“Sorry to bother you,” I say. I take a step down the porch, then turn back before they’ve closed the door.
“I’m a policeman,” I say. “Do you have food?”
They nod.
“How much?”
“A lot,” says the woman.
“Enough,” says the man.
“Okay,” I say. Our bones are rattled by a reverberant boom from the southwest, the area of Little Pond Road and the reservoir.
“Do me a favor, folks: Don’t answer your door anymore.”
They nod, wide eyed. “You mean, tonight?”
“Just don’t answer your door anymore.”
The wind is picking up, summer breezes transforming into a panicky wind, sending leaves skittering down the street and banging garbage cans together and fanning the flames jumping up off the roof of the prison.
Houdini bounds down the porch ahead of me and we go to the other torch-lit house, number nine Delaney Street. As we cross the lawn, Houdini barks at the ground and some nocturnal creature leaps away from him, rustling a row of bushes. Even in the darkness the heat is unrelenting. My arm sweats in the sling. It’s a rickety wooden porch, cluttered with old junk. The door is unpainted and there’s a big New England Patriots beach towel strung across the front windows. This is right—it seems right—like just the sort of house where a quasi-employed twenty-year-old jack-of-all-trades would be crashing with assorted friends and acquaintances. I take the steps, two at a time, my heart beating fast for Martha.
Cortez was hit on the head this morning, he said, three hours before I got there. I got there at around 11:30. That means Martha was taken twelve hours ago. I bang on the door and call out “Jeremy—” the story alive and clear in my head.
Jeremy loved Martha. Martha loved her husband.
But canny young Jeremy had seen into the husband’s secret heart, and he knew that what Brett wanted was to leave. He knew from long talks over grocery runs and late nights at the pizza joint that Brett’s heart was straining at the leash: Here was a strange and high-minded man who wanted to use the last months to do some furious good in the world—who felt sure, in fact, that God was calling him to do so. But he was trapped by another kind of goodness, bound by his marriage vows.
And so Jeremy’s plan, the forged diary page, the deceit, like something out of Shakespeare, something from the opera: exile the man by guile, take the woman by force.
“Jeremy?” I call again, rattle the handle.
Fresh gunfire rends the air like distant thunder, and I hear indiscriminate screaming and then, by some trick of the wind, snatches from a desperate conversation—“no, come on—no…” “shut up, you shut your mouth”—from some other crisis, some other corner of the city.
No one answers the door. The wind is rifling my hair, raising hackles on my neck. Time to get in there.
“Stay,” I tell the dog. “Stand guard.” He looks up at me, his head at a tilt, his teeth bared. “Anybody comes up the steps, bark. Anybody comes out but me, attack. Okay?”
Houdini settles on his haunches at the top of the stairs, silent and purposeful. I haul back and kick, hard, with my right foot. The thin wood splinters; my body explodes in pain. The tissue shrieks in my sewn-up arm. I scream and double over and scream again, hold my head down until the pain concludes its route along the lines of my leg into the arm and back down to the ground. Houdini stands there, eyes wide with sympathy and wonder, but keeping in position as I have instructed.
“Good boy,” I mutter, breathing in and out, in and out. “Good boy.”
When I can move I go inside, into a dark and cluttered living room, one flickering torch burning down in a vase. A suitcase is propped against the back wall, half open, a few T-shirts spilling out like clustered snakes. An unplugged refrigerator lies on its side in the front room like a beached whale; someone has spray painted DOES NOT WORK across the top of it.
“Martha?” I call, and again, shouting, stepping carefully forward, no gun, hands raised before me. “Martha?
To the right is an arched doorway leading to a kitchen, to the left a long hallway. I head to the hallway and trip on something—a pair of sneakers, tongues lolling out obscenely, no laces. Once, I bet, this house was littered with pizza boxes, beer cans; once the TV was always on, someone was always on the sofa getting high, people were stumbling into and out of the bathroom getting dressed for smalltime retail gigs. It’s dark now; now all these young men are gone, wandering around the world. I imagine them, one gone home to be with mom and dad, one coupled off in an asteroid marriage, one to New Orleans, off and running.
And one still here. One a kidnapper, a murderer.
I hear him just at the moment I see him, slumped on a landing at the top of the stairs, moaning.
“Hey,” he says dimly, his voice thick. “Someone there?”
Jeremy Canliss is collapsed with his back against the bannister, hovering above me on the stair landing, the outline of a man against the darkness like a ghost caught halfway to heaven. The little ponytail is undone, and his hair is greasy and lank, framing the small scared face. His eyes are twitching and sorrowful, his cheeks red and flushed, like he’s nothing but a kid with a crush, a kid with a crush on Martha Milano.
A long-barreled rifle with a mounted scope, the gun he used to shoot Brett Cavatone, lies next to him on the floor, the barrel facing the wall, the handle jammed awkwardly under his left buttock.
“It’s Detective Palace, Jeremy.” I say it strong, barreling my voice up the stairs. It feels good, just the action of raising my voice, dipping into that powerful tough-policeman register. “Stay right where you are.”
“You’re like a monster, dude,” he says, light amusement coloring his strained voice. “From a monster movie. The man who would not fucking quit.”
“I need you to stand up, please, and put your hands in the air.”
He laughs and mutters, “Cool, man,” but stays where he is, his head rolling a little on his neck. It’s like he’s the last man at the frat party, abandoned by his brothers to sleep it off on the landing, maybe tumble down the steps.
I have no authority. I have no gun. I take a step up, toward the killer.
“Where’s Martha, Jeremy?”
“I do not know.”
“Where is she?”
“I wish I knew.”
I take another step.
“Who’s N.?”
“Nobody,” he whispers, laughs. “It stands for ‘nobody.’ Funny, right?”
I’m not laughing. I take another step, getting closer. He’s still not moving.
“Why did you do it?” he asks me, petulant, childish.
“Why did I do what, Jeremy?”
“Go and get him. I told you not to do that. I told you.” He looks at me with genuine bafflement, puzzled and sorrowful. “I just wanted my chance, you know? I just wanted a chance with her. I just needed her to be alone, so I could talk to her, so I could make her understand.”
All this I already know. After he created his forgery, tore out a page from Martha’s hot-pink cinnamon-scented diary and crafted the incriminating passage, he “discovered” it and passed it on to Brett.
Jeez, man, I don’t know how to tell you this… this was just, like, lying open… in your house… I’m sorry… I’m really sorry.
Any husband would have been skeptical, would have confronted his wife, demanded an explanation, hoped for a misunderstanding. Except for Brett: the husband who wanted to go, who wanted his marriage to be over, for the contract to be abrogated so he could go off and do God’s work in the woods.