Red 1-2-3

38

The room itself seemed conspiratorial. Dark shadows seeping into corners, the wan light from the nearby art building, the odd shapes of scientific equipment spread throughout the long, wide space-everything made it seem like the sort of spot where bad ideas and wild schemes were hatched. It had been years since Karen had been in a school laboratory. Sarah’s scientific sensibilities were defined by elementary classroom studies of ducks and frogs and barnyard animals. Jordan, however, loved the room, not because of the science that was contained there, but because it seemed to her to be the place where odd chemicals and strange substances could be combined into smelly failures or explosive successes, and that paralleled the position she imagined the three of them were in. She was encouraged as well by the idea that it was a place of well-defined formulas and eminent reason, so that the order and understanding that science tried to impose on the world might help them as they designed what their next steps were to be.

The three Reds sat cross-legged on the floor behind a long table. They had Karen’s laptop between them, and they hunched forward as Jordan typed in various bits of information.

“Here,” Jordan said. She pointed at the screen. “Gotta love Google Images.”

The unprepossessing image of a man in his sixties stared back at them. He had a paunch around his middle and skin that sagged beneath his chin. He had shaggy gray-tinged hair around his ears, but a thinning top, and he wore old-fashioned horn-rimmed glasses perched on the end of his nose. The picture was taken a few years earlier at a local bookstore reading series. He was clearly a little shy of six feet tall, and not heavy-set, but not athletic-looking either. His ordinariness was his most dramatic feature.

“You think that’s a killer?” Jordan asked.

“He doesn’t look like what I imagined the Wolf would look like,” Karen said.

“What do killers look like?” Jordan asked. “And what would a wolf look like?”

“Tall. Strong. Predatory. I don’t see that,” Karen said quietly. “You think that guy could chase you down?”

“He’s a writer. Mysteries and thrillers,” Sarah said.

“Does that mean anything?” Karen responded.

“Well, I guess it means he knows something about crimes,” Sarah replied. “Wouldn’t any crime writer who was good enough to get a book published know something about how to commit a felony?”

“Yeah, probably,” Karen answered sharply. “But they’d also know how people get caught.” She turned to Jordan. “Tell us about the wife,” she asked.

“Bitch,” Jordan snapped.

“That doesn’t say much,” Karen said.

“Yes it does,” Sarah interjected.

“The woman sits up in the dean’s office and never smiles,” Jordan said. “Never says hello. Acts put out when you show up to get reamed by the dean for whatever you’ve done wrong, like you’ve somehow made her day worse.”

“So, just because she’s a little rude, you think…” Karen stopped. Teenage think is simple think, she reminded herself. Except when it isn’t, when they surprise you with some truly prescient idea or observation. She looked through the dark at Jordan, trying to discern which of these moments this was. Jordan was the angriest of the three of them. Even in the room’s shadows, she could see her face lit with barely contained fury. Karen imagined that it was the teenager’s anger that made her risky. It also made her attractive. She wasn’t beset by doubts-or, at the least, no doubts that Karen could see. She wondered whether she had once been like Jordan and suspected the answer to that question was yes, because the line between anger and determination was often thin. At least, she hoped she’d once been like Jordan. She suddenly felt old, then thought, No, that’s not what I’m feeling. What I’m feeling is defeated already by what we might have to do.

“I still think she’s a bitch,” Jordan replied. The teenager hesitated, then gasped sharply, the sound echoing about the science lab.

“What is it?” Sarah asked.

Jordan’s voice trembled. It was in sharp contrast to the blustery, fierce Jordan that the other Reds had grown accustomed to. “I just realized: The bitch comes to every basketball game.”

“Well, what does-” Sarah started, only to have Jordan leap excitedly into a rush of words.

“Every game. I mean, she’s always up there in the middle of the stands-I’ve seen her a million times, watching us play. Except I only thought it was us. Maybe it was me. And if she’s there, I bet her husband is there, too, right next to her.”

“Well, have you ever seen him?”

“Yeah. Sure. Probably. How would I know who he was?”

This made sense.

“And that’s not all,” Jordan said, her voice picking up momentum. “In the dean’s office, she would have access to my school record. She would know just about every scheduled place I had to be. She’d know when I was likely to be in class, or eating lunch or going to basketball or heading to the library. She would know just about everything. Or, at least, could figure it out.”

Sarah leaned back. Her mind churned. You take one thing and add it to another thing, you combine one observation with something else you’ve noticed, and it all seems to mean something when maybe it doesn’t.

To Jordan, it suddenly seemed obvious: mean secretary. Husband. Games. Her every trip to the gym. All the failed appointments with psychologists to get her back on track. She thought, It has to connect the dots. But not yet to the other two Reds. Jordan abruptly punched computer keys, and pictures of the husband’s four book jackets arrived on the screen.

The pictures were lurid, suggestive, and over-the-top images. A man wielding a bloody knife figured prominently in one. A large handgun resting on a table was in the center of another. A third sported a shadowy figure lurking in an alleyway. This jacket caused Karen to shudder.

“He hasn’t published in years. Maybe he’s retired,” Karen said. Not one word that fell from her lips had any conviction behind it.

“Yeah. Or maybe something else,” Jordan sneered. “Maybe he got tired of writing about killers and decided to try a real suit on for size.”

The three Reds remained silent. They could hear distant music from the dance. The pulse of rock and roll contradicted the dark feelings they all felt.

“What do we do now?” Sarah whispered. “Maybe it’s him. Maybe it isn’t. I mean, what the hell can we do? What are our alternatives?”

Again silence enclosed the three women. It took Karen, the organized one of the three, a few minutes to reply. “One, we do nothing-”

“Great plan,” Jordan interrupted. “And wait for him to kill us?”

“He hasn’t yet. Maybe he won’t. Maybe this is all just, I don’t know…”-she waved her hand at the science lab equipment-“some weird experiment, the kind of bizarre thing a writer thinks up and-” She stopped. “We have no real evidence, other that the Wolf’s word, that he intends to kill us.”

“Bullshit! He’s been stalking us and-” Sarah countered.

“What about your dead cats?” Jordan cut in.

“I don’t know for sure they’re dead. I only know-” Karen realized she was contradicting everything she truly believed.

“Bullshit!” Jordan interrupted, echoing Sarah. “You fucking well know.”

Karen did, but she continued on, false reason and awkward compromise littering her voice. “Maybe that’s all there is to it. Maybe he just wants to go on taunting us and teasing us and threatening us for years.”

Jordan shook her head back and forth. “Any one of the shrinks my fucking parents have forced me to go to over the years would grin and say that’s total denial, as if they were making some sort of really wonderful point that should straighten me out like instantly and turn me into a well-adjusted, happy, perfectly normal teenager, like there is such a thing anywhere in the world.”

Both Karen and Sarah were glad of the dark, because they both smiled right past their fears. Karen thought this was exactly what she really liked about Jordan. If she can live through all this, Karen thought, she will grow into someone special.

The word if was nearly painful inside her, like a sudden clenched stomachache or a slap across the cheek.

“Okay, so nothing and wait to see if he does kill us is one choice,” Sarah said. “And?”

“We can try confrontation,” Karen said. “See if that scares him off.”

“You mean,” Jordan interjected, “like knock on his door and say, ‘Hi. We’re the three Reds. One of us has already faked her death, but we’d really like it if you’d stop saying you’re going to kill us, pretty please.’ Now, that’s a plan that we can all really get behind.”

Sarah nodded. “Of course, we do that or something like that-let him know we know who he is-and it’s just as possible that it would force him to make a move. He might accelerate all his plans. Think of all the movies you’ve seen, where the kidnappers tell the victim’s family, ‘Don’t call the police,’ and either they do or they don’t, but neither answer is ever right because it sets everything in motion. It’s like we’ve been kidnapped.”

“One other thing,” Jordan added. “If we just confront him, we lose all our advantages. He just denies he’s the Wolf, slams the door in our faces, and we’re back at square one. Maybe we’re dead tomorrow or next week or next year. Maybe all he’ll do is decide to invent a new plan and put that into action.”

Karen put her head into her hands for an instant. She was trying to see clearly through a fog of possibilities. It was like sorting through symptoms belonging to a very sick patient. A misstep, a wrong diagnosis, and the patient might die.

“We don’t know for sure that he is the Wolf,” she said. “How can we act without being one hundred percent sure?” She was a little surprised at the hesitancy creeping into her words; she always tried to be aggressive, decisive. This was hard for her. She felt like she had just delivered a joke that fell flat, and she was being laughed at, not with.

Jordan shrugged. “So what? We’re not a court of law. We’re not going to the cops with some crazy-ass story about notes and a Wolf and sneaking around for all this time, just so a cop can think we’re complete nuts.” Jordan was speaking fast. Probably too fast, the other two Reds thought. “It’s all about maintaining the edge. Keeping control. There’s only one thing we can do.”

Karen knew what Jordan was going to say, but she let the teenager say it anyway.

“We outwolf him.”

“How do we do that?” Sarah asked. She already knew the answer to her question. It just scared her.

Karen, too, knew the answer. She leaned back and felt a ripple of muscle tension race through her entire body, as if she was quivering from head to toe. Her last remaining bit of reason forced some words out of her mouth. “We can’t just go kill him, just like that. Wait outside his front door and when he comes out to get the newspaper, shoot him and then try to disappear? Do our own little urban drive-by? That’s not who we are. And we’d all end up in prison, because that’s not self-defense, it’s murder, and the last time I checked, none of us are master criminals.”

“How do we make it into self-defense?” Sarah asked. “Like a trap? Do we wait for him to try to kill us first? Except, maybe he’s been doing that already.”

“I don’t know,” Karen replied. “None of us has ever done anything like this before.”

“Are you sure?” Sarah allowed frustration to creep into her voice. “We invented my death. We’ve all been manipulative, scheming, I don’t know what, at some point in our lives. Everyone has. Everyone lies. Everyone cheats. You grow up and you learn how. We just have to create something that the Wolf would never expect. Why can’t we do that?”

“What do you mean ‘create something’-” Karen started, but was interrupted by Sarah.

“Something he would never expect.”

“And what-”

“Don’t you feel like everything he’s done depends upon us acting like nice normal sensible friendly folks? We stop acting like all those things that make us who we are. Or, who we have been.”

The three Reds were quiet for a few moments.

“I want to kill him,” Jordan said slowly, breaking into a silence that seemed lethal. “I have since the very start. I want to be finished with the Wolf totally and completely. And I don’t care about anything anymore except that we move, and move fast. And prison is better than a grave.”

“You sure about that?” Karen asked.

Jordan didn’t reply. It’s a good question, she thought. This idea was immediately followed by the young person’s automatic answer to all huge doubts: Ahhh, fuck it.

“But how?” Sarah asked sharply. “What do we do?”

She couldn’t believe she was actually agreeing to a murder. She also couldn’t believe she would not agree to murder, in this case. She wasn’t even completely sure they were talking about murder, except that was what it sounded like. It was as if in the darkness of the science lab, any chance of rational thought was dissipating around them.

Karen was about to say something, but then stopped herself. Are you a killer? she suddenly demanded of herself. She did not know the right response, but she knew she was about to find out.

Jordan was nodding her head. She typed some numbers into the search engine on the computer.

A Google Earth image of a modest suburban home in an undistinguished neighborhood came up on the screen. Jordan hit street view and suddenly they were moving up and down the road where the writer and the secretary lived. It was not unlike Sarah’s old neighborhood: trim, white-sided houses with well-kept yards. It was a typical New England neighborhood, not the sort that end up on postcards or in travel brochures featuring farms or stately old houses. These were simply rows of homes built thirty years earlier, with a postwar feel, well maintained by generations of blue-collar workers and their families, who took pride in ownership as part of the American dream of upward mobility. It was a place where folks generally went to the local high school to cheer for the football team on Friday nights and ate a post-church meat loaf dinner on Sundays. People would be rabid supporters of the Red Sox and Patriots, but unable to afford the exaggerated ticket prices except maybe once a year. Their kids grew up hoping for a good job with a union contract, so they could repeat the same arc as their parents, only just a little bit better, just as their parents had done a little bit better than their parents.

It was the sort of place that encapsulated all that was both right and wrong with America, because hidden behind all the mowed lawns and freshly painted aluminum siding were more than a few alcohol or drug problems, domestic violence, and the other sorts of afflictions that commonly run beneath the fake surface of normalcy. The three Reds all looked at the images of the house and the street-from above, from in front, from behind-and tried to imagine how something as evil as the Wolf could flower in that sort of spot. That a killer lived there seemed impossible. Red One thought, These are the people who come to me for help when they are sick. Red Two thought, These people are just like me. I taught their children. Red Three thought, I have nothing in common with these people, and they would look at my private school, nice clothes, and money background and hate me instantly.

Sarah spoke first. “I don’t know if that’s the Wolf’s home,” she said hesitantly, “but we have no other leads. No other ideas. No one else seems like a possibility. So I think that’s where we should go.”

“I agree,” Karen said.

“You know,” Jordan said softly, “Little Red Riding Hood doesn’t exactly turn and run when the Wolf confronts her. She’s observant. She voices her doubt. ‘What big teeth you’ve got, grandmother.’ The others were silent. “We have to go ask this writer and his secretary wife some hard questions. We can’t wait. We can’t delay. Every minute we don’t act, we give the Wolf time to close in on us. We have to change the game around completely, from this moment on. We take control. If we wait one more second, it could kill us. It’s been like that from the very start, and we’ve probably pushed our luck to the damn edge. We have to be able to ask questions in such a way that he can’t possibly lie to us. Then we’ll know the truth. And we’ll know what to do, because right at that minute it will be fucking obvious.”

She paused, and whispered, “No lies, no lies, no more lies. No longer.”

“How do we guarantee that?” Sarah asked. “How do you ask a question that someone can’t answer with a lie?”

She knew the answer to her question.

So did Karen.

Jordan reached down and suddenly the others saw the knife in her hand. The thin, sharp blade caught a streak of diffuse light slipping through one of the laboratory’s windows and glowed like silver mercury.