No One You Know Part 18

"I don't know why I sat there in silence that night when he came into the room-I was going to say something, and then I saw him pull out the key-and I don't know, I guess, in a way, I must have wanted to be let in on his secret, whatever it was. He pulled something out, then closed the drawer back, and I must have made a sound, because he turned around, startled.

"At that point I flipped on the light switch, and I was about to make some joke about him sneaking around in the middle of the night when I saw that he was holding a necklace."

"What kind of necklace?" I asked, but I already knew.

Frank got up and went over to the mantel. He opened a little hen-shaped jadeite dish, took out a small skeleton key, and went over to the secretary. Then he did what Will must have done on that night six years before. He slid open the rolltop lid and began opening the compartments one by one, like a Chinese puzzle. Finally he came to a tiny compartment, buried so deep in the desk that I had to marvel at the ingenuity of the carpenter who made it. He slid two fingers into the drawer and pulled something out. His hand covered it so that I couldn't see, and he came over to me. I held out my palm, and when he opened his fist it slid into my hand, as cool as if it had been buried deep in the earth. It was Lila's gold chain with the topaz pendant, the necklace I'd given to her for her eighteenth birthday.

I couldn't say anything. I couldn't breathe.

"Her necklace is missing," my father had said, that day when he called me from the morgue in Guerneville to tell me that he had identified my sister's body. Sitting in Frank's living room, holding Lila's necklace up to the light, I remembered how I had felt that day, as I held the phone to my ear and listened to my father's monotone delivery. What I remembered was this: while I wasn't quite able to process, during that brief phone call, the fact of my sister's death, I had felt, quite clearly, a burning sense of injustice and disgust at the thought of someone stealing her necklace. It was just a cheap trinket, purchased with babysitting money, but she had loved it enough to wear it every day. For Lila, its value had nothing to do with the object itself, everything to do with her love for me.

Twenty years of my life had been defined by the loss of my sister, the person I had loved most in the world. But now I allowed myself to remember that she had loved me, too, absolutely and unconditionally. The secrecy of her final months, her reluctance to tell me the truth about Peter McConnell, did nothing to change that fact. It occurred to me then that she would have told me about McConnell, she would have told me about the whole affair-eventually, I knew, she would have-it was simply a part of the story that she hadn't gotten to yet.

I was stuck inside the moment, unable to speak or even cry. There was shock, but there was also an enormous sense of relief at having the necklace in my possession. It was a piece of my sister's story, a piece of my own.

Thirty-seven.

AFTER THAT, THE FACTS I'D BEEN WAITING to hear for twenty years came out in a breathless rush.

"I didn't even have to question him," Frank said. "Will just started talking, without provocation. 'It was an accident,' he kept saying, and I had no idea what he was talking about. 'What was an accident?' I asked, and he said, 'I cared about her, I never would have hurt her.'

"'Who?' I asked. That's when he said her full name, for the first and only time, 'Lila Enderlin.'"

This was what it came down to. The man who had helped me and Lila start our car all those years ago, the one I'd thought of as an interesting diversion on the farm, the one who didn't even merit a brief mention in Thorpe's book-it all, somehow, came back to him.

"Remember how I'd put him up in the hotel out by the beach after Nancy kicked him out?"

I nodded. I was clutching the necklace, and I could feel the pendant digging into my palm.

"Well, he never did get a job. He actually tried, but no one would hire him. He went through all the money I gave him, and then he had nowhere to stay, so he started living in his car. To make money for food and gas, he'd sing and play his guitar. He'd found that the best time was at night when people were going home from the bars. He'd go down into the Muni station, hop the turnstile to get to the westbound platform, lay his guitar case out on the ground, and start playing. Folks would be drunk, waiting around for the train, and they'd get generous when they heard him. I mean, he was good. He knew how to connect with people. He could pull in twenty, thirty bucks on a good night, enough for food, gas to get around town, a matinee every now and then, but it wasn't enough to get a hotel room, not a decent one anyway. He was trying to steer clear of those dumps in the Tenderloin, because he knew how easy it was to get sucked back into the drugs again, and he was really trying to stay clean. And he was also trying to save a little money, so he could rent a studio and record some new songs.

"He told me he was doing it for Tally. He wanted to stay clean for three months. If he could do it for that long, out there on his own, he believed he could stay clean forever. After three months he'd come back to the farm and prove to me that he'd changed, that he could be a proper uncle.

"So one night he's down there in the Muni station, about to pack up to go, singing his last song for the night, a Tim Hardin tune, 'Reason to Believe,' when he sees this good-looking woman down the track, walking toward him. And as she gets closer he realizes who it is. I'd always loved that song, 'Reason to Believe.' But now every time I hear it, it reminds me of Will's story.

"At first he keeps his head down, hoping she won't recognize him, because he's embarra.s.sed for her to see him like that. But she comes over, and she gets close so she can see his face, you know, and she listens to him for a few seconds before she finally says, 'William, is that you?'"

Frank had the simplest way of telling a story, no big embellishments, no dramatic pauses or hand gestures, but as he spoke I could see Lila, in her green corduroy skirt, her black Converse high-tops and peacoat, walking up to her old acquaintance, tilting her head slightly, moving closer to get a better look. And I could hear her, "William, is that you?"-the kindness that would have been in her voice, and the concern, and the complete lack of judgment.

"It's your sister, of course," Frank said. "And once he gets over the embarra.s.sment, he realizes that he's really happy to see her. She's just come from dinner and is on her way home, she seems upset, but he doesn't want to pry, so he doesn't ask what's bothering her. They make small talk for a couple of minutes, and finally she asks if he's doing all right. The way she asks, he can tell that she knows he isn't really okay, but he tries to play it off, just a short run of bad luck, he says.

"At some point she looked up at the kiosk. There'd been an accident in the Montgomery Street Station, and it was going to be another half hour at least before her train arrived. Will offered to wait down there with her until the train came, because the station can get pretty dodgy at night, but she said she didn't want to put him out. That's when he told her that his car was parked just a half-block away, and he offered to give her a ride home. She said she'd be fine, but he insisted it was no trouble."

As I listened to Frank's story, I felt the way you feel when you're watching a scary movie and the heroine goes into the dark house. The script has already been written, the movie's already been made, but that doesn't keep you from talking to the person on screen. Don't go, I was saying in my mind. Don't go. But of course I knew she'd already gotten in the car. There was no way to rewrite the script, no way to rewind the film.

"They were driving up Market when Will remembered your family's cabin at the Russian River. He and Lila had talked about it back when she was keeping Dorothy on the farm. Once, she'd even shown him a picture of the place. He was really desperate for a shower, a quiet place to stay and sort things out. And so he just asked her, point-blank, if he could stay there. And she thought about it for a minute, she seemed to be considering it, but she said she couldn't give him permission to do that. It was her parents' house, not hers, and she knew they wouldn't be okay with it.

"And this is where things got rocky. I mean, I keep telling you what a good guy Will was, and still in my heart I believe in his basic goodness, but there was this other part of him, this, I don't know how to say it, this brashness. Where he'd get an idea in his head and he just wouldn't let go of it, and if you threw an obstacle in his way, it made him all the more determined to get what he wanted. Sometimes it was a great character trait-it's a big part of what made his band successful for a while there, without a doubt. But sometimes it could be scary. If he got hold of any idea that was, to him, perfectly rational, and somebody shot him down, he was capable of losing all sense of reason. And I know that's what happened that night. His brain just checked out."

"Why did she accept the ride?" I said. "She hadn't seen your brother in years. Why didn't she call me? I would have come to pick her up. It was a Wednesday, and Wednesday was my day to get the car. If I'd just let her have the car that morning-"

Frank reached over as if to touch my shoulder, but then he pulled his hand back. "I'm sorry," he said. "Are you sure you want to hear this right now? I can wait as long as you need."

"It's okay. Go ahead."

"Will wouldn't take no for an answer. At some point your sister noticed that they'd taken a wrong turn-but when she told him, he just kept driving. By the time they got to the Golden Gate Bridge, she knew where they were headed. She demanded that he turn the car around, but he wouldn't. He apologized, promised he wasn't going to hurt her. He just needed to get to the cabin, he told her-by then, he'd decided it was the answer to his problems. And when they arrived, she could let him in. It was very important to him, see, that she let him in. He wanted to enter the house the proper way, like an invited guest.

"I've gone over it hundreds of times and it doesn't make any sense at all. I asked him, point-blank, what his plan was once he got to the cabin-was he going to hold this poor girl captive?-and he said he hadn't thought that far ahead. He was angry with me for even suggesting it. 'I'm not a kidnapper,' he said. When I told him that yes, that's exactly what he was, he started crying, saying none of it went the way it was supposed to, that it was all f.u.c.ked up.

"He genuinely believed that while they were driving, he'd be able to appeal to her compa.s.sion, he'd be able to convince her to let him stay there, just for a week or two. He was certain he could find some sort of manual labor at Guerneville, and as soon as he got a paycheck he'd rent a place, because it was so much cheaper there than the city. He'd do work around the cabin, too, to earn his keep. He was telling her all of these things, and she just kept saying no, begging him to take her back home. But he kept driving."

I was thinking about that drive over the Golden Gate Bridge in the middle of the night, how when we were kids, Lila and I would huddle in the backseat while the car b.u.mped over the bridge, and we'd gaze out in amazement at the fog, which looked ghostlike in the glow of the bridge lights. We usually left for the river on Friday nights, and the last half hour of the drive along dark, winding roads had always scared me. I had this feeling that something might leap out of the redwoods into our path-a deer, or the boogeyman-but Lila always tried to a.s.suage my fear by telling me that deer avoided headlights and the boogeyman was just a stock character in scary movies.

"While he drove," Frank continued, "Lila was getting more and more nervous. She started yelling at him, demanding that he stop the car and let her out, but he wouldn't. She became frantic, and he kept telling her to calm down. Finally, on a wooded stretch of two-lane road just past Korbel, she jumped out of the car.

"Will said it happened so fast, he couldn't stop her. He immediately pulled off to the side of the road and ran down the embankment, and found her lying there, not moving. He realized how stupid his plan had been, what a huge mistake he'd made. 'She had no reason to be afraid of me,' Will told me, which just shows how full of holes his brain was by then, maybe from all the drugs, I don't know. I mean, he knew he wasn't going to hurt her, and he expected her to understand that, too."

And I was thinking about Lila, rational Lila. How she would have weighed her options as she sat in the car with her captor. How she would have calculated her chances of surviving a fall and running away, weighed them against what might happen if she didn't. A couple of hours before, she'd been having dinner with Peter McConnell, wrapped up in the drama of their affair-thinking, perhaps, that she couldn't stand what was happening to her, couldn't deal with the fact that she had fallen in love with a married man. And then, she had to recalibrate everything. Maybe, as she sat captive in the car with William, she wished that she could go back to the mundane drama of the affair. Or maybe she made a decision about what she would do if she made it back home okay-maybe she decided to break it off with McConnell, start clean. Maybe she was thinking about the Goldbach Conjecture, the problem she still had to solve, the proof she was determined to find. And then she jumped. In a way, it made perfect sense. Lila, after all, was a person of action. For her, sitting back to see what happened, granting someone else control over her fate, would not have been an option.

"Are you okay?" Frank asked.

I was bent over, shivering. There was a white patch the size of a quarter on the carpet. I concentrated on the spot and said, "Go on."

"She was resting against this big, sharp rock, and there was blood on the rock, and Will realized she'd hit her head. He couldn't hear her breathing, so he put his ear against her chest. When he didn't hear anything, he tore open her shirt to listen to her heart, and still there wasn't a sound. He tried mouth-to-mouth. He wasn't sure how to, he was just copying what he'd seen on TV. He picked up her hand and felt for a pulse. He sat there with her for ten minutes, fifteen, trying to revive her. 'But there wasn't anything I could do for her,' he told me. And while he talked, he was still crying, still holding on to that necklace. Finally he picked her up and carried her to the car."

I thought of Thorpe's description of how she had been found. Clothed, but with her blouse open, the top four b.u.t.tons gone. The fact that the b.u.t.tons hadn't been found at the scene had been an indication that the crime might have happened elsewhere, but no one could figure out where. Thorpe had dismissed the matter of the b.u.t.tons. According to his scenario, she had died in the place she was buried.

"Before he put her in," Frank said, "he laid a blanket across the seat. That's something I've never really forgiven him for. Everything else, and the blanket is what I keep coming back to. Because it means he didn't want blood in the car. For whatever reason, while Lila lay there dead, he had the common sense to cover his tracks.

"There were no other cars on the highway. He was frantic, he didn't know what to do. His first thought was to take her to the hospital. But then he saw that there was blood on his hands, his clothes. He started thinking about what would happen when he got there, how he'd be accused of doing something terrible, when he'd never meant to hurt her at all. So instead he drove out to Armstrong Woods, carried her into the trees, and laid her down on the ground, and arranged her as best he could, as if she were sleeping. He was sitting there, staring down at her, and he saw the necklace, and he felt that he needed something to take with him, to prove that what had happened was real. Because part of him thought it was all some terrible hallucination, some bad trip. After leaving her, he drove out to Johnson's Beach, wrapped his clothes up in layers of bags, and tossed them in a Dumpster. He washed up in the river, then took her backpack out to Healdsburg and dumped it in a bin behind a restaurant. He didn't want his clothes and her body anywhere near each other. Then he drove out here, which was the only place he could think to go, and that's how I found him on the doorstep early that next morning."

I sat in silence, stunned. Everything about his story was so different from everything I had believed for so long. In this version, there was no malice, no premeditated crime. There was, instead, a random meeting in a train station with a junkie, followed by a botched kidnapping and a horrible accident. The mistake Lila had made had nothing to do, in the end, with McConnell. Her mistake had been in trusting the wrong person, in having faith in the general goodwill of people. Finally I managed to say, "How do you know he was telling the truth?"

"I know," Frank said. "My brother had a lot of problems, but he couldn't have hurt her on purpose. He just couldn't have."

"Why didn't you say anything?" I asked. "You knew what he'd done. You should have gone to the police."

Frank looked down at his hands. "I planned to, I really did. I told Will he had to turn himself in. I told him I'd go there with him. I told him if he didn't turn himself in, it would catch up to him eventually. I even said that if he didn't do it, I would. I figured that wasn't the sort of thing you could hide forever. I'd protected him from a lot of things, but I couldn't protect him from that. He refused. He said he'd lived in a lot of s.h.i.tty places, but one place he knew he couldn't handle was jail. Two days after his confession, Tally found him dead in the car. And at that point I just couldn't bring myself to come forward. I researched the case-your sister had been dead for fourteen years by then. I knew no one had been arrested. It wasn't like some innocent guy was sitting in prison, paying for Will's crime. I felt responsible for Will's suicide. If I hadn't pressured him to turn himself in, he probably wouldn't have killed himself."

"You can't know that," I said.

"No, but I'll always wonder. And I figured there was nothing else I could do for him, short of keeping his name out of the papers."

Exactly what I hadn't been able to do for Lila. Part of me was angry with Frank for keeping his secret all these years. If he had come forward when Will confessed, there would have been six fewer years of uncertainty for my family, possibly six fewer years of exile for McConnell. And yet, I felt sympathy for him. I understood his reasons. He had lost a brother, I had lost a sister. I figured he could understand, better than most, what had happened in my life.

Then Frank was moving closer, and he had both arms around me, saying, "I know, I'm so sorry." It felt surreal to be in this man's arms, in this place, the mystery of Lila's death laid bare. I noticed that his shirt was wet, and then I understood why he was holding me. I was crying, and I couldn't stop.

I was thinking of Lila on that final morning, how she'd noticed the fallen limb on the deck, but we'd done nothing about it. I was thinking of the night we lay on the gra.s.s in our backyard, searching for Lyra, while she told me the story of Orpheus, who could not bring his wife back from the dead. I was thinking of who she was-my beautiful, brilliant, secretive sister-and who she might have been, if she had lived. And I was thinking of my parents, each of whom had managed to make a life with one daughter, instead of two. All these years, there was so little I'd been able to give them. Now, finally, I could at least give them this story.

I'm not sure how much time pa.s.sed before my breath came easily again. I know that the light changed in the room, and water went on upstairs, and the house's old pipes began to clang. Finally, Frank let go of me. It was a strange, awkward moment, both of us shifting out of that unexpected intimacy. I wanted to say something to him, but I couldn't imagine what. We sat there for a minute or two, neither of us meeting the other's eyes. He was the one who broke the silence.

"Ever since he died, my hope has been that, one day, his music will resurface. Some DJ will play it on a radio station somewhere, or some journalist will write about it for a magazine, and people will be reminded of him, they'll start playing his songs again. I just want him to be remembered as Billy Boudreaux, who made great music."

"You should hear it," I said. "It's a beautiful song."

He went over to the tape player and pressed play. Billy Boudreaux's voice came out raw and raspy, growing stronger as the song progressed.

Deep in the trees I'm on my knees Looking at you and not believing What have I done, my beautiful one What have I done As the song ended, I looked up and saw Frank. He hadn't even bothered to turn his face away from me. He just stood by the tape player, one arm on the mantel, staring at a spot on the wall, his tears coming soundlessly.

Thirty-eight.

THORPE SAW MY REFLECTION IN THE WINDOW before he saw me. He jumped, turned to face me. The only light in the room came from the computer monitor. In its glow, he looked pale and somewhat sickly.

"How did you-"

"I knocked, but you didn't answer. The front door was unlocked, so-"

The expression on his face changed from startled to hopeful. "I'll have a key made. You can come and go as you please. Just knowing that you might show up at any moment would keep me motivated. I'd be sitting here at my desk in the middle of the night-"

"I meant to ask you, why is it that you write in the middle of the night?"

"My mind is clearer."

"I see."

"As I was saying, I'll be sitting right here in my office, struggling to squeeze out the next sentence, and then I'll hear your key in the lock. I won't get up, you won't even have to come say h.e.l.lo. But I'll hear you walking around downstairs, fixing yourself a bite to eat in the kitchen, taking a book down from the shelf. Maybe I'll even be able to hear you turning pages. And as I write I'll be imagining you as my ideal reader. The words I put on the page, they'll all be directed at you. Forever ago, a writing teacher told me you have to always think of the audience. I never could figure out what he meant. How does anyone know who his audience will be?"

"I'm probably not it," I said.

"Pardon?"

"Your audience."

"You could be."

"I prefer fiction, remember?"

"You're in luck. My novel is really coming along. Who knows, maybe you'll like it." Thorpe gestured toward the desk chair. "Have a seat." He was perched on some sort of ergonomic stool, clad in a beat-up pair of flannel pajamas.

"That doesn't look very comfortable," I said, eyeing the stool.

"I got it on the recommendation of my life coach. Align the body before you can align your mind, that sort of thing."

I remained standing and surveyed the desk, which was covered with papers and Post-it notes. Beside the keyboard was a white sheet of paper bearing a pencil sketch. I picked it up and looked more closely. The sketch was of my old house. There, on the second-floor window frame, was the little Victorian birdhouse.

"Look," Thorpe said. "What do I have to do to make it up to you? What do I have to say to make it so we can be friends again?"

He smelled like cigarettes. I almost felt sorry for him. I knew how hard he'd tried to break the habit. What if my doctor told me I had to give up coffee? I was pretty sure I couldn't do it.

"You were wrong about Billy Boudreaux," I said.

Thorpe raised an eyebrow. Everything about him looked bushier tonight. His hair, his beard, the eyebrows. He'd put on weight since I'd last seen him. There was something else about his hair, too. There were tiny follicle dots along the hairline where he used to be bald.

He smiled slightly. "How so?"

"He would have made a good character."

"You met him?" Thorpe looked a bit surprised.

"Yes." I didn't tell Thorpe that it had been over twenty years ago when we met. Or that he had since committed suicide. I didn't really want to tell him anything. I could see his book t.i.tle now: Music and Madness: The Unauthorized Biography of Billy Boudreaux. When I drove to Thorpe's house, intending to confront him about the extent of his lies, I wasn't sure what I would say when I got there. But now I understood something of my own motivation that hadn't been clear to me before. I was here to prove to myself that, for once, I had the upper hand. I wasn't going to tell Thorpe anything-who killed Lila, or why. He didn't deserve to have that information handed to him. He could read about it just like everyone else. I knew just who could handle the story.

"You really should have included him," I said. "Steve Strachman, too. And the janitor, James Wheeler. Don Carroll, all of them."

"Red herrings," Thorpe said, and then he smiled again, as if he was waiting for me to say something. "Red herrings, right?"

"Maybe, but any one of them, if you looked closely enough, would have been enough to build a chapter on. Earlier today, I remembered something you told me once, when we were reading Brighton Rock in cla.s.s."

"Hmmm?"

"We were talking about Pinkie, those gold crowns on the red-upholstered chairs in his hotel. Some guy raised his hand and asked why Graham Greene spent so much time on Pinkie, when he was just a minor character. And you said that, in order for a book to be really good, it's not enough to develop the major characters. The minor ones, too, have to be distinct. When readers close the book, they shouldn't just remember the protagonist and antagonist. They should remember everyone who walks across the page."

Thorpe reached up and fingered the dots on his forehead, as if he'd just remembered they were there. "I said that?"

"Because that's what life is, you said. It's not just about the major characters and the big events. It's about everyone, everything, in between."

"Yes," he said. "That sounds familiar."

"Do you still believe it?"

"I'm not sure I ever believed it. Maybe it was just something I said, a way to fill the time in cla.s.s."

"Well, I was thinking about it when I was driving over here. And while it's probably true for books, I don't think it's true for real life. Here I am, closing in on forty, and I can count on my fingers the people who have really mattered."

"Who are they?" he asked.

"Lila, of course. My parents. Peter McConnell. Henry." I paused. "You."