The Wrong Man (2 page)

His eyes traveled over the rest of the room. Photographs of Ashley and friends taped to one wall; knickknacks; handwritten notes in the flowing, precise script of teenage girls. There were posters of athletes and poets, a framed poem by William Butler Yeats that ended with the words
I sigh that kiss you, for I must own, that I shall miss you when you have grown,
which he’d given her on her fifth birthday, and which he’d often whispered to her as she fell into sleep. There were photographs of her various soccer and softball teams, and a framed prom picture, taken in that precise moment of teenage perfection, when her dress clung to her every newfound curve, her hair dropped perfectly to her bare shoulders, and her skin glowed. Scott Freeman realized that what he was looking out upon was the collected stuff of memories, childhood documented in typical fashion, probably no different from any other young person’s room, but unique in its own way. An archaeology of growing up.

There was one picture of the three of them, taken when Ashley was six, perhaps a month before her mother left him. It had been on a family vacation to the shore, and he thought the smiles they all wore had a helpless undercurrent to them, for they only barely masked the tension that had dominated their lives. Ashley had built a sand castle with her mother that day. The rising tide and waves poured over their every effort, washing every structure aside despite their frantic digging of moats and pushing together of sand walls.

He searched the walls and desk and bureau top, and he could see no sign of anything even the slightest bit out of place. This worried him more.

Scott looked down at the letter.
No one could ever love you like I do.

He shook his head. That was untrue, he thought. Everyone loved Ashley.

What frightened him was the notion that someone could believe the sentiment expressed in the letter. For a moment, he tried again to tell himself that he was being foolish and overprotective. Ashley was no longer a teenager, no longer even a college student. She was on the verge of joining a graduate program in art history in Boston and had her own life.

It was unsigned. That meant she knew who sent her the letter. Anonymity was as strong a signature as any written name.

By the side of Ashley’s bed was a pink telephone. He picked it up and dialed her cell phone number.

She answered on the second ring.

“Hi, Dad! What’s up?”

Her voice was filled with youth, enthusiasm, and trust. He breathed out slowly, instantly reassured.

“What’s up with you?” he asked. “I just wanted to hear your voice.”

A momentary hesitation.

He didn’t like that.

“Not too much. School is fine. Work is, well, work. But you know all that. In fact, nothing seems to have changed since I was home the other week.”

He took a deep breath. “I hardly saw you. And we didn’t get much chance to talk. I just wanted to make sure that everything is okay. No troubles with the new boss or any of your professors? Have you heard anything from that program you’ve applied to?”

Again, she paused. “No. Nothing really.”

He coughed once. “How about boys? Men, I guess. Anything I should know about?”

She did not immediately answer.

“Ashley?”

“No,” she said quickly. “Nothing, really. Nothing special. Nothing I can’t handle.”

He waited, but she didn’t say anything else.

“Is there something you want to tell me about?” he asked.

“No. Not really. So, Dad, what’s with the third degree?”

She asked this question with a lightheartedness that didn’t match his own sense of worry.

“Just trying to keep up. Your life zooms along,” he said. “And sometimes I just need to chase you down.”

She laughed, but with a slightly hollow tone. “Well, that old car of yours is fast enough.”

“Anything we need to talk about?” he repeated, then scowled, because he knew she would notice the redundancy.

She answered quickly, “No. For the second time. Why do you ask? Is everything okay with you?”

“Yes, yes, I’m fine.”

“What about Mom? And Hope? She’s okay, isn’t she?”

He caught his breath. The familiar way she used the name of her mother’s partner always took him aback, though he knew he shouldn’t be surprised after so many years.

“She’s fine. They’re both fine, I guess.”

“So what’s with the call? Something else bugging you?”

He looked at the letter in front of him.

“No, not at all. No particular reason. Just catching up. And anyway, that’s what dads do: We’re always bugged. We worry. All we can imagine are worst-case scenarios. Doom, despair, and difficulty, lurking at every turn. It’s what makes us the uniquely boring and deadly dull people we are.”

He listened to her laugh, which made him feel a little bit better.

“Look, I’m heading into the museum and we’re going to lose service. Let’s talk again soon, okay?”

“Sure. Love you.”

“I love you, Dad. Bye.”

He placed the phone back on the cradle and thought that sometimes what you don’t hear is much more important than what you do. And, on this occasion, he had heard nothing but trouble.

Hope Frazier watched the opposing team’s outside midfielder closely. The young woman tended to overplay her side of the field, leaving the defender behind her exposed. Hope’s own player, marking back closely, didn’t yet see the way she could use the risks taken by her opposite number to create a counterattack of her own. Hope paced a small ways down the sideline, thought for a moment about making a substitution, then decided against it. She removed a small pad of paper from her back pocket, seized a stub of pencil from her jacket, and made a quick notation. Something to mention in training, she thought. Behind her, she heard a murmur from the girls on the bench; they were accustomed to seeing the notebook come whipping out. Sometimes this meant praise, other times it turned into laps after the next day’s practice. Hope turned to the girls.

“Does anyone see what I see?”

There was a momentary hesitation. High school girls, she thought. One second, all bravado. The next, all timidity. One girl raised her hand.

“Okay, Molly. What?”

Molly stood up and pointed at the outside midfielder. “She’s causing us all sorts of problems on the right, but we can take advantage of her recklessness…”

Hope clapped her hands. “Absolutely!” She saw the other girls smile. No laps tomorrow. “Okay, Molly, warm up and go into the game. Go in for Sarah in the center, get the ball under control, and start something in that space.” Hope went over and sat in Molly’s spot on the bench.

“See the field, ladies,” she said quietly. “See the big picture. The game isn’t always about the ball at your feet, it’s about space, time, patience, and passion. It’s like chess. Turn a disadvantage into a strength.”

She looked up when she heard the crowd raise their voices. There had been a collision on the far sideline, and she could see a number of people gesturing for the referee to issue a yellow caution card. She could see one particularly irate father storming up and down the sideline, arms waving wildly. Hope stood up and took a few strides toward the touch line, trying to see what had taken place.

“Coach…”

She looked up and saw the nearside ref waving at her.

“I think they need you…”

She saw that the opposing team’s coach was already half-jogging across the field, and so she rapidly set forth, after grabbing a bottle of Gatorade and an emergency kit from her bag. As she made her way across, she angled herself close to Molly.

“Molls…I missed it. What happened?”

“They clashed heads, Coach. I think Vicki got the wind knocked out of her, but the other girl seems to have gotten the worst of it.”

By the time she arrived at the spot, her player was already sitting up, but the opposing team’s player lay on the ground, and Hope could hear muffled sobbing. She went to her own player first. “Vicki, you okay?”

The girl was nodding, but she had a look of fear across her face. She was still gasping for breath.

“Does anything hurt?”

Vicki shook her head. Some of the players had gathered around, and Hope dismissed them back to their positions. “Do you think you can stand up?”

Vicki nodded again, and Hope took her by the arm and steadied her as she rose. “Let’s sit on the bench for a bit,” she said calmly. Vicki started to shake her head, but Hope gripped her arm more tightly.

On the nearby sideline, the one parent had raised his voice further and was now verbally assaulting the other coach. No obscenities had spilled as yet, but Hope knew they couldn’t be far behind. She turned to the sideline.

“Let’s stay calm,” she told him. “You know the rules about taunting.”

The father shifted his glance to her. She saw his mouth open, as if to say something, then stop. For a second, he seemed about to release his anger. Then the barest restraint showed on his face, and he glared at Hope, before turning away. The other coach shrugged, and Hope heard him mutter, “Idiot” under his breath. She steered Vicki away and slowly began to escort her across the field. Vicki was still a little wobbly, but she managed to say, “My dad gets crazy.” The words were spoken with such simplicity and so much hurt that Hope understood, in that second, there was far more to that moment than a collision on the field.

“Maybe you should come talk to me about it after practice this week. Or come into the guidance office when you have a free period.”

Vicki shook her head. “Sorry, Coach. Can’t. He won’t let me.”

And there it was.

Hope squeezed the teenager’s arm. “We’ll figure it out some other time.”

This, she hoped was true. As she seated Vicki on the bench and substituted a new player into the game, she thought to herself that nothing was fair, nothing was equal, nothing was right. She glanced across the field, to where Vicki’s father stood, a little ways apart from the other parents, his arms crossed, glaring, as if counting the seconds that his daughter remained out of the game. Hope understood, in that moment, that she was stronger, faster, probably better educated, certainly far more experienced at the game. She had acquired every coaching license, attended advanced training seminars, and with a ball at her own feet, she could have embarrassed the lumbering father, dizzying him with sleight of foot and change of pace. She could have displayed her own skills, alongside championship trophies and her NCAA All-American certificate, but absolutely none of it would have made an iota of difference. Hope felt a streak of frustrated anger, which she bottled, alongside all the other, similar moments, in her heart. As she thought these things, one of her players broke free down the right and in a fast, almost imperceptible bit of skill, thundered the ball past the keeper. Hope understood, as the team jumped up and cheered at the goal, all smiles, laughter, and high fives, that winning was the one thing, and perhaps the only thing, that kept her safe.

Sally Freeman-Richards remained in her office, waiting in the October half-light, after her secretary and both her law partners had waved their good-byes and set off in the evening traffic for their homes. At certain times of the year, especially in the fall, the setting sun aggressively dropped behind the white spires of the Episcopal church on the close edge of the college campus and would flood through the windows of the adjacent offices with a blinding glare. It was an unsettled time of the year. The glare had an unwitting, dangerous quality to it; on several occasions students hurrying back from late-day classes had been hit crossing the streets by drivers whose vision had been eradicated by windshield-filling light. Over the years, she had observed this phenomenon from both sides, once defending an unlucky driver, in another instance suing an insurance company on behalf of a student with two broken legs.

Sally watched the sunlight stream through the office, carving out shadows, sending odd, unidentifiable figures across the walls. She appreciated the moment. Odd, she thought, that the light that seemed so benign could harbor such danger. It was all in where you were located, at just the wrong moment.

She sighed and thought that her observation, at least in a small way, defined much of the law. She glanced over toward her desktop and grimaced at the stack of manila envelopes and legal files that weighed down one corner. At least a half dozen were piled up, none of which were much more than legal busywork. A house closing. A workplace compensation case. A small lawsuit between neighbors over a disputed piece of land. In another corner, in a separate file cabinet, she kept the cases that intrigued her more, and which really were the underpinnings of her practice. These involved other gay women throughout the valley. There were all sorts of pleadings, ranging from adoptions to marriage dissolutions. There was even a negligent-homicide defense that she was taking second chair on. She handled her caseload with expertise, charging reasonable rates, holding many hands, and thought of herself at her best as the lawyer of wayward, misplaced emotions. That some sense of payback, or debt, was involved, she knew, but she didn’t like to be nearly as introspective about her own life as she was frequently forced to be about others’.

She seized a pencil and opened one of the boring files, then just as quickly pushed it aside. She dropped the pencil back into a jar labeled
WORLD’S BEST MOM
. She doubted the accuracy of this sentiment.

Sally rose, thought that there was nothing really pressing that required her to work late, and was wondering idly whether Hope was home yet, and what Hope might concoct for dinner, when the phone rang.

“Sally Freeman-Richards.”

“Hello, Sally, it’s Scott.”

She was mildly surprised to hear her ex-husband’s voice.

“Hello, Scott. I was just on my way out the door…”

He pictured her office. It was probably organized and neat, he thought, unlike the chaotic clutter of his own. He licked his lips for an instant, thinking how much he hated that she had kept his last name—her argument had been that it would be easier on Ashley as she grew up—but hyphenated in her own maiden name.