Eye Contact (28 page)

Matt's obviously not going to back down. “It's not quite that easy, Cara. Number one, Phillips passed a polygraph test. Admittedly, these aren't one hundred percent reliable, but in this case, I feel like it's fairly significant. Number two, we've picked up his footprints about forty yards away from the crime scene, but there's nothing around them—no partials, nothing. Even if the guy took off his thongs and tiptoed up to the scene, crawled, got there on his
knees,
there should be
something,
and there's not. As far as we can tell, what he's told us is true: He never got closer than forty yards away. He says he heard a little girl singing when he played his flute, that's it.”

“He's also been diagnosed with a mental illness, am I wrong?”

Matt holds up a flat hand. “I'll grant you. But we've also got Barrows telling us a story that has some problems to say the least. If the girl picked up the knife and handed it to Phillips, where is the knife now? Phillips had nowhere to hide something like that. We would have found it by now—it would have turned up in the woods, buried in a bush, or under some leaves.”

“What does that have to do with Kevin's story?”

“The reason we can't find the knife is that it went home with someone.”

She stares at him. “You think Kevin took the knife home with him? That's absurd.” Even as she says this, she understands what he's getting at: Kevin's story doesn't hold up completely. He has painted a picture of himself in the woods, tongue-tied and awkward, saying too little or all the wrong things, so why would Adam have echoed words of anger? It's a question, certainly, but in her mind, not a major one, because she believes that if he's lied about the details of this story, its essence is true. His guilt is tied up to his own bad judgment: his being there at all, his contacting Adam without her permission. These aren't small matters, and she will certainly have to think a long time about whether Kevin can see Adam in the future, but this also isn't a matter for the police to make judgments on, and she feels hugely annoyed that an hour earlier, she was making great claims to Matt's sensitivity. If she could, she'd lean forward and tell him off: tell him that maybe he doesn't understand the nature of long and embroiled friendships, that people can affect each other without seeing one another. That they can undermine and hurt each other even if they also, in a fashion, love each other, too. And that these relationships, fraught as they are, produce actions that don't always follow logical paths.

The longer she sits here, the more certain she is that she's right. Whatever the holes in Kevin's story are, whatever he's too embarrassed to say, he was there out of love, acting in the driving force of its name. And what she can't get over—what kills her, really—is that it wasn't love for her that sent him sneaking around, on a mission of subterfuge. It was love for Adam.

“Kevin didn't kill her. I know him. He couldn't have. I'm sure of it.”

He holds up a finger, as if to say,
Wait, one more thing.
“I'm assuming there's something Barrows probably hasn't told you.” Cara stares at him and waits. “He probably hasn't told you that he's spent some time in jail.”

 

Chris doesn't know how long he's been here. He knows he fell asleep and woke up. He knows it was dark for a while and then light again. He's eaten through all the food he brought, a backpack stuffed with fruit. He can't help himself, every time he gets nervous, hears a noise, imagines what might happen here, he returns to his backpack and eats some more. He's needed to go to the bathroom for about six hours now, but he doesn't want to try until he's finished with what he has to do. He's got his designs, his notebook propped open under a rock. For a while he thought this would be too hard for him, his arms weren't strong enough; he'd only brought what he could fit in his backpack, so he doesn't have a real shovel, only a garden trowel of his mother's.

He planned for this to take two hours.

That he's been here at least twenty-four is further proof that nothing works out for him the way it's supposed to.

But now it's okay. Now he's getting somewhere, crouched on the soles of his feet, hugging his knees as he stabs at the rocky ground. It's a beautiful hole, deep enough that it's an effort for him to get out, long enough that he can lie flat without touching any sides. These are the dimensions he needs. It must look like a coffin, he's decided, because that's what it will be.

 

Morgan didn't expect it would be this easy. With Cara gone, and a nervous old lady in her place, he can ask Adam anything he wants. He could even suggest going up to Adam's room, which he does. Wendy doesn't follow them. She isn't like Cara, who hardly lets Adam out of her sight. So far, he's asked Adam about a few of the names—Randall Im, Wilson Burnstein—and Adam has said nothing, just stared at him blankly. “How about a guy with glasses?” Morgan asks, and Adam blinks. Forget it, he decides.

He'll try something else.

Alone in Adam's room, he pokes around for a bit—Adam kneels on his bed, picks up a small blue blanket, and drapes it around his shoulders.

“So Adam,” he says. “About this girl, Amelia?”

He hears footsteps on the stairs. He'll have to act fast, then he thinks of something else. He kicks the door shut and the footsteps stop.

 

Cara has to leave Kevin at the police station, she has no choice. She doesn't believe what Matt is suggesting, that Kevin might be guilty, but she can't stay any longer to argue her point. It's nearly six o'clock and Adam will need her; he'll want dinner soon, and his usual routine, especially after this unprecedented length of time with another child.

She isn't allowed to see Kevin or say good-bye, so she asks a station secretary to call his mother, tell her where he is and what's going on. On the drive home with an officer she's never met before, she wonders for the first time: Where
is
Kevin's mother? She remembers Suzette, in the flush of discussing her friendship with Kevin, talking as frequently about his mother as she did about him.
I don't think she has so many problems. At least she talks about them. At least she's honest.
In all these years, Cara has thought very little about those months before she first became pregnant, when Suzette came alive again with stories to tell, about Kevin and his mother. She realizes now that she never believed his mother was the patient. That whole time, all those stories, she assumed Kevin was the patient, volunteering with children who were in the hospital. She assumed this because it fit the picture of Kevin, forever in her head, lying in bed, whispering: “My body is finally falling apart.” Kevin was the weak link, his mother the steely rod anchoring him to life, pulling him back, time and again. How could the woman Cara remembers, with her lipstick and curlers, her gaze fixed so steadily on the face of her fragile son, have allowed herself a breakdown?

She never knew the answer to this. Her brief adult friendship with Kevin had presumed that Suzette had met neither one of them at the hospital, that everyone was fine, except of course Suzette. When she understood that the truth was far more complicated, steeped in countless lies that weren't Suzette's at all, she was a month away from giving birth, which made it possible to say to herself:
I won't think about this now, I'll think about it later.

And then she saw a different way out. Kevin might be Adam's father, but he also might not be. She could decide for herself not to decide. Make true what she had said to her parents:
It doesn't matter who the father is. It's not important.
She kept it up steadfastly through prenatal visits, through hospital admissions, through birth certificate application forms.
Father: Unknown,
she wrote each time. Toward the end, people began to question her more; in the hospital she got assigned a social worker who told her, five hours after she'd delivered Adam, that there were men who sued former girlfriends for access to the children they'd never been told they had.

“No, no,” Cara said, staring down at the baby in her arms, already serious, brow already furrowed in doubt about this business of leaving the womb. “That won't be the case here.”

“Look,” the woman finally said. “Any way you want to cut your cake, you can. I'm not going to tell you how to live your life when I don't know you from Eve. But every book you read, every study says, a kid who knows his father is a more grounded, healthier kid. You hear what I'm saying? I'm not talking the guy has to be a zoo dad or what have you. I'm saying knowing is better than not knowing. A name on that birth certificate is whole lot better than no name.”

Even in the face of this large, persuasive woman's obvious logic, she didn't cave in. She simply said, “It'll be okay. In this case, he'll be okay. I promise.”

In all this time, she's never doubted this decision, or the certainty she made it with. Three years later, she sat through neurologist appointments, with their battery of genetic questions, and didn't doubt herself. She understood that a named father wouldn't change what was happening; that Adam's brain, his stalled development, had nothing to do with missing a father.

She arrives home to find Morgan and Adam perfectly content, sitting at the dining room table playing Sorry. She watches for a while, knowing the logistics of this game are too complicated for Adam, though he seems happy enough to let Morgan move his piece while he rolls the dice and says “Sorr-eee,” each time.

“Is everyone here okay?” she asks Wendy, who is sitting on the sofa.

“I think we're fine. Everyone wanted hot dogs for dinner, so that's what they ate.”

She turns back to the boys. Adam is kneeling on his chair, leaning forward over folded arms so his nose can hover a few inches above something that has caught his interest on the board.

“Seven,” he says, studying the dice, his chin furrowed in concentration.

Morgan looks closer. “Eight actually. Five plus three is eight.”

Cara smiles. Rain Man, he's not.

“Oh yeah. Eight, eight, eight, gate.”

“You want to move, or you want me to move for you?”

“Move for you, move for you,” he giggles, and now it's clear what's caught Adam's interest, what he's loving about this game: the knocking sound Morgan makes moving the piece forward. Click, click, click, click, click. Adam is helpless with laughter. Cara laughs, too, catches Wendy's eye. She smiles and nods. “They're fine, really.”

Later, Morgan agrees to watch an opera with Adam, but five minutes into it, he wanders out of the family room and finds Cara cleaning up in the kitchen. She turns and smiles. “A little bored with opera?”

“Yeah.” He shakes his head. “It's like all in a different language or something.”

“It
is
a different language. It's German.”

“Oh. I don't know German.”

“Neither does Adam.”

“So why does he like it?”

She shrugs. Though she's tried, she doesn't really understand it herself. She has sat with him through countless opera videos and they all remain a mystery to her—people flinging their arms, chins quivering under heavy wigs. When he watches, she usually sits beside him, trying to piece together a plot he never cares about anyway. “These two either love each other, or else she's his mother, I can't tell which,” she'll say to Adam, who will beg, with his eyes, for her to stop talking.

“So there's something I wanted to talk to you about,” Morgan says.

“Okay.” She dries her hands, and turns around to face him.

Morgan speaks quickly, staring at the ground. “The first thing is, I started a fire on my mother's land. Well, not her land, but the land she's been trying to save. Now it's all gone, the beavers and salamanders, everything is dead.”

Cara widens her eyes. She remembers the fire, three weeks ago maybe. The papers were full of it—pictures of firefighters bent over beside the ash-covered ground and blackened tree skeletons. Arson was suspected, but couldn't be proved. “On purpose?”

“Not exactly. But it wasn't exactly an accident, either.”

What does this
mean
? What sort of boy has she let into their lives?

“I never meant for it to happen the way it did. I'm going to make up for it.”

“How?”

“I'm going to solve this murder. I'm going to figure out who did it and then no one will be mad at me anymore.”

“That's why you've been coming here? To solve the murder?”

He nods. “Yeah. I mean. Yeah.”

“You thought Adam might tell you what he hasn't told the police or me?”

“He might. You never know.”

Cara is surprised by how quickly and completely anger sweeps through. She has spent all day responding reasonably to shocking revelations and now, at last, this one has pushed her over the edge. “Adam
likes
you, Morgan.”