Red Leaves

TWENTY-FOUR

The ambulance and police had already arrived by the time I got to Wirren's house. The whole neighborhood strobed with flashing lights, and a yellow tape had been stretched across the driveway and along the borders of the yard.

I had called 911 immediately, though even at that moment, I wasn't sure exactly what Warren had done. He'd been drunk, after all, and on such occasions in the past, he'd not been above making some melodramatic gesture in order to win me back. Once, as a boy, he'd taken a plunge off a high embankment after I'd yelled at him. He'd pulled similar stunts after my father had laced into him for one reason or another. It was a pitiful attempt to regain whatever he thought he'd lost in our affection, and it had never worked. Warren had never been one to learn from experience, however, and even as I watched the flashing lights that surrounded his house, I half expected to see him stagger out into the yard, arms spread in greeting, all bleary good cheer. Hey, Bro.

But as I closed in on the house, I knew that this time, it was different. The front door was wide open, and Peak stood, backlit by the light of the foyer, scribbling in a small notebook.

"Is he okay?" I asked as I came up to him.

Peak sank the notebook into his jacket pocket. "He's dead," he told me. "I'm sorry."

I didn't shudder at the news, and even now I can hardly recall exactly what I felt, save the curious realization that I would never see my brother alive again. A moment ago, he'd spoken to me. Now he was utterly and forever silent. If I thought or felt more than this at that moment, then those feelings were too vague and insubstantial to make a sustained impression.

"Do you want to identify him?" Peak asked.

"Yes."

"Mind if I ask you a few questions first?"

I shook my head. "I've gotten used to questions."

He drew the notebook out of his pocket and flipped it open. "You spoke to him just before he did it, right?"

"I heard the shot."

This did not faze Peak, and for a moment it struck me that he probably thought it a way of gaining the sympathy he was not inclined to offer.

"What did he say?"

"That my troubles were over," I answered.

"What did he mean by that?"

"That he wouldn't be a bother to me anymore, I guess."

Peak looked at me doubtfully. "You don't think this had anything to do with Amy Giordano?"

"Just the pictures you found on Keith's computer," I said. "They were his."

"How do you know?"

"Warren stayed at our house while he was recovering from a broken hip," I said. "He stayed in Keith's room."

"That doesn't mean the pictures were his," Peak said.

"I know they weren't Keith's."

"How do you know?"

I shrugged. "Why would Warren have done this if the pictures weren't his?"

"Well, he might have thought we'd shift away from Keith," Peak said. "I mean, he all but confessed, didn't he?"

"No, he didn't," I said. "Except that the pictures were his. But he said they weren't ... sexual. That he didn't use them that way."

"Then why did he have them?"

"He said he just thought the kids were ... adorable."

Peak looked at me squarely. "Do you think he had anything to do with Amy Giordano being missing?"

I gave the only answer I could be certain of. "I don't know."

Peak looked surprised by my answer. "He was your brother. If he were capable of something like that, kidnapping a little girl, you'd know it, wouldn't you?"

I thought of all the years I'd spent with Warren and realized that for all we'd shared, parents, the big house we'd lost together, the joint trajectories of our lives, for all that, I simply couldn't answer Peak's question, couldn't in the least be sure that I knew Warren at all, or knew any more than his glossy surfaces. "Can you ever know anyone?" I asked.

Peak released a long frustrated breath and closed the notebook. "All right." He glanced inside the house, then back at me. "You ready to make the identification?"

"Yes."

Peak turned and led me up the stairs, then down the short corridor to Warren's room. At the door, he stepped aside. "Sorry," he murmured. "This is never easy."

Warren had pulled a chair up to the window, facing out toward the elementary school's dimly lit playground. His head was slumped to the right, so that he looked as if he'd simply gone to sleep while staring out the window. It was only when I stepped around to face the chair that I saw the shattered mouth, the dead eyes.

I don't know what I felt as I stared down at him during the next few seconds. Perhaps I was simply numb, my tumorous suspicion now grown so large that it was pressing against other vital channels, blocking light and air,

"Was that all he said?" Peak asked. "Just that your troubles were over?"

I nodded.

"How about before he spoke to you? Did he talk to anyone else in your family?"

"You mean Keith, right?" I asked.

"I mean anybody."

"Well, he didn't talk to Keith. He talked to my wife briefly, but not to Keith."

"What did he say to your wife?"

"I don't know," I told him. "When I got home, she handed me the phone. Then Warren said that my troubles were over—nothing else. When I heard the shot, I called 911, then came directly here."

"You came alone, I noticed."

"Yes."

Peak looked as if he felt sorry for me because I'd had to come to the scene of my brother's suicide alone, without the comfort of my wife and son.

"Do you want to stay a little longer?" he asked finally.

"No," I told him.

I gave Warren a final glance, then followed Peak back down the stairs and out into the yard where we stood together in the misty light that swept out from the school playground. The air was completely still, the scattered leaves lying flat, like dead birds, in the unkempt yard.

Peak looked over toward the playground, and I could see how troubled the sight of it made him, the fear he had that some other little girl was still in peril because whoever had taken Amy Giordano was still out there.

"I read that leads get cold after a couple of weeks," I said.

"Sometimes."

"It's been two weeks."

He nodded. "That's what Vince Giordano keeps telling me."

"He wants his daughter back," I said. "I can understand that."

Peak drew his gaze over to me. "We're testing the cigarettes. It takes a while to get the results."

"And what if they were Keith's?"

"It means he lied," Peak said. "He told Vince Giordano that he never left the house. He said he was inside the whole time."

"And he was," I said, a response that struck me as wholly reflexive.

Peak returned his attention to the deserted playground, held his gaze on the ghostly swings and monkey bars and seesaws. He seemed to see dead children playing there.

"What if your son hurt Amy Giordano?" He looked at me very intently, and I saw that he was asking the deepest imaginable question. "I mean, if you knew he did it, but also knew that he was going to get away with it, and that after that, he was going to do it again, which most of them do, men who kill children. If you knew all that I've just said, Mr. Moore, what would you do then?"

I would kill him. The answer flashed through my mind so suddenly and irrefutably that I recoiled from this raw truth before replying to Peak. "I wouldn't let him get away with it."

Peak seemed to see the stark line that led me to this place, how much had been lost on the way, the shaved-down nature of my circumstances, how little I had left to lose. "I believe you," he said.

***

Meredith was waiting for me when I got home, and the minute I saw her, I recalled the way she'd stood with Rodenberry, and all my earlier feelings rose up, hot and cold, a searing blade of ice.

"He's dead," I told her flatly.

Her hand lifted mutely to her mouth.

"He shot himself in the head."

She stared at me from behind her hand, still silent, although I couldn't tell if it were shock or simply her own dead center that kept her silent.

I sat down in the chair across from her. "What did he say to you?"

She looked at me strangely. "Why are you so angry, Eric?"

I had no way to answer her without revealing the murky water in which my own emotions now washed about. "The cops will want to know."

She bowed her head slightly. "I'm so sorry, Eric," she said quietly. "Warren was so—"

Her feelings for Warren sounded like metal banging steel. "Oh please," I blurted. "You couldn't stand him."

She looked stunned. "Don't say that."

"Why not? It's the truth."

She looked at me as if I were a stranger who'd somehow managed to crawl into the body of her husband. "What's the matter with you?"

"Maybe I'm tired of lies."

"What lies?"

I wanted to confront her, tell her that I'd seen her and Rodenberry in the college parking lot, but some final cowardice, or perhaps it was only fear that if I broached that subject, I would surely lose her, warned me away. "Warrens lies, for one thing. Those pictures the cops found on Keith's computer. They were Warren's."

Her eyes glistened slightly, and I saw how wracked she was, how reduced by our long ordeal, her emotions tingling at the surface.

"Leo told me about it," I went on. "He said Warren had been caught watching kids play at the elementary school. He'd stand at the window of his little 'bachelor lair' and watch them. With binoculars. It was so fucking obvious the school complained about it. The principal went over and told Warren to stop it. So when this thing with Amy Giordano happened, somebody called the police hotline and told them about Warren."

"So that's what it was," Meredith said. She seemed relieved, as if a small dread had been taken from her. She remained silent a moment, gazing at her hands. Then she said, "Warren couldn't have done something like that, Eric. He couldn't have hurt a little girl."

Her certainty surprised me. She had never cared for my brother, never had the slightest respect for him. He was one of life's losers, and Meredith had never had any patience for such people. Warren's drinking and self-pity had only made it worse. But now, out of nowhere, she seemed completely confident that Warren had had nothing to do with Amy Giordano's disappearance.

"How do you know?" I asked.

"I know Warren," she answered.

"Really? How can you be so sure you know him?"

"Aren't you?"

"No."

"He was your brother, Eric. You've known him all your life."

Peak had said the same thing, and now I gave the same reply. "I'm not sure you ever know anyone."

She looked at me, puzzled and alarmed, but also alerted to something hidden. "Warren said you came over to his house. He said you had a quarrel."

"It wasn't exactly a quarrel," I told her.

"That's what he called it," Meredith said. "What was it then?"

"I talked to him about the pictures."

"What did he say?"

"That they weren't really sexual." I shook my head. "He said he just liked looking at the pictures. That the kids were ... adorable."

"And you didn't believe him?" "No."

"Why not?"

"Oh come on, Meredith, he fits the profile in every aspect. Especially the low self-esteem part."

"If low self-esteem is a big deal, then you'd better mark Keith for a pedophile, too."

"Don't think that hasn't crossed my mind."

Now amazement gave way to shock. "You think that?"

"Don't you?"

"No, I don't."

"Wait a minute," I yelped. "You're the one who first had doubts about Keith."

"But I never thought it was a sexual thing. That even if he hurt Amy, it wasn't because of sex."

"What then?"

"Anger," Meredith answered. "Or maybe a cry for attention."

A cry for attention.

This sounded like the sort of psychobabble that would come from Stuart Rodenberry, and I bristled at the thought that Meredith was arguing with me through him, using his professional expertise and experience against me.

"Oh, bullshit," I said sharply. "You don't believe a word of that."

"What are you saying, Eric?"

"I'm saying that from the minute Amy disappeared you thought Keith was involved. And I don't for a fucking second believe you thought a 'cry for attention' had anything to do with it." I looked at her hotly. "You thought it was in the family. Something he inherited. Connected to me. To Warren." I laughed brutally. "And you were probably right."

"Right? You mean because you've decided that Warren was a pedophile?" Her gaze was pure challenge. "And what, Eric, makes you so sure of that? A few pictures on his computer? The fact that he liked to watch kids play? Jesus Christ, anybody could—"

"More than that," I interrupted.

"What then?"

I shook my head. "I don't want to go into this anymore, Meredith."

I started to turn away, but she grabbed my arm and jerked me around to face her. "Oh no, you don't. You're not walking away from this. You accuse Keith of being a pedophile, a kidnapper, and God knows what else. You accuse me of suggesting that something awful is in your family. You do all that, and then you think you can just say you're tired and walk away? Oh no, Eric, not this time. You don't walk away from an accusation like that. No, no. You stand right here and you tell me why you're so fucking sure of all this bullshit."

I pulled away, unable to confront what I'd seen in Jenny's room that morning, then conveyed to Warren in a single glance, how, upon that accusation, he must have finally decided that the world was no longer a fit place for him.

But again Meredith grabbed my arm. "Tell me," she demanded. "What did Warren or Keith ever do to—"

"It has nothing to do with Keith."

"So, it's Warren then?"

I gazed at her desolately. "Yes."

She saw the anguish flare in my eyes. "What happened, Eric?"

"I thought I saw something."

"Something ... in Warren?"

"No. In Jenny."

Meredith peered at me unbelievingly. "Jenny?"

"The day she died I went into her room. She was trying desperately to tell me something. Moving all around. Lips. Legs. Desperate. I bent down to try to hear what she was saying, but then she stopped dead and pulled away from me and just lay there, looking toward the door." I drew in a troubled breath. "Warren was standing at the door. He'd been with Jenny that night and..." I stopped. "And I thought maybe he—"

"Jesus, Eric," Meredith gasped. "You said that to him?"

"No," I answered. "But he saw it."

She stared at me as if I were a strange creature who'd just washed up on the beach beside her, a crawler of black depths. "You had no evidence of that at all, Eric," she said. "No evidence at all that Warren did anything to your sister"—there was a lacerating disappointment in her gaze—"How could you have done that? Said something like that without ... knowing anything?"

I thought of the way she and Rodenberry had stood together in the parking lot, their bodies so close, the cool air, the night, the rustle of fallen leaves when the wind touched them. "You don't always need evidence," I said coldly. "Sometimes you just know."

She said nothing more, but I felt utterly berated, like a small boy whipped into a corner. To get out of it, I struck back in the only way that seemed open to me.

"I saw you tonight," I told her.

"Saw me?"

"You and Rodenberry."

She seemed hardly able to comprehend what I was saying.

"In the parking lot at the college."

Her lips sealed tightly.

"Talking."

Her eyes became small, reptilian slits. "And?" she snapped. "What are you getting at, Eric?"

"I want to know what's going on," I said haughtily, a man who knew his rights and intended to exercise them.

Fire leaped in her eyes. "Wasn't Warren enough for you, Eric?" she asked. "Isn't one life enough?"

She could not have more deeply wounded me if she'd fired a bullet into my head, but what she said next was said with such utter finality that I knew nothing could return me to the world that had existed before she said it.

"I don't know you anymore," she added. Then she turned and walked up the stairs.

I knew that she meant it, and that she meant it absolutely. Meredith was not a woman to make false gestures, bluff, halt at the precipice, or seek to regain it once she'd gone over. Something had broken, the bridge that connected us, and even at that early moment, when I was still feeling the heat of her eyes like the sting of a slap, I knew that the process of repair would be long, if it could be done at all.