Raveling (44 page)

“Whose decision is it?”

“It has to go up the chain of command.” The detective smiled, pointing to the ceiling. “But,” he said, “I’ll send it over
to the lab and ask them what they can figure out about it.”

“There’s more coming,” Katherine said. She realized that this was just teasing him, but she wanted to be taken seriously.

“What’s that?”

“Pilot says there’s more.”

“More?”

“More evidence. He claims to have the shoe that goes with the shoelace, and also, he says, a bloody knife.”

“A bloody knife?” Vettorello laughed. “Now we’re talking.”

“But Pilot is, he’s away right now, visiting his father, and I have no way of finding these things without him.”

“So,” Vettorello said, “right now we’ll just see what we can find out about this shoelace.”

Katherine worried that Vettorello’s good-natured smile was designed to humor her—the way Dr. Lennox smiled at everyone, vague
and deceitful—but she smiled back. “I have to get to work.”

“I’m sure you do,” Vettorello said, his chair squeaking loudly. “A lot of crazies out there.”

I sat in my father’s living room and watched old movies with Patricia, dutifully taking my medication as indicated. She’d
bring me a glass of orange juice, in fact, whenever it was time, a nervous smile on her face. I tried to imagine her with
children, but I couldn’t. She was someone’s girlfriend. Even at forty-five or however old she was, Patricia had the look of
a girl you take to a restaurant, the one who will go home with you, not the one you go home to. “Thank you,” I said, taking
the glass of juice and reaching across the coffee table for the plastic amber bottle with the child-resistant cap. Her face
asked me how I was feeling. But I turned to the television, not answering.

Outside, there were palm trees, long fronds drooping over the warm Florida winter.

Later, Katherine dialed the listing she had found in the white pages for Jerome and Carla Cleveland. It rang for a few moments,
and just as she was about to hang up, an older woman’s voice came on the line and said brightly, “Carla speaking.”

“Hello,” Katherine said, almost startled. “May I speak to Jerome Cleveland, please?”

“May I ask who’s calling?”

“My name is Katherine DeQuincey-Joy.”

“One minute, please, Miss Joy,” the woman said pleasantly. Katherine heard her put the telephone down and then the words,
“It’s your mistress.”

Now a man’s voice came on the line. “Hello.”

“Detective Cleveland?”

“Used to be Detective,” he laughed. “Now I’m just Jerry.”

“My name is Katherine DeQuincey-Joy,” Katherine said. “I’m, uh, I’m—”

“We really can’t buy anything, Miss Joy, I’m sorry—”

“Oh, I’m not trying to sell anything.” Katherine laughed. “I’m a psychologist.”

“A psychologist? It’s a psychologist.”

“Yes,” Katherine said, “and I wanted to ask you about a case, one you had a long time ago.”

“A case? Oh, I’m completely retired from police work—”

“I know,” Katherine said. “That’s what they told me at the station, but I have a patient who, it turns out, has been withholding
evidence for over twenty years, evidence you should have had, and I thought you might like to know about it.”

Katherine heard a long, sad sigh. “What case was it?”

“There was a little girl named Fiona Airie. She was abducted. Do you—”

Jerry Cleveland cleared his throat. “Oh, yes,” he said. “I remember her very well.”

“Do you remember the details of the case, sir?”

“Yes,” he said, “yes I do.”

“My patient is Pilot Airie,” Katherine said. “Fiona’s brother. Do you remember that he found one of her sneakers in the woods?”

“The sneaker, I remember. The boy found the sneaker in the woods.”

“And no one could recover the other one.”

“Never found it, no.”

Katherine turned to the window. There they were, the treetops rustling in the fall breeze. “Pilot claims to have the other
sneaker.”

“Says he’s got the other one?”

“And a knife,” Katherine said. “A bloody knife.”

“That kind of evidence would have made all the difference back then,” Cleveland said laughing. “All the difference.”

“I was wondering if I could meet with you,” Katherine said, “talk about the case. My patient is, is a very troubled person.
He had a psychotic episode recently, and a lot of his thoughts are very, well, they’re disorganized.”

“I can imagine.”

Just at that moment, Dr. Lennox popped his head in Katherine’s door. “Kate,” he said smiling, “I have some possible answers
to your question from yesterday,” he said. “You got a minute?”

Katherine held her finger up to Greg Lennox the same way the receptionist at the police station had done to her this morning.
“Can I speak to you later, Jerry?” Katherine said into the phone. “I have a visitor right now.”

“Why don’t you meet me at my office?” Cleveland said. “Come by five-fourteen Sky Highway, the Oak Road exit. I’ll be there
all afternoon.”

“Terrific. I’ll probably see you around four,” Katherine said, writing down his address. “Is that okay?”

“Fine,” Cleveland said. “Bye now.”

“Good-bye.” Katherine hung up.

Dr. Lennox walked in. “I hope I didn’t interrupt anything important.”

Katherine smiled. “No.”

“Anyway,” the psychiatrist said, “there’s a new drug. It’s sort of a synthetic neurotoxin, not unlike some poisonous
snake venoms. If you took enough of it at once, your neurological system would overload and you’d die. But if you took it
in very small quantities over a period of time, it might cause your brain to sort of get excited, tense up, as it were. The
result could be a psychotic reaction.”

“How do you get it?” Katherine asked.

“That’s just it. It’s used after certain kinds of brain surgeries,” Dr. Lennox told her. “It kind of excites the brain back
into action. And a clever brain surgeon—they’re famous for their cleverness—could probably get his hands on some.” Dr. Lennox
put his hands behind his head. “Dr. Eric Airie, for instance.”

“How would it be administered?”

“Easy,” Dr. Lennox said through a large smile. “You could put it in someone’s food.”

“Really?” Katherine said. “In food?”

He nodded. “There are probably other ways to do it.” Dr. Lennox folded his legs, leaning back. “But the thing about it is
that the body produces something so similar naturally that it would never show up in a blood test. In fact, I don’t think
you could detect it at all unless you were specifically looking for it, and even then…”

“It would be difficult to detect.”

Lennox nodded. “Extremely.”

I was outside an enormous discount bookstore in a strip mall, the kind where there would be nothing anyone would want to read.
It was the only public telephone I could find anywhere. “Katherine,” I said. “It’s me.” I had left my father’s four-wheel
drive idling at the curb with the door open.

“Pilot,” Katherine said, a bit surprised. “Are you back?”

“No, I’m still in Florida,” I said. “I just wanted to, just
wanted to check in, you know, that’s all, see how things—” I stopped talking. A little boy with a blond crew cut waited for
his mother outside the discount bookstore. He cupped his hands against the window and looked in, trying to locate her, I supposed.
Wasn’t she keeping an eye on him? Wasn’t she watching him?

“I’m glad you called,” Katherine said. It was in the late afternoon, the time of day Katherine told me I could call because
she didn’t have any patients. “How are you feeling?”

“Sane,” I told her. “Completely, totally—”

“Have you been taking—”

“Yeah,” I answered, “all the time.”

“That’s good.”

“The shoelace?”

“I took it to the police.” I thought I could see Katherine turning in her chair, looking at the trees across the highway,
the yellow winter light filtering through a smoggy sky. “They’re going to examine it.” She brought her finger to her mouth
and bit on a tattered piece of skin.

“Really?” I was surprised.

“And they’re having the files for the investigation sent down from Albany.”

“That’s excellent.” I imagined the stack of police files being removed from a cardboard carton in a huge warehouse somewhere,
someone placing them in a handcart and pushing a trolley into the mail room.

“Are you enjoying yourself?” Katherine asked. “Are you having a good time with your father?”

“Given the circumstances,” I said. “Given that I’m watching football constantly, and constantly fishing, and so forth.” This
phone was an old one. There were profanities written all over it—threats, slanders, propositions.

Katherine laughed, then asked, “Have you spoken to your mother lately?”

“I can call her from the house,” I said. “She’s the same. Still seeing ghosts.”

“And your brother?”

I let a moment pass by reading about the offers for sex written on the side of the pay phone. Then I said, “No, I haven’t
talked to him in a while. Have you? I mean, besides sleeping with him.”

“Pilot,” Katherine said, letting it go, “do you remember the policeman, the detective, his name was Detective Cleveland, who
investigated your sister’s—”

“I remember him.” I remembered a gray man in a gray suit with big gray features. I remembered the way he leaned down when
he spoke to me, hands on his knees, the way he called me
son
. “What about him?”

“I’ve contacted him,” she said. “I want to ask him about the case, if there’s anything that he remembers, if anything has
been bothering him about it all these years.”

“Not a bad idea,” I told her. “What does Eric think?”

“I just wanted to make sure it was okay with you.”

“It’s just fine with me.”

The little blond boy’s mother came out of the discount bookstore at this moment and said, “Talbot,
comeer!
” The little boy went to her, and she dragged him by the hand, never taking her eyes off me—a strange man at a public telephone
in a strip mall.

I saw Talbot’s eyes turn toward me, too, a look of dim realization passing over his small, toothy face.

“So,” Katherine said heavily—and, I thought, a bit distractedly—“you’ve been feeling all right, then? No strange sensations?
No voices? Nothing unusual?”

Hadn’t I told her this? “I’m perfectly sane, Katherine. There’s nothing wrong. There’s absolutely—”

“I have to ask you,” Katherine said. “When you came back from California, was Eric around a lot?”

“Yeah,” I said, “he was with me all the time, at my mother’s.”

“Did he come over to your mother’s for dinner?”

“Sometimes,” I said. “But mostly he was there in the mornings.”

I noticed that this little boy, Talbot, was on the other side of the bookstore window now, cupping his hands and looking out
at me through the glass. Evidently, I fascinated him.

I stuck my tongue out.

“Describe it,” Katherine said.

“What do you mean?”

“What would happen, generally, in the mornings when Eric came over?”

Talbot’s mouth dropped open. His eyes grew wide.

“I’d wake up and Eric would be in the kitchen with our mother, making breakfast.”