The Double Bind (28 page)

“What are you gonna do with those pictures?” Shem asked when he had finished this part of the story. He was staring at the print of Julie Andrews as Guinevere and seemed startled by the image, even touched. “I saw this show. It was 1960. The Majestic Theater. I was a newlywed. Has Julie Andrews ever looked prettier?”

Laurel assured him that she hadn’t. And she added that unlike most women her age, she actually knew the words to “The Simple Joys of Maidenhood.” Then she told Shem of her boss’s plan for a retrospective, the idea of giving Bobbie Crocker the show that he had never had in his life.

“Oh, I’ll bet his sister will just love that,” Shem said, a small wary chuckle punctuating his remark. “She still living? Or did she pass, too?”

“She’s still alive. But she tells people her brother died when he was a teenager—at least that’s what she told me. She even dared me to fly to Chicago to see where he was buried. Do you think she knows about Bobbie’s son?”

“I doubt it,” he said. “You know, she won’t be happy about your show. I got the impression from Bobbie that she was very loyal to her mother and father. Very loyal. Not just a daddy’s girl and not just a mommy’s girl. Both. Bobbie and Reese thought it was a stitch the way she worked so hard for so much of her life to rehabilitate her parents’ reputation. She’ll go to her grave telling anyone who will listen that all those stories about her mom and Jay Gatsby were a lot of malarkey—and all completely unprovable.”

She laced her fingers together on the table before her and thought about this. “What are you suggesting? Do you think there’s a picture in this pile that somehow proves Jay Gatsby was Bobbie’s father?”

“Maybe not in this pile, but in some pile! Absolutely! That’s what our paranoid schizophrenic was doing, don’t you see? View those pictures like a crazy man’s Post-it notes. Post-it notes in a code. Those pictures Bobbie kept with him? They’re like a treasure map.”

“Or an autobiography.”

“Exactly! You remember that old program,
This Is Your Life
? Actually, you probably don’t. It was way before your time. It was an old TV show. From the 1950s. Ralph Edwards was the host. Guests would be paraded out—Nat King Cole, maybe, or Gloria Swanson—and friends and family would come out one by one to surprise them. Well, Bobbie was sort of doing his own
This Is Your Life
with his pictures. He was taking photos of the Gatsby side. Reese told me it was like an obsession with Bobbie.”

“Did Bobbie himself ever tell you he was doing this?”

“No. But I do know this: You know that day back in 1939 when Bobbie found the picture Jay gave his mom? The one where Jay’s decked out as a soldier boy? Bobbie took it with him. Reese saw it many, many years ago, when he and Bobbie were still working at
Life.
Said Bobbie was still young enough that you could see the resemblance. It was unbelievable. After that, the photos Bobbie took are like the clues in a scavenger hunt. At least some are. You know, maybe you find the house. Then maybe you find the bureau. Then you open the drawer. And there it is—the picture.”

“There what is? The photo of Jay from Camp Taylor?”

He put out his hands, palms up. “Oh, I don’t know for sure what’s in the drawer. I don’t even know if it is a drawer. Or a bureau. Or a box. I was just using that as an example. But Bobbie told Reese and Reese told me that it’s all in the pictures. That’s why he took them with him, no matter where he went or how bad things got for him. They were the proof of who he was, the proof that his old man was that good old sport we’ve heard all about—better than the whole damn bunch on the other side of the cove.”

“I have some snapshots Bobbie had with him at the end. There’s one of Bobbie and his sister, and there’s one of Jay beside a flashy car. But that photo you told me about—the one of Jay in his uniform. I don’t have that one.”

“Maybe the boy knows where it is,” Shem said. “Or maybe the boy knows how to find it. Maybe that’s the real reason why Bobbie came here seven years ago. To plant that final clue.”

Laurel knew where the two men were serving their time. The more violent of the pair, the one who had murdered a schoolteacher in Montana, was in the maximum security compound of the state prison forty miles northwest of Butte. The other, a fellow with no previous criminal record, was still in Vermont, at the correctional facility just outside of Saint Albans. She hadn’t anticipated ever seeing either of them again once they had been escorted from the courtroom after their sentencing, one to a prison in Vermont and one to be tried next for a murder in Montana.

“It’s possible that his son has the picture, isn’t it?” she said. “Or some proof of some kind?”

“Sure. But how do you even begin to find the boy? All you know is that he might have done something awful. You don’t even know for certain he’s in a jail somewhere.”

Oh, but I do,
she thought.
I just don’t know whether the jail is in Montana or Vermont.

P
ATIENT
29873

I brought up the book this morning. I expected enthusiasm, but patient was defensive and derisive instead. Eventually settled down. When I asked for elaboration, was told I didn’t know what I was talking about.

At this point, the benefits of discussing the book outweigh the risks.

From the notes of Kenneth Pierce,
attending psychiatrist,
Vermont State Hospital, Waterbury, Vermont

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-T
WO

W
HIT HAD BEEN EXHAUSTED
when he’d had dinner with his aunt and uncle on Saturday night, but the serious paintball-induced pain was still a half day away. By Sunday morning, it had come in with the sweep of high tide. It wasn’t, in all fairness, a searing, debilitating, white-lights-dancing-against-his-eyelids sort of pain. But his day in the paintball woods had left him limping gingerly around his apartment. There was a steady throb in his lower back, his calves were almost too sore to stretch, and he felt a sharp dagger slicing into his side whenever he tried to breathe deeply. He wondered if he had cracked a rib. Still, it was a beautiful morning today and he had an evening in the library before him, and so about twelve-thirty he decided he would hoist his bike onto the top of his slightly battered Subaru (battered because his mother was a careless driver, oblivious to curbs and parking meters and great cement columns in parking garages, and the vehicle had been hers before she had passed it along to her son), and drive out to Underhill. He hadn’t gotten there the previous weekend as he’d hoped, and so he figured he might as well head out there today. He guessed the most difficult part would be lifting his bike onto and off of the car’s roof rack. But the frame was so light he figured even that should be manageable.

He hadn’t been out to Underhill since early August, perhaps a month after he’d moved into this house. That day he’d spent time in the state park and then ridden for a while on the logging trails in the nearby woods. He liked the way a ride there was peppered with long stretches beneath a vaguely claustrophobic canopy of leaves, followed by picture-postcard-like vistas of Mount Mansfield and Camels Hump.

Tentatively, he tugged his bike shorts over the grapefruit-sized black and purple bruise on his hip, and then held his breath and closed his eyes as he pulled a tight long-sleeved jersey over his chest. Reflexively, he moaned aloud. He wondered briefly if this ride really was such a good idea, but he couldn’t imagine spending a day like this inside. Not with seriously cold weather barely a month or two in the distance.

As he was passing Laurel and Talia’s front door, he paused. He heard music inside and decided to knock. He wanted to ask Laurel about yesterday, inquire why she hadn’t joined them for paintball. Talia answered, and it didn’t appear she had been up very long. He guessed she had walked the pony that their neighbor Gwen claimed was a dog and then gone back to bed for a couple of hours, because her hair was wild with sleep and she was wearing a pair of pink and black polka-dot pajama bottoms with the drawstring so loose that they hung far—erotically far, hip bone low far, a wisp of mons pubis far—below her waist and a silk camisole that neither matched her pajama bottoms nor hid the vast majority of her breasts. He felt far more guilty than aroused, however, because in the long strip of flesh between the bottom of her top and the top of her bottom he saw a machine-gun line of welts across her abdomen. Even her navel looked bruised.

“Well,” she said, her voice thick and tired and in desperate need of a drink of water, “if it isn’t Sergeant York.”

He motioned toward her stomach. “I think I know when that happened. I have a bad feeling I even know who did it. It was when you came over the top of that rusty jeep and didn’t know I was there, right?”

She looked down. “Usually, I have a silver flower in my belly button. A little Celtic charm. It dangles. It’s very lovely. If I hadn’t had the foresight to take it out before we played, you probably would have shot it through my intestines.”

“I’m really sorry. I guess I got a little out of control.”

“Are you serious? You can’t be serious. Yesterday was the most fun I have had in a very long time. It was fabulous. You were fabulous.
I
was fabulous.”

“You make it sound like sex.”

She shook her head. “Oh, as I told Laurel, paintball is better than sex. At least most sex. I am so glad you were there. Really, Whit, thank you.”

“I had fun, too. Is Laurel home?”

“Nope. Left this morning at the crack of dawn. Enter the crib and I’ll tell you the little I know.”

He hadn’t thought about the possibility that only Talia might be here, and he realized he was looking at a lengthy detour. But he did want to know what had happened to Laurel, and suddenly he liked the idea of commiserating with another grown-up who had spent the previous day mercilessly abusing her body.

“You can’t possibly feel up to a bike ride,” she said, motioning him inside, waving her arm ironically as if she were fanning it over a wall of game-show prizes. “If you do…then you’re a bloody superman. I can barely walk. Really, come in.”

The place was a mess: There were blue jeans and tops and bras and thongs (or at least very small bikini panties) wadded up on the couch and the coffee table, and the floor was awash in CD cases and fashion magazines and books, some of which had titles like
The Powerfully Contagious Christian
and
Teen Saviors.

“So, I guess you just got up?” he asked, wondering for a moment where he should sit. He wasn’t sure if he was supposed to move her clothing and her lingerie or sit on top of it. Quickly, however, she scooted in front of him and gathered her underwear and her jeans into a ball and heaved them through the door to her bedroom so he had a place to sit down.

“Just got up? Are you crazy? I just got back from church! I was about to go back to bed, if you want to know the truth. But, no, I suck it up, thank you very much, and get my butt to church every Sunday morning. I am—and this does horrify some people, I guess—a role model. At the moment, of course, I might be a role model who looks like she just spent the night at some nightmarish frat party. But I was in bed last night with the lights out by ten. And this morning I was cleaning and organizing before church. Gwen’s dog sort of trashed our place yesterday, and when I was tidying up I decided to do some serious organizing. Even clean out my drawers. Hence, the…the chaos. You want some coffee?”

“No, I’m good.”

She nodded. “Right answer. It would mean getting dressed and going to Starbucks.” She plopped herself down on the couch beside him.

“So, did you see Laurel before you crashed?” he asked.

“I did. And it wasn’t pretty.”

“Excuse me?”

“Your crush is losing her shit.”

“Laurel is not my crush!”

She ducked her chin and looked at him over the tops of her eyes, a glimpse that conveyed in an instant her incredulity. “You have serious longing issues for that girl—and, I might add, ones with little chance of fruition given that she seems to have an older man jones.”

“What do you mean she’s losing her shit?” he asked, picking up one of her books about Christians and teens off the floor. “Did you find out why she didn’t play paintball with us?”

“Yup. It was those pictures. The ones some old BEDS client left behind at the Hotel New England. She actually spent yesterday—most of it, anyway—in the darkroom. Can you believe it? She is so obsessed with those loopy old photos that she completely forgot she was supposed to be running around the woods with my youth group. With me! She’s actually forgotten about me totally lately. I must confess, I didn’t think such a thing was possible, and I am more than a little bent out of shape. But more than that, I am worried about her.”

She recounted for him the way Laurel had presumed their apartment had been ransacked yesterday, and her fear that someone was after the old homeless man’s pictures. She told him how her friend had been avoiding her since she had returned from Long Island, and how Laurel’s life seemed, suddenly, to be revolving around this strange dead man’s work. When she was finished, she leaned her head against the back of the couch, closed her eyes, and said almost plaintively, “Really. I don’t know what to make of this or who I should call. Her boss, maybe? The minister at my church? What would you do?”

He wondered if she was, perhaps, overreacting. “Isn’t this just a new hobby? Something she’s jazzed about because it’s all fresh? Obviously, I don’t know a whole lot about her life or how she spends her time. She’s from Long Island, she works at BEDS, she’s dating an older guy from the newspaper. She likes to swim in the morning. She used to bike. That’s about it. But she doesn’t seem to have a whole lot going on in her life, does she? So why shouldn’t she work on those photos? It sounds like all they’re really keeping her from is…well, you.”

He hoped this last remark had sounded like a good-natured joke, but given the speed with which that sleepy hand of hers had backhanded him on the chest—a spring-loaded paddle, it felt like—he wasn’t so sure.

“Not everything is about me,” she said.

“No?”

“No. There is actually quite a lot going on in our Laurel’s life—or, at least, in her head. You don’t know what the girl has been through. Almost no one does.”

Her tone was uncharacteristically wistful, and it made him wonder: “Does this have anything to do with the fact she was nearly raped once?”

“Nearly?”

“Yeah, I guess. The other day Gwen said something to me that implied Laurel had almost been raped. I don’t know anything more than that. I don’t know where or when or the circumstances. I figured it was none of my business and I didn’t want to pry.”

She raised her head from the couch and turned toward him. “It wasn’t almost.”

“Oh, shit.”

“And it wasn’t just rape. They—”

“They?”

“There were two of them. You want to know about Laurel? You want to know why she doesn’t bike anymore and why I worry? Okay, Captain Lycra, here’s the four-one-one on Miss Laurel Estabrook,” she said. Then, her eyes never wavering from his, Talia told him precisely what had happened to her friend up in Underhill, and why she was worried now.