meredith's Because people lie, Eric; Warren's Everybody's fake. That I would remember such painful statements didn't strike me as particularly unusual. What was incontestably alarming was that this time I'd made such a statement myself. Why? I couldn't find an answer. All I knew was that each time I tried to think it through, examine the tortuous changes I could feel in myself, I returned to a single gnawing memory. Again and again, like a loop of film continually unfolding the same image, I saw Jenny that last time, mute, dying, her eyes full of a terrible urgency as she pressed her lips to my ear. Clearly she had been struggling against all odds to tell me something. In the years since her death I'd imagined it as some great truth she'd glimpsed on the precipice of death. But now, I wondered if that urgent communication might have been no more than some similarly dreary truth: Don't trust anyone or anything—ever.

I thought of Keith, the way I'd found him smoking sullenly near the playground, then of the things Peak had told me, that he had "a father-son thing" with Delmot Price and that he was a thief and planned to run away. All of this had come as a complete surprise, facts, if they were facts, which I couldn't have guessed, and which, if true, pointed to the single unavoidable truth that I did not know my son.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, a boiling wave of anger washed over me, anger at myself. What kind of father was I, really, if Keith had found it necessary to find another man, confide in him, reveal his most secret plans?

I had always felt terribly superior to my own father, far more involved with my son than he had ever been with any of his children. Even during Jenny's last days he'd made overnight business trips to Boston and New York, assigning Warren to stay at her bedside, see her through the night, a job my brother had made no effort to avoid, save on that last night, as I recalled now, when he'd emerged from Jenny's room looking old and haggard, a boy who, from his pale, stricken appearance on that gloomy morning, looked as if he'd seen the worst of things.

But now I wondered if, in fact, I was any better at fatherhood than my own father had been. When was the last time I'd actually talked with my son? Sure, we chatted over dinner, exchanged hasty asides as we passed each other in the hallway. But that was not real talk. Real talk bore the weight of hopes and dreams, tore away facades, and let each face shine in revealing light. Real talk was about life, the way we try to get through it, make the best of it, what we learn along the way. This kind of talk Keith had saved for Delmot Price, the man he'd gone to because he could not come to me, and who, if I were to begin to get a handle on my son before it was too late, I knew I would have to seek out, too.

Delmot Price wasn't hard to find, and the moment he saw me come through the door of his flower shop, he looked like a man who'd suddenly found himself in the crosshairs of a rifle scope.

He'd been wrapping a dozen long-stem red roses as I came into the shop. I stood off to the side and waited while he completed the task, took payment, and with a quick smile, thanked the woman whose roses they were.

During that time, I noted how gracefully he moved, his white hair gleaming in the overhead light, his long fingers folding the silver foil just so, tying the gold ribbon with a perfect knot. His fingers moved like dancers in a flowing and oddly beautiful choreography. There was no room for the slightest misstep, they had that kind of precision. And so it was obvious that in Keith, Price had not found a boy who was like himself, the way an English teacher might find a student with the same literary aspirations the teacher had once known as a youth. But instead, Delmot Price had found his opposite in Keith, a graceless, slovenly boy with tangled hair and a sullen smirk, a boy he'd befriended not out of admiration but because he pitied my son, felt sorry for how awkward and isolated and utterly directionless he was, how in need, as Price must have supposed, of a father.