The Wrong Man

39

Sally spoke first. “We will need to identify and divide up the responsibilities. We must create a plan. And then we must stick to it. Religiously.”

She was surprised by the words coming out of her mouth. They were so harshly calculating, it sounded to her as if they were being spoken by someone she didn’t know. The three of them seemed to be the least likely of murderers, she thought. She had immense doubts whether they could actually pull off something like what she had proposed.

Hope looked up. “I don’t know anything about this. I’ve never even had a speeding ticket. I hardly ever read mystery novels or thrillers, except back when I was in college I read Crime and Punishment in one course, and In Cold Blood in another.”

Scott laughed a little uncomfortably. “Great,” he said. “In the first, the killer is driven near mad by guilt and finally confesses, and in the other, well, the bad guys get caught because they are clueless and then they go to the gallows. Maybe we ought to not use those books as models.”

This, he thought, was probably funny, but no one even smiled.

Sally waved a hand in the air. “You know, forget it,” she said archly. “We’re not killers. We shouldn’t even be thinking this way.”

Scott broke the momentary silence. “In other words, wait for something to happen, and then hope that it isn’t a disaster?”

“No. Yes. I’m not sure.” Sally was suddenly unsteady, both in what she said out loud and what she felt inside. “Perhaps we are not giving the legal channels enough credence. Maybe we go get the restraining order. Sometimes they work fine.”

“I fail to see how that is a solution,” Scott said. “It resolves nothing. It leaves us, and more critically Ashley, in a perpetual state of fear. How can anyone live that way? And even if it causes O’Connell to back off, every day that passes, every day that he appears to be out of her life, all that reassurance really just builds into more and more uncertainty. It solves nothing! It creates an illusion of safety. Even if it were to create real safety, how would we ever know? For sure?”

Sally sighed deeply. “You’re very good at arguing things that cannot be debated, Scott. Tell me, will you pull the trigger and kill someone?”

“Yes,” he blurted out.

“Easy, quick answer. Passion speaking, not sense. How about you, Hope? Would you kill someone, a stranger, to protect Ashley-or maybe, at that crucial moment, wouldn’t you suddenly say to yourself, ‘What am I doing? She’s not my child.’ ”

“No. Of course not,” Hope replied.

“Again, we’re awfully quick with our answers.”

Scott felt a surge of frustration. “So, devil’s advocate, what about you? Will you do it?”

Sally frowned. “Yes. No. I don’t know.”

Scott leaned back in his seat. “Let me ask you this. When Ashley was little, and when she got sick, do you ever remember praying ‘I’d rather it was me. Make me sick. Make her well.’ ”

Sally nodded. “Every mother, I guess, has felt that.”

“Would you give your life for your child?”

Sally could feel her throat closing with emotion. She nodded. She swallowed hard, to regain control.

“I can do it,” she said slowly. “I can design a crime. I know enough about it. And maybe it will work. Maybe it won’t. But even if we all go to prison, we will at least have tried to defend her. And that’s something.”

“Yes, but not enough.” Scott was a little surprised at how stiff he sounded. “Tell me what you are thinking.”

Sally shifted about. “What do we suppose is O’Connell’s greatest weakness?”

“It must have something to do with the father,” Scott said.

“Actually,” Sally continued, “their bad relationship. That sort of hate is something I suspect O’Connell won’t be able to control.”

Scott and Hope both went quiet.

“It’s where he seems vulnerable. Just like he managed to find out things about us where we were vulnerable, that’s what we need to use against him. Hasn’t he taught us some of the things we need to know? He found out where we were weakest, and then he exploited that. He has done the same with Ashley. He turns everything upside down so that he can control things. Why are we here? Because we think he is going to hurt her. Maybe even kill her, if his frustration grows uncontrollable. So, if we step back, think a little, it seems to me that we merely do to him what he’s been doing to us. We create havoc, without leaving a trail.”

Again, the two others remained silent, but everything Sally said seemed to make sense. Both Scott and Hope stared at the woman that they had once loved or continued to love and saw someone they barely recognized.

“We must bring the father and son together. That would be crucial. They must face each other. Hopefully, they’ll fight. That needs to be something a detective can prove. That they came together and they fought. And into that anger, we have to find a way to inject ourselves. Secretly. Leaving absolutely no marks behind and completely unseen by anyone-except the man we kill.”

Sally stared across the room, but lifted her eyes toward the ceiling, no longer even facing Hope and Scott. Her voice took on a musing, almost speculative tone. “You see, it would make sense. They hate and distrust each other. There is a history of violence between the two. Unfinished business. What would make more sense than the son killing the father in a rage?”

“That’s true,” Scott said. “A Greek-tragedy sense of justice. But they haven’t spoken in years. How do we-”

Sally held up her hand. She spoke softly. “If he thought Ashley was there at the old man’s house…”

Scott burst out, “You mean to use her as bait?” He was shaking his head. “But that’s impossible.”

“What other bait do we have?” Sally asked coldly.

“I thought we agreed that Ashley was to be excluded from all this,” Hope said.

Sally shrugged. “Ashley could make a phone call without knowing why she was making it. We could give her a script.”

Hope leaned forward. “Assuming…but only just assuming, we can get them into the same room together. And then we show up…how do we kill him?” She was suddenly taken aback by the words she heard herself speak.

Sally paused, thinking. “We’re not strong enough…” Then her face froze. “You said Michael O’Connell has a gun?”

“Yes. Hidden in his apartment.”

Sally nodded. “We have to use that gun. Not even a gun like it. That precise gun. His gun. The one with his fingerprints on it and maybe carrying his DNA.”

“How do we get it?” Scott asked.

Hope, however, was reaching into her jeans pocket. She held up the key to O’Connell’s apartment.

The other two stared at her. And in that moment, although neither Scott nor Sally said anything, both thought the same thing: This is possible.

Sally remained alone while the others went in to begin the dinner that Catherine and Ashley had whipped up. She thought she should feel awful, but she did not. A large part of her was energized, almost gleefully excited by the prospect of murder.

She wanted to laugh out loud at the irony of it all. We will do something that will change us forever so that we don’t have to change forever. She overheard Hope’s voice coming from the kitchen and imagined that the only route back to wherever it was where they had once loved one another traveled through Michael O’Connell and his father. She asked herself, Can death create life? Surely, she imagined, the answer had to be yes. Soldiers, firemen, rescue workers, policemen-all know they might face that choice one day. Sacrifice so that others can survive. Were they doing anything different?

She reached over and took up a yellow legal pad and a cheap pen.

Sally started to sketch ideas on the pad of paper. She began a list of items that might be needed, and details that would create a compelling portrait for the police investigators who would inevitably arrive. As she wrote down things to consider, she realized that the actual act of pulling the trigger was less crucial than how it would be perceived afterward. She leaned forward, like an anxious student taking an exam who suddenly remembers the answers, as she began to work backward through the crime.

Invent a killing, she said to herself.

She held up her hand in front of her face. We are about to become everything we’ve always hated, she thought. She slowly clenched her hand into a fist, although it wasn’t a fist that she felt; it was as if she had suddenly wrapped her fingers around O’Connell’s neck, choking off the air from his windpipe, imagining that she could abruptly, unexpectedly, strangle him into oblivion.

It was late, and I hesitated in the doorway.

You hear something. Someone tells you a story. Words spoken in a low-voiced whisper. And it suddenly seems as if there are far many more questions than there are ever answers. She must have sensed this, because she said, “Do you begin to see now where their reluctance to speak with you comes from?”

“Yes,” I said. “Of course. They want to avoid prosecution. There’s no statute of limitations on murder.”

She snorted. “That’s obvious. That’s been obvious from the beginning. Try to look beyond that decidedly practical aspect of all this.”

“All right, because they are frightened of the betrayals involved in the story.”

She inhaled sharply, almost as if afraid of something. “And what, pray tell, were those betrayals, as you so elegantly put it?”

I thought for a moment. “Sally had been educated in the law, and she should have had more respect for its powers.”

“Yes, yes,” she said, nodding. “An officer of the court. She saw only the flaws in the law, not its strengths. Go on.”

“And Scott, well, a professor of history. Perhaps more than any of the others, he should have had an appreciation of the dangers in acting unilaterally. He was the one with the sense of social justice.”

“A man who disdained violence suddenly embracing it?” she asked.

“Yes. Even when he was young and went into the service, that was more a political act, or maybe, you might say, an act of conscience, than it was some sort of gung ho patriotism. That kept his hands if not exactly clean, at least not exactly dirty, either. But Hope…”

“What about Hope?” she asked abruptly.

“It seems that she was the least likely of them all to be, I don’t know, wrapped up in criminality. After all, her connection was the least profound.”

“Was it? Had she not risked the most of all of them? A woman who loved another woman, with all the societal baggage that carries, who took the biggest chance on love and who had, it would appear, given up on the desire to have her own family, to present a normal face to the world, and so had adopted Ashley as her own. And what did she see when she looked at Ashley? Did she see a part of herself? Did she see a life she might have chosen? Did she envy her, love her, feel some sort of immense internal connection that is different from what we ordinarily expect from a mother or father? And, as the athlete that she was, did she not prize a direct take-charge sort of approach?”

Her sudden volley of questions encapsulated me as swiftly as the dark of night.

“Yes,” I said. “I can see all that.”

“All of Hope’s life was about taking chances and following her instincts. It was what made her so beautiful.”

“I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

“Do you not think Hope was, in some regards, the key to all this?”

I shook my head, but just slightly. “Yes and no.”

“How so?” she demanded.

“Ashley remained the key.”