Red 1-2-3

21

Mrs. Big Bad Wolf watched her car disappear down their little suburban side street. There was a flash of red brake lights at the corner before the vehicle disappeared into the evening. Just as it went out of sight she lifted her hand and made a small half-wave, although she knew her husband wouldn’t be looking back in her direction. She was happy to see him go and happier still that she had helped make it possible. Sighing, she stepped back inside their home, walked directly to the kitchen, and dutifully called the auto club, just as she had promised. The dispatcher told her it would be between thirty and forty-five minutes before a tow truck would arrive with someone to change the flat. She hung up the phone. In the living room the television was already playing. She could hear canned laughter and familiar sitcom voices. She put the car keys down on the kitchen countertop and was about to join the characters toiling at Dunder Mifflin or working on the Big Bang Theory when she stopped short.

Car key. Black electronic car door opener with red alarm button. House key attached to a single ring. She recognized those.

Beside them a fourth key. The key to her husband’s office.

She stared at that key. She realized that she had never before, not once, held it in her hand. In fact, she couldn’t remember ever seeing it, other than during those fleeting moments when her husband stood just outside his office. There were no other doors requiring locks in the entire house. It was, as best she knew, the only key that would open up that particular door. Perhaps he had a spare, hidden somewhere in some drawer, or taped behind a mirror, but she had never seen one and had no idea where he might have concealed it and had never hunted for it despite her constant curiosity about what exactly went on when he was inside working. She lifted her eyes from the key to the office door, looking back and forth as if following the flight of a tennis ball during a match. There was nothing special about the key-a single, silver-coated slab of metal that fit into the dead-bolt lock her husband had installed within a week after their wedding.

“I need to keep my writing space private,” he’d told her.

He had said this in an offhand, matter-of-fact manner that fifteen years earlier had seemed to make perfectly reasonable sense. That he needed total isolation to invent plots, scenes, and characters hadn’t seemed anything out of the ordinary to her, especially in the first happy weeks of marriage.

She could remember him kneeling beside the door, drill and hardware spread out on the floor beside him, a handyman of secrecy. It had not bothered her in the slightest. We all need some secrets, she’d thought during those heady first days.

Except, right at that moment, staring down at the office key, she couldn’t immediately recall any of her own that she had hidden from him. Then she told herself to stop being foolish. Of course you have secrets, she insisted. Like when you got so sick and believed you were going to die and you wouldn’t tell him how scared you were and how much pain you had. Those were secrets.

Except she knew he had always understood the truth.

But doubt crept inside her. Did he?

Of course he did, she sternly replied to her doubting half. Remember how attentive he was? Remember how concerned? Remember how he would bring flowers to the hospital and he would hold your hand and the soft, reassuring tone of voice he always used? He was sweet.

More canned laughter echoed from the living room. Uproarious. Unbridled. Enthusiastic. Irrepressible. Undoubtedly fake laughter, manufactured by a machine.

Without even internally asking herself the crucial question, she answered out loud. “You can’t. You just can’t.”

A rapid argument took place within her. It’s his private space. He’ll never know. You can’t violate his trust. What’s the harm? The two of you share everything. That’s what marriage is all about. All you’re going to do is read a little bit of the book you know he’s writing just for you. A few words, just to get a handle on it. Something to dream about while he works so hard to get it finished.

The clinching argument wasn’t about privacy or curiosity but about love and need, and her own curious obsession: I know he’d want me to read a few pages. I just know he would. In fact, I’m surprised he hasn’t read some to me already.

This was categorically untrue, and she knew on some level that she wouldn’t approach. She would not say the word liar to herself. She felt reckless and adventurous, like a child, drawn by uncontrollable fascination, peeping through a bathroom keyhole to see some adult’s naked, unsuspecting body. She was excited by the illicit nature of what she was doing, but unable to harness her desire as it mingled with the guilt of seeing something strangely forbidden.

She took the key in her hand and, shaking a little because somewhere within her she knew she was doing something incredibly wrong that she was altogether powerless to stop, went up to the office door.

The key slid effortlessly into the dead-bolt lock. The bolt slid open with a small click.

She pushed the door and stood in that transitional space between the two rooms. Light from the kitchen and living room behind her crept forward into the pitch black of the office. She told herself not to hesitate, and reached out and switched on the overhead lamp as she stepped into the room.

For a moment, she shut her eyes as light flooded into the office. Like some better-half conscience, a voice told her to stop: to shut off the lights, step back, keep her eyes closed, slam the door, lock it, and go watch television.

She felt a hot rush of danger. A benign danger that was cooled by curiosity. She told herself, Just learn a little. It will be your secret. She smiled, and opened her eyes.

The first thing she saw was a wall covered with different-sized photographs. There were lined 6-by-9 note cards in wildly bright colors-lime green, lavender, yellow-bearing dates and small, pithy observations about location and time beneath the pictures. It looked both terrifically organized and oddly haphazard at the same moment.

She stepped toward the wall. Her eyes centered on a single picture. She saw red hair.

“But that’s Doctor Jayson,” she whispered out loud.

She stepped closer, peering at another picture. More red hair.

“Jordan?” she asked, although she knew the answer.

She reached out like a blind person to touch one of the pictures. “Who are you?” she demanded of the third picture. It was a redheaded woman standing in an empty, anonymous parking lot on a summer afternoon. She could not see the woman’s face very well, as the photograph’s subject had buried it into her cupped hands.

She saw sheets of paper with the words Red One, Red Two, and Red Three and outlines of schedules: History Class, Academic Building #2, 10:30 MTWTF. She turned and saw Patients 830 to 1230 hour break. Frequent lunch spots: Ace Diner. Subway. Fresh Side Salad Store. Return at 130. More patients.

Another sheet of paper was divided into three sections. Beneath Red One was a Favorite Places list that had businesses and nightclub addresses. A similar list-though shorter-was provided for Red Two. Beneath a picture of Jordan and the identifier Red Three was a basketball schedule.

Mrs. Big Bad Wolf stepped back.

She was unsure whether she was speaking out loud or not, but the word Why? seemed to reverberate loudly through the room.

This was followed by something clear and whispered: “I don’t understand.” The photographs seemed slippery and elusive. She couldn’t see a reason for them. Not spoken out loud but ricocheting around within her was the weak rationalization: There’s got to be a simple, safe explanation.

She racked her imagination. Some clear-cut writerly vision of storytelling. Some essential part of the mystery process that she didn’t comprehend, but which made utterly perfect and totally reasonable sense to an author. He had to be using real people as models for characters. That has to be it, Mrs. Big Bad Wolf insisted. You just don’t get it. You’re not the creative sort that understands these complex things.

But the pictures seemed too explicit and far too provocative. And as she stared, she could tell each was taken from some vantage point that shouted of concealment. From behind a tree. From inside a car through an open window. From around a brick wall. From an upper window in an office building. There was not one picture that even vaguely implied that the subject knew she was being photographed.

A stalker would take these pictures. An obsessed fan or a deranged lover might create this wall of fascination. But she couldn’t find these words within her. It was more as if reason and observation had been replaced inside her by some white, burning light and crashing, screeching discordant noise.

No, no, no, Mrs. Big Bad Wolf thought. The word, repeated like some oriental mantra, calmed her a little.

She staggered back, still unsteady but trying to reassure herself with every step, and turned toward the computer. On a corner of the desk next to the printer there was a facedown stack of papers in an 8 ½-by-11 box.

It shouted novel.

Mrs. Big Bad Wolf picked up the top sheet and turned it over in her hands.

She read a single line from the top of the page: Only a fool thinks just of the ending. It’s the process of killing that incorporates true passion. I can hardly wait for that moment to arrive.

Her hand shook as she slid the page back onto the pile. For the first time in her marriage, she did not want to read more of her husband’s work. Her mind seemed to have gone into a black vacuum that refused to process any information-especially the information that was right in front of her-or to draw conclusions. There were ideas, thoughts, suppositions racing about within her shouting for attention, but she ignored all of the shrieks and cries they made.

“I don’t understand,” she said out loud. Then she was scared, as if the question would somehow scar the room.

“This just can’t be right,” she whispered. But she was unsure what right was or wasn’t.

She looked at the computer. Her fingers shook as she rolled the mouse. A prompt filled a black screen: Enter Password.

Mrs. Big Bad Wolf stepped back. A part of her insisted that she could figure out the password-Maybe it’s my name-but a louder part yelled that she didn’t want to open up the portal to the computer because she didn’t want to know what she would find there. Carefully, she shut the computer back down. This felt illicit.

Her mind was working rapidly, soaring on tangents that led her nowhere. It was a little like coming across a secret stack of pornographic images that were truly questionable. Images of children. Except these weren’t dirty, illegal pictures.

They meant something else.

She turned toward the wall of photographs, but before she could really focus again on what it amounted to, she shut her eyes. If there was something to see, she no longer wanted to see it.

The only thing she could tell herself to do was to retreat slowly, carefully, making certain that she did not disrupt anything so that there was no lingering sign of her intrusion. Step back out and everything will be as it was just a few minutes ago, she told herself. But her eyes were drawn to a large red leather-bound scrapbook that dominated a shelf of books, towering over paperback copies of her husband’s novels and popular nonfiction accounts that detailed in great degree sensational modern crimes.

The scrapbook was identical to one she had on her bureau. Hers contained wedding pictures and a copy of the invitation and the menu at the small country club where they’d had their modest reception. She suddenly recalled her husband buying the two scrapbooks in a leather goods store on their brief honeymoon. He had given her one and kept the other for himself.

Pictures of our wedding.

She was drawn to it. She reached out, and as if seized by someone else, the scrapbook fell open in front of her.

Her first glance reassured her. No, not the wedding, which would have been a relief, but collections of reviews. Of course, she insisted to herself. Why not? This made complete sense, and she could feel herself slowly exhaling.

Then she looked a little closer. Intermingled with the reviews were newspaper clippings about prominent murders.

She wanted to shrug. Another of course. Has to be research, she insisted.

But the newspaper stories seemed to be off-point. She couldn’t see the relationship between book reviews and the seemingly unconnected homicides. There has to be a connection; you just can’t see it, she told herself. There were some grisly, large-type headlines, and grainy pictures of police cars. Names and dates leapt out at her. For another moment, she shut her eyes. When she blinked them open again, she was afraid they were watering.

It was a little like staring at a picture obscured within one of those geometrically designed multicolored artworks that had been popular in the ’80s. A trompe l’oeil. There was some image that she couldn’t quite recognize, but knew was hidden there.

It had been many years since Mrs. Big Bad Wolf drove recklessly. But that was what she felt: out of control, swerving wildly, tires skidding sickeningly on wet pavement. She seized a blank note card and a pencil from her husband’s desk and rapidly wrote down the dates and locations of the newspaper clippings and the names of the murder victims that screamed from the headlines. She took the note card and slipped it inside her shirt, so that it was up against her skin. It felt clammy, like the touch of something dead.

She felt nauseous.

Head spinning, hand quivering, she carefully replaced the scrapbook on its shelf. She returned the pencil to the exact same spot on the desk. She looked around, suddenly frightened that somehow she had touched something, shifted something, and left behind a telltale mark. She had a surge of panic, thinking that her perfume’s scent might linger in the closed air of the office. She stepped back toward the door, wildly waving her arms to try to chase any lingering smell out alongside her.

Her eyes took a last look inside, printing the space like a picture in her memory. She shut off the overhead light and slowly closed the office door. Her hands fumbled with the lock and she almost passed out when she heard a loud, blaring noise coming from somewhere close, but from some different world.

She gasped. Electric shock coursed through her body. She dropped the keys to the floor. She staggered backward like someone shot with a gun or struck hard across the face, almost falling. She had to seize the countertop to keep her balance. She could feel sweat on her forehead, and she gasped out a small, terrified gurgle. The noise sounded again.

Car horn.

As promised, the auto service had arrived.