The only sound in the town house was the slow, steady ticking of my schoolhouse clock. Pete had been there. How like him to wind it for me. I called Birdie’s name, but he didn’t appear. I hung my jacket in the hall closet and muscled the suitcase up the narrow staircase to my bedroom.
“Bird?”
No answering meow and no furry white face appearing around a corner.
Downstairs, I found a note on the kitchen table. Pete still had Birdie, but he was going to Denver on Wednesday for a day or two, and wanted the cat picked up no later than tomorrow. The answering machine was blinking like a hazard light, and appropriately so, I thought.
I looked at my watch. Ten-thirty. I really didn’t want to go back out.
I dialed Pete’s number. My number for so many years. I could picture the phone on the kitchen wall, the V-shaped nick in the right-side casing. We’d had good times in that house, especially in that kitchen, with its walk-in fireplace and huge old pine table. Guests always drifted to that room, no matter where I tried to steer them.
The machine came on and Pete’s voice asked for a short message. I left one. I tried Harry. Same routine, my voice.
I played my own messages. Pete. My department chair. Two students. A friend inviting me to a party the previous Tuesday. My mother-in-law. Two hang-ups. My best friend, Ann. No land mines. Always a relief when the series of monologues runs its course without describing catastrophies concluded or in the making.
I’d zapped and eaten a frozen pizza, and was almost finished unpacking when the phone rang.
“Good trip?”
“Not bad. Same old.”
“Bird says he’s bringing suit.”
“For?”
“Abandonment.”
“He may have a case. Will you represent him?”
“If he can come up with the retainer.”
“What’s in Denver?”
“A deposition. Same old.”
“Could I get Birdie tomorrow? I’ve been up since six and I’m really exhausted.”
“I understand Harry paid you a visit.”
“That’s not it,” I snapped. My sister had always been a source of friction with Pete.
“Hey, hey. Ease down. How is she?”
“She’s terrific.”
“Tomorrow is fine. What time?”
“It’s my first day back, so I know I won’t get away until late. Probably six or seven.”
“No problem. Come after seven and I’ll feed you.”
“I—”
“For Birdie. He needs to see that we’re still friends. I think he feels it’s all his fault.”
“Right.”
“You don’t want him in veterinary therapy.”
I smiled. Pete.
“O.K. But I’ll bring something.”
“Fine with me.”
* * *
The next day was even more hectic than I’d anticipated. I was up by six, on campus by seven-thirty. By nine I’d checked my e-mail, sorted my snail mail, and reviewed my lecture notes.
I handed back exams in both my classes, so I had to extend office hours well beyond the normal time. Some students wanted to discuss their grades, others needed clemency for missing the test. Relatives always die during exams, and all manner of personal crises incapacitate the test takers. This midterm had been no exception.
At four I attended a College Course and Curriculum Committee meeting where we spent ninety minutes discussing whether the philosophy department could change the name of an upper-level course on Thomas Aquinas. I returned to my office to find my phone light blinking. Two messages.
Another student with a dead aunt. A taped message from campus security warning of break-ins in the Physical Sciences Building.
Next I turned to collecting diagrams, calipers, casts, and a list of materials I planned to have my assistant lay out for a lab exercise the next day. Then I spent an hour in the lab assuring that the specimens I’d chosen were appropriate.
At six I locked all the cabinets and the outer lab door. The corridors of the Colvard Building were deserted and quiet, but when I turned the corner toward my office I was surprised to see a young woman leaning against my doorway.
“Can I help you?”
She jumped at the sound of my voice.
“I—No. Sorry. I knocked.” She spoke without turning, making it hard to see her face. “I have the wrong office.” With that she bolted around the corner beyond my office and disappeared.
I suddenly recalled the message about break-ins.
Chill, Brennan. She was probably just listening to see if someone was inside.
I turned the handle and the door opened. Damn. I was sure I’d locked it. Or had I? My arms were so full I had pulled the door closed with my foot. Maybe the latch hadn’t caught.
I did a quick inventory of the room. Nothing looked disturbed. I pulled my purse from the bottom file drawer and checked. Money. Keys. Passport. Credit cards. Everything worth taking was there.
Maybe she had been at the wrong place. Maybe she’d looked in, realized her mistake, and was leaving. I hadn’t actually seen her open the door.
Whatever.
I packed my briefcase, turned the key and tested the lock, then headed for the parking deck.
* * *
Charlotte is as different from Montreal as Boston is from Bombay. A city suffering from multiple personality disorder, it is at once the graceful Old South and also the country’s second-largest financial center. It is home to the Charlotte Motor Speedway and to NationsBank and First Union, to Opera Carolina and Coyote Joe’s. It is churches on every corner, with a few titty bars around the corner. Country clubs and barbecue joints, crowded expressways and quiet cul-de-sacs. Billy Graham grew up on a dairy farm where a shopping center now stands, and Jim Bakker had his start in a local church and his finish in a federal courthouse. Charlotte is the place where mandatory busing to achieve racial balance in public schools began, and the home of numerous private academies, some with a religious orientation, others entirely secular.
Charlotte was a segregated city going into the 1960s, but then an extraordinary group of black and white leaders began to work to integrate restaurants, public lodging, recreation, and transportation. When Judge James B. McMillan handed down the mandatory busing order in 1969, there were no riots. The judge took a lot of personal heat, but his order stood, and the city complied.
I have always lived in the southeast part of town. Dillworth. Myers Park. Eastover. Foxcroft. Though a long way from the university, these neighborhoods are the oldest and prettiest, labyrinths of winding streets lined with stately homes and large lawns canopied by huge elms and willow oaks older than the pyramids. Most of Charlotte’s streets, like most of Charlotte’s people, are pleasant and graceful.
I cracked the car window and breathed in the late March evening. It had been one of those transitional days, not quite spring but no longer winter, when you slip your jacket on and off at least a dozen times. Already the crocuses were pushing through the earth, and soon the air would be lush with the smell of dogwoods, redbuds, and azaleas. Forget Paris. In spring, Charlotte is the most beautiful city on the planet.
I have several choices of routes going home from campus. Tonight I decided to take the highway, so I used the back exit to Harris Boulevard. Highways I-85 and I-77 were moving well, so in fifteen minutes I had cut through uptown and was heading southeast on Providence Road. I stopped at the Pasta and Provisions Company for spaghetti, Caesar salad, and garlic bread, and shortly after seven I was ringing Pete’s doorbell.
He answered wearing faded jeans and a yellow and blue rugby shirt, open at the neck. His hair stuck up as though he’d just combed it with his fingers. He looked good. Pete always looks good.
“Why didn’t you use your key?”
Why didn’t I?
“And find a blonde in spandex in the den?”
“Is she here now?” he said, whipping around as if seriously searching.
“You wish. Here, boil water.” I held out the pasta.
As Pete took the bag, Birdie made his appearance, stretching first one hind leg, then the other, then sitting with all four feet in a neat square. His eyes locked onto my face, but he did not approach.
“Hey, Bird. Did you miss me?”
The cat didn’t move.
“You’re right. He’s pissed,” I said.
I threw my purse onto the couch and followed Pete to the kitchen. The chairs on each end of the table were filled with stacks of mail, most unopened. The same was true of the buggy seat beneath the window and the wooden shelf below the phone. I said nothing. It was no longer my problem.
We passed a pleasant hour eating spaghetti and discussing Katy and other family. I told him his mother had called complaining of neglect. He said he’d represent her and Birdie in a package deal. I told him to call her. He said he would.
At eight-thirty I carried Birdie to the car, Pete following with the paraphernalia. My cat travels with more baggage than I do.
As I opened the door Pete placed his hand over mine.
“You’re sure you don’t want to stay?”
He tightened his fingers and, with the other hand, gently stroked my hair.
Did I? His touch felt so good, and dinner had seemed so normal, so comfortable. I felt something inside me start to melt.
Think, Brennan. You’re tired. You’re horny. Get your ass home.
“What about Judy?”
“A temporary disturbance in the cosmic order.”
“I don’t think so, Pete. We’ve been over this. I enjoyed the dinner.”
He shrugged and dropped his hands.
“You know where I live,” he said, and walked back to the house.
* * *
I’ve read that there are ten trillion cells in the human brain. All of mine were awake that night, engaged in frenzied communication on one topic: Pete.
Why hadn’t I used my key?
Boundaries, the cells agreed. Not the old “here’s a line in the dirt, don’t cross it” challenge, but the establishing of new territorial limits, both real and symbolic.
Why the breakup at all? There was a time I wanted nothing more than to marry Pete and live with him the rest of my life. What had changed between the me then and the me now? I was very young when I married, but was the me in the making so very different from the me today? Or had the two Petes diverged course? Had the Pete I married been so irresponsible? So unreliable? Had I once thought that was part of his charm?
You are starting to sound like a Sammy Cahn song, the cells piped up.
What along the way had led to our present separateness? What choices had we made? Would we make those choices now? Was it me? Pete? Fate? What had gone wrong? Or had it gone right? Was I now on a new but correct path, the road of my marriage having led as far as it was going to take me?
Tough ones, the brain cells said.
Did I still want to sleep with Pete?
A unanimous yes from the cells.
But it’s been a lean year for sex, I argued.
Interesting choice of words, the id guys pointed out. Lean. No meat. Implies hunger.
There was that lawyer in Montreal, I protested.
That’s not it, the higher centers said. That guy hardly jiggled the needle. The voltage is in the red zone with this one.
There’s no arguing with the brain when it’s in that mood.
WEDNESDAY MORNING I HAD JUST ARRIVED AT THE university when my office phone rang. Ryan’s voice took me by surprise.
“I don’t want a weather report,” he said by way of greeting.
“Low sixties and I’m wearing sunblock.”
“You really do have a vicious streak, Brennan.”
I said nothing.
“Let’s talk about St-Jovite.”
“Go ahead.” I picked up a pen and began drawing triangles.
“We’ve got names on the four in back.”
I waited.
“It was a family. Mother, father, and twin baby boys.”
“Hadn’t we already figured that out?”
I heard the rustle of paper.
“Brian Gilbert, age twenty-three, Heidi Schneider, age twenty, Malachy and Mathias Gilbert, age four months.”
I connected my base series to a set of secondary triangles.
“Most women would be impressed with my detecting.”
“I’m not most women.”
“Are you pissed off at me?”
“Should I be?”
I unclenched my molars and filled my lungs with air. For a long time he didn’t reply.
“Bell Canada was unhurried as usual, but the phone records finally came on Monday. The only nonlocal number called during the past year was to an eight-four-three area code.”
I stopped in mid-triangle.
“Seems you’re not the only one whose heart’s in Dixie.”
“Cute.”
“Old times there are not forgotten.”
“Where?”
“Beaufort, South Carolina.”
“Are you on the level?”
“The old lady was a great dialer, then the calls stopped last winter.”
“Where was she calling?”
“It’s probably a residence. The local sheriff’s going to check it out today.”
“That’s where this young family lived?”
“Not exactly. The Beaufort link started me thinking. The calls were pretty regular, then they stopped on December twelfth. Why? That’s about three months before the fire. Something kept bugging me about that. The three-month part. Then I remembered. That’s how long the neighbors said the couple and the babies had been at St-Jovite. You had said the babies were four months old, so I figured maybe those kids were born in Beaufort, and the calls stopped when they arrived in St-Jovite.”
I let him go on.
“I called Beaufort Memorial, but there’d been no twin boys delivered there in the past year. Next I tried the clinics and hit pay dirt. They remembered the mother at . . .” More paper rustling. “. . . Beaufort-Jasper Comprehensive Health Clinic out on Saint Helena. That’s an island.”
“I know that, Ryan.”
“It’s a rural health clinic, mostly black doctors, mostly black patients. I spoke to one of the OB-GYNS, and, after the usual patient privacy bullshit, she admitted she treated a prenatal that fit my description. The woman had come in four months pregnant, carrying twins. Her due date was late November. Heidi Schneider. The doctor said she remembered Heidi because she was white, and because of the twins.”
“So she delivered there?”
“No. The other reason the doctor remembered her was because she’d disappeared. The woman kept her appointments through her sixth month, then never went back.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s all she’d give up until I faxed her the autopsy photo. I suspect she’ll be seeing that in her sleep for a while. When she phoned back she was more cooperative. Not that the chart info was all that helpful. Heidi wasn’t exactly forthcoming when she filled out the forms. She listed the father as Brian Gilbert, gave a home address in Sugar Land, Texas, and left the boxes for local address and phone number blank.”
“What’s in Texas?”
“We’re checkin’, ma’am.”
“Don’t start, Ryan.”
“How schooled are the Beaufort boys in blue?”
“I don’t really know them. Anyway, they wouldn’t have jurisdiction out on Saint Helena. It’s unincorporated, so it’s the sheriff’s turf.”
“Well, we’re going to meet him.”
“We?”
“I’m flying in on Sunday and I could use a local guide. You know, someone who speaks the language, knows local protocol. I have no idea how you eat grits.”
“Can’t do it. Katy’s coming home next week. Besides, Beaufort is perhaps my favorite spot on the planet. If I ever do give you a tour, which I probably won’t, it will not be while you’re taking
care of business.”
“Or why.”
“Why what?”
“Why anyone would eat grits.”
“Ask Martha Stewart.”
“Think about it.”
No need. I had as much intention of meeting Ryan in Beaufort as I did of registering myself as an available single person in the People Meeting People section of my local paper.
“What about the two charred bodies upstairs?” Back to St-Jovite.
“We’re still working on it.”
“Has Anna Goyette turned up?”
“No idea.”
“Any developments on Claudel’s homicide?”
“Which one?”
“The scalded pregnant girl.”
“Not that I’m aware of.”
“You’ve been a fountain of information. Let me know what you find in Texas.”
I hung up and got myself a Diet Coke. I didn’t know at that point, but it was going to be a phone-intensive day.
All afternoon I worked on a paper I planned to present at the American Association of Physical Anthropology meetings in early April. I felt the usual stress from having left too much until the last minute.
At three-thirty, as I was sorting photos of CAT scans, the phone rang again.
“You ought to get out more.”
“Some of us work, Ryan.”
“The address in Texas is the Schneider home. According to the parents, who, by the way, aren’t ever going to win Final Jeopardy, Heidi and Brian showed up sometime in August and stayed until the babies were born. Heidi refused prenatal care and delivered at home with a midwife. Easy birth. No problems. Happy grandparents. Then a man visited the couple in early December, and a week later an old lady drove up in a van and they split.”
“Where did they go?”
“The parents have no idea. There was no contact after that.”
“Who was the man?”
“No clue, but they say this guy scared the crap out of Heidi and Brian. After he left they hid the babies and refused to go out of the house until the old lady got there. Papa Schneider didn’t like him much either.”
“Why?”
“Didn’t like his looks. Said he brought to mind a . . . Let me get this exactly.” I could picture Ryan flipping pages in his notebook. “. . . ‘goddam skunk.’ Kinda poetic, don’t you think?”