The Ninth Step (9 page)

A wall chart was mounted directly next to the state map. This chart was labeled
CHAOS AND CRIME BIFURCATION MAP
. The chart was a complex series of egg-shaped swoops and swirls. The legend at the bottom neatly indicated that the solid lines represented stable crime statistics, while the dotted line represented chaos.

Edgar affixed a blank chart to the wall and, using a Sharpie marker, labeled it
LIKELIHOODS
. He wrote:

Next Edgar performed a quick Google search for the term “percent red cars road” and navigated to a web page with a bar graph that listed vehicle color popularity. The color red was graphed at 7 percent. Edgar clicked the “print” button, and a copy of the graph whispered from his laser printer. He added the printout to a bulging file labeled
Statistics
. He made a mental note to split the file into parts A and B so that it wouldn’t bulge so much.

Referencing his notes from late-night car counting, Edgar began to fill in the new wall chart. The doorbell rang, and Edgar capped the marker.

Parked at the curb, Helen sat in her car and watched Edgar’s house. The blinds were down and the curtains were drawn, showing only a bit of yellowish light behind them—like embers banked in deep ash.

Helen unfolded her clenched fist to reveal her six-month sobriety chip. In actuality, it was a blue poker chip available by the gross at Walmarts across the world. To her, it was everything. She placed it on the dashboard of her car and went to the front door.

Although she had parked on this street and watched this house in the past, she had never actually seen Edgar Woolrich up close. The man who opened the door squinted at her behind
ludicrously thick bifocals. He looked to Helen like a mole. An inquisitive mole.

She found that she couldn’t speak. She couldn’t introduce herself to this man. Blood flushed the capillaries of her face as all of her resolve drained away.

“May I help you?” he asked, when it became clear that Helen was not going to voluntarily explain her presence.

Helen opened her mouth and was surprised to hear words come out of it.

“I’ve come about your wife.”

Helen couldn’t understand Edgar’s initial reaction to her presence. He smiled. The man had smiled and invited her in. He acted almost as though he expected her. As though he considered it normal for a stranger to show up on his doorstep late in the evening inquiring about his dead wife. He’d said, “I almost didn’t put my address on it. Most people do e-mail or a phone call. But I wanted to be thorough.” Then a beeping sound diverted his attention and he excused himself to the kitchen.

She stared at the maps, charts, and graphs on Edgar’s walls. Much of it she didn’t understand, but the gist was quite obvious. The man was not at peace. He was carrying a burden. He wanted to find the person responsible for killing his wife. Helen clenched her fist, wishing she had brought the chip with her.

“They help me to keep things straight in my mind,” Edgar said, back from the kitchen, a box of colored Sharpies in one hand and a steaming green Tupperware container in the other.

“This is so… thorough.”

“She was pregnant, did you know that?”

“No. I’m so sorry.”

Edgar placed his dinner on the corner of his work desk, using a hot pad to protect the wood surface. He pulled a ledger from one of the drawers and flipped through it. “Give me just a minute. I want to update a color code for this.”

Helen’s attention was drawn to the glass-enclosed case on the far wall. She crossed over to it and took in the display. At first, she thought they were objects of art, but she quickly realized that they were puzzles of some kind. There was a plain-looking wooden box—no bigger than her fist—alongside which stood a neatly printed card informing the observer that this was a seventy-eight-step nineteenth-century Japanese puzzle box,
himitsu-bako
.

Helen opened the case and carefully picked up the box. She was surprised at how light it was. She quickly replaced it, careful to position it exactly as she had found it. When she was finished, she found that Edgar was standing directly behind her. He reached into the case and repositioned the box. To Helen, it looked as though he had changed its position by, maybe, a millimeter. She thought,
Note to self: Do not touch the puzzle boxes.

“Have you ever done a Rubik’s Cube?” she asked.

“That’s not really where my interest lies.”

“Oh. But have you ever done one? I had one in seventh grade. I never did solve it.”

“Really?” His tone was deadpan.

“Really. So, have you?”

One eyebrow arched up over the top of his glasses, as he looked at her in question.

“Done a Rubik’s Cube. Have you?”

“Mass-produced games and puzzles hold little interest for me.”

“So the answer is no.”

“Correct. The answer is no,” Edgar replied, conceding the point.

“You should buy one. If anyone could solve one of those, it’s you.”

“I really don’t think it would hold much—” Edgar cut himself off. From the look on his face, it was clear to Helen he was irritated to have allowed himself to be drawn into this particular conversation. Edgar sat down and cracked open the ledger. “How did I first contact you? Was it the flyer? An e-mail? Do you work in the area? Or are you a resident? I’ll need to plot it.”

Helen was lost. She looked from the maps to the charts, to the puzzle boxes, and finally to the open, hopeful look in Edgar’s eyes. She didn’t know what to say.

“I don’t mean to be overly personal. It will help me to know how I intersected with you. So that I expand the area of probability. You see?”

Helen most certainly did not see. But she was able to piece together that Edgar was investigating his wife’s death, and he thought that Helen was here in response to some flyer or phone call he had made.

“Do you have something for me? Information?”

Helen felt blindsided. The moment had rushed up on her.
She thought she would have had the chance to feel him out a little and work her way up to this moment. But the moment was here. And there was no equivocation. There was no room for doubt or debate. The man wanted to know. It was a puzzle he could not solve, and he would find no peace until he solved it. It was clear. Now was the time. This was it.

“Yes,” Helen said. Edgar leaned forward, pen poised over the ledger. “I mean no. I mean… I was there. That night. I drove past. After. I didn’t stop. I didn’t stop and I felt so bad that I didn’t stop and I just—”

“You’re here because you feel bad because you didn’t stop? After the accident had occurred?”

Helen nodded, on the brink of tears, ashamed of both her secret and the lie she had just told. What had happened to her courage? To her resolve?

Edgar reached out, as though to touch her, to comfort her, but then withdrew his hand.

“No. It doesn’t matter. You couldn’t have done anything. She was dead within minutes. She was… You couldn’t have helped. You have nothing to feel guilty about. Nothing. Were there other vehicles around? Did you see anybody else? The other car?”

Helen shook her head.

“Nothing. The ambulance was about half a mile behind me. I’m… I’m an—”

Edgar nodded and held his hand out in such a way that it communicated to Helen that he was absolving her and at the same time had lost interest in her. He was ready for her to go. He walked toward her, his hand rising to usher her toward the door.

“I can help you,” Helen offered. She didn’t want the encounter to end. Not like this. Not with the lie still on her lips. “I can talk to people. I can help look. I can—”

“That won’t be necessary. Thank you for coming.”

He had corralled her so quickly that she just had time to realize that she was once again standing on the front porch when the door closed quietly in her face.

The front door opened and the woman walked back inside his home.

“No,” she said, “I can’t leave yet.”

Edgar was appalled. It was bad enough that she had come here seeking only solace for herself; now she was an actual intruder. Some of his puzzle boxes were of genuine value. For all he knew, her goal could be to divert his attention and steal a handful of them.

“You can’t leave yet? Of course you can leave. Just turn around.”

“No. I’m… I… I have to help you. I want to help you.”

“I don’t want your help. I want you to leave. Are you unstable?”

“Un… ? What? Look, you’re trying to accomplish something here. And you’re alone. You’re alone and… and you don’t have to be. What if I helped make calls or something?”

“Make calls? I want you to leave my house and take your help with you. I don’t need it.”

“What if—”

“No.”

“Maybe I—”

“No.”

The woman—she’d never introduced herself, so he would have no name to give to the police should it come to that—lowered her head and pinched the bridge of her nose. When she raised her head and looked up at him, he saw anger in her eyes. They were like cold marble. And then he realized that it wasn’t anger he saw in those eyes. It was something like anguish. Or was it pity?

“You need help.”

“Excuse me?”

“You need help. I need to help someone. See how that evens out?”

“Equations. Those I can understand. Unfortunately, your hypothesis is wrong. Why would you think I need help? And if I did, why would I accept it from a total stranger?”

“Because it’s what you need.” She indicated the wall charts, the ledger. “This, this, this. Not healthy.”

“True. It’s probably not. But it’s really none of your business. And why do you
need
to help someone?”

“It’s not that I need to. It’s, well, I’m in recovery. In a program.
And anything that you feel bad about, that worries you, nags at you, you have to address it, take care of it.”

“I told you, there was nothing you could have done. And you said the ambulance was right behind you anyway. I forgive you. Now please leave.”

“Let me help you.”

“I asked you to leave.”

The woman crossed her arms and just stood there. Edgar picked up the telephone. He made an elaborate show of dialing 9 and 1—leaving his thumb poised over the final 1.

“You have three seconds to vacate.”

The woman’s hands rose in a warding-off gesture, and she slowly backed out the door.

Edgar held his crisply folded sack lunch in one hand and a thick book in the other. There was something about walking down a school hallway when it was empty between classes. It seemed so full of potential.

The illusion of solitude was spoiled. Up ahead, he saw four boys scuffling around an open locker. As he drew closer, Edgar saw Jack Mendelson and two of his cronies. They all wore denim clothes and leather work boots. Standard issue. As usual, Martin Kosinski was at the center of it all. They saw Edgar coming and pushed Martin into the nearby boys’ bathroom.

Edgar paused at the bathroom door. He could hear muffled taunts. Edgar looked at the book in his right hand.
Crime and Chaos Theory.
There was a time that he believed his interventions could save Martin. But not now. Not now.

Surrounded by his charts, graphs, equations, and bifurcation maps, Edgar sat in his living room on Saturday afternoon, reading. There was no sound other than the faint humming of the refrigerator compressor—punctuated with the occasional dropping of ice cubes from the ice maker.

He was using five highlighters of differing colors to carefully mark passages he found of particular importance. Chaos and crime was an emerging science, and comparatively very little had been written about it. It consumed his waking hours. Even Edgar was aware that it had become an obsession. Not healthy, he’d been recently told.

He uncapped the red pen and highlighted a passage:
It takes but a small change in everyday factors to bring about victimization.
The victim may desire to not be a victim. Remember, chaos cannot be predicted, but it can be controlled to an extent.

Edgar heard a vehicle outside. He had ordered a new textbook from a publisher in the United Kingdom and was eager to receive it. It had been quite expensive, and Edgar was afraid that he would have to sell one of his better puzzle boxes on eBay to cover his bills. He peeked through the curtain, hoping to see the familiar brown color of UPS, but instead saw a black Honda Insight. It was that woman.

Edgar watched her emerge from her car carrying a casserole dish and head for the front steps. He crossed over to the front door and opened it before she could ring the bell. Edgar looked the woman in the eye, calmly shook his head no, and closed the door in her face.

At suppertime, Edgar decided to go pick up something from a fast-food drive-through. He opened his front door and found the casserole dish sitting on the top step. He stepped over it and continued on his way.

The next day, upon arriving home from the grocery store, Edgar found that the casserole and dish had been replaced with a fresh one. He stepped over it and continued on into his house.

After school on Monday, he found yet another casserole dish awaiting him. He picked it up and considered it a moment. He then hurtled it out into the street, where it smashed.

To the empty street he yelled, “Leave me alone!”

He would have to clean up the mess himself, but for now, for the moment, the violent gesture brought him comfort. After
that, Edgar took to picking up the casserole dishes and promptly dropping them in the trash. He figured that at some point the constant replacement of the dishes might become too much of a financial burden for the woman.