Two weeks after the night he died, Ricky sat on the edge of a lumpy bed that creaked whenever he shifted position, listening to the sound of distant traffic filter through the thin walls of the motel room. It mingled freely with the noise of a television set in an adjacent room tuned too loudly to a ball game. Ricky concentrated on the sound for a moment and guessed that the Red Sox were at Fenway, and the season was closing down which meant that they would be close, but not close enough. For a moment, he considered turning on the set in the corner of his room, but decided against it. They will lose, he told himself, and he did not want to experience any more loss, even the transitory one provided by the eternally frustrated baseball team. Instead, he turned to the window, staring out into the evening. He had not drawn the shades, and could see headlights slicing down the nearby interstate highway. There was a red neon sign by the driveway to the motel, which informed drivers that nightly, weekly, and monthly rates were available, as were kitchenettes such as the one he occupied, although why anyone would want to stay in that location for more than a single night eluded Ricky. Anyone except himself, he thought ruefully.
He rose from his seat and went into the small bathroom. He inspected his appearance in the mirror above the sink. The black dye that had marred his light hair was fading quickly, and Ricky was beginning to regain his normal appearance. He thought this slightly ironic because he knew that even if he once again looked as the man he once was, he would never actually be that person.
For two weeks, he had barely left the confines of the motel room. At first he’d been in a sort of self-induced shock, like a junkie undergoing a forced withdrawal, shivering, sweating, twisting in pain. Then, as this initial phase dissipated, it had been replaced by an overwhelming outrage, a blinding, white-hot fury that had caused Ricky to pace angrily around the tiny confines of the room, teeth gritted, his body almost contorted by rage. More than once he’d punched the walls in frustration. Once he’d picked up a glass in the bathroom and crushed it into shards in his hand, slicing himself in the process. He’d bent over the toilet, watching blood drip into the water in the bowl, half wishing that every drop within him would simply flow out. But the pain that gathered in the ravaged palm and fingers reminded him that he remained alive, and eventually led him into another stage, where all the fear, then all the rage finally subsided, like the winds settling down after a thunderstorm. This new stage seemed to Ricky to be cool, like the touch of polished metal on a winter morning.
In this stage, he began to plan.
His motel room was a shabby, decrepit place that catered to long-haul truckers, traveling salesmen, and the local teenagers needing a few private hours away from prying adult eyes. It was located on the outskirts of Durham, New Hampshire, a place that Ricky had selected at random because it was a college town, housing a fractious population thanks to the state university. He had thought the academic atmosphere ensured him access to the out-of-town newspapers he would need, and provide a transitory world that would help to hide him. This guess on his part, as best as he could tell, had so far proven true.
At the end of his second week of death, he’d begun to make sorties out into the world. On the first few occasions, he’d limited himself to the distance his feet would carry him. He didn’t speak with anyone, avoided eye contact, stuck to abandoned streets and quiet neighborhoods, almost as if he half expected to be recognized, or worse, to hear the mocking tones of Virgil or Merlin float over his shoulder from behind his back. But his anonymity remained intact, and confidence grew within him. He’d rapidly expanded his horizon, finding a bus line and riding it throughout the small city, getting off at random locations, exploring the world he’d entered.
On one of these trips, he’d discovered a secondhand clothing store, which had provided him with an oddly well-fitted, cheap, and utilitarian blue blazer and some worn slacks and button-down shirts. He’d found a used leather satchel at a nearby consignment shop. He put away his eyeglasses in favor of contact lenses, purchased at a chain eyewear outlet. These few items, worn with a tie, gave him the appearance of someone on the edge of academia, respectable, but not important. He thought he blended in nicely, and he welcomed his invisibility.
On the kitchenette table to his side in the small room were copies of the Cape Cod Times and the New York Times for the days immediately following his death. The paper on the Cape had stripped the story across the bottom of their front page, with the headline: prominent physician an apparent suicide; landmark farmhouse destroyed in blaze. The reporter had managed to acquire most of the details that Ricky had provided, from the gasoline purchased that morning in newly acquired containers spread throughout the home, to the suicide note and the contributions to charities. He’d also managed to discover that there had been recent “allegations of impropriety” against Ricky, although the reporter neglected to convey the substance of the concoction invented by Rumplestiltskin and carried out so dramatically by Virgil. The article also mentioned his wife’s death three years earlier and suggested that Ricky had recently undergone “financial reversals” that also might have contributed to his entering a suicidal frame of mind. It was, Ricky thought, an excellent piece of writing, well researched and filled with persuasive details, just as he’d hoped. The New York Times’s obituary, which appeared a day later, had been discouragingly brief, with only a suggestion or two for the reasons behind his death. He had stared at it with a sense of irritation: a little angry and put out that the entirety of his life’s accomplishments seemed to be so successfully wrapped up in four paragraphs of clipped and opaque journalese. He thought that he had given more to the world, but then understood that perhaps he hadn’t, which made him pause for a moment or two. The obituary also pointed out that no memorial service was planned, which, Ricky realized, was a much more important consideration. He suspected that the lack of a service honoring his life reflected Rumplestiltskin and Virgil’s work with the sexual misconduct allegation. None of his colleagues in Manhattan wanted to taint themselves with attendance at some event that memorialized Ricky’s work and persona when so much of that had been abruptly called into question. He guessed that there were a great number of fellow analysts in the city who saw the news of his death in the paper and thought that it was exquisite proof of the truth to Rumplestiltskin’s creation and at the same time was a fortunate thing, for the profession was spared a moment of ugliness when the allegations had surfaced in the New York Times, as they inevitably would have. This thought created in Ricky a modest fury with the membership of his own profession, and for a moment or two he insisted to himself that he was well to be done with it.
He wondered whether up to the first day of his vacation he had been equally as blind.
Both newspaper stories stated that his death was apparently by drowning, and that Coast Guard units were searching Cape waters for Ricky’s body. The Cape Cod Times, though, to Ricky’s relief, quoted the local commander saying that body recovery was extremely unlikely, given the strong tides in the area of Hawthorne Beach.
When he reflected upon it, Ricky thought it was as good a death as he could come up with, on such short notice.
He hoped that all the clues of his own suicide had been collected, from the prescription for the overdose he’d appeared to have taken before walking into the waves, to his unforgettable and uncharacteristic rudeness to the teenager in the marine supply store. Enough, he told himself, to satisfy the local police, even without a body to autopsy. Enough, too, he hoped, to convince Rumplestiltskin that his plan for Ricky had been successful.
The oddity of reading about one’s own suicide created a turmoil within him that he was having trouble sorting through. The toil of the stress of his last fifteen days of life, from the moment Rumplestiltskin entered his life to the moment he’d walked down to the edge of the water, carefully leaving footprints in the newly scoured sand, had put Ricky through something that he thought no psychiatric text ever contemplated.
Fear, elation, confusion, relief-all sorts of contradictory emotions-had flooded him, almost from the first step, when, water licking at his toes, he’d thrown the handful of pills into the ocean, then turned and walked through the wash a hundred yards, distant enough so that the new set of footprints when he emerged from the cold water around his ankles would not be noticed by the police or anyone else inspecting the scene of his disappearance.
The hours that had followed seemed to Ricky, alone in the kitchenette, to be the stuff of memory nightmare, like those details of a dream that stick with one after waking, giving a sense of unsettled uneasiness to each daytime step. Ricky could see himself dressing on the bluff in the extra set of clothes, pulling on the running shoes in a frantic hurry to escape the beach without being spotted. He’d strapped the crutches to the backpack, then hefted it onto his shoulders. It was a six-mile run to the parking lot of the Lobster Shanty, and he’d known that he had to get there before dawn and before anyone else taking the six a.m. express to Boston arrived.
Ricky could still feel the sensation of wind burning in his lungs as he’d raced the distance. The world around was still night and filled with black air, and as his feet had pounded against the roadway, he’d thought that it was like running through what he imagined a coal mine to be like. A single set of eyes marking his presence might have destroyed the slender chance at life that he was seizing, and he had run with all that urgency driven into every step taken down the black macadam street.
The lot had been empty when he arrived, and he’d drifted into the deep shadows by the corner of the restaurant. It was there that he’d unstrapped the crutches from the backpack and slung them on his arms. Within a few moments, he’d heard a distant sound of sirens blaring. He took a small satisfaction in how long it had taken someone to notice his home burning. A few moments later, some cars began to drop people in the lot, to wait for the bus. It was a mingled group, mostly young people heading back to Boston jobs and a couple of middle-aged business types, who seemed put out by the need to ride the bus, despite the convenient quality it had. Ricky had hung back, to the rear, thinking that he was the only one of the people waiting on this damp, cool Cape morning bathed in the sweat of fear and exertion. When the bus arrived two minutes late, Ricky had crutched out into line to board. Two young men stood aside, letting him struggle up the steps, where he had handed the driver his ticket purchased the day before. Then he had sat in the back, thinking that even if Virgil or Merlin or anyone assigned by Rumplestiltskin to probe the suicide and who might have doubted the truth of his death thought to question any bus driver or passenger on that early morning trip, what they would remember was a man with dark hair and crutches, and not known that he had run to the waiting area.
There had been an hour delay before the bus to Durham. In that time he’d walked two blocks away from the South Street bus terminal, until he’d found a Dumpster outside an office building. He’d thrown the crutches into the Dumpster. Then he had returned to the station and boarded another bus.
Durham, he thought, had one other advantage: He had never been there before, knew no one who’d ever lived there, and had absolutely no connection with the city whatsoever. What he did like were the New Hampshire license plates, with the state motto: Live Free or Die. This, he thought, was an appropriate sentiment for himself.
He wondered: Did I escape?
He thought so, but he wasn’t yet sure.
Ricky went to the window and again stared out into a darkness that was unfamiliar. There is much to do, he told himself. Still searching the nighttime beyond the motel room, Ricky could just make out his own reflection in the glass. Dr. Frederick Starks no longer exists, he told himself. Someone else does. He breathed in deeply, and understood that his first priority was to create a new identity for himself. Once that was accomplished, then he could find a more permanent home for the upcoming winter. He knew he would need a job to supplement the money he had left. He needed to cement his anonymity and reinforce his disappearance.
Ricky stared over at the table. He had kept the death certificate for Rumplestiltskin’s mother, the police report for the murder of her onetime lover, and the copy of the file from his months in the clinic at Columbia Presbyterian, where the woman had come to him for help and he’d failed to deliver it. He thought to himself that he had paid a large price for a single act of neglect.
That payment was made, and he couldn’t go back.
But, Ricky thought, his heart filled with a cold iron, now I, too, have a debt to collect.
I will find him, he insisted to himself. And then I will do to him what he did to me.
Ricky stood and walked over to the wall, where he flicked the switch for the lights, dropping the room into darkness. An occasional sweep of headlights from outside sliced across the walls. He lay down on the bed, which creaked in an unfriendly fashion beneath him.
Once, he reminded himself, I studied hard to learn to save lives.
Now I must educate myself in how to take one.
Ricky surprised himself with the sense of organization that he was able to impose on his thoughts and feelings. Psychoanalysis, the profession that he’d just departed, is perhaps the most creative of all the disciplines of medicine, precisely because of the changeable nature of the human personality. While there are recognizable diseases and established courses of treatment within the realm of therapy, ultimately they are all individualized, because no two sadnesses are precisely alike. Ricky had spent years learning and perfecting the flexibility of the therapist, understanding that any given patient could walk through his door on any given day with something the same, or something utterly different, and that he had to be prepared at all times for the wildest swings in mood and sense. The problem, he thought to himself, was how to find the strengths of the capabilities that he’d developed in his years behind the couch, and translate them into the singleness of purpose that would recover his life for him.
He would not allow himself to fantasize that he could ever go back to who he was. No daydream of hope that he could return to his home in New York and take up again the routine of his life. That wasn’t the point, he understood. The point was to make the man who’d ruined his life pay for his fun.
Once that debt was paid, Ricky realized, then he would be free to become whatever he wanted. Until the specter of Rumplestiltskin was removed from his life, Ricky would never have a moment’s peace, or a second’s freedom.
Of this, he was unequivocally certain.
Nor was he sure, yet, that Rumplestiltskin was convinced that Ricky had killed himself. The possibility existed, Ricky thought, that he’d only bought some time for himself, for whatever innocent relative had been targeted. It was the most intriguing of situations, he knew. Rumplestiltskin was a killer. Now Ricky needed to be able to outplay the man at his own game.
He knew this: He had to become someone new and someone utterly different from the man he once was.
He had to invent this new persona without creating any telltale sign that the man once known as Dr. Frederick Starks still existed. His own past was cut off for him. He did not know where Rumplestiltskin might have put a trap, but he knew one was there, waiting for the slightest sign that he wasn’t floating somewhere in the waters off Cape Cod.
He knew he needed a new name, an invented history, a believable life.
In this country, Ricky realized, what we are first and foremost are numbers. Social Security numbers. Bank account and credit card numbers. Tax identification numbers. Driver’s license numbers. Telephone numbers and home addresses. Creating these was the first order of business, Ricky thought. And then he needed to find a job, a home, he needed to create a world around him that was credible and yet totally anonymous. He needed to be the smallest and most insignificant of someones, and then he could start to build the education that he needed to track down and execute the man who’d forced him to murder himself.
Creating the history and the personality of his new self didn’t worry him. He was, after all, an expert in the connection between actual events and the impressions these made on the self. Of greater concern was precisely how to create the numbers that would make the new Ricky believable.
His first sortie out on this task was a failure. He went to the library at the University of New Hampshire, only to discover that he needed a college identification card to get past the security at the door. For a moment, he looked longingly at the students wandering through the stacks of books. There was, however, a second library, significantly smaller, located on Jones Street. It was a part of the county library system, and, while lacking the volume and the cavernous quiet of the university, still had what Ricky thought he would need, which was books and information. It also had a secondary advantage: Entrance was open. Anyone could walk in, read any newspaper, magazine, or book in any one of the large leather chairs interspersed throughout the low-slung, two-story brick building. To check out a book would require a card, however. The library also had another advantage: Along one wall was a long table with four different computers set up. There was a printed list of rules for operating the computers, which started with the first-come, first-available, rule. Then operating instructions.
Ricky eyed the computers, and thought to himself that perhaps they might be of assistance to him. Unsure where to start, wearing a sort of antique attitude about modern devices, Ricky, the onetime man of talk, wandered into the stacks of books, searching for a section on computers. This did not take more than a few minutes to uncover. He tilted his head slightly, to be able to read the book titles along their spines, and within moments spotted one entitled: Getting Started in Home Computing-A Guide for the Uninitiated and Afraid.
He dumped himself into a leather armchair and started reading. The prose in the book was irritating and cloying, directed toward true idiots, he thought. But it was filled with information, and, had Ricky been a little more astute, he would have understood that the childish word formations were designed for people such as himself, because the average American eleven-year-old already knew everything contained within the pages.
After reading for an hour, Ricky approached the rows of computers. It was midmorning, midweek, late in the summer, and the library was almost empty. He had the area to himself. He clicked on one of the machines, and drew himself up to it. On the wall, as he’d noted, were instructions, and he skipped down to the segment where it explained how to access the Internet. He followed the directions and the computer screen leapt to life in front of him. He continued clicking buttons and typing in instructions and within a few more moments had jumped full-bore into the electronic world. He opened up a search engine, as the guidebook had told him to, and typed in the phrase: False Identity.
Less than ten seconds later, the computer told him there were more than 100,000 entries under that category, and Ricky started to read from the beginning.
By the end of the day, Ricky had learned that the business of creating new identities was a thriving one. There were dozens of companies spread throughout the world that would provide him with virtually every sort of false documentation, all of which was sold under the disclaimer for novelty purposes only. He thought there was something transparently criminal in a French business that offered to sell a California driver’s license. But while transparent, it was also not against the law.
He made lists of places and documents, putting together a fictional portfolio. He knew what he needed, but obtaining it was a bit of a problem.
He realized swiftly that people seeking fake identities already were someone.
He was not.
He still had a pocket filled with cash, and locations where he could spend it. The problem was, they all existed in the electronic world. The cash he had was useless. They wanted credit card numbers. He had none. They wanted an E-mail address. He had none. They wanted a home to deliver the material to. He had none.
Ricky refined his computer search and started reading about identity theft. He discovered that it was a thriving criminal enterprise in the United States. He read horror story after horror story about people who awakened one day to find their lives in turmoil because someone somewhere with little conscience was running up debts in their name.
It wasn’t a difficult leap for Ricky to recall how his own bank and brokerage accounts had been eviscerated, and he suspected that Rumplestiltskin had accomplished all this with remarkable ease simply by acquiring a few of Ricky’s numbers. It helped explain why the box containing his old tax returns was missing when he went to search for it. It wasn’t particularly difficult to be someone else in the electronic world. He promised himself that whoever he managed to become, he would never again idly toss into the trash a preapproved credit card application he received unsolicited in the mail.
Ricky pushed himself away from the computer and walked outside the library. The sun was shining brightly, and the air was still filled with the heat of summer. He continued walking almost aimlessly, until he found himself in a residential area filled with modest two-story wood-frame houses and small yards often littered with bright plastic children’s toys. He could hear some young voices coming from a backyard, out of sight. A dog of undetermined breed looked up from where he rested on one small lawn, restrained by a rope tied at one end to his collar and the other to a thick oak tree. The dog wagged his tail vigorously at Ricky’s appearance, as if inviting him to come over and scratch its ears. Ricky looked around, at tree-lined streets, where the shadows thrown by leafy branches created dark spots on the sidewalk. A slight breeze ruffled through the canopy of green, making the streaks and splotches of darkness on the sidewalks shift position and shape, before returning to rest. He took a few more strides down the street and in the front window of one house, he saw a small, hand-lettered sign: room to rent. inquire within.
Ricky began to step forward. That’s what I need, he said to himself.
Then, as abruptly, he stopped.
I have no name. No history. No references.
He made a mental note of the location of the house, and walked on, thinking to himself: I need to be someone. I need to be someone who can’t be traced. Someone alone, but someone real.
A dead person can come back to life. But that creates a question, a small rend in the fabric, that can be uncovered. An invented person can suddenly rise out of imagination, but that, too, creates questions.
Ricky’s problem was different from the criminals, the men seeking to run away from alimony payments, the ex-cult members afraid they were being followed, the women hiding from abusive husbands.
He needed to become someone who was both dead and alive.
Ricky thought about this contradiction, then smiled. He leaned his head back, facing into the bright sun.
He knew exactly what to do.
It did not take Ricky long to find a Salvation Army clothing store. It was located in a small, undistinguished shopping mall on the main bus route, a place of pavement, low-slung, square buildings, and bleached and peeling paint, not exactly decrepit and not precisely run-down, but a place that showed the fraying of neglect in trash cans that hadn’t been emptied and cracks in the asphalt parking lot. The Salvation Army store was painted a flat, reflective white, so that it glowed in the afternoon sun. Inside, it was similar to a small warehouse, with electrical appliances like toasters and waffle irons for sale on one wall, and rows of donated clothing hanging from racks occupying the center of the store. There were a few teenagers pawing through the racks, searching for baggy, fatigue pants and other bland articles, and Ricky sidled in behind them, inspecting the same piles of clothes. It seemed to him upon first glance that no one ever donated anything to the Salvation Army that wasn’t chocolate brown or black, which fit his imagination.
He quickly found what he was seeking, which was a long, ripped wool winter overcoat that reached to his ankles, a threadbare sweater, and pants two sizes too large for him. Everything was cheap, but he selected the cheapest of the offering. Also the most damaged and the most inappropriate for the still-hot last of the summer weather that gripped New England.
The cashier was an elderly volunteer, who wore thick glasses and an incongruously red sport shirt that stood out in the bleak and brown world of donated clothing. The man lifted the overcoat to his nose and sniffed.
“You sure you want this one, fella?”
“That’s the one,” Ricky replied.
“Smells like it’s been somewhere nasty,” the man continued. “Sometimes we get stuff in here, it makes it to the racks, but really ought not to. There’s much nicer stuff, you look a little harder. This one kinda stinks and somebody should have repaired that rip in the side before putting it out for sale.”
Ricky shook his head. “It’s exactly what I need,” he said.
The man shrugged, adjusting his glasses, peering down at the tag. “Well, I ain’t even gonna charge you the ten bucks they want for that. Say, how about three? That seems more fair. That okay?”
“You’re most generous,” Ricky said.
“What you want this junk for, anyway?” the man asked, not unfriendly in his curiosity.
“It’s for a theater production,” Ricky lied.
The elderly clerk nodded his head. “Well, I hope it isn’t for the star of the show, because they take one whiff of that coat, they’re gonna go looking for a new prop master.” The man wheezily laughed at his joke, making small breathy sounds that sounded more labored than humored. Ricky joined in with his own false laugh.
“Well, the director said to get something ratty, so I guess it’ll be on him,” he said. “I’m just the gofer. Community theater, you know. No big budget…”
“You want a bag?”
Ricky nodded, and exited the Salvation Army store with the purchases under his arm. He spotted a bus pulling up to the pickup spot on the edge of the mall, and he hurried to catch it. The exertion caused him to break a sweat, and once he slapped himself down in the backseat of the bus, he reached inside and took the old sweater and dabbed at the moisture on his forehead and under his arms, wiping himself dry with the article of clothing.
Before he reached his motel room that evening, Ricky took all the purchases to a small park, where he took time to drag each one in some dirt by a stand of trees.
In the morning, he packed the new old articles of clothing back in a brown paper bag. Everything else, the few documents he had about Rumplestiltskin, the newspapers, the other items of clothing that he’d acquired, went into the backpack. He settled his bill with the clerk at the motel, telling the man he would likely be back in a few days, information that didn’t make the clerk even glance up from the sports section of the newspaper that occupied him with a distinct intensity.
There was a midmorning Trailways bus to Boston, which Ricky now felt some familiarity with. As always, he sat scrunched into a seat in the back, avoiding eye contact with the small crowd of fellow passengers, maintaining his solitude and anonymity with each step. He made sure he was the last to step off the bus in Boston. He coughed when he inhaled the mingled exhaust and heat that seemed to hang above the sidewalk. But the inside of the bus terminal was air-conditioned, although even the air inside seemed strangely grimy. There were rows of brightly colored orange and yellow plastic seats bolted to the linoleum floor, many of which sported scars and markings deposited by bored folks who had hours to kill waiting for their bus to arrive or depart. There was a noticeable smell of fried food, and along one side of the terminal there was a fast-food hamburger outlet side by side with a doughnut shop. A newspaper kiosk sold stacks of the day’s papers and newsmagazines along with the more mainstream of the pseudo-pornography available. Ricky wondered just how many people in the bus station were likely to buy copies of U.S. News amp; World Report and Hustler at the same time.
Ricky took up a seat as close to opposite the men’s room as he could manage, watching for a lull in the traffic heading in. Within some twenty minutes, he was persuaded that the bathroom had emptied out, especially after a Boston policeman wearing a sweat-stained blue shirt had walked in and then emerged five minutes later, complaining to his clearly amused partner loudly about the nasty effect of a recently ingested sausage sandwich. Ricky darted in as the two policemen walked off, their black brogans clicking against the dirty floor of the station.
Moving swiftly, Ricky closed himself into a toilet stall, and stripped off the reasonable clothing he had been wearing, replacing it with the items purchased at the Salvation Army. He wrinkled his nose at the difficult combination of sweat and musk that greeted his nose as he slid into the overcoat. He packed his clothes into his backpack, along with everything else he had, including all his cash, with the exception of a hundred dollars in twenties, which he slid into a tear in the overcoat, and worked down into fabric, so that it was if not totally safe, at least secure. He had a little bit of change, which he stuffed into his pants pocket. Emerging from the stall, he stared at himself in a mirror above the sink. He had not shaved in a couple of days, and that helped, he thought.
A bank of blue metal storage lockers lined one wall of the terminal. He stuffed his backpack into a locker, although he kept the paper bag that he’d used to carry the old clothes in. He put two quarters into the lock, and turned the key. Closing away even the few items that he had made him hesitate. For a moment, he thought that finally, right at that minute, he was more adrift than he’d ever been. Now, save the small key that he held in his hand to locker number 569, there was nothing that linked him to anything. He had no identification. No connection to anyone.
Ricky breathed in hard, and pocketed the key.
He walked away fast from the bus station, pausing only once when he believed no one was watching, to scoop some dirt from the sidewalk and rub it into his hair and face.
By the time he’d walked two blocks, sweat had begun to rise beneath his arms and on his forehead, and he wiped it away with the sleeve of the overcoat.
Before he’d reached the third block, he thought: Now I look to be what I am. Homeless.
For two days Ricky walked the streets, a foreigner to every world.
His outward appearance was of a homeless man, someone clearly alcoholic, drug-addled, or schizophrenic, or even all three combined, although if someone had looked carefully into his eyes, they would have seen a distinct purpose, which is an unusual quality for the down-and-out. Inwardly, Ricky found himself eyeing people on the street, half fantasizing who they were, and what they did, almost envious of the simple pleasure that identity gave one. A woman bustling ahead, gray-haired, carrying shopping packages emblazoned with Newbury Street boutiques, spoke one story to Ricky, while the teenager wearing cut-off jeans and hefting a backpack, a Red Sox cap tilted on his head, said another. He spotted businessmen and taxi drivers, appliance deliverymen and computer technicians. There were stockbrokers and physicians and repairmen and a man hawking newspapers from a kiosk on one corner. Everyone, from the most destitute and abandoned, mumbling, voice-hearing madwoman to the Armani-wearing developer sliding into the backseat of a limousine, had an identity defined by what they were. Ricky had none.
There was both luxury and fear in what he was, he realized. Belonging nowhere, it was almost as if he were invisible. While there was a momentary relief, knowing that he was hidden from the man who had so successfully destroyed who he once was, he understood this was elusive. His being was inextricably wrapped up with the man he knew only as Rumplestiltskin, but who once had been a child of a woman named Claire Tyson, whom he had failed at her moment of need, and now was alone, because of that failure.
His first night was spent alone beneath the curved brick of a Charles River bridge. He wrapped himself in his overcoat, still sweating profusely with the leftover heat from the day, and thrust himself up against a wall, struggling to steal a few hours away from the night, awakening shortly after dawn with a crick in his neck, every muscle in his back and legs shouting outrage and insult. He rose, stretching carefully, trying to remember the last occasion he’d slept outdoors, and thinking it was not since his childhood. The stiffness in his joints told him that there was little to recommend it. He imagined his appearance, and thought that not even the most dedicated method actor would adopt his approach.
There was a mist rising from the Charles, gray banks of vaporous fog that hung over the edges of the slick water. Ricky emerged from the underpass, and stepped up to the bike path that mirrors the bank of the river. He stood, thinking that the water had the appearance of an old-fashioned black typewriter ribbon, satin in look, winding through the city. He stared, telling himself that the sun would have to rise much higher before the water would turn blue, and reflect the stately buildings that approached the sides. In the early morning, the river had an almost hypnotic effect upon him, and for an instant or two, he simply stood stock-still, inspecting the sight in front of him.
His reverie was interrupted by the rhythmic sound of feet slapping against the macadam of the bike path. Ricky turned to see two men running side by side, approaching fast. They wore shiny athletic shorts and the latest in running shoes. Ricky guessed they were both close in age to himself.
One of the men gestured wildly with his arm toward Ricky.
“Step aside!” the man yelled.
Ricky stepped back sharply, and the two men swept past him.
“Out of the way, fella,” one of the two said briskly, twisting so that he wouldn’t make physical contact with Ricky.
“Gotta move,” the other man said. “Christ!”
Still within earshot, Ricky heard one of the joggers say, “Fucking lowlife. Get a job, huh?”
The companion laughed and said something, but Ricky couldn’t make out the words. He took a step or two after the men, filled with a sudden anger. “Hey!” he yelled. “Stop!”
They did not. One man glanced back, over his shoulder, and then they accelerated. Ricky stepped a pace or two after them. “I’m not…” he started. “I’m not what you think…”
But then he realized he might as well have been.
Ricky turned back toward the river. In that second, he understood, he was closer to being what he appeared than he was to what he had been. He took a deep breath and recognized that he was in the most precarious of psychological positions. He had killed who he was in order to escape the man who set out to ruin him. If he went much longer being nobody, he would get swallowed by precisely that anonymity.
Thinking he was in as much danger in those minutes as he had been when Rumplestiltskin was breathing down the back of his every action, Ricky moved forward, determined to answer the first and primary question.
He spent the day, going from shelter to shelter, throughout the city, searching.
It was a journey through the world of the disadvantaged: an early morning breakfast of runny eggs and cold toast served in a backroom kitchen at a Catholic church in Dorchester, an hour spent outside a storefront temporary work broker on a nearby street, milling with men looking for a day’s work raking leaves or emptying trash bins. He went from there to a state-operated shelter in Charlestown, where a man behind a desk insisted that Ricky couldn’t enter without a document from an agency, which Ricky thought was as crazy an insistence as those delusions the truly mentally ill suffered from. He stomped angrily and went back out to the street, where a pair of prostitutes working the lunchtime crowd laughed at him when he tried to ask for directions. He continued to pound the pavement, passing alleys and abandoned buildings, occasionally muttering to himself whenever anyone came too close to him, language being the rough edge of madness, and along with his growing fetid smell, a pretty successful armor against contact with anyone other than the disenfranchised. His muscles stiffened and his feet grew sore, but he continued looking. Once a policeman eyed him cautiously, at one corner, took a step toward him, and then, obviously, thought better of it, and walked on past.
It was deep in the afternoon, with the sun still pounding down, making wavy lines of heat rise from the city streets, that Ricky spotted a possibility.
The man was rooting through a garbage can on the edge of a park, not far from the river. He was about Ricky’s height and weight, with thinning streaks of dirty brown hair. He wore a knit cap, tattered shorts, but an ankle-length wool overcoat that almost reached down to one brown shoe and one black, one a pull-on loafer, the other a workman’s boot. The man was muttering to himself, intent on the contents of the garbage can. Ricky moved close enough to see the lesions on the man’s face and the backs of his hands. As the man worked, he coughed repeatedly, remaining unaware of Ricky’s presence. There was a park bench ten yards away, and Ricky slumped into it. Someone had left a part of the day’s paper behind on the seat, and Ricky grabbed this and pretended to read while he devoted himself to observing the man. After a second or two, he saw the man pull a discarded soda can from the garbage and toss it into an old steel shopping cart, but not the type that one pushes, instead, the type one pulls. The cart was almost filled with empty cans.
Ricky eyed the man as closely as he could, saying to himself: You were the doctor just weeks ago. Make your diagnosis.
The man seemed suddenly enraged when he pulled a can from the trash that had some problem, abruptly throwing it to the ground and kicking it into a nearby bush.
Bipolar, Ricky thought. And schizophrenic. Hears voices, has no medication, or at least, one that he is willing to take. Prone to sudden bursts of manic energy. Violent, too, probably, but more a threat to himself than others. The lesions could either be open sores from living on the street, but they could also be Kaposi’s sarcoma. AIDS was a distinct possibility. So was tuberculosis or lung cancer, given the man’s wracking cough. It could also be pneumonia, Ricky thought, although the season was wrong for it. Ricky thought the man wore equal cloths of life and death.
After a few minutes, the man determined that he’d taken everything of value from the trash, and headed to the next canister. Ricky remained seated, keeping the man in sight. After a few moments dedicated to assessing that trash, the man strode off, pulling his cart behind him. Ricky trailed after him.
It did not take long to reach a street in Charlestown that was filled with low-slung and grimy stores. It was a place that catered to the disadvantaged of all sorts. A discount furniture outlet that offered in large letters written on the windows layaways and easy credit, spelling the word E-Z. Two pawnshops, an appliance store, a clothing outlet that had mannequins in the windows all of which seemed to be missing an arm or a leg, as if crippled or scarred in some accident. Ricky watched as the man he was following headed straight to the middle of the block, to a faded yellow painted square building with a prominent sign on the front: al’s discount soda and liquors. Beneath that was a second sign, in the same block print, nearly as large: redemption center. This sign had an arrow pointing to the rear.
The man towing the cart filled with cans marched directly around the corner of the building. Ricky followed after.
At the back of the store was a half door, with a similar sign above the lintel: redeem here. There was a small doorbell button to the side, which the man rang. Ricky shrank back against the wall, concealing himself.
Within a few seconds a teenager appeared at the half door. The transaction itself took only a few minutes. The man handed in the collection of cans, the teenager counted them, and then peeled off a couple of bills from a wad he pulled from his pocket. The man took the money, reached into one of the large pockets of the overcoat, and pulled out a fat, old leather wallet, stuffed with papers. He put a couple of the bills into the wallet, and then handed one of them back to the teenager. The kid disappeared, then returned moments later with a bottle, which he handed to the man.
Ricky slunk down, sitting on the alley cement, waiting while the man walked past him. The bottle, which Ricky assumed was some cheap wine, had already disappeared in the folds of the overcoat. The man cast a single glance toward Ricky, but they made no eye contact, as Ricky hung his head. He breathed in hard for another few seconds, then rose, and continued to follow the man.
In Manhattan, Ricky had played the mouse to Virgil, Merlin, and Rumplestiltskin’s cats. Now he was on the opposite side of the same equation. He hung back, then sped up, trying to keep the man in sight at all times, close enough to follow, distant enough to remain hidden. Armed now with the bottle concealed in his coat, the man marched ahead with purpose, like some military quick march with a destination in mind. His head pivoted about frequently, glancing in all directions, unmistakably afraid of being followed. Ricky thought that the man’s paranoid behavior was well founded.
They covered dozens of city blocks, winding in and out of traffic, the neighborhood they traveled through growing seedier with every stride. The day’s dwindling sun threw shadows across the roadways, and the peeling paint and decrepit storefronts seemed to mimic the appearance of both Ricky and his target.
He saw the man hesitate midblock, and as the man turned toward where Ricky was, Ricky dipped against a building, concealing himself. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the man abruptly lurch down an alleyway, a narrow crevasse between two brick buildings. Ricky took a deep breath, then followed.
He came up to the entrance to the alleyway and cautiously peered around the edge. It was a spot that seemed to greet the night well in advance. It was already dark and closed in, the sort of confined space that never warmed in the winter, nor cooled in the summer. Ricky could just make out a collection of abandoned cardboard boxes and a green steel Dumpster at the far end. The alleyway abutted the back of another building, and Ricky guessed that it was a dead end.
A block away, he’d passed both a convenience store and a cheap liquor store. He turned, leaving his quarry, and headed in that direction. He slid one of his precious twenty-dollar bills from the lining of his coat, gripping it in his palm where it was immediately damp with sweat.
He went first to the liquor store. It was a small place, with advertised specials smeared in red paint on the front window. He stepped up and put his hand on the door to enter, only to find it locked. He looked up and saw a clerk sitting behind the register. He tried the door again, and it rattled. The clerk stared his direction, then suddenly bent forward and spoke into a microphone. A tinny voice came out of a speaker near the door.
“Get the hell out of here, yah old fuck, unless yah got some money.”
Ricky nodded. “I’ve got money,” he replied.
The clerk was a middle-aged paunchy man, probably close to his own age. Ricky saw, when he shifted position, that he wore a large pistol holstered on his belt.
“Yah got money? Sure. Let’s see it.”
Ricky held the twenty-dollar bill up. The man eyed it from his spot behind the register
“How’d you get that?” he said.
“I found it on the street,” Ricky answered.
The door buzzer went off, and Ricky pushed his way inside.
“Sure yah did,” the clerk said. “All right, you got two minutes. Whatcha want?”
“Bottle of wine,” Ricky said.
The clerk reached behind himself to a shelf and picked out a bottle. It wasn’t like any bottle of wine that Ricky had ever drunk before. It had a screw top and was labeled Silver Satin. It cost two dollars. Ricky nodded and handed over the twenty. The man put the bottle in a paper bag, opened the register, and removed a ten and two singles. He handed these to Ricky. “Hey!” Ricky said. “You owe me a couple more.”
Smiling nastily, placing a hand on the butt of his revolver, the clerk replied, “I think I gave you some credit the other day, old man. Just getting my previous kindness paid back.”
“You’re lying,” Ricky said angrily. “I’ve never been in here before.”
“You think we ought to really have an argument, you fucking bum?” The man clenched a fist and thrust it in Ricky’s face. Ricky stepped back. He stared hard at the clerk, who laughed at him. “I gave you some change. More ’n you deserve, too. Now beat it. Get the fuck out of here, before I kick you out. And if you make me walk around this counter, then I’m gonna take my bottle back and the change back and I’m gonna kick your ass in the process. So what’s it gonna be?”
Ricky moved slowly toward the door. He turned, trying to think of a proper rejoinder, only to have the clerk say, “What? What is it? You got some problem?”
Ricky shook his head and exited, clutching the bottle, hearing the clerk laugh behind his back.
He walked down the block to the convenience store. He was greeted there with the same, “You got some money?” demand. He showed the ten-dollar bill. Inside, he purchased a pack of the cheapest cigarettes he could find, a pair of Hostess Twinkies, a pair of Hostess Cup Cakes, and a small flashlight. The clerk in this store was a teenager, who threw the stuff into a plastic bag and said, “Nice dinner,” sarcastically.
Ricky walked back onto the sidewalk. Night had swept the area. Wan light from the stores that remained open carved small squares of brightness from the darkness. Ricky crossed back to the alley entrance. He dipped as quietly as he could just inside, putting his back up against a brick wall, and sliding down to sit and wait, all the time thinking he’d had no idea before this night how easy it was in this world to be hated.
It seemed as if the darkness slowly enveloped him in the same way that the heat during the summer day did. It was thick, syrupy, a blackness that reached within him. Ricky allowed a couple of hours to pass. He was in a semidream state, his imagination filled with pictures of who he was once, the people who had come into his life to destroy it, and the scheme he had to build to regain it. He would have been comforted, sitting with his back against the brick in the darkened alleyway in a section of a city that he was unfamiliar with, if he could have pictured his late wife, or perhaps a forgotten friend, or maybe even a memory of his own childhood, some mental picture of a happy moment, a Christmas morning, or a graduation day or perhaps wearing his first tuxedo to a high school prom, or the rehearsal dinner on the eve of his wedding. But all these moments seemed to belong to some other existence, and some other person. He had never been much for reincarnation, but it was almost as if he had returned to earth as someone new. He could smell the growing fetid dank stench from his bum’s overcoat and he held up his hand in the darkness and imagined that his fingernails were clogged with dirt. It used to be that the days his nails were filthy were happy days, because that meant he’d spent hours in the garden behind his house on the Cape. His stomach clenched and he could hear the whomping sound of the gasoline spread throughout the farmhouse catching fire. It was a memory in his ear that seemed to come from some other era, pulled from some distant past by an archaeologist.
Ricky looked up, and pictured Virgil and Merlin sitting in the alleyway across from him. He could make out their faces, envision each nuance and mannerism of the portly attorney and the statuesque young woman. A guide to Hell, that’s what she told me, he thought. She’d been right, probably more right than she had any idea. He sensed the presence of the third member of the triumvirate, but Rumplestiltskin was still a collection of shadows, blending with the night that flooded the alleyway like a steadily rising tide.
His legs had stiffened. He didn’t know how many miles he’d walked since his arrival in Boston. His stomach was empty, and he opened the package of cupcakes and ate them both in two or three gulps. The chocolate hit him like a low-rent amphetamine, giving him some energy. Ricky pushed himself to his feet and turned toward the pit of the alleyway.
He could hear a faint sound and he craned toward it, before recognizing it for what it was: a voice singing softly and out of key.
Ricky moved cautiously toward the noise. To his side he heard some animal, he guessed a rat, scuttling away with a scratching sound. He fingered the small flashlight in his hand, but tried to let his eyes adjust to the pitch-black in the alleyway. This was difficult, and he stumbled once or twice, his feet getting tangled in unrecognizable debris. He almost fell once, but kept his balance and continued moving forward.
He sensed he was almost on top of the man when the singing stopped.
There was a second or two of dark silence, and then he heard a question: “Who’s there?”
“Just me,” Ricky replied.
“Don’t come any closer,” came the reply. “I’ll hurt you. Kill you, maybe. I’ve got a knife.”
The words were slurred with the looseness that drink provides. Ricky had half hoped the man would have passed out, but instead, he was still reasonably alert. But not too mobile, Ricky noted, for there had been no sounds of scrambling out of the way or trying to hide. He did not believe the man actually had a weapon, but he wasn’t completely certain. He remained stock-still.
“This is my alley,” the man continued. “Get out.”
“Now it’s my alley, too,” Ricky said. Ricky took a deep breath and launched himself into the realm he’d known he would have to find in order to communicate with the man. It was like diving into a pool of dark water, unsure what lay just beneath the surface. Welcome madness, Ricky said, trying to summon up all the education that he’d gained in his prior life and existence. Create delusion. Establish doubt. Feed paranoia. “He told me we’re supposed to speak together. That’s what he told me. ‘Find the man in the alleyway and ask him his name.’ ”
The man hesitated. “Who told you?”
“Who do you think?” Ricky answered. “He did. He speaks to me and tells me who to seek out, and this I need to do because he’s told me to, and so I did, and here I am.” He rattled this near-gibberish out swiftly.
“Who speaks to you?” The questions came out of the dark with a fervent quality that warred with the drink that clouded the man’s already crisscrossed mind.
“I’m not allowed to say his name, not out loud or where someone might hear me, shhhh! But he says that you will know why I’ve come, if you’re the right one, and I won’t have to explain any further.”
The man seemed to hesitate, trying to sort through this nonsensical command.
“Me?” he asked.
Ricky nodded in the darkness. “If you’re the right one. Are you?”
“I don’t know,” was the reply. Then, after a momentary pause, the addition, “I thought so.”
Ricky moved swiftly to buttress the delusion. “He gives me the names, you see, and I am supposed to seek them out and ask them the questions, because I need to find the right one. That’s what I do, over and over, and that’s what I have to do, and are you the right one? I need to know, you see. Otherwise this is all wasted.”
The man seemed to be trying to absorb all this.
“How do I know to trust you?” the man slurred.
Ricky immediately slipped the small flashlight out and held it underneath his chin, the way a child might when trying to spook his friends around a campfire. Ricky flashed the light up, illuminating his face, then instantly swung it over at the man, taking seconds to survey the surroundings. He saw the man was lying with his back up against the brick wall, the bottle of wine in his hand. There was some other debris, and a cardboard box to his side that Ricky guessed was home. He switched off the light.
“There,” Ricky said as forcefully as he could. “Do you need more proof?”
The man shifted. “I can’t think straight,” he moaned. “My head is hurting.”
For an instant, Ricky was tempted to simply reach down and take what it was that he needed. His hands twitched with the seduction of violence. He was alone in a deserted alley with the man, and he thought, the people who had put him in that location wouldn’t have hesitated to use force in the slightest. It was only by the greatest sense of control that he was able to fight off the urge. He knew what he wanted, only he wanted the man to give it up. “Tell me who you are!” Ricky half whispered, half shouted.
“I want to be alone,” the man pleaded. “I didn’t do anything. I don’t want to be here anymore.”
“You aren’t the right one,” Ricky said. “I can tell. But I need to be sure. Tell me who you are.”
The man sobbed. “What do you want?”
“Your name. I want your name.”
Ricky could hear tears forming behind every word the man spoke. “I don’t want to say,” he said. “I’m scared. Do you mean to kill me?”
“No,” Ricky said. “I will not harm you if you prove to me who you are.”
The man paused, as if considering this question. “I have a wallet,” he said slowly.
“Give it here!” Ricky demanded sharply. “It’s the only way to be sure!”
The man scrambled and scratched, and reached inside his coat. In the darkness, his eyes barely adjusted, Ricky could see the man holding something out in front of him. Ricky grabbed it and thrust it into his own pocket.
The man started to cry then. Ricky softened his voice.
“You don’t have to worry anymore,” Ricky said. “I will leave you alone, now.”
“Please,” said the man. “Just go away.”
Ricky reached down and removed the bottle of cheap wine that he’d purchased at the liquor store. He also grasped a twenty-dollar bill from the lining of his coat. He thrust these to the man. “Here,” he said. “Here is something because you weren’t the right man, but that is no fault of your own, and he wants me to compensate you for bothering you. Is that fair?”
The man clutched the bottle. He didn’t reply for a moment, but then seemed to nod. “Who are you?” he asked Ricky again, with a mingling of fear and confusion still riding every word.
Ricky smiled inwardly and thought there are some advantages to a classical education. “Noman is my name,” he said.
“Norman?”
“No. Noman. So, if anyone asks who came to visit you this night, you can say it was Noman.” Ricky presumed that the average cop on the beat would have about the same patience for the tale that Polyphemus’s cyclops brothers did, and the fiction created centuries beforehand by another man adrift in a strange and dangerous world. “Have a drink and go to sleep, and when you wake up, all will be exactly the same for you.”
The man whimpered. But then he took a long pull from the bottle of wine.
Ricky rose, and picked his way gingerly down the alleyway, thinking that he had not exactly stolen what he needed, nor had he purchased it. What he’d done was what was necessary, he told himself, and was well within the rules of the game. Rumplestiltskin, of course, didn’t know that he was still playing. But he would, soon enough. Ricky moved steadily back through the darkness toward the weak light of the city street just ahead.
Ricky did not open the man’s wallet until after he’d reached the bus station, a trip across the city that required him to change subways twice, and after he’d retrieved his clothes from the locker where he had stored them. In the men’s room, he managed to get at least partially cleaned up, scrubbing some of the dirt and grime from his face and hands, and rubbing a paper towel soaked with lukewarm water and thick-smelling antibacterial soap in his armpits and across his neck. There was little he could do about the slick greasiness that matted his hair or the overall musty odor that only a long shower would repair. He dumped his filthy bum’s clothes into the nearest wastebasket and climbed into the acceptable khakis and sport shirt that he’d kept in the backpack. He inspected his appearance in the mirror and thought that he’d crossed back over some invisible line, where now, once again, he appeared to all to be a participant in life, rather than an occupant of the nether regions. A couple of strokes with a cheap plastic comb aided his look, but Ricky thought that he still was located on some edge, or close to it, and far distant from the man he once was.
He exited the men’s room and purchased a ticket for a bus back to Durham. He had nearly an hour’s wait, so he bought himself a sandwich and a soda and repaired to a corner of the station that was empty. After looking around to make certain that no one was watching him, Ricky unwrapped the sandwich on his lap. Then he opened up the wallet, concealing it with the food.
The first thing he saw brought a smile to his face and a sense of relief flooded him: a tattered and faded, but legible, Social Security card.
The name had been typed: Richard S. Lively.
Ricky liked this. Lively was what, for the first time in weeks, he felt. He saw an additional good fortune; he wouldn’t have to learn to accommodate a new first name, the common nickname of Richard and his own Frederick, being the same.
He put his head back, staring up into the fluorescent ceiling lights. Rebirth in a bus station, he thought. He supposed there were far worse places to reenter the world.
The wallet smelled of dried sweat, and Ricky quickly searched the contents. There was not much, but what there was, he realized, was something of a gold mine. In addition to the Social Security card, there was an expired Illinois driver’s license, a library card from a suburban system outside of St. Louis, Missouri, and a Triple A auto service card from the same state. None of these was a photo ID, except for the driver’s license, which Ricky noted, gave details such as hair, eye color, height and weight, next to a slightly out-of-focus picture of Richard Lively. There was also a hospital clinic identification card from a Chicago facility that was marked with a red asterisk in one corner. AIDS, Ricky thought. HIV positive. He’d been right about the sores on the man’s face. All the various pieces of identification had different addresses listed. Ricky removed all these and thrust them into his pocket. There were also two yellowed and tattered newspaper clippings, which Ricky unfolded carefully and read. The first was an obituary for a seventy-three-year-old woman, the other was an article about workforce layoffs in an automobile parts manufacturing plant. The first, he guessed, was Richard Lively’s mother, and the second was the job the man had had before launching into the world of alcohol that had delivered him to the street where Ricky had spotted him. Ricky had no idea what had made him travel from the Midwest to the East Coast, but recognized this was a propitious shift for his purposes. The chances of someone making a connection to the man diminished sharply.
Ricky read through the two clippings swiftly, committing the details to memory. He noted that there was only one other family member listed among the woman’s survivors, apparently a housewife in Albuquerque, New Mexico. A sister, Ricky thought, who’d given up on her brother many years ago. The mother had been a county librarian and onetime school principal, which was the modest claim on the world that had prompted the obituary. It said her husband had passed away some years earlier. The plant that had once employed Richard Lively had manufactured brake pads and fallen victim to a corporate decision to shift to a location in Guatemala, which made the same item for far less in wages. Ricky thought that created a not uncommon bitterness, and was more than enough reason to let drink take over one’s life. How the man had acquired the disease, he couldn’t tell. Needles, he suspected. He stuffed the clippings back inside the wallet, then he tossed it into a nearby wastebasket. He thought about the hospital identification card with its telltale red marking, then reached into his pocket, pulling it out. He bent it until it tore, then ripped it in half. He stuck this in the wrappings from his sandwich, and also stuffed it down to the bottom of the wastebasket.
I know enough, he thought.
The announcement for his bus came over the loudspeaker, spoken in nearly unintelligible tones by some clerk behind a glass partition. Ricky rose, swinging his backpack over his shoulder, and putting Dr. Starks deep within some hidden crevice inside himself, and took his first step forward as Richard Lively.
His life began to take shape rapidly.
Within a week, he had acquired two part-time jobs, the first manning a register at a local Dairy Mart for five hours a day in the evening, the second stocking shelves in a Stop and Shop grocery store for another five hours in the morning, a time frame which gave Ricky the afternoons for his other needs. Neither place had asked too many questions, although the manager of the food market pointedly asked whether Ricky was in a twelve-step program, to which he’d replied affirmatively. It turned out the manager was as well, and after giving Ricky a list of churches and civic centers and all their scheduled meetings, he’d handed Ricky the ubiquitous green apron and put him to work.
He used Richard Lively’s Social Security number to open a bank checking account, depositing the remainder of his cash. Once that was accomplished, Ricky found that sorties into the world of bureaucracy were relatively easy. He’d been issued a replacement Social Security card by filling out a form, one that he signed himself. A clerk at the Department of Motor Vehicles hadn’t even glanced at the picture on the Illinois license when Ricky turned it in and obtained a New Hampshire driver’s license, this time with his own picture and signature, his own eye color, height, and weight. He also rented a post office box at a local Mailboxes Etc. location, which gave Ricky a viable address for his bank account statements and as much other correspondence as Ricky could produce rapidly. He welcomed catalogs. He joined a video rental club and the YMCA. Anything that provided another card in his new name. Another form and a check for five dollars got him a copy of Richard Lively’s birth certificate, mailed by a thoughtful county clerk outside of Chicago.
He tried not to think about the real Richard Lively. He thought it had not been a particularly difficult task to delude a drunken, sick, and deranged man out of his wallet and his identity. While he told himself that what he had done was better than beating it out of him, it was not much better.
Ricky shrugged off the feelings of guilt as he expanded his world. He promised himself that he would return Richard Lively’s ID to him when he’d managed to truly extricate himself from Rumplestiltskin. He just didn’t know how long that would take.
Ricky knew he had to move out of the motel kitchenette, so he walked back to the area not far from the public library, searching for the house with the room for rent sign. To his relief, it was still in the window of the modest, wood-frame home.
The house had a small side yard, shaded by a large oak tree. It was littered with brightly colored plastic children’s toys. An energetic four-year-old boy was playing with a dump truck and a collection of army figures in the grass, while an elderly woman sat on a lawn chair a few feet away, occupied mostly with a copy of that day’s newspaper, occasionally glancing at the child, who made engine and battle sounds as he played. Ricky saw that the child wore a hearing device in one ear.
The woman looked up and saw Ricky standing on the walkway.
“Hello,” he said. “Is this your house?”
She nodded, folding the paper in her lap and glancing toward where the child was playing. “It is indeed,” she said.
“I saw the sign. About the room,” he said.
She eyed him cautiously. “We usually rent to students,” she replied.
“I’m sort of a student,” he said. “That is, I hope to be working on some advanced degrees, but I’m a little slow because I have to work for a living, as well. Gets in the way,” he said, smiling.
The woman rose. “What sort of advanced degree?” she asked.
“Criminology,” Ricky replied off the cuff. “I should introduce myself. My name is Richard Lively. My friends call me Ricky. I’m not from around here, in fact, only recently arrived here. But I do need a place.”
She continued to look him over cautiously. “No family? No roots?”
He shook his head.
“Have you been in prison?” she asked.
Ricky thought the true answer to this was yes. A prison designed by a man I never met but who hated me.
“No,” he said. “But that’s not an unreasonable question. I was abroad.”
“Where?”
“Mexico,” he lied.
“What were you doing in Mexico?”
He made things up rapidly. “I had a cousin who went out to Los Angeles and got involved in the drug trade, and disappeared down there. I went down trying to find him. Six months of stone walls and lies, I’m afraid. But that’s what got me interested in criminology.”
She shook her head. Her tone of voice displayed she had some large and immediate doubts about this abrupt outlandish tale. “Sure,” she said. “And what got you here to Durham?”
“I just wanted to get as far away from that world as possible,” Ricky said. “I didn’t exactly make a great many friends asking questions about my cousin. I figured it had to be someplace far away from that world, and the map suggested it was either New Hampshire or Maine, and so this was where I landed.”
“I don’t know that I believe you,” the woman answered. “It sounds like some sort of story. How do I know you’re reliable? Have you got references?”
“Anyone can get a reference to say anything,” Ricky replied. “It seems to me that you’d be a lot wiser to listen to my voice and look at my face and make up your own mind after a bit of conversation.”
This statement made the woman smile. “A New Hampshire sort of attitude,” she said. “I’ll show you the room, but I’m still not certain.”
“Fair enough,” Ricky said.
The room was a converted attic area, with its own modest bathroom, just enough space for a bed, a desk, and an old overstuffed armchair. An empty bookcase and a chest of drawers were lined on one wall. It had a nice window enclosed by a girlishly frilly pink curtain, with a half-moon top that overlooked the yard and the quiet side street. The walls were decorated with travel posters advertising the Florida Keys and Vail, Colorado. A bikini-clad scuba diver and a skier kicking up a sheet of pristine snow. There was a small alcove off the room which contained a tiny refrigerator and a table with a hot plate. A shelf screwed into the wall contained some white, utilitarian crockery. Ricky stared at the efficient space and thought it had many of the same qualities as a monk’s cell, which is more or less how he currently envisioned himself.
“You can’t really cook for yourself,” the woman said. “Just snacks and pizza, that sort of thing. We don’t really offer kitchen privileges…”
“I usually eat out,” Ricky said. “Not a big eater, anyway.”
The owner continued to eye him. “How long would you be staying? We usually rent for the school year…”
“That would be fine,” he said. “Do you want a lease?”
“No. A handshake is usually all we require. We pay utilities, except for the phone. There’s a separate line up here. That’s your business. The phone company will activate it when you want. No guests. No parties. No music blaring. No late nights-”
He smiled, and interrupted her, “And you usually rent to students?”
She saw the contradiction. “Well, serious students, when we can find them.”
“Are you here alone with your child?”
She shook her head with a small grin. “There’s a flattering question. He’s my grandson. My daughter is at school. Divorced and getting her accountant’s degree. I watch the boy while she’s working or studying, which is just about all the time.”
Ricky nodded. “I’m a pretty private guy,” he said, “and I’m pretty quiet. I work a couple of jobs, which takes up a good deal of my time. And in my free time, I study.”
“You’re old to be a student. Maybe a bit too old.”
“We’re never too old to learn, are we?”
The woman smiled again. She continued to eye him cautiously.
“Are you dangerous, Mr. Lively? Or are you running away from something?”
Ricky considered his reply, before speaking. “Stopped running, Mrs…”
“Williams. Janet. The boy is Evan and my daughter whom you haven’t met is Andrea.”
“Well, this is where I’m stopping, Mrs. Williams. I’m not fleeing from a crime or an ex-wife and her lawyer, or a right-wing Christian cult, although you might allow your imagination to race ahead in one or all of those directions. And, as for being dangerous, well, if I was, why would I be running away?”
“That’s a good point,” Mrs. Williams said. “It’s my house, you see. And we’re two single women with a child…”
“Your concerns are well founded. I don’t blame you for asking.”
“I don’t know how much I believe of what you’ve said,” Mrs. Williams responded.
“Is believing all that important, Mrs. Williams? Would it make a difference if I told you I was some alien from a different planet sent here to investigate the lifestyles of the folks of Durham, New Hampshire, prior to our invasion of the world? Or if I said I was a Russian spy, or an Arab terrorist, just a step ahead of the FBI and would it be okay if I used the bathroom to concoct bombs? There are all sorts of tales one can weave, but ultimately all are irrelevant. The truth that you need to know is whether I will be quiet, keep to myself, pay my rent on time, and generally speaking, not bother you, your daughter, or your grandson. Isn’t that really what is critical here?”
Mrs. Williams smiled. “I think I like you, Mr. Lively. I don’t know that I trust you all that much yet, and certainly don’t believe you. But I like the way you put things, which means you’ve passed the first test. But how about a month’s security and first month’s rent and then we’ll do things on a month-to-month basis, so that if one or the other of us feels uncomfortable, we can bring things to a quick conclusion?”
Ricky smiled and took the old woman’s hand. “In my experience,” he said, “quick conclusions are elusive. And how would you define uncomfortable?”
The smile on the older woman’s face broadened some, and she maintained her grip on Ricky’s hand. “I would define uncomfortable with the numerals nine, one, and one, punched on the telephone keypad and a subsequent series of any number of unpleasantly pointed questions from humorless men in blue uniforms. Is that clear?”
“Clear enough, Mrs. Williams,” Ricky said. “I think we have an agreement.”
“I thought so,” Mrs. Williams replied.
Routine came as quickly to Ricky’s life as the fall did to New Hampshire.
At the grocery store he was swiftly given a raise and additional new responsibilities, although the manager did ask him why he hadn’t seen him in any meetings, and so Ricky went to several, rising once or twice in a church basement to address the room filled with alcoholics, concocting a typical tale of life ruined by drink that brought murmurs of understanding from the collected men and women and several heartfelt embraces afterward, that Ricky felt hypocritical accepting. He liked his job at the grocery store, and got along well, if not expansively, with the other workers there, sharing the occasional lunch break, joking, maintaining a friendliness that successfully masked his isolation. Inventory was something he seemed to have a knack for, which made him think that stocking shelves with foodstuffs was not all that dissimilar to what he’d done for patients. They, too, had had to have their shelves restored and refilled.
A more important coup came in mid-October, when he spotted an ad for part-time help on the janitorial staff at the university. He quit his cash register job at the Dairy Mart and started sweeping and mopping in the science labs for four hours a day. He approached this task with a singleness of purpose that impressed his supervisor. But, more critically, this provided Ricky with a uniform, a locker where he could change clothes, and a university identification card, which in turn, gave him access to the computer system. Between the local library and the computer banks, Ricky went about the task of creating a new world for himself.
He gave himself an electronic name: Odysseus.
This gave rise to an electronic mail address and access to all the Internet had to offer. He opened various accounts, using his Mailboxes Etc. post office box as a home address.
He then took a second step, to create an entirely new person. Someone who had never existed, but who had a claim on the world, in the form of a modest credit history, licenses, and the sort of past that is easily documented. Some of this was simple, such as obtaining false identification in a new name. He once again marveled at the literally thousands of companies on the Internet that would provide fake IDs “for novelty purposes only.” He started ordering fake driver’s licenses and college IDs. He was also able to obtain a diploma from the University of Iowa, class of 1970, and a birth certificate from a nonexistent hospital in Des Moines. He also got himself added to the alumni list at a defunct Catholic high school in that city. He invented a phony Social Security number for himself. Armed with this pile of new material, he went to a rival bank to where he had already established Richard Lively’s account and opened another small checking account in a second name. This name he chose with some thought: Frederick Lazarus. His own first name coupled with the name of the man raised from the dead.
It was in the persona of Frederick Lazarus that Ricky began his search.
He had the simplest of ideas: Richard Lively would be real and would have a safe and secure existence. He would be home. Frederick Lazarus was a fiction. There would be no connection between the two characters. One man was a man who would breathe the anonymity of normalcy. The other was a creation and if anyone ever came asking about Frederick Lazarus, they would discover that he had no substance other than phony numbers and imaginary identity. He could be dangerous. He could be criminal. He could be a man of risks. But he would be a fiction ultimately designed with one single purpose.
To ferret out the man who had ruined Ricky’s life and repay in kind.
Ricky let weeks slide into months, let the New Hampshire winter envelop him, disappearing into the cold and dark that hid him from everything that had happened. He let his life as Richard Lively grow daily, while at the same time he continued to add details to his secondary persona, Frederick Lazarus. Richard Lively went to college basketball games when he had an evening off, occasionally baby-sat for his landladies who had rapidly come to trust him, had an exemplary attendance record at work, and gained the respect of his coworkers at the grocery store and the university maintenance department by adopting a kidding, joking, almost devil-may-care personality, that seemed to not take much seriously except for diligent, hard work. When asked about his past, he either made up some modest tale, nothing ever so outrageous that it wouldn’t be believed, or deflected the question with a question. Ricky, the onetime psychoanalyst, found himself to be expert at this, creating a situation where people often thought that he’d been talking about himself, but in reality was talking about them. He was a little surprised at how easily all the lying came to him.
At first he did some volunteer work in a shelter, then he parlayed that into another job. Two nights each week he volunteered at a local suicide prevention hot line, working the ten p.m. to two a.m. shift, which was by far the most interesting. He spent more than the occasional midnight speaking softly to students threatened by various degrees of stress, curiously energized by the connection with anonymous but troubled individuals. It was, he thought, as good a way as any of keeping his skills as an analyst sharp. When he hung up the phone line, having persuaded some child not to be rash, but to come into the university health clinic and seek help, he thought, in a small way, that he was doing penance for his lack of attention twenty years earlier, when Claire Tyson had come to his own office in the clinic he hated so much, with complaints that he’d failed to listen to and in a danger he’d failed to see.
Frederick Lazarus was someone different. Ricky constructed this character with a coldheartedness that surprised himself.
Frederick Lazarus was a member of a health club, where he pounded out solitary miles on a treadmill, followed by attacking the free weights, gaining fitness and strength daily, the onetime lean, but essentially soft body of the New York analyst re-forming. His waistline shrank. His shoulders broadened. He worked out alone and in silence, save for an occasional grunt and the pounding of his feet against the mechanized tread. He took to combing his sandy hair back from his forehead, slicked aggressively. He started a beard. He took an icy pleasure in the exertion that he delivered to himself especially when he realized that he was no longer breathing hard as he accelerated his pace. The health club offered a self-defense class, mostly for women, but he rearranged his schedule slightly to be able to attend, learning the rudiments of body throws and quick, effective punches to the throat, face, or groin. The women in the class seemed a bit uncomfortable with him at first, but his willingness to serve as a volunteer for their efforts gained him a sort of acceptance. At least, they were willing to smash him without guilt when he wore protective clothing. He saw it as a means of toughening himself further.
On a Saturday afternoon in late January, Ricky slide-stepped through snowdrifts and icy sidewalks into the R and R Sporting Goods store, which was located well outside the university area in a low-rent strip mall, the sort that catered to discount tire stores and quick-lube auto service. R and R-there was no ready indication what the letters stood for-was a modest low-slung, square space, filled with plastic deer targets, blaze-orange hunting clothing, stacks of fishing rods and tackle, and bows and arrows. Along one wall there was a wide array of deer rifles, shotguns, and modified assault weapons that lacked even the modest beauty of the wood stocks and polished barrels of their more acceptable brethren. The AR-15s and AK-47s had a cold, military appearance, a clarity of purpose. Underneath the glass-topped counter were rows and rows of various handguns. Steel blue. Polished chrome. Black metal.
He spent a pleasant hour discussing the merits of various weapons with a clerk, a bearded and bald middle-aged man, sporting a red check hunting shirt and a holstered.38 caliber snub-nosed pistol on his expansive waistline. The clerk and Ricky debated the advantages of revolvers versus automatics, size against punch, accuracy compared with rate of fire. The store had a shooting range in the basement, two narrow lanes, side by side, separated by a small partition, a little like a dark and abandoned bowling alley. An electrically operated pulley system carried silhouette targets down to a wall some fifty feet distant that was buttressed by brown hundred-pound bags of sawdust. The clerk eagerly showed Ricky, who had never fired a weapon in his life, how to sight down the barrel, and how to stand, two hands on the weapon, holding it out in such a way that the world narrowed, and only his vision, the pressure of his finger on the trigger, and the target he had in his aim mattered. Ricky fired off dozens of rounds, ranging from a small.22 automatic, through the.357 Magnum and 9 mm that are favored by law enforcement, up to the.45 that was popularized during the Second World War and which sent a jolt right through his palm all the way into his shoulder and down to his chest when he fired it.
He settled on something in between, a.380 Ruger semiautomatic, with a fifteen-shot clip. It was a weapon that functioned in the range between the big bang preferred by police and the deadly little assassin’s weapons that women and professional killers liked. Ricky chose the same weapon that he’d seen in Merlin’s briefcase, on a train to Manhattan, in what seemed to him to have taken place in a different world altogether. He thought it was a good idea to be equal, if only in terms of handguns.
He filled out the permit forms under the name Frederick Lazarus, using the fake Social Security number that he’d created precisely for this purpose.
“Takes a couple of days,” the fat clerk said. “Although we’re a whole helluva lot easier than Massachusetts. How’re you planning on paying for it?”
“Cash,” Ricky said.
“Antiquated commodity,” the clerk smiled. “Not plastic?”
“Plastic just complicates your life.”
“A Ruger.380 simplifies it.”
Ricky nodded. “That’s more or less the point, isn’t it.”
The clerk nodded as he finished the paperwork. “Anyone in particular you’re thinking of simplifying, Mr. Lazarus?”
“Now that’s an unusual question,” Ricky responded. “Do I look like a man with an enemy for a boss? A neighbor who has let his mutt loose on my lawn one too many times? Or, for that matter, a wife who had perhaps nagged me once too often?”
“No,” the clerk said, grinning. “You don’t. But then, we don’t get too many handgun novices in here. Most of our customers are pretty regular, at least maybe so’s we knows the face, if not the name.” He looked down at the form. “This gonna fly, Mr. Lazarus?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“Well, that’s more or less what I’m asking. I hate this damn regulation crap.”
“Rules are rules,” Ricky replied. The man nodded.
“Ain’t that the goddamn truth.”
“How about practicing,” Ricky asked. “I mean, what’s the point of getting a fine weapon like this if I don’t get real expert at handling it?”
The clerk nodded. “You’re a hundred percent right about that, Mister Lazarus. So many folks think that when they buy the gun, that’s all they need for protecting themselves. Hell, I think that’s where it starts. Need to know how to operate that weapon, especially when things get, shall we say, tense, like when some criminal is in the kitchen, and you’re in your jammies up in the bedroom…”
“Precisely,” Ricky interrupted. “Don’t want to be so scared…”
The clerk finished his sentence for him, “… that you end up blowing away the wife or the family dog or cat.” Then he laughed. “Though maybe that wouldn’t be the worst thing of all. Take that burglar out for a beer afterwards, if you was married to my old lady. And her damn fluffy, makes-me-sneeze-all-the-damn-time cat.”
“So, the shooting range?”
“You can use it anytime we’re open and it ain’t already being used. Targets is just fifty cents. Only thing we require is that you buy your ammo here. And you don’t come walking through the front door with a loaded weapon. Keep it in the case. Keep the clips empty. Fill ’em up here, where’s someone can see what you’re doing. Then you can go squeeze off as many as you like. Come spring, we sets up a combat course in the woods. Maybe you’d like to try that out?”
“Absolutely,” Ricky said.
“You want me to call you when the approval comes back, Mr. Lazarus?”
“Forty-eight hours? I’ll just swing on by myself. Or give you a call.”
“Either one is fine.” The clerk eyed Ricky carefully. “Sometimes,” he said, “these handgun permits come back rejected because of some dumb-ass glitch. You know, like maybe there’s a problem or two with the numbers you gave me. Something comes up on somebody’s computer, you know what I mean…”
“Foul-ups happen, right?” Ricky said.
“You seem like a pretty good guy, Mr. Lazarus. I’d hate you to get turned down ’cause of some bureaucratic snafu. Wouldn’t be fair.” The clerk spoke slowly, almost cautiously. Ricky listened to the tone of what the man was saying. “All depends on what sort of clerk you get looking over the application. Some guys over at the federal building, they just punch the numbers in, hardly pay attention at all. Other guys take their job real serious…”
“Sounds like you sure want to get that application in front of the right guy.”
The clerk nodded. “We ain’t supposed to know who’s doing the checking, but I got some friends over there…”
Ricky removed his wallet. He placed a hundred dollars on the counter.
The man smiled again. “That’s not necessary,” he said. But his hand closed over the cash. “I’ll make sure you get the right clerk. The type of guy who processes things real quick and efficient…”
“Well,” Ricky said, “that’s real helpful. Real helpful. I would feel like I owed you a favor, then.”
“No big deal. We try to keep customers happy, that’s all.” The clerk stuffed Ricky’s cash into his pocket. “Hey, you interested in a rifle? We got a special on a real nice.30 caliber with a scope for deer. Shotguns, too…”
Ricky nodded. “Maybe,” he said. “I’ll have to check what my needs are. I mean, once I know that I’m not going to have any problem with permits, I’ll be assessing my needs. Those look pretty impressive.” He pointed at the collection of assault weapons.
“An Uzi or an Ingram.45 caliber machine pistol or an AK-47 with a nice banana clip can go a long ways toward settling any dispute you might be facing,” the clerk said. “They tend to discourage disagreement and urge compromise.”
“That’s a good thing to keep in mind,” Ricky replied.
Ricky became significantly more adept at the computer.
Using his screen name, he made two different electronic searches for his own family tree, discovering with daunting speed how easy it was for Rumplestiltskin to have acquired the list of relatives that had been the fulcrum of his initial threat. The fifty-odd members of Dr. Frederick Starks’s family had emerged across the Internet in only a couple of hours’ worth of inquiries. Ricky was able to ascertain that armed with names, it did not take much longer to come up with addresses. Addresses turned into professions. It was not hard to extrapolate how Rumplestiltskin-who had all the time and energy he’d needed-had come up with information as to who these people were, and to find a few vulnerable members of the extended group.
Ricky sat at the computer, slightly astonished.
When his own name came up, and the second of the family tree programs that he was employing showed him as recently deceased, he stiffened in his chair, surprised, though he shouldn’t have been; it was the same way that one feels a momentary surge of shock when an animal runs in front of their car wheels at night, only to disappear into the shrub brush by the side of the road. An instant of fear, swept away in the same moment.
He had worked for decades in a world of privacy, where secrets were hidden beneath emotional fogs and layers of doubts, mired in memory, obscured by logjammed years of denials and depressions. If analysis is, at best, the slow peeling away of frustrations in order to expose truths, the computer seemed to him to have the clinical equivalence of a scalpel. Details and facts simply blipped across the screen, cut free instantaneously with a few strokes on a keyboard. He hated it at the same time that it fascinated him.
Ricky also realized how antique his chosen profession appeared.
And, swiftly, he understood, as well, how little chance he’d ever had at winning Rumplestiltskin’s game. When he replayed the fifteen days between the letter and his pseudodeath, he realized how easy it had been for the man to anticipate every move Ricky made. The predictability of his response at every turn was utterly obvious.
Ricky thought hard about another aspect of the game. Every moment had been designed in advance, every moment had thrust him in directions that were clearly expected. Rumplestiltskin had known him every bit as well as he had known himself. Virgil and Merlin together had been the means used to distract him from ever getting any perspective. They had created the breakneck pace, filled his last days with demands, made every threat real and palpable.
Every step in the play had been scripted. From Zimmerman’s death by subway to his trip to see Dr. Lewis in Rhinebeck, through the clerk’s office at the hospital where he’d once seen Claire Tyson. What does an analyst do? Ricky asked himself. He establishes the simplest yet most inviolable of rules. Once a day, five days per week, his patients showed up at his door, ringing the bell distinctively. Out of that regimen the rest of the chaos of their lives gained form. And with that, the ability to get control.
The lesson was simple, Ricky thought: He could no longer be predictable.
That was slightly incorrect, he told himself. Richard Lively could be as normal as necessary, as normal as he desired. A regular kind of guy. But Frederick Lazarus was to be someone different.
A man without a past, he thought, can write any future.
Frederick Lazarus obtained a library card, and immersed himself in the culture of revenge. Violence dripped from every page he read. He read histories, plays, poetry, and nonfiction, emphasizing the genre category of true crime. He devoured novels, ranging from thrillers written in the last year, to Gothics from the nineteenth century. He blistered through the theater, almost memorizing Othello and then, deeper still, to The Oresteia. He plucked segments from his memory and reread passages recalled from his own college days, spending time in particular with the man who donated his screen name to him and lent him the name he’d used with the derelict whose wallet he’d stolen. He absorbed the sequence where Odysseus slams shut the doors on the suitors and promptly murders all the men who presumed him dead.
Ricky had known little of crime and criminals, but fast became expert-at least, he understood, to the degree that the printed word can educate. Thomas Harris and Robert Parker taught him, as did Norman Mailer and Truman Capote. Edgar Allan Poe and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle were mixed liberally with FBI training manuals available through the Internet bookselling outlets. He read Hervey Cleckley’s The Mask of Sanity and came away with a much better knowledge of the nature of psychopaths. He read books entitled Why They Kill and The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers. He read about mass murder and explosive killings, crimes of passion and murders thought to be perfect. Names and crimes filled his imagination, from Jack the Ripper to Billy the Kid, to John Wayne Gacy and The Zodiac Killer. From past through the present. He read about war crimes and snipers, about hit men and satanic rituals, mobsters, and confused teenagers who took assault rifles to school, searching for classmates who had teased them perhaps once too often.
To his surprise, he discovered he was able to compartmentalize all he read. When he shut the cover of yet another book detailing some of the more grisly acts one man can do to another, he put aside Frederick Lazarus and returned to Richard Lively. One man studied how to garrote an unsuspecting victim and why a knife is a poor choice for a murder weapon, the other read bedtime stories to his landlady’s four-year-old grandson and memorized Green Eggs and Ham, which the child never tired of hearing at virtually any moment of the day or night. And, while one man studied the impact of DNA evidence in crime scene analysis, the other spent one long night talking an overdosed student down from a dangerous high.
Jekyll and Hyde, he thought.
In a perverse way, he discovered that he enjoyed the company of both men.
Maybe, curiously enough, more than the man he’d been when Rumplestiltskin entered his life.
Late one early spring night, nine months after his death, Ricky spent three hours on the telephone with a distraught, deeply depressed young woman who called the suicide prevention line in despair, a bottle of sleeping pills on the table in front of her. He spoke to her of what her life had become, and what it could become. He painted a word picture with his voice of a future free from the sorrows and doubts that had driven her to the state she was in. He wove hope into every thread of what he said, and when the two of them greeted the first dawn light, she had put aside the threatened overdose and made an appointment with a clinic physician.
When he walked out that morning, more energized than exhausted, he decided that it was time to make his first inquiry.
Later that day, when he had finished his shift in the maintenance department at the university, he used his electronic pass card to enter the computer sciences department’s student study room. This was a square space cut up into study carrels, each with a computer linked to the university’s main system. He booted one up, entered his own password, and slid right into the system. In a folder by his left hand, he had the small amount of information that he’d obtained in his former life about the woman he had ignored. He hesitated momentarily, before making his first electronic sortie. Ricky understood he could probably find freedom and a quiet, simple life, merely by living the rest of his days as Richard Lively. Life as a janitor wasn’t that bad, he had to acknowledge. He wondered, for an instant, whether not knowing would be better than knowing, because he knew that as soon as he began the process of uncovering the identities of Rumplestiltskin, and his partners, Merlin and Virgil, he would be unable to stop. Two things would happen, he told himself. All the years spent as Dr. Starks, dedicated to the proposition that unearthing truth from deep within was a valuable enterprise, would take hold of him. And Frederick Lazarus would demand his own dues, as the vehicle for his assault.
Ricky warred within himself for some time. He was unsure how long. It might have been seconds, he might have stared at the screen in front of him for hours, fingers poised, frozen, above the keyboard.
He told himself that he would not be a coward.
The problem was, he thought, where did cowardice lie? In hiding. Or in acting?
A coldness swept over him as he made a decision. Who were you, Claire Tyson?
And where are your children today?
There are many kinds of freedom, Ricky thought. Rumplestiltskin had killed him to acquire one sort. Now he would find his own.
This is what Ricky knew: Twenty years earlier a woman died in New York City and her three children were turned over to the state for adoption. Because of that fact alone, he’d been forced to kill himself.
Ricky’s first computer sorties, chasing Claire Tyson’s name, had come up curiously empty. It was as if her death had erased her from the records he could access electronically as surely as it had erased her from the earth. Even with the copy of the twenty-year-old death certificate, he was initially stymied. The family tree programs that had displayed his own stack of relatives so rapidly, proved to be significantly less effective at tracing her. She seemed to stem from folks with far less status, and this lack of identity seemed to diminish her presence in the world. He was a bit surprised at the lack of information. The Find Your Missing Relatives! programs promised to be able to trace virtually anyone, and her apparent disappearance from any record rapidly obtained was unsettling.
But his first efforts weren’t complete wastes. One of the things that he’d managed to learn in the months since his final vacation had begun, was to think considerably more tangentially. As a psychoanalyst, he’d learned the art of following symbols and tracing them into realities. Now, he was using similar skills, but in a far more concrete manner. When Claire Tyson’s name didn’t produce success, he began to search for other avenues. A computer sortie into Manhattan real estate records gained him the current ownership of the building where she had lived. Another inquiry led him to names and addresses in the city bureaucracy where she would have applied for welfare, food stamps, and aid to families with dependent children. The trick, Ricky thought, was to imagine Claire Tyson’s life twenty years earlier, and then narrow that down, so that he could understand all the forces that were in play at that time. Somewhere in that portrait would be a link to the man who’d stalked him.
He also searched electronic telephone books for the north of Florida. That had been where she had come from, and Ricky suspected that if she had any living relatives-other than Rumplestiltskin-that would be where they were located. The death certificate listed an address for her next of kin, but when he cross-checked the address against the name, he determined someone different was living at that location. There were a number of Tysons in the area outside of Pensacola and it seemed a daunting task to try to ascertain who was who, until Ricky remembered his own scrawled notes from his few sessions with the woman. She was a high school graduate, he recalled, with two years of college before dropping out to follow a sailor stationed at the naval base, the father of her three children.
Ricky printed out the names of potential relatives and the addresses of every high school in the area.
It seemed to him, as he stared at the words on the sheets of computer paper, that what he was doing was what he should have done so many years before: try to come to know and understand a young woman.
He thought that the two worlds couldn’t have been much different. Pensacola, Florida, is in the Bible Belt. Jesus-thumping, raised voices, praise the Lord and go to church on Sunday and any other day when His presence was needed. New York-well, Ricky thought, the city probably stood for pretty much everything anyone who grew up in Pensacola knew to be wrong and evil. It was an unsettling combination, he thought. But he was relatively certain of one thing: He was far more likely to find Rumplestiltskin in the city than in the countryside of North Florida. But he didn’t think that the man had had no impact down South.
Ricky decided to start there.
Using the skills he’d already mastered, he ordered a fake Florida driver’s license and retired military identification card from one of the novelty identification outlets on the Internet. The documents were to be sent to Frederick Lazarus’s Mailboxes Etc. box number. But the name on the identification was Rick Tyson.
People were likely to want to help out a long-lost relative, he thought, who innocently appeared to be trying to trace his roots. As a further hedge, he made up a fictional cancer treatment center, and on invented stationery wrote a “to whom it may concern” letter, explaining that Mr. Tyson’s child was a Hodgkin’s disease patient in need of a bone marrow match, and any assistance in tracing various family members, whose marrow DNA carried an increased chance of match success, would be appreciated and possibly even lifesaving.
This letter was wholly cynical, Ricky thought to himself.
But it would likely open some doors he needed to open.
He made himself an airplane reservation, made arrangements with his landladies and with his boss at the university maintenance department, switching around some workdays and hours to give himself a block of time, then he stopped in at the secondhand clothing store and purchased himself a simple, extremely cheap summer-weight black suit. More or less, he thought to himself, what a mortician would wear, which, he believed, was appropriate for his circumstances. Late in the evening of the day before he was to depart, wearing his janitor’s shirt and work pants, he let himself into the theater department at the university. One of his passkeys opened the storage area where costumes for various college productions were kept. It did not take him long to find what he needed.
There was a heavy dampness hidden like a veiled threat in the heat of the Gulf Coast weather. His first breaths of air, as he walked from the airconditioned chill of the airport lobby out to the rental car waiting area, seemed to hold an oily, oppressive, slick warmth far removed from even the hottest days up on Cape Cod, or even in New York City during an August heat spell. It was almost as if the air had substance, that it carried something invisible, yet questionable. Disease, he thought at first. But then, he guessed that was too harsh a thought.
His plan was simple: He was going to check into a cheap motel, then go to the address that was written on Claire Tyson’s death certificate. He would knock on some doors, ask around, see if anyone currently at that location knew of her family’s whereabouts. Then he would fan out to the high schools closest to the address. It wasn’t much of a plan, he thought, but it had a journalistic sturdiness about it: knock on doors and see who had something to say.
Ricky found a Motel 6 located on a wide boulevard that seemed to be dedicated to little except strip mall after strip mall, fast-food restaurants of every imaginable chain, and discount shopping outlets. It was a street of sun-washed cement, glowing in the undeniable sun of the Gulf. An occasional palm or shrub-brush landscaping seemed washed up against the shore of cheap commerce like flotsam and jetsam after a storm. He could taste the ocean nearby, the scent was in the air, but the vista was one of development, almost endless, like a repeating decimal of two-story buildings and garish signs.
He checked in under the name Frederick Lazarus, and paid cash for a three-day stay. He told the clerk he was a salesman, not that the man was paying all that much attention. After surveying the modest room, Ricky left his bag and walked through the parking lot to a convenience store gas station. There, he was able to purchase a detailed street map for the entire Pensacola area.
The tract housing near the sprawling naval base had a certain uniformity to it that Ricky thought might be similar to one of the first circles of Hell. Rows of cinder-block framed houses with tiny splotches of green grass steaming beneath the sun and ubiquitous sprinklers dashing the color with water. It was a short-hair-and-page-boy-cut area; it seemed to Ricky, driving through, that each block had a quality to it that seemed to define the aspirations of the inhabitants; the blocks that were well mowed and modestly manicured, with houses freshly painted so that they glistened with an otherworldly bright white beneath the Gulf sun seemed to speak of hope and possibility. The cars that rested in the driveways were clean, polished, shining, and new. There were swing sets and plastic toys on some of the lawns, and despite the midmorning heat, some children were at play beneath the watchful gaze of parents. But the lines of demarcation were clear: A few blocks in a different direction and the houses gained a worn, more used appearance. Run-down, flaking paint, and rain gutters that were stained with use. Streaks of brown dirt, chain-link fences, a car or two up on cinder blocks, wheels removed, rusting. Fewer voices raised in play, trash cans filled past their brims with bottles. Blocks of limited dreams, he thought.
In the distance, he was aware that the Gulf, with its expanse of vibrant blue waters, and the station, with great gray navy ships lined up, was the axis on which everything revolved. But as he moved farther from the ocean, deeper into disadvantage, the world he traveled in seemed limited, aimless, and as hopeless as an empty bottle.
He found the street where Claire Tyson’s family lived, and shuddered. It was no better, no worse than any of the other blocks, but in that mediocrity, spoke volumes: a place to flee from.
Ricky was looking for number thirteen, which was in the middle of the block. He pulled up and parked outside.
The house itself was much the same as the others in the block. A single-story, small two- or three-bedroom home, with air conditioners hanging from a couple of windows. A slab of concrete served as front porch and a rusty black kettle grill was leaned up against the side. The house was painted a faded pink and had an incongruous thirteen in hand-lettered black near the door. The one was significantly larger than the three, which almost indicated that the person who’d put the address on the wall had changed his mind in midstroke. There was a basketball hoop nailed to the portal of an open-air carport that looked to his unpracticed eye to be six inches to a foot lower than regulation. Regardless, the rim was bent. There was no net. A weathered, faded orange ball rested against a stanchion post. The front yard had a neglected look to it, streaks of dirt sidled up against grass choked with weeds. A large yellow dog, chained to a wall, confined by a steel fence to the tiny, square backyard, started to bark furiously as he walked up the driveway. That morning’s paper had been left near the street, and he picked it up and carried it to the front door. He touched the buzzer and heard the bell sound inside. A baby was crying inside, but quieted almost instantly as a voice responded, “I’m coming, I’m coming…”
The door opened and a young black woman, toddler on her hip stood before him. She did not open the screen door.
“What you want?” she demanded, furious and barely constrained. “You here for the TV? The washer? Maybe the furniture? Maybe the baby’s bottle? What you gonna take this time?” She looked past him, out to the street, her eyes searching for a truck and a crew.
“I’m not here to take anything,” he said.
“You with the electric company?”
“No. I’m not a bill collector and I’m not a repossession man, either.”
“Who you be, then?” she asked. Her voice was still aggressive. Defiant.
“I’m a man with a couple of questions,” he said. Ricky smiled. “And if you have some answers, maybe some money.”
The woman continued to eye him suspiciously, but now with some curiosity as well. “What sort of questions?” she asked.
“Questions about someone who lived here once. A while ago.”
“Don’t know much,” the woman said.
“Family named Tyson,” Ricky said.
The woman nodded. “He be the man got evicted before we move in.”
Ricky took out his wallet and removed a twenty-dollar bill. He held it up and the woman opened the screen door. “You a cop?” she asked. “Some sort of detective?”
“I’m not a policeman,” Ricky said. “But I might be some sort of detective.” He stepped inside the house.
He blinked for a moment, his eyes taking a few seconds to adjust to the darkness. It was stifling in the small entranceway and he followed the woman and the child into the living room. The windows were open in this space, but the built-up heat still made the narrow room seem like a prison cell. There was a chair, a couch, a television, and a red-and-blue playpen, which is where the child was deposited. The walls were empty, save for a picture of the baby, and a single stiffly posed wedding photo of the woman and a young black man in a naval uniform. He would have guessed the ages of the couple as nineteen. Twenty at most. He stole a look at the young woman and thought to himself: nineteen, but aging fast. Ricky looked back at the picture and asked the obvious question: “Is that your husband? Where’s he now?”
“He shipped out,” the woman said. With the anger removed from her voice, it had a lilting sweetness to it. Her accent was unmistakably Southern black, and Ricky guessed deep South. Alabama or Georgia, perhaps Mississippi. Enlisting, he suspected, had been the route out of some rural world, and she’d tagged along, not knowing that she was merely going to replace one sort of harsh poverty for another. “He’s in the Gulf of some Arabia somewhere, on the USS Essex. That’s a destroyer. Got another two months ’fore he gets home.”
“What’s your name?”
“Charlene,” she replied. “Now what’s those questions that’s gonna make me some extra money?”
“Things are tight?”
She laughed, as if this was a joke. “You’d best believe it. Navy pay don’t go too far until your rating get up a bit. We already lost the car and be two months slow on the rent. The furniture, we owe on, too. That be the story for just about everyone in this part of town.”
“Landlord threatening you?” Ricky asked. The woman surprisingly shook her head.
“Landlord be some good guy, I don’t know. When I got the money, I send it to a bank account. But a man at the bank, or maybe a lawyer, he called up and told me not to worry, to pay when I could, said he understood things were hard on military sometimes. My man, Reggie, he just an enlisted sailor. Got to work his way up before he make any real money. But landlord be cool, nobody else be. Electric say they gonna shut off, that’s why can’t run the air conditioners or nothing.”
Ricky moved over and sat on the single chair, and Charlene took up a spot on the couch. “Tell me what you know about the Tyson family. They lived here before you moved in?”
“That’s right,” she said. “I don’t know all that much about those folks. All I knows about is the old fella. He was here all alone. Why you interested in that old man?”
Ricky removed his wallet and showed the young woman the fake driver’s license with the name Rick Tyson on it. “He’s a distant relative and he may have come into a small amount of money in a will,” Ricky lied. “I was sent by the family to try to locate him.”
“I don’t know he gonna need any money where he be,” Charlene said.
“Where’s that?”
“Over at the VA nursing home on Midway Road. If he’s still breathing.”
“And his wife?”
“She dead. More ’n a couple of years. She had a weak heart, or so’s I heard.”
“Did you ever meet him?”
Charlene shook her head. “Only story I knows is what I was told by the neighbors.”
“Then tell me that story.”
“Old man and old woman live here by themselves…”
“I was told they had a daughter…”
“I heard that, too, but I heard she died, long time ago.”
“Right. Go on.”
“Living on Social Security checks. Maybe some pension money, I don’t know. But not much. Old woman, she got sick with her heart. Got no insurance, just the Medicare. They suddenly got bills. Old woman, she up and dies, leaving the old man with more bills. No insurance. He just an old, nasty man, got no neighbors like him none too much, no friends, no family anyone knows about. What he got same as me, just bills. People who wants their money. Up one day, comes late with the mortgage on the house, finds out that it ain’t the bank he thinks that owns the note anymore, it be someone who bought the note from the bank. He misses that payment, maybe one more, the sheriff’s deputies come with an eviction notice. They put the old guy out onna street. Next I hear, he’s in the VA. I’m not guessing he’s ever gonna get out of there, neither, except maybe feetfirst.”
Ricky considered what he’d just heard, then asked: “You came in after the eviction?”
“That’s right.” Charlene sighed and shook her head. “This whole block be a whole lot nicer just two years back. Not so much trash and drinking, people fighting. I thought this be a good place to get started, but now ain’t got no place and no money to move. Anyway, I heard the old man’s story from folks across the street. They gone now. Probably all the folks knew that old man be gone now. But it didn’t seem like he had too many friends. Old man had a pit bull, chained up in back where we got our dog now. Our dog, he just bark, make a commotion, like when you come walking up. I let him loose, he likely to kiss your face more than he be like to bite you. Tyson’s pit bull, not like that none. When he was younger, he likes to fight that dog, you know, in those gambling fights. Those places, they got lots of sweaty white men betting money they don’t have, drinking and swearing. That be the part of Florida that ain’t for tourists or the navy folks. It be like Alabama or Mississippi. Redneck Florida. Rednecks and pit bulls.”
“Not a popular choice,” Ricky said.
“There’s plenty kids in the neighborhood. Dog like that a threat to maybe hurt one of them. Maybe some other reasons folks ’round here don’t like him much.”
“What other reasons?”
“I heard stories.”
“What sort of stories?”
“Evil stories, mister. Mean, nasty evil, be all wrong and bad stories. I don’t know they’s the truth, so my mother, my father, they tells me not to go repeating things I don’t know for certain, but maybe you ask around somebody not as God-fearing as me likely to talk to you some. But I don’t know who. No folks left from that time.”
Ricky thought another moment, then asked, “Do you have the name, maybe the address of the guy you pay rent to now?”
Charlene looked a bit surprised, but nodded. “Sure. I make the check out to a lawyer downtown, send it to another guy at the bank. When I got the money.” She took a piece of crayon from the floor, and wrote down a name and address on the back of an envelope from a furniture rental outlet. The envelope was stamped in red with the phrase: second notice. “I hope this helps you out some.”
Ricky pulled two more twenty-dollar bills from his wallet and handed them to the woman. She nodded her thanks. He hesitated, then pulled a third out. “For the baby,” he said.
“That’s nice of you, mister.”
He shielded his eyes from the sun as he walked back out onto the street. The sky above was a wide determined expanse of blue, and the heat had increased. For a moment he was reminded of the high summer days in New York, and how he’d fled to the cooler climate of the Cape. That was over, he thought. He looked toward where his rental car was parked by the curb and he tried to imagine an old man sitting amid his meager possessions by the side of the street. Friendless and evicted from the house where he’d lived a hard life, but at least his own life, for so many years. Cast out quickly and without a second thought. Abandoned to age, illness, and loneliness. Ricky stuffed the paper with the lawyer’s name and address into his pocket. He knew who had evicted the old man. He wondered, however, if the old man sat in the heat and despair of that moment and understood that the man who had cast him out on the street was the child of his child who so many years earlier he’d turned his back upon.
There was a large, sprawling high school less than seven blocks away from the house that Claire Tyson had fled from. Ricky pulled into the parking area and stared up at the building, trying to imagine how any child could find individuality, much less education, within the walls. It was a huge, sand-colored cement building, with a football field and a circular track stuck on the side behind a ten-foot-high link fence. It seemed to Ricky that whoever had designed the structure had merely drawn an immense rectangle, then added a second rectangle to create a blocklike T, and then stopped, his architecture completed. There was a large mural outline of an ancient Greek helmet painted on the brick of the building, and the slogan home of the south side spartans! beside it in flowing, faded red script. The entire place baked like a pound cake in a pan beneath the cloudless sky and fierce sun.
There was a security checkpoint just inside the main entrance, where a school guard, wearing a blue shirt, black patent leather belt and shoes, and black pants, giving him if not the same status as a policeman, at least the same appearance, manned a metal detector. The guard gave Ricky directions toward the administrative offices, then had him walk between the twin posts of the machine, before pointing him on his way. His shoes clicked against the polished linoleum floor of the school hallway. He was between classes, so he maneuvered more or less alone between rows of gray-colored lockers. Only an occasional student hurried past him.
There was a secretary at a desk inside the door marked administration. She steered him to the principal’s office after he explained his reason for visiting the school. He waited outside while the secretary had a brief conversation, then appeared in the doorway to usher him in. He stepped inside and saw a late-middle-aged woman, wearing a white shirt that was buttoned to her chin, look up from where she worked at a computer screen, peering over glasses, giving an almost scolding, schoolmarmish look in his direction. She seemed mildly discomfited by his intrusion, and gestured toward a chair, while she swung around and sat behind a desk cluttered with papers. He sat heavily, thinking that he was taking a seat that had probably mostly known squirming students, caught in some malfeasance, or distraught parents, being informed of much the same thing.
“How precisely is it that I can help you?” the principal asked briskly.
Ricky nodded. “I’m searching for information,” he said. “I need to inquire about a young woman who attended school here in the late Sixties. Her name was Claire Tyson-”
“School records are confidential,” the principal interrupted. “But I remember the young woman.”
“You’ve been here a while…”
“My whole career,” the woman said. “But short of letting you see the class of 1967 yearbook, I don’t know if I can be of much help. As I said, records are confidential.”
“Well, I don’t really need her school records,” Ricky said, removing his phony cancer treatment center letter from his pocket and handing it to the lady. “I’m really searching for anyone who might know of a relative…”
The woman read the letter swiftly. Her face softened. “Oh,” she said apologetically. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize…”
“That’s okay,” Ricky said. “This is kind of a long shot. But, then, you have a niece who’s this sick, you’re willing to take any long shot there is.”
“Of course,” the woman said rapidly. “Of course you would. But I don’t think there’s any Tysons related to Claire left around here. At least not that I recall, and I remember just about everyone who passes through these doors.”
“I’m surprised you remember Claire…,” Ricky said.
“She made an impression. In more ways than one. Back then I was her guidance counselor. I’ve come up in the world.”
“Clearly,” Ricky said. “But your recollection, especially after all these years…”
The woman gestured slightly, as if to cut off his question. She rose and went to a bookcase against a rear wall, and returned in a moment with an old, faux leather-bound yearbook from the class of 1967. She passed it across to Ricky.
It was the most typical of yearbooks. Page after page of candid shots of students in various activities or games, buttressed by some overly enthusiastic prose. The bulk of the yearbook was the formal portraits of the senior class. These were posed shots of young people trying to look older and more serious than they were. Ricky flipped through the lineup, until he came to Claire Tyson. He had a little trouble reconciling the woman he’d seen a decade later with the fresh-faced, well-scrubbed almost adult in the yearbook. Her hair was longer, and tossed in a wave over her shoulder. She had a slight grin on her lips, a little less stiff than most of her classmates, the sort of look that someone who knows a secret might adopt. He read the entry adjacent to her portrait. It listed her clubs-French, science, Future Homemakers, and the drama society-and her sports, which were varsity softball and volleyball. It also listed her academic honors, which included eight semesters on the honor roll and a National Merit Scholarship commendation. There was a quote, played for humor, but which to Ricky had a slightly ominous tone, “Do unto others, before they have a chance to do unto you…” A prediction: “Wants to live in the fast lane…” and a look into the teenage crystal ball: “In ten years she will be: On Broadway or under it…”
The principal was looking over his shoulder. “She had no chance,” she said.
“I’m sorry?” Ricky replied, the words forming a question.
“She was the only child of a, uh, difficult couple. Living on the edge of poverty. The father was a tyrant. Perhaps worse…”
“You mean…”
“She displayed many of the classic signs of sexual abuse. I spoke with her often when she would have these uncontrollable fits of depression. Crying. Hysterical. Then calm, cold, almost removed, as if she were somewhere else, even though she was sitting in the room with me. I would have called the police if I’d had even the slightest bit of concrete evidence, but she would never acknowledge quite enough abuse for me to take that step. One has to be cautious in my position. And we didn’t know as much about these things then as we do now.”
“Of course.”
“And, then, I knew she would flee, first chance. That boy…”
“Boyfriend?”
“Yes. I’m quite certain she was pregnant and well along at that, when she graduated that spring.”
“His name? I wonder if any child might still be… It would be critical, you know, with the gene pool and all, I don’t understand this stuff the doctors tell me, but…”
“There was a baby. But I don’t know what happened. They didn’t put down roots here, that’s for sure. The boy was heading to the navy, although I don’t know for certain that he got there, and she went off to the local community college. I don’t think they actually ever married. I saw her once, on the street. She stopped to say hello, but that was it. It was as if she couldn’t talk about anything. Claire went from being ashamed about one thing right to the next. The problem was that she was bright. Wonderful on the stage. She could play any part, from Shakespeare to Guys and Dolls, and do it wondrously. Real talent for acting. It was reality that was a problem for her.”
“I see…”
“She was one of these people you’d like to help, but can’t. She was always searching for someone who could take care of her, but she always found the wrong people. Without fail.”
“The boy?”
“Daniel Collins?” The principal took the yearbook and flipped back a few pages and then handed it to Ricky. “Good-looking, huh? A ladies’ man. Football and baseball, but never a star. Smart enough, but didn’t apply himself in the classroom. The sort of kid who always knew where the party was, where to get the booze, or the pot or whatever, and he was the one who never got caught. One of those kids who was merely slipsliding through life. Had all the girls he wanted, but especially Claire, on a string. It was one of those relationships you are powerless to do anything about, and know will bring nothing but sorrow.”
“You didn’t like him much?”
“What was there to like? He was a bit of a predator. More than a bit, actually. And certainly only really interested in himself and what made him feel good.”
“Do you have his family’s local address?”
The principal rose, went over to a computer, and typed in a name. Then she took a pencil and copied down a number onto a scrap piece of paper, which she handed over to Ricky. He nodded a response.
“So you think he left her…”
“Sure. After he’d used her up. That was what he was good at: using people then discarding them. Whether that took one year or ten, I don’t know. You stick in my line of work, you get pretty good at predicting what will happen to all these kids. Some might surprise you, one way or the other. But not all that many.” She gestured at the yearbook prediction. On Broadway or under it. Ricky knew which of those two alternatives had come true. “The kids always make a joke along with a guess. But life’s rarely that amusing, is it?”
Before heading to the VA Hospital, Ricky stopped at his motel and changed into the black suit. He also took with him the item that he’d borrowed from the property room of the theater department back at the university in New Hampshire, fitted it around his neck and admired himself in the mirror.
The hospital building had the same soulless appearance as the high school. It was two stories, whitewashed brick seemingly plopped down in an open space between, by Ricky’s count, at least six different churches. Pentecostal, Baptist, Catholic, Congregational, Unitarian, AME, all with the hopeful message boards on their front lawns proclaiming unfettered delight in the imminent arrival of Jesus, or at least, comfort in the words of the Bible, spoken fervently in daily sessions and twice on Sundays. Ricky, who had gained a healthy disrespect for religion in his psychoanalytic practice, rather enjoyed the juxtaposition of the VA Hospital and the churches: It was as if the harsh reality of the abandoned, represented by hospital, did some measure of balancing with all the optimism racing about unchecked at the churches. He wondered if Claire Tyson had been a regular church visitor. He suspected as much, given the world she grew up in. Everyone went to church. The trouble was, it still didn’t stop folks from beating their wives or abusing their children the remaining days of the week, Ricky thought, which he was relatively certain that Jesus disapproved of, if He had an opinion at all.
The VA Hospital had two flagstaffs, displaying the Stars and Stripes and the flag of the State of Florida side by side, both of which hung limply in the unseasonable late spring heat. There were a few desultory green bushes planted by the entranceway, and Ricky could see a few old men in tattered gowns and wheelchairs on a small side porch sitting about unattended beneath the afternoon sun. The men weren’t in a group or even in pairs. They each seemed to be functioning in an orbit defined by age and disease that existed solely for themselves. He walked on, through the entranceway. The interior was dark, almost gaping like an open mouth. He shuddered as he walked in. The hospitals where he’d taken his wife before she died were bright, modern, designed to reflect all the advancements in medicine, places that seemed filled with the energy of determination to survive. Or, as was her case, the need to battle against the inevitable. To steal days from the disease, like a football player struggling to gain every yard, no matter how many defenders clung to him. This hospital was the exact opposite. It was a building on the low end of the medical scale, where the treatment plans were as bland and uncreative as the daily menu. Death as regular and simple as plain, white rice. Ricky felt cold, walking inside, thinking that it was a sad place where old men went to die.
He saw a receptionist behind a desk, and he approached her.
“Good morning, father,” she said brightly. “How can I help you?”
“Good morning, my child,” Ricky replied, fingering the clerical collar that he’d borrowed from the university property room. “A hot day to be wearing the Lord’s chosen outfit,” he said, making a joke. “Sometimes I wonder why the Lord didn’t choose, oh, those nice Hawaiian shirts with all the bright colors, instead of the collar,” Ricky said. “Be much more comfortable on a day like this.”
The receptionist laughed out loud. “What could He have been thinking?” she said, joining him in the humor of the moment.
“So, I am here to see a man who is a patient. His name would be Tyson.”
“Are you a relative, father?”
“No, alas, no, my child. But I was asked by his daughter to look him up when I came down here on some other church-related business.”
This answer seemed to pass muster, which is what Ricky had expected. He didn’t think anyone in the panhandle of Florida would ever turn away a man of the cloth. The woman checked through some computer records. She grimaced slightly, as the name came up on her screen. “That’s unusual,” she said. “His records show no living relatives. No next of kin at all. You’re sure it was his daughter?”
“They have been deeply estranged, and she turned her back on him some time ago. Now, perhaps, with my assistance, and the blessing of the Lord, the chance of a reconciliation in his old age…”
“That would be nice, father. I hope so. Still, she should be listed.”
“I will tell her that,” he said.
“He probably needs her…”
“Bless you, child,” Ricky said. He was actually enjoying the hypocrisy of his words and his tale, in the same way that a performer enjoys those moments onstage. Moments filled with a little tension, some doubt, but energized by the audience. After so many years spent behind the couch keeping quiet about most things, Ricky actually found himself eager to be out in the world and lying.
“It doesn’t appear that there is much time for a reconciliation, father. I’m afraid Mr. Tyson is in the hospice section,” she said. “I’m sorry, father.”
“He is…”
“Terminal.”
“Then perhaps my timing is better than I hoped. Perhaps I can give him some comfort in his final days…”
The receptionist nodded. She pointed to a schematic drawing of the hospital. “This is where you want to go. The nurse on duty there will help you out.”
Ricky made his way through the warren of corridors, seeming to descend into worlds that were increasingly cold and bland. It was as if, to his eyes, everything in the hospital was slightly frayed. It reminded him of the distinctions between the button-down, expensive clothing stores of Manhattan, that he knew from his days as a psychoanalyst, and the secondhand, Salvation Army world that he knew as the janitor in New Hampshire. In the VA Hospital, nothing was new, nothing was modern, nothing looked as if it worked quite the way it was supposed to, everything looked as if it had been used several times before. Even the white paint on the cinder-block walls was faded and yellowed. It was a curious thing, he thought, to be moving through the midst of a place that should have been dedicated to cleanliness and science, and get the sensation that he would need to shower. The underclass of medicine, he thought. And, as he passed the cardiac care units and the pulmonary care units and past a locked door that was labeled psychiatry, things seemed to grow increasingly decrepit and worn, until he reached the final stage, a set of double doors, with the words hospice unit stenciled on them. The person who had done the lettering had placed the words slightly askew, one on each door, so that they failed to line up properly.
The clerical collar and suit did their job impeccably, Ricky noted. No one asked him for identification, no one seemed to think he was out of place in the slightest. As he entered the unit, he spotted a nursing station, and he approached the desk. The nurse on duty, a large, black woman, looked up and said, “Ah, father, they called me and told me you were coming down. Room 300 for Mr. Tyson. First bed by the door…”
“Thank you,” Ricky said. “I wonder if you could tell me what he’s suffering from…”
The nurse dutifully handed Ricky a medical chart. Lung cancer. Not much time and most of it painful. He felt little sympathy.
Under the guise of being helpful, Ricky thought, hospitals do much to degrade. That was certainly the case for Calvin Tyson, who was hooked up to a number of machines, and rested uncomfortably on the bed, propped up, staring at an old television set hung between his bed and his neighbor’s. The set was tuned to a soap opera, but the sound was off. The picture was fuzzy, as well.
Tyson was emaciated, almost skeletal. He wore an oxygen mask that hung from his neck, occasionally lifting it to help him breathe. His nose was tinged with the unmistakable blue of emphysema, and his scrawny, naked legs stretched out on the bed like sticks and branches knocked from a tree by a storm, littering the roadway. The man in the bed next to him was much the same, and the two men wheezed in a duet of agony. Tyson turned as Ricky entered, just shifting his head.
“I don’t want to talk to no priest,” he choked out.
Ricky smiled. Not pleasantly. “But this priest wants to speak to you.”
“I want to be left alone,” Tyson said.
Ricky surveyed the man lying on the bed. “From the looks of things,” he said briskly, “you’re going to be all alone for eternity in not too long.”
Tyson struggled to shake his head. “Don’t need no religion, not anymore.”
“And I’m not going to try any,” Ricky replied. “At least not like what you think.”
Ricky paused, making certain that the door was shut behind him. He saw that there was a set of earphones dangling over the bed corner, for listening to the television. He walked around the end of the bed, and stared at Tyson’s roommate. The man seemed just as badly off, but looked at Ricky with a detached expectancy. Ricky pointed at the headphones by his bed. “You want to put those on, so I can speak with your neighbor privately?” he asked, but in reality demanded. The man shrugged, and slipped them onto his ears with some difficulty.
“Good,” Ricky said, turning back to Tyson. “You know who sent me?” he asked.
“Got no idea,” Tyson croaked. “Ain’t nobody left that cares about me.”
“You’re wrong about that,” Ricky answered back. “Dead wrong.”
Ricky moved in close, bending over the dying man, and whispered coldly, “So, old man, tell me the truth: How many times did you fuck your daughter before she ran away for good?”
The old man’s eyes widened in surprise and he shifted about in his bed. He put up a bony hand, waving it in the small space between Ricky and his sunken chest, as if he could thrust the question away, but was far too weak to do so. He coughed and choked and swallowed hard, before responding, “What sort of priest are you?”
“A priest of memory,” Ricky answered.
“What you mean by that?” The man’s words were rushed and panicked. His eyes darted about the room, as if searching for someone to help him.
Ricky paused, before he answered. He looked down at Calvin Tyson, squirming in his bed, suddenly terrified, and tried to guess whether Tyson was scared of Ricky, or of the history that Ricky seemed to know about. He suspected that the man had spent years alone with the knowledge of what he’d done, and even if it had been suspected by school authorities, neighbors, and his wife, still he’d probably deluded himself into imagining it was a secret only he and his dead daughter shared.
Ricky, with his provocative question, must have seemed to him to be some sort of deathly apparition. He saw the man’s hand start to reach for a button on a wire hanging over the headboard, and he knew that was the nurse call button. He bent over Tyson and pushed the device out of his grasp. “We’re not going to need that,” he said. “This is going to be a private conversation.” The old man’s hand dropped to the bed and he grasped at the oxygen mask, sucking in deep draughts of enriched air, his eyes still wide in fear. The mask was old-fashioned, green, and covered the nose and mouth with an opaque plastic. In a more modern facility, Tyson would have been given a smaller unit that clipped beneath his nostrils. But the VA hospital was the sort of place where old equipment was sent to be used up before being discarded, more or less like many of the men occupying the beds. Ricky pulled the oxygen mask away from Tyson’s face.
“Who you be?” the man demanded, fearful. He had a voice filled with the locutions of the South. Ricky thought there was something childlike in the terror that filled his eyes.
“I’m a man with some questions,” Ricky said. “I’m a man searching for some answers. Now, this can go hard or easy, depending on you, old man.”
To his surprise, he found threatening a decrepit, aged man who had molested his only daughter and then turned his back upon her orphaned children, came easy.
“You ain’t no preacher,” the man said. “You don’t work with God.”
“You’re mistaken there,” Ricky said. “And considering as how you’re going to be facing Him any day now, maybe you’d best err on the side of belief.”
This argument seemed to make some sense to the old man, who shifted about, then nodded.
“Your daughter,” Ricky started, only to be cut off.
“My daughter’s dead. She was no good. Never was.”
“You think you maybe had something to do with that?”
Calvin Tyson shook his head. “You don’t know nothing. Nobody know nothing. Whatever happened be history. Ancient history.”
Ricky paused, staring into the man’s eyes. He saw them hardening, like concrete setting up quick in the harsh sun. He calculated quickly, a measurement of psychology. Tyson was a remorseless pedophile, Ricky thought. Unrepentant and incapable of understanding the evil that he’d loosed in his child. And he was lying in his death bed and probably more scared of what awaited him, than what had gone past. He thought he would try that chord, see where it took him.
“I can give you forgiveness…,” Ricky said.
The old man snorted and sneered. “Ain’t no preacher that powerful. I’m just gonna take my chances.”
Ricky paused, then said, “Your daughter Claire had three children…”
“She was a whore, ran away with that wildcatter boy, then run on up to New York City. That’s what killed her. Not me.”
“When she died,” Ricky continued, “you were contacted. You were her closest living relative. Someone in New York City called you up and wanted to know if you would take the children…”
“What did I want with those bastards? She never married. I didn’t want them.”
Ricky stared at Calvin Tyson and thought this must have been a difficult decision for him. On the one hand, he didn’t want the financial burden of raising his daughter’s three orphans. But, on the other, it would have provided him with several new sources for his perverted sexual urges. Ricky thought that would have been a compelling, almost overwhelming seduction. A pedophile in the grips of desire is a potent unstoppable force. What made him turn down a new and ready source of pleasure? Ricky continued to eye the old man, and then, in an instant, he knew. Calvin Tyson had other outlets. The neighbors’ children? Down the street? Around the corner? In a playground? Ricky didn’t know, but he did understand that the answer was close by.
“So you signed some papers, giving them up for adoption, right?”
“Yes. Why you want to know this?”
“Because I need to find them.”
“Why?”
Ricky looked around. He made a small gesture at the hospital room. “Do you know who put you on the street? Do you know who foreclosed on your house and tossed you out so that you ended up here, dying all by yourself?”
Tyson shook his head. “Somebody bought the note on the house from the mortgage company. Didn’t give me no chance to make good when I was short one month. Just bang! Out I went.”
“What happened to you then?”
The man’s eyes grew rheumy, suddenly filling with tears. Pathetic, Ricky thought. He curbed any nascent sensation of pity, though. What Calvin Tyson got was less than he deserved.
“I was out on the street. Got sick. Got beat. Now I’m fixing to die, just like you said.”
“Well,” Ricky said, “the man who put you in this bed all alone is your daughter’s child.”
Calvin Tyson’s eyes widened and he shook his head. “How that be?”
“He bought the note. He evicted you. He probably arranged to have you beaten as well. Were you raped?”
Tyson shook his head. Ricky thought: There’s something Rumplestiltskin didn’t know about. Claire Tyson must have kept that secret from her children. Lucky for the old man that Rumplestiltskin never bothered to speak with the neighbors or anyone at the high school.
“He did all that to me? Why?”
“Because you turned your back on him and on his mother. So, he repaid you in kind.”
The man sobbed once. “All the bad that happened to me…”
Ricky finished for him, “… comes from one man. That’s the man I’m trying to find. So, I’ll ask you again: You signed some papers to give the children up for adoption, right?”
Tyson nodded.
“Did you get some money, too?”
Again the old man nodded. “Couple thousand.”
“What was the name of the people who adopted the three children?”
“I got a paper.”
“Where?”
“In a box, with my things, in the closet.” He pointed at a scarred gray metal locker.
Ricky opened the door and saw some threadbare clothes hanging from hooks. On the floor was a cheap lockbox. The clasp had been broken. Ricky opened it and rapidly shuffled through some old papers until he found several folded together, with a rubber band around them. He saw a seal from the state of New York. He thrust the papers into his jacket pocket.
“You won’t need them,” he told the old man. He looked down at the man stretched across the dingy white sheets of the hospital bed, his gown barely covering his nakedness. Tyson sucked at some more oxygen and looked pale. “You know what,” Ricky said slowly, his cruelty astonishing him, “old man, now you can just go about the business of dying. I think you’d be wise to get it over with sooner rather than later, because I think there’s more pain waiting for you. Much more pain. As much pain as you delivered on this earth multiplied a hundred times. So just go ahead and die.”
“What you going to do?” Tyson asked. His voice was a shocked whisper, filled with gasps and wheezes and constricted by the disease eating away at his chest.
“Find those children.”
“Why you want to do that?”
“Because one of them killed me, too,” Ricky said, as he turned to leave.
It was just before the dinner hour, when Ricky knocked on the door of a trim two-bedroom ranch house on a quiet street lined with palms. He was still wearing his priest’s regalia, which gave him an extra bit of confidence, as if the addition of the collar around his neck provided him with an invisibility that would defy anyone who might ask questions. He waited while he heard shuffling inside, and then the door cracked open and he saw an elderly woman peering around the edge. The door opened a little wider when she saw the clerical garb, but she remained behind a screen.
“Yes?” she asked.
“Hello,” Ricky replied cheerily. “I wonder if you might help me. I’m trying to trace the whereabouts of a young man named Daniel Collins…”
The woman gasped, and lifted a hand to her mouth to cover her surprise. Ricky remained silent as he watched the woman struggle to recapture her composure. He tried to read the changes her face underwent, from shock, narrowing to a harshness that seemed to him to be filled with a chill that reached right through the screen door. Her face finally set stiffly, and her voice, when she was able to use it, seemed to employ words carved from winter.
“He is lost to us,” she said. There were some tears that battled at the corners of her eyes, contradicting the iron in her voice.
“I’m sorry,” Ricky said, still maintaining a cheeriness that helped mask his sudden curiosity. “I don’t understand what you mean by ‘lost ’? “
The woman shook her head, not replying directly. She measured his priest’s outfit, then asked, “Father, why are you looking for my son now?”
He pulled out the phony cancer letter, guessing that the woman wouldn’t read it carefully enough to find questions in it.
As she started to eye the document, he started to speak, figuring that she wouldn’t really be able to concentrate on what was written while he spoke. Distracting her from asking questions of him didn’t seem like a difficult chore. “You see, Mrs… Collins, correct? The parish is really trying to reach out to anyone who might be a marrow donor for this youngster who is related to you distantly. You see the problem? I’d ask you to take the blood screening test, but I suspect you’re beyond the age where marrow can be donated. You’re over sixty, correct?”
Ricky had no idea whether bone marrow ceased being viable at any age. So he made up a phony question where the answer was obvious. The woman lifted her eyes from the letter to respond, and Ricky reached out and took it from her hands, well before she’d had the opportunity to digest all of it. He said, as he did so, “This has a lot of medical stuff in it. I can explain, if you’d prefer. Perhaps we could sit down?”
The woman nodded reluctantly and held the door open for him. He stepped into a house that seemed as fragile as the old woman who lived there. It was filled with small china objects and figurines, empty vases and knickknacks, and had a musty aged smell that overcame the stale air of the air conditioner pumping away with a banging sound that made him think some part was loose inside. The carpets had plastic runners and the couch, as well, had a plastic cover, as if the woman were afraid of any dirt that might be left behind. He had the impression that everything had a proper position in the house, and that the woman who lived there would be able to sense instantly any item that had shifted position even a fraction of an inch.
The sofa made a squeak as he sat.
“Your son, is he available? You see, he might be a match…,” Ricky launched ahead, lying easily.
“He’s dead,” the woman said coldly.
“Dead? But how?”
Mrs. Collins shook her head. “Dead to all of us. Dead to me, now. Dead and worthless, nothing but pain, father. I’m sorry.”
“How did he…?”
She shook her head. “Not yet. But soon enough, I’m thinking.”
Ricky leaned back, making the same squeaking sound. “I’m afraid I don’t precisely understand,” he said.
The woman reached down and removed a scrapbook from a shelf beneath a coffee table. She opened it, flipped through several pages. Ricky could see newspaper stories about sports games, and he remembered that Daniel Collins was a high school athlete. There was a graduation picture and then a blank page. She stopped there, and handed it across to him. “Turn the page,” she said bitterly.
Centered on a single sheet of the scrapbook was a single story from the Tampa Tribune. The headline was: man arrested after barroom death. There were few details, other than Daniel Collins had been arrested slightly over a year earlier, and charged with homicide following a fight in a barroom. On the adjacent page, another headline: state to seek death in bar fight slaying. This story, clipped and glued to the middle of another page, had a photograph accompanying it, of a middle-aged Daniel Collins being led handcuffed into a courtroom. Ricky scanned the newspaper clipping. The facts of the case seemed simple enough. There had been a fight between two drunken men. One of them had gone outside and waited for the other to emerge. Knife in hand, according to the state prosecutors. The killer, Daniel Collins, had been arrested at the scene, unconscious, drunk, bloody knife near his hand, victim spread-eagled a few feet away. The victim had been eviscerated in a particularly cruel fashion, the newspaper hinted, before being robbed. It appeared that after Collins had murdered the man and taken his money, he’d paused to swig another bottle of some cheap liquor, become disorientated, and passed out before fleeing the scene. Open and shut.
He read meager stories about a trial and a conviction. Collins had claimed that he was unaware of the killing, so addled with drink that night. It wasn’t much of an explanation and it didn’t work well with the jury. They were out deliberating for only ninety minutes. It took them an additional couple of hours to recommend the death penalty-the same explanation being offered up in mitigation that was ignored. Official death, cut and dried, wrapped up and packaged with a minimum of messiness.
Ricky looked up. The old woman was shaking her head.
“My lovely boy,” she said. “Lost him first to that bitch girl, then to drink, now to death row.”
“Have they set a date?” Ricky asked.
“No,” the woman replied. “His lawyer says they’ve got appeals. Going to try this court, that court. I don’t really understand too well. All I knows is that my boy says he didn’t do it, but it didn’t make no difference.” She stared hard at the clerical collar snug around Ricky’s neck. “In this state, we all love Jesus, and most folks worship on Sundays. But when the Good Book says ‘Thou Shall Not Kill,’ it don’t seem to apply to our courtrooms none. Us and Georgia and Texas. Bad places to do a crime where someone dies, father. I wish my boy’d thought of that before he took up that knife and got into that fight.”
“He says he’s innocent?”
“That’s right. Says he’s got no memory of the fight at all. Says he woke up all covered in blood when the policeman shoved him with their sticks and with that knife by his side. I guess having no recollection isn’t much of a defense.”
Ricky turned the page, but the scrapbook was blank.
“Got to save a page, I guess,” the woman said. “For one last story. I hope I pass before that day arrives, for I do not want to see it come.”
She shook her head. “You know something, father?”
“What’s that?”
“It always made me angry. You know, when he scored that touchdown against South Side High, in the city championship, why, they put his picture right on the front page. But all these stories, over there in Tampa where nobody much knew about my boy at all, why, they were little stories, stuck way inside the paper, where hardly anyone ever saw them. It seems to me that if you’re going to go about taking some man’s life away from him in a court of law, why you ought to make a big deal of it. It ought to be special and right up there on the front page. But it isn’t. It’s just another little story that gets stuck back next to the broken sewer main and the gardening column. It’s like life isn’t all that important anymore.”
She rose and Ricky rose with her.
“Talking about this makes my heart feel filled with sickness, father. And there ain’t no comfort in any words, not even the Good Book, to take the hurt away.”
“I think, my child, that you should open your heart to the goodness that you remember, and that way you will be comforted.” Ricky thought trying to sound like a priest made his words trite and ineffectual, which was more or less how he wanted them. The old woman had raised a boy who was to all outward appearances a proper son of a bitch, he thought, who started out his sorry excuse for life by seducing a classmate, dragging her alongside of him for a few years, then abandoning her and her children when they became inconvenient; and he ended up by killing another man over probably no reason at all, other than one created by too much liquor. If there was anything redeeming about Daniel Collins’s silly, useless existence, he had yet to see it. This cynicism, boiling around inside of him, was more or less confirmed by the words the old woman spoke next.
“The goodness stopped with that girl. When she got pregnant that first time, why, any chance my boy had, just went right away then. She lured him in, used all that woman cunning, trapped him, and then used him to get out of here and away. All the trouble he had, becoming someone, making his way in the world, why, I blame it all on her.”
The woman’s voice left no room for any compromise. It was cold, clipped, and utterly committed to the idea that her darling boy had nothing to do with creating any of the trouble that befell him. And Ricky, the onetime psychoanalyst, knew there was little chance that she would see her own complicity. We create, he thought, and then, when that creation goes so wrong, we want to blame others, when it is usually ourselves to blame.
“But you think he’s innocent?” Ricky asked. He knew the answer. And he did not say of the crime, because the old woman believed her son was innocent of everything he’d done wrong.
“Why, of course. If he said it, I believe it.” She reached into the scrapbook and found an attorney’s card, which she handed to Ricky. A public defender in Tampa. He noted the name and number and let her show him out the door.
“Do you know what happened to the three children? Your grandchildren?” Ricky asked, gesturing with the phony medical letter.
The woman shook her head. “They was give up, I heard. Danny signed some paper when he was in jail in Texas. He got caught doing a burglary, but I didn’t believe it none. Did a couple of years in prison. We never heard from them no time again. I guess they’s all grown up now, but I never seen any of ’em, not one time, so it’s not like I think of them. Danny, he did the right thing by giving them up after that woman passed, because he couldn’t raise three children he didn’t know all by hisself. And I couldn’t help him none, either, all alone here and being sick and all. So they became someone else’s problem and someone else’s children. Like I said, we never heard from them.”
Ricky knew this last statement was untrue.
“Did you even know their names?” he asked.
The woman shook her head. The cruelty in that gesture almost struck him like a fist, and he understood where the young Daniel Collins had found his own selfishness.
When the last of the day’s heat and sunshine hit his head, he stood dizzily on the sidewalk for just a moment, wondering whether Rumplestiltskin’s reach was so far, that it had put Daniel Collins on death row. He guessed that it was. He just wasn’t precisely certain how.
Ricky returned to New Hampshire and back to life as Richard Lively. Everything that he’d learned on his trip to Florida troubled him.
Two people had entered Claire Tyson’s life at critical moments. One had left her and her children adrift, and now occupied a cell on death row, claiming innocence in a state notorious for turning a deaf ear on such protests. The other had turned his back on the daughter he’d abused and the grandchildren who’d needed help, and years later he’d been turned out on the street equally cruelly, and now was condemned to wheeze away his final days on a different, but similarly unforgiving death row.
Ricky added to the equation beginning to form in his head: The boyfriend who beat Claire Tyson in New York was then beaten to death in his own turn, with a bloody R carved into his chest. The lazy Dr. Starks, who because of his own indecisiveness at one time failed to help the distraught Claire Tyson when she came pleading to him, was subsequently driven to suicide after every avenue where he might find help for himself was systematically destroyed.
There had to be others. This realization chilled his heart.
It seemed that Rumplestiltskin had designed a number of acts of revenge according to a simple principle: to each according to who they were. Crimes of omission were being judged and sentences being dealt out, years later. The boyfriend, who was nothing more than a thug and criminal, had been treated one way. The grandfather who’d denied his offspring’s entreaties had been punished differently. It was, Ricky thought, a unique method of delivering evil. His own game had been designed with Ricky’s personality and education in mind. Others had been dealt with more brutally, because they came from worlds where brutality was more refined. One other thing seemed clear cut: In Rumplestiltskin’s imagination, there was no statute of limitations.
The end results, though, he took note, seemed to be the same. A consistent path of death or ruin. And anyone who might stand in the way, like the unfortunate Mr. Zimmerman or Detective Riggins were seen as impediments that were summarily erased with the same amount of compassion one would reserve for a horsefly that landed on one’s forearm.
Ricky shuddered as he assessed how patient, dedicated, and cold-blooded Rumplestiltskin truly was.
He started to make a modest list of people who also might have failed to help Claire Tyson and her three young children when they were in need: Was there a landlord in New York who demanded rent from the destitute woman? If so, they were probably on the street somewhere, wondering what happened to their building. A social worker who failed to get her into an assistance program? Had they been ruined financially, and now forced to apply for the same program? A priest who had listened to her entreaties and suggested that prayer might fill an empty stomach? They were probably praying for themselves, now. He could only guess how far Rumplestiltskin’s revenge reached: What happened to the city power worker who had turned off the electricity at her house when she failed to pay a bill on time? He didn’t know the answers to these questions, nor did he know precisely where Rumplestiltskin had drawn his dividing line, separating the people he’d judged guilty, from however many others there might be. Still, Ricky knew one thing: A number of people had once upon a time come up far short and were now paying a price.
Or, more likely, had paid their debt. All the people who had neglected to help Claire Tyson, so that her only choice was to take her own life in despair.
It was the most frightening concept of justice that Ricky had ever imagined. Murders of both the body and the soul. It seemed to Ricky that he had often been scared since Rumplestiltskin had entered his life. He had been a man of routine and insight. Now, nothing was solid, everything was unsettled. The fear that ricocheted within him now was something different. Something he had difficulty categorizing, but he knew it left his mouth dry and a bitter taste on his tongue. As an analyst, he had lived in his well-to-do patients’ worlds of convoluted anxieties and debilitating frustrations, but these seemed now to be uniformly petty and pathetically self-indulgent.
The scope of Rumplestiltskin’s fury astounded him. And, at the same time, made perfect sense.
Psychoanalysis teaches one thing, he thought: Nothing ever happens in a vacuum. A single bad act can have all sorts of repercussions. He was reminded of the desktop perpetual motion machines that some of his colleagues had, where a group of ball bearings were hung in a row, and if one was lifted slightly, so that it swung against the others, the force would cause the last in the line to swing out and then bounce back, making a clicking sound and starting an engine of momentum that would only stop when someone injected their hand into the works. Rumplestiltskin’s revenge, of which he’d been only a single part, was like that machine.
There were others dead. Others destroyed. He alone, in all likelihood, saw the entirety of what had taken place. Perpetual motion.
Ricky felt shafts of cold drip through his body.
These were all crimes that existed in a plane defined by immunity. What detective, what police authority, would ever be able to link them all together, because the only thing the victims had in common was a relationship with a woman dead for twenty years.
Serial crimes, Ricky thought, with a thread so invisible that it defied imagination. Like the policeman who had blithely told him about the R carved in Rafael Johnson’s chest, there was always someone far more likely to wear guilt than the vaporous Mr. R. The reasons behind his own death were blatantly obvious. Career in tatters, home destroyed, wife dead, finances in ruins, relatively friendless and introspective, why wouldn’t he kill himself?
And one other thing was abundantly clear to him: If Rumplestiltskin learned that he’d escaped, if he even suspected that Ricky still breathed air on this planet, he would be on Ricky’s trail instantly with evil intentions. Ricky doubted that he would have the opportunity to play any game the second time around. It also occurred to him how easy it would be to dispatch his new identity: Richard Lively was a nonentity in the world. His very anonymity made his own quick and brutal death a relative certainty. Richard Lively could be executed in broad daylight, and no policeman anywhere would be able to make the necessary connections leading him back to Ricky Starks and some man called Rumplestiltskin. What they would find out was that Richard Lively wasn’t Richard Lively and he would instantly become a John Doe, planted with little ceremony without a headstone in some potter’s field. Perhaps a detective would wonder idly who he truly once was, but, inundated with other cases, the death of Richard Lively would simply be shunted aside. Forever.
What made Ricky so safe, also made him utterly vulnerable.
So, upon his return to New Hampshire, he greeted taking up the simple routines of his life in Durham with unbridled enthusiasm. It was as if he hoped he could lose himself readily in the steadiness of getting up each morning and going to work with the rest of the janitorial force at the university, of swabbing floors, cleaning bathrooms, polishing hallways, and changing lightbulbs, exchanging a joke or two with coworkers, speculating about the Red Sox’s prospects for the upcoming season. He functioned in a world so insistently normal and mundane that it cried out to be painted in institutional pale blues and light greens. Once, when operating a steam cleaner across the carpet of the faculty lounge, he discovered that the sensation of the machine humming, vibrating in his hands, and the swath of clean rug that it created was almost hypnotically pleasant. It was as if he could disappear from who he once had been in the new simplicity of this world. It was a strangely satisfying situation; alone, a job that shouted out routine and regularity, the occasional night spent manning the telephone bank at the suicide prevention line, where he recalled his skills as a therapist, dispensing advice and throwing lifelines in a modest, controlled fashion. He discovered he didn’t much miss the daily deposit of angst, frustration, and anger that characterized his life as an analyst. He wondered, some, whether the people he’d known, or even his late wife, would recognize him. In a curious way, Ricky thought that Richard Lively was closer to the person that he had wanted to be, closer to the person who’d found himself in summers on the Cape, than Dr. Starks had ever realized treating the rich and powerful and neurotic.
Anonymity, he thought, is seductive.
But elusive. For every second that he forced himself to grow comfortable with who he was, the revenge persona of Federick Lazarus shouted contradictory commands. He renewed his physical fitness training, and spent his free hours perfecting marksmanship skills on the pistol practice range. As the weather continued to improve, bringing warmth and bursting with color, he decided he needed to add outdoor skills to his repertoire, so he signed up for an orienteering class operated by a hiking and camping company under the name of Frederick Lazarus.
In a way, he’d been triangulated, in much the same way one finds his location when lost in the woods. Three pillars: who he was, who he’d become, who he needed to be.
He asked himself, late at night, sitting alone in the near-darkness of his rented room, a single desk lamp barely denting the shadows, whether he could turn his back on everything that had happened. Simply abandon any emotional connection to his past and what had befallen him, and become a man of complete simplicity. Live paycheck to paycheck. Take pleasure in basic routine. Redefine himself. Take up fishing or hunting or even just reading. Connect with as few people as possible. Live life with monklike style and a hermit’s solitude. Turn his back on fifty-three years of life, and say that it all started anew from the day he’d set fire to his home on the Cape and gone forward from there. It was almost Zenlike and tantalizing. Ricky could evaporate from the world like a puddle of water on a hot, sunny day, rising into the atmosphere.
This ability was almost as frightening as the alternative.
It seemed to him that he had reached the moment where he had to make a choice. Like Odysseus, his screen name, the route lay between Scylla and Charybdis. There were costs and risks with each selection.
Late at night, in his modest rented room in New Hampshire, he spread out on his bed all the notes and connections he had to the man who had forced him to erase himself from his life. Bits and pieces of information, clues and directions that he could follow. Or not. Either he was going to pursue the man who’d done this to him, risking exposure. Or he was going to toss it all and make what life he could out of what he’d already established. He felt a little like some fifteenth-century Spanish explorer, standing unsteadily on the pitching deck of a tiny sailing ship, staring out at the wide expanse of deep green ocean and perhaps a new and uncertain world just beyond the horizon.
In the center of the pile of material were the documents that he’d taken from the old man Tyson on his death bed at the VA Hospital in Pensacola. In the papers were the names of the adoptive parents who had taken the three children in twenty years ago. That, he knew, was his next step.
The decision was: take it-or not.
A part of him insisted he could be happy as Richard Lively, maintenance man. Durham was a pleasant town. His landladies were nice enough folks.
But another part of him saw things differently.
Dr. Frederick Starks did not deserve to die. Not for what he’d done, even if wrong, at a time of his own indecision and doubt. There was no denying that he could have done better for Claire Tyson. He could have reached out and perhaps been the hand that helped her find a life worth living. He couldn’t debate that he’d had that chance and that he had missed it. Rumplestiltskin was right about that. But his punishment far exceeded his complicity.
And this thought infuriated Ricky.
“I didn’t kill her,” he said out loud, but whispering the words.
The room around him was as much a coffin as it was a life raft, he believed.
He wondered if he could ever take a breath of air, without it tasting of doubt. What sort of safety was there in hiding forever? Of always suspecting the person behind every window of being the man who had driven him to anonymity. It was an awful thought, he understood: Rumplestiltskin’s game would never end for him, even if it had ended for the elusive Mr. R. Ricky would not know, never be certain, never really have a moment’s peace, free from questions.
He needed to find an answer.
Alone in his room, Ricky reached for the papers on the bed. He rolled the rubber band that held the adoption documents together off the sheaf so quickly that it snapped.
“All right,” he said quietly, speaking to himself and to any ghosts who might have been listening in, “the game starts up again.”
What Ricky learned swiftly was that social services in New York City had placed the three children into a succession of foster homes for the first six months after their mother died, until they were adopted by a couple who lived in New Jersey. There was a single social worker’s report stating that the children had been difficult placements; that except for their last and unidentified foster home, they had proven to be disruptive, angry, and abusive in each group setting. The social worker had recommended therapy, especially for the oldest. The report was written in plain, bureaucratic cover-your-butt English, without the sort of detail that might have told Ricky something about the child who was to grow into the man who had tormented him. He did learn that the adoption was handled by the Episcopal Diocese of New York, under their charity wing. There was no record of money changing hands, but Ricky suspected some had. There were copies of legal documents relinquishing any claims on the children signed by old man Tyson. There was another document, from Daniel Collins, signed while he was in jail in Texas. Ricky noted the symmetry of that element: Daniel Collins had rejected the three children while in prison. Years later, he is returned to prison under the rough guidance of Rumplestiltskin. Ricky thought that however the man who was once a rejected child managed this feat, it must have given him terrific satisfaction.
The couple who took in the three abandoned children was Howard and Martha Jackson. An address in West Windsor, a semisuburb, semifarmland locale a few miles away from Princeton, was given, but no other detailed information about the parents. They had taken all three children, which interested Ricky. There were questions in how they’d managed to stay together that were as potent as why they weren’t separated. The children were listed, as male child Luke, twelve years; male child Matthew, eleven years; and female child Joanna, nine years. Biblical names, Ricky thought. He doubted that these names had remained connected to the children.
He made several computer sorties, but drew blanks. This surprised him. It seemed to him that there should have been some information available floating around in the Internet. He checked the electronic white pages, found many Jacksons in central New Jersey, but no name that dovetailed with those he had on the meager sheaf of papers.
What he did have was an old address. Which meant that there was a door he could knock on. It seemed his only alternative.
Ricky considered using the priest’s garb and fake leukemia letter, but decided they had served their purpose once, and were best saved for another occasion. He ceased shaving instead, rapidly growing a spotty beard, and ordered a mock identification card from a nonexistent private detective agency over the Internet. Another late-night inspection of the drama department’s wardrobe room provided him with a fake stomach, a pillow-type device that he could strap beneath a T-shirt and which made him appear to be perhaps forty or fifty pounds heavier than his lean figure actually was. To his relief, he also found a brown suit that accommodated the extra girth. In the makeup cases, he also uncovered an extra bit of help. He slipped all the necessary items into a green garbage bag and took it home with him. When he got to his room, he added his semiautomatic pistol and two fully loaded clips to the bag.
He rented a four-year-old car that had seen better days from the local Rent-A-Wreck, which generally provided for students, and seemed more than willing to take his cash with few questions, the clerk dutifully taking down the information from the phony California driver’s license that he provided, and the following Friday evening, when he’d finished his shift in the maintenance department, started driving south toward New Jersey. He let the night surround him, allowed the miles to hum beneath the tires on the rental car, and drove rapidly but steadily, a constant five miles per hour above the posted speed limit. Once he rolled down the window, feeling a breath of warm air slide into the car, and he thought that it was quickly approaching summer once again. If he’d been in the city, he would have begun trying to steer his patients toward some recognition that they could hold on to when his inevitable August vacation rolled around. Sometimes he could manage this, sometimes not. He remembered walking in the city in the late spring and early summer and how the flowers in the park and the burst of greenery coming forth seemed to defeat the canyons of brick and concrete that were Manhattan. It was the best of times, there, he thought, but elusive, replaced quickly by oppressive heat and humidity. It lasted just long enough to be persuasive.
It was well past midnight when he skirted the city, stealing a glance back over his shoulder as he cruised across the George Washington Bridge. Even in the dead of night, the city seemed to glow. The Upper West Side stretched away from him, and he knew that just out of his sight was Columbia Presbyterian Hospital and the clinic where he’d worked so briefly so many years earlier, oblivious to the impact of what he was doing. A curious blend of emotions slapped him, as he swept past the tolls, and arrived in New Jersey. It was as if he was caught in a dream, one of those unsettling, tense series of images and events that occupied the unconscious, that bordered on nightmare, just stepping back from that edge. The city seemed to him to be all about who he was, the car that rattled as he steered it over the highway represented what he’d become, and the darkness ahead, what he might be.
A vacancy sign at an Econo Lodge on Route One beckoned him and he stopped. The night desk was manned by a sad-eyed man from India or Pakistan, who wore a nametag that identified him as Omar, and who seemed a little put out that his half-sleep reverie was interrupted by Ricky’s arrival. He did provide Ricky with a street map of the area, before returning to his chair, some chemistry books, and a thermos of some warm liquid that he cradled in his lap.
In the morning, Ricky spent some time with the actor’s makeup kit in the bathroom of the motel room, giving himself a fake contusion and scar just to the side of his left eye. He gave the addition a purplish-red coloring that was bound to draw the attention of anyone he spoke with. This was fairly elemental psychology, he thought. Just as in Pensacola, what folks would remember there was not who he was, but what he was, here their eyes would be drawn to the facial blemish inexorably, not registering the actual details of his face. The scraggly beard helped conceal his features as well. The fake stomach hung beneath his T-shirt added to the portrait. He’d wished that he’d also gotten some lifts for his shoes, but thought he might try that sometime in the future. After dressing in a cheap suit, he stuck his pistol in one pocket, along with the backup clip of bullets.
The address he was heading to, he believed, was a significant step closer to the man who’d wanted him dead. At least, he hoped it was.
The area he drove through seemed to him to be curiously conflicted. It was mainly flat, green, countryside, crisscrossed with roads that probably had once been rural, quiet, and neglected, but now seemed to carry the burden of upscale development. He passed numerous housing complexes, ranging from the decidedly middle-class, two- and three-bedroom ranch houses, to far more luxurious, mock mansions, with porticoes and columns, bedecked with swimming pools and three-car garages for the inevitable BMW, Range Rover, and Mercedes. Executive housing, he thought. Soulless places for men and women making money and spending money as rapidly as possible and thinking that this was somehow meaningful. The blend of the old and new was disconcerting; it was as if this part of the state couldn’t make up its mind as to what it was and what it wanted to be. He suspected that neither the older farm owners, nor the modern business and brokerage types got along very well.
Sunlight filled his windshield and he rolled down the window. It was, he thought, a perfectly nice day-warm, filled with springtime promise. He could feel the weight of the pistol in his jacket pocket and he thought that he would fill himself with winter thoughts, instead.
He found a mailbox by the side of a back road in the midst of some remaining farmland that corresponded to the address he had. He hesitated, not at all sure as to what to expect. There was a single sign by the driveway: safety first kennels: boarding, grooming, training. breeders of “all natural” security systems. Next to this statement was a picture of a Rottweiler, and Ricky saw a little sense of humor in that. He drove down the driveway, beneath some trees that formed a canopy above him.
When he came out from under the trees, he pulled up a circular drive to a 1950s-styled ranch house, a single story, with a brick facade in the front. The house had been added onto, in several phases, with white clapboard construction that connected to a warren of chain-link enclosures. As soon as he stopped and exited his car, he was immediately greeted by a cacophony of barking dogs. The musty odor of waste matter was everywhere, gaining purchase in the late morning heat and sun. As he stepped forward, the racket grew. He saw a sign on the addition that said office. A second sign, much the same as the one by the driveway entrance, adorned the wall. In the kennel closest to him, a large black Rottweiler, barrel-chested and weighing over a hundred pounds, rose up on its hind legs, mouth open, baring teeth. Of all the dogs in the kennel, and Ricky could see dozens twisting about, racing, measuring the extent of their confinement, this one seemed the only one that was quiet. The dog eyed him carefully, almost as if it was sizing him up, which, he supposed, it was.
He stepped inside the office and saw a middle-aged man sitting behind an old steel desk. The air was stale with the scent of urine. The man was lean, bald, rangy, with thick forearms, which Ricky figured were muscled by handling large animals.
“Be with you in a sec,” the man said. He was punching numbers onto a calculator.
“Take your time,” Ricky replied. He watched a few more keystrokes, then saw the man grimace at the total. The man rose and came toward him.
“How can I help you,” he said. “Jeez, fella, looks like you were in some kind of fight.”
Ricky nodded. “I’m supposed to say, ‘You ought to see the other guy…’ ”
The dog breeder laughed. “And I’m supposed to believe it. So, what can I do for you? But, I would point out, that if you’d had Brutus at your side, there wouldn’t have been a fight. No way.”
“Brutus is the dog in the pen by the door?”
“You guessed it. He discourages debate through loyalty. And he’s sired some pups that will be ready for training in another couple of weeks.”
“Thanks, but no thanks.”
The dog breeder looked confused.
Ricky pulled out the fake private investigator’s identification card that he’d acquired from the novelty outlet over the Internet. The man stared at it for a minute, then said, “So, Mr. Lazarus, I guess you’re not here looking for a puppy?”
“No.”
“Well, what can I help you with?”
“Some years ago a couple lived here. A Howard and Martha Jackson…”
When he spoke the names, the man stiffened. The welcoming appearance disappeared instantly, replaced by an abrupt suspiciousness, that was underscored by the step back the man took, almost as if the names being spoken out loud had pushed him in the chest. His voice took on a flat, wary tone.
“What makes you interested in them?”
“Were they related to you?”
“I bought the place from their estate. This is a long time ago.”
“Their estate?”
“They died.”
“Died?”
“That’s right. Why are you interested in them?”
“I’m interested in their three children…”
Again the man hesitated, as if considering what Ricky had asked.
“They didn’t have no children. Died childless. Just a brother lived some ways away. He’s the one sold me the place. I fixed it up real good. Made their business into something. But no kids. Never.”
“No, you’re mistaken,” Ricky said. “They did. They adopted three orphans from New York City through the Episcopal Diocese of New York…”
“Mister, I don’t know where you got your information, but you’re wrong. Dead wrong,” the breeder said, voice abruptly filling with barely concealed anger. “The Jacksons didn’t have no immediate family ’cept that brother who sold me this place. It was just the old couple and they passed away together. I don’t know what you’re talking about, and I think maybe you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Together? How?”
“That wasn’t any of my business. And I don’t know that it’s any of your business, either.”
“But you know the answer, right?”
“Everyone lived around here knew the answer. You can check the newspaper. Or maybe go to the cemetery. They’re buried right up the road.”
“But you’re not going to help me?”
“You got that right. What sort of private detective are you?”
“I told you,” Ricky responded swiftly. “One that’s interested in the three children that the Jacksons together adopted in May of 1980.”
“And I told you, there weren’t any children. Adopted or otherwise. So what’s your real interest?”
“I have a client. He’s got some questions. The rest is confidential,” Ricky said.
The man’s eyes had narrowed, and his shoulders straightened, as if his initial shock had worn off, replaced by an aggressiveness that spoke loudly. “A client? Somebody paying you to come around here and ask questions? Well, you got a card? A number where I can reach you, if maybe I remember something…”
“I’m from out of town,” Ricky lied quickly.
The breeder continued to eye Ricky. “Telephone lines go state to state, fella. How can I reach you? Where do I get hold of you, if I need to?”
Now it was Ricky’s turn to step back. “What is it that you think you can remember later that you can’t remember now?” he demanded.
The man’s voice had finally cooled completely. Now he was measuring, assessing, as if trying to imprint every detail of Ricky’s face and physique. “Let me see that identification again,” he said. “You got a badge?”
Everything about the man’s sudden change screamed warnings to Ricky. He realized in that second that he was suddenly close to something dangerous, like walking in the dark and abruptly realizing he was at the edge of some steep embankment.
Ricky took a step back toward the door. “Tell you what, I’ll give you a couple of hours to think this over, then I’ll call you back. You want to talk, you remember something, we can get together then.”
Ricky quickly maneuvered out of the office and took several strides toward the rental car. The breeder was a few steps behind him, but turned to the side, and within a second had reached the kennel containing Brutus. The man unlatched the gate and the dog, mouth agape, but still silent, sprang immediately to his side. The breeder gave a small, open palm signal, and the dog instantly froze, eyes locked directly on Ricky, waiting for the next command.
Ricky turned around to face the dog and owner, and took the last few steps to the car door backing up slowly. He reached into his pants pocket and removed the car keys. The dog finally emitted a single, low growl, just as menacing as the coiled muscles in its shoulders and the ears perked, awaiting the release from the breeder.
“I don’t think I’m going to see you again, mister,” the breeder said. “And I don’t think coming around here and asking any more questions is a real good idea.”
Ricky moved the keys to his left hand and opened his door. At the same time, his right hand crept into the suit coat pocket, gripping the semiautomatic pistol. He kept his eyes on the dog, and he concentrated hard on what he might have to do. Flick off the safety latch. Pull the pistol free. Chamber a round. Assume a firing position and take aim. When he did this on the range, he was never rushed, never hurried, and it still took several seconds. He had no idea whether he could get a shot off in time, and whether he could hit the dog. It occurred to him, as well, that it might take several rounds to stop the animal.
The Rottweiler would probably cross the space between them in two, three seconds at most. It crept forward, eager, inching a little closer to Ricky. No, Ricky thought, less than that. A single second.
The breeder looked at Ricky, and saw his hand creeping toward the pocket. He smiled. “Mister private detective, even if that is a weapon you have in your pocket, trust me, it isn’t going to do the trick. Not with this dog, right here. No chance.”
Ricky closed his hand around the grip of the pistol, sliding his index finger onto the trigger. His own eyes were narrow and he barely recognized the even tones of his own voice. “Maybe,” he said very slowly and carefully, “just maybe I know that. And I won’t even bother to try to put a round into your dog there. Instead, I’ll just nail one right in the center of your chest. You’re a nice big target, and trust me, I won’t have any trouble hitting you. And you’ll be dead before you hit the ground, and you won’t even have the satisfaction of seeing your mutt there chew me up.”
This reply made the breeder hesitate. He put his hand on the dog’s collar, restraining it. “New Hampshire plates,” he said after a moment. “With the motto Live Free or Die. Very memorable. Now get out of here.”
Ricky did not hesitate to slip into the car and slam the door shut. He removed the pistol from his jacket and then started the car up. Within seconds he was pulling away, but he saw the breeder in his rearview mirror, the dog still at his side, watching him depart.
He was breathing heavily. It was as if the heat outdoors had overcome the car’s air-conditioning system, and as he bumped off the driveway up onto the black macadam road surface, he rolled down his window and took a gulp of the wind created by the car’s motion. It was hot to the taste.
He pulled over to the side of the road to regain his composure, and as he did, he saw the entrance to the cemetery. Ricky steadied his nerves and tried to assess what had happened at the breeder’s house. Clearly the mention of the three orphans had triggered a response. He guessed it was one from deep within, almost a subliminal message. The man had not thought about those three children in years, until Ricky arrived with a single question, and that had stirred up a response recalled from deep within him.
There had been something dangerous about the meeting that went far beyond the dog at the man’s side. Ricky thought it was almost as if the man had been waiting years for Ricky, or someone like Ricky, to show up with some questions, and once his initial surprise that the moment he’d been awaiting for years had finally arrived, he knew precisely what to do.
Ricky felt a little queasy in his stomach as this thought churned about.
Just inside the cemetery entrance there was a small, white clapboard building, tucked off a little ways away from the roadway that sliced between the rows of graves. Ricky suspected it was something slightly more than a storage shed, and he pulled in front of it. As he did, a gray-haired man, wearing a matching blue set of work clothes not all that dissimilar to what Ricky wore at the university maintenance department, came out from the building, taking a step or two toward a riding mower parked to the side, but stopping when he saw Ricky emerge from the rental car.
“Help you with something?” the man asked.
“I’m looking for a pair of graves,” Ricky said.
“Got lots of folks planted here, who in particular you looking for?”
“A couple named Jackson.”
The old man smiled. “Ain’t nobody been up to visit them in a long time. People probably think it’s bad luck. Me, I think anybody taking up residence here has experienced all the luck, good and bad, they’re ever gonna have, so I don’t care much. Jacksons’ graves in back, last row, way over to the right. Take the road to the end, get out and head that way. You’ll find it soon enough.”
“Did you know them?”
“Nope. What, you a relative?”
“No,” Ricky said. “I’m a detective. Interested in their adopted kids.”
“They didn’t have no family to speak of. Don’t know nothing about no adopted kids. That would have been in the papers back when they passed, but I don’t remember nothing about that, and the Jacksons, they were front page for a day or so.”
“How’d they die?”
The man looked a little surprised. “Figured you know, coming up to see the graves and all…”
“How?”
“Why, it was what the cops call a murder-suicide. The old man shot his wife after one of their fights, then turned the gun on hisself. Bodies stewed for a couple of days in the house before the mailman realized nobody’s picked up the mail, gets suspicious and calls the local cops. Apparently the dogs got at the bodies, as well, so there weren’t much left, except some mighty unpleasant remains. Lot of anger in that house, you’d best believe.”
“The guy that bought it…”
“I don’t know him, but they say he’s a piece of work. Just as nasty as the dogs. Took over the breeding business, too, that the Jacksons had going there, but at least he killed all the animals that had eaten the former owners. But I’m thinking he’s likely to end up that way, hisself. Maybe that’s what wears on his mind. Makes him the nasty folk he is.”
The old man gave a grisly laugh and pointed up the incline. “Up there,” he said. “Actually, a pretty nice spot to rest for eternity.”
Ricky thought for a moment, then asked, “You wouldn’t know who bought the plot, do you? And who pays for maintenance?”
The man shrugged. “Checks just come in, I don’t know.”
Ricky found the grave site without any difficulty. He stood for a second amid the silence of the bright midday sun wondering for a moment whether anyone had given thought to a headstone for him after his suicide. He doubted it. He’d been as isolated as the Jacksons. He wondered, as well, why he’d never put up some sort of memorial to his dead wife. He had helped establish a book fund in her name at her law school, and he’d annually made a contribution to the Nature Conservancy in her name, and he’d told himself that these acts were better than some cold piece of stone standing sentinel over a narrow slice of earth. But standing there, he was less certain. He found himself caught in a reverie of death, thinking about the permanence and the impact on those left behind. He thought, we learn more about the living when someone dies, than we do the person who passed away.
He was uncertain how long he remained there, in front of the graves, before finally examining them. It was a joint headstone, and it merely said the names, the dates of their birth, and the date of their death.
Something bothered him, and he stared at this small bit of information, trying to discern what it was. It took several seconds before he made a connection.
The date of the murder-suicide was the same month that the adoption papers were signed.
Ricky took a step back. And then he saw something else.
The Jacksons were both born in the 1920s. They would have both been in their mid-sixties when they died.
He felt hot again, and he loosened the tie around his neck. The fake stomach seemed to pull at him, weighing him down, and the fake contusion and scar suddenly began to itch on his face.
No one can adopt a child, much less three children, at that age, he thought. The guidelines for adoption agencies would rule out a childless couple that age almost immediately, in favor of a younger, far more vigorous couple.
Ricky stood by the graves thinking he was looking at a lie. Not a lie about their death. That was true enough. But a lie somewhere in their life.
Everything is wrong, he thought. Everything is different from what it should be. Ricky was almost overcome with the sense that he was treading on the edge of something larger than what he’d expected. Revenge that was boundless.
He told himself that what he needed to do was to get back to the safety of New Hampshire and sort his way through what he’d learned, make some sort of rational, intelligent next step. He halted the rental car outside the office of the Econo Lodge, and stepped inside, spotting a different clerk. Omar had been replaced by James, who wore a clip-on tie that still managed to be skewed around his neck.
“I’m going to check out,” Ricky said. “Mr. Lazarus. In room 232.”
The clerk pulled up a bill on the computer screen, and said, “You’re all set. Except there were a couple of phone messages for you.”
Ricky hesitated, then asked, “Phone messages?”
James the clerk nodded. “Guy from some dog kennel called, asking if you were staying here. Wanted to leave a message on your room phone. Then, just before you came in, there was another message.”
“Same guy?”
“I don’t know. I just push the buttons. Never talked to the person. It just sticks a number up here on my call sheet. Room 232. Two messages. You want, just pick up the phone over there and punch in your room number. You can hear the messages that way.”
Ricky did as instructed. The first message was from the kennel owner.
“I thought you’d be staying someplace cheap and close. Wasn’t too hard to figure out where. I been thinking about your questions. Call me. I think maybe I’ve got some information that might help you out. But you better get out your checkbook. Gonna cost you.”
Ricky pushed the numeral three to erase the message. The next message was played automatically. The voice was clipped and cool and astonishing, almost like finding a piece of ice on a hot sidewalk during a summer day.
“Mister Lazarus, I have just been informed of your curiosity concerning the late mister and missus Jackson, and believe I might have some information in that regard that might assist you in your inquiries. Please telephone me at 212-555-1717 at your earliest possible convenience, and we can arrange a meeting.”
The caller did not provide a name. That was unnecessary. Ricky recognized the voice.
It was Virgil.