Six Years (8 page)

“I don’t remember the case that well,” I said. “How did it end? Did Todd’s father serve any time?”

“No. He was found innocent.”

“Oh?” I said.

“The outcome didn’t really get much press. That’s part of our process. The accusation gets page one. The retraction not so much.”

“So he was found not guilty?”

“That’s correct.”

“Big difference though between not guilty and innocent.”

“True,” Eban said, “but not in this case. During the first week of trial, it came to light that a vindictive parent made it up because Todd’s father wouldn’t let his son pitch. The lie just snowballed. But in the end Todd’s father was cleared of all charges.”

“And Todd returned to school?”

“Yes.”

“And I assume the derogatory comment had something to do with the accusations against Todd’s father?”

Eban raised an unsteady hand in mock toast. “You are correct, sir. You see, despite the new evidence, many believed, as you did, that where there was smoke there was fire. Mr. Sanderson must have done
something
. Maybe not this. But something. Especially after what happened after the trial.”

“What happened after the trial?”

He stared at his glass again. I was losing him.

“Eban?”

“I’m getting to it.”

I waited, gave him his space.

“Todd Sanderson came from a small Southern town. His father had lived there his entire life. But now, well, you could imagine. He couldn’t get a job. His friends wouldn’t talk to him. See, no one had truly believed him. You can’t unring that bell, Jacob. We teach that here, don’t we? Only one person still believed in him.”

“Todd,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Weren’t there other family members? Todd’s mother?”

“Long dead.”

“So what happened?”

“His father was crushed, of course, but he insisted that Todd go back to school. Did you read Todd’s transcript?”

“Yes.”

“Then you know already. Todd was a magnificent student, one of the finest ever to attend Lanford. He had a bright future. His father saw that too. But Todd wouldn’t come back. He saw it as abandoning his father in his hour of most need. Todd flat-out refused to return until the situation at home got better. But of course, as we know all too well, situations like this don’t get better. So Todd’s father did the only thing he thought he could to end his own pain and free his son to continue his studies.”

Our eyes met. His were wet now.

“Oh no,” I said.

“Oh yes.”

“How . . . ?”

“His father broke into the school where he used to work and shot himself in the head. See, he didn’t want his son to be the one who found his body.”

Chap
ter 12

T
hree weeks before Natalie dumped me,
when we were madly in love, we sneaked down from our retreats in Kraftboro to visit Lanford. “I want to see this place that means so much to you,” she said.

I remember the way her eyes lit up when she walked with me on that campus. We held hands. Natalie wore a big straw hat, which was both endearing and odd, and sunglasses. She looked a bit like a movie star in disguise.

“When you were a student here,” she asked me, “where did you take the hot coeds?”

“Straight to bed.”

Natalie playfully slapped my arm. “I’m serious. And hungry.”

So we headed to Judie’s Restaurant on Main Avenue. Judie made a wonderful popover and apple butter. Natalie loved it. I watched her take it all in—the artwork, the décor, the young waitstaff, the menu, everything. “So this is where you took your ladies?”

“The classy ones,” I said.

“Wait, where did you take the, uh, classless ones?”

“Barsolotti’s. The dive bar next door.” I smiled.

“What?”

“We used to play condom roulette.”

“Excuse me?”

“Not with girls. I was kidding about that. I’d go there with friends. There was a condom dispenser in the men’s room.”

“A condom dispenser?”

“Yep.”

“Like a condom vending machine.”

“Exactly,” I said.

Natalie nodded. “Classy.”

“I know, right?”

“So what are the rules of condom roulette?”

“It’s silly.”

“Oh, you’re not getting off that easy. I want to hear.”

There was that smile that knocked me back a step.

“Okay,” I said. “You play with four guys . . . this is so stupid.”

“Please? I love it. Come on. You play with four guys . . .” She gestured for me to continue.

“The condoms come in four colors,” I explained. “Midnight Black, Cherry Red, Lemon Yellow, Orange Orange.”

“You’re making up those last two.”

“Something like that. The point is, they came in four colors, but you never knew which one you’d get. So see, we’d each put three bucks in the pot and choose a color. Then one of us would go to the dispenser and bring back the wrapped condom. Again, you didn’t know the color until you actually open the wrapper. Someone would do a drumroll. Another guy would do the play-by-play like it was an Olympic event. Finally, the package was opened, and whoever picked the right color got the money.”

“Oh, that’s too awesome.”

“Yeah, well,” I said. “Of course, the winner had to buy the next pitcher of beer, so there wasn’t much of a financial windfall. Eventually Barsy—that’s the guy who owned the place—made it a full-fledged game with rules and league play and a leader board.”

She took my hand. “Could we play?”

“What, now? No.”

“Please.”

“No way.”

“After the game,” Natalie whispered, giving me a look that singed my eyebrows, “we could use the condom.”

“I call Midnight Black,” I said.

She laughed. I could still hear that sound as I entered Judie’s, as if her laugh were still here, still echoing, still mocking me. I hadn’t been back to Judie’s in, well, six years. I looked over at the table where we’d sat. It was empty.

“Jake?”

I spun toward my right. Shanta Newlin sat at a quiet table over by the bay windows. She didn’t wave or nod. Her body language, usually fully loaded with confidence, seemed all wrong. I sat across from her. She barely looked up.

“Hi,” I said.

Still staring at the table, Shanta said, “Tell me the whole story, Jake.”

“Why? What’s going on?”

Her eyes came up, pinning me interrogator-style. I could see the FBI agent now. “Is she really an old girlfriend?”

“What? Yes, of course.”

“And why do you all of a sudden want to find her?”

I hesitated.

“Jake?”

The e-mail came back to me:

You made a promise.

“I asked you a favor,” I said.

“I know.”

“So you can either let me know what you found or we can just forget it. I’m not sure I get why you need to know more.”

The young waitress—Judie always hired college kids—gave us menus and asked if we would like drinks. We both ordered iced teas. When she left, Shanta turned the hard eyes back on me.

“I’m trying to help you, Jake.”

“Maybe we should just let it go.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“No,” I said. “She asked me to leave her alone. I should probably have listened.”

“When?”

“When what?”

“When did she ask you to leave her alone?” Shanta asked.

“What difference does that make?”

“Just tell me, okay? It could be important.”

“How?” Then, figuring, what was the harm, I added: “Six years ago.”

“You said that you were in love with her.”

“Yes.”

“So was this when you broke up?”

I shook my head. “It was at her wedding to another man.”

That made her blink. My words diffused the hard glare, at least for the moment. “Just so I’m clear on this, you went to her wedding—were you still in love with her? Dumb question. Of course you were. You still are. So you went to her wedding, and while you were there, Natalie told you to leave her alone?”

“Something like that, yes.”

“That must have been some scene.”

“It wasn’t like it sounds. We had just broken up. She ended up choosing another guy over me. An old boyfriend. They got married a few days later.” I tried to shrug it off. “It happens.”

“You think?” Shanta said with the confused head tilt of a freshman. “Go on.”

“Go on with what? I went to the wedding. Natalie asked me to accept her choice and leave them be. I said I would.”

“I see. Have you had any contact with her during the past six years?”

“No.”

“None at all?”

I realized now how good Shanta was at this. I had taken the position that I wouldn’t talk, and now you pretty much couldn’t get me to shut up. “Right, none at all.”

“And you’re sure her name is Natalie Avery?”

“That’s not the kind of thing you make a mistake about. Enough questions. What did you find, Shanta?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

The waitress came back with a big smile and our iced teas. “Here are some of Judie’s fresh popovers.” Her voice was the happy song of youth. The popover scent rose from the table and took me back to my last visit here, yep, six years ago.

“Any questions about the menu?” the perky waitress asked.

I couldn’t answer.

“Jake?” Shanta said.

I swallowed. “No questions.”

Shanta ordered a grilled portobello mushroom sandwich. I went with the turkey BLT on rye. When the waitress was gone, I leaned across the table. “What do you mean you found nothing?”

“What part of ‘nothing’ is confusing you, Jake? I found nothing on your ex—zippo,
nada
, zilch. No address, no tax returns, no bank account, no credit card statement. Not-a-thing, no thing, nothing. There is not one shred of evidence that your Natalie Avery even exists anymore.”

I tried to take this in.

Shanta put her hands on the table. “Do you know how hard it is to live off the grid like that?”

“Not really, no.”

“In this day and age with computers and all the technology? It’s pretty close to impossible.”

“Maybe there’s a reasonable explanation,” I said.

“Like what?”

“Maybe she moved overseas.”

“Then there’s no record of her going there. No passport issued. No entry or exit in the computer. Like I said before—”

“Nothing,” I finished for her.

Shanta nodded.

“She’s a person, Shanta. She exists.”

“Well, she existed. Six years ago. That was the last time we had an address on her. She has a sister named Julie Pottham. Her mother, Sylvia Avery, is in a nursing home. Do you know all this?”

“Yes.”

“Who did she marry?”

Should I answer that one? I saw little harm. “Todd Sanderson.”

She jotted the name down. “And why did you want to look her up now?”

You made a promise.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I should just let it be.”

“Are you serious?”

“I am. It was a whim. I mean, it’s been six years. She married another man and made me promise to leave her alone. So what exactly am I looking for anyway?”

“But that’s what makes me curious, Jake.”

“What does?”

“You kept this promise for six years. Why did you suddenly break it?”

I didn’t want to answer that, and something else was starting to gnaw at me. “Why are you so interested?”

She didn’t reply.

“I asked you to look a person up. You could have just told me that you didn’t find anything. Why are you asking me all these questions about her?”

Shanta seemed taken aback. “I was just trying to help.”

“You’re not telling me something.”

“Neither are you,” Shanta said. “Why now, Jake? Why are you looking for your old love now?”

I stared down at the popover. I thought about that day in this restaurant six years ago, the way Natalie tore off small pieces of her popover, the look of concentration as she buttered it, the way she simply enjoyed everything. When we were together, even the smallest thing took on significance. Every touch brought pleasure.

You made a promise.

Even now, even after all that had happened, I couldn’t betray her. Stupid? Yep. Naive? Oh, several steps south of that. But I couldn’t do it.

“Talk to me, Jake.”

I shook my head. “No.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Who ordered turkey BLT?”

It was another waitress, this one less perky and more harried. I raised my hand.

“And the grilled portobello sandwich?”

“Wrap it for me,” Shanta said, rising. “I lost my appetite.”

Chapter 13

T
he first time I met Natalie
she was wearing sunglasses indoors. To make matters worse, it was nighttime.

I rolled my eyes, thinking it was for effect. I figured that she fancied herself an Artiste with a capital
A
. We were attending a mixer of sorts, the art colony and the writers’ retreat, sharing one another’s work. This was my first time attending, but I soon learned that it was a weekly gathering. The art was displayed in the back of Darly Wanatick’s barn. Chairs were set up for the readings.

The woman in the sunglasses—I hadn’t met her yet—sat in the last row, her arms crossed. A bearded man with dark curly hair sat next to her. I wondered whether they were together. Remember the blowhard named Lars who was writing poetry from the perspective of Hitler’s dog? He began to read. He read for a long time. I began to fidget. The woman in the sunglasses remained still.

When I could listen no longer, rude or not, I wandered toward the back of the barn and started to check out the various art on display. Most of it, well, I will be kind. I didn’t “get it.” There was an installation piece called
Breakfast in America
that featured spilled boxes of cold cereal on a kitchen table. That was it. There were boxes of Cap’n Crunch, Cap’n Crunch with Peanut Butter (one person actually muttered, “Notice there is no Cap’n Crunch with Crunch Berries—why?—what is the artist saying?”), Lucky Charms, Cocoa Puffs, Sugar Smacks, even my old favorite, Quisp. I looked at the spilled cereal coating the table. It did not speak to me, though my stomach grumbled a little.

When one person asked, “What do you think?” I was tempted to say that it needed a little milk.

As I kept walking, only one artist’s work gave me real pause. I stopped at a painting of a small cottage on top of a hill. There was a soft morning glow hitting the side—the pinkness that comes with the first light of day. I couldn’t tell you why but it choked me up. Maybe it was the dark windows, as though the cottage had once been warm but it was abandoned now. I don’t know. But I stood in front of the painting and felt lost and moved. I stepped slowly from one painting to the next. They all delivered a blow of some kind. Some made me melancholy. Some made me nostalgic, whimsical, passionate. None left me indifferent.

I will spare you the “big reveal” that the paintings were done by Natalie.

A woman was smiling at my reaction. “Do you like them?”

“Very much,” I said. “Are you the artist?”

“Heavens no. I run the bakery and coffee shop in town.” She offered me her hand. “They call me Cookie.”

I shook it. “Wait. Cookie runs a bakery?”

“Yeah, I know. Too precious, right?”

“Maybe a tad.”

“The artist is Natalie Avery. She’s right over there.”

Cookie pointed to the woman with the sunglasses.

“Oh,” I said.

“Oh what?”

With the sunglasses-indoors look, I had her pegged as the creator of
Breakfast in America
. Lars had just finished his reading. The crowd gave him a small golf-clap, but Lars, sporting an ascot, bowed as though it were a thunderous standing ovation.

Everyone quickly rose except for Natalie. The man with the beard and curly hair whispered something to her as he stood, but still she didn’t move. She stayed with her arms crossed, still lost, it seemed, in the essence of Hitler’s dog.

I approached her. She looked right through me.

“The cottage in your painting. Where is it?”

“Huh?” she said, startled. “Nowhere. What painting?”

I frowned. “Aren’t you Natalie Avery?”

“Me?” She seemed befuddled by the question. “Yeah, why?”

“The painting of the cottage. I really loved it. It . . . I don’t know. It moved me.”

“Cottage?” She sat up, took off the sunglasses, and rubbed her eyes. “Sure, right, a cottage.”

I frowned again. I was not sure what reaction I expected, but something a bit more demonstrative than this. I looked down at her. Sometimes I am not the sharpest knife in the drawer but when she rubbed her eyes again, the realization hit me.

“You were sleeping!” I said.

“What?” she said. “No.”

But she rubbed her eyes some more.

“Holy crap,” I said. “That’s why you’re wearing the sunglasses. So no one can tell.”

“Shh.”

“You were sleeping this whole time!”

“Keep it down.”

She finally looked up at me and I remembered thinking that she had a beautiful, sweet face. I would soon learn that Natalie had what I’d call a slow beauty, the kind you don’t really notice at first and then it knocks you back and grows on you and she gets more beautiful every time you see her and then you can’t believe that you ever thought that she was anything less than completely stunning. Whenever I saw her, my entire body reacted, as though it were the first time or better.

“Was I that obvious?” she asked in a whisper.

“Not at all,” I said. “I just thought you were being a pretentious ass.”

She arched an eyebrow. “What better disguise to blend in with this crowd?”

I shook my head. “And I thought you were a genius when I saw your paintings.”

“Really?” She seemed caught off guard by the compliment.

“Really.”

She cleared her throat. “And now that you see how deceptive I can be?”

“I think you’re a
diabolical
genius.”

Natalie liked that. “You can’t fault me. That Lars guy is like human Ambien. He opens his mouth, I’m out.”

“I’m Jake Fisher.”

“Natalie Avery.”

“So do you want to grab a cup of coffee, Natalie Avery? Looks like you could use one.”

She hesitated, studying my face to the point where I think I started to redden. She tucked a ringlet of black hair behind her ear and stood. She moved closer to me, and I remember thinking that she was wonderfully petite, smaller than I had imagined when she’d been sitting. She looked way up at me, and a smile slowly came to her face. It was, I must say, a great smile. “Sure, why not?”

That image of that smile held in my brain for a beat before it mercifully dissolved away.

I was out at the Library Bar with Benedict. The Library Bar was pretty much exactly that—an old, dark-wood campus library that had recently been converted into a retro-trendy drinking establishment. The owners were clever enough to change very little of the old library. The books were still on the oak shelves, sorted in alphabetical order or the Dewey Decimal System or whatever the librarians had used. The “bar” was the old circulation desk. The coasters were old card files that had been laminated. The lights were green library lamps.

The young female bartenders wore their hair in severe buns and sported fitted conservative clothes and, of course, horn-rimmed glasses. Yep, the fantasy librarian hottie. Once an hour, a loud librarian
shush
would play over the loudspeaker and the bartenders would rip off their glasses, let loose their bun, and unbutton the top of their blouse.

Cheesy but it worked.

Benedict and I were getting properly oiled. I threw my arm loosely around him and leaned in close. “You know what we should do?” I asked him.

Benedict made a face. “Sober up?”

“Ha! Good one. No, no. We should set up a rousing tournament of condom roulette. Single elimination. I’m thinking sixty-four teams. Like our own March Madness.”

“We aren’t in Barsolotti’s, Jake. This place doesn’t have a condom vending machine.”

“It doesn’t?”

“No.”

“Shame.”

“Yeah,” Benedict said. Then he whispered, “Pair of red-hot spank-worthy honeys at three o’clock.”

I was about to turn to my left, then to my right, and suddenly the concept of three o’clock made no sense to me. “Wait,” I said, “where’s my twelve o’clock again?”

Benedict sighed. “You’re facing twelve o’clock.”

“So three o’clock would be . . . ?”

“Just turn to your right, Jake.”

You may have guessed that I do not handle spirits well. This surprises people. When they see someone my size, they expect me to drink smaller folks under the table. I can’t. I hold my liquor about as well as a freshman coed at her first mixer.

“Well?”

I knew the type before my eyes even had a chance to settle on them. There sat two blondes who looked good-to-great in low Library Bar light and ordinary-to-frightful in the light of the morning sun. Benedict slid toward them and started chatting them up. Benedict could chat up a file cabinet. The two women looked past him and at me. Benedict signaled for me to join them.

Why the hell not?

You made a promise.

Damn straight I did. Thanks for the reminder. Might as well keep it and try to score me a honey, right? I weaved my way toward them.

“Ladies, meet the legendary Professor Jacob Fisher.”

“Wow,” one of the blondes said, “he’s a big boy,” and—because Benedict couldn’t help but be obvious—he winked and said, “You got no idea, sweetheart.”

I bit back the sigh, said hello, and sat. Benedict “macked” on them with pickup lines, specifically handpicked for this bar: “It’s a library so it’s perfectly okay to check you out.” “Will I be fined if I keep you out late?” The blondes loved it. I tried to join in, but I have never been great with superficial banter. Natalie’s face kept appearing. I kept pushing it away. We ordered more drinks. And more.

After a while we all stumbled to couches near the former children’s section. My head lolled back, and I may have passed out for a bit. When I woke up, one of the blondes started talking to me. I introduced myself.

“My name is Windy,” she said.

“Wendy?”

“No, Windy. With an
i
instead of an
e
.” She said this as though she had said it a million times before, which, I guessed, she had.

“Like the song?” I asked.

She looked surprised. “You know the song? You don’t look old enough.”

“‘
Everyone knows it’s Windy,
’” I sang. Then: “My dad loved the Association.”

“Wow. My dad too. That’s how I got the name.”

It turned into, surprisingly enough, a real conversation. Windy was thirty-one years old and worked as a bank teller, but she was getting her degree in pediatric nursing, her dream job, at the community college down the road. She took care of her handicapped brother.

“Alex has cerebral palsy,” Windy said, showing me the picture of her brother in a wheelchair. The boy’s face was radiant. I stared at it, as if somehow the goodness could come out of the picture and be a part of me. Windy saw it, nodded, and said in the softest voice: “He’s the light of my life.”

An hour passed. Maybe two. Windy and I chatted. During nights like these, there is always a time when you know if you are going to, ahem, close the sale (or, to stay within the library metaphors, if you are going to get your library card punched) or not. We were at that time now, and it was clear that the answer was yes.

The ladies left to powder their noses. I felt overly mellow from drink. Part of me wondered whether I’d be able to perform. Most of me didn’t really care.

“You know what I like about both of them?” Benedict pointed to a shelf of books. “They’re stacked. Get it? Library, books, stacked?”

I groaned out loud. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

“Amusing,” Benedict said. “By the way, where were you last night?”

“I didn’t tell you?”

“No.”

“I went up to Vermont,” I said. “To Natalie’s old retreat.”

He turned toward me. “Whatever for?”

It was an odd thing, but when Benedict talked after drinking too much, a hint of a British accent came through. I assumed that it was from his prep school days. The more he drank, the more pronounced the accent.

“To get answers,” I said.

“And did you get any?”

“Yep.”

“Do tell.”

“One”—I stuck a finger in the air—“no one knows who Natalie is. Two”—another finger—“no one knows who I am. Three”—you get the point with the fingers—“there is no record at the chapel Natalie ever got married. Four, the minister I saw conducting the wedding swears it never happened. Five, the lady who owned the coffee shop we used to go to and who first pointed Natalie out to me had no idea who I was and didn’t remember either Natalie or me.”

I put my hand down.

“Oh, and Natalie’s art retreat?” I said. “The Creative Recharge Colony? It’s not there and everyone swears it never existed and that it’s always been a family-run farm. In short, I think I’m losing my mind.”

Benedict turned away and started sipping his beer.

“What?” I said.

“Nothing.”

I gave him a little shove. “No, come on. What is it?”

Benedict kept his head lowered. “Six years ago, when you went up to that retreat, you were in pretty bad shape.”

“Maybe a little. So?”

“Your father had died. You felt alone. Your dissertation wasn’t going well. You were upset and on edge. You were angry about Trainor getting off with nary a slap.”

“What’s your point?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Forget it.”

“Don’t give me that. What?”

My head was really swimming now. I should have stopped several glasses ago. I remembered once when I had too much to drink my freshman year and I started walking back to my dorm. I never quite arrived. When I woke up, I was lying on top of a bush. I remembered staring up at the stars in the night sky and wondering why the ground felt so prickly. I had that sway now, like I was on a boat in a rough sea.

“Natalie,” Benedict said.

“What about her?”

He turned those glass-magnified eyes toward me. “How come I never met her?”

My vision was getting a little fuzzy. “What?”

“Natalie. How come I never met her?”

“Because we were in Vermont the whole time.”

“You never came to campus?”

“Just once. We went to Judie’s.”

“So how come you didn’t bring her by to meet me?”

I shrugged with a little too much gusto. “I don’t know. Maybe you were away?”

“I was here all that summer.”

Silence. I tried to remember. Had I tried to introduce her to Benedict?

“I’m your best friend, right?” he said.