Two Days Gone Page 12

  “And you met this woman? Professor Huston’s Annabel?”

  “I wanted to. In fact I had planned to until late that afternoon.”

  “And?”

  “A friend of mine called from the road. He was headed north, thought he might swing by if I had the time.”

  “Which you did.”

  “I mean, I wanted to go with Tom. I hated to turn him down. But at the same time I didn’t want to go with Tom.”

  “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “Strip clubs, you know? They’re just not my thing.”

  “He was meeting Annabel at a strip club?”

  “His Lolita character, his Annabel, works at a strip club. In his novel. So that’s where he was doing his research.”

  “You’re going to have to bear with me here because I’ve never read Lolita. But what you’re saying is that Annabel is the name he gave to a character he was modeling after a character named Lolita in the novel Lolita?”

  Briessen smiled. “No. Lolita is a nickname for a character in Nabokov’s novel Lolita. She’s a young girl, what Nabokov called a nymphet. Not a child but not yet a woman. And the narrator of that novel, Humbert Humbert, is a literature scholar who has an unhealthy obsession with nymphets. He traces that obsession back to his very first intimate encounter, when he was still a boy, with a twelve-year-old girl named Annabel, who died of typhus. Tom took that same name as the name of his Lolita character. He also intended for his Annabel to have some association with Poe’s Annabel Lee, from the poem of the same name, just as Nabokov’s Annabel did.”

  “Whew,” DeMarco said. “I think I’m getting dizzy.”

  “All of Tom’s novels, as I’m sure you know, have borrowed characters and situations from other novels. Tom intended his novel to be like Nabokov’s in its use of wordplay and lots of literary allusions, and to be a comment on contemporary American society. The plot would be different, of course, just as all of Tom’s plots were wholly his own creation, but in theme, you might say, his D was going to echo Lolita in that both would be about desire and the moral implications of how we respond to our desires.”

  “This is very helpful information,” DeMarco told him. “Though I can’t help but wonder how you came to be so well informed.”

  “I told you, Tom was my advisor. I went to his office nearly every day. I picked his brain every chance I could. He’s a very, very generous man with his time and advice. And I like to think that he saw some potential in me as a writer and that’s why he was so supportive.”

  “So if I want to find this Annabel character… You say she was only twelve years old?”

  “In Nabokov’s novel. But not in Poe’s poem. And not in Tom’s novel either. But she would be somebody still young enough to have a kind of wounded innocence to her.”

  “A wounded innocence.”

  “Someone who has been hurt but is still…vulnerable, I guess. Trusting. Not yet jaded. Not yet cynical.”

  “Someone like you,” DeMarco said.

  Nathan Briessen flinched. “Funny you should say that. Tom said that once.”

  Strange irony, DeMarco thought. Huston was writing a novel about an older man who falls in love with a girl, and here was a young man who was in love with the older man.

  “Desire,” DeMarco said. “That’s what the title stood for? D for desire?”

  “The book was to be divided into four parts: Desire, Deception, Despair, and Discernment.”

  “Discernment? It was going to have a happy ending?”

  “That I don’t know. In all likelihood, Tom didn’t either. What I do know is that discernment doesn’t always lead to happiness. Sometimes just the opposite.”

  “Well,” DeMarco said. Then, a moment later, “Do you know which club it is? Where Annabel works?”

  “I know that Tom had been visiting various clubs for a couple of months now, trying to find the one girl who seemed to have the qualities he was looking for. The one who wasn’t faking it, you know? He said that some of them were very good at faking it.”

  “Faking interest in him?”

  “Faking innocence.”

  “Is that possible? For a woman to work as a stripper and still be an innocent?”

  “Apparently Tom thought so.”

  “And you?”

  Briessen shrugged. “I guess it’s fair to say that my own view of life isn’t quite so…conciliatory. Not that I don’t wish I could share Tom’s view. And you, Sergeant?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “How do you view the world?”

  DeMarco smiled. “Did Professor Huston happen to mention the name of the club where Annabel works?”

  “He mentioned others, ones he had crossed off the list. But this new one? I don’t think so. I know he’d visited it three, maybe four times already before he invited me to go along. I think he just wanted me to look at the girl too, you know? See if I thought she was the real thing.”

  “Very strange place to go searching for innocence.”

  “I made the same comment. And you know what he said?”

  “I’d like to.”

  “He said that’s what makes it worth writing about. The apparent dichotomy. The internal conflict.”

  “The human heart in conflict with itself.”

  Briessen cocked his head and smiled. “You’ve read Faulkner.”

  “Once upon a time,” DeMarco said. “As for the name of this strip club…”

  “It wasn’t anything local, I know that much.”

  “He couldn’t risk being seen by someone he knows.”

  “Right. I mean his wife knew, but even so.”

  “She knew he was going to strip clubs?”

  “It was research. She understood. They trusted each other completely.”

  “And this you know because…?”

  “He told me.”

  DeMarco smiled and nodded. We believe what we want to believe. He said, “So it wasn’t a local club. Can you give me anything more than that?”

  “I think he said something about going north. The first time he went to this club, I mean. Must have been three, four weeks ago.”

  “North to Erie?”

  “No…no, he asked me about a golf course that was nearby. Twin Oaks something. Twin Oaks Country Club, that was it. He asked if I knew how to get to Twin Oaks Country Club because the strip club was off the same road, just a couple of miles away.”

  “Twin Oaks straddles the Pennsylvania-Ohio border. Just north of Pierpont.”

  “There you go. That’s where the club is. Somewhere not far from there.”

  DeMarco smiled. “You’ve been a great deal of help today.”

  “I only wish I knew more.”

  “This novel he was writing. The one he called D. I haven’t found it anywhere. Not on his computers, not in any of his papers.”

  “You wouldn’t find it on his computers. Bits and pieces maybe. Random notes, things that occurred to him at the time. But he always wrote his first drafts in longhand.”

  “You’re sure about this?”

  “Positive. He encouraged all of his students to do the same. He said that writing in longhand is less mechanical, more organic and sensual. That it encourages a freer flow of thought.”

  “And how much of the novel do you think he had written?”

  “It couldn’t have been much because he was still doing his research. He wouldn’t start the actual writing until he knew his subject inside and out.”

  “And he had only recently found his Annabel.”

  “Right. So I’m sure there’s a journal of some kind because I saw him writing in it in his office. But I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the book still exists only inside his head.”

  DeMarco sat motionless for a while. Then he pushed himself to his feet. “So what
does this do to your thesis project? Will you ask Denton to take over as your advisor?”

  Briessen shook his head. “I’m trying to be like Tom. I’m still holding out hope that everything will work out.”

  DeMarco’s smile felt forced and crudely drawn. But he held it until he was down on the street.

  Twenty-Seven

  From behind a thicket of thorny bushes on the edge of a field, Huston studied the collection of small, white buildings two hundred yards to the northeast. One, two, three…seven wooden buildings in all if he did not count the dugouts at the two ball fields. Each of the buildings was painted white, each with a red metal roof. He knew he had seen them before but he could not remember when. Two equipment sheds, both centered between the Little League field and what was probably the girls’ softball field, one building maybe thirty feet long, twice as long as the other. Two restrooms, actually one building with two entrances back to back. Then a small building behind the batting cage, and beside it a building of identical size—a pump house and a shed for the power boxes and meters? And the largest building, the long narrow one between the two ball fields, recessed equidistant some twenty yards behind the backstops and boarded up tightly, the concession stand. Both ball fields had lights and electronic scoreboards. Both had expensive fencing and an array of stadium bleachers. The entire complex seemed more suitable for a small college than for a tiny village twenty miles from nowhere.

  Then he remembered. The Little League All-Star playoffs two summers ago. “This is Bradley,” he said aloud. “The name of the town is Bradley.” The town itself was tiny, no more than four hundred residents. But the birthplace of a woman who was now a famous actress. Bradley Community Park had been her gift to the town.

  “We call it Blow Job Community Park,” a woman had told Claire that breathless July day. Tommy was at second base, playing defense, still early in the game. On offense, he would go three for three that day, a double and two singles. Two stolen bases, three RBIs. The All-Stars’ coaching staff comprised the head coaches from four different teams, so Huston was in the stands that day, was trying to watch the game but couldn’t help listening in as the woman explained to Claire the origins of the park. She looked to be in her late thirties, maybe a few years younger than Claire, and spoke with a deep-throated coarseness that he knew his wife found offensive but would never comment on, not even to him.

  “I went to school with her,” the woman said. “Trust me, I know. She screwed and blew her way through high school. Rumor was she had two abortions her senior year. Day after graduation, she hopped on a plane out of here. Next day she started sucking and fucking her way through Hollywood. They say she gives the best blow jobs in Beverly Hills. Personally I wouldn’t know, but my ex says he can believe it. So anyway, she came back here, must’ve been five, six years ago, told the town council she’d build the kids a park if we’d rename Main Street after her. So why not, what’d we care? Street’s hardly fifty yards long end to end anyway. She probably thinks she bought herself some kind of big eraser, you know? I laugh about it every time I come here.”

  Huston had wanted to concentrate on the game, but she was a great character, the way she sat there in the bleachers in her tight jeans with her knees spread wide, her blue flip-flops perched on the bench in front of her. He had meant to make some notes about her when he got home, the pretty but hard-edged face, the mass of black hair that gleamed in the sun like a crow’s feathers, the smoky, lusty growl in her voice. But Tommy’s team had lost the game by one run, was knocked out of the playoffs, so the family took him to Chuck E. Cheese in Erie to cheer him up, made a long night of it, and by the time they returned home, the woman had fled from Huston’s memory. But here she was back now. All of it was back.

  It hit Huston like a blow to the chest—the day, the sunshine, the grin on Tommy’s face every time he had stood safely on base and looked into the stands. The pain pierced his chest like a spear, mushroomed into a toxic cloud of pain, filled him from top to toe. He dropped to his knees behind the thorny bush, fell forward onto his hands. “It can’t be gone,” he said aloud. “I can smell the hot dogs. I can hear the game.” His arms quivered, his body shook. The thorns jabbed at his skull.

  Twenty-Eight

  Both Huston’s house and his office had been searched thoroughly. So where, DeMarco asked himself, could the manuscript of D be hiding? And why would Huston hide it? If DeMarco could answer the second question, maybe he could hazard an intelligent guess to answer the first.

  He sat in his car along the street outside Nathan Briessen’s apartment. He had his window down, needed a feeling of openness, a sense of forward movement. The traffic noise did not bother him, but the odors of sweet rolls and doughnuts and bread coming from the bakery made his stomach growl. I need to walk, he told himself.

  Four minutes later, with a cup of coffee in one hand and half of a pumpernickel roll in the other, he walked north on Mulravy Street. The street slanted uphill toward the college, through a residential neighborhood of older two-story houses, shingled and vinyl-sided working-class homes. Dogs chained in side yards barked at him. Old women peeked out from behind faded curtains. All of this registered on DeMarco along with the soft, yeasty warmth of the fresh roll and the rich bitterness of strong black coffee, but he kept it as background to the thoughts that scrolled through his mind.

  He hides the manuscript to protect it, he told himself. Because it’s an original copy, valuable, one of a kind. In which case he isn’t really hiding it but securing it somewhere. In a fireproof box? No such container was found in his office. The small safe from the house had already been opened. Passports, social security cards, birth certificates, a copy of the deed, and titles to the vehicles. A few pieces of Claire’s best jewelry, including a gaudy diamond ring that had probably belonged to her grandmother. A copy of her parents’ will, a copy of the Hustons’ will. An old gold watch that had probably belonged to Huston’s father. No manuscript.

  Okay then, he hides it because…because he’s superstitious? He thinks it’s good luck to put the manuscript away in exactly the same place every day? A place only he knows about?

  Or he hides it because he doesn’t want it read? Doesn’t want his wife to know about his visits to the strip clubs? Doesn’t want anyone from the university to know—especially anyone who might take delight in tarnishing Huston’s image?

  Whatever the reason, the manuscript, if one existed, could be anywhere. But the forensics team had already turned over every rug, vacuumed every carpet, luminoled and black-lighted every surface. The desk in Huston’s offices had practically been torn apart, every closet emptied, every cubbyhole probed. No manuscript.

  The early forensics report had identified black nylon fibers of three different kinds in every bedroom and Huston’s study, consistent with nylon socks, a nylon warm-up suit, and nylon batting gloves. No such fibers were found underneath Huston’s chair at his home, however, where he himself might have left them, which indicates that they came from somebody else, somebody who had stood near his desk and chair and in fact walked all around it. But who? The boy? Claire? Somebody else? Forensics was currently attempting to match the fibers to clothing taken from the house. Similar black fibers had also been found just inside the back door. Unfortunately, probably dozens of people passed through that house every week. The kids’ classmates. Neighbors. Newspaper reporters. Impossible to identify and track all of them down.

  Okay, forget the fibers for now, DeMarco told himself. Let’s say that Huston hides the manuscript because he’s afraid that it might be damaged by two active children and their friends. Occam’s razor—the simplest answer is the best answer. The manuscript is the sole record of his current project, everything he’s been thinking about for the past few months. So he hides it for safekeeping. But in this case, he just needs to secure it out of their reach. A filing cabinet will do. A desk drawer. The top of an armoire. A bookshelf. All places already search
ed. No manuscript.

  DeMarco went back to the university and spent another fifteen minutes inside Huston’s office at the college. Poked around in every crevice large enough to hold a tablet or sheaf of papers. Nothing.

  He used his cell phone to call Nathan Briessen. “I’m hitting a wall here, Nathan, and I think you’re the only one who can help me get through it.”

  “Whatever I can do, just ask.”

  “This manuscript you told me about. The work in progress. I can’t for the life of me figure out where it could be. Where did Professor Huston do his writing? At home, at the college, in his car, at the local coffee shop maybe?”

  “Home and university office to be sure. The other places? I doubt it. He likes solitude when he works. Maybe a little music but nothing else.”

  “He told you this?”

  “It’s something every student asks him sooner or later. Every interviewer. How does a writer work?”

  “So the manuscript could be in either place? Either the home office or the university office. He carried it back and forth with him?”

  “That’s right, yes.”

  “Well…it’s not here in his office. And our previous searches didn’t uncover it at his house. It’s apparently not anywhere it might logically be.”

  “I really don’t know where else to tell you to look. I’m sorry.”

  “Could he have left it in his car, by any chance? The night he went to the strip club, for example? It’s not in the car now. I know that already, but I’m just wondering if he might have left it in the car at some point and left the car unlocked…”

  “I highly doubt it. First of all, I don’t think he would have taken it with him to a place like that. And secondly, I last talked to him on Friday. If he had somehow lost his work, he would have been…beside himself. Absolutely devastated.”

  “You’re sure a manuscript exists?”