Blue Diary (6 page)

Jay can't even be depended upon to come and pick up the last of his belongings, which was supposed to have been done this evening. Charlotte had hoped they might have one final dinner together to celebrate the end of their fruitless union. It's true, every now and then she wonders if his passion for her could ever be reignited, about as likely a possibility as a bear knocking at her front door and asking directions to Hamilton. When Jay doesn't show up, Charlotte takes her bath, and afterward phones in an order to the Pizza Barn. By now, she doesn't have to give her address. The counterman knows who she is: he even asks if she wants extra cheese, per her usual. When the delivery boy, Brendan Derry. arrives, Charlotte tips him twenty dollars. She does it not to spite Jay. who is notoriously cheap, but to see the grin on Brendan's face. How lovely that someone can feel joy over such a little thing. How wonderful to know there are still some people in this world who can manage to be happy.

Charlotte eats pizza out of the box on the floor of her bedroom. Because of the size of the house, she likes to cocoon in the one room where she feels most comfortable, and so she's there, munching on crusts and going over some paperwork, when she happens to glance up at the eleven o'clock news, thereby learning that her best friend's husband has been arrested for murder that very morning, in the doorway of his own house. Charlotte's initial reaction to the news is helped along by the slices of pizza she has consumed, far too many, as well as the hour, far too late for someone who wakes at five A.M. But perhaps what makes Charlotte ill is the mere idea that on a perfectly ordinary night, as June bugs hit against the window screens and the whole world smells of honeysuckle, there is no protection from disaster.

Whatever the cause, Charlotte goes into the bathroom; she holds back her red hair and vomits, then washes her face with cool water. When she returns to the bedroom, she searches her closet for a crumpled pack of cigarettes she keeps for occasions such as this. Quickly, she lights up, then grabs the phone and dials Jorie, whose number she knows so well she could recite it in the depths of her sleep. The TV is still on, filling the bedroom with wavering light. It's turned on in houses all over town, as well, illuminating living rooms and bedrooms in the old section of town and up here in Hillerest. Even those residents who usually go to bed early stay up late on this strange and singular night; they wake their husbands or wives and say,
Look at this,
mostly because they find themselves doubting their own vision, obscured by the snaky blue images on their TVs, wondering if their sight is failing.

But what they see on their screens is real, there's no denying that fact. It's a portrait of Ethan Ford in an old photograph, when he was a good fifteen years younger, a likeness that glides through the air, circulating past apple trees and telephone wires, drifting through town like a fine rain over people's rooftops. This handsome and familiar man, boyish but still recognizable, startles people as they walk to the bathroom to brush their teeth and makes them forget the simplest of tasks. Cats are not put out for the evening, sleeping children are not checked upon, husbands and wives are not kissed good night.

Residents of Monroe are stunned by the possibility of something amiss. This is a safe village, far from the crime of Boston, and yet tonight many will lock their doors, some for the first time in years. They'll use bolts they had previously judged to be pointless and make certain to secure their windows in spite of the fine weather. Not that everyone in town believes what they see on the news. Warren Peck's father, Raymond, who helps his son out at the Safehouse Bar every now and then, and whose wife Margaret's heart attack might have been fatal had Ethan not been so quick to arrive on the scene, applauded when Warren threw a pitcher at the TV perched above the bar during the news broadcast, so outraged were they by what were obviously bald-faced lies. Neither old Raymond nor Warren took the time to think about how the TV screen would splinter, however, smashed into thousands of shards, leaving customers to find slivers of glass in every bowl of peanuts and cashews set out during happy hour the following week.

Charlotte lets the phone go on ringing even when it becomes clear that Jorie isnt going to answer. She sits on the floor next to her bed, smoking one cigarette and then another, thinking about the last time both couples had gone out together, to DiGorina's Restaurant in Hamilton. Ethan and Jorie couldn't seem to stay away from each other that night. Their behavior was nothing unexpected for people in love a few kisses, hands on each other's legs, whispered jokes no one else was privy to but sitting there with Jay didn't make their display any easier for Charlotte. She remembers thinking how unfair it was for Jorie to have wound up with everything. They'd both had hopes, hadn't they? They'd both deserved happiness, and yet their fates hadn't been measured out in even amounts. Charlotte recalls exactly how sharp her envy had felt that night, little pinpricks that caused her great pain.

When her own phone rings. she grabs for it. hoping Jorie is calling. To her surprise, it's Jay. He apologizes for not showing up, but then he was always good at excuses.

“I caught the news over at the Safehouse,” Jay tells her. “What a bunch of bullshit.”

“It's all a mistake.”

“They've got the wrong man.”

For once, they agree on something. It's quite a shock to both of them, and they laugh.

“Too bad we couldn't have a conversation when we were married,” Jay says.

Charlotte can hear the crowd at the Safehouse. She can close her eyes and visualize Jay standing at the phone beyond the bar, his head bent close so he can hear.

“You were never around when we were married.” Charlotte reminds him.

“That does make it difficult,” Jay concedes. “How's Jorie?”

“Not picking up the phone.”

“Poor kid.” Jay has always had a soft spot for Jorie. I
don't see
her
complaining,
he'd said to Charlotte on more than one occasion and Charlotte had always fought the urge to spit back
Of course you don't. She's got nothing to complain about.

Charlotte lights up another cigarette and inhales.

“Are you smoking?” Jay asks.

“Do you care?” Big mistake. Never ask a question you don't want an answer to. And never tell bad news to someone who's already walked away. She had mentioned her doctor's appointment to Jay the last time he came by to pick up a suitcase full of clothes, but he clearly doesn't remember, and why should she expect him to? They have been little more than roommates for quite some time.

“My life's my own business, right?” Charlotte says. “If I want to smoke, I can puff away.”

“That's right, honey,” Jay says, and for a moment Charlotte isn't sure whether he's speaking to her or to some other woman at the Safehouse, some lovesick paramour, perhaps, who doesn't know any better than to wait around for a man like Jay.

Charlotte laughs at herself and whoever else is foolish enough to respond to Jay's charms. “I pity whoever falls in love with you.”

“So do I,” Jay says cheerfully before he hangs up.

Charlotte pulls on a pair of jeans and a tee-shirt and takes her cigarettes from the night table. She goes downstairs, through the darkened hall, then into the kitchen, which Ethan remodeled two years earlier. He'd done a great job, installing granite countertops. along with cherrywood cabinets that open without a sound, and a floor fashioned from terra cotta tiles. The truth of it is, there were days when Charlotte had rushed to get dressed in order to hurry downstairs in the pale morning light and drink a cup of coffee with Ethan before she went off to work. Listening to the birds who were waking in the trees, standing so close to him, she was afraid he would hear her heart pounding. Throughout the day her thoughts would return to him, and she couldn't put aside the way she felt when she brought him to mind, a mixture of deep pleasure and guilt.

As for Ethan, he never seemed to notice her attraction to him. He treated her as though she were his wife's best friend, which, of course, was exactly what she was. In a way, she'd been relieved when he'd finished with the job, and she'd never bothered to call him back when it turned out the sink had been installed incorrectly, phoning Mark Derry, the plumber, directly to ask if he'd stop by and make the repairs. She hadn't wanted to see Ethan in her kitchen again or feel her pulse quicken when he was close by and from then on she avoided him. Maybe she'd been afraid of what irretrievable thing she might say or do, distrusting her own uncultivated desires as if they were a flock of wild birds let loose, the sort you could never catch once they'd been freed, not if you chased them to the farthest corners of the Commonwealth.

Tonight as she locks her house before heading over to Jories, Charlotte thinks about the brittle wedge of resentment she'd felt earlier when Jorie hadn't shown up at the bakery. She had planned to tell Jorie about the lump that she'd found, for she'd needed an optimist's embrace, and Jorie always managed to see the best in every situation. Now Charlotte understands why Jorie never arrived. She'd been down at the county offices, on King George's Road, caught up in the turmoil of something gone so haywire, no one in the town of Monroe ever would have imagined the way her day would begin and how it would end.

The newscaster had said Ethan was being detained in regard to a murder that had taken place fifteen years earlier, not that Ethan Ford was his true name. It was nothing more than an identity he'd purchased for two hundred dollars. The real Ethan Ford, the one whose social security number this man had been using ever since his arrival in New England, had died in his crib thirty-nine years ago on a summer night in Maryland; he had not lived past his first birthday. Now, as the evening cools down, Charlotte walks out of her house and across the lawn beneath a ceiling of stars and confusion. If she believes what has been reported tonight, then perhaps anything is possible. She might turn onto Front Street and fall headlong into the ether. She might take a single step and find there are constellations swirling beneath her feet as well as up above, in the black and endless sky.

Usually, most houses were dark at this hour, but tonight people in Monroe were staying up late; even those who believed in early to bed and early to rise were drinking coffee and trying their best to puzzle things out. They're caught up in something they've always believed couldn't happen anywhere close by, not in Monroe, where there are only eight men on the police force and no one frets when children play outside after dusk. Those who knew Ethan Ford best of all—his friend Mark Derry, for instance, or the lawyer Barney Stark, who's been his fellow coach at Little League for the past six years, or the valiant members of the volunteer fire department. who have time after time entrusted their lives to him—feel as though they'd been hit hard, right in the stomach, so that it is now impossible for these men to draw a breath without pain.

Barney Stark assumes he'll step in as Ethan's attorney, just as he had two years ago, when the Jeffrieses over on Sherwood Street sued Ethan after their house burned down. True enough, Ethan had refinished their basement and, therefore, the Jeffrieses had been quick to blame the blaze on the insulation he'd installed. That Ethan had helped to extinguish the Jeffrieses' fire, putting his own life at risk, meant nothing to Roger Jeffries and his wife. Dawn. They were days away from a court date when the insurance company found that the fire had started in the Jeffrieses' teenaged son's bedroom. The case was dropped when the boy himself, a gawky, shy sixteen-year-old, finally admitted he had fallen asleep while smoking in bed.

Like everyone else close to the Fords, Barney hasn't had any luck reaching Jorie. The wires have been jammed since the news-cast, with Jorie's sister, Anne, setting her phone on automatic redial. But after a while, even single-minded Anne realizes that Jorie has decided not to answer, and figures it's best to wait until morning. Barney, however, does not yield so easily He's a worrier, a good and thorough man, the sort of individual who gets in his car and drives over to the Fords', just to make certain he isn't needed. Lights have been left on inside the house, but the curtains are drawn, and no one answers when Barney knocks at the door. He smells something he doesn't recognize. Noneysuckle, perhaps. A sweet summer night. From what he can gather from the news-cast, there is some evidence that connects Ethan to a murder in Maryland—he was in the town where it happened and abandoned his truck there, a vehicle that recently had been pulled out of the sludge when a local swimming hole was drained—but this is circumstantial evidence, the sort of half-truth that gets innocent men sent away for crimes they would hardly be able to imagine, let alone commit.

“Hello,” Barney hollers to the shuttered house. “Anyone home?”

One yard away, the younger of the Williams sisters sits on the porch, not fifteen feet from the spot where her father killed himself last July. Kat Williams watches Barney with narrowed eyes, arms encircling her knobby knees.

“Do you know if anybody's home?” Barney waves to make sure he's made contact, because you never can tell with Kat Williams. She's the kind of child who makes Barney nervous, a wild card you can never trust to act like a child, alternately older and younger than her age. Thankfully, Barney's own daughters are calm, predictable girls, although he's none too thrilled that his eldest girl, Kelly, is friendly with Kat's sister, who has a reputation for her rude behavior as well as her beauty. Sorry to say, but when it comes to Rosarie Williams, Barney can see nothing but trouble ahead. “No one's answering when I knock.” Barney calls to the girl who's watching him.