Nine Lives(23)

He’d had that dream so many times he sometimes believed it was real.

Except for teaching a spin class at the gym from eleven to noon, Jay had a free day ahead of him. He did some push-ups, made himself a smoothie, then watched some porn without allowing himself to masturbate, not even touching himself. It was painful, but kind of invigorating at the same time. When he got bored with that, he checked his phone and saw that he had a voice mail message from a number he didn’t recognize. It had been left the day before, and he assumed it was a sales call, but decided to listen to it just in case it had something to do with a job. Turned out to not be a sales call, but a Jessica Winslow from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, wanting him to call her back as soon as possible. His stomach twisted with a feeling of rage and fear. Jesus, was it that email he’d sent last night to that slut on Craigslist? That couldn’t be it. She probably heard that stuff all the time, and besides, there was no way his account could be traced back to him. Also, he just realized, he’d gotten the phone call from the FBI yesterday afternoon and he’d sent the message on Craigslist last night. He relaxed a little. Still, that wasn’t the first message of that kind he’d sent from his account. Maybe he should delete it, just in case, scrub his laptop.

He listened to the message again, trying to read her tone of voice. He couldn’t tell a thing. It was probably nothing, hopefully nothing. Either way, he decided he didn’t want to call her back. No matter what she had to say, it wasn’t something he wanted to hear. He erased the message.





5





SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 2:05 P.M.


Caroline had risen late, then spent the morning grading papers, tweaking her lecture on George Eliot, and even spent half an hour memorizing a Weldon Kees poem. She made herself a grilled cheese sandwich for a late lunch, heating up some of the homemade tomato soup she’d put together at the beginning of the week. She brought the food out to her front porch, considered pouring herself a glass of wine, then decided not to.

It was warm, and slightly overcast, clouds stretched like gauze across the sky, or like a patient etherized upon the table. Estrella was on the porch with her, watching a cardinal through the screen. Fable was still outside; she’d seen him earlier stalking through the high grass of her neighbor’s wild lawn.

She’d brought her phone with her outside and looked back over the email thread with that strange guy from Texas. It had been such an odd encounter that she couldn’t shake it out of her mind. She supposed that for her students—for her contemporaries, probably, as well—having a long, flirty digital conversation was a regular occurrence, but it was new to her, and now she was consumed with thoughts of a man she’d never met. No, that wasn’t true. They had met, last night, even if it wasn’t in person. In some ways it was the most significant conversation she’d had in years, so much more interesting than her occasional flirtations with self-satisfied academics at conferences. She flipped from her emails to her internet browser and looked at the few pictures of Ethan Dart that she’d found. On a whim, she searched for videos and found one on YouTube of him alone with a guitar on a stage, singing a song called “Just Because.” It was from an event called Austin Showcase from a couple of years earlier. Ethan wore black jeans and a De La Soul T-shirt and he perched on a wooden stool while he played and sang. Caroline had limited knowledge of music, in general. She knew what she liked but didn’t necessarily seek out new acts or go to shows. Most of what she listened to were CDs she’d owned since college—girl folksingers, and string quartets, and some Icelandic ambient stuff she’d inherited after her split with Alec. But she was relieved that she liked Ethan’s song, the chorus repeating the line “Just because my boot was tapping didn’t mean I liked the song,” and she found herself unpacking that line for all its possible meanings.

As she was dipping the remainder of her sandwich into her soup, she noticed the police cruiser slowly turning into the driveway. A few random thoughts slipped through her mind: Are my parents dead? Has my cat been found on the side of the road? Have they come to question me about Ethan Dart? And that last thought made her realize they were probably there to follow up on the strange list. Two uniformed officers, one male, one female, one wide-hipped, one pigeon-toed, stepped from the cruiser and made their way to the porch.





6





SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 1:18 P.M.


An Austin patrol officer, just one, came to Ethan’s apartment at roughly the same time as Caroline let the Ann Arbor police onto her porch. Officer Resendez knocked on Ethan’s door while he was asleep. He’d already been up for a cup of coffee and three over-easy eggs, but he’d been so exhausted that he’d climbed back into bed and was still napping. The three sharp raps from Officer Resendez got incorporated into Ethan’s dream, one in which he’d had to return to college in Lubbock to take one last exam in order to graduate. The raps, in his dream, were made by a large black vulture outside of one of the exam room’s windows, pecking at a plane of glass. By the time Ethan had hoisted himself from the futon on his floor, and made his way to the door, peering through the eyehole to see a clean-shaven cop, the dream was gone.

“Hey,” Ethan said to the policeman after opening the door about six inches.

“Are you Ethan Dart?”