I hadn’t rehearsed any of this, but when I’d said it, I felt proud. It meant something profound, or sounded like it might—which is plenty good enough when you’re eighteen.
Fisher looked at the ground for a minute and then seemed to nod faintly. “Thanks.”
I nodded back, all out of words, and went thudding down the track to hurl my spear. Maybe I was showing off, hoping to impress the Gary Fisher of eight months before. Either way I pulled my arm over far too fast, reopened an old split on the tip of my middle finger, and wound up not making the last meet after all.
The end of school came and went. Like everyone else, I was too busy rushing through celebrated rites of passage to pay much attention to people I didn’t really know. Tests, dances, everything hurried as our childhoods started to run out of gas. Then—bang: out into the real world, which has a way of feeling like that supertest you never got around to studying for. It still feels that way to me sometimes. I don’t think I heard Fisher’s name mentioned once during the summer, and then I left town to go to college. I thought about him every now and then over the next couple years, but eventually he dropped out of my head along with all the other things that had no relevance to my life.
And so I was not really prepared for the experience of meeting him again, nearly twenty years later, when he turned up at the door of my house and started talking as if no time had passed at all.
I was at my desk. I was trying to work, though a time-management study would probably have suggested that my job consisted of staring out the window, with only occasional and apparently random glances at a computer screen. The house was very quiet, and when the phone rang, it jerked me back in my chair.
I reached out, surprised that Amy was calling the landline rather than my cell, but not thinking much more about it than that. Being on the phone to my wife meant a break from work. Then I could make more coffee. Go have a cigarette on the deck. Time would pass. Tomorrow would come.
“Hey, babe,” I said. “How stands the corporate struggle?”
“Is this Jack? Jack Whalen?”
It was a man’s voice. “Yes,” I said, sitting up and paying more attention. “Who’s this?”
“Hang on to your hat, my friend. It’s Gary Fisher.”
The name sent up a flag right away, but it took another second to haul it back through the years. Names from the past are like streets you haven’t driven in a while. You have to remember where they go.
“You still there?”
“Yes,” I said. “Just surprised. Gary Fisher? Really?”
“It’s my name,” the guy said, and laughed. “I wouldn’t lie about something like that.”
“I guess not,” I said. I had question marks right across the dial. “How did you get my number?”
“A contact in L.A. I tried calling last night.”
“Right,” I said, remembering a couple of hang-ups on the machine. “You didn’t leave a message.”
“Thought it might come across kind of weird, getting in touch after nearly twenty years.”
“A little,” I admitted. I found it hard to imagine that Fisher and I had anything to discuss unless he was running the class reunion, which seemed unlikely in the extreme. “So what can I do for you, Gary?”
“It’s more what I might be able to do for you,” he said. “Or maybe both of us. Look—where is it you live, exactly? I’m in Seattle for a few days. Thought it might be cool to meet up, talk about old times.”
“Place called Birch Crossing. Hour and a half inland. Plus, my wife’s got the car,” I added. Amy has claimed that if you could get enough unsociable people together in a room to vote, they’d make me their king. She’s probably right. Since my book came out, I’d been contacted by a few other people from the past, though none as far back as Fisher. I hadn’t bothered to reply to their e-mails, forwarded via the publisher. Okay, so we used to know each other. What’s your point?
“I’ve got a day to kill,” Fished persisted. “Had a string of meetings canceled.”
“You don’t want to just tell me on the phone?”
“Would be a long call. Seriously, you’d be doing me a favor, Jack. I’m going nuts in this hotel, and if I walk round Pike Place Market one more time, I’m going to wind up with a big dead fish I don’t need.”
I thought about it. Curiosity struck a deal with the desire not to work, the terms brokered by a small part of my soul for which—absurdly—Gary Fisher’s name evidently still held something of a charge.
“Well, okay,” I said. “Why not?”
He arrived a little after two. I’d achieved nothing in the meantime. Even a call to Amy’s cell phone for a hey-how-are-you had dead-ended in her answering ser vice. I was becalmed in the kitchen thinking vaguely about lunch when I heard someone pulling into the drive.
I walked up the polished wood steps and opened the front door to see a black Lexus where our SUV usually sat—a vehicle that was currently in Seattle, with my wife. The car door opened and some mid-thirties guy got out. He came crunching over the gravel.
“Jack Whalen,” he said, breath clouding around his face. “So you grew up. How did that happen?”
“Beats me,” I said. “Did everything I could to avoid it.”
I made coffee, and we took it down into the living room. He looked around for a few moments, checking out the view of the wooded valley through the big plate-glass windows, then turned to me.
“So,” he said, “still got that good throwing arm?”
“Don’t know,” I said. “Don’t get much occasion to throw stuff these days.”
“You should. It’s very liberating. I try to throw something at least once a week.”
He grinned, and for a moment he looked pretty much how I remembered him, albeit better dressed. He reached a hand across the coffee table. I shook it.
“Looking good, Jack.”
“You, too.”
He was. You can tell men in good condition just from how they sit in a chair. There’s a confidence in their poise, a sense that sitting is not a relief but merely one of the many positions in which their body is at ease. Gary looked trim and fit. His hair was well cut and not gray, and he had the skin that healthy eating and nonsmoking deliver to those with the patience to endure that type of lifestyle. His face had matured into that of a youthful senator from somewhere unimportant, the kind who might have a shot at vice president someday, and his eyes were clear and blue. The only thing I had over him was that the lines around my mouth and eyes were less pronounced, which surprised me.
He was silent for a few moments, undoubtedly making a similar assessment. Meeting a contemporary after a long time personifies the passage of time in a serious and irrevocable way.
“I read your book,” he said, confirming what I’d suspected.
“So you’re the one.”
“Really? Didn’t do so well? I’m surprised.”
“It did okay,” I admitted. “Better than. Problem is, I’m not sure there’s another.”
He shrugged. “Everyone thinks you’ve got to do things over and over. Nail your colors to the mast, make it who you are. Maybe one was all you had.”
“Could be.”
“You couldn’t go back to the police force?” He saw the way I looked at him. “You thank the LAPD in the acknowledgments, Jack.”
Slightly against my will, I smiled back. Fisher still had that effect. “No. I’m done there. So how do you earn a buck these days?”
“Corporate law. I’m a partner in a firm back east.”
Him being an attorney figured, but it didn’t give me a lot to work with. We knocked sentences back and forth for a little while, mentioning people and places we’d once known, but it didn’t catch fire. It’s one thing if you’ve kept in touch over the years, lit beacons to steer you across the seas of time. Otherwise it seems strange, being confronted with this impostor who happens to have the same name as a kid you once knew. Though Fisher had referred to old times, we didn’t really have any, unless pounding around the same track counted, or a shared ability to remember the menu at Radical Bob’s. A lot had happened to me since then, probably to him, too. It was evident that neither of us counted classmates as friends or retained ties to the town where we’d grown up. The kids we’d once been now seemed imaginary, a genesis myth to explain how we’d used up our first twenty years.
“So,” I said, swallowing the rest of my coffee, “what did you want to talk to me about?”
He smiled. “You’re done with the small talk?”
“Never really been a core skill.”
“I remember. What makes you think I’ve got something to say?”
“You said you did. Plus, until you got my new number, you evidently thought I still lived in L.A. That’s not a couple hours’ drive from Seattle. So you started looking for me for some other reason.”
He nodded, as if pleased. “How’d you find this place anyway? Birch Crossing? Is it even on maps?”
“Amy did. We’d talked about getting out of L.A. I had, at least. She got this new job. It meant we could basically be anywhere as long as she could get to an airport once in a while. She found this place online or somewhere, came and checked it out. I took her word for it.”
“Liking it?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Kind of a change from Los Angeles, though.”
“That was partly the point.”
“Any kids?”
“No.”
“I got a couple. Five and two years old. You should try it. They change your life, dude.”
“So I hear. Where are you based these days?”
“Evanston. Though I work in downtown Chicago. Which brings me to it, I guess.”
He stared at his hands for a moment, and then started talking in earnest.
“Here’s what I know,” he said. “Three weeks ago two people were murdered in Seattle. A woman and her son, killed in their own home. The police were called after a neighbor noticed smoke and came outside to see flames in the house. When the police get in, they find Gina Anderson, thirty-seven, lying in the living room. Someone had dislocated her jaw and broken her neck. On the other side of the room was Joshua Anderson. He’d been shot in the head and then set on fire. According to the fire department, that wasn’t what burned the house, though: The flames had only just reached that room when they arrived. The main blaze had been set in the basement, where the woman’s husband, Bill Anderson, had a workshop. From the debris it looked like someone had trashed the place, emptied out a bunch of filing cabinets full of notes and papers, and put a match to it all. I don’t know how well you know Seattle, but this is up in the Broadway area, overlooking downtown. The houses are close to each other, bungalows, two-story, mainly wooden construction. If the fire had really gotten going, it wouldn’t have taken much to jump to the ones around it and wipe out the whole block.”
“So where’s the husband?” I asked.
“No one knows. In the early part of the evening, he was out with two male friends. He’s a lecturer at the community college, about a half mile away. They have a semiregular night out, every six weeks. These guys confirm that Anderson was with them until a quarter after ten. They split up outside a bar, went their separate ways. Nobody’s seen Anderson since.”
“How are the police handling it?”
“Nobody saw anyone come or go from the house during the evening. The prevailing assumption is Anderson is the suspect, and they’re not looking anywhere else. Problem is working out why he’d do this. His colleagues say he seemed distracted, and they and others claim he’d been that way for a few weeks, maybe a month or more. But no one’s got anything on problems he might have had, there’s no talk of another woman or anything along those lines. Lecturers don’t make a whole lot of cash, and Gina Anderson wasn’t earning, but there’s no evidence of a drastic need for money. There’s a life insurance policy on the wife, but it’s hardly worth getting out of bed for, never mind killing someone.”
“The husband did it,” I said. “They always do. Except when it’s the wives.”
Fisher shook his head. “I don’t think so. According to the neighbors, everything was fine. Their son liked his music a little loud, but otherwise all was good. No arguments, no atmosphere.”
“Bad families are like the minds of functioning alcoholics. You have to live inside to have the first clue what’s going on.”
“So how do you read it?”
“Could be one of any number of scenarios. Maybe Bill was laying into Gina that night over something you and I will never understand. Son hears the noise, comes down, yells at Dad to stop. Dad won’t. Son’s been seeing this all his life, tonight he’s not taking it anymore. He goes to the closet and gets his father’s gun. Comes back and says he means it—stop beating up on Mom. They fight, Dad grabs hold of the gun, or it goes off accidentally, whatever. Son gets shot. Wife’s screaming the place down, his son’s lying on the floor, Anderson knows he’s not walking away from this. So he sets a fire in the part of the house that’s known to be his domain to make it look like an intruder, then makes sure there’s no witnesses to tell the story another way. Right now he’s on the other side of the country and drunk and practically out of his mind with remorse, or else halfway to convincing himself they brought it on themselves. He’ll either commit suicide within the week or get caught in eighteen months living quietly with a waitress in North Carolina.”
Fisher was silent for a moment. “That works, I guess,” he said. “But I don’t believe it. Three reasons. First is that Anderson is the nerds’ poster nerd, a hundred and twenty pounds soaking wet. He doesn’t present as someone who could physically dominate two other people.”
“Body weight is irrelevant,” I said. “Domination is mental. Always.”
“Which also doesn’t sound like Anderson, but I’ll let that pass. The second reason is there’s a witness who claims to have seen someone who looked like Anderson entering the street at around twenty to eleven. No one’s paying much attention to this woman, because she’s old and nuts and loaded to her back teeth with lithium, but she claims she saw him get far enough down the road to see his house, then turn and run away.”
“Not someone you’re going to put on the stand,” I said. “And even if she did see him, it could be Anderson setting up an alibi. What else you got?”