No One You Know (26 page)

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 shitty 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 grass 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 passed 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

T
HORPE 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 hello. 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 title 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 class.”

“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 class.”

“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.”

“Me?”

“I was barely twenty years old when I read your book,” I said. “And I believed every word of it. You wrote the story of my life before I’d had a chance to live it. You said I was directionless, but how could you have known that? I was still so young. But I thought you were so smart, I thought you knew the answers. No one had ever examined me as closely as you did, no one had ever taken as keen an interest. I figured you’d seen into my core and could make out, better than anyone else, who I was. It wasn’t very smart on my part. I know I’m as much to blame as you—or more—but I became that character.”

“I also wrote that you were smart,” Thorpe said, “and beautiful. I wrote that you were passionate.”

“I don’t remember any of that.”

“It’s there.”

“You referred to Lila as ‘the good daughter.’”

“Yes, but I didn’t call you the bad daughter.”

“You didn’t have to.”

Thorpe glanced at a clock on the wall, then turned away from me and looked out the window. I followed his gaze. Moments later, someone moved in front of the window of my old bedroom. The shade went down, the light went off.

Thorpe got up and flipped the switch on the wall, flooding his office with light.

“Sorry,” he said, looking back toward me.

“What?”

“She lowers the shade and turns off the light at precisely this time every night. Twelve forty-five. I could set my clock by her. Immediately thereafter I switch on my light. It’s this game I play. I like to think she notices my light going on—as if we’ve choreographed it, a silent form of communication. At five minutes past seven every morning, she opens the shade. Except Sunday. Sunday she pulls up the shade at six-thirty, emerges from the front door at seven-fifteen, and walks down the hill to St. Paul’s. Coming and going during the week, she always looks very stylish—sleek black dresses, black boots, elegant scarves. But on Sunday, on her way to Mass, she wears this ill-fitting yellow coat. Every week without exception, no matter the weather.”

“Maybe the church is cold,” I said.

“It is.”

“You followed her there?”

“It’s a church. All souls welcome, right? I was just curious. She lives alone, and I had this idea that she would be alone at Mass, too. But she isn’t. She meets a fellow there, a guy with a limp, and they sit together in the back row.”

“What else have you uncovered about her? Date of birth? Favorite color? Her first heartbreak?”

“That’s the thing,” he said. “I don’t have to. She’s the subject of my novel. I get to make all that stuff up.”

“Let’s say she reads the book one day,” I said.

“That’s quite a leap of faith, isn’t it? I don’t even know if I can publish it. Maybe no one wants a novel from a writer of true crime books, especially a love story.”

“It’s a love story?”

“Yes. I’m tired of blood. I wanted to write about something beautiful. Something I’ve experienced. All these books about murder—I’m an outsider, not a participant.”

“What about
Second Time’s a Charm
? That was a love story.”

“That book was as much a farce as my marriage. No, this one is about true love. Not sexual love, something deeper. The kind of love that exists even when it isn’t returned. The kind of love that can keep on going for a lifetime, with no reciprocation. Tragic love, if you will.”

“Some would call that obsession, not love.”

His left eye twitched. It was just the tiniest movement, but I knew I had gotten to him. For once, my words were the ones that stung. I was surprised to discover that I felt no satisfaction. I would have liked to take it back. Maybe that’s what makes books so dangerous; the record is permanent, indelible.

“The woman who lives in your old house,” Thorpe said. “I’ve seen her playing the piano, hosting dinner parties, going to church, but I’ve never once seen her read. If I am able to publish this novel, it may come and go without fanfare. But even if it magically jumps all the hurdles and becomes a hit, I’d say the chances of her reading it are very slim.”

“For the sake of argument, what if she does? Will she recognize herself?”

Thorpe turned to me, hands in his pockets. He sat on his little stool again. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you. I’ve been looking for the perfect opportunity to stick it in conversation, but it hasn’t really come up.”

I couldn’t imagine what sort of shoe he’d drop now. It occurred to me that I was ready for all of this to be over. When I walked out his door, I was certain I’d never come back. From now on, new chapters, new plot, my story.

“There’s this guy out in L.A.,” Thorpe said, “Wade Williams. He was just a college kid when he first read the book, but now he’s this hotshot Hollywood producer. He wants to do a film adaptation of Lila’s story.”

I knew what was coming. In literature, characters have a habit of undergoing major transformations by the final chapter. But in reality, most people don’t change. You can throw anything at them, and they will remain, in every way that really matters, the same. I turned to go.

“Wait,” Thorpe said, putting a hand on my arm. “It’s been a dream of mine, ever since I started writing, to see one of my books make it to the big screen.”

I was already at the door to the office, my back to him. There was a weird smell in the hallway—those vanilla candles again.

“I was all set to make the deal,” Thorpe said, “but then you came along. And I told him no.”

I stopped, just stood there for a moment. Then I turned to him. I needed to see his face, to know if he was telling the truth.

“For what it’s worth,” he said, “I just want you to know the movie isn’t going to happen. And I’m not going to be talking about the book anymore. It’s what everyone wants to talk about when I do events—always that one, never the others. For the longest time, my ego has been living off that book. But I want you to know I’m finished with that.”

I was leaning against the door frame. There was a crack on the wall across from me, stretching in a crooked diagonal from the ceiling, halfway down the wall, ending somewhere behind the desk. Every building in the city had them. The house I grew up in had them. Every time an earthquake hit, my mother would do a walk-through, looking for new telltale lines in the walls and floors. As a kid I’d been certain that one day, we’d get a crack so big the house couldn’t keep standing; it would just fall apart.

“Why?” I asked Thorpe.

“When I wrote that book, I didn’t mean to hurt you. I had tunnel vision. All I could see was my opportunity, my way out of teaching and into this thing that I wanted so much I could taste it. I wanted so desperately to be a writer, I forgot about everything else. So I guess this is my way of saying I’m sorry. Granted, it may be too late. But I mean it, Ellie. I’m sorry. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

“Thank you.”

He was looking at me, as if there was more he wanted to say. I was grateful to him for not saying it.

He walked me downstairs. Above the mantel was the Munkácsi photograph he’d told me about before—two men on a dark street, locked in battle, their arms wrapped around one another. The photograph was violent, yet somehow beautiful, full of life.

In the entryway, something was different—the silence. In the dim streetlight that shone through the front window I could see that the fountain was empty, it had been scrubbed clean. Thorpe opened the door for me. Just as I stepped outside, he took my hand in his, pulled me toward him. I didn’t resist. I let him hug me, and for a second or two I hugged him back.