Light of Day (19 page)

Hopewell rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. “Maybe this guy causes enough mental confusion to drive a boy to suicide, I can't rule it out. I'm sorry to have to do this to you, Dr. Owens, but I've got certain protocol I have to follow, certain procedures. I need you to take a look.”

“You mean right
now
?”

“When you get the chance. Sooner rather than later.” He let out a loud sigh and leaned against the car. “Even if you don't find—This guy might still try to contact your son, so I have to ask you to kind of monitor his e-mail from time to time and let me know if something turns up.” He straightened himself and opened the door.

“Wait a minute. You can't just drive off like this without giving me some kind of assurance. You don't
really
think Danny was getting into chat rooms with a child molester.” Jack thought about the days and nights last May when he wasn't home. What was Danny doing all that time? And he thought about how he'd taught Danny not to talk to strangers and trusted him not to—

“There's nothing I'd like better, Dr. Owens, than to tell you he wasn't involved in this.” Hopewell slid behind the wheel. “All I can tell you is, check his e-mail and keep an eye on it. That's the only way either of us will be sure.”

Jack watched the car pull away and drive down the road. “The son of a bitch.”

Stan was contemplating the bottom of his coffee cup when Jack came around to the back porch. Mutt was rolling in a rain puddle and snapping at his tail.

“Is there a problem?” Stan asked.

“The detective investigating Danny's suicide,” was all Jack said, all he had to say to Stan. “I'll be ready,” he assured him.

Stan put his hand on Jack's arm. “If anything comes up in the meantime, if you need a sounding board or just someone to have a drink with and talk things over—”

“Of course,” Jack said absently.

He'd told his boss that a detective had just come to the house and he was sure Stan wanted to know all about it, he might even think he had the authority to ask, even if it went against his better judgment and high principles—there's always that itch to get under the skin of someone else's life, to lift the lid, to find out, for no other reason than the reassurance that someone is worse off than you, or someone's got it better, or simply because he's concerned. Or maybe Stan was just curious enough to want to dig in the muck of the human condition. But he didn't ask.

 

The moment of panic came as soon as Stan's car pulled away and Jack walked inside the house and up to Danny's room, where it still felt of Danny's presence, or the presence of his absence, the blank space. Any scenario that Jack hadn't played out since the day Hopewell walked into his office played out in his head now with the same breakneck speed and calculation as when the car goes into the spin, the speed of the reflex to stop disaster from happening, the reflex to assure himself that Danny hadn't been pushed to suicide by a pederast he'd met over the Internet, to assure himself Danny would never do that. But there was this too: Jack could always trust the living Danny, the Danny who never broke the rules. But the dead Danny obeyed no rules or else there was no reason to be here and no reason to be afraid. And it was also this: there was something about Danny that Jack didn't know. The something that put the bag over Danny's head and killed him.

The world can turn in on itself just so many times and then there's nothing left to be afraid of. Jack wanted to believe that. He wanted to believe that the worst had already happened, while he sat at Danny's desk facing the computer. He hesitated, like a man facing a strong wind and needing to muster all of his strength to walk the few more steps.

H
e wasn't Jack. He wasn't Dr. Owens, but the creation of Danny's suicide, the creation of Hopewell's suspicions, who had searched through Danny's e-mail. He wasn't the man Danny called Dad, who had sat at the kitchen table one of the mornings during finals when he and Danny managed to have breakfast together, before they made their respective rushes to school—was Danny already planning it? Was there already something in his face that Jack hadn't seen? Could he see it now?

Danny looked tired. He pushed his food around the plate but he wasn't eating. He asked, “Which is more important, Dad, honesty or loyalty?”

“Good question,” Jack answered, and Mutt started barking, the school bus driver honked the horn and Danny grabbed his books and bolted.

But that wasn't the question right now. The question now was about faith and trust because Hopewell had asked
his
questions and those questions put faith and trust in doubt. Jack had thought the worst—he could make a convincing argument that his confidence was a fragile edifice these days like the shacks out by the river, where the air stank of cabbage and diapers and the sweat of despair. He was panicked and trembling as he sat at Danny's desk and looked into Danny's email—he might have been looking into his soul, for that's how it felt—
and if the rules did not apply to the dead Danny, they still applied to the living Danny. The Danny who did not disappoint. If Danny had his own deal, a deal whose end Jack might never guess and might never know, it had not allowed for pederasts and predators. Jack had known that. He'd never had a reason to doubt the living Danny, never before today. The trust and faith were understood. He never made Danny live up to anything he couldn't handle. He'd been careful not to turn into one of those parents looking to catch his kid in a lie, rummaging through dresser drawers in hot pursuit of drugs or pornography or worse.

Now he stared at Danny's computer screen, scrolled through the menus, looked down the columns, cautiously, as though he were tiptoeing into the room of his sleeping child—and would he awaken something much more dangerous than a sleeping child that lived within Danny? But Jack found no correspondences from pederasts. There were no vulgar messages, nothing of insidious intent and crude suggestions. Danny still did not disappoint.

Jack thought: Those rules still apply.

The living Danny had not been subverted by the dead Danny, but Jack had been. He'd been subverted by the last act of the living Danny, which itself was a subversion by the dead Danny.

And the following morning, Jack drove to campus and went to his screening room, as though he might breathe deeply and fill his lungs with all that had been lost, as though the essence of his past were contained, preserved, in the air of this place, who he was with Danny and to Danny, who he was because of Danny, as though Danny himself were alive here and could be inhaled. As though all of Jack, who had sat here as the complete man, could be inhabited again.

The screening room was still a piece of terra firma, where Irwin McCormick waited at the foot of the projection booth stairs and said, “She's all ready for you,” nodding his head with proprietary sureness, for he was attached, anchored, to this same piece of terra firma and had been since the semester Jack was tenured and had him budgeted into the film department, on call to run the projector, serve as all-around handy-man and caretaker, and even carry a sleeping Danny out to the car on more than a few nights when Jack had to work late, the au pair had the
day off and no babysitter was available. “You are one good little Danny,” Irwin always said. “One hell of a little man.”

Today, Irwin didn't mention Danny by name as he gave Jack a thorough looking-over through pale, myopic eyes. His striated face showed neither too little nor too much sympathy, ever mindful of the social amenities he'd learned, the rules of comportment, Gilbert style, which say not to overstep the bounds of someone else's personal sorrow. After all, Irwin was the son of an old-timer, who'd taught him those rules and, along the way, taught him to stay away from coal mining, another rule he obeyed, working twenty years on whatever shift they'd give him at the college's physical plant and now, thanks to Jack, supplementing his pension with a bimonthly check. All he said was, “I know how tough times has been for you, but you're where you belong now,” then hitched his gray overalls over his spare hips, one of them prosthetic and apt to give him trouble, and on which he was careful to put as little weight as possible while he emitted painful grunts and carefully climbed the stairs.

Jack walked down the aisle and took his customary seat in the fifth row. He'd come to the place where there was no doubt he belonged, the place where he existed, not as a memory, not as the ghost rattling his chains. This was his little theater, with the wide screen, two dozen seats and the podium off to the side. The little theater that Irwin kept polished, waxed and shampooed. But all he could do was go through the motions, the motions of being the college professor, he could perform an impersonation of that other man, show up for the fall semester, stand in front of the ten apprehensive faces, wondering if he could give them their tuition's worth. All he could do was wonder if he could act like Dr. Owens when it counted.

But going through the motions can blur the line between the real and the facsimile, blur the line between who you are and who you are expected to be. The facsimile can never be as real as the genuine article. It will be too perfect. And the effort always shows. Although sometimes that's all there is. When there's nothing left of the genuine article, you have to settle for the sorry little man sweating the choreography, fretting the song and dance.

Jack could watch his films and be merely the Dr. Owens of memory,
following the old choreography. He could look around where nothing in this room was unfamiliar and find the terrain beyond recognition. Where he was just another shadow on the screen, all flickers and light. That's what it's like when you aren't who you are.

He had come here to get lost in the dark, to watch films and make his notes and hope that it passed for normalcy, or an imitation of what passed for normalcy. But Jack was thinking about Danny, that he never should have doubted him. While Danny receded further away.

“You all settled in?” Irwin called down.

Jack said he was all settled in and the lights slowly dimmed.

 

When the film was over and the notes were written, when the lights came up and Irwin limped out to get himself lunch, Jack stayed in his little theater. He leaned back in the seat, closed his eyes and rested.

There were afternoons when he had imagined Danny grown up, traveling the world. “You should do some traveling,” Jack used to tell him. “See what other places look like and feel like, see how other people live and what they know and how they think, before making your decisions. You'll have to make them anyway, so why not make them after you've been somewhere and had some fun.” That's what Jack told Danny. “There'll be time,” he promised him.

There was supposed to be time, and Jack would let nothing rush so much as one minute of Danny's life. That was part of the deal. You make the deal, you keep it and hope everything falls into place, or nothing else falls apart. For ten years the deal stuck.

Maybe Danny had his own neurotic tic. That might explain the piano lessons and the concerts and baseball…Why Danny's e-mail came up clean. No, Jack knew better than that, that was just Danny, that came naturally.

 

It was dusk when Jack walked out of the theater, into the timid glow of the gaslights. Long gray shadows stretched across the quadrangle and up the brick sidewalk. Slight indications of activity on campus were apparent, as though an organism were coming back to life, one of those ancient fish that lives on the bottom of the ocean, all nervous system
and impulse, scales like coral and barnacles, asleep all day, waking at night with the sluggishness of Eternity, it sticks out its whiplash tongue and swallows some unsuspecting school of krill, which in this case was time, faculty and the student body.

Windows that had been closed all summer were raised, scattering yellow rectangles of light backward into the recesses of offices and hallways. Out of the twilight, under brick arches, faces appeared. They were to be avoided, sidestepped, dodged down the alley, through the side entrance, up the stairs to the office, where it smelled of musty paper and warm sun stains, where it smelled of summer's idleness. Where Time stood still, like in a diorama at the museum. If he turned on the light, Jack would see himself at his desk and it was early morning, the month was May, and nothing had changed.

 

The following afternoon, Jack was sitting at a booth in Paul's waiting for Marty and reading the morning paper. The headline read:
INTERNET PEDOPHILE PREYS ON GILBERT YOUTH
. It was the story about Lamar Coggin's murder. There was no mention of Danny by name, only an allusion to a suicide being “possibly related.” The piece was mostly about Hopewell and how he had “determined” that Lamar Coggin's death was a homicide committed by “a perverted killer stalking young boys on the Internet.” According to the paper, “Little Lamar is the only known victim so far and Detective Earl Hopewell is close on the trail of the killer.” Hopewell was confident that he would soon make an arrest. The detective was quoted: “Keeping the children of Gilbert safe from these sick predators is my primary concern.” The Coggin family thanked God for bringing Hopewell to them, and were grateful for the detective's efforts to avenge their son's murder. “We know that Lamar is in heaven, looking down on us and feeling grateful, too.”

There was an editorial calling for stricter regulation of the Internet and admonishing parents to monitor their children's Internet activities.

Marty came in and sat down. He pushed the newspaper aside and said unhappily, “I wish you hadn't seen that.”

“Is there anything to it?”

Marty started to answer, but stopped when the waiter came over.
They ordered lunch, and after the waiter walked away Marty said, “It has nothing to do with Danny.” He folded the newspaper and dropped it next to him on the banquette. “Believe me, Jack, Danny is so far out of this. You know that.”

“I'm not sure Hopewell agrees.”

The corners of Marty's mouth sagged.

Jack said, “He wanted me to look through Danny's e-mail and to keep checking it to see—well, to see if he'd been online with that pedophile.” Jack shook his head slowly. “Of course he
wasn't
. I called Hopewell and told him so, but now he wants to look for himself and take the hard drive—there's
no
way I'm going to let him look through Danny's e-mail or anything else of Danny's.”

“He doesn't need your permission.”

“He can just come into my house and invade my son's privacy?”

“If he gets a search warrant.”

“Like hell he can.”

“I wouldn't worry about that happening. He has enough without having to read Danny's e-mail.”

“Enough of what?”

Marty didn't answer. He only looked around uneasily and it made Jack nervous to watch him. It made him wonder what Marty wasn't saying, what he wasn't telling him, and Marty must have known it. He told Jack, “I know I'm only making you think the unthinkable by not telling you everything, but you'll just have to believe me.” A look of unhappiness deepened in his face. “This is Hopewell's case and I have to respect that and how he chooses to go about it. Even if I don't agree with it.” This was said so plaintively that Jack wanted to apologize for asking. He wanted to tell him: “I know that I've been leaning on you all summer. Maybe it's time I backed off and took care of all this on my own now.”

But Marty spoke first. He started to say, “Look, Jack—” paused when the waiter brought over the sandwiches, and then, “I really don't want to make things any worse for you than they already are, but I have to trust—I have to have your word that you're not going to say anything about this to anyone.”

“Anything about
what
?”

“Hopewell's got a suspect.” Marty spoke softly across the table. “He's not ready to make an arrest. An elementary school teacher here in Gilbert. He lives with his two sisters. Really pathetic. Apparently he gets into chat rooms with young boys, gets them to talk dirty with him, in a clumsy, manipulative way, and tries to meet them. My captain sent me over to talk to the boys this guy was online with here in town. Some of these kids are pretty fragile to begin with, and once he gets started on them—it's really twisted. Hopewell's trying to get him airtight on using the Internet to talk to Lamar, then he'll work the homicide.”

“And what about Danny?”

“Danny wasn't murdered. Hopewell knows that and I want you to know that.” Marty looked past Jack. “Hopewell's got his hands full trying to make Lamar's case. The forensics are so iffy that without an eyewitness, a confession or finding Lamar's personal effects on the suspect, he'll have a hell of a time making the homicide stick.”

“You don't sound like that's such a terrible thing.”

Marty took a bite of his sandwich and chewed it slowly. He pushed a few stray crumbs around his plate before he answered. “I don't see anything pointing to this guy being a murderer, if that's what you mean.” His voice was no louder than a whisper. “Not that I doubt Hopewell's ability to scare him so bad he'll admit day's night. But that's not going to catch the killer.” He gave the sandwich a quizzical look, as though he didn't know how it got into his hand. “It doesn't take great police—you can pretty much profile these characters. This guy gets his kicks
talking
about sex to young boys. He's not luring them into the woods and killing them.”