“Lots of young people continue to see their pediatric physicians into their twenties. The important thing was for Babes to find the right doctor.”
“It was important for Chelsea to go to a good school, too. It was important for us to give her and Ryan a decent wedding. It was important to take a family vacation every now and then. But there wasn’t ten cents left for any of those things. I run a stinking hardware store, not a bank.”
Rachel was still peering through the crack in the doorway, then looked at Paul. “A family does what it has to do.”
“Yes, I agree. But you have always
over
done it. Do you remember those business cards you printed up to hand out to people in restaurants? ‘My son has an autism-related disorder. Thank you for your patience.’ People thought you were nuts.”
“I was just ahead of the times. I’ll have you know that some of the top experts recommend that parents have a card like that handy.”
“Yes, to pass out
after
your child has an embarrassing meltdown in a public place. Not to hand out to everyone in the restaurant as you walk in. I swear, sometimes it seems like you
prefer
having a son with AS.”
Rachel let the door swing closed. She turned slowly to face her husband, her expression stone cold. “You wish it had been him, don’t you.”
“What?”
“Don’t you think Babes can sense it? If you could ask God to rewrite history, you’d have Him take Babes instead of Chelsea.”
“Oh, please,” he said, his voice rising. “Don’t bring God into this.”
“Mom!” Babes shouted from the room.
“See, now you’ve upset him.”
“Me? What did
I
do?”
Rachel shoved the door open and dashed into the living room. Paul started after her, but then he stopped. He’d had enough of this.
He paced angrily across the kitchen floor, not sure how to vent. That was a cruel thing for Rachel to have said—to suggest that he’d wish his own son into the grave. Wishing was for fools, anyway, at least when the wish was for something that could never come true. In that respect, Paul Townsend was as foolish as the next guy.
He wished that Babes didn’t have Asperger’s.
And more than anything, he wished that Chelsea were still alive.
Paul grabbed his coat and went out the back door for the one thing that had become the hallmark of his marriage.
Time alone.
AROUND ELEVEN-THIRTY RYAN EMERGED FROM THE BEDROOM
and went out to grab the newspaper from the front step. He thumbed through the
Herald
in the open doorway. The Boston papers apparently hadn’t picked up Emma’s press release. He walked back inside to the computer in the kitchen and checked online. The
Projo
had the story on page 1, below the theoretical fold:
NEW LIFE FOR INVESTIGATION INTO DEATH OF PAWSOX WIFE
.
Good job, Emma.
Ryan was suddenly hungry, but not just for anything. The trials of the morning had him craving Juan in a Million, an unfussy Tex-Mex joint in Austin that was famous for its award-winning breakfast tacos. The key ingredients were open to debate—corn versus flour tortillas, whole versus refried beans, bacon versus chorizo, real cheese versus processed, potatoes or none—but one thing was for certain: breakfast tacos were the de rigueur morning-after grub at the University of Texas. The aftereffects of a sleeping pill weren’t technically a hangover, but they were a pretty fair excuse for something sinfully delicious.
Ryan found one waiting for him in the refrigerator. Knowing he’d need one, Claricia had made it for him before taking Ainsley to school. Breakfast tacos weren’t even remotely Colombian cuisine, but Claricia was a fast learner and always eager to please. It was her way of letting him know that she wasn’t mad at him anymore.
God bless you, Claricia.
The phone rang as he popped his breakfast into the microwave. A quick check of the caller ID showed that his mother-in-law was not about to go away quietly. This time he answered.
“Why weren’t you on the radio this morning?” she said.
“I think I’ve got the flu.”
Ryan expected a challenge to his obvious lie, but Chelsea’s mother had more important news: “A detective came to see us.”
That seemed odd, given Emma’s sensitivity to the anniversary of Chelsea’s death last night. Sending a cop—a total stranger—the next morning didn’t seem like Emma.
“What was his name?”
“Lieutenant Keith Benjamin,” she said, clearly reading his name from a business card.
Ryan had dealt with several detectives over the years relating to the accident, but the name Benjamin didn’t ring a bell.
“What was the other guy’s name?”
“What other guy?”
“His partner.”
“He came alone,” she said.
That also seemed strange to Ryan, but only because it wasn’t the way they did it on
Law & Order
.
“I didn’t like this,” said Rachel. “Emma should have at least called one of us to say that a detective was coming.”
“You’re right. That isn’t like Emma.”
“And he was so rude. He insisted on speaking to Babes alone. Naturally, Babe’s is all upset now. Paul’s angry. This family can’t operate like this.”
“I understand. Let me give Emma a call and see what this is all about.”
“It won’t do any good. Detective Benjamin said she’s in trial all day.”
“How does he know that?”
“I don’t know. Why wouldn’t he?”
Ryan’s suspicions were growing, but he didn’t want to sound paranoid. “Hold on a second,” he said. “I’ll dial her on my cell now.”
After three rings, Emma answered.
“Emma, hi. It’s Ryan James. Did I get you at a bad time?”
“No, this is fine.”
“I thought you might be in trial.”
“No, not today. I’m waiting on a jury verdict.”
Lieutenant Benjamin clearly had bad info. “Hey, do you know anything about the detective from the Rhode Island Sheriff’s Department who visited Chelsea’s parents this morning?”
“This morning?” she said, surprise in her voice. “No.”
“I have Rachel on the phone now. She’s pretty upset.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. But this is complete news to me. The only detective work so far has been the follow up on the message that came with the flowers on Chelsea’s grave—which, by the way, Tony from Watertown denies any involvement with. But let’s stick with this for the moment. Did your mother-in-law give you the names of the detectives who came to see her?”
“That’s another weird thing. There was just one guy. Lieutenant Benjamin.”
“Benjamin?” she said. “Not anyone I know. Hold on a second, let me pull up my directory.”
Ryan waited as she scrolled down her computer screen, muttering “Benjamin, Benjamin, Benjamin” into his ear.
“Are you sure about the name?”
“Hold on,” said Ryan. He double-checked with Rachel and then got back on the line with Emma.
“Rachel tells me she’s reading straight from the business card he gave her—‘Lieutenant Keith Benjamin, Rhode Island Sheriff’s Department.’”
There was silence.
“Okay,” Emma said finally. “Here’s the thing: we don’t have a Lieutenant Benjamin.”
EMMA WAS AN HOUR CLOSER TO PAWTUCKET THAN RYAN WAS, SO
she arrived while he was still on the road.
Paul and Rachel Townsend had been married thirty years, and they still lived in the brownstone flat that Chelsea had grown up in. They were wearing sweaters—the chill in the air was a reminder that the official start of autumn was only days away—and were seated in patio chairs outside on the covered front porch. Babes was off by himself at a small round table in the corner of the porch. An open newspaper was spread out before him. His elbows were on the table, and his hands were in his hair, as if he were trying to pull the thoughts out of his head. Babes read his newspaper the way Emma studied her legal research. He didn’t look up, didn’t move a muscle as Paul and Rachel rose to greet Emma.
Emma said, “Sorry to pull you out of your own house. A forensic team will be here shortly. We didn’t want you walking around touching things, possibly destroying fingerprints. I’m determined to find out who this impostor Lieutenant Benjamin was.”
“This is really scary,” said Rachel.
Paul took her hand. “It’s like I told you, honey. Probably just an overly ambitious reporter looking for a story.”
Emma was about to tell him that she didn’t think so, but Paul was clearly just trying to put his wife at ease. It wasn’t working.
“I have such a bad feeling about this,” said Rachel, shaking her head.
Paul looked for another diversion.
“Babes, say hello to Ms. Carlisle,” he said.
Emma didn’t take it personally that Babes didn’t respond. She understood him better now. To see him laughing at his sister’s funeral had been a shock, but Rachel had pulled Emma aside to explain that Babes wasn’t cold and uncaring. “It’s not that Babes doesn’t feel at all,” she’d told Emma, “it’s that he feels too much. It’s confusing for him.” At first, Emma simply took Mrs. Townsend’s word for it. As the investigation wore on, Emma grew to believe that this mother was right about her son; Babes loved Chelsea with all his heart.
“Oh, never mind,” said Paul.
Rachel tried a sweeter tone. “Babes, Ms. Carlisle is here.”
No answer. Emma guessed that he truly hadn’t heard his mother, though it had nothing to do with a hearing impairment. If Babes stared at the newspaper any harder, he might burn a hole in it.
Emma said, “He’s quite the voracious reader.”
“Yes, anything sports. He loves to collect information. That’s his AS.”
Paul rose, suddenly annoyed. “I’m going to get a root beer. The good lieutenant didn’t go into the kitchen. Anybody want something?”
“Don’t go through the living room,” said Rachel.
“I’ll walk around back. Emma, something to drink?”
“No, thank you.”
“Babes, you want a soder?”
Again, no answer. Paul shook his head, climbed down the front steps, and headed around to the back of the house.
“Paul’s a little out of sorts,” said Rachel, once he was out of earshot.
“I understand. This impostor in your house has us all concerned.”
“Honestly, it started before that. Yesterday marked three years since Chelsea passed. The anniversaries don’t get any easier.”
“I’m sure that it’s very difficult for everyone.”
“But it’s even harder than you might imagine for Paul. From the day she was born, Chelsea was her daddy’s girl. That became even more true with Babes and his special needs. I had less and less time for Paul or Chelsea, which seemed to draw them closer to each other. No regrets. It’s just a fact.”
Her concern for Paul and everyone else but herself was classic caregiver syndrome. Emma couldn’t help but notice how much Rachel had aged in the three years since her daughter’s death. Some of the lines on her face seemed carved in wax.
“How is Babes holding up?”
Rachel breathed in and out, as if taken by the size of the question. “It depends on which doctor you talk to. One thinks he’s taking on aspects of obsessive compulsive disorder.”
“How so?”
“He obsesses about keeping people safe. But if you talk to other doctors, they will say it’s not OCD, that it’s perseveration of thoughts.”
“What does that mean?”
Rachel glanced across the porch at her son. He was still devouring his newspaper. No way was he listening. “He can get stuck on a certain event or situation and be unable to let go. It was really bad right after Chelsea died. Getting Babes to ride in a car was virtually impossible. He walked or took the bus everywhere. Sometimes he walked a mile out of his way just to avoid crossing certain busy streets.”
“Is that still the case?”
“It’s not as bad. But in other ways, he’s worse. I’m sure you remember how he’s totally into anagrams, right?”
“Yeah. Baseball, as I recall.”
“His anagrams are less about sports these days. They’re more about danger and violence—particularly against women.”
Emma’s gaze shifted toward Babes. He was still reading the same page of the newspaper, but his hands were out of his hair. He was squeezing a Koosh ball, one of those squishy stress relievers made of rubber.
“That looks to be the sports page he’s reading now,” said Emma.
“Baseball is still his special thing. He probably reads three or four sports sections a day. Babes says it’s important to know your enemy,” she said, with a wan smile, “so we also got him a subscription to the
New York Times
. And he never throws anything away. Like I said, he reads to collect information. You should see his bedroom. Stacked floor to ceiling.”
“He saves newspapers?” said Emma.
“And magazines. Everything from the
Pawtucket Times
to
Sports Illustrated
. Paul says that one of these days the floor will collapse under all that weight.”
Emma suddenly had a thought. “Did this Lieutenant Benjamin speak to Babes?”
“As a matter of fact, he seemed determined to speak to Babes alone. Paul and his tough love for Babes—he insisted that we leave the room and let that impostor have his time alone with Babes. Poor boy is still traumatized about it.”
“What did he and Babes talk about?”
“I don’t know. I was in the kitchen with Paul, and I can’t get Babes to open up about it.”
Emma glanced in Babes’s direction. “Do you mind if I talk to him?”
Rachel bristled.
“I won’t push,” said Emma. “I’ll keep it light.”
“Well,” Rachel said tentatively, “I guess that would be okay.”
Emma crossed the porch and sat in the wire chair on the other side of the little round table from Babes. He was so into his newspaper that he didn’t notice her. She took her BlackBerry from her purse and laid it on the table beside his newspaper.
“You have one of these, Babes?”
His gaze slowly shifted from the sports page to the BlackBerry.
Emma said, “I can get the Internet on that. You want to pull up some baseball scores?”
He picked up the BlackBerry and pushed a few buttons, his focus now on the device. “Can I get the
Times
article I’m reading?” he asked.
“Absolutely. What’s it about?”
His posture straightened, his eyes brightened. He was suddenly engaged; they were talking about what he wanted to talk about. “The San Diego Padres are in New York to play the Mets this week.”
“Are you a Mets fan?”
“Heavens, no.”
Heavens, no
, thought Emma. She had forgotten how stiff and formal Babes’s speech could be.
Babes continued, “The article is of particular interest to me, however, because it is about former Boston Red Sox catcher Josh Bard, who was a career .240 hitter with the Red Sox and has batted an astonishing .338 in 231 at bats since being traded to the National League Padres.”
“I see,” said Emma. It was precisely the kind of statistical detail that would captivate Babes, recited exactly the way he’d read it and committed it to memory. He continued to summarize the article in language more suitable for the printed word, spouting more of a monologue than a conversation. Emma pretended to be interested, but then something really did catch her attention.
In the masthead of Section A, which Babes had set aside, each of the printed letters in the words
The New York Times
was crossed out in pen and rearranged into “They strike women.”
“That’s an interesting anagram,” said Emma, remembering Rachel’s earlier comment about the change in Babe’s anagrams.
“Oh. Just something I came up with.”
Emma noticed another anagram in the Sports section—this one in the body of the lead article. “What’s that one say?”
“Nothing, really.”
“Can I see?”
He shrugged, seemingly reluctant to share. But he didn’t physically stop Emma from sliding the paper toward her. In paragraph two of the article about the Padres and Mets, former Boston Red Sox “catcher Jason Bard” was circled in ink with “Crash hard object” written in the margin next to it.
“That’s a rather stupid one, actually,” said Babes.
Emma was still impressed. Anagrams were not a skill she possessed.
“If I really thought about it,” Babes said, “I’m sure I could come up with something better.”
He took the newspaper back from her, clicked his pen, and turned his laserlike stare back to the newsprint. Just like that, he was completely disengaged from their conversation and absolutely refocused on the
New York Times
.
Emma watched him work, the wheels turning in her head.
“I’m back,” said Paul, breaking the silence as he climbed the steps.
Emma rose and stepped away from Babes before Paul could sit down. “Could we talk in private?” she said to both him and Rachel.
Paul glanced toward his son, then back at Emma, as if to tell her that they already were in private. But Emma indicated she wasn’t comfortable. Paul led them down the front steps, and they followed the sidewalk to where Emma’s car was parked at the curb.
Emma said, “I was going to wait for Ryan to get here before we discussed anything important, but something just hit me, and I need to talk about it. What exactly did this Lieutenant Benjamin ask you?”
Paul answered. “He was actually very to the point with Rachel and me. He wanted to know who we thought the tipster might be.”
“And he said you have a list of people who you thought might be the tipster,” said Rachel. “He wanted to know if you had shown us that list.”
“I don’t have a list,” said Emma. “But that’s all he asked?”
“Yes,” said Paul. “To be honest, he seemed more interested in getting Babes alone and talking to him.”
“That’s what Rachel told me,” said Emma. “Which is interesting.”
“In what way?” said Rachel.
“Last night, all the Providence news stations and two in Boston ran the story about an anonymous tipster coming forward in the investigation. It’s possible that the media attention riled the tipster up, pushed him to show up here this morning pretending to be a cop.”
“But why? He should just help us.”
“That goes without saying, but here’s another possibility. It could be that the driver who caused the accident saw the report on the news and freaked. He could have hired someone to come and find out exactly how much the police know, or come here himself.”
Paul’s expression turned to disgust. “That’s a stomach-turning thought—that we were possibly sitting in our living room with the man who killed Chelsea.”
“Either way, you satisfied him rather quickly that you didn’t know anything. But something made him zero in on Babes. He needed to get Babes alone. The question is, why?”
“I can’t answer that,” said Rachel.
“I can’t either,” said Emma. “But something just came to me—it may sound screwy, but hear me out.”
“Go ahead,” said Paul.
Emma said, “We didn’t go public with this part, but you know that the tipster used a three-year-old copy of the
Pawtucket Times
to communicate with me, in code.”
“Ryan told us,” said Paul, “but we haven’t actually seen it.”
“The point is that the tipster created a coded message in an old newspaper. I find that very interesting, particularly since I just watched Babes decode words in the
New York Times
, and Rachel tells me that he has a collection of old newspapers in his room.”
“Are you saying that our son is the anonymous tipster?” said Paul.
“I would just like to ask him some questions.”
“This is crazy,” said Rachel.
“I have to agree with Rachel,” said Paul. “If you think that for three years Babes has been sitting on useful information about the driver who caused his sister’s crash, I’m afraid you’re way off base. Maybe I’m overreacting, since Rachel has already laid into me for letting Lieutenant Benjamin have Babes to himself. But this kind of interrogation you want—anything that dredges up the memory of Chelsea’s death—is too much for Babes right now.”
Rachel took a breath, trying to steady her voice and downplay her anger. “You see, Emma, people with AS often have prodigious memories, but unhappy memories are particularly vivid, and the replaying of unhappy moments in their life can persist for years and—”
“Oh, knock off the psychobabble, Rachel,” he said. “The bottom line is that Babes isn’t up for it. Just look at him, for Pete’s sake. We had to give him that Koosh ball to make him stop pulling his eyelashes out.”
“It’s a tactile release that his therapist encourages in order to keep him from engaging in socially unacceptable or destructive forms of self-stimu—”
“I said stop it, Rachel. My point is this: on his bad days, Babes is barely functional. I’m not one to coddle our boy, but I’m afraid that if you start interrogating him now, you’ll undo thousands of dollars’ worth of therapy and push him back into a world where he has
only
bad days.”
“Mom,” called Babes, “it’s getting cold out here. I want to go inside.”
“I’ll take him,” said Paul, walking back up to the porch.
Babes kept his nose in his newspaper as his father took him by the arm and led him down the front steps. He handed Emma her BlackBerry as he passed, and the men walked around to the back of the house. Emma and Rachel returned to their patio chairs to wait for Ryan.