The Wrong Man (59 page)

It was early, and the house was still filled with the occasional sounds of sleep. Catherine in the next room snored loudly. There wasn’t any stirring from either Sally or Hope, although late the night before, she had heard them talking. The words had been too distant for her to make out, but she presumed they had something to do with her. She hadn’t heard any muffled, hidden noises of affection in some time, and this troubled her. She very much wanted her mother to stay with Hope, but Sally had grown so distant in the past years, she was unsure what would happen. Sometimes she didn’t believe she could handle the emotional briars of another divorce, even one that was gentle. From experience she knew the “amicable divorce” doesn’t really make the internal pain any less.

For a moment, Ashley listened, then slowly let a few tears well up in the corners of her eyes. Nameless had always slept at the end of the hallway on a tattered dog bed just outside the master bedroom, so that he could be close to Hope. But often, when Ashley was young, he had sensed in that magical dog way when something was troubling her, and he would come down, uncalled, nose open the door to her room, and without any fuss take up a position on the carpet by her bureau. He would watch her until she would tell him whatever was bothering her. It was as if by reassuring the dog, she could reassure herself.

Ashley bit down on her lip. I’d shoot him myself, just for what he did to Nameless.

She kicked her feet off the bed and rose. For a moment, she let her eyes meander slowly over all the familiar items of her childhood. On one wall, surrounding a poster board, were dozens of her own drawings. There were snapshots of her friends, of herself dressed up for Halloween, on the soccer field, and ready for the prom. There was a large, multihued flag with the word
PEACE
in its center above an embroidered white dove. An empty bottle of champagne with two paper flowers in it signified the night her freshman year in college when she’d lost her virginity, an event she had secretly shared with Hope, but not her mother and father. She slowly let out her breath and thought to herself that all the things she could see in front of her were signs of who she had been, but what she needed to imagine was what she was going to become. She went to the shoulder bag hanging from the doorknob to her closet, reached in, and removed the revolver.

Ashley hefted it in her hand, then turned and assumed a firing position, aiming first at the bed. Slowly, one eye closed, she rotated, bringing the weapon to bear on the window. Fire all six shots, she reminded herself. Aim for the chest. Don’t jerk on the trigger. Keep the weapon as steady as possible.

She was a little afraid that she looked ridiculous.

He won’t be standing still, she thought. He might be rushing forward, trying to close the distance between himself and death. She reassumed her stance, widening her bare feet on the floor, lowering herself a couple of inches. She did measurements in her memory: How tall was O’Connell? How strong was he? How fast would he move? Would he plead for his life? Would he promise to leave her alone?

Shoot him in the goddamn heart, she told herself, if he has one.

“Bang,” she whispered out loud. “Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.”

She lowered the revolver to her side.

“You’re dead and I’m alive. And my life gets to go on,” she said softly, to make certain that no matter how troubled the sleep of the others was, they wouldn’t hear her. “No matter how damn bad it might seem, it will be better than this.”

Still gripping the gun, she sidled to the edge of the window. Concealing herself behind the curtains, she peered up and down the street. It was only a little past dawn, a weak half-light slowly bringing out shapes up and down the block of houses. It would be cold, she thought. There would be damp frost on the lawns. Too cold for O’Connell to have spent the night outside, keeping watch.

She nodded and replaced the gun in her satchel. Then she rapidly pulled tights, a black turtleneck, and a hooded sweatshirt from her drawers and grabbed her running shoes. She did not think that she would have many moments over the next few days when she could be alone, but this seemed to her to be one of them. As she tiptoed from the room, she had a twinge of regret, leaving the pistol behind. But she couldn’t really run with it, she thought. Too heavy. Too crazy.

The air was tinged with Canadian cold that had drifted down through Vermont. She closed the front door quietly and pulled a knit cap down over her ears, then took off fast up the street, wanting to get away from the house before anyone could tell her not to do what she was doing. Whatever risk was involved, it rapidly fled from Ashley’s thoughts as she accelerated hard, forcing her heartbeat to warm her hands, going fast enough to leave even the cold behind.

Ashley ran hard, seeming to keep up a rhythm to her thoughts. She let the pounding of her feet turn her anger into a sort of runner’s poetry. She was so fed up with being restricted and ordered around and constrained by her family and by her fears that she insisted to herself that she was willing to take a chance. Of course, she told herself, don’t be so stupid as to not make it difficult; she traveled an erratic, zigzag path.

What she wanted, she thought, was the luxury of acting rashly.

Two miles became three, then four, and the morning’s spontaneity dissolved into a steadiness that she hoped protected her. The wind was no longer cold and burning on her lips and drawn into her lungs, and she could feel sweat around her neck. When she turned and started back toward her home, she felt some fatigue, but not enough to slow her down. Instead, what she felt was an unsettled heat that burned inside her. She scanned the path ahead and suddenly saw movement. She was nearly overcome by the sensation that she was no longer alone. She shook her head and kept moving.

Some eight blocks from her house, a car sliced dangerously close by. She gasped, wanting to shout an obscenity, but kept running.

Six blocks from her house, a loud voice called out a name as she ran past. She could not tell if it was hers, and she didn’t turn to look, but started to move faster.

Four blocks from her house, someone nearby honked a car horn. The sound made her nearly jump out of her skin, and she started to sprint.

Two blocks from her house, she suddenly heard tires squealing behind her. She gasped for breath and, again, didn’t turn to investigate, but leaped from the roadway to the uneven cement sidewalk, broken up by tree roots that had pushed the surface into a ripple of cracks and breaks, like the unsettled surface of the ocean before a storm. The pavement seemed to snap at her ankles, and her feet complained with the difficulty. She ran harder. She wanted to close her eyes and tried to shut out all sounds. This was impossible, so she began humming to herself. She religiously kept her eyes straight ahead, refusing to turn in either direction, like a racehorse with blinders on, sprinting as fast as she could manage toward her home. She jumped across a flower bed and dashed across the lawn, almost slamming into the front door, before she stopped and slowly turned around.

She stared up, then down the street. She saw a man backing his car out of his driveway. Some laughing children overloaded with bulging backpacks heading toward a school bus stop. A woman with a long, bright green overcoat tossed over her nightgown, reaching down for the morning paper.

No O’Connell. At least nowhere that she could see.

She leaned her head back, gasping in drafts of cold air. Her eyes strayed across the morning normalcy and she gasped back a sob. In that moment, she realized that he no longer actually had to be present in order to be present.

From a spot a short ways down the street, Michael O’Connell feasted his vision upon Ashley as she stood hesitantly on the front porch of her mother’s house. He was sipping from a large coffee cup, hunched down behind the wheel of his car. He believed that if she knew how to look, she might see him, but he made little other effort to conceal himself. He simply waited.

He had considered, then dismissed, trying to stop her as she ran. The surprise might cause her to panic, and it would have been too easy for her to flee. She was far more familiar with the side streets and backyards of the neighborhood, and as quick as he was, he was unsure whether he could have caught her. But, more important, she might have screamed, gotten the attention of neighbors, and somebody might have called the police. If she had made a scene, he would have had to back down before he had a chance to speak with her. More than anything, what he did not want was to have to make some sort of explanation to some skeptical police officer as to what he was doing.

He had to find the right moment. Not this one, on the street where she’d grown up. It resonated her past. He was her future.

Easier, by far, he thought, to drink in her vision. He particularly liked watching her legs move. They were long and supple, and he wished that in their sole night together, he’d paid even more attention to them. Still, he was able to picture them, naked, glistening, and he shifted about in his seat as he felt the first heat of being aroused. He wished that Ashley would remove her knit cap, so that he could see her hair, and when he looked up and she did this, he smiled and wondered if he could send her all sorts of subliminal messages, directly from his thoughts to hers. It just reinforced in his mind how linked they were.

Michael O’Connell laughed out loud.

He could simply look at Ashley from afar and feel her warmth throughout his body. It was as if she energized him. He reached out, as if driven by passion, unable to sit still, and opened his door.

A short ways away, Ashley turned at that same moment and, without seeing the movement, filled with despair, stepped back into the house.

Michael O’Connell stood up, half in the car, one leg on the ground behind the door, staring at the spot where Ashley had disappeared. In his imagination, he could still see her.

Steal her, he said to himself.

It seemed so simple to him.

He smiled. It was just a matter of getting her alone.

Not exactly alone, he thought. But alone in his world. Not hers.

I am invisible, he thought, as he slid back into the car and pulled away from the curb.

He was wrong about this. From the window in her upstairs bedroom, Sally stood, watching. She gripped the window frame with white-knuckled fingers, close to breaking the wood, her nails digging into the paint. It was the first time she had seen Michael O’Connell in the flesh. When she’d first spotted the figure behind the wheel of the car, she had tried to tell herself that he wasn’t who she thought he was, but, in the same thought, knew she was deluding herself. It was him. It could be no one else. He was as close as he’d always been, right beyond their reach, shadowing Ashley’s every step. Even when she could not see him, he was there. She felt dizzy, enraged, and almost overcome by anxiety. Love is hate, she thought. Love is evil. Love is wrong.

She watched the car disappear down the street.

Love is death, she thought.

Breathing hard, she turned away from the window. She decided against instantly telling everyone that she’d spotted O’Connell on their street, only yards away from the front door, spying on Ashley. The family would be enraged, she thought. Angry people behave rashly. We need to be calm. Intelligent. Organized. Get to work. Get to work. Get to work. She turned back and found the pad of paper where she was making her notes. Notes for a murder. When she picked up her pencil, though, she noticed that her hand was quivering just slightly.

In the late afternoon, Sally went shopping for items she believed were integral to their task. It was not until early in the evening that she got back, checked once on Ashley, who appeared oddly bored, curled up on her bed reading, wondered where Hope was, as she listened to Catherine fiddle about in the kitchen, and then got around to calling Scott on the phone.

“Yes?”

“Scott? It’s Sally.”

“Is everything okay?”

“Yes. We got through the day more or less without incident,” she said without mentioning that she had seen O’Connell lurking about their street that morning. “How much longer that will be the case, I have my doubts.”

“I understand that.”

“Good. I hope so. Because I think you should come over here now.”

“All right…” He hesitated.

“It’s time to act.” Sally laughed, but without humor, as if pricked by some deep cynicism. “It seems to me that we’ve agreed more in the past few weeks than we ever did when we were actually married.”

Scott, too, smiled ruefully. “That is a strange way of looking at things. Maybe. But when we were together, well, there were times it wasn’t that bad.”

“You weren’t living a lie like I was.”

“
Lie
is a strong word.”

“Look, Scott, I don’t want to fight over past fights again, if that makes sense.”

For a moment they remained silent, then Sally added, “We’re getting sidetracked. This isn’t about where we were, it’s about where we can go or even who we are. And most important, it’s about Ashley.”

“Okay,” Scott said, feeling that some huge swamp of emotions was between them that was never spoken of and never would be.

“I have a plan,” Sally blurted.

“Good,” he said after taking a deep breath. He wasn’t sure that he meant that.

“I don’t know if it is a good one. I don’t know if it will work. I don’t know if we can pull it off.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“We shouldn’t be talking on the phone. At least not on these lines.”

“Right. Of course not. That makes sense.” He wasn’t at all sure why this made sense, but he said it anyway. “I’ll be over straightaway.” He hung up the phone and thought that there was something awful in the routines of life. Teaching, living alone with all the ghosts of statesmen, soldiers, and politicians that made up his courses, his existence was completely predictable. He guessed that that was going to change.

Hope returned to the house before Scott arrived. She had been out walking, trying without much luck to sort through all that was happening. She found Sally in the living room, poring over some loose sheets of paper, pencil stuck in her mouth. She looked up when Hope entered.