Safer (21 page)

“Yeah? How good?”

“Pretty good. It’s got lies, adultery, subterfuge, police corruption, you name it. I’m prepared to offer complete preemptive access to the wrongly accused.”

“Who would be you?”

“And I’ll talk to you exclusively. If”—I raise a finger dramatically—”you promise to quit stalking me.”

Maya Lamb leans forward and slips her book into the outside pocket of her bag. She brushes a lock of dark hair from her eyes. “I’ve been stalking you for three days. Why are you suddenly so eager to talk to me now?”

“Because I want you to quit following me. And because maybe we can help each other.”

“How do you think we might be able to do that?”

“Do you want the deal or not?”

She taps her fingertips on the arms of the chair and narrows her eyes. “I’d need a down payment.”

“Do you have one in mind?”

“Well, in the five minutes we’ve been talking, you’ve already admitted to telling me one tall tale.”

“Yes, but I admitted it. That shows credibility.”

“How about something that shows me what kind of a tale we’re talking about this time?”

“Sure,” I say. “But bear in mind, I could be fibbing again, so if you report this before it’s confirmed by some other source, you could look foolish.”

“With all due respect, Professor, based on this exchange, I’m willing to bet that I’m a better journalist than you are a fibber.”

“All right. Try this and tell me if I’m fibbing.”

Without naming my source, I tell her about the mystery tattoo that doesn’t appear in the photographs of Brit Seward.

“A butterfly,” Maya Lamb says.

“That’s what I’m told. I’ve never seen it myself.”

Her smile gets bigger.

“That’s just an appetizer,” I say.

“When do we eat?”

“Does that mean you agree to the terms?”

“If you agree to meet with me exclusively before the day is over, then yes. We have a deal.”

“Done.” I reach into my pocket and take out the cell phone Douglas Bennett gave me so that we’ll be able to keep in touch at all times. “What’s your mobile number?”

I punch in the numbers as she speaks them. In a moment, her bag begins to play muffled music, and I recognize the tune she’s using as a ring tone. It’s an old hit from the seventies. Blondie. “One Way or Another.”

She digs the phone out, flips it open, and says, “Hello?”

“Nice ringer.”

“I like it.” She smiles and closes her phone against her cheek.

“So now I’ve got your number,” I say. “You have mine. We’ll stay in touch and meet up later.”

“Before the end of the day. That’s our deal, right?”

“That’s our deal.”

As I turn and head for the doors, she says, “So where are you off to? You’re not dressed for lawyers.”

I hold an imaginary cell phone to my ear—
We’ll stay in touch
—and push out into the morning cold.

At the 7-Eleven on Belmont, I fill up and buy coffee. There’s a woman in line in front of me on her way to work reading meters
for the gas company. The guy behind the register says, “Can you make ‘em go backward? My heat bill’s through the roof.”

She laughs and tells him they should swap each other. “I’ve got eighty bucks until payday, and I just put forty in the tank.”

Listening to this, I’m seized by an idea that I know is silly. But this morning I seem to have woken up with an overpowering urge to throw good sense to the wind.

I step out of line and offer the woman two twenty- dollar bills to take my phone, dial Sara’s mother’s house in Philly, and pretend to be the dean of Western Iowa University.

She gives me the kind of look I’d expect. Then she glances at the bills in my hand and screws up her mouth. One hand on the door handle, she says, “Do what?”

I tell her the truth: I need to apologize to someone, but I can’t get an audience. “All you have to do is ask for Sara. I promise, I’m mostly harmless.”

She shrugs and takes the money. I hand her the phone. A minute later, she hands it back to me and says, “She’s coming.”

“I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this.”

“Ho ho ho,” the woman says, saluting with my two folded twenties on her way out the door.

Frigid air streams in and swirls around me. I walk to an empty spot over by the slushie machines, hold the phone to my ear, and wait. In a few moments, Sara’s voice comes onto the line.

“Dean Palmer, hello. I intended to call you myself this morning and—”

“Sara, it’s me. Don’t hang up. Please.”

Silence.

“I just needed to hear your voice.”

More silence. Colder than the air outside.

“Tell me what you want me to do,” I say. “Whatever it is, I’ll do it.”

“I want you to go back in time and decide not to hump our next- door neighbor,” Sara says. “Will you do that?”

“If I could, I would.”

“Our
neighbor.
My jogging partner. Goddamn you both.”

“Sara, I can’t erase it, and I don’t know how to make it up to you, but I’ll kill myself trying.”

“You’ll be able to do that from prison?”

I realize now that in our years together, Sara has never spoken a truly cruel word to me. This is what it feels like.

“Wow.” It’s all I can come up with.

“I’m sorry.” She breathes an angry sigh in my ear. “That was rotten.”

“Sara…”

“If you really want to do something for me, don’t call here. Because I can’t do this yet.”

She pauses, as though she’s about to say something else. Then she hangs up instead.

The sound of the dial tone in my ear might as well be the sound of a heart monitor going flatline. I woke up two hours ago ready to take on the world, or at least Iowa. Now I want to go back to my room and pull the drapes and order scotch for breakfast.

I head for the doors. Just as I push the handle, a voice behind me says, “Sir?”

The guy behind the register is looking at me cynically. I say, “Yes?”

“You planning on paying for that coffee?” He nods toward the windows. “And the thirty bucks in gas you pumped on three?”

Oh. “I’m sorry. Of course.”

I work out my wallet with my free hand as I walk back to the counter. I pretend to ignore the fidgets and sighs and eye-rolls from the people waiting in line, the slow nod from the guy behind the register.
Nice try, buddy.

I’m halfway to Ponca Heights when the cell phone rings.

“Melody just called,” Bennett says.

I feel a quick shot of disappointment that it isn’t Sara.

Then relief creeps in.
Melody just called.

I hadn’t doubted her, but the relief is still there. She called first thing in the morning, just like she said she would; she’s slept on this, and she hasn’t changed her mind. “When will you talk to her?”

“She’s coming in this morning,” Bennett says. “How soon can you be here?”

“Actually, I’m a little tied up at the moment.”

“Sorry to complicate your busy schedule. Tied up how?”

“Isn’t it better if I’m not there anyway? So she can speak freely or whatever?”

There’s a pause, then Bennett says, “What are you up to?”

“Just errands,” I tell him. “I need a toothbrush. And a razor. Maybe a new tie for the thing on Wednesday.”

“Hey, as long as you’re running around, do me a favor, would you?”

“Sure.”

“Save the bullshit for the reporters.”

I don’t have a response for that.

“Let me tell you something, Paul, if you’re thinking about trying to go talk to Brittany Seward while her dad’s at work and Melody’s here—”

“Give me some credit,” I say. “I’m not stupid.”

“That’s good.”

“Look, if you think I should be there, I’ll come in.”

For a moment, Bennett doesn’t say anything. Even his silence sounds frustrated with me.

Finally, he says, “Subtle pattern.”

“Sorry?”

“The tie you’re buying for Wednesday. Best to go with a subtle pattern. Nothing flashy.”

“Oh.” Does this mean I’m off the hook? “Thanks for the tip.”

“Make sure you keep the phone with you.”

“It’s practically an extension of my hand.”

Bennett hangs up just as I’m turning left off Belmont. I drop the phone into the console and follow Wildwood into the subdivision. I’ve never actually entered Ponca Heights from this direction; even after patrolling the area on foot, the meandering network of streets and roundabouts and cul- de- sacs plays with my sense of direction.

Around me, smoke trails from the chimneys of the homes of Ponca Heights South. Rooftops and windowpanes shimmer with frost. It’s mid- morning and sunny—18 degrees, according to the sign at the bank downtown—and of course I haven’t been entirely truthful with Douglas Bennett.

I might well be stupid. I’m also forbidden from contacting Brittany Seward. That much I’ve come to accept.

But nobody’s ever said anything about me talking with her friend Rachel.

The McNallys live on a corner lot in one of the newer sections. My plan is simple: find a place along the curb, park, walk to the front door, and ring the bell.

It’s Monday morning, and the Clark Falls public schools have released early, due to storm predictions, for the holidays. Best case, I get lucky, Rachel is home alone, and I’m somehow able to convince her not to slam the door in my face and call the police. But even in the probable case—that this goes nowhere— I’m confident of one thing:

It will get back to Roger that I came here and rang the doorbell. I’d like Roger to know that. I want him to know that we have no truce, and if it puts him at ease to think that ringing Rachel McNally’s doorbell is the best defense maneuver I can come up with, so much the better.

The minivan backing out of the McNally driveway makes all of this strategy a moot point. Rachel’s mother is behind the wheel. At a glimpse, I take the girl in the passenger seat to be Rachel’s older sister. Through the minivan’s tinted back windows, I can just make out a third head of hair.

I pull to the curb and watch my rearview mirror. From the corner of my eye, I become aware of the irony of my position:

I’m sitting directly beneath one of our curbside Safer Places coalition signs.
This neighborhood is monitored by the Ponca Heights Neighborhood Patrol.

The minivan turns onto Walnut and heads away down the hill.

I doubt that Douglas Bennett would advise me to turn around in the nearest driveway and follow.

THE PARKING LOT of the Loess Point Shopping Mall is aswarm. Holiday shoppers stream from their cars onto the sidewalks, making lines toward all visible entrances. The Salvation Army is out in force, standing by their red buckets, scarves over their mouths. The peal of handbells fills the air.

The McNally family minivan pulls to a stop in front of the main atrium and sits there, circled in exhaust. I luck into a parking space and watch my mirrors.

After a few minutes, the minivan’s passenger side opens up. Rachel and her sister emerge onto the sidewalk and heave their doors shut.

Bye, Mom.

•    •    •

What I’m doing may not be well- advised, but it’s disturbingly easy.

A hundred feet inside the main entrance to the mall, in front of the towering, ribboned Norway spruce rising up to the domed skylights three stories overhead, Rachel and her older sister stand bickering for a minute. The sister finally makes a zipping motion across her mouth, stabs a finger at her cell phone, and heads off in the other direction.

I watch as big sis meets up with a group of friends and disappears into the crowd. I watch as Rachel takes off her stocking hat and heads glumly toward the escalators alone.

And this is what I can’t help thinking, as I shadow a thirteen- year- old girl through a busy shopping mall, a crowd of oblivious faces circulating around us:

It isn’t difficult. If I were the kind of person I’m accused of being, it wouldn’t be difficult to get close to this kid. I could be even worse than the kind of person I’m accused of being.

Keeping a margin between us, I follow Rachel McNally up the escalators and around the second level. She stops at a few windows but doesn’t go into the stores. She spends a few minutes looking at cheap earrings at a jewelry pagoda.

She ducks into a music store and buys a CD, paying at the register with two crumpled bills she pulls from her purse. She counts her change—a couple bucks and a few coins—and tucks what’s left in the front pocket of her jeans.

We spend close to an hour at the big computer store at the far end of the mall. Rachel spends the whole time at the same counter, fiddling wistfully with the iPods.

At last she looks at her watch and pulls herself away. She leaves the computer store and heads for the food court. She uses the money in her front pocket to buy a smoothie at the Jamba Juice.

I watch her pick out a table by the railing and give her a few minutes to get settled.

Then I walk over. “Rachel,” I say, smiling. “Hi there.”

Her first expression is a smile in return. She’s been trained to be polite.

But she recognizes me almost immediately. Her smile falters and melts away. By the time I sit down, she’s staring straight ahead, eyes wide, holding her smoothie in both hands, sucking purposefully on her straw.

“Don’t be scared.” I speak softly, partly to seem as un-threatening as possible, partly to avoid being heard by the people sitting at nearby tables. It’s almost lunchtime. Pretty soon, the food court will be packed. “I’m a friend. I promise.”

“Go away.”

“I just want to talk to you for a minute.”

“Go
away.”

I do my best to appear relaxed and familiar. Like maybe I’m her father. A father having a tangle with his difficult teen ager.

Rachel McNally looks the way it seems to me a thirteen-year- old ought to look. Skinny. Freckles. Braces on her teeth. I imagine that it must be hard for her sometimes, being best friends with Brit Seward. Especially in the boys’ department.

It’s funny, but based on the stories I’ve heard from Melody and Pete, I’d always sort of assumed that Rachel must have been the instigator of most of her and Brittany’s unapproved adventures together. Now I wonder. What kind of jerk accepts a fake ID from this kid?