Red Leaves

TWENTY-THREE

In all the years I'd gone there, the scores and scores of times, I'd never noticed anything. But now as I turned onto Warren's street, I noticed everything. I noticed how close his house was to the elementary school, how his upstairs window looked out over the school's playground, how, from that small, square window, he could easily watch the girls on the swings, see their skirts lift and fold back as they glided forward. He could stand behind the translucent white curtains and observe them clamoring over the monkey bars and riding up and down on the seesaw. Or, if he wished, he could stare down at the entire playground, take in small gatherings of little girls at a single glimpse, keep track of them as they played, pick and choose among them, find the one that most interested him and follow her like a hunter tracking a deer caught in the crosshairs of his scope.

As I closed in upon his house, I thought of other things, too. I recalled that Warren preferred to work on weekends and take Wednesdays and Thursdays off, both school days, days when the little girls of the elementary school would be frolicking on the playground. I remembered how he never minded working holidays, when school was out, and how each year, he seemed to dread the approach of summer, when school would no longer be in session. He had reasons for all these preferences, of course. He didn't mind working weekends, he said, because he didn't have anything to do anyway. He didn't mind working holidays because holidays depressed him, which, in turn made it harder for him to resist the bottle. He dreaded summer because it was hot and muggy, and he didn't like to work in heat and humidity.

In the past, his reasons had always made perfect sense to me. Now they seemed fabrications, ways of concealing the fact that what my brother wanted to do more than anything was to stand at his window and peer down at the elementary school playground and watch little girls at play.

These thoughts led me to a yet darker one, hurling my mind back to the month when Warren had been holed up at my house with a broken hip. Holed up in Keith's room. With Keith's computer. I could almost hear the tap of his fingers on the keys as I had so many times when I'd walked by the closed door of Keith's room when Warren was staying there. At the time, I'd assumed that Warren was playing some mindless computer game.

Then I thought of the pictures Detective Peak had shown me, pictures taken from Keith's computer, and remembered the anguish of Keiths denial, the way he'd banged his head against the wall, how fiercely he had fought off the horror of my accusations. Now I knew that it had been Warren all along, Warren who'd sat hour after hour cruising the Internet for pictures of little girls. The only question now was what he saw in them. What in the twisted circuitry of my brother's mind allowed him to drag these little girls from the safety of their childhoods and harness their small undeveloped bodies to his adult desire?

I tried to recall if I'd ever seen the slightest sign of such a dark perversity. I went back through the days and years of our youth, the times we'd been together in the presence of small children, and searched for some glimmer in Warren's eye, a look I might not have understood at that earlier time, but which I would easily recognize now. Had his gaze ever followed a child across a yard or down a street? Had he ever stopped in midsentence at a little girl's approach? Had he ever so much as mentioned a neighborhood kid, someone's little sister, perhaps, or a visiting cousin?

I could find no instance of any such early indication, not one occasion when Warren had seemed anything but an awkward boy, lacking in self-confidence, slow in his studies, incompetent on the playing field, the butt of countless school-yard jokes. He'd been all these things, and in one way or another I'd always felt sorry for him. But now I felt nothing but revulsion, a creepy sense that this boy had grown into an utterly repulsive man.

I pulled into Warren's driveway behind the battered truck he used in his work. Its open bed was scattered with paint cans and spattered drop cloths, and two equally spattered wooden ladders were strapped to its sideboards, loosely tied and drooping, as I would have expected from Warren. All his life he'd done things haphazardly, with little attention to detail, following a course as wobbly as his footsteps when he'd had too much to drink. Even so, I'd always had a brother's affection for him, overlooked his lassitude, his drinking, those parts of his life that were basically pathetic. But now a vile shadow covered him, my suspicions so intense, and in their intensity, so brutal, that I couldn't ignore them.

And yet, for all that, I sat behind the wheel for a long time, sat in Warren's weedy driveway, unable to move, staring at the small bleak house he'd lived in for fifteen years. His door was closed, of course, but a sickly yellow light shone from the upstairs room he called his bachelor lair. He'd furnished the room with a motley assortment of furniture, along with a television, a computer, and a refrigerator just large enough to hold a few six packs of beer. He'd lit the place with lava lamps at one point, then a series of garish paper lanterns, but these had ultimately given way to the single uncovered ceiling light and the flickering of his computer screen.

The image of Warren's dissolute body slumped in an overstuffed chair, his doughy face eerily lit by the computer screen sent a piercing melancholy through me. I saw the weary run of my brother's life, the corrosive nature of his most guarded secret, the unspeakable cravings that ceaselessly gnawed at him. One by one the photographs Detective Peak had found on Keith's computer surfaced in my mind, little girls in nature, naked, innocent, incapable of arousing anything but a child-man. But that was what Warren was, wasn't he? Stunted in every way a man can be stunted, dismal in his own sickly underdevelopment, a wretched, pitiable creature, hardly a man at all.

But none of that, I decided, changed what he had done. He had come into my house, lived in my son's room, and while living there, had poisoned Keith's computer with pictures of naked little girls. And when Keith's computer was seized by the police, he'd kept the fact secret that such incriminating material might still be floating about in its unknowable circuitry. He had sat back silently, knowing full well that the pictures the police found would be laid at Keith's door.

Suddenly, whatever pity I'd felt for Warren vanished, replaced by a stinging anger that he had been perfectly willing to feed my son, his own nephew, to the dogs.

When he answered the door, he was clearly surprised to see me. His eyes were watery and red-rimmed, his cheeks flushed. There was an odd grogginess and imbalance in his posture, so that he seemed almost to teeter as he stood before me in the doorway.

"Hey, Bro," he said softly. He lifted his hand, his finger tightening around a can of beer. "Want a drink?"

"No, thanks."

"What's up?"

"I need to talk to you, Warren."

A gray veil fell over his eyes. "The last time you had to talk to me, I didn't like it very much."

"It's more serious this time," I said grimly. "Something the police found out. Something about you."

I wanted the look in his eyes to be genuine surprise, because if I saw surprise, then I knew I would force myself to entertain the hope that it could all be explained, every detail of what Leo had told me as I stood, dumbstruck in his office. I wanted Warren to explain away the fact that school officials had reported him for staring out his window at the playground, to explain the pictures on Keith's computer, all of it miraculously a mistake. But I didn't see surprise. I saw resignation, a little boy who'd been caught at something disreputable. There was a hint of embarrassment, too, so that I thought he might actually come out with it without my asking, simply tell me to my face that he knew what I was talking about, and that, yes, it was true.

But instead of an admission, he simply shrugged, stepped back into the foyer of his house and said, "Okay, come in."

I followed him into the living room, where he switched on a standing lamp, plopped down on a cracked Naugahyde sofa, and took a quick sip of beer. "Sure you don't want one?" he asked.

"I'm sure."

He sucked in a long breath. "Okay, shoot," he said. "What's on your mind, Bro?"

I sat down in the wooden rocker a few feet away, a relic from the grand house, probably an antique, but worthless now because Warren had taken no care to protect it from scrapes and cuts. "They found pictures on Keith's computer," I began.

Warren lowered his gaze, all the proof I needed that he'd done exactly what I suspected.

"They were of little girls," I added. "Naked little girls."

Warren took a long pull on the beer, but held his gaze on the floor.

"Keith says he never downloaded any pictures like that," I added. "He absolutely denies that they're his."

Warren nodded heavily. "Okay."

"The police checked on when the pictures were downloaded," I said though I had no real proof of this. To this bluff, I added another. "You can do that, you know. You can find out." I watched Warren for any sign that he might come clean. "The exact dates. Literally, to the minute."

Warren shifted uneasily in his chair, but otherwise gave no hint that he could see where I was going with all this, how relentlessly I was closing in.

"They were all downloaded a year ago, Warren," I said. I could not be sure of this, but in my dark world, a lie designed to expose other, darker lies seemed like a ray of light. "Last September." I looked at him pointedly. "You remember where you were last September?"

Warren nodded.

"You were staying in Keith's room," I told him. "You were using Keith's computer. No one else was using it."

Warren lowered the beer to his lap, cradling it between his large flabby thighs. "Yeah," he said softly.

I leaned back in the chair and waited.

"Yeah, okay," Warren said.

Again, I waited, but Warren simply took another sip of beer, then glanced over at me silently.

"Warren," I said pointedly. "Those pictures are yours."

One fat leg began to rock tensely.

"Little girls," I said. "Naked little girls."

The steady rock grew more intense and agitated.

"And then I learned that some people at the school have complained about you," I said. "In the past, I mean. Complained about you watching the kids. Somebody reported that on the police hotline."

"I just look out my window, that's all," he said. The leg rocked violently for a few more seconds then stopped abruptly. "I wouldn't hurt a little girl." He looked lost, but more than that, inwardly disheveled, a crumpled soul, but for all I knew this was no more than a ruse.

"Then why do you watch them, Warren?" I demanded. "And why did you download those pictures?"

Warren shrugged. "They were pretty, the pictures."

A wave of exasperation swept over me. "They were little girls, for Christ's sake!" I cried. "Eight years old. And they were naked!"

"They didn't have to be naked," Warren said weakly, his voice little more than a whine.

"What are you talking about?" I barked. "They were naked, Warren."

"But they didn't have to be, that's what I'm saying." He looked at me like a small child desperately trying to explain himself. "I mean, I don't ... need them to be naked."

"Need?" I glared at him. "What exactly do you need, Warren?"

"I just like to ... look at them," he whimpered.

"Little girls?" I fired at him. "You need to look at little girls?" I bolted forward, my eyes like lasers. "Warren, did you know those pictures were on Keith's computer?"

He shook his head violently. "I didn't. I swear I didn't. I tried to—"

"Erase them, yes, I know." I interrupted. "The cops know it, too."

"I can't help it, Eric."

"Can't help what?"

"You know, looking ... at..." He shook his head. "It's sick. I know it's sick, but I can't help it." He began to cry. "They're just so ... adorable."

Adorable.

The word leaped in me like a flame. "Adorable," I repeated, all but shaking with the vision my mind instantly created, Warren coming out of Jenny's room that final morning, his face wreathed in what I had taken for exhaustion, but now saw as a scalding shame. "You always said that about"—I saw my sister as she lay in her bed later that same afternoon, her eyes darting about frantically. She'd seemed desperate to tell me something, her lips fluttering in my ear, until suddenly they'd stopped and I'd glanced back toward the door and seen Warren standing there, head bowed, his hands deep in his pockets—"about Jenny."

He saw it in my eyes, the searing accusation that had suddenly seized me.

"Eric," he whispered. He seemed to come out of his stupor, all the day's accumulated drink abruptly draining from him. It was as if he'd been dipped in icy water, then jerked out of it to face a reality colder still. "You think...?"

I wanted to howl no! no!, deny in the most passionate and conclusive terms that I had the slightest suspicion that he had ever harmed Jenny, that even his most desperate urge would have stopped at her bed, her helplessness, that as she lay dying, pale and wracked with suffering, he could not possibly have found her ... adorable.

But the words wouldn't come, and so I only faced him silently.

He stared at me a moment in frozen disbelief. Then he shook his head wearily and pointed to the door. "I'm done with you, Eric," he said. His wet eyes went dry as a desert waste. "I'm done with everything." He pointed to the door. "Go," he said, "just go."

I knew nothing else to do. And so I rose, walked silently out of the room and back to my car. As I pulled out, I saw the light flash upstairs in Warren's bachelor lair and imagined him there alone, sunk in this new despair, wifeless, childless, motherless, fatherless, and now without a brother, too.

I drove back home in a kind of daze, Meredith, Warren, Keith—all of them swirling around in my head like bits of paper in foaming water. I tried to position myself somehow, get a grip on what I knew and didn't know, the dreadful suspicions I could neither avoid nor address, since they were made of smoke and fog.

I pulled in the driveway a few minutes later, got out of the car, swept past the branches of the Japanese maple and headed on down the walkway to the front door.

Through the window, I saw Meredith clutching the phone. She seemed very nearly frantic, her eyes wide in an unmistakable look of alarm. I thought of the other time I'd come upon her abruptly, the way she'd blurted, "Talk to you later," and quickly snapped her cell phone shut and sunk it deep into the pocket of her robe. I had caught her again, I supposed, and, with that thought, fully expected her to hang up immediately when she heard me open the door.

But when I opened the door, she rushed over to me, the phone trembling in her hand. "It's—Warren," she said. "He's drunk and"—she thrust the phone toward me almost violently—"Here," she blurted. "He's yours."

I took the phone. "Warren?"

There was no answer, but I could hear him breathing rapidly, like someone who'd just completed a long exhausting run.

"Warren?" I said again.

Silence.

"Warren," I snapped. "Either talk to me or get the fuck off the phone."

The silence continued briefly, then I heard him draw in a long slow breath.

"Bro," he said softly, "your troubles are over."

Then I heard the blast.