No Book but the World: A Novel (29 page)

Mr. Charles raises a hand and closes his eyes, stopping me from going on. When I fall silent, he turns to the next sheet in his folder. This, it seems, is development number two.

According to the police report, the boy’s discarded clothes—coat, hat, scarf, gloves, sweater, shirt, pants and one sock—were not found in a single heap, as one might expect, he says, if they had been forcibly removed and tossed aside. Instead they were found spread out, as if they’d been discarded an item at a time, to form a kind of trail.

“Like bread crumbs,” I breathe.

Dennis looks at me curiously.

“In a manner,” Mr. Charles continues, “not inconsistent with a poorly understood symptom of hypothermia.” It seems that in twenty to fifty percent of hypothermal deaths, the victim may engage in a behavior known as—here he pauses to refer to the document before him, running an index finger methodically across the paper until he finds it—“‘paradoxical undressing.’” Apparently hypothermia can lead to vasodilation, a surge of blood to the extremities, which makes people experience a surge of heat that can lead them to shed their garments. “Although not rare among victims of hypothermia,” Mr. Charles reads aloud, slowing down now for effect, “the behavior is frequently misunderstood by law enforcement officials, who may mistakenly interpret it as an indication of sexual assault.”

Now I cannot speak for fear of sobbing; in fact I have half covered my face with one hand (Dennis has the other and is squeezing it hard), so it is Dennis who asks, after a beat, “You said there were three developments?”

And now Bayard Charles grins, there is no other word for it, and he settles a hand on top of the great, bald dome of his head in a gesture that seems linked to his own elation, as though he must work to keep himself from springing out of his chair. “So I’m reading over the case, my own notes, the report of the state’s medical examiner, the report of
our
medical expert, the police reports, the newspaper articles, what have you, and I come across this.” He slides a piece of paper across the desk. Dennis holds it so we can both see it. Across the top it says
PERDU, NY POLICE DEPARTMENT INCIDENT SUPPLEMENT REPORT
. I skim what seems to be a collection of statements by witnesses who saw James Ferebee in a truck near his middle school on the afternoon of his disappearance. A few lines have been highlighted in yellow about halfway down the page:
Christine Davilla, 51, resident 903 Wynett Ave. Apt. 2, reports seeing victim driving white Toyota pickup approximately 1500 hrs headed west on Bridge Street
.

“Yes . . . ?” I look up, uncertain.

“Notice anything off?”

I don’t. I’m trying to recalibrate the military time—is there a discrepancy around when he was last seen?

Dennis ventures a guess to do with direction. “I think on the map it looked like the state forest was north of Perdu?”

But we are both on the wrong track.

“Driving.”
Mr. Charles claps his hands once. “Says she saw the victim driving.”

We both look again at the page.

“Now, it could be a typo. Clerical error on the part of the officer who took her statement. Or the witness herself misspoke. Except”—he pauses for a fraction of a second, demonstrably pleased; I can practically see him licking the cream from his whiskers—“I called Mrs. Christine Davilla this morning, asked if she wouldn’t mind clarifying the statement she gave the police. Says no, not at all, she’d be glad to. And she goes on to repeat her statement, exact same way. Says the boy was driving the vehicle, she’s one hundred percent certain he was in the driver’s seat with the vehicle in motion. Says he was laughing.”

“But how? He was only twelve.”

“Ayuh. It’s not uncommon for kids here to drive young, sometimes, if they’re on the family property, kids as young as thirteen, fourteen. Families with farms, that sort of thing. Can’t get your license till sixteen, but no one’ll generally bother you about it if you’re driving a tractor or a snowplow on family property.”

“Did the Ferebees have a farm?” Dennis asks confusedly.

“Nope. But they have a lot of land. Auto salvage yard right next to the house. They’d get junkers in all the time that still ran. Apparently Ferebee used to let his own kids drive ’em around the lot, had ’em all learn to drive that way. Not such a stretch to think he’d let his grandkid do the same.”

“At the memorial service,” I remember, “they said something about it. That Jimmy loved cars, loved driving.”

Mr. Charles spreads his hands as if to say,
There you are
, and sits back, his leather chair creaking. Behind him, outside the narrow window, snow tumbles fast and glittering under a pink cone of light.

“So the ramifications?” Dennis is working to make sense of the big picture. “On the case, I mean, if Fred wasn’t the driver?”

Mr. Charles sticks a thumb in the air. “It gets rid of unauthorized use of a vehicle right off the bat.” He sticks out his pointer, then his middle finger. “Puts serious holes in kidnapping and unlawful imprisonment, too. Realistically, those’d have to be dropped. Can’t prove abduction if the boy was driving himself of his own free will. The witness says she’s certain about the laughing, that he had the window open, the radio on. Most they could do now is place the accused in the vicinity of the boy. But when you combine testimony that has the boy driving himself to Meurtriere with the medical expert’s testimony, what you’re looking at is a volitional runaway.”

“So that leaves us . . . ?”

The lawyer leans forward and levels his gaze at us both. “I hate, I mean I hate, to raise false hopes. Not my policy. Told your wife the first time I met her I don’t believing in sugarcoating. But.” He draws a long breath through his nose. “We could be looking at a full dismissal.”

Something escapes me, a little broken peal of sound, equal parts laughter and moan of relief. Then, afraid I am letting myself get too happy too soon, I frown at the police report Dennis is still gripping. “But weren’t there other witnesses”—I am trying to be a careful citizen now, to ward off disappointment by preferring caution and forethought to eager belief—“didn’t other witnesses say they saw James Ferebee in the passenger seat?”

“Funny thing,” says Mr. Charles. “Three other people gave statements putting him in the truck. Not one mentions seeing him in the passenger seat.” He rubs a hand over his face. “Something I’ve learned, Mrs. Manseau. All my years of practice. We see what we expect to see. Human nature. We fit what facts we have to the story we’ve been conditioned to believe.”

•   •   •

H
ERE IS MY FINAL CONFESSION.

I make it with a heavy heart, coming as it does in the wake of Fred’s death.

We never did learn whether, in light of the new information Bayard Charles managed to unearth, the district attorney would have dropped all charges. I do know that Mr. Charles—with whom Dennis and I have remained in sporadic contact, speaking on the phone a couple of times last winter to tie up loose ends, exchanging New Year’s cards just this past month, with brief handwritten messages of greeting—remains staunch in his belief that if the case had gone to trial, the jury would’ve acquitted.

A year has passed since the evening we left Bayard Charles’s office full of unexpected hope. Dennis and I sort of staggered out onto the sidewalk with a kind of dazed buoyancy. We didn’t know where to go next, what to do, how to feel. For a while we just walked, saying little, strolling through the Criterion town green in the confetti of the snowfall. We were well-bundled, and after the close air of the law offices, the cold night air felt good. It was strange not being able to share the heartening news with Fred right away, but we’d come to Perdu knowing the rules: we would not be permitted into the jail for visiting hours until Thursday. This was Tuesday.

Before we said goodbye, Mr. Charles promised he would go see Fred himself first thing in the morning, so at least we knew Fred would receive encouragement at the earliest possible occasion.

In the meantime, Dennis and I found ourselves unexpectedly on holiday—alone in a pretty, snow-coated world far from home with no obligations, nothing to do, the burden that had been weighing on us the past few months greatly dissipated. It had been a long time since we’d found ourselves on vacation of any kind, and that night in Criterion, crisscrossing with welcome aimlessness the paths that traversed the green, high above which had been strung holiday lights in all different colors, turning the tumbling-down flakes gold and green and pink and blue, we were beset by an unexpected sense of festivity.

We went to an Italian restaurant off the green, where more strings of colored lights festooned the windows, and the menus were printed on the paper place mats. We ordered pasta and champagne. “I don’t think we have that,” balked the teenaged waiter, almost as if we’d given offense, but he checked with the manager, who himself delivered the bottle to the table, himself very decorously popped the cork.

Dennis drove us back to Mrs. Tremblay’s over the winding mountain roads, taking the turns with slow grace, shifting into low gear for the steepest climbs. I told him again my story of skidding into a ditch in the rain, and being helped by the man who turned out to be Mrs. Tremblay’s nephew. Dennis told me again, “I’m glad you were okay,” just like that, with the brevity and heartfelt simplicity that has at times left me lonely and frustrated, because isn’t there more to it, shouldn’t there be more delicate layers of tissue to tease apart and examine at length? But that night I liked his answer. It struck me that his answer likely came from the same place as Mrs. Tremblay’s nephew’s decision to stop and help me that day. I laid my mittened hand on my husband’s leg and leaned my head back against the rest. I was aware of feeling confident that he would deliver us safely to the guesthouse, aware of being grateful for this confidence.

We spent the night exultantly under the mauve-and-blue bedspread. We kept the curtains open, and at some point the snow stopped and the moon came out. I rose and went to the window. We’d been sweating under the covers but the room air was frigid. Dennis came to the window behind me and wrapped his arms around my middle and we stood together, our hot skin rapidly turning cold, neither of us minding. We fit together, limb to limb, crown to chin, belly to back, and took in the shapes the moonlight mapped across the landscape: the white-iced pines, the slippery road, the mountains like torn paper pasted on the sky.

After a while I whispered, “It’s awful, Den, isn’t it?”

“What?” he asked, his mouth in my hair.

“The boy. Jimmy.”

“Yes.”

“To think how he lived.”

“Yes.”

“And died.”

“Yes.”

Across the road ran a barbed-wire fence: five rows of wire strung between vertical wooden posts. Each length of wire was encased in its own sheath of ice. The barbs were encased, too, each one a little frozen star caught on the staff. I thought of June then, teaching me to read music, and of Freddy naming the cows when he was five, and Neel saying
They don’t say moo
, and I missed them all.

It was Bayard Charles who informed us. The phone rang early in the morning while we were still in bed. When we came down for breakfast, Mrs. Tremblay had already laid our places, put out a rack holding two pieces of raisin toast and poured our tiny glasses of grapefruit juice, but before we sat she said, “A Mr. Charles would like you to call,” and she handed me the piece of paper on which she’d written the number. I started back upstairs for the hall phone, but she indicated I could use the one there in the kitchen. Then she took off her apron and folded it over the back of a chair and excused herself from the room.

Fred strangled himself with his prison pants, got them wet in the sink and twisted them into lengths thin enough to knot one end around a heating pipe and the other around his neck.

When Mr. Charles finished telling me, or when I had finished listening to what I could take in, I handed Dennis the phone and walked out the front door and crossed the street and grabbed onto the fence and brought my forehead down on the uppermost, ice-encased wire. I didn’t know what I was doing or what I hoped might happen, except I wanted to feel something strong enough to interrupt the terrible current that had seized me through the phone line back in Mrs. Tremblay’s kitchen. But this fence was not electric. I fell to my knees beside it, then lay on my back in the snow under the white empty sky until Dennis came with my coat.

Later, when Kitty heard what had happened, she said, “Why do they even bother taking away their belts and shoelaces if they can just use pants?” which is so exactly like Kitty I didn’t know what to say.

Tariq said we might be able to sue.

Don and Meg sent sunflowers, a lot of them, and later, when Dennis told them he was scared and didn’t know what to do, Meg took the train to Freyburg and stayed with us for more than a week until I’d gained back a few pounds and was bathing again and getting dressed again each day.

Even now, a year later, whenever I think of the industry and ingenuity Fred’s act must have required, I am demolished anew.

I never thought my brother capable of such despair. Or of such resourcefulness.

I spent my life thinking of Fred as unreachable, but there is nothing so unreachable as dead. Only when the possibility of ever learning his account of all that had happened was extinguished did I realize how much I had been counting on it, holding out hope for it still. He would tell me. I believed this. In time, he would trust, speak, explain. Because I am Ava. His sister. His. I don’t know whether to call that vanity or love, but until Bayard Charles’s early-morning call, I’d had faith I would eventually hear Fred’s version. He would convey it to me in his Fredly way, and I would translate for the rest of the world. I would help others make sense of him, reach him. I would help him be reached.

For why are we here if not to try to fathom one another? Not through facts alone, but with the full extent of our imaginations. And what are stories if not tools for imagining?

Here then is my final confession: I have written this entire account. Every word of it is mine.