Page 22 of Nine Lives

Together they walked to Ruth Jackson’s office.

4

Saturday, September 17, 9:48 a.m.

Jay woke up in a filthy mood, the memories of his failed audition two days earlier fresh in his mind. He felt hungover, a dull headache behind his eyes, and he counted his drinks from the night before. A few light beers at his local bar, then two—or was it three?—hefty vodka rocks back in his apartment. He’d been on Craigslist, hunting through the personals for someone he could fuck, or, preferably, fuck up. He’d even messaged for a while with some straight-up prostitute, negotiating fees. She’d stopped writing him after he asked her what it would cost for him to fuck her from behind and then punch her in the kidneys. That had been the highlight of his evening, picturing her face when she received that message, but even then, he’d been thinking about the woman at the Brentwood Country Mart who he’d followed back to her apartment in Koreatown. Maybe he really should pay her a visit. He’d been thinking that last night, and he was thinking that again this morning. He found her on Instagram and scrolled through her pictures, thinking that they looked like every other Instagram feed from every other hot piece of ass. There she was curled up with a book to show everyone how smart she was. And there she was drinking prosecco with her girlfriends at brunch. And, of course, there were about three hundred pictures of her in a bikini because that’s all she really wanted to show the world. Look at this body, and don’t you wish you could fuck it. That’s what it was all about, and he’d love to take her down a notch, or maybe two.

He put the phone down for a moment, and the dream he’d had the night before swam up briefly into his consciousness. It was a recurring dream, one he’d had for as long as he could remember. He’d killed someone and he needed to hide the body, and he was terrified of getting caught. Or else he’d already hidden the body but he knew it was going to be found. He tried hard to unpick the strands of last night’s dream, wondering who he’d killed. Was it the blonde from Brentwood? He didn’t think so. It had probably been Olivia Bauer, his high school girlfriend, the girl he’d lost his virginity to, and it wasn’t the first dream in which he’d beaten her to death and hidden her in Eel Pond, that swampy, shallow pretend lake in the shitty town in New Hampshire he’d grown up in. No, he’d had that dream before, and it was always the same; he kept trying to weigh her down under the green surface of the pond by covering her body with rocks, but she kept bobbing back up to the surface.

He’d had that dream so many times he sometimes believed it was real.

Except for teaching a spin class at the gym from eleven to noon, Jay had a free day ahead of him. He did some push-ups, made himself a smoothie, then watched some porn without allowing himself to masturbate, not even touching himself. It was painful, but kind of invigorating at the same time. When he got bored with that, he checked his phone and saw that he had a voice mail message from a number he didn’t recognize. It had been left the day before, and he assumed it was a sales call, but decided to listen to it just in case it had something to do with a job. Turned out to not be a sales call, but a Jessica Winslow from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, wanting him to call her back as soon as possible. His stomach twisted with a feeling of rage and fear. Jesus, was it that email he’d sent last night to that slut on Craigslist? That couldn’t be it. She probably heard that stuff all the time, and besides, there was no way his account could be traced back to him. Also, he just realized, he’d gotten the phone call from the FBI yesterday afternoon and he’d sent the message on Craigslist last night. He relaxed a little. Still, that wasn’t the first message of that kind he’d sent from his account. Maybe he should delete it, just in case, scrub his laptop.

He listened to the message again, trying to read her tone of voice. He couldn’t tell a thing. It was probably nothing, hopefully nothing. Either way, he decided he didn’t want to call her back. No matter what she had to say, it wasn’t something he wanted to hear. He erased the message.

5

Saturday, September 17, 2:05 p.m.

Caroline had risen late, then spent the morning grading papers, tweaking her lecture on George Eliot, and even spent half an hour memorizing a Weldon Kees poem. She made herself a grilled cheese sandwich for a late lunch, heating up some of the homemade tomato soup she’d put together at the beginning of the week. She brought the food out to her front porch, considered pouring herself a glass of wine, then decided not to.

It was warm, and slightly overcast, clouds stretched like gauze across the sky, or like a patient etherized upon the table. Estrella was on the porch with her, watching a cardinal through the screen. Fable was still outside; she’d seen him earlier stalking through the high grass of her neighbor’s wild lawn.

She’d brought her phone with her outside and looked back over the email thread with that strange guy from Texas. It had been such an odd encounter that she couldn’t shake it out of her mind. She supposed that for her students—for her contemporaries, probably, as well—having a long, flirty digital conversation was a regular occurrence, but it was new to her, and now she was consumed with thoughts of a man she’d never met. No, that wasn’t true. They had met, last night, even if it wasn’t in person. In some ways it was the most significant conversation she’d had in years, so much more interesting than her occasional flirtations with self-satisfied academics at conferences. She flipped from her emails to her internet browser and looked at the few pictures of Ethan Dart that she’d found. On a whim, she searched for videos and found one on YouTube of him alone with a guitar on a stage, singing a song called “Just Because.” It was from an event called Austin Showcase from a couple of years earlier. Ethan wore black jeans and a De La Soul T-shirt and he perched on a wooden stool while he played and sang. Caroline had limited knowledge of music, in general. She knew what she liked but didn’t necessarily seek out new acts or go to shows. Most of what she listened to were CDs she’d owned since college—girl folksingers, and string quartets, and some Icelandic ambient stuff she’d inherited after her split with Alec. But she was relieved that she liked Ethan’s song, the chorus repeating the line “Just because my boot was tapping didn’t mean I liked the song,” and she found herself unpacking that line for all its possible meanings.

As she was dipping the remainder of her sandwich into her soup, she noticed the police cruiser slowly turning into the driveway. A few random thoughts slipped through her mind: Are my parents dead? Has my cat been found on the side of the road? Have they come to question me about Ethan Dart? And that last thought made her realize they were probably there to follow up on the strange list. Two uniformed officers, one male, one female, one wide-hipped, one pigeon-toed, stepped from the cruiser and made their way to the porch.

6

Saturday, September 17, 1:18 p.m.

An Austin patrol officer, just one, came to Ethan’s apartment at roughly the same time as Caroline let the Ann Arbor police onto her porch. Officer Resendez knocked on Ethan’s door while he was asleep. He’d already been up for a cup of coffee and three over-easy eggs, but he’d been so exhausted that he’d climbed back into bed and was still napping. The three sharp raps from Officer Resendez got incorporated into Ethan’s dream, one in which he’d had to return to college in Lubbock to take one last exam in order to graduate. The raps, in his dream, were made by a large black vulture outside of one of the exam room’s windows, pecking at a plane of glass. By the time Ethan had hoisted himself from the futon on his floor, and made his way to the door, peering through the eyehole to see a clean-shaven cop, the dream was gone.

“Hey,” Ethan said to the policeman after opening the door about six inches.

“Are you Ethan Dart?”

“Uh-huh,” he said, and coughed to clear his phlegmy throat. Was he about to get arrested?

“Do you mind coming with me to the station? You’re being put under temporary protective custody. There’s a federal agent on his or her way to the station who can explain it to you.”

“Seriously? What’s going on?”

“Honestly, I have no idea, man. But I’d find some comfortable clothes to put on. You don’t know how long you’ll be in them.”

7

Saturday, September 17, 3:10 p.m.

Jack Radebaugh heard the unusually loud thump of his mail being delivered through the slot in his front door and got up from the kitchen table to go take a look. There was a package from his wife in a manila envelope. She hadn’t written a return address, but he knew her writing better than he knew his own.

He went back to the kitchen table with the thick package and slit it open using a steak knife. Inside was a stack of mail addressed to him at his old address. On the top letter was a sticky note, on which Harriet had written: Change your address!

He flipped through his mail, half of which could’ve been thrown out unopened. There were lapsed subscription notices, pleas for political donations, offers for credit cards. There was also his royalty check from his publishing house, a Christmas card from his old friend Earnest that was either very early or very, very late, and a thin white envelope, that, like the package it arrived in, had no return address. He opened it, and read a list of names, his included. He slid it on top of the pile of mail he intended on throwing out, then changed his mind, and moved it to the pile of keepers.

Three days earlier he’d received a call from a female FBI agent asking him if he’d received a list in the mail with his name on it. He’d told her that he hadn’t, but now that he’d actually received such a list, he supposed that the thing to do would be to call her back. He wondered if he’d kept her number.

He got up and refilled his coffee mug, knowing he would take only a few sips, but liking the feel of the hot mug in his hands. Fall had arrived. Jack’s favorite season anywhere, but especially in West Hartford, where he’d grown up, and where he was now living again, having bought his childhood house. It was a three-bedroom Tudor in a neighborhood of brick Tudors, each with its own fairytale profile—the steep roof, the narrow windows—and each with its own tidy front yard.

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