Thomas Cook - Red Leaves

She nodded heavily. "So you have to talk to him, Eric."

"We both do."

"No," Meredith said firmly. "It would look like we were ganging up on him."

"All right," I said. "But I'm going to tell him everything Peak told me. Everything Price told me. And I'm going to ask him who brought him home that night. I want an answer to that."

Meredith released a weary breath.

"I won't take some bullshit story, either," I said. "This is getting worse and worse, and he has to know that."

"Yes," Meredith said. She seemed far away, and getting farther, like a boat unmoored and drifting out into the open sea. "All right," she said. Then she turned and made her way down the corridor to her small office, where I imagined she remained, waiting anxiously for her son to come home.

TWENTY

It was nearly four in the afternoon when Keith appeared.

During the hours before I finally saw Keith peddle down the unpaved driveway, I tried to find the best way to approach him. I remember how clumsy my mother had always been at such interrogations. She would ask Warren about some misdeed. He would deny it. She would accept his denial, and that would be the end of it. My father, on the other hand, had relentlessly pursued him, puncturing each alibi, watching sternly, his eyes gleaming with superiority as my brother steadily sank deeper into the mire of his own inept little falsehoods. If Warren claimed to have been watching television when some small misdeed had been committed, my father would whip out the TV Guide and demand to know exactly what Warren had been watching. If Warren were clever enough actually to have named a program, my father would rifle through the pages until he found the show and then demand that Warren tell him precisely what, exactly, the show had been about. He'd always managed to be two or three steps ahead of Warren, waiting for him like a mugger in a dark alleyway, poised to strike.

But Warren had been easy to frighten and confuse. After only a few minutes under my father's inquisition he would invariably surrender, confess what slight crime he'd committed, then accept whatever punishment my father decreed. Warren had always been pliant, straining to please, contrite, eager to say or do whatever my father commanded.

I knew I could not expect the same of Keith. His mood was volatile, resentful, sullen. At the slightest provocation, he might bolt out of the room, storm into the night, make his run for it. More than anything, what I feared as I watched him slip off the seat of his bike and trudge up the walkway toward the house was that in the end it would turn physical, that in order to prevent him from running away, I would have to use force.

He didn't see me when he came through the door. He tossed his book bag on the stairs, whirled to the right, and strode into the kitchen. I heard him open the refrigerator. There was a clink of bottles, the sound of one being opened. I assumed he'd taken a bottled water or a soda, but when he slouched back into the foyer, I saw that he held a beer.

When he saw me sitting in the living room, he stared at me evenly, waiting for a challenge, then tilted back his head, took a long swig, and wiped his mouth with his sleeve.

"You're not of drinking age, Keith," I reminded him.

"That right?" he asked with a smirk. "Well, by the time I'm old enough to drink, I'll be in jail, so, like they say, what the fuck." He grinned at me defiantly, took another swig, then pressed the bottle toward me. "Care for a drink, Dad?"

I stood up, walked over to him, and yanked the bottle from his hand. "We need to talk," I said. "In your room."

"My room?" He laughed dismissively. "No way, Dad."

I placed the bottle on the table beside the door. "Your room," I said evenly. "Now."

He shook his head with exaggerated weariness, turned, and made his way up the stairs with a slow exhausted gait, like a boy who'd worked in the fields all day, rather than one who'd spent the last seven hours sitting in a classroom.

At the door of his room, he turned to me. "You're not going to like it," he said. "It's not like all neat and orderly."

"I don't care what it looks like," I told him.

With that, Keith opened the door to his room and stepped inside.

I followed behind, stepping into a level of clutter and disarray that I'd fully expected. The only surprise was that between the window and the small desk that had once held his computer, he'd hung a thick black cloth, which was clearly meant to block the monitor from view. The walls of the room were covered with torn-out magazine pictures of people dressed in Goth attire, black jeans and black T-shirts, stringy hair dyed black, blackened eyes and lips and fingernails.

"Like the décor, Dad?" Keith asked with a brutal laugh. "Glad you came to visit?"

I whirled around to face him. "Delmot Price and I had a little talk this morning," I said.

Keith slumped down on the unmade bed and idly picked up a magazine. "So?"

"The police have talked to him, too," I added. "They know you called him the night Amy disappeared."

Keith flipped a page of the magazine, licked his finger, and flipped another. "I just wanted to talk," he said.

"About your plan to run away?"

Keith gave no sign that the fact that I knew about his plan in the least bothered him. He continued to stare at the magazine.

"Look at me, Keith," I said sharply.

He lifted his eyes languidly.

"Put the magazine away."

He flipped the cover, tossed it across the room, and made a great show of staring me directly in the eye.

"First off, don't even think about leaving town," I said. "That's all the cops would need right now."

Keith kicked off his shoes, pressed his back against the wall, and folded his arms over his chest.

I pulled the chair away from his desk, planted it in the center of the room, and sat down so that we were now eye to eye.

"I need some answers, Keith," I said.

Keith said nothing but continued to stare at me sullenly.

"They found pictures on your computer," I said.

I looked for some sign that the shock of having the pictures discovered had shaken him but saw nothing but his cold metallic stare.

"Why did you have those pictures, Keith?"

His silence was like a cocked gun.

"Little girls," I said. "Naked."

He closed his eyes.

"Why did you have pictures of little girls on your computer?"

He shook his head.

"They found them, Keith," I said firmly. "They found them on your computer."

He continued to shake his head, eyes still closed.

"You know what that looks like, don't you? How bad it looks. With Amy missing."

He began to breathe with exaggerated force, rhythmically, like a pant.

"Keith, are you listening to me? They found pictures! "

He was breathing in short gasps, loud and furiously, like a diver gearing up for a frightening plunge.

"They showed them to me, Keith," I said. "Little girls. Seven, eight years old."

Suddenly the gasping breaths ceased, and his eyes shot open. "What else?" he hissed. "What else, Dad? I know there's more."

"Yes, there is," I said hotly, as if he'd challenged me to make a stronger case against him. "I want to know who brought you home the night Amy disappeared."

He stared at me silently for a moment, and I expected him to yell back some ridiculous reply, but instead something appeared to unravel deep within him, as if he were suddenly in the motions of a final letting go. "Nobody brought me home."

I leaned forward threateningly. "I saw a car pull into the driveway, Keith. Up on the road. It pulled in. I saw the lights. Then it backed up and drove away. That's when I saw you coming down the drive." I lifted my head and looked him dead in the eye. "Who brought you home in that car, Keith?"