“How could you tell?”
“From the first moment. He didn’t have that bedraggled, slightly-amazed-at-the-world look about him, like so many students. He had this, I don’t know, a looseness to him. He was good-looking. Well put together. But he exuded a sort of dangerousness. As if he cared not one whit for anything other than some unspoken agenda. And when you stared closely at him, he had this truly unsettling look in his eyes. This don’t-get-in-my-way look.
“You know, he handed in an assignment once a couple of days late, so I did what I always do, and which I tell every class about on the first day: I marked it down one full grade point for each day late. He came to see me and told me that I was being unfair. This was, as you would probably guess, not the very first time that a student had come to me complaining about a grade. But, with O’Connell, the conversation was somehow different. I’m not sure how he did it, but somehow I was in the position of justifying what I had done, not the other way around. And the more I explained that it wasn’t unfair, the more his eyes narrowed. He could look at you the way some people might actually strike you. The impact was the same. You just knew you didn’t want to be on the other end of that look. He never threatened, never suggested, never said or did anything overt. But every instant we spoke, I could feel that that was precisely what was happening. I was being warned.”
“It made an impression.”
“Kept me up at night. My wife kept asking me, ‘What’s the matter?’ and I had to reply, ‘Nothing,’ when I knew that wasn’t precisely true. I had the sensation that I managed to dodge something truly terrifying.”
“He didn’t ever do anything?”
“Well, he let me know, one day, in passing, that he’d just happened to find out where I lived.”
“And?”
“That was it. And that was where it ended.”
“How?”
“I violated every rule I have. Complete moral failure on my part. I called him in after a class, told him I’d been mistaken, he was absolutely one hundred percent right, and gave him an A on the assignment, and an A for the semester.”
I didn’t say anything.
“So,” Professor Corcoran asked as he gathered his things together, “who did he kill?”
10
Hope was in the kitchen, working on a recipe she had never tried before, waiting for Sally to get home. She tasted the sauce, which burned her tongue, and she cursed under her breath. It just did not taste right, and she feared that she was destined for a failed dinner. For an instant, she felt a helplessness that seemed far deeper than a kitchen disaster, and she could feel tears welling up in her eyes.
She did not know precisely why Sally and she were going through such a rocky period.
When she examined it all on the surface, she could see no reason for their extended silences and stony moments. There was no real anxiety at either Sally’s legal practice or Hope’s school. They were doing well financially and had the funds to take an exotic vacation or buy a new car, even redo the kitchen. But every time one of these indulgences had come up in conversation, it had been shunted aside. Rationales were given for why they shouldn’t do one or the other. Hope thought that almost always whatever obstacle made whatever adventure impossible seemed to be raised by Sally, and this worried her deeply.
It seemed to her that it had been a long time since they’d shared something.
Even their lovemaking, which had once been both tender and filled with abandon, had been tempered of late. Its perfunctory quality unsettled her. And the occasions for sex had become far less frequent.
In a curious way the lack of passion suggested that Sally was seeking affection elsewhere. The notion that Sally was having an affair was totally ridiculous, and yet, completely reasonable. Hope gritted her teeth and told herself that to fantasize emotional disaster was to invite it, and to dwell on one suspicion or another only made her more anxious. She hated doubt. It wasn’t really a part of her makeup, and to allow it in now, unbidden, was a mistake.
She looked up at the clock on the wall and was suddenly overcome with the urge to turn off the stove, grab her running shoes, and head out on a really hard, fast run. A little bit of daylight was left, and she thought that even if she was completely exhausted by the school day, and by soccer practice, still, a couple of miles at a near sprint was a good idea. When she had been a player, the one thing she could always count on near the end of a game was that she would have more energy than her opponents. She was never sure that this was really the result of extra conditioning, as her coaches always thought. She believed it had something to do with some inherent emotional capability, something that drove her, so at the end, when others were weakening, she had some extra strength that she could summon. A special reserve, perhaps, that became the ability to run hard when others were gasping, as if she could put off the pain of exhaustion until after the game.
She turned down the heat on the stove and quickly rose to the bedroom, taking the steps two at a time. It only took her a few seconds to strip off her clothes, throw on some shorts and an old red Manchester United sweatshirt, and grab her shoes. She wanted to get out the door before Sally came back, so that she wouldn’t have to come up with an explanation why she felt driven to run at an hour when she was generally preparing dinner.
Nameless was at the bottom of the stairs wagging with mixed enthusiasm. He recognized the running outfit and knew that he was rarely included now. At one time he would instantly have been at her side, circling with enthusiasm, but now he was more than willing to escort her just as far as the door and then settle down and wait, which, she thought, seemed to be how Nameless interpreted his dog responsibilities.
Hope had paused to rub his head when the phone rang.
What she wanted, in that second, was to get away from all the troubles that were coursing within her, if only temporarily. She guessed the call would be Sally, maybe saying she was going to be late. She never seemed to call anymore to say she would be early. Hope didn’t want to hear this, and her first instinct was to ignore the ringing.
The phone rang again.
She started toward the door, pulling it open, but stopped, turned, and took a dozen quick strides into the kitchen and seized the phone.
“Hello,” she said briskly. No-nonsense.
“Hope?”
And in that second, Hope not only heard Ashley’s voice, but a world of trouble behind it.
“Hello, Killer, ” she said, using a joke nickname that only the two of them knew about. “Something wrong?” She put a liveliness in her voice that belied not only her own situation, but the emptiness that she suddenly felt in her stomach.
“Oh, Hope,” Ashley said, and Hope could hear the vacant echo of tears in her voice. “I think I have a problem.”
Sally was listening to the local alternative-rock station on the car radio when the late Warren Zevon’s “Poor, Poor Pitiful Me” came on, and for some reason she couldn’t quite fathom, she felt compelled to pull to the curb, where she listened to the entirety of the song frozen in her seat, drumming her fingers on the steering wheel with the beat.
As the music flooded her small sedan, she held her hands up in front of her.
The veins on the backs were standing out, blue, like the interstates on a travel map. Her fingers were tight, maybe a little arthritic. She rubbed them together, trying to regain some of the suppleness they once held. Sally thought that when she was younger, much about her had been beautifuclass="underline" her skin, her eyes, the curve of her body. But she had been proudest of her hands, which seemed to her to hold notes within them. She had played the cello growing up and had considered auditioning for Juilliard or Berklee, but at the last moment had decided to pursue a more general education, which had somehow evolved into a husband, a daughter, an affair with another woman, a divorce, a law degree, and her current practice and her current life.