Sudden Exposure (26 page)

“No.”

You can’t win them all. “What did she talk about?” I lifted the cup of plain black tea and forced myself to sip.

He held his cup near his mouth, breathing in the fragrant steam, then slowly, carefully, as if each movement were a project in itself, he brought it to his lips and took one quick slurp. The dogs had finished eating and lay on the floor around him; Pablo, the protective one, was stationed between his master and me. Pironnen reached down and gave each one an affectionate scratch.

I almost had to bite my lip to keep from repeating my question, embellishing it with suggestions. I took another sip of tea, using it to wash down a hair that had gotten in my mouth.

“Ellen talked about being invisible,” he said as if there had been no gap of time since I’d asked.

I looked away to cover my excitement. “Why invisible?”

“She knew I wouldn’t be frightened; I’d understand. If I could be really invisible, I would. Saves hassle.”

“You’ve gotten it pretty close.”

He nodded.

“But Ellen didn’t
choose
to become invisible, did she?”

“No. She had to. Hard, she said. Moving every three or four months, more if people are nosy. No forwarding address, ever. Friends she missed, she’d never see again. She said”—he lifted the cup and took a quicker drink—“her parents must think she died. And of course, she did.”

“You mean years ago.”

He looked up at me and nodded as if I’d gotten the point. “She lost herself in one of the moves.”

I nodded back, imagining Ellen Waller’s life, abandoning cities and friends, changing identities every couple of months, answering to a new name, ever alert so she didn’t miss that name when it was called, so she didn’t draw attention to herself. She’d have been alone in strange cities, unable even to swim if she was a swimmer, or to work out if she had belonged to a gym before; she must have known those were the places detectives on her trail would target. She’d have looked in the mirror and seen clothes that weren’t “her,” her hair a different color or an unfamiliar style. And the more she felt at home in a place, the more she clicked with a friend, the more tantalizing she found a lover, the harder it would have been to move on. She must have learned that lesson over and over. She’d come home from the kind of manual job she could get without references, with muscles she’d never given a thought to, now aching. And after a while those muscles would toughen, they’d pull more firmly on her bones, they’d alter her stance, broaden her shoulders, shift the hang of her arms. Her body would change. And whoever Ellen Waller had been would indeed have been lost in the moves.

My chest felt cold and empty. My hand stiffened on the tea mug. I don’t know that I could have moved it even if I had wanted to.

Moments passed, and then suddenly, I realized the chair slats were biting into my back, my feet were pressed against the floor, the mug was burning my fingers. “Ellen must have really trusted you to reveal herself.”

Pironnen wasn’t moving; he was watching me like a scientist observing the contents of a petri dish. I had that odd sense that he could see my thoughts—you do with some people on the edge—and that he knew I had experienced a flash of what Ellen had lived. Or in a way, what he had lived.

“Come,” he said, standing up.

I followed him through the swinging door that led from the kitchen to the entry hall. The dogs threaded between us, Nora, the setter, bounding eagerly to the front door. When Pironnen started up the stairs, Pablo, the pi dog, moved in behind, keeping me at a distance, as if giving his owner time to reconsider. I wondered how long it had been since Pironnen had taken anyone other than Jed Estler to the second floor. Nora bounded past me, kicking up dust and hair. Behind Pironnen’s back I covered my nose.

The house was a cube and the top of the staircase emerged in the middle of the south side. Across the dark wood landing was the bathroom, probably original to the house, pre-Depression. At the rear of the house, two stained oak doors stood open to two small rooms. One was a bedroom with a single bed, with the sheets and blankets pulled up over the pillow, closer to madeup than I would have guessed for Pironnen. The other must once have been an office—file cabinet, desk with phone, and now nothing else but the ubiquitous dust and hair. The floor was covered with three amoebalike dog beds. The life the rooms revealed was bare of luxuries, or interest. It was what I would have expected.

I noted all this in quick glances. Pironnen walked to the front, to the entrance to the master bedroom. The door was closed. He waited until I was beside him, stared down at me with that same wary expression, as if reassessing his decision, then he turned the knob and let the door swing open.

The room wasn’t clean—nothing could be clean here—but otherwise it looked like a normal room in a normal house. It was easily twice the size of either of the others, extending across the entire front of the house. A double bed—just box springs and mattress—held a faded red and blue plaid spread. The paperback book jackets, too, had faded, witness to the movement of the sun from season to season, year to year. Between the windows was a stereo and tape deck, and at the far end sat a Danish modern love seat, a scratched oak coffee table holding an opened envelope, a knobby black orb the size of a half dollar, and a rumpled Penn State T-shirt. It could have been the room of any guy a year or two out of college. “Your brother’s room?”

Pironnen nodded and walked over to the love seat, hung up a navy blazer that had been sprawled over a corner, and sat down.

When I hesitated, he said, “It’s not a shrine. I didn’t leave it as it was the day Dan died. That’s not the day I want to remember. You can sit here; it’s still just furniture.”

I sat next to him on the love seat. But of course, it wasn’t just any room, it
was
a shrine.

Pironnen picked up a Penn State T-shirt that Dan could have dropped on the floor there last night, or two and a half decades ago. He held it between thumb and fingers with exquisite care. Touching without touching. “I come in here to be with Dan. To bring him alive from my memory. I left the room unchanged for a year after he died. One day I realized that nothing I saw made me
feel
anything anymore. So, I put away the clothes Dan left out. I cleaned the place up. Then I tossed a sweater he wore a lot on the sofa, and changed the book he was reading. In a few days I changed things again, just like he’d have done.” He wasn’t looking at me—he was staring into infinity—but I could read in the tenseness of his face how essential it was to him that I truly understand what he was maintaining here.

“Like he might come in any moment?” I waited until he nodded, then asked, “What do you think of in here?”

“Think of? Nothing. Sometimes incidents I’d forgotten for thirty years pop up. But mostly nothing. I just feel like …”

“I know.” He meant how the house feels different when someone else is home. Even if I’m sitting cross-legged on the bed reading the paper on one of those fogged-in gray mornings, if Howard is downstairs spackling, the air is charged. And with Pironnen’s brother, the outgoing one, the one who made Karl brave enough to go to the chess tournaments—that charge would be stronger, hold longer, and its light would cut through the gray of his reclusive brother’s soul.

Pironnen continued to look out into space. “When Dan died, it was such a shock. He was the younger brother. I never thought he’d
die.
He was so good at things, made friends so easily, he bought this house as easily as he’d pick up a newspaper. Life was the Southern Pacific tracks and he was the San Francisco Zephyr. But he did die. And then”—he swallowed—“he was gone. He ceased to exist. He wasn’t married. His friends had other friends.”

I nodded. Pironnen didn’t react, but I sensed that he felt me listening.

“Dan only exists in here now. If it weren’t for this room, he wouldn’t exist at all.” Pironnen turned to face me. “The neighbors think I’ve gone wacko here alone with the dogs all these years. They cross the street when they see me. Some try to chat, and then they’re
sure
I’m crazy. I never had much chat, even when Dan was alive. He was the talker. I just followed along. Now I can’t. But I’m not crazy.”

“No.”

“Dan was twenty-five when he died. Made no mark, as they say, anywhere. If I forget him”—he looked up, his face white with intensity, hands quivering on Dan’s T-shirt—“he’ll be rubbed out, erased. Nothing left of those years but an old hermit in a dirty house with dogs.”

I wanted to contradict him, comfort him, tell him no one exhales without affecting everyone who breathes. But that was all too amorphous even for me, and any view of life and death I had would be an insult to a man who had spent the last twenty years of his life as keeper of the flame.

I waited until he dropped his gaze and shifted his legs, then said, “After Dan died, what did you do?”

“Nothing. Literally. It was like I was wrapped in rolls of cotton. I couldn’t move. Everything was awkward, hard, worthless.” A sad smile flickered and died. “They say I was depressed. Depressed is so much better than I was. I didn’t tell them that. I just filled the prescriptions I was given, took the medication home, and flushed it down the toilet.”

“But you’re not still wrapped in cotton. What happened?” Even as I spoke, I suspected the answer.

“I saw Adam’s picture in the paper.”

Adam. I smiled. “What kind of dog was he?”

“A mutt. They would have gassed him the next day.”

The door to Dan’s room was open, but the dogs hadn’t followed us in. They came from a different era in Pironnen’s life, and they seemed to know it. I sat there, feeling like I’d been transported back twenty years in time. Outside, the fog had grown dense and blocked the view from the windows. Like Pironnen had been blocked after his brother’s death. When Dan died, he died.

Or perhaps he merely ceased contributing the way he had before. I said, “You keep alive someone you loved by honoring his memory. You save animals who would be killed for no reason and you give them lives most dogs would envy. And you play a mean game of chess. You could do worse.”

He didn’t say anything, just rested his hands on the old cloth of the T-shirt.

I had thought before that I understood Jed Estler’s protectiveness. Now I realized that I’d just skimmed the surface. Being allowed into this room was like stepping into Karl Pironnen’s soul. I shrank back from it as if it were a gift I couldn’t swear to honor, and I felt a wave of fear for him. He never should have trusted
me
, never should have allowed a virtual stranger to touch his soul. Perhaps he had been so isolated that he couldn’t judge people, and so mistook the facade of interest for trustworthiness. I looked around the room and felt the same eerie sense I had felt standing before Bryn Wiley’s confessional bench. “Karl,” I said softly, “have you brought anyone else here?”

He nodded.

“Ellen?”

“Yes.”

On a hunch I said, “You don’t feel guilty about Ellen, do you?”

“No!” he snapped, flinging the T-shirt away.

I must have jumped. He stared directly at me, insisting, “They’re not the same. If I had been a normal man, Dan would have been home and I would have been at the bank like I should have been. But I never asked Ellen to take me places. She insisted, like it mattered to her.”

I made my face blank, so it wouldn’t reveal my reaction. The confessional bench was the one thing Ellen had chosen and forced into Bryn’s house. Maybe Bryn was not the intended penitent. Maybe Ellen had been quietly obsessed with making amends for something in that hidden life of hers. Was part of her penance the trips to the vet and the bank with a dusty hermit and his dogs?

“Karl,” I said, realizing the import of my question, “did you invite Ellen up here like you did with me? Or did she ask you to bring her here?”

The air seemed stiller than ever. It was almost as if the air of the past hardened around him, not permitting him to answer. “I mentioned I had Dan’s things. She asked … three times … before I let her in.”

I could almost see her genuflecting at the door and kneeling before the shrine of the room. Dan’s room. Dan who had died in the Golden State robbery. The driver of the getaway car was Mary
Something
Nash. Mary
Ellen
Nash. “And she confessed?”

His body tightened. Now the air seemed to explode with the energy Karl had spent two decades holding in. “She said she was sorry. She said they shouldn’t have picked Golden State Savings. They didn’t mean for anyone to die; they couldn’t know Dan would step wrong off the curb and crack his skull. She would never have done it if she had known he would die. She said she had regretted it every day since. There was never a day she didn’t think of Dan. She gave me this.” He picked up the dried black ball.

“What is it?”

“An orange. Dan’s. He was holding it. It flew out of his hand when he fell. She had the car door open, waiting. It landed in the car.”

“And she saved it all these years?” I said, amazed.

He nodded. I could tell the gesture seemed not at all bizarre to him. It was the only offering worthy of the shrine. Suddenly I felt the enormity of Pironnen’s loss with Ellen’s death. The only person who had shared the intensity of his obsession was dead. The chance to talk about Dan to someone who cared was snatched away. The promise of bringing Dan to life anew had been killed, shot down.

“Coming face to face with a woman involved in Dan’s death; did you want to kill her?” I asked, careful not to change the tone of my voice.

He shook his head. “Revenge is a fool’s game. I’m a chess player; I know that. I don’t want the case all over the papers again, photographers taking my picture, asking about Dan, asking about her. Every time I’d turn on the news, they’d be interviewing her. I don’t want that. What I want is what I have here.”

I knew the answer to the next question before I spoke, but I had to ask. “Did you think of turning her in? The law—”

“The law! Society! Justice? Why should I care about all that? Dan never mattered to them. The columnist back then referred to Dan as ‘just some poor schmuck in the wrong place.’ He didn’t even call him by name.”