Two Days Gone Read online

  These woods are ugly, dark, and deep. But I have promises to keep.

  What were those promises? To whom had he made them? He could not remember. All he knew was that he could not stand there forever. He might be spotted. Would that be a bad thing? Would that be the best thing? He could not be sure. Nothing was certain. Nothing was clear.

  A kind of narrow trail snaked away in front of him, a deer run. He began to see himself as a character in a story that had come to an impasse. The plot faced a fork in the road. The story could continue, or it could come to an end.

  I took the road less traveled by…

  He started walking. He would let the trajectory of the deer run choose the trajectory of the story. His legs pushed through the mist of dawn and began to warm. Movement was not so hard after all. Once started, it would be harder to stop. He felt his joints loosen, felt the muscles gather their old strength. Just two years ago, the legs had carried him to a respectable finish in the Pittsburgh Marathon, three hours and forty-nine minutes, and since then, his legs had logged at least twenty miles per week. They were strong, reliable legs. And now they belonged to a character in a story, a man seeking answers in movement, escape from memory, a man on a narrow, twisting trail.

  When this character came to the edge of a wide swampy area, then noticed to his left the road of hard-packed clay and gravel, he crossed to that road, turned north, walked more briskly now, eager until Huston told him, Wait. The character stopped. You can’t go home, Huston told him. You have to get off the road. The character pivoted and, moving more hesitantly, uncertain, returned to the edge of the cranberry bog. He stood there and stared at the water and waited for the writer to decide what he should do.

  He knows the police are somewhere back there in the woods, Huston thought. He knows they probably have dogs. He knows they might even bring in a search helicopter once the mist rises and it’s safe to fly. So what would he do now?

  With a little effort, Huston was able to achieve the split point of view that allowed him to do his best work. Usually, he was aware first of himself at his desk, blue ink moving across a yellow legal pad, but also aware of himself as the character in the story unrolling in his imagination. This time, the perspectives were reversed. He was the character first, cold and tired and hungry, and then, removed to the background, the writer watching and directing the action.

  The character from Huston’s story stood by the edge of the swamp and waited. Huston had given him no name and was unwilling to consider the reason for the man’s flight. He had filed the man’s backstory in a black pigeonhole in his mind. Huston’s only concern at the moment was to focus on this troubling plot point before him. What should the character do now?

  He’s got to get into the water.

  The character looked down at his shoes. They were leather Skechers, moccasin style, with rawhide laces. They would offer no protection against the icy water.

  A month from now, I would be wearing my Clarks. The Clarks were ankle-high with an inch of protective black rubber around the lower sides, the leather waterproofed against the inevitable sludge that would slicken the campus’s walkways until early March. I should be wearing my Clarks.

  But then Huston pulled himself back and stepped away from the character, because he did not want to be the character beside the swamp, he wanted to be the writer writing the character. The Skechers are good, Huston told himself, because they put him in more peril. And peril is good for a story. The more peril, the better.

  He should go into the water but not too deep.

  Gingerly, the character stepped into the water, first his left foot, then his right. The water circled his shins like icy socks. The bottom of the swamp was soft and spongy, a layer of matted grass.

  He should work his way around the bog, Huston thought, and the character started moving toward the south. Huston did not know how big the swamp was because he had not written it. The swamp had existed prior to the story and had appeared of its own volition. Huston had no choice as a writer but to take this unforeseen story element and employ it as best he could, with no knowledge of its ramifications. He reminded himself of what Doctorow had said, that writing a story is like driving at night through a fog. The thing to do is to just keep moving.

  Just keep moving, Huston told his character. Even if you can’t see very far ahead. Take it one page at a time. Let the story grow organically.

  Huston was pleased to see that the charcoal water swallowed up every sign of his character’s passage. With each step, his character had to lift his foot completely out of the water so as not to be caught and tangled in a lasso of wild vines, but at least the water quickly erased his footprints, and the clouds of muddy water were quickly diffused and absorbed back into the swamp. It was not long before the character’s feet began to burn with cold, but he had no choice but to keep going. He could not risk setting foot on solid ground just yet. Huston told him to just keep moving as quickly as he could, and the character did so. He was not an absurdist character but a Huston character. He did as he was told, to the best of his ability.

  At the southern end of the cranberry bog, Huston’s character came to a stream flowing south. The character stopped and waited while Huston regarded the stream. It was not Huston’s desire to have his character moving continually southward, but he knew that the stream presented a good opportunity to keep his trail undetectable, and even though the character’s feet were now throbbing and burning, Huston could not yet allow him the relief of dry ground.

  Huston told his character to follow the stream and quicken his pace. The going was easier now, the water in the stream only a few inches deep, and there was enough exposed bedrock in the stream that the character could find solid footing without having to slow down. And the water seemed a few degrees warmer now. Maybe the character’s feet would not be damaged after all, would not be black with frostbite when he sat down to take his shoes off. Maybe they would, but maybe they wouldn’t. Huston would just have to wait and see how the story evolved and where the stream might take his character.

  It’s a strange kind of story to be writing, Huston thought. He watched his character almost running now down the shallow stream, he heard the slap and splash of water. But he felt the sun on his character’s face now too, and he told himself what he always had to tell himself from time to time, every time he felt overwhelmed by a writing project, every time he felt himself about to surrender to frustration. Trust the process, Huston. Trust the story.

  Ten

  DeMarco could not remember ever having used the word pall in conversation except in the word pallbearer, but now, though he did not utter the word aloud, he felt its meaning as he walked from a campus parking lot to Campbell Hall some sixty or seventy yards away. He felt the pall that had descended over Shenango College as tangibly as he would feel a sudden drop in air pressure. The atmosphere felt sodden and heavy. The students crossing between buildings moved like prisoners trudging from their cells to the gas chamber. Even their laughter, which was in low abundance, rang sour and false.

  He had been on the campus several times before, twice for blues concerts but usually to haul in a student on suspicion of selling drugs, for sexual assault, for abandoning his vehicle in a ditch somewhere outside the borough. On those occasions, no matter the season, the ambiance had seemed swollen with promise, almost festive, and buoyant with innocence. Now it felt like the air inside a punctured balloon.

  The college administration preferred that any external law enforcement personnel visiting the campus be accompanied by someone from campus security. Normally, DeMarco would have honored that request. But today he did not feel like having an undertrained snot nose watching his every move, maybe making small talk all the while, trying to ingratiate himself, wheedling for an invitation to apply to the state police. Today, DeMarco was in no mood for camaraderie.

  Yesterday, he had hiked through Maurice K. Goddard State Park unti
l his legs ached. He had drunk too much burned coffee from too many foam cups, had suffered too many pairs of young eyes following him all day long as if he were the keeper of all secrets and might dribble one forth at any moment, might utter a few precious words of knowledge. Today, he felt depleted of anything valuable, as empty as a pocket turned inside out.

  In Campbell Hall, he made his way to the English Department’s offices on the second floor. The hallway was empty but for one female student, pale and blond and waifish, sitting on the floor outside a closed door, a notebook open in her lap. DeMarco glanced at the door on his way past; below the nameplate of Dr. Robert Denton, a strip of paper had been taped, and on the paper, typed in bold black script, was part of a poem:

  Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay:

  I’m martyr to a motion not my own;

  What’s freedom for? To know eternity.

  Theodore Roethke

  He recognized Denton’s name, the resident poet. The poets, it seemed, always had pretty, young things waiting outside their doors. DeMarco wondered, And why is that?

  The answer was a simple one: Because poets and pretty, young things still believe in romance. They still believe that truth heals and beauty sutures. They still believe that love forestalls, deters, and turns away the tragedy that is life.

  DeMarco thought again of his wife, Laraine. She had been a pretty, young thing once upon a time. She too had believed in romance for a while. Until she cradled her broken-necked baby in her arms.

  Yellow police tape had been stretched across the doorway of room 214. DeMarco reached beneath the tape and tried the door, though he knew it would be locked. He then returned past the poet-adoring student to the department office by the stairwell. The secretary was a light-skinned black woman in her late twenties. Her posture was disciplined and straight, her chin held high as she sat at the computer, fingers long and slender and beautifully manicured as they rattled an elegant tattoo over the keyboard.

  He approached her desk. “I’ll need the key for Professor Huston’s office, please.”

  His voice startled her, but she jerked only a little, kept the look of surprise from her face as she turned to him. “They’ve already searched there,” she said. “In fact, they took the computer and a few other things.”

  “Yes, we did,” he said and smiled. He pulled a leather case from his pocket, showed her his badge and ID card. “That doesn’t mean we’re finished in there.”

  She nodded, pulled open a drawer, found the key, and handed it to him.

  “I usually go to lunch at twelve thirty,” she told him.

  He glanced at his wristwatch: 12:21. “And what time do you usually return?”

  “A quarter after?” she said.

  “Take the full hour. I can wait.”

  Huston’s office felt cold to him, empty of all vitality. DeMarco stood with his back to the closed door, allowed his eyes to scan the crowded bookshelves again, the gray metal filing cabinet, which he knew was now empty, its contents still being cataloged at the station’s evidence room. Only a telephone and blotter sat atop the desk. On a small table behind the desk chair was a short stack of students’ papers, already graded and waiting to be returned. DeMarco had glanced through those papers two days earlier: twelve short stories from Huston’s Craft of Fiction workshop. Beside these papers was a framed five by seven of Huston with his children, little Davy riding high on Huston’s shoulders as he stood at the small lakefront dock in his backyard on a summer afternoon, the toddler’s fingers buried in his father’s thick mop of sandy-brown hair. Thomas Jr. was leaning perilously over the edge of the dock, using a paddle to reach for a red canoe that was about to drift out into the lake. Alyssa stood beside her brother, waiting breathlessly, it seemed, hands held against her chest as if in prayer.

  Huston’s wife did not appear in the photo. A separate headshot of her in a heavy silver frame sat just to the left of the family photo.

  And what does that mean? DeMarco asked himself. Does it mean anything at all?

  He crossed the room and sat in Huston’s leather chair and swiveled around to face the photos. “It could mean a couple of things,” he told Claire Huston’s softly smiling face. “You took the picture at the dock. That’s why you’re not in that photo. So you get a photo of your own. But was the placement of your picture here just a gesture on his part, something for public consumption? Or do you get a picture of your own because you hold a special place in his heart?”

  He sat and waited then, waited for a whisper, a hunch.

  “Talk to me, Claire,” he said.

  He sat in silence. When the door to the office squeaked open, he swiveled around, expecting to see the department secretary. Instead, he faced a hulking, middle-aged man of weak posture, a surprised individual with a long, sagging face. “Sorry,” the man said and quickly closed the door again.

  What the fuck? thought DeMarco. He stood so abruptly that the chair flew out from under him and slammed into the small table, knocking both photographs onto their faces. By the time he righted the photos, his radio was crackling.

  “The divers found the murder weapon,” Morgan told him.

  DeMarco winced, felt something snag in his chest. “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

  He hurried into the hallway. The corridor was empty now; even the waifish student was gone. DeMarco glanced at his watch again; it was now 12:32. He pulled the door to Huston’s office shut, locked it, refastened the police tape, and raced down the steps and outside. The department secretary was climbing into a white Celica. She spotted DeMarco hurrying toward her; she shut the car door and lowered the window.

  DeMarco handed her the key. “I locked up. I have to get back to the station.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Okay.”

  “But there was a man,” DeMarco said. “Maybe six-one, six-two. At least two hundred pounds. Sort of reminded me of Thomas Wolfe?”

  She wrinkled her brow. “The Thomas Wolfe of Look Homeward, Angel?”

  “That’s the one. So who would that man have been?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know what Thomas Wolfe looked like.”

  DeMarco smiled, tried to slow himself down. His heart always raced when he was excited or in a hurry, and when his heart raced, he sometimes spoke too quickly. “Actually, I don’t either. But the way I always envision him is the way this man looked. Big and kind of slovenly? With a sort of paranoid look in his eyes?”

  She nodded. “That would be Professor Conescu.”

  “Conescu,” DeMarco repeated. “And why would he be crossing police tape to go inside Dr. Huston’s office?”

  “He did that?”

  “Apparently he didn’t know I was inside.”

  She glanced back at the building, then lowered her voice. “That’s just the way he is. Kind of snoopy. Always wants to know everybody else’s business.”

  DeMarco smiled again and backed away from the car. “Enjoy your lunch,” he told her.

  She started the engine and drove away. Now DeMarco turned to face Campbell Hall. He looked to the second floor just in time to see a shadow duck away from a window.

  Eleven

  Thomas Huston’s feet were blue but they were not black. Sitting as high as he could on the inside of the concrete drain pipe, buttocks four inches above the thin stream of water gurgling through the pipe, a foot braced against the other side, he had removed his soggy shoes and socks and now rubbed one bare foot and then the other until they no longer felt like packages of refrigerated meat in his hands. He rubbed away the agonizing needle prick and then kept massaging until he could flex his toes without fearing they might break off.

  He had scuttled into the culvert just minutes earlier, awkwardly straddling the little stream until he was fifteen or so feet inside the pipe at more or less the center of the asphalt road overhead. According to his wristwatch,
it was now 11:40 in the morning, though the hour or even the date bore little meaning to him. Something had happened to his concept of time. Time had been shattered and broken, some of the pieces melted together, others wholly lost. Ten minutes might carry the pain of a month, two days nothing more than a sliver of glass in the corner of his eye.

  Maybe he had been inside that drainpipe forever. Maybe he was a character in a play by Beckett and what he thought of as his memory was merely seepage from his creator’s brain.

  He pulled the collar of the dirty jacket tight around his neck, then tucked both hands into the side pockets. And only then saw that he was wearing a jacket and knew it wasn’t his. He had no idea where it had come from or when he had put it on. It felt too loose across his chest and shoulders, was the jacket of a bigger man. An old, quilted jacket, dark green, stained with dark blotches that smelled of motor oil, with long tears in both sleeves through which the dirty white batting showed. Small patches of dried clay marked the front, the sleeves, every surface he could see. He sniffed a patch of dirt; it reminded him of the cave. But the memory of the cave was itself uncertain, dreamlike, and unreal. When had he been in a cave? And why?

  What was not dreamlike was the heavy, deep ache in his chest, the feeling of grief that made his head feel swollen, made every breath feel like a bruise. He wanted desperately to weep, he wanted that comfort. But he was not sure why.

  Now and then, a vehicle rumbled down the asphalt road, and when it passed atop him, Huston reflexively hunched his shoulders and lowered his head. Afterward, he smiled to himself because he recognized the uselessness of that posture. Part of him was helpless to resist the urge to take a defensive posture, and part of him could not help being amused by it.