“Smart, Max. Very smart.” Picking the Glock up, I flicked the light and left the room. Outside, I locked the door again and walked down the hall. How dangerous and wrong that must have looked. What’s wrong with this picture? Why is Max Fischer charging through his house with a .45 pistol in his hand? Who does he plan on shooting?
Where were Lily and Greer now? At the market. She’d said they were going to stop at the market first and then come home. But I’d been so nuts when I ran in to tell her I had to leave, she might have panicked and would return much sooner than planned. I hoped not. I hoped she’d stay away. I hoped the phone wouldn’t ring yet. I hoped my room was still only a room and not a whole new crisis.
The house had grown even bigger since I’d gone through Lincoln’s room. A small picture on the wall I’d drawn for Lily loomed, a yellow rug glowed so much on the floor that I stepped over to avoid touching it. You grow smaller. You lose perspective, control. Something is eating you from inside out and there is nothing you can do about it. It’s your own fear.
At the door to my room I put a hand on the knob, paused a breath, turned it. Clicked the light on.
Nothing.
Nothing had been touched. The neatness that was my room, that always was the room, was there. Until I noticed the smell. Shit. The place was clean and tidy and reeked vilely of shit. The smell owned the room.
It was on my desk. Two things were on my desk: one of Lily’s favorite dinner plates piled with shit, a photograph stuck in the top. Next to it was a green manila folder. I owned only one green folder. Purposely. I kept it in a locked strongbox at the bottom of a locked filing cabinet. In that box was the green file along with copies of my will, insurance policies, and important bank certificates. Lily did not know about the box but our lawyer did. No one but me knew the contents. If I were to die suddenly, he would inform her and give her the extra key. I hadn’t told her because I knew she would have objected furiously to the existence of the file. It was dangerous and incriminating, but I believed a fundamental artifact of our life and relationship. I envisioned a day when we were older, going through the papers together. I believed experiencing it all again through sixty-year-old eyes and hearts would matter very much to both of us.
The file was thick. It held ninety-three pages of information gathered by the detective about Anwen and Gregory Meier. It also held the diary I’d kept from the day I went to visit the Meiers in New Jersey until the day before Lily confessed to kidnapping her son. Once she had told me the truth, I felt no need to write about what I thought was the truth anymore. I felt no need to write about anything at all. It had changed from being what was feared to what was from that moment on.
As Lincoln grew older and more untrustworthy, I’d twice moved the box to a safety-deposit box at our bank. But having it there made me extremely uneasy and both times I’d brought it back. To lessen the risk of discovery, I put the “Lily documents” at the bottom and covered them over with stock certificates and other boring papers that had no immediate value or interest to a snooper or a thief.
Even reading through the papers from the detective agency, one would have thought I simply had an inordinate interest in a couple named Meier. People who had tragically gone through one harrowing experience after another and only barely survived to crawl out on the other shore of life. Those Xerox copies alone said nothing.
It was my diary. I could quote specific, damning passages from it here, but what would be the point? You have already heard my questions, alarm, and pain from that time. The diary Lincoln found and read said it all. Except for the one other thing I discovered the night of Lily’s confession. But seeing the shit and that deadly green folder so neatly side by side on the desk, I did not think of that one other thing. The hideous smell got stronger, closer; it made me want to retch. I walked over and sat down in the chair. Breathing through my mouth, I bent forward and plucked the photograph out of the top of the glistening brown pile. It was of our son squatting on this desk, shitting onto this plate. He was grinning at the camera and giving it the finger. Written in thick black marker across it was: “Look what I found!”
The telephone rang. I glanced at it. It seemed a hundred miles away on the other side of the desk. I didn’t have the strength to reach across the few inches for it. It rang again. It rang again.
“Hello?”
“Dad!” His voice sounded so happy. “Now, I thought you’d be home. Get my message? It must be pretty ripe by now. What did you tell old Lil to get you home so fast? I bet you hightailed it over to see if I’d be there. Right?”
“Something like that. Lincoln—”
“Shut up. I don’t want to hear a word from you. I’ll hang up if you start talking. I’m at the airport. I took your extra Visa card and am going to use it for a while. I already got a few hundred out of a money machine with it. Bet you didn’t know I knew your code, didja? Do not call Visa and stop the card, understand?”
“Yes, use it, but listen—”
His voice grew more confident. “Good, right. I’m catching a plane to New York in ten minutes. Just so you and Mommy know, and don’t worry. Then I’m going to get a car and drive out to visit Mr. and Mrs. Meier. We need to have a good long talk together.”
“Lincoln—”
“Shut the fuck up! I’m going to talk to them and then I’ll think about you. Maybe. Maybe I’ll come back, maybe not. Don’t try to follow me. Besides, there isn’t another plane to New York for three hours. I checked. Even if you try, it won’t do you any good.
“Stay away. You owe me that, asshole. You and Lily owe me a lot more than that. Stay away until I get in touch with you. In the meantime, the only money I’ll have will be from your credit card, so do not cancel it.”
I had to say just one thing to him. I had to chance it. “Lincoln, the Meiers—”
“Shut up!” The line went dead.
Before doing anything else, I took the plate from the desk, shook what was on it into the toilet, and flushed. Then I rinsed the plate in fresh water until it was clean again. Not good enough. Taking it to the kitchen sink, I poured on liquid bleach and let it sit in that chemical bath a few minutes before cleaning it off with scalding water and soap. Still unsatisfied, I put the plate into the empty dishwasher and turned the machine on. I wonder what Lily thought later, opening the door and seeing only one plate. Strange things afoot that night in the Fischer household.
I didn’t want to be around to tell her what had gone on in the last hours. For a short time I considered admitting everything, including Lincoln knowing because he’d read the diary I’d kept hidden from her for years. But that would demand a discussion meant for a night when we had hours to weigh and argue and hopefully come to a peace with each other about my having kept the book around in the first place. There was no time now. Lincoln was about to board a plane to New York and do whatever the hell he planned to do with the Meiers once he got there.
I called flight information at Los Angeles Airport. The boy had told the truth—the plane just now leaving for New York was the last for three hours. No, there were no flights to Newark either. One to Hartford in an hour, another to Philadelphia in two. Both cities were too far away to be of any help. I needed New York or New Jersey but neither was available for one hundred and eighty minutes, plus flight time. For a while I felt hopeful on realizing that even with a valid credit card, an auto rental place won’t rent a car to a sixteen-year-old. Right! He’ll have to stay in the airport till he can figure a way out, which will buy me badly needed time. Yet this was also the young man who kept a loaded .45 pistol taped to the back of his dresser and had found my most secret of secrets. Which meant, of course, he was enterprising enough to find a way to Somerset, New Jersey, a lot sooner than I would.