Thomas Cook - Red Leaves

"Here's another guess," I said sharply. "The person who called the hotline was a woman, wasn't it?"

Leo leaned forward and peered at me closely. "Eric, you need to calm down."

I rebuked him with a harsh cackle. "The wife of the man Meredith is supposed to be having an affair with, that's who called."

Leo now looked as if deep in thought, unable to decide between two equally difficult choices.

"A pale little wisp of a thing named Judith Rodenberry," I added.

Leo shook his head. "I don't know what you're talking about, Eric," he said.

He was lying, and I knew it. Again, I recalled that first day, when Meredith had walked him to his black Mercedes, the two of them standing there in the driveway, half concealed by the spreading limbs of the Japanese maple, but not concealed so much that I hadn't seen the way Meredith's hands fluttered about like panicked birds until a few no-doubt well-chosen words from Leo stopped them in their frenzied flight. "What had he said?, I wondered now, then instantly put the words into his mouth: Don't worry, Meredith, no one will find out.

"Did you hear me, Eric?" Leo said firmly. "I have no idea what you're talking about. The hotline matter, it had nothing to do with Meredith."

"What then?" I challenged. "What did this person say? What was this something wrong'?" I felt like a vial filled to the brim with combustible materials, everything poised at the volcanic edge. " Tell me the fucking truth! "

Leo slumped back in his chair and seemed almost to grow older before my eyes, more grave in his demeanor than I had ever seen him. "Warren," he said. "The 'something wrong' is Warren."

TWENTY-THREE

In all the years I'd gone there, the scores and scores of times, I'd never noticed anything. But now as I turned onto Warren's street, I noticed everything. I noticed how close his house was to the elementary school, how his upstairs window looked out over the school's playground, how, from that small, square window, he could easily watch the girls on the swings, see their skirts lift and fold back as they glided forward. He could stand behind the translucent white curtains and observe them clamoring over the monkey bars and riding up and down on the seesaw. Or, if he wished, he could stare down at the entire playground, take in small gatherings of little girls at a single glimpse, keep track of them as they played, pick and choose among them, find the one that most interested him and follow her like a hunter tracking a deer caught in the crosshairs of his scope.

As I closed in upon his house, I thought of other things, too. I recalled that Warren preferred to work on weekends and take Wednesdays and Thursdays off, both school days, days when the little girls of the elementary school would be frolicking on the playground. I remembered how he never minded working holidays, when school was out, and how each year, he seemed to dread the approach of summer, when school would no longer be in session. He had reasons for all these preferences, of course. He didn't mind working weekends, he said, because he didn't have anything to do anyway. He didn't mind working holidays because holidays depressed him, which, in turn made it harder for him to resist the bottle. He dreaded summer because it was hot and muggy, and he didn't like to work in heat and humidity.

In the past, his reasons had always made perfect sense to me. Now they seemed fabrications, ways of concealing the fact that what my brother wanted to do more than anything was to stand at his window and peer down at the elementary school playground and watch little girls at play.

These thoughts led me to a yet darker one, hurling my mind back to the month when Warren had been holed up at my house with a broken hip. Holed up in Keith's room. With Keith's computer. I could almost hear the tap of his fingers on the keys as I had so many times when I'd walked by the closed door of Keith's room when Warren was staying there. At the time, I'd assumed that Warren was playing some mindless computer game.

Then I thought of the pictures Detective Peak had shown me, pictures taken from Keith's computer, and remembered the anguish of Keiths denial, the way he'd banged his head against the wall, how fiercely he had fought off the horror of my accusations. Now I knew that it had been Warren all along, Warren who'd sat hour after hour cruising the Internet for pictures of little girls. The only question now was what he saw in them. What in the twisted circuitry of my brother's mind allowed him to drag these little girls from the safety of their childhoods and harness their small undeveloped bodies to his adult desire?

I tried to recall if I'd ever seen the slightest sign of such a dark perversity. I went back through the days and years of our youth, the times we'd been together in the presence of small children, and searched for some glimmer in Warren's eye, a look I might not have understood at that earlier time, but which I would easily recognize now. Had his gaze ever followed a child across a yard or down a street? Had he ever stopped in midsentence at a little girl's approach? Had he ever so much as mentioned a neighborhood kid, someone's little sister, perhaps, or a visiting cousin?

I could find no instance of any such early indication, not one occasion when Warren had seemed anything but an awkward boy, lacking in self-confidence, slow in his studies, incompetent on the playing field, the butt of countless school-yard jokes. He'd been all these things, and in one way or another I'd always felt sorry for him. But now I felt nothing but revulsion, a creepy sense that this boy had grown into an utterly repulsive man.

I pulled into Warren's driveway behind the battered truck he used in his work. Its open bed was scattered with paint cans and spattered drop cloths, and two equally spattered wooden ladders were strapped to its sideboards, loosely tied and drooping, as I would have expected from Warren. All his life he'd done things haphazardly, with little attention to detail, following a course as wobbly as his footsteps when he'd had too much to drink. Even so, I'd always had a brother's affection for him, overlooked his lassitude, his drinking, those parts of his life that were basically pathetic. But now a vile shadow covered him, my suspicions so intense, and in their intensity, so brutal, that I couldn't ignore them.

And yet, for all that, I sat behind the wheel for a long time, sat in Warren's weedy driveway, unable to move, staring at the small bleak house he'd lived in for fifteen years. His door was closed, of course, but a sickly yellow light shone from the upstairs room he called his bachelor lair. He'd furnished the room with a motley assortment of furniture, along with a television, a computer, and a refrigerator just large enough to hold a few six packs of beer. He'd lit the place with lava lamps at one point, then a series of garish paper lanterns, but these had ultimately given way to the single uncovered ceiling light and the flickering of his computer screen.

The image of Warren's dissolute body slumped in an overstuffed chair, his doughy face eerily lit by the computer screen sent a piercing melancholy through me. I saw the weary run of my brother's life, the corrosive nature of his most guarded secret, the unspeakable cravings that ceaselessly gnawed at him. One by one the photographs Detective Peak had found on Keith's computer surfaced in my mind, little girls in nature, naked, innocent, incapable of arousing anything but a child-man. But that was what Warren was, wasn't he? Stunted in every way a man can be stunted, dismal in his own sickly underdevelopment, a wretched, pitiable creature, hardly a man at all.

But none of that, I decided, changed what he had done. He had come into my house, lived in my son's room, and while living there, had poisoned Keith's computer with pictures of naked little girls. And when Keith's computer was seized by the police, he'd kept the fact secret that such incriminating material might still be floating about in its unknowable circuitry. He had sat back silently, knowing full well that the pictures the police found would be laid at Keith's door.