No One You Know (23 page)

“I don’t know how much Peter told you. But he’s done some amazing work in both number theory and topology over the last couple of decades, despite being sequestered away in that little cabin in the jungle. He’s quite intent on living the life of a primitive, though. No computer, it boggles the mind. As I mentioned before, he sends me letters, although it’s a stretch to call them letters. Generally there are a few vague lines of text—he’ll mention the weather, or some improvement he’s made to the house—followed by pages and pages of calculations carried out in longhand. For years I read the letters myself, but after my eyesight began to deteriorate, I started having my secretary type out the letters before I read them. Peter’s handwriting is impossible.”

Carroll gestured to a cardboard box on the floor stuffed with file folders. “There they are, arranged by year. At first I just put them in a drawer, thinking he’d be home soon. Then a year passed, two years, three, and I realized he wasn’t coming back. I know I should find a better place to store them—I’m the only person in the world who has a record of Peter’s work—but I’ve become accustomed to having them close by so I can reach in and pull one out at a moment’s notice. They’re brilliant. This thing is filled with work that could cause quite a stir. I keep trying to persuade Peter to let me submit them for publication, but I think he’s become accustomed to anonymity.”

“When I met him he was very modest,” I said. “He gave no indication that he’d been doing anything worthwhile.”

“He’s a rare breed,” Carroll said. “Even before his career was derailed, it was obvious it wasn’t about the glory or recognition. He simply loved the work.”

“Like Lila,” I said.

Carroll raised an eyebrow. After a slight hesitation, he said, “Certainly, she did enjoy the work. But one mustn’t forget that your sister was quite ambitious.”

I was still stuck on our earlier conversation. “You said McConnell’s wife, Margaret, made threats after she found out about Lila. When was that?”

Carroll paused to think. “To my recollection it was maybe a month before—” He hesitated, as if searching for the most delicate phrasing. “Before your sister’s passing.”

“McConnell said he had told his wife about Lila only days before Lila went missing.”

“He said that?”

“Why would he have lied to me?”

Carroll shifted in his seat and adjusted his watchband. “I can’t speak for Peter. But I can tell you that he was very protective of his family. Whatever Margaret’s faults were, she was a good mother. The most important thing in the world to Peter was his son, and he would do anything to make sure that little boy could stay with his mother. He would willingly take the heat for Margaret.”

“I don’t follow.”

Carroll hesitated. “You must understand, I’m reluctant to say more, because there is no proof whatsoever to support my theory.”

“Your theory?”

“Margaret knew some unsavory characters. Lila was a thorn in Margaret’s side. I have no evidence, mind you, only a gut feeling. And a gut feeling, I’m afraid, is worth very little.”

“I’m sorry. I have to ask you to speak more plainly.”

Carroll crossed his legs again. When he shifted in his chair, the inner collar of his jacket came into view. His name had been sewn into it in red cursive letters. “It would be injudicious of me to spell it out further. Perhaps I’ve already said too much. At any rate, Peter thought my suspicions were baseless.”

“What about Strachman?” I asked. “Why didn’t he tell anyone about Lila and McConnell?”

“Ah yes, Strachman. That was interesting, too. Strachman used his silence as a bargaining tool.”

“For what?”

“Peter and I were collaborating on a paper. Under his own aegis, Strachman would have had no access to me. To be quite honest, I disliked him. He was Peter’s opposite in every way: cagey, humorless, moody. And jealous—personally as well as professionally. I guarantee you, he would have given anything to have been in Peter’s shoes—to have Peter’s natural talent, not to mention Lila’s affection.”

“He had a crush on Lila?”

“Oh, yes. But despite the fact that he would have given his right arm to date her, he was as jealous of her mathematical abilities as he was of Peter’s, probably more so.”

“But he won the Hilbert Prize.”

“Oh, yes, that.” Carroll frowned. “He never would have had a chance were it not for earlier research he’d done with Peter. That work laid the foundations for his paper on the Hodge Conjecture. Every truly original idea that grew out of that collaboration could be attributed to Peter. But it wasn’t in Peter’s nature to make a fuss over it. At any rate, after your sister died and the police came around, Strachman vowed his silence on the condition that he be allowed to coauthor a paper with Peter and me.”

“And you agreed?”

“You must understand, Peter was very dear to me. He still is. I don’t know what it is about him, but he has always brought out my paternal side.”

Suddenly, Carroll smiled and stood, holding out his hand. “It’s been wonderful talking with you, Ellie, but it’s past my curfew. My wife will be wondering about me.”

“Thank you,” I said, shaking his hand.

“Would you like me to call campus security for you? They’ll send someone to walk you to your car. One can’t be too careful—”

“I’ll be fine.”

As I turned to walk out the door, he placed his hand very lightly in the small of my back. It was one of those male gestures that had always made me uncomfortable, simultaneously chivalrous and patronizing—two sides of the same coin.

“I was wondering,” he said, his hand still resting in that intimate place.

I turned and faced him, so that his hand was left hovering in the air. “Yes?”

“Lila—did she ever mention me?”

“She did.”

His shoulders relaxed, and there was the beginning of a smile on his face.

I left it at that. I didn’t tell him that she had only mentioned him in passing, as a brilliant professor with whom she would like to work. Like McConnell, her friendship with Carroll, and her evenings at his house had been a secret she kept hidden from me.

My footsteps echoed in the long hallway. I passed by a door with a small sign that said
Stanford Journal of Mathematics.
A strip of light shone under the door. Was this the room where Strachman had come upon Lila and McConnell, all those years before?

Keys in hand, I walked quickly to my car, which I’d illegally parked in the faculty lot near the building. Someone had stuck a white envelope under the windshield wiper. I removed it—a parking ticket. Apparently, the meter maids didn’t sleep.

Thirty-three

A
FEW DAYS LATER, WHEN
I
PULLED UP
behind Golden Gate Coffee, I spotted Henry’s silver Prius. Dora whistled as I walked in. “Going somewhere special?”

“It was the only thing I had clean,” I said. Maybe the black pencil skirt and knee-high boots were too much. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d worn anything like it to work.

She winked. “Henry’s going to love it.”

In the cupping room, I began preparing the latest samples—an El Salvador yellow bourbon cultivar, a caturra from the Boquete region of Panama, and a peaberry from Costa Rica. I’d just finished pouring the water into the cups when Henry walked in from the roasting room, his face flushed from the heat. He looked different, and it took me a moment to figure out why.

“You got your hair cut,” I said.

He brought his hand self-consciously to his head. “I went to my old place in the Castro, but Dottie wasn’t there anymore. The new woman got carried away with the clippers.”

“It looks good.”

“You always hated it short.”

I smiled. “It’ll grow back.”

He pulled out a chair and turned it around backward before sitting down, legs straddling the back of the chair. It was a habit I’d always found oddly endearing.

“Remember that time you cut my hair?”

“Yes. I thought that would be the end of us. What a way to begin a relationship.”

“Granted, it was not a good haircut,” he said. “Still, the whole point was that you were the first woman I ever trusted to do it.”

I felt my face heating up. It was strange. After two people had been as intimate as we had, for as long as we had, shouldn’t all possibility of embarrassment be removed?

I picked up my heavy spoon and broke the crust on the coffee, glad to have something to do. “It’s too cool,” I said. “I’ll have to start over.”

He said something, and I thought I couldn’t have heard him correctly. “What did you just say?”

“Maybe that’s something we could think about. Me and you. Starting over.”

I put the spoon down. “Are you serious?”

“Why is that such a crazy idea?”

“It’s been three years, Henry.”

“I never stopped thinking about you.”

“After you left, I spent the longest time waiting for you to come to your senses, because I was certain it couldn’t just be over so abruptly. But when you didn’t come back, I realized that I must have loved you so much more than you ever loved me. That was the only explanation that made any sense to me. Now you’re back. I should be furious with you.”

“You never loved me more,” Henry said. “If anything, it was the other way around.”

I shook my head. “If that were the case, you would have tried to make it work.”

“I did try,” Henry said. “How many times did I tell you I couldn’t take another fight? You would agree with me, you’d promise not to get worked up over small things, and everything would be fine for a couple of weeks, a month, and then all of the sudden you’d come from out of nowhere with some grievance, attacking me for something I didn’t even know I’d done.”

“I was like that?”

He sighed. “Yes, you were like that.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m not asking for apologies. If anyone should be apologizing, it’s me. Don’t think I don’t realize what a jerk I was in the end. Honestly, I’d understand if you didn’t even want to talk to me. I’m just reminding you that I tried very hard to make it work. But every time we fought, it made me think you weren’t really serious. The only explanation I could come up with was, for some reason, you wanted to drive me away.”

“I didn’t want that at all.”

For a minute, neither of us said anything. I dipped the spoon into a glass of lukewarm coffee. I scooped the crust off the surface of the first glass, and went down the line until I’d removed the grounds from all nine glasses.

“It was always like this,” he said softly.

“Like what?”

“We’d begin a serious conversation, and as soon as it got uncomfortable, you would start doing something else. Laundry, dishes, coffee, whatever.”

I looked up at him. I knew he was right. For some reason, despite all of my effort, I couldn’t break past a certain level of intimacy, even with Henry.

“You told me something once,” I said. “It was early on. You said that the seed of a relationship’s demise is always apparent, even from the very first moment. You said that if you look closely at the beginning, you will always be able to see the end. At the time it seemed sort of ridiculous. But then, during those last few months together, when we were fighting so much, I started to really think about your comment. And then I traced our entire relationship back to the beginning, all the way back to our first date. I wanted to find that seed, I wanted to discover the clue, the thing that foretold the end.”

“Did you find it?” he asked softly.

“No. Not at all. It wasn’t there. At least it wasn’t there for me. And since then, over the last three years, I’ve wondered whether the sign was there for you. I mean, did you notice something about me on the first date, or the first time we slept together, or hell, I don’t know, the first time we met, that told you how it might all end?”

He fiddled with a spoon on the table. “If I tell you something, promise you won’t take it the wrong way,” he said.

I was still trying to decide whether I really wanted to hear whatever it was he had to say when Mike walked into the room.

“I need you in Nicaragua again in October,” Mike said to me.

“All right.”

Mike looked at Henry, as if he’d just noticed him. “How long since you’ve been down to Central America?”

“A while.”

“You should go, too. Think of it as a welcome-home gift.”

The statement hung there in the room. Mike had never been one for subtlety. When we broke up, he told Henry he was making a mistake he’d regret forever. Several times during the first month after Henry left, Mike had put his arm around my shoulders and said, “He’ll be back.”

“Maybe I will go,” Henry said. Even though I pretended to focus on the cups in front of me, I knew that Henry was looking straight at me, waiting for some kind of signal.

Thirty-four

T
HE SIGN OUT FRONT WAS SHAPED LIKE A
farmhouse—red cursive on a white background,
Boudreaux Family Dairy.
Beside that was another, temporary sign, hand-lettered on a piece of wood:

Welcome to Farm Trails Weekend

Pick Your Own Pumpkin

Dig for Potatoes

Meet Tabitha

Milk a Cow!

Cool Drinks

Fresh Cheese Here

I turned down the lane. The driveway was flanked by pasture on both sides, bright green against the brown hills. An antique plow lay stranded in the grass. A crow was perched on top, cleaning itself in the sun. An ancient-looking horse standing by the fence glanced up lazily as I passed. I thought of the summer afternoon right before Lila sold Dorothy, when we drove out to the stable together and Lila saddled her up for me. “Give her a good kick,” Lila had said with her customary matter-of-factness. “Let her know who’s boss.” But when I did just that, Dorothy had taken off across the field in a wild gallop, while I held on for dear life.

Lila’s horse phase seemed a lifetime ago, almost like something I’d dreamed, but driving down the dusty lane, with the fog tumbling down from the hills and Cat Stevens playing on the radio, it was impossible not to remember Lila in her riding pants, with her black sweater and black boots, ponytail flowing behind her. I couldn’t help wondering how things might have turned out if she hadn’t given up riding. If, instead of devoting herself wholeheartedly to math, she had done as my mother advised and kept this small hobby on the side, this pleasure that had nothing to do with her academic life. I had wondered, more than once, whether it was her ambition that was her undoing. If only she hadn’t been so good at what she did, so singular of vision, surely the order of her days would have been rearranged in some significant way. After all, when it comes to the major events that shape our lives, timing is everything. Maybe Lila’s schedule, altered by a fraction, would not have delivered her into the hands of her killer. And instead of spending my Saturday touring a dairy farm in search of some elusive truth, I’d be jetting across the country to visit her at Princeton or Columbia. Maybe there would be a niece, or a nephew, or both, for whom I would bring presents. Who knows, maybe I would even have a child of my own, a husband, the whole pretty picture.

I tried to imagine what Lila would look like now, at forty-two, but all I could fix in my mind was an unsettling image of one of those age-progression sketches, dark pencil-marks indicating lines around the mouth and along the forehead. I always wondered how the artists went about selecting hairstyles for those sketches, how they settled on the decision to shorten or lengthen the hair, add or subtract bangs.

I glanced up at the rearview mirror and tried to effect Lila’s off-kilter smile, activating the dimple on the right cheek and squinting up the right eye by a fraction; that was the closest I would ever come to knowing how she would have turned out, but I had the feeling it wasn’t close enough. As adults, would we look more alike than we had as children, or less? Probably less.

Worse than not knowing how she would have looked was not knowing the person she would have been. Although Lila had a clear idea of how she wanted her life to turn out, there would have inevitably been some surprises. How she would have reacted to these surprises, and how her reactions would have reverberated down the years, were questions I could never answer. Lila was like an unfinished novel—two hundred pages in, just when you’re really getting into the story, you realize the rest never got written. You’ll never know how the story ended. Instead, you’re left with an abrupt and unsatisfying
non
-end, all the threads of the plot hanging loose.

About a quarter mile down the road, I passed a large shed. A few dozen cattle were lined up inside, facing the driveway, their heads thrust beneath a wooden rail, eating from a long trough. At the end of the driveway, to the right, was a small pumpkin patch, flanked by a row of red wheelbarrows and a couple of Radio Flyer wagons. Half a dozen cars were parked in the pasture. I pulled in next to a silver minivan. A young blonde woman was struggling to get two crying preschool-aged children out of their car seats. “It’s a farm!” she said. “It’ll be fun!”

I got out of my car and walked past the row of wheelbarrows, stepping carefully around patches of animal droppings. A small white dog materialized from behind a bale of corn husks—
Maize Maze!
a sign declared—followed by a young boy with a stick. The dog shot past me, and the boy, panting, stopped and said, “Lady, can you help me catch Rowdy?”

“Okay,” I said, but I was relieved when a short, stocky man emerged from the maze and threatened not to let the boy milk the cow if he didn’t stop torturing the dog. I could travel the world and feel completely at home, but put me on a farm with a few wheelbarrows and pumpkins, and I felt as out of place as if I’d landed in Oz.

The air was infused with the light, oddly pleasant odor of cow dung. A plume of smoke rose from a small shed several hundred yards away. Beyond the pumpkin patch, a table had been set up under a tent. A woman with a green bandana around her neck stood there looking bored.

“Sorry,” she said. “My guys haven’t shown up yet. We’re not doing tractor rides until two.”

“Not a problem,” I said, wondering what it was about me that made her think I was in the market for a tractor ride.

“Want a sample?” she asked, cutting a cube off a wedge of white cheese. “This is our Sonoma Jack. Melt this over a baked potato with a little fresh garlic and you’ll think you’ve found Nirvana.”

I bought some and talked with her about cheese for a couple of minutes before getting around to the question I really wanted to ask. “Is Billy Boudreaux around, by any chance?”

“There’s no one here by that name. Maybe you’re looking for Frank.”

“Frank?”

“The owner. He’s around here somewhere.” She pointed across the driveway, where half a dozen hay bales surrounded a big brown cow. “He’ll be doing a milking demonstration right over there in about fifteen minutes.”

“Thanks,” I said. I took off across the pumpkin patch, past a sign that said
Sugar Pie.
As I was crossing the road I saw that the field in front of me was made up of long rows of dry-looking dirt. I thought of the potato patch Lila had shown me that day, forever ago, when I visited Dorothy with her for the last time. I had a pit-of-my-stomach feeling, a shivery sort of reaction that caused me to turn slowly in my tracks, toward the house rising up at the end of the driveway. I’d hardly noticed it at first, obscured as it was by a row of fir trees almost as tall as the house, but by looking between the trees now I could see the wraparound porch and dormer windows, the ramshackle additions on the west-facing side of the house.

I had been here before.

I
T WAS AN INSTINCT, MORE SO THAN A FULLY
formed idea, that pulled me across the pasture to the old horse. When I was within ten feet of the animal, she lifted her head and regarded me.

I was sideways to her, something Lila had taught me. “A horse’s vision is peripheral,” she had said. “If you approach them straight on, they get spooked. And don’t look them in the eye right away—that’s what predators do.”

“Hi, girl,” I called out, proceeding very slowly. The horse stomped and swished her tail. As I drew closer, she took a few steps away. I stopped and stood still for a minute. Finally, I held out my arm, wishing I had an apple or carrot to offer.

The horse was old and swaybacked, graying, with protruding teeth, rheumy eyes, and a white stripe down her face. I stepped closer, and this time she didn’t back away. Soon I was close enough to feel her warm, moist breath on my arm. I patted her very gently on the jaw; she snorted and blinked.

“Hey there,” I said in a quiet voice.

She stomped weakly and swished her tail again. A fly landed on her left eye. She blinked, but the fly remained there. I shooed it away and began petting her flank. She inched closer. Her fur was thick and shiny, and when I touched it, to my surprise, I didn’t experience the same revulsion I’d felt as a young girl whenever I touched a horse. She had that distinctive horse smell—dirt and oats and sun.

A horse is just a horse, I told myself. Don’t all horses, to a layperson, look the same?

“How old are you?” I said.

I heard footsteps behind me, and turned to see a man in jeans and a plaid flannel shirt walking toward me from the direction of the barn, carrying a small bucket. “Thirty-one,” he said. “She’s old but tough.” He came around on the other side of her and ran his hand along her back. “Just like me, huh, old girl?” he said, hugging her around the neck. He looked at me and said, “We’re getting all our old-age symptoms at the same time—arthritis, failing eyesight, stiff legs, the works. My wife tells me that pretty soon she’s going to have to put me out to pasture, too.” He reached into the bucket and pulled out a turnip, which he cut into small pieces with a pocketknife before offering it to her on the flat of his hand. She nibbled it slowly.

“You must be here for Farm Trails weekend,” he said. “We’re a lot busier than usual this year. Must be a slow day in the city.”

“This is your farm?” I asked.

“Mine and my wife’s. As of 1983. Back when we bought it they only had a few cattle—it was an apple farm in those days—but we expanded over the years, and in 1998 we turned it into a fully organic operation. Now we have nine hundred cattle. Still small as dairy farms go, but more than big enough to keep us busy. I’m Frank Boudreaux,” he said, offering me his hand.

“Ellie.”

His handshake was firm but not too forceful, and I could feel the thick calluses where his fingers met his palm.

“It’s a beautiful piece of land,” I said.

“We think so.” He patted the horse, who nuzzled her head against his shoulder. He pulled out a couple of blackberries, and she took them from his hand. “When my wife and I bought the farm, we just thought of it as a way to go off the grid, make ends meet, and have a better quality of life. We never dreamed of all this.” He tended to the horse while he talked, checking her ears, dabbing her eyes with a damp cloth. Finally, he dumped the remaining turnips on the ground in front of her and said, “I’m about to milk Tabitha. That’s pretty much the day’s main attraction, if you want to join us.”

I couldn’t figure out how to tell him why I was really there. Instead I just smiled and said, “Wouldn’t miss it.” I patted the horse’s flank and ventured a question, unsure if I was ready for the answer. “What’s her name?”

“Dorothy. I’m surprised she didn’t run away from you. She doesn’t usually take too well to strangers.” Frank glanced over at me. “Hey, are you all right?”

“We’re not strangers,” I managed to say.

“Come again?”

“Dorothy and I go way back. I knew her before she came out here, back when she was being stabled in Montara.”

He did a double take then, studying my face. “What did you say your name is?”

“Ellie.”

“Enderlin?” he asked.

I nodded.

He looked at the ground. For a few seconds neither one of us spoke. Finally he looked up. “You’re not here to milk the cow, are you?”

“No.”

What he said next completely took me off guard. “I think I always knew you’d show up one of these days. In a way, I suppose I’ve been waiting for you.”

“You have?”

“Yeah. I’m glad you’re here. I want to talk to you.” He looked up the hill, flustered. “Unfortunately, I’ve got all these kids over there, waiting for me to put on a show. Why don’t you stick around? This afternoon, after everyone is gone, we can sit down and talk.”

“Okay,” I said. I was beginning to feel a bit dizzy, like everything was happening too fast. I didn’t know what to make of this man, this place. Part of me wanted all the answers. Another part of me, I realized, wasn’t prepared for this.

For the next few hours, time took on a hazy, unreal quality. I sat on a hay bale in the circle of children while Frank showed us how to milk Tabitha. The children had a go, one by one, followed by their reluctant parents, and then it was my turn to sit on the little metal stool. I’d never milked a cow before, and it was nothing like I thought it would be. The teat looked like a finger, or a flaccid penis. When I squeezed and pulled, squirting the milk into a plastic cup, Tabitha lifted her tail and released a large, wet dollop of shit. This delighted the children, one of whom promptly declared it “grosser than gross.” I declined to drink the milk, even though everyone else had drunk theirs.

“Drink it!” someone yelled. It was the little boy who had been chasing the dog, Rowdy. Then the other kids joined in, until they were all chanting, “Drink it! Drink it!” So I did. It was warm and weirdly sweet, and it was an effort to get it down.