Security E-Book

Stephen Amidon

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Seitenzahl: 454

Beschreibung

Everything is neat and peaceful in Stoneleigh. Bad things don't often happen, and when they do, the residents trust the forces of law and order to deal with them efficiently and with minimum fuss. But appearances can be misleading. It takes just one crime - a disturbing allegation of sexual assault - to blast through the veneer of mutual trust, to expose a hotbed of suspicion and paranoia. Suddenly politicians, businessmen, mothers, students and gossips all seem to care less about the truth, than they do about the illusion of personal and public security. Security is a tense, penetrating and brilliantly observed novel about actual and imagined safety - about public and private life today.

Leseprobe

For my brother, Tom

Contents

Monday

1

2

3

4

Wednesday

5

6

7

8

9

10

Friday and Saturday

11

12

13

14

15

16

Monday

17

18

19

20

Wednesday

21

22

23

Friday

24

25

26

27

28

Saturday

29

30

31

32

MONDAY

1

The alarm came in just as he was leaving the office. His first impulse was to keep walking. Even now, in the dead of the night, the time of break-ins and drunken squabbles and combusting embers, it would almost certainly be false. Somebody coming home after a few too many and fumbling the abort code; a nightmare-addled child staggering into a forbidden room. And yet, Janine would know that he had heard, and Edward couldn’t just leave while she was in the middle of dealing with an alert. So he shut the door on the cold night and walked back into the office to see if he could lend a hand.

The gentle electronic pulse sounding from the dispatcher’s console had all the urgency of a boarding announcement at a regional airport. But Janine was all business as she slipped on her headphones and dialed the client. Edward was struck by the transformation: a moment ago she had been hinting at quitting, and now she had the tunnel vision of a frontline soldier. The word kicking around the office was that she was getting tired of the graveyard shift. And so, having found himself once again irrevocably awake at two a.m., Edward had decided to swing by to cheer her up. He’d discovered her standing beneath a nimbus of Camel smoke outside Stoneleigh Sentinel’s propped-open front door. She was wrapped in an over-sized Patriots windbreaker; her outerwear seemed to be composed entirely of leave-behinds from boyfriends and husbands. She dropped the cigarette when she saw his car; the way her right shoe twisted over the butt made her look like a wallflower at a high school dance. He would have let her smoke in the office, but didn’t need the hassle of getting caught violating the town’s draconian anti-tobacco measures.

They chatted at the dispatch console. It was a family thing. Her girls were running wild. She sounded like she really would walk this time, which would not be good: a skilled dispatcher was as hard to find as a plumber on a Sunday morning. As she talked, Edward found himself examining the photos of her three daughters arranged on the console. All of them in their late teens, early twenties. The only feature they shared was the panicked, pre-impact sheen of their eyes. None were in school; all still lived at home; the one with the nose stud was pregnant. He could only imagine the cramped house at night, the tense silences and explosions of temper, the sullen visiting boys slouched on weary furniture.

“What do you say we swap you to days?” he asked abruptly.

She narrowed her eyes in gratitude.

“Well, hell yes.”

And so it was decided that she would not be quitting after all. He’d switch her with Cole Birdsong, his four-hundred-pound, Bible-toting day dispatcher. The man lived with his mother and was always hinting about needing more money for her diabetes bills; he’d take the extra ten percent to work nights. Of course, Edward would have to keep Janine on that rate of pay as well, but he could afford it. Business was good.

He hung around for the three a.m. status check; he felt no great rush to face the sleepless hours ahead. Janine went through the roster of the company’s eight guards, located in hushed lobbies throughout town, where they made sure nobody burgled the converted factories where their fathers and grandfathers had once held decent jobs. The tally ended with Mike Tolland, Stoneleigh Sentinel’s senior patrolman. Its “armed response,” who covered the premier residential clients in the foothills west of town. Characteristically, he was out of position in a quiet subdivision in the north part of town. Edward almost got on the horn and asked him what the hell he was doing, but one personnel crisis was sufficient for a chilly November night. Instead, he headed for the door and Janine reached for her Camels.

That was when they’d heard the alarm. He read the screen as he neared the console. The alert was at Doyle Cutler’s place. As premier as an account could get. Cutler lived at the very edge of the town; his five-acre mountain estate backed onto wilderness. If there was a major burglary in Stoneleigh in the dead of a Sunday night, this was as likely a spot as any. As Janine speed-dialed the home phone, Edward read the screen more closely. The house’s front door and its gate had both been opened. No abort code entered.

“Voice mail,” Janine said.

Edward listened to the police scanner mounted above the desk, but there was only static. The next step should be dispatching Tolland, though that would mean stirring him from his pint of Wild Turkey and this month’s Soldier of Fortune. It would be quicker just to send the police. Edward was about to call 911 when Janine held up a finger. Someone had picked up.

“Yes, this is Stoneleigh Sentinel,” she said. “We have two alarms sounding at your house. We need you to provide your abort code.”

She listened with a scowl.

“I understand, sir, but you need to do that in thirty seconds or we must respond.”

Edward looked at the screen. Galt.

“Could you repeat that?”

Janine’s eyes were locked on the screen as well. She nodded.

“Thank you. And with whom am I speaking?” She nodded. “Will you be in need of further assistance from us, Mr. Cutler? Then, have a good night.”

She looked at Edward after she broke the connection. Her expression was uneasy.

“What did he say?” he asked.

‘A houseguest just left and they forgot about the alarm.” Her voice dropped into a conspiratorial register. “He sounded funny.”

“Funny as in . . .”

“You know, not right.”

“Drunk? Panicky?”

“Jacklit.”

Edward looked back at the screen. Technically, contractually, the event had just ended. Inner door, outer gate, abort code. Why a guest would be leaving unexpectedly at three a.m. fell into the vast category of things that were none of Edward’s business. But he didn’t like the sound of a stressed client – not at three in the morning on the edge of the wilderness. Especially not Doyle Cutler. Images of some sort of home invasion – unprecedented in the town’s history, though certainly not in the nation’s – shifted through his mind.

“You want me to send Tolland?” Janine asked dubiously.

He could call Cutler back himself, but what would he say? My dispatcher said you sounded funny? What was really required was for a seasoned pro to have a quiet look around. Not Tolland, who had just last spring tried to Taser a Mt. Stoneleigh student for “getting lippy.” He would demand entry; he’d want to rattle doors and ask all the wrong questions. If he was denied access, he would almost certainly call in the town police.

“I think I’ll take a ride over there myself.”

“Kind of out of your way, isn’t it?”

Edward didn’t tell her that he was in fact headed in that general direction when he left, even though Cutler lived on the opposite side of town from his house. No one was supposed to know that it had been almost a month since he’d slept in his own bed.

“You want Tolland to meet you there?” she asked when it became clear he wasn’t going to explain himself.

“I’ll let you know.”

It was three miles across town to the Cutler house. He drove fast. He turned on his scanner, but there was still nothing but static. The roads were late-night empty; the traffic lights had all been switched to flashing yellow. He first passed through Cheapside, the working-class neighborhood in the eastern part of town: Sentinel didn’t have many residential clients among its boxy little houses and eight-unit apartment buildings; business here was limited to a few Cumberland Farms stores and the Liquid Assets pawnshop. People robbed them, the time-lapse cameras immortalized their faces, the cops made an arrest. Next he passed through Old Town, with its sturdy Victorians and revitalized downtown. He’d installed plenty of standard home systems here, though few were premier clients. Those were up ahead, on Mountain. He was forced to slow a little after he joined the winding and sporadically lit road, which was liable at this hour to be occupied by astonished animals, some of them large enough to total a car. There were no shops or schools or traffic lights on Mountain Road; no billboards or parking lots or Little League fields. Just a few dozen estates, each hidden by its own automatic gate and impenetrable foliage and switchback driveway. Beyond these were the floor sensors and glass-break monitors and laser perimeter awareness systems, the hidden cameras and panic rooms. People up here liked to be left alone.

As he powered up the hill, Edward tried to decide exactly how he was going to play this. He’d spoken to Cutler only a few times, and that had been when he’d installed his system over two years ago. There had been no activity on the account. No upgrades, either; just routine maintenance. The house had been a scrape job. The mansion the Cutlers had dozed was beautiful to look at, gables and dormer windows, a magnificent wraparound porch. The sort of place people referred to as a classic, though Edward had noticed that none of his neighbors had been moved to buy it during the two years it moldered on the market. The dry rot and subsidence and decrepit pipes were simply too daunting. The Cutlers had replaced it with a residence that many townsfolk complained would have fit more easily into a gated Houston suburb. Although Edward would never have admitted it to a living soul, he sort of liked the look of the place, with its indoor pool and a tennis court and hangar-like garage. When it came to security, Cutler had wanted the works, including a digital CCTV system and external burglar lights, although Edward had talked him out of the latter: with the wildlife up here, these would turn the property into a sort of rustic disco. He had also wanted a direct link to the town police, but the local cops were understaffed and overburdened and loath to drive up Mountain every time a raccoon got at the garbage. They had even started writing citations for false alarms.

In person, Doyle Cutler was unimposing in the way of most wealthy people Edward encountered: around five eight, with a neat beard meant to cover a receded chin and small, wandering eyes. He seemed to be the sort of person who was incapable of occupying the moment, always waiting for the next fortunate thing to happen to him. He’d made his money in a steamy, long-fanged sector of the capitalist jungle before taking early retirement. Debt consolidation, it was called, at least while there were witnesses around. Edward had never met his wife; according to Meg, she thought Stoneleigh was part of the Third World. Cutler was, in other words, the sort of man who would not appreciate being intruded upon, although Edward guessed that he would also be fairly unforgiving if let down. And then there was the fact that in five days he would be hosting a big party at this very house in honor of Edward’s wife.

He passed the entrance to Mt. Stoneleigh College and then the common land, the unofficial beginning of the Mountain Road neighborhood. From here it was less than a mile to Cutler’s. The road grew even narrower and more twisted, its shoulders sloping off abruptly into drainage ditches that sparkled with frost. Everything was getting darker. The only evidence of human habitation now were occasional mirrors indicating a blind drive and rusticated gates. The police scanner remained quiet; Janine still had not called with further news.

And then he was there. He rolled to a stop on the paved crescent in front of Cutler’s gate, his eyes traveling instinctively to his company’s royal blue sign, its subtle gold lettering pledging twenty-fourhour vigilance and rapid armed response. Protected by Stoneleigh Sentinel. Edward got out of the car and stood perfectly still. There was only the usual moonlit hush. He stepped up to the gate to look through the spiked bars, their iron wrought into an unclimbable configuration. Oddly for Mountain Road, part of the house was visible, the glow of a solitary window, although a stockade of shrubbery made it impossible to see the ground floor or the front courtyard. He walked over to the pillar on his right. A small camera, encased in a fake stone, peered down at him. He contemplated the brass control panel below it, the keypad and speaker box. What the hell, he thought. Cutler was awake anyway. If he got angry, he’d get over it: Edward was just watching his back. He pressed the buzzer. Ten seconds passed, twenty. He was about to press it again when there was the familiar click of someone operating the system at the other end.

“Yes?”

“Mr. Cutler?”

“Yes?”

“This is Edward Inman from Stoneleigh Sentinel. I’m just following up on that alarm.”

There was no response. Edward realized that he hadn’t asked a question.

“I wanted to double-check that you weren’t in need of any assistance.”

“No, I’m fine here. A houseguest left without telling me. As I’ve explained.”

There was enough of a pause before the last sentence to register proprietary displeasure. Edward hesitated. The man sounded perfectly normal. Vaguely annoyed, though who wouldn’t be?

“Will there be anything else, Mr. Inman?”

“No.”

“Then, good night.”

There was a concluding rattle in the speaker. After one last look at the house, Edward walked back to his car. The dashboard clock read 3:19. Too early to return to his own home without waking Meg and the girls. Which meant that he would be driving back to his temporary refuge to wait for dawn. As he rolled slowly past the mirrors and gates, he wondered if any of the other owners were at home. Most Mountain Road residents were weekenders, except during the summer and the ski season. David McGreeves, a former all-star defense-man for the Bruins, was on the road forty weeks a year to give rousing speeches at corporate retreats, where he reminded his audiences that quitters never win, and winners never quit; that it wasn’t the size of the dog in the fight, and that you were only as good as your last deal. Tom and Nancy Stubblefield, whose marriage had fused two family fortunes, now spent most of their time on their yacht tomandnancy, while Sun Tse-sen, a Taiwanese chemist who had once been a professor at Mt. Stoneleigh College but now worked as a consultant for a big pharmaceutical, was almost always at the company’s Swiss headquarters. There were times, especially in the spring and fall, when Edward would have guessed that not a single house above the college was occupied.

He passed a sign explaining that this section of road was kept clean by the local chapter of the Sigma Epsilon Tau fraternity. He passed the common land; with his line of sight extended by the clear chill air, Edward could glimpse the campus sparkling through the depleted foliage. He drove on. A half mile farther down the road he passed College Avenue, the arrow-straight gaslit road that led to the school’s main entrance, so majestic that it seemed specially designed to make parents feel better about parting with the fifty thousand dollars a year it now cost to send their children to Mt. Stoneleigh.

And then, two hundred yards past the college, Edward saw someone walking along the narrow shoulder on his side of the road. It was the first human being he had seen since he left the office. Probably a student: you sometimes saw them after the bars closed. Sure enough, there was a weave in his walk. But he was moving in the wrong direction, downhill, away from campus. Edward slowed and swung toward the middle of the road. Just before he arrived, the walker turned in surprise. Headlights flared on his face, though only for an instant: his sudden movement had caused him to lose his balance. As the car passed, he was in the process of tumbling into the dying weeds at the side of the road. Edward pulled over. He knew that face. It was Kathryn’s son Conor.

The boy was already back on his feet by the time Edward got out of his car. He was so drunk that he looked like someone doing a bad imitation of a drunk. Edward tried to remember whether he would be eighteen or nineteen.

“Are you all right?” Edward called out.

His voice echoed: he’d almost shouted, worried that Conor didn’t even know that there was someone standing in front of him. Sure enough, the boy kept coming. Edward put his large frame in his path. Conor wove a bit and Edward moved again. They were now ten feet from a collision.

“Conor, hold on a sec.”

The mention of his name finally caused him to stop. His eyes narrowed.

“You look like you could use a ride home,” Edward said.

A glimmer of lucidity entered Conor’s expression.

“Okay . . . Do I know you?”

“I know your mother.”

“No, I’m good.”

He nodded and took a step. Edward held up his right hand.

“Conor, come on. I’ll have you there in a minute.”

He finally got the message: he was getting in the car. He shrugged, his mouth twisting in private amusement. Edward opened the passenger door and guided him through. Once they were both inside, Edward could smell the alcohol. Sour and meaty. Red wine was his guess. Plenty of it.

“So what brings you out here so late at night?” Edward asked. “You up at the college?”

Conor nodded vaguely as he closed his eyes.

“You going there now?” he asked.

“Yeah, right,” he said. “As if.”

“Party, huh.”

Conor’s chin dropped a little and his lips parted, though no response was forthcoming. Edward studied him. Although he’d glimpsed him a few times over the summer at Stoneleigh Books, they had never been this close. Edward was struck by his likeness to Kathryn, more obvious than ever now. The tapered nose and long forehead, the mouth that managed to be both delicate and full. His long brown hair had her gentle waves, though it lacked the reddish hue.

“Conor?” Edward asked.

But the boy clearly would not be accounting for himself, at least not anytime soon. The only thing left to do was take him home to Jupiter Street.

2

Kathryn was awake when the car pulled up. Her eyes had opened five minutes earlier. Which was strange, because she rarely woke during the middle of the night. And yet, here she was, feeling as if she’d just downed two espressos. Knowing that she had a full day of classes tomorrow, she was tempted to listen to something narcotic on the headphones: the Beaux Arts recording of Schubert trios she’d unearthed the other day, or her beloved standby Nick Drake. But some nebulous instinct told her that she had to keep her ears open to the world. The phone could ring with the latest installment in the Conor saga; Andrew could have another nightmare. A hang glider might land in the backyard. Given the last few years, anything could happen.

And then she heard a car on Jupiter and she knew that it was going to stop in front of her house. It was almost as if she’d awoken because she could sense its impending arrival. She got out of bed and looked through her window. For a moment she thought the big dark sedan might be the police, but then a familiar figure rose from the driver’s door. Kathryn took a half step backwards, partially in surprise, but also to keep Edward from seeing her in her just-risen state. He walked around the car and opened the door and waited patiently as her elder son struggled to his feet. Her extremely drunk elder son. It occurred to Kathryn that this was a strange combination of best- and worst-case scenarios. Conor made a tomahawking motion with his hand in the direction of the front porch but veered off in the general direction of Rhode Island after just a few steps. Fortunately, Edward was there to corral him. Please don’t accompany him to the door, Kathryn thought, whereupon Edward commenced to do just that. She briefly wondered if it would be possible to shower, dry her hair, dab perfume, tastefully apply cosmetics and find something attractive to wear in the space of ten seconds. Probably unrealistic. Instead, she took her robe from the straight-backed chair and headed downstairs.

They had paused at the bottom of the porch steps when she turned on the light; the short ascent seemed beyond her son. Kathryn opened the door with her right hand and held her robe tight to her neck with her left.

“Just tell me what happened,” she said. “Feel free to sugarcoat it.”

“It’s okay. I saw him out walking and I thought I’d give him a lift. That’s all.”

“So bail wasn’t necessary.”

Edward smiled and slowly shook his head. Conor had recovered his senses enough to mount the four stairs to the porch, though each one required a new calibration.

“I’ll deal with you later,” Kathryn said as he passed.

“No you won’t,” he answered, his voice more amused than hostile.

She sighed as she looked back at Edward.

“So,” she said.

“It’s nice to see you, Kathryn. You look good.”

She touched her hair.

“We must not have the same definition of good.”

Their eyes held.

“So what are you doing out and about at this hour?” she asked. “Shouldn’t you be home?”

“Can’t sleep.”

“That doesn’t sound like you.”

Once again, their gaze held for a few moments. She was the first to turn away. She stared at the storm door, as if she had forgotten that she was holding it open.

“Well, I’d better get inside before I lose all my heat.”

“Okay,” he said. “Good night.”

“Edward . . .”

He waited.

“Thanks,” she said.

As she watched his car slide away, what struck her about the encounter wasn’t its surreal awkwardness or even how long it had been. It was how easy it had been to speak with him. Seven years had vanished since their last conversation, provided you did not include those eternal few minutes they had spent together in line at the cineplex before A Beautiful Mind, with Meg watching Kathryn like an assassin eyeballing her target in a crowded elevator. And yet, it was as if they did this at three every Monday morning. She would have liked nothing more than to invite him in for coffee, though this was an impossibility on many levels, the most immediate being that her son looked likely to aspirate his vomit. So she said good night to the one who’d got away and went to deal with the one who would not go away. Conor made it to his bed without apparent mishap, though undressing was clearly beyond him. She briefly considered peeling off his shoes and shucking his peacoat, but that would suggest an implicit acceptance of this sort of behavior. Instead, she shut the door and went back to bed, where she afforded herself the luxury of thinking about Edward. He had looked tired. Handsome and healthy, but also tired. Hardly surprising at this hour. Thank God he had been the one to pick up her son. She doubted the new-look Stoneleigh Police would have been as sympathetic.

Thoughts of Edward lulled her into a gentle sleep. And then the alarm was sounding and it was time for another day. She was tempted to shake Conor awake so that they could have it out. The thought was speculative when it arrived, another meager fantasy of domestic control, but as she got the coffeemaker under way she decided to do it. It wasn’t as if she demanded much of him for his renewed tenancy except that he remain within the broad parameters of legality. That, and not play his stereo too loud. She didn’t ask him to help with the bills, although that would have been handy; she didn’t require that he rake leaves or caulk things; he didn’t have to look after Andrew every now and then so she could at least pretend to have a life. All she wanted was to have some degree of confidence that he was not currently sitting handcuffed in the back of a police car or being extracted from the tangled wreckage of some girl’s Accord. Not much to ask, but then, Kathryn had learned that the small favors were just as liable to be denied as the big ones.

She hurried upstairs before she lost her nerve. She made sure that Andrew’s door was shut as she passed. She paused outside Conor’s room, her determination slipping a little. It was four hours until the time he usually roused himself to shuffle off to his half-baked job at the bookstore. But this was ridiculous. He couldn’t just move back home and act like he was still living in a dorm. She raised her hand to knock, though she knew that it was a futile act: he slept so deeply that he would never hear her unless she made enough noise to frighten Andrew. She tried the handle. Locked. He must have got up during the night. Although he seemed happy to leave the house wide open when he came home late, a locked bedroom door had become an essential stone in his ever-growing wall of seclusion.

So there would be no encounter. Maybe it was for the best. She didn’t need another fight. There was already enough strife in their life together. She went back into her bedroom to dress, though it was getting increasingly difficult to put on makeup without actually looking into the mirror. And then it was time to rouse Andrew. She sat on the edge of his bed and stroked his forehead, her free hand secretly checking the sheets to see if he’d wet them. The fabric was hot but dry. He flashed her his sweet, besieged smile.

“And off we go,” she said.

“Can I stay home today?”

She was tempted. They could both take a day. But she chased the thought away and hustled him through his morning routine, half listening to his chatter as she tried to imagine where Conor had been last night. All those recent nights. It had to be a girl. This was Conor, after all. The Don Juan of Stoneleigh Regional High. But why was he being so secretive about this one? Maybe it was a married woman, the wife of some local doctor or lawyer who was taking her walk on the wild side of Western Mass. Kathryn could see it. Physically, at least, he was becoming a man, those teen-idol looks setting into something more sturdy, though his personality was still lost and wild enough to attract some poor woman who was just realizing that a second home at Stowe and enough money for private schools weren’t all they were said to be.

It wasn’t until she’d placed the toaster pancakes in front of Andrew that she realized she was out of maple syrup. Which was ironic, when you considered what was happening in the woods all around them, leakage and tin buckets on just about every tree, an entire landscape suppurating with sweet wounds. Maybe not ironic. Pathetic might be a better word. A good line for a song she’d never write: It used to be ironic, the way we’d something-something / Now it’s just pathetic when the something-something comes. Okay, maybe not. She secretly removed the patina of mold from an old jar of strawberry jelly, then added a splash of hot water to shift it from a solid to a gelid state. What a handy little homemaker she was!

Once Andrew was eating, she contemplated calling Conor’s cell and having it buzz him awake like a wasp perched on a picnicker’s dozing head. But that would be childish. She understood that there wasn’t really anything she could do to chasten him, and with this understanding came a sense of weary gloom. Having him around was like having his father back, only without the good times. Not that she could recall too many of those. She tried not to think about what awaited them down the road. Pungent smoke seeping from beneath his locked door. A hard-faced, unabashed girl moving in and showing no sign of leaving. Her purse ransacked. Or – God forbid – he’d go all the way and become one of the cranked-up pieces of Yankee trailer trash the cops had become so adept at chasing out of town.

Andrew’s voice roused her from the sad reverie.

“You’re doing that thing again,” he said.

“What thing?”

“Rubbing your fingers into your forehead.”

She pulled her hand away. He was right: a patch of skin above her eyes felt numb.

“You keep doing that and you’re going to wind up with a hole in your head,” he said.

“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” she answered.

The morning went slowly, as mornings always did at Stoneleigh Regional Middle School. Two sessions of music appreciation, although neither the teacher nor her squirming students were doing much appreciating. Afternoons were worse, a glacial crawl of sixth-graders honking on recorders, piano lessons with lump-fingered boys and, finally, terribly, the wind band that the board of education would not let her replace with an actual string orchestra. When she’d taken the job she’d thought that, statistically, a town of 34,000 would produce at least a few junior-high-school-age prodigies. And she was right. What she hadn’t counted on was the fact that their parents sent them to private schools, where the pay was too low to meet even Kathryn’s diminished needs.

Her anger at Conor, stymied at his bedroom door, underwent a resurgence as the morning ground on, so much so that she drove into town during her lunch break, determined to have it out with him. Better to do this at the bookstore. No tantrums. No slammed doors. She lucked into a place directly outside the shop. It was crowded inside, though most of the business was in the café. Just a few browsers moved through the stacks where Conor worked with such well-advertised reluctance. It was a job he had taken only after weeks of badgering from her. Initially, when he came back from UMass last March, he’d sleep past noon and then surf the Internet until dusk, whereupon he’d vanish to meet up with the settled dregs of his high school class or whatever girl he’d temporarily “hooked up” with. Even after wrecking “his” car – the aged Datsun that Mark had left in the garage when he lit out for points west – he still seemed to believe that he needn’t work. She’d finally begged a favor from Dale Overby, Stoneleigh Books’ owner and member of Mark’s crew of local losers. One of the few she still considered a friend, Dale had graciously offered Conor the most humble position he had, then asked Kathryn out on a date. As if she would screw him to get her son a minimum-wage gig stacking gift calendars and tomes about the war on terror. She’d been polite when she declined, making it seem that her only reservation was that word might filter back to Mark in Tucson. As if he would care.

There was no sign of Conor. He wouldn’t be at lunch: his shift started at noon, and she doubted that even her son would feel entitled to take a meal break after ten minutes on the job. She approached the counter, which was festooned with bookmarks and postcards and miniature reading lamps and anything else that happened not to be a book. The sole employee in sight was a familiar-looking, catastrophically skinny girl with an erratic streak of pink in her hair and a T-shirt that bore the word Usless. She looked up with an utter lack of recognition, even though she had met Kathryn several times, including one embarrassed late-night encounter in the hallway outside the upstairs bathroom back on Jupiter.

“I’m looking for Conor.”

Nothing.

“I’m his mother?”

“He’s not here,” she said warily.

“Do you know when he’ll be here?”

“No, I mean, as in He doesn’t work here anymore.”

This was said blandly. There was no sense of surprise that a son would keep such a vital piece of information from his mother. Welcome to Generation – what was it now? Z? Or had they moved beyond that? And, if so, what the hell were you supposed to call it? Because as far as Kathryn could tell they were out of letters.

“For how long?”

“A month?”

“A month? Are you sure?”

The girl shrugged and her gaze traveled beyond Kathryn. There was someone else in line.

“Is Dale here?”

“I think he’s having lunch?”

Kathryn found him seated at a corner table in the store’s busy café, his mouth full of the first bite of some elaborate, sprout-ridden sandwich. He looked like the giant in a children’s book who was in the process of devouring the family farm. There was a complaisant smirk in his eyes when he saw her, as if he expected her to announce second thoughts about his offer of a night of bliss in his pale, hairy arms.

“What’s going on, Dale?”

He slowly finished chewing.

“With what?” he asked, his voice muffled by a remnant of unswallowed food.

“Conor doesn’t work here anymore?”

He used a tiny paper napkin to wipe smeared avocado from his lips and beard. He missed some. She let it go.

“You don’t know?”

“Clearly.”

“He stopped showing up about, gosh, six weeks ago. I left a bunch of messages at your house. Well, a few.”

She had heard no messages. Which meant that Conor had erased them before she got home from work. Or Dale Overby was full of shit. She felt no great need to choose between the two options.

“Did he say why?”

“He didn’t say anything, Kathryn. He just stopped showing up. I would have appreciated a little notice, but” – his smile had the same lupine quality as Mark’s – “we’re getting by without him.”

She tried to call Conor once she left the store, but all she got was a cheery robot directing her to leave a message: he hadn’t even bothered to put his own voice into the system. She told him that he should wake up, she was on her way home right now, and understood what a pointless message it was as soon as she finished speaking. Her voice seemed to echo back at her and she imagined some vast warehouse where they stored all such unwanted messages, a black space filled with the ceaseless murmur of unheeded questions and complaints and pleas.

As she drove the five speed-bumped blocks to her house, she was overwhelmed by the feeling she’d been trying to hold at bay ever since spring: she was finished being a mother to Conor. She’d tried, she’d labored mightily and she’d failed. He might still live under her roof; he’d pick through the dinners she made and hit her up for money and tell her what was on his mind when the urge struck him. But he would no longer come to her for wisdom or guidance, and there would never again be any intimacy between them. This from the boy who had once been so open with his affection, so willing to tell her about a fight among his friends or some girl he liked. Mark had gone, physically and absolutely, and now their firstborn had departed in spirit. His physical presence was simple inertia.

She called out his name as she stepped through the front door but there was no answer. She listened for the telltale bass drone of his stereo, but the house was silent. And then there was a sharp clink in the kitchen. She pushed through the swinging door and there he was, slouched at the kitchen table in front of a bowl of Rice Krispies, several of which littered the table like pale rat droppings. His cell phone was pressed to his ear.

“Gotta go,” he said when he laid eyes on her.

He cut the connection and returned to his cereal. It could have been any late morning. Her elder son, blearily awake, ready to occupy the margins of yet another day. Except that it was afternoon. He wore jeans and a T-shirt and dirty socks that dangled loosely from his toes. His hair was wet from the shower.

“Hey,” he said.

He had yet to meet her eye.

“Conor,” she said.

He finally looked at her. She searched his face for some sort of indication that he understood her exasperation, that he was at all remorseful. Or, more pertinently, to find out if he was stoned. But there was only that inscrutable look that had been there since his mid-semester return from college, just in time for April Fool’s Day. Amazingly, he did not appear to be hungover.

“What on earth were you thinking last night?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Wandering around drunk at three in the morning.”

“I wasn’t wandering around. I was walking home.”

He lowered his face and started eating again.

“From where?” she tried.

He said nothing.

“But where were you?” she asked slowly, to make it clear that this was more than a garden variety squabble. “And who’s giving you alcohol?”

He looked at her, his expression making clear that he thought she was crossing some line in the sand. She couldn’t believe this was happening again. Standing in her kitchen, arguing about booze and lies.

“I was with some friends. And I wasn’t drunk. I’d just had a few.”

‘A few what? Vats?”

“Ma, don’t freak out.”

“Don’t tell me not to freak out,” she said quietly, sounding exactly like her own mother, whose icy calm always managed to suggest roiling depths of hysteria.

He said nothing. Instead, he shook more cereal into his bowl. Snap, crackle and pop.

“Why didn’t you answer your cell phone just now?” she asked – not the most pressing of questions, but she felt the need to introduce something answerable into the conversation. “I had to drive all the way home.”

“It was off. And no, you didn’t.”

“This is . . . what if the police had picked you up?”

“They didn’t.”

“I thought I made it clear under what circumstances you’d be allowed to move back home.”

“Look, I went out last night and then I came home. It’s not a big deal.”

“And what’s this about quitting your job?”

This got to him. The kitchen suddenly grew very still. Even the cereal seemed to cease its racket.

“I’m getting something else going,” he muttered.

“Like what?”

“Microsoft called. They want me to run things for them while Bill Gates cures Africa.”

“Be serious, please.”

He shook his head in wry wonder, as if being serious was in some way grossly inappropriate. Or simply uncool. There was neither joy nor warmth in his smile.

“What do you want from me? What difference does it make if I do some drudge job? Why is it such big shit if I chill with friends? If you want to throw me out, then go ahead.”

And then he stood, his lithe movements reminding her that he was still only nineteen years old. He strode right past her, his eyes fixed on a point deep in the house. His feet detonated on the steps and then came the inevitable door slam. Kathryn walked across the kitchen and leaned against the counter, her hands pressing into the chilly fake marble. She closed her eyes. Her heart pounded; her breath was a little short. How could this have happened? They occupied the same space; they participated in the same conversation. They were flesh and blood. And yet, it was as if they didn’t have the slightest thing in common.

All right. She’d let it go. Last night could be history. He’d win, and in winning, he would notch up another loss. She had to get back to school. She taught music, for God’s sake. It wasn’t as if she could afford to take a single wrong step. She drove through Old Town in a sort of trance; she was in the faculty parking lot before she was really aware of having left Jupiter. As she quickstepped through the lobby the secretary gave her a darkly suspicious look, ready to report her slightest transgression. The sixth-graders were already in the music room. They would be wielding their recorders, which most of them saw as nothing more than sleek black noisemakers. Sure enough, as she hurried down the hall she could hear them warming up, a raucous cacophony she would never be able to bring into harmony.

3

There should not have been sun. There should not have been jagged shadows across the ceiling’s rough plaster. This time of year, sunlight did not strike his bedroom window until just before seven. But he woke at six. Invariably. Morning after morning, ever since he was in high school. The only exceptions were the worst days after the accident, and that situation had passed before they even discharged him from Samaritan. He checked the clock on his bedside table. It was 7:22. Steckl felt the first stirrings of dread at the onset of another bad development in his life. Sleeping late – this was not good. Especially today, when he had to be at the courthouse by eight. He sat up quickly, too quickly, releasing the pain that had pooled in his body overnight. Usually he spent five minutes extricating himself from bed, moving through his routine one step at a time, like a scuba diver rising to the ocean’s surface. Now, because he’d moved too fast, the pain flooded through his nervous system, coursing along muscle and bone until it reached the places where it lived during waking hours: his hands and feet and face. Its intensity almost drove him back down to the mattress, though he knew there would be no relief there. Relief was in the small plastic bottles from CVS. It was in the vodka at the back of the freezer.

He jettisoned his stiff legs over the side of the bed, and after what seemed like a very long fall, his feet hit the floor with consecutive thuds. It took him a moment to understand the sound: he’d slept in his boots. He tried to remember getting into bed, though the last thing that came clearly to mind was Mary’s departure in the late afternoon and the first stinging sip just after she shut the door behind her. After that was the usual mess. Legal books rested on the tussled blankets at the foot of the bed. One was splayed open: Pro Se by Julius T. Meadows, J.D. It was Steckl’s new bible. There was a yellow pad too. He’d tried to work on his case. He riffled through it, discovering four new pages of notes, none of them coherent, the last one an unreadable scrawl. He remembered none of this. It was all gone.

He stood slowly and stretched the clenched muscles in his lower back before limping to the bathroom, where he pissed away a frothing brew of chemicals and booze. His head began to throb as he scraped the yeasty film from his teeth. He cleaned out the sink with his hand and filled it with cold water and buried his face beneath the surface for as long as he could bear. This beat back the sizzling pain in his jaw and lips and nose. It also cleared the worst of the dizziness. He reached instinctively for the medicine cabinet but stopped himself. He should not take pills this morning. He’d have to speak in court and he didn’t want to sound like what they were accusing him of being.

There was no time to shower. His days of jumping in and out of the shower were long gone. Instead, he soaked himself with deodorant and cologne to mask the stink. Before dressing, he packed his briefcase: even though it was just a preliminary hearing, he didn’t want to show up empty-handed. He dumped the wires and fuses and meters on his bed and then piled in his pads and Xeroxes. There was no time to put them in any sort of order. He hoped he wouldn’t need any of this. He dreaded the thought of rummaging through papers with his afflicted hands in front of the magistrate. Awkward and muttering. The man they were falsely accusing him of being.

He dressed as quickly as possible. His back was so stiff that he had to lie on the bed to put on his boxers and slacks. Like a baby. It was good that Agatha never saw him like this. Buttoning his shirt was almost impossible; his fingers buzzed like live cable by the time he finished with his tie. He was moving too quickly, but he had no choice. Downstairs, he went into the kitchen and saw the empty fifth on the table. It had been nearly full last night when he’d pulled it from the freezer.

It took him five tries to turn over the van’s engine. He would need a new starter for the winter. Snow tires. And a storm window for the family room, now that he was making a list. Slates to replace the ones torn off during the summer thunderstorms. But he couldn’t think about that now, the things he needed. He had to deal with what was in front of him. At least the cold steering wheel soothed his hands. That was one good thing about winter: how it could numb you.

He tried to piece yesterday together as he drove through town. He’d awakened early to prepare for today’s court date, then cleaned up for Mary’s visit, getting rid of the empties and the fast-food wrappers and everything else he did not want her to see. He remembered getting nervous as he worked, wondering how he was going to tell her about his arrest. He could no longer put it off, not with his docket looming. He’d offered to drive over to get her from college, but she’d called late in the morning to let him know that she would be walking. There wouldn’t be many chances for hiking once the snow and ice came. She gave him a gift when she arrived, a big jar of vitamin capsules. B complex. She claimed it helped repair the nervous system and might be a way of allowing him to ease back on the prescription medicine. They joked about that a little, the idea of Walt Steckl starting to take vitamins at the age of fifty-one. And then he sat with her in the kitchen and watched her cook his usual weekend lunch. Sausage and cabbage, mashed sweet potatoes and broccoli with melted Gorgonzola. His favorite meal. She would have a little of the broccoli after she’d scraped off the cheese, plus a salad soaked with the dressing she liked, the one that smelled of the woods.

He’d planned on confessing when they started eating, but the opportunity never seemed to arise. No, that was a lie. He knew full well that the opportunity was not going to arise unless he yanked it up out of himself. But he could not do it. As he watched his daughter fuss over the chopping board and the stove, his mind started to churn out reasons to wait until after his court appearance. He told himself that he still had a chance of getting the charges dismissed, and it would be better that she heard about it after that happened. Or maybe they wouldn’t print it in the Morning Call’s court record section for a couple weeks; maybe not at all. These were lies, of course. But this was how his mind worked. It was like some sort of machine minting excuses, one after the other. The true reason he didn’t want to tell her was that he was afraid. Of her anger, yes, but more of her shame. She’d chosen to stay in this godforsaken town to be near him and now his name was once again about to be listed as some sort of criminal.

After lunch they’d washed the dishes together – a little ritual: he rinsed and she dried; the water felt good on his hands – and then they went out to the sun porch for coffee. This would have been the time to tell her what had happened. How he’d had a few beers at Kaz’s after work; how those had combined with the pills he’d taken at lunch to beat back the pain and allow him to grip a pair of pliers. How he’d had the presence of mind to leave the van and walk home from the tavern; how he’d stopped to gather his thoughts on some steps. But the police had made him stand before he was ready. He would never have stumbled if they’d given him a minute. They had overreacted, actually Tasered him for what anyone could have seen was incidental contact. And yet, he still could not bring himself to explain any of this to his daughter, his only child, the one person left who mattered. Even though not telling her yesterday meant there was a good chance that she would hear it from someone else.

As soon as she was on her way back to Mt. Stoneleigh, he took the bottle from the back of the freezer and grabbed a shot glass from the breakfront in the dining room and went back out onto the screened porch. The shot glass was another example of how his mind worked these days. If he only drank smaller portions, if he took only an ounce at a time, then it was not so bad. Even though the bottle wound up just as empty. He could feel the beginnings of the cold night in the air but it was still warm enough with the last of the sun through the slats. He drank one and then he went ahead and downed another. The time for willpower had come with his daughter and it had gone with her as well. Now it was time to forget.

He parked five blocks from the courthouse. There were closer spots but that would have meant feeding a meter. He would give this town nothing, not even nickels. Before leaving the van he punched open the glove compartment with the heel of his hand and rummaged through the Baggies he kept there for emergencies. Now that he faced the prospect of being trapped in court for the better part of the day, he was reconsidering his decision to take no medication. On bad days – and, my God, this counted as one of those – the pain could be more distracting than the medicine. It might be worth a gamble. The Vioxx was best, but you weren’t supposed to take those anymore. Vicodin was a sure thing, but that would make him dopey. He settled on the Skelaxin, little better than fancy aspirin, but it took the edge off. He was just about to dry swallow two of them when he stopped himself. No. This was not right. The voice that was permitting him to do this was the same voice that had stopped him from telling Mary yesterday. He wouldn’t take anything, not even these. He could get through the next few hours on his own. It was only pain. No matter how bad it got, pain held no more surprises for him.

His briefcase felt much heavier than it had back at the house. The ache in his right hand grew unbearable after carrying it for just a block. It soon radiated through his shoulder to his jaw. He moved the case to his left hand, but it was the same story there. He had to stop twice before arriving at the courthouse, putting the bag down and staring at it, like a man waiting for an old dog to piss. Inside the building, there was a long line at the metal detector, a whole family from somewhere south of the border. It was a big production number, nobody speaking the same language, handbags spilling out their contents, loose change going everywhere. The two security guards from Ed Inman’s outfit didn’t seem inclined to move things along. The younger one was clearly a by-the-book type. He searched everything thoroughly, even a beaten-up purse that belonged to an old lady who looked like she’d been dead and planted for years. And this fellow really liked to use that wand. The older guard had clearly semiretired into this job and just wanted to get through another day When it was his turn, Steckl hoisted his case onto the big zinc table, then passed through the detector. Something flinched deep within him when he was within its magnetic thrall, his damaged muscles and nerve endings sensing the electrical field. Remembering.

“What is this?” the younger guard asked, staring into the open case.

“Legal papers,” Steckl answered, his voice hoarse with the first words of the day.

The guard removed a pair of needle-nose pliers from one of the pockets on the lid. In his haste, Steckl had missed them.

“That’s just my gear.”

“Gear? For what?”

“I’m a master electrician.”

“This isn’t the service entrance. You have to go back out and ring—”

“No, I’m not working today.”

“Then, what’s your business here?”

“I’m appearing before the magistrate.”

That settled matters.

“Sir, step out of line, please.”